Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  We each had three blankets, which, when I helped Anne and Mary make our beds, I thought ridiculous. We finished the beds with two, and I folded the extra ones and laid them aside, sure we would not use them. But the first night proved me wrong. The nights were not chilly but cold, down to six or eight above zero—centigrade, of course—from a pleasant twenty-five or twenty-eight during the day. The air was thin, too. And all the windows of the house stayed open, and the hearth in the salon stayed cold and bare. I got up in desperation and put my third blanket on too late, for I was cold into my marrow. By morning I was wearing socks, and a sweater over my pajamas. (The next night, I started out in that rig, as soon as I could decently leave the supper table and the salon somewhat warmed by four other healthy people, and by dawn I could kick off the socks; and the girls told me they had double-folded their blankets and slept happily under all six backcracking thicknesses. The nights were fine, though, with good dreams and many gentle half-awakenings to listen to the river far below, a little breeze, the cuckoos before daylight. My girls heard a nightingale once, but I did not, though I did see a cuckoo fly one day from a tall chestnut tree. I was congratulated, for it is said to be an elusive bird. It was surprisingly large, and I thought clumsy: grey with some black and white on it.)

  The first morning, we started a joke that lasted until we left. Georges appeared with the little dead rat soon after breakfast, and asked us how we could possibly not have heard it during the night. “How soundly you city people must have slept in this poor hut,” he kept marvelling in his professorial way. “And here is my poor old father who complains of sleeping lightly, and boasts of his perfect hearing! Surely you heard this poor creature’s last agony, Pépé?” He described at length how a trapped rat must and always does sound. “Even with the quickest and most humane snap of the trap,” he finished, “there is one big thump as the animal dies. And quite often there is a series of thumps, crashes, and even screams, depending on how the trap has been sprung, and where on the little body. Yes, often there are sharp, high cries. Occasionally, it is necessary to go to the merciful rescue and, with infinite caution, catch the wounded creature and do away with it by other means.” Yes, it was indeed astonishing—in fact, almost incredible—that neither Pépé nor a sharp-eared, sensitive woman like me had heard the rat as the trap was sprung during this past night! It never once occurred to Georges that the macabre event could and obviously did happen the night before, when he himself was sleeping in his own room under the attic. Every morning, the subject was opened wide. “What? No more agonized thumpings to disturb the dainty slumbers of you townspeople?” Now and then, he would shake his head ponderously and tease Pépé about never believing him again when he complained of insomnia. “And how did you get through the night?” he would ask me. “Not as soundly as the first one, of course, when you could ignore the death throes right above your head!”

  Georges had a sign on the door into the kitchen: “No Women Allowed.” The arrangement when he was alone with his father was that he cooked and marketed and Pépé did the dishes. He agreed, however, to let me take over the kitchen during our stay, and the first noon we ate the chicken from Lodève, which I roasted with some anxiety in the peculiar little electric oven. It was delicious, and fun for me to be cooking again after months of restaurants. Pépé sat all morning at the big kitchen table, while I puttered about. He was shelling a basket of peas Georges had got in the village the night before, and mumbling and growling because they were indeed too young to be picked—barely a bowlful at the end of his two hours of fastidious labor. He promised the woman who had fobbed them off on Georges a rare talking-to (she was the widow of a distant cousin, of course), and meanwhile he scolded his son whenever that young fellow of seventy-four came into earshot.

  There was almost nothing in the kitchen to work with. It was interesting to try to cook without all the tools and supplies that I take for granted in my own kitchens. While I was in Le Truel, I kept wishing with real regret that I were capable of living in such continued simplicity. But I am not. Sometimes I honestly want to live in a plain room with a narrow bed, a chair, a table. But then I would need a bookcase. I would see a poster I must put on the wall. I would pick up a shell here, a bowl or vase there, another poster, enough books for two bookcases, a soft rug someone might give me—and where would the first plainness be? I cannot fight too hard against it, but I regret it.

  That first noon, Mary and Pépé did the dishes together, and she was astounded by the mixture of persnickety and sloppy in the old man’s much vaunted method. He had learned it in Normandy, he told us, from his daughter-in-law. It was based upon a careful balance in stacking, he said: largest plates at the bottom, and so on. It involved many changes of water, all of which must, at Le Truel, be heated in a very small teakettle. The water fairly well covered the floor, the sink, and one wall with vague splashings and drippings; the table was a great puddle; the towels could be wrung out halfway through the ritual. But, Mary told me with pride, Pépé the Imperturbable never dropped a plate or spoon, and while the goblets might be a little smeary, they were basically clean.

  Pépé’s hands were surprising. They were not at all mottled or gnarled, with the loose papery skin one expects in old hands. They were well formed, firm and sturdy to the touch, and as steady as a healthy young man’s—much younger in every way than Georges’, which I sometimes felt he was forcing himself to keep from fumbling and clumsiness, when, for instance, he rolled his cigarettes.

  I realized later that he was indeed quite nervous and shaky about being alone with his father. One day, he and I walked out to the little bridge that went over the huge water pipe snaking down the mountainside to the northeast of Les Pénarderies, to carry water from the upper lakes of the Aveyron down to the electric plant on the Tarn. It is a silver-painted tube over a thousand metres long, about ten feet in diameter at the top and diminishing, of course, at the bottom for pressure. Georges said that on June first he would start for Normandy and the daughter-in-law, with Pépé. “I must confess that once I have settled him with her,” he said in his sombre yet nonchalant way, “and have got myself back to Dijon alone, I shall feel an enormous relief. It is a foolhardy thing for me to be up here, hours from any help, with a man as old as my father. I live in constant apprehension—a fall, a chill. Each year I say that this is the last one.”

  I could not help thinking that, except for the immediate anguish of the son, it would be a fine poetical thing for Pépé to be able to die in the same strong, plain stone house where a hundred years before he had been born, and in the same bed in the room above the mule and the little flock of sheep. In that time, every family in the Aveyron had a flock of about twenty, for wool, meat, milk. Pépé’s father, like a Connes of every generation, was a blacksmith, but he raised his family on the food he scratched from the part of the mountainside that was his, like all the other people of that stern country.

  For two more round deep days and three more glittering cold nights, we lived high above the black river, in a kind of dream. Occasionally, the thin air would be filled with a kind of humming from the generators far below, but we seemed free from all the pulls and pressures of sound, of the bells and sirens and alarms that kept telling us, down in Aix, to move faster and get up and lie down and run, run, run. I saw the girls look sweeter before my eyes, and younger and gayer. They lay in the grass, and climbed the cherry tree, and moved about with soft words. They washed dishes together, and swept out the kitchen. Their hair, like mine, took on a softer, glimmering look.

  Our meals, when we all met in the dark, friendly salon, were long and enjoyable, although we ate lightly and drank almost nothing. Georges is really an austere person. During our stay he opened four or five bottles of wine, none of them more than fairly good, but we did not finish a single one. He is not at all stingy, but simply ascetic.

  Pépé was basically a much more open happy nature. One night at supper, he said to Anne and Mary, laughing in little snorts, with
his eyes very bright, “Vive la gaîté! That’s my motto! Yes, and it always has been. All my life I have practiced it. I love to be gay.”

  Once, I asked Georges where his more withdrawn melancholic character came from, and he said from his mother’s side. She was a quiet woman, very well read for her time and social level. Pépé inherited from his father, Georges’ grandfather, his happy nature. This man was known for three things throughout the Aveyron, where he was one of the few literates and, like my own grandfather Holbrook, kept books and made loans and so on: he did not believe in the Immaculate Conception; he never came home from work without bringing in a piece of firewood he had found or a handful of chestnuts or berries he had picked; and he always wore a flower or a sprig of leaves in his hatband.

  At least twice, Pépé started, in the extra-perfect syllables of a person who is speaking his second but familiar tongue, to recite La Fontaine’s fables to us. He cannot finish, we all thought, for nobody ever does. But he did, in a spate of magnificent rhythmic rhyme. He disdained the ones we all had learned, like “The Crow and the Fox” and “The Grasshopper and the Ant”; he rolled out to us long stories of unsuspected chicaneries and revenges of other beasts among us, political as well as social. Then he laughed with pleasure. Another time, he sat back and sang at least ten verses of “Malbrouck S’en Vat-en Guerre,” and I feel quite sure that Georges had no more previous knowledge of some of the couplets than I. I looked across the dark and cluttered table at him, and his eyes were full of delighted tears as he regarded his father. Pépé’s tooth shone unashamedly in his strong ancient face. Anne and Mary thumped their feet to the chorus, unconscious of anything but the man within the shell, ageless and alive.

  Always after the noon meal, Georges would amble to the kitchen and take an interminable time to make coffee. The girls were twitching to be out in the grass, but they sat helplessly while he brought Pépé the coffee mill, got out his little bag of beans brought from Dijon, heated water, on and on. The coffee, once it had dripped, was exquisite. Then, in the same excruciatingly slow way, Georges would get out a small bottle of Myrtille, and after we had drained our little cups of coffee he would pour in a sip or two, no more, of the pungent sweet liqueur. A digestive, he said in excuse. It was indeed very good.

  Gradually we finished the two dry cakes from Lodève, and the cheeses we had brought from Aix, and two big bowls of wonderful strawberries from Le Truel, bought from the same unfortunate soul who sold Georges the tiny peas.

  Almost always after the noon meal, Pépé and Georges played a little boules or pétanque on the terrace in front of the house. I have never been able to follow the floating rules of their game, but the sound of the balls is good against the earth and when they click together, and there is a special relaxed melody about the voices of the players.

  One evening before supper, Pépè asked me hopefully if I would not like a little apéritif. I bounded with delight, but too late. Georges had already said a stern and sneering no. “Mary Frances should not be introduced to those noxious, dangerous, habit-forming poisons,” he said to Pépé. “A little good wine with a meal is enough for anyone.” Pépé and I grinned secretly at each other, and the next evening I asked blandly if he would still like to “introduce” me to a glass of Cinzano. It tasted like nectar. When Pépé said he would join me, Georges frowned mightily, mouthed from the doorway, “Very little for him,” and left in a pout.

  The second full day we were there was Pentecost Monday, a great festival. Georges said, “I would like to show you the Gorges du Tarn, but the road will be bumper-to-bumper.” So we sat on the terrace, or leaned from our windows, and watched the slow creeping of a procession of perhaps fifty villagers leave Le Truel at about eight in the morning and then disappear into the forest across from us. They were almost invisible before then, but between us we believed we identified the priest in front in long black robes, and a little boy bearing a cross, and another, bigger one the tricolor, and then a few white-clad children who had obviously just made their First Communion, and a straggle of older, slower figures all in black.

  “Why don’t we hear them chanting as they always do?” Pépé fretted, and Georges repeated several times to him that the wind was blowing away, away. And also there were few people this year. “Ah,” Pépé said, “all the young ones are leaving the mountains—too lazy to put in a real day’s work anymore.” We forbore to remind him that he had been one of the first to escape—to Paris, to become a fairly high functionary and not to return until he was in his eighties and hiding out during the Occupation in the early 1940s.

  About an hour later, the little procession, much smaller than a line of ants, emerged from the forest onto the clear trail that led past a group of farm buildings and up the newly graded road to the parking place at the foot of the Virgin’s summit. There were a lot of cars, and plainly it was an important pilgrimage. Georges said there were stands selling sandwiches and wine and postcards and rosaries. Once, he and his young son, Pierre, went to the Mass on Pentecost Monday with the pilgrims, perhaps two thousand of them. It took the two men about six hours to descend to the Tarn and then climb up again to the chapel to join the procession on the other side of the statue—and longer to get back.

  When I asked what Notre Dame du Désert stood for, why she was there, who had built her, the two Conneses shrugged. Why does any village have its Virgin? No special miracle; just intercommunity rivalry.

  We kept an eye on the pilgrims across the valley all that day. Pépé now and then deplored, naïvely but firmly, the lack of faith, to make the crowd so small. We did not mention his own lifetime absence from it. We approved of the fine weather, for ourselves and all fellow-creatures, and Georges got out the old leather book his grandfather had started more than a hundred years before, which he was continuing, with reports on the weather and debts cancelled and so on (some of the loans were for as little as two francs and took ten years to be repaid and crossed off), and it seems that we were unusually lucky not to be in a drench, a bog, called succinctly the Pentecostal deluge.

  Pépé said that the biggest crowd he ever saw walking to Notre Dame du Désert was in the spring of 1875, when smallpox cut down the countryside. Only four died in Le Truel, but in a nearby village more than fifty people died, and the whole valley walked in a body to pray for help. Their singing rang back and forth against the mountainsides, he said. It was an expression of blind desperation and faith. Little difference there, he added noncommittally. That was a bad year, 1875; the Tarn roared out of control and destroyed the few bridges and swept away fields and dwellings. People drowned. Many believed that the end of the world had come, with flood and pestilence. Pépé was about thirteen, and he remembered the wild scene of the river after two solid days of rain, and how people returning from the pilgrimage were cut off from their homes when the newly built bridge at Le Truel broke, and how the lakes up on top, from which the enormous silver pipeline now snakes down to the dam, overflowed and spewed a great gush of dead cows and sheep and even men, and green trees and bedsprings, past Les Pénarderies and on into the flood below. He remembered, too, the hideous pockmarked face of one little girl who survived the plague in the village.

  Pépé said that the Virgin had sent out the news of freedom in 1945. Men working on the electric lines that ran up to the little farm hamlet from the new dam had got radio news of the liberation, and they hurried up to the chapel of Notre Dame du Désert, the nearest place, and roused the old bell ringer there, and for several hours the bell rang, to catch every wind and send the news through the air of the mountains. Pépé, his old wife, and one or two of their hideaways from the North heard the bell off and on all day and knew what it meant, although on this present Pentecost Monday, when we all felt free, we heard nothing but one faint snatch of song after the noon Mass, and a few salvos of musket fire. Then, halfway along the invisible path across from us on the mountainside, about four o’clock, there was another snatch of sound, and Georges said scornfully, “Hah, s
omebody poured himself too good a time today!”

  During the last war, Les Pénarderies sheltered many friends either getting to the temporary Free Zone or lying low. The Germans were thick in that part, because of the electric power, but did not bother the old Conneses. Once, some local hot-bloods of the Maquis blew up a power line nearby, and pieces of the porcelain conductors, which Pépé loved to exhibit on a shelf in the salon, crashed through the air. But Hitler, he said, soon had the line repaired. Le Truel lost only one man in this war, a youth shot dead on his own farm when discovered helping the Underground. Always before, the men of Le Truel who died for their country did so at a great distance, as in the Franco-Prussian War, when the ten-year-old Pépé was counted as one of the few men left to care for the women and children.

  The morning we must leave, we all lingered irresistibly, so that we started down the mountainside at least an hour later than I had said we would. My bed seemed too warm and familiar to quit. The air was too thin and sweet. Down in the big white kitchen, the bowls of hot café au lait and the last wooden crust of the loaf of bread were too good to finish. We did not want to say goodbye.

  Georges was remote and moody, and stalked about on the terrace, pretending to rearrange the back of the 2 CV for our tardy luggage. This disdainful attitude of his, I knew, came from his not wanting us to leave. I was going to quote one of his earliest pronunciamentos to me, but I refrained: “A guest is like a fresh fish; the first day delicious, the second day a bit boring, and the third day a stink.” This was the third day in hours, really the fourth by sunrises and sunsets, but I knew that his look of sneering impatience did not mean that he was tired of us.