I went downstairs and prepared coffee that I’d bought at Leader Price in Boulière. I tore a hunk from a baguette I’d also purchased at Leader Price and found some vintage Nutella in the kitchen cabinets. It was ten years old but still sealed. Dead-stock Nutella. Nutella never goes bad, just gets a bit crystallized. I spread some on my bread.
As I ate, Vito sent me a selfie of him at the Calanques outside Marseille, on a rock above the transparent water.
I stamped his image with my digital thumbs-up.
—Serge wanted to be here by 7 am to film sunrise. We had to get all these permits. The road is narrow, the width of only one car. Serge was driving. He keeps honking. I said what are you honking at, why do you keep honking? He goes, I’m required to honk. You have to honk at every turn. Just in case. It’s illegal not to honk. It’s beautiful here. How is it there? What are you doing?
—eating bread w nutella. pride of your nation.
—That family are billionaires off this goo they invented. Wartime chocolate.
—do italians have a word like goo? because i can’t think of one.
—… gelatina?
—that’s not even close.
His thumbs-up brightened my screen.
—Europe’s children are being raised on this goo and they don’t know it. Because they don’t have a wonderful word like goo.
I pressed a heart on that declaration.
It’s rare for Italians to acknowledge their nation’s cultural limitations. Vito is different, in this way and in other ways. Italians often want to tell you that the pasta and wines from their particular locality are the best. They want to pretend that different shapes of noodle are different culinary sensations. Spaghetti is made of flour and water and wherever it comes from it all tastes the same. Italian wines don’t vary much either despite what Italians say. They call it Nebbiolo or tears of Christ and they claim the grapes are grown from volcano ashes or Sardinian sand, but to my palette Italian wine is more or less table wine. It is wine in a box.
Vito was not in denial of Italy’s bland culinary offerings, and he had a sense of humor, which he steadily employed in this short-term friendship pact that he and I had formed. Its temporary nature was unknown to him, but no friendship, no contract of sympathy or trust with other people, comes with a guarantee of permanence.
Finished with my package coffee, my stale bread and wartime goo, I set up a satellite router. The router was new, had cost me two thousand euros, and could get a signal at the North and South Poles. It was the size of a small box of chocolates. I flipped up its antenna. The lights flashed from red to green. No more traveling with a clumsy dish I would try to mount and angle to get my signal. This little box was working perfectly. I took care of messages while toggling between various news sites.
A heat wave was gripping all of southern Europe. The newspaper headline that morning was “L’ENFER” over a map of the bottom half of France. Trains would be delayed on account of the conditions. A forest was on fire in Provence. The article included quotes from the directors of morgues, where bodies were expected to pile up.
I enjoy heat, personally. It’s vivifying.
The Lucien phone came to life. It was Vito, texting to say they were leaving the Calanques. It was full of stinging jellyfish.
—as opposed to some other kind of jellyfish?
—I’m emphasizing the danger. This body of water is thirty percent jellyfish. Serge says it’s global warming.
—did anyone get stung.
—the soundman, Attilio. He’s getting some goop from the pharmacy right now… Sadie *do not* ask if Italians have a word like goop! They don’t. The French don’t either.
I silenced that phone and tried to figure out where Bruno’s place was. I had no address, only a sense it was in the hills above Vantôme. Bruno had lived there with a wife and their three children when the accident occurred.
He never mentioned this accident in his emails to Pascal and the group. I know the outlines of the story through the dossier I was given on Bruno, which included a news clipping about it (and was otherwise quite thin considering French authorities had been watching him for half a century).
The timeline was spotty, but it seemed that by 1973, he and his wife had relocated to this area and begun to have children. His last of three, a girl, would have been born in 1980, as I deduced from the news clipping, which was dated 1988. According to the article, Bruno had been teaching his youngest to drive a tractor. The tractor was on a grade—it was hillside property—and the little girl was trying to turn it. The tractor tipped over and crushed her. She was eight years old.
Bruno’s marriage did not survive this tragedy. From court records, I pieced together that just after the death of the child, his wife had left, along with his surviving daughter and son. A divorce was filed in Souillac, on the river Dordogne, suggesting that the wife had relocated to that area, rural, like this area, but with a tourist economy.
Bruno’s letters made it seem as if he had good relations with both adult children. The surviving daughter now lived on his property, in the farmhouse where the whole family had once lived, and where Bruno no longer lived.
It was after the tractor accident resulting in the death of his daughter, and the departure of his remaining family, that Bruno vacated the farmhouse and moved into his barn.
He talked about this personal history, his house-to-barn transition, in the emails to Pascal, by explaining that he had wanted to be closer to a more rudimentary diurnal pattern, and attuned to his animals. (He had a cow, several sheep, a pig, geese, guinea fowl, and chickens. His ducks, which he’d set on his pond, were quickly “reabsorbed into the greater chain of being,” he wrote, in other words eaten by predators.) No mention was ever made, in these emails to Pascal and the Moulinards, of the death of his younger daughter, her life cut short by a tractor.
He wrote instead about the smell of hay, which has one thousand different permutations, he said, depending on season, relative humidity, barometric pressure, what the animals have been eating and drinking to influence the fragrance and pH of their urine. Stored hay, he said, when properly dried, creates its own microclimate, warm in winter, cool in summer.
He talked about the swallows’ nests accumulating on the high posts of his barn like “mailboxes,” one on every post, and the swallows, the mail carriers, darting in and through the barn in a sinuous tangle of swooping deliveries, bringing mud and grass to patch or improve their mailbox, or with leggy insects threaded in their beaks for the pink-orange maws of their peeping young. These birds, he said, had traveled all the way from Africa on their annual migration. They came to his barn from across the world and they brought the world to him, as much of the world as he would ever want.
In the emails, Bruno’s life in the barn was treated as part of a long and involved process of altering consciousness and retreating from civilization, which he saw as the only solution to this stage of late capitalism. Revolution, which back in 1968 he had believed was possible, he now understood to be foreclosed. The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind.
From the barn, life for Bruno grew simpler still.
As he described in his emails, he gave up the barn for an ancient dry-stone hut that had been on his property for five hundred years. No one knows, Bruno said, what these peculiar huts, of which there were perhaps a dozen in the hills above Vantôme, were originally used for, whether to store tools, or for a shepherd to seek shelter in a storm, or for some other reason. They were a kind of halfway station, Bruno said, between man and nature, between farming and wilds. They had no door, just an open entrance, and they were low, forcing a man to stoop and crawl. Bruno said his stone hut had both reduced and expanded his mind. The hut had expelled him from the world he knew, but opened him to a different one, a realm that was nomadic and dirty and damp, but revelatory.
That hut was his final built structure, Bruno said, before he went into the caves.
He had always known the caves were there, he wrote to Pascal and the Moulinards, but the depth of them, their spatial complexity, had stunned him.
We never expect the true depth of a cave, he said, on account of our indoctrination, our enslavement to the aboveground, which is scaled to us and above us, scaled to trees, to high-rise buildings, to the industrial dreams of twentieth-century man, and to his military imagination, scaled to fighter jets, and to heaven, to our need to claim something in the blue beyond, a thing we might call “blessed.”
This vertical arrow aiming from ground to sky constitutes modern man’s entire spatial reality, Bruno wrote. It excludes the other direction, he wrote, the down-into-the-earth. This is an incredible blind spot, he said, and he himself had not understood how blind, until he one day squeezed himself into his own cave, on his own little property in the Guyenne.
When he had purchased the land, in the early 1970s, the previous owner had shown him the cave as a curiosity. That owner had kept a board over its entrance. Beyond the board was an opening, a cavern five feet shallow, at the end of which two rocks angled together into a narrow crevice. For years, the board remained there. One day, in the period after he’d left the farmhouse, and the barn, and was sleeping in his little stone hut, Bruno removed the board and went in. He put his hand through the crevice in the rocks and felt wind. He understood that beyond the crevice there must be a large open space. He returned with ropes and a headlamp and pushed through the crevice and lowered himself. He did not hit bottom for quite a while. When he did, he was in an enormous room, its ceiling perhaps three meters high. He found multiple openings off this main room leading in different directions.
One particularly magnificent discovery was a chamber that was flocked white like a snowy landscape. Is this a dream? he wondered. It was not a dream. The walls were coated with magnesium crystals. They were blanketed in sparkling white, a natural geologic phenomenon. Some call this moon milk, Bruno wrote. It coated the floor. In that moon milk floor were indentations that he believed were records of human presence, and in particular, shapes that looked, and felt, like the footprints of a child.
