Ransacking Paris (23 page)

‘
C'est la vie
,' he said.

Jean-Jacques and Ana stayed in Paris four days, which was as long as they felt they could be away from their children. It was probably long enough for all of us; even when hearts reconnect, daily life has to go on. It was time for me to see what had happened in my draft while it had been out from under my anxious gaze. Sometimes things sort themselves out when I'm not working on them. We said goodbye to each other, insisting, as people do, that the next time we meet up must be in Australia.

Twelve

May

Grace and beauty occupy and fulfil me as much or more than weight or profundity.

Michel de Montaigne

Marc gave us the final list of songs we had to learn for the Fête de la Musique. Some we already knew – ‘
Petit Poucet
', ‘
La Paysanne
', ‘Mercedes Benz' and ‘
Ai Linda
' and the African song I knew from my choir in Australia, ‘
Asikatali
'
–
and some new French songs, ‘
La Pluie
' and ‘
Le Jazz et la Java
'
.
We weren't singing the Bach, no-one else liked it. Except for the choruses, I still found the French songs too much like speech – and with far too many muttering verses. I sang the rousing ‘
Marchons, Marchons
' of ‘
La Paysanne
' with gusto and then rushed through the tangle of words in every verse, still hoping only to finish the line at the same time as everyone else.

Marie-Louise helped me with translating words and expressions in the
chanson
. I still have the song sheets with
la
recolte
, harvest, and
les sillons
, furrows, and
la charrue
, plough, underlined. They are the words of my childhood, familiar, everyday: the paddocks of ripe wheat on the farm, and the harvester, or ‘header' as we called it, and my sister and I squatting in the header box where the yellow grain flowed in, letting it bank and flood around us. I can see the large discs of the plough, and the glistening slices of earth turning over, and the straight furrows behind it and my father saying he loved to look around at the end of the row of ploughing to see how straight the furrows were. I was moved to think of him gaining pleasure from the artistry of his work, straight lines across the paddock.

*

Lilacs bloomed in the gardens behind Montmartre – the sweet, cool smell transported me to my back yard in the Mountains – and the tulips in the Bois de Vincennes spread their so-pretty dresses and the roses in the Bagatelle spilled crimson, orange, pink, white and yellow colours and heady scent into the air. It was reassuringly beautiful – and ordered, almost as if spring had come on the request of the gardeners, each blossom arriving at a predefined time in an already arranged place. Nothing accidental. I wondered if spring was fierce and random in the country, on the farms and in the forests. After so long in the ground, it must burst through with determined abandon, pushing through sticks and leaves and around rocks and through cracks. I started to long for wildness, a place where trees didn't grow in rows and disorderly blackberry bushes straggled in every direction.

Vicky said we should go and enjoy spring at her farmhouse on the edge of Lacapelle-Biron. It was about 600 kilometres south-west of Paris in the Lot-et-Garonne, bordering on the Perigord region famous for foie gras and truffles. After her children had grown and she moved to Paris, the farmhouse was empty for most of the time – she said she wouldn't sell it because she and everyone else in Paris went back to their villages in the summer. It was a necessary return to their
terroir
, their place on the earth, she said. I thought of my father selling our childhood farm while he was in the grip of anxiety and depression and then afterwards, after the electric-shock therapy erased the memory, my mother having to tell him he had sold it. I thought of the Wiradjuri too, who had been displaced from their country nearly 200 years ago. They were still fighting for the right to call their country their own. Not everyone gets the choice to keep his place on the earth.

Vicky didn't want us to pay her any rent. ‘Just tidy up the garden for me,' she said. And she even had an old car down there we could use. Her neighbour and friend, Michel, used it most of the time, but he would pick us up from the train in nearby Fumel and drive us to Lacapelle-Biron and then the car would be ours.

‘And you can write down there,' she said, ‘it's quiet and there's plenty of room.'

We left mid-morning on a Saturday from Montparnasse, a gigantic station under the only high-rise building in Paris. The station was crowded and chaotic but we eventually found the right platform and settled down on the TGV high-speed train. It rocketed to the south-west in less than five hours, but we had to change to a two-carriage local train at Agen so it was early evening by the time we arrived in Fumel and stumbled off with our bags. I had been wondering how we would find Michel, but as soon as I saw him standing on the platform, I recognised him – he was the same shape and size and build as my father, a short, stocky peasant. Vicky had warned me I wouldn't understand his broad south-west accent, but I felt so immediately at home with him that I couldn't help exclaiming, ‘
Vous me rappelez de mon père. Il était fermier aussi.
' You remind me of my father. He was a farmer also.

He nodded and smiled politely. He was only about ten years older than I was.

Michel drove us through the countryside speaking slow and careful French in answer to our questions. I know I gazed out the window trying to take everything in, but recall only a generalised pretty scene – dense forests, dappled light on the roads, small fields, streams, villages. I do remember my first sight of Lacapelle-Biron as we drove down the hill towards it, a medieval village tucked into the landscape as if it had been there forever. It feels as if my mind took a picture of the village, as if I knew I'd find a connection to this place.

We stopped at a farmhouse just outside the village, set down a short slope from the road.

‘Vicky's farm,' Michel said. He gave us the key, said
au revoir
and drove off with his wife, who had been waiting there with her car. We stood there in the midst of the countryside, a French farmhouse to ourselves, a car, and, we found when we went inside, a bottle of wine and a round of cheese.

‘
La vie est belle, uh?
' Anthony said. We'd seen a young girl about ten years old exclaim
La vie est belle, uh?
on a news interview one night. It was an item about the summer holidays just after we'd arrived, and we adopted her knowing comment whenever things seemed too good to be true. Life is beautiful, eh?

We woke next morning and looked out the window and saw there was a field with a sprinkling of green, bordered by a stream with a forested hill on the other side. The stream, the Lède, wound its way between the field and forest, and crossed the road a short way up the Gavaudun valley. In the coming weeks we found it turning up here and there, wandering over the countryside, often with a few graceful fishermen standing on its banks. A field, a forest and a stream. I grew up with paddocks and a dry creek that only ever ran with muddy water for a couple of hours after it rained.

‘I'm in a book,' I said.

I went downstairs and out to the garden, which ran down to the stream on one side and the field on the other. From here I could see there were distinct new blades pushing through the ploughed earth of the field. Dew glinted on wheat or oats – it was too soon to tell which it was – in the cool morning, like thousands of diamonds shooting red and emerald and blue fire in tiny glittering sparks. And then I was a child walking up the lane through our wheat paddock to catch a ride to school with the teacher – he lived further up the road and gave us a lift in the back of his ute each morning – walking past rows of fresh green wheat blades, each one spangled with dew shooting fire as I walked. And then it was another season and I was a teenager and the wheat had grown as high as my waist and changed colour to a blue-green like water under a summer sky. The wind moved over it and the wheat waved like the sea hundreds of miles away, deep and restless.
Shifting green and blue.
I could dive into it, swim, feel it slide over my body.
Aqua light and shadow.
And then the need to seize the wheat-sea with a net of words, to hold on to it and dive in whenever I wished.
Wind rippling the seed-heads of the sea.

Eighty years earlier, a couple of hours' drive from Lacapelle-Biron, teenage de Beauvoir felt her soul reach out in the quiet evening dew. Felt the desire to hold beauty. Every summer she visited her aunt and uncle and cousins in the country at Meyrignac, near Limoges.

‘Lying in the grass, I gazed up at the moon; it was shining down on an Umbrian landscape [she was reading a life of St Francis of Assisi] radiant with the first dews of night: I felt breathless with the soft beauty of the moment. I should have liked to snatch it as it fled and fix it forever on paper with immortal words …'

I wondered if the desire to seize beauty is the first impulse, even before the impulse to attribute it to unseen powers. The old, old longing, against the unstoppable nature of being, to haul the moment out of time, to ‘snatch it as it fled and fix it forever on paper'. Simone lay on the grass in the moonlight and felt beauty flood her soul, and then, immediately, came the desire to seize fluid time, to pluck at and fix a moment like a butterfly on a pin.

Rousseau asserted that the only time he had been happy was when he was immersed in nature and that he was never seriously ill when he lived in the country. He said: ‘When you see me at the point of death, carry me into the shade of an oak and I promise you I shall recover.' It was his central belief, that nature was inherently good and civilisation destructive: ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hand of the Author; everything degenerates in the hands of Man', but it's clear that it wasn't just an idea; he was more content, more at peace, when surrounded by forests and lakes and mountains.

Late in his life he lived for a while on an island in a lake. ‘On getting up I never failed, if it was fine, to run out to the terrace and breathe in the fresh and healthy morning air, and to let my eyes skim along the horizon of that beautiful lake whose shores and whose skirt of mountains delighted my gaze.' He couldn't understand how anyone immersed in the natural world could not have faith in God: ‘How is it that their souls are not raised in ecstasy a hundred times a day to the Author of the wonders that strike their eyes?'

But it wasn't just a delightful wandering about, floating in beauty. He studied botany and was dedicated to the idea that observing detail revealed wonder: ‘Others, when they look at all these treasures of nature, feel only a stupid and monotonous admiration. They see nothing in detail because they do not even know what they ought to look at; and they fail equally to see the whole. Because they have no idea of the chain of relations and combinations, which is so marvellous it overwhelms the observer's mind.'

Simone de Beauvoir, who, I suspect, would have no patience with Rousseau in most situations, might have liked him in the country. When she stayed at Meyrignac:

The chief of my pleasures was to rise early in the morning and observe the wakening of nature; with a book in my hand, I would steal out of the sleeping house and quietly unlatch the garden gate: it was impossible to sit down on the grass, which would all be white with hoar-frost; I would walk along the drive, beside the meadow planted with specially chosen trees that my grandpa called the landscape garden; I would read a little from time to time, enjoying the feeling of the sharp air softening against my cheeks; the thin crust of rime would be melting on the ground; the purple beech, the blue cedars, and the silvery poplars would be sparkling with the primal freshness of the first morning in Eden: and I was the only one awake to the beauty of the earth and the glory of God …

Like Rousseau's, her romantic love of nature had a strong spiritual meaning: ‘Here I could see blades of grass and clouds that were still the same as when He snatched them from primal Chaos, and that still bore His mark. The harder I pressed myself against the earth, the closer I got to Him, and every country walk was an act of adoration.'

There is a quality in her feeling that's even more than a response to beauty. It's the same feeling that came in my childhood when I stood on Baron Rock behind our farm, surrounded by its ancient volcanic rock and twisting gums, and as a young woman in the Blue Mountains immersed in the hot dreaming bush – blue gums, banskia, grevillea – pulsing with imminent revelation. And sometimes even in the cultivated nature of a city. It happened not long ago on a recent return to Paris one afternoon as I walked into the Jardin des Plantes. Just inside the gate was a Wollemi pine, the ancient tree discovered in a lost valley in Australia, and I stopped to pay a brief homage, but didn't feel anything in particular except perhaps a sort of pride. Then I walked through an avenue of chestnuts planted in rows, their branches and leaves clipped into the usual absurd cubes, towards an expanse of rectangular garden beds – and then, without warning, it came. I felt it arrive like waves rolling across the garden beds and up the avenue, a vast and joyful peace, warm and replete. For minutes I was filled with joy and felt I must have been shining. Even when it left it pervaded the whole rest of the afternoon with an afterglow of tranquil happiness. Meaning is given to that glorious feeling, most often awe of the Almighty, but couldn't it be fine, as yet undetectable, waves of energy from trees and plants, from the natural world? It sounds fantastical and I don't have any evidence, but I have felt it and cannot call it God anymore.

*

There were bikes in the back shed at the farmhouse, so after eating toasted baguette with jam at the table in the back garden, we decided to explore. I was here to write, but I needed to locate myself in the landscape first. The immediate area of Vicky's place and two other houses nearby was known as Courances. It was at the beginning of the Gavaudun valley, which we found later was a picture-book valley: tiny wheat fields, dappled oak and birch forests, the Lède stream wending its way beside the road, delicate sharp-eared deer in the evening, a ruined chateau on a cliff. The village of Lacapelle-Biron was about a kilometre in the other direction so we headed that way first. We pedalled up a slight incline, the soft whirr of the bikes and the cool May morning air and faint scents of grass reminding me of riding to school in the early morning.