Ransacking Paris (24 page)

As we entered the village we saw a car parked outside a dilapidated stone house, an old black Citroën, looking as if it had driven out of a French war film. Opposite was a shop selling wine and local walnuts and prunes and general goods. Vicky had told us it was run by an elderly woman called Madame Hebiard and that we ought to introduce ourselves to her as ‘
les amis de Madame Cole
'. Just ahead in the centre of the village was a war memorial, a large slab of rock inscribed with the names of the dead, held up by many stony arms coming out of the soil. Later, when I got to know Madame Hebiard, she told me that during the Second World War, the Germans had rounded up all the men in the village and shot some of them in a field and sent the rest to Dachau and that most of them, including her father, never came back.

A couple of years ago I went to a service at the memorial and saw and listened to the children and grandchildren of the men who disappeared that day, most of them now old themselves. I listened carefully and understood the loss and what was owed in a way that I never had on Anzac Day in my hometown, even though the names of my own great uncles who had died were inscribed on the war memorial there. In my town war had seemed too long ago and too far away.

It was recent history here. Lacapelle-Biron had been in this small fold of the hills since at least the twelfth century, watching wars for centuries. It had been here when the English rampaged back and forth during the Hundred Years War and when the Catholics murdered Huguenots in the name of God in the sixteenth century. It had been here when Montaigne was writing in the tower of his chateau at Bergerac an afternoon's horse and carriage ride away. Its stone houses watched quietly, did not draw attention.

All around the Lot-et-Garonne and the Dordogne, there are many
bastides
, walled towns, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries either by the invading English, or to protect against them, with market squares and beautiful arcades on hill-tops, but Lacapelle-Biron is just a huddle of houses and a few shops. It is pretty, as stone villages are, but it is no different from thousands of other French villages. Its main tourist attraction is Chateau de Biron four or five kilometres on the other side, but tourists stop there rather than the village, so Lacapelle-Biron remains quiet. We found two cafés, a
boulangerie
, a
boucherie
and
pharmacie
and a small supermarket and petrol bowsers, all except the cafés with notices stating they would be shut in the middle of the day. It was a small, ordinary village. The few people we saw nodded and said, ‘
Bonjour
.'

Riding to the village became part of the rhythm of our days. I wrote in the mornings and then we took turns to ride to the
boulangerie
to buy a baguette just before lunch. In the afternoons we drove to one of the
bastides
or headed out on foot, following the maze of walking paths through the forests and fields. The footpaths were part of the great network of trails all over France, the
Grande
and the
Petite Randonées
, the
Grande
marked with red and white stripes and the
Petite
with yellow. There was one twelve-kilometre circular path that began directly opposite the farmhouse, or at least we could join it there.

The first time we walked it was late in the evening, during the golden twilight. We had a map but the path was clear enough. It plunged straight up a hill into a small oak wood and then came out on a ridge through a wheat field from where we could see the lie of the land. Across the valley were more wooded hillsides and ahead was Lacapelle-Biron. The path skirted along the edge of the village then veered back into the trees
–
oaks, chestnuts, birch, locusts. We stopped every now and then to check for the yellow way-markers that appeared on posts, trees, the side of a Telecom box. At one point we came to the ruins of a stone cottage, its roof fallen in, a gnarled oak twisting its roots over the lintel like a tightrope walker over my head. Skinny oaks grew inside the four walls open to the sky. In a short distance, the path came out into a ploughed field, and I suddenly felt the expansion of open fields and a longer perspective.

‘Out of the woods,' Anthony said aloud. I suddenly understood what that meant in my body, the physical release of being out of the woods. The language that I had known all my life had lived outside of my skin and I hadn't even noticed.

Ahead on the next hill was the Chateau de Biron, its round towers and chapel and battlements outlined against the sky in the twilight. From the twelfth century it had been the seat of a powerful family, the Gontaut-Birons, but most of it was built in the sixteenth century.

‘Fairytale,' I thought. It was impossible to think any other word.

‘Fairytale' was in my mind for most of the walk – it was the only context I had for castles and keeps and forests. On the map, Vallon du Loup, the Vale of the Wolf, was marked to the east. I thought about wolves and how quickly I might be able to climb an oak tree. When we crossed the road in front of the chateau we entered another wood, which was dark oak on one side and a delicate tracery of beech on the other. Milky green lichen grew down one side of every tree and I remembered reading that's how people knew which direction they were going in a wood; moss and lichen grow on the north side of trees. In small clearings corn grew or a stone house appeared. White clematis tangled over broken walls along a path worn nearly two metres below fields from a thousand years of walking.

And then we came out at St Avit, a medieval village about a kilometre on the other side of the farmhouse. We peered in the open door of the twelfth-century church and saw swallows and robins swooping inside in the dimness. Outside on its stone roof, plants and grasses grew as if the stones were still back on the hillside 800 years ago. Old roses climbed and fell from stone fences, bees staggered home to hives, a meadow with grasses and poppies wafted sweet smells. Across from the church a cemetery sank into the side of the hill, new and old graves crowding together. The long-ago past dreamed in the air. Our sons would have loved this place, I thought, especially Patrick, who had read medieval fantasy novels right through his teenage years.

From St Avit the path followed an ancient stone wall all the way back to the darkened farmhouse. I felt that my feet had connected not only to the earth, but to all the people who had trodden the path down through the centuries. Farmers like my father, and blacksmiths, beekeepers, women gathering mushrooms, shepherds, lovers holding hands where no-one could see them, children taking bread and cheese to their fathers in the fields, my footsteps on their footsteps, making my faint mark on the earth. I was beginning to know this land close-up at a walking pace, which I've come to believe is the only way to know the land.

*

In one of those unlikely coincidences that pattern life, several years later when Patrick had finished his degree and was working in Paris teaching English, he met a girl at a party whose family came from Lacapelle-Biron. The girl, Céline, thought it quite incredible – and perhaps a chat-up line – that he knew of and had visited her tiny village (fewer than 500 inhabitants) to see his Australian parents at the Englishwoman, Madame Cole's, house. When Céline took him to the village to meet her parents and grandparents, he walked around the streets and pointed out the
boulangerie
and the wifi café and the road to Gavaudun. Céline now lives with Patrick in Australia and when I go back to Lacapelle-Biron these days, I think of her ancestors walking along the paths in the oak forests and along the streams, and wonder at the intricate ways we are bound together.

*

Wild grasses growing on the stony roof of the St Avit chapel; an oak growing out of a lintel – these sights please me. Things that are well ordered reassure for a while – a neat row of trees in a winter park – then I want to rebel. It could be just that I'm not good at order, I've never achieved a ‘look' that goes together perfectly, a room where everything is in the same style. Perhaps it's disruption that attracts me, the point between order and chaos where neither dominates. Montaigne aimed for that kind of disorderly order in his writing style, a kind of roughness and disruption: ‘I like to imitate the unruly negligence shown by French youth in the way they are seen to wear their clothes …'

I laughed when I read it, thinking of suit jackets worn with t-shirts, and then he went on to say: ‘With their mantles bundled over their necks, their capes tossed over one shoulder or with a stocking pulled awry: it manifests a pride contemptuous of the mere externals of dress and indifferent to artifice.'

Montaigne said too: ‘Those clever chaps [he meant other writers, not the French youth] […] are always adding glosses […] they never show you anything pure, they bend it and disguise it to fit with their own views.'

Is that what I've done? I have wanted to be honest, but it's easy to add gloss, to make things shine when in life they have an ordinary colour, a plain finish. It's the nature of writing to complete things, to give form, perhaps some bending and disguising can't be helped.

Many centuries later, Annie Ernaux aimed for a style without disguise, for directness and simplicity, although it seems to me for a different reason. For her it was a way of giving allegiance to her country working-class origins, ‘to accord the same importance to the words, to the gestures, of the people'.

It makes me curious that an aristocratic man from the sixteenth century and a working-class woman from the twenty-first century had the same desire to disrupt the smooth and stylish surface of language. Was it because they were both from the country, or even just that they were not from Paris and they found its elegant rule overbearing? Like the farmers who come to Paris every now and then: when they are unhappy with the government they shovel cow manure, or sometimes horse manure, onto their trucks and hold their anger and drive up the motorway to Paris and stop in front of the
Assembl
é
e Nationale
, and as they unload the steamy pile in front of the Parliament it breaks the spell of the word-spinners.

I like plain and simple, rough and ready, but I also love fine and precise. I'm not single-minded, I'll be led anywhere. Montaigne said his mind ‘bolts like a runaway horse', heads in any and all directions. He leaps from the body's ills to sexual inclinations to dislike of morose temperaments – and back again, quoting Horace here and Cicero there, interrupting his own thought or jumping sideways. ‘I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune and take the first she presents to me, they are all the same to me.' It sounds lazy but I want to defend it because I suspect it's what I do as well. He says he gives himself to ‘doubt and uncertainty, and to my governing method, ignorance'.

Stendhal said he wanted to use language that the workers at Les Halles, the city market in Paris, used, concrete and direct. He also drew sketches all the way through his memoir – interrupting the flow of words. They are rough and odd, sometimes incomprehensible, messy or spidery corners of his memory, a contrast to his elegant and sharp thinking. And at the end he attached an appendix, which he wrote a couple of years before he died. It's a list of twenty-three articles of privilege he would like to be granted.

Article 3

A hundred times a year he will know for twenty-four hours whatever language he wishes.

Article 7

Four times a year he will be able to turn himself into the animal he wishes and then turn himself back again into a man.

Article 18

Ten times a year, on demand, the privilege-holder will be able to reduce by three-quarters the pain of someone whom he sees …

Article 21

Twenty times a year the privilege-holder will be able to divine the thoughts of all persons around him, at a distance of twenty paces.

It's a peculiar way to end a memoir, and it's scrappy like the drawings, but in this odd list, tacked on the end, the bits and pieces of the boy and the man come to life and someone breathing steps out of the book. Not everything is continuous, part of a whole, makes perfect sense.

I thought of an article of privilege for myself.

Article 1

Twelve times a year the privilege-holder can become anyone who has ever existed for half an hour and then be themselves again without harm or advantage, but keeping the memories, if they so wish, of the other.

Back in Paris after two weeks away, the air was noticeably warmer; summer was coming at last. Bees had returned to the Jardin du Luxembourg and the gardens in Montmartre, collecting nectar for the beekeepers who kept hives in the Gardens and on the roof of the old Palais Garnier op
e
ra building and the roof of Temple de l'Étoile near the Arc de Triomphe.

In yet another of those odd patterns in an apparently random world, I've discovered that in Greek mythology a bee settling on the lips signified a truth-teller in scholarship and in poetry. In some African cultures too, honey was put on the lips of newborns so that they would be truth-tellers. In India, the bowstring of the Goddess of love, Kamadeva, is made of honey-bees. And then, in Hebrew, ‘honey-bee' has the same root as ‘word', both coming from the letters DBR. The letters can be interpreted as ‘to pick a direction'. Bees don't so much pick as reveal a direction in the steps of the dance they perform in front of their hives. They show where and how far away the clematis or linden or eucalypt flowers bloom. I thought of words taking me this way and that, perhaps not even revealing a direction for me, but at least uncovering where I have been.

I don't believe anymore in a cosmology where the world is speaking to me, speaking to us all, but I keep wondering about the stinging restlessness that pulled me to Paris in the first place. Was I longing for direction, the ordinary longing of those who have lost their origins? I thought I knew where I'd come from, that I had already ‘picked my direction'. The Wiradjuri country of my childhood is my heart and soul and all the sense memories of my body too, which are no small things, but truthfully, my mind has come from elsewhere. The stories that I read, that filled my days, had the weather and geography and animals, snowstorms and wolves and castles, oaks and meadows, of a world that I had not seen. Even language, the English I've always thought of as mine, so deep in my cells, didn't come out of the soil I grew up on, didn't match the landscape or the weather. Here I was finding out what words meant for the first time. I found myself at home on the other side of the world and I found too that I didn't belong. Paradox shifts the lens, brings who I am in and out of focus. There was always, perhaps will always be, a fine split, a self which is never quite whole. And neither does it matter. Nothing on earth is pure and unmixed, even honey, and there will always be flaws and cracks and things that cannot be one. It's the nature of being here in the world and I wonder if I even desire wholeness anymore.