The dim light here converted the woods to a tangle of shadows and gave me an unpleasant feeling.
Bruno was some kind of lunatic, I considered, as I walked in the half-light.
At the same time, I could not help but see his discussions of cave frequency as a naked expression of grief. He was down there looking for his dead daughter, convincing himself he heard her voice.
I heard footsteps in the gravel just behind me.
I turned around. On the path was a large bird with long legs, a heron, its body dusty blue and floating like a petticoat. It stepped and restepped on the path’s soft embankment, which collapsed under its large gangly feet.
“What’s your problem,” I said to it.
It moved in place, stepping on its thin legs.
Why was it not in a hurry to get away, I wondered, and then I saw why: it had a gopher in its beak. Its instinct to eat was overriding its instinct to flee. It took sideways steps, its large beak like gardening shears holding the gopher.
It aimed its head up to swallow the gopher and took off flying with a lot of frantic flapping.
Nature doesn’t bother me. What bothers me in nature is the possibility of people. I get a feeling in woods, no matter how remote they are, that someone could be around. I was still on edge from that moment at the abandoned truck stop, flinching to think someone was approaching as I squatted in a vulnerable position, peeing next to women’s underpants discarded on a bush, a scene I’d come to think of as the Tomb of the Unknown Hooker.
The woods gave way to a plateau with farmland on either side, fields of yellow grass, and large rolls of hay wrapped in white plastic like giant pills. No vehicles appeared as I walked along this road. I heard cowbells in the distance, and a soft nagging drone of farm machinery being operated somewhere out of sight.
On a hillside above the road was a little stone hovel, no windows, crudely built, with a dark and open doorway. It looked like a sad shelter for a nomad or vagrant. It looked like the sort of hut that Bruno had described and had lived in.
I passed rows of pruned vines, heavy with clusters of purple grapes. I stopped to eat a few.
Bruno had said the old Occitan name for this region, unknown to many, even those who studied Occitan, was the Aguienne Neire. “Neire” meant black, he said, and might have referred to black walnuts and black grapes. But more fundamentally, he said, this ancient name referred to the black of the caves.
It was curious to realize, as I tasted these grapes, how much I knew about this region, a place I couldn’t care less about. I would not be here long, and when the job was finished, I would never see this remote little corner of France again. I would drive the rental car to Paris and meet my contacts and get fresh documents and then it would be a flight from Charles de Gaulle to my next destination. This place would all but cease to exist.
But because of Bruno’s attention to local features, I had learned some of them. I knew this variety of grape I was tasting, the darkest by skin color, purple-black. The juice, Bruno said, was famously sweet, and here I was, tasting these local grapes, as sweet as he claimed.
And while I had not taken seriously his disquisition in one of the letters that the walnut orchard was a metaphor for wisdom, its filtering of light like the necessary filtering of truths, ugly ones hidden and useful ones highlighted, I had myself just traversed the Dubois property’s walnut orchard, nuts moldering on the ground, their skins split and dehiscing. And while these skins were green, I knew they were a variety of black walnut, on account of Bruno.
Some kind of lunatic, a man who lived in a cave and ranted about cave frequencies, but his descriptions of the region were being confirmed one after the other.
I was on a high road now that was like the spine of an enormous sleeping animal. I could see Vantôme, and the scarred, logged hillsides above it, and down below, the glint of the lake. I could see one of the two rivers that crossed the valley, and various tributaries, marked by thickets of greenery in the folds where hills touched, forming natural hedges between tracts of land.
“Neire” could also have referred to the Guyenne’s forests, Bruno had said, which are dense, at least those not defaced by logging.
I had just traversed that density. Released from it, I could see the defacement.
East of Vantôme was a series of low hills above the lake, where I suspected Bruno lived, based on his descriptions.
At the top of those hills was a castle. I could see its towers, the overlapping slate tiles glistening like fish scales in the sunlight. I peered through my binoculars. Four towers. This had to be the Château de Gaume, whose history Bruno recounted in one of his letters.
Below the Château de Gaume, closer to the lake, the land was all forested. Somewhere in there was Bruno, but all I saw through the binoculars was blurry and overmagnified green.
IT WAS TEN A.M. and getting quite hot. I consulted the iPhone (there was no cell service in this countryside but I’d loaded the map before leaving the house; I’d also brought a satellite phone in case I needed it). I realized I wasn’t far from a connector to the D43, which would be the shortest route back to the Dubois house.
This steep connector switchbacked down to the D43 past huge walls of limestone. As I walked, the high sun illuminated uncanny colors in the limestone, colors so vibrant and bright they looked artificial. Some areas were lavender, but patterned with lichen that was gold-bright like ground turmeric. Other lichens were creamy white and stretched along the rock face like embroidery. I passed, on these switchbacks, limestone cliffs that were striped in lemon yellow. Aren’t rocks supposed to be gray? I passed bands that were streaked the red of freshly butchered meat. Farther along this same section of rock shelf were drips of pale pink like candy hearts, and then thick vertical washes of baby blue. This had to be paint. I stopped to inspect. I touched the rock. It was warm as a body, from the sun. It wasn’t paint. The color was inside the limestone.
As I walked, I passed an opening in the rock covered by a barred grate, like a little door. I thought about what Bruno said, that these caves look as if they end, but they do not end. The little barred door had a lock. Who has the key to these things, I wondered. I put my ear to the grate. I heard the very faint trickle of water and felt cool air against my cheek.
On the other side of the road, farther down, was a sign that said “lavoir” with an arrow. There were wooden steps leading off the road to a rectangular stone pool.
I sat on the edge and put a hand in the pool, to wash off the sticky residue of grapes. I studied the ripple the spring made on the water’s surface. I understood that to put a hand in it was to touch what has been in the earth.
This kind of communal basin is standard in rural France, where women washed clothes, shared news, gossiped. I had an unsettled feeling of company, like other people, the women who had long ago come here to gossip, were here with me now.
I wasn’t afraid of them, which I took as a possible sign the heat was getting to me.
AMONG THE MEANINGS OF “NEIRE,” in the ancient name of the region, was bloodshed, Bruno said.
Neire was the history of violent struggle in this little valley of the greater Guyenne.
I here refer, he said, to the long and curious history of the Cagot, which you may not know much about, but should. For one thousand years in the Guyenne, Cagots were banished from community life, submitted to a range of untouchable-isms, and driven into the forests and onto high bluffs, where they survived secretly, in rock shelters and caves, sleeping in stone huts.
There are theories, he said, that these huts, like the one on Bruno’s own property, are in fact Cagot architecture—Cagot design and construction—given that those deemed Cagot were forced into a nomadic and furtive life, traveling at night like escaped prisoners, to limit their contact with others.
These people were forbidden to keep farm animals. They could not enter taverns, or drink from communal cisterns, or wash in communal lavoirs, or shop in village markets. They were believed to live on black bread, roots, rodents, and creek water. If a Cagot came to town, he was forced to walk under rain gutters and downspouts. If one of them was caught violating the law, a strip of vertical flesh was removed on either side of his spine. It was not a crime to murder one of them.
The Cagots could not worship in church, or take Communion, with the single exception of the parish of Vantôme, whose tolerant and eccentric clergy offered these poor souls Communion from the side of the chapel, through a slit of a door that is still there. The opening was narrow so that clergymen were protected from having to look at the Cagots, as it was believed that meeting their gaze was dangerous. The priest held out a long wooden spoon through the narrow door, the host balanced in the spoon’s ladle. Perhaps the most merciful acts in all of Christendom, Bruno said, took place in the little garden of the Vantôme chapel.
The Cagots were tall, sturdy of frame, with large faces and a heavy brow that gave them a brooding look. Many had red hair and pale complexions. Legend had it they were of rare and unique intelligence.
You may guess, he said, where this is heading, and indeed: there was an ancient rumor that the Cagot was a strain of earlier human, perhaps Neanderthal, which might account for why they had been barred from blending into the population.
Young people like yourselves, Bruno said, addressing Pascal and the Moulinards, are so often focused on 1871. The Paris Commune as our only flicker of something more, something better. I would like to point you toward a different date. I want you to look at 1594: the year of the Cagot Rebellion.
