A big wind moved through the churchyard, stirring the tall and sturdy thistles, their purple tips bobbing like the needles of metronomes, and riffling the green stinging nettles that clustered around the dry fountain and grew right up to the old Cagot door.
Perhaps it was my own malady of brain, but I felt that the wind was moving through the churchyard in response to my thoughts, like it was an affirmation of my sudden awareness that this door was that door, and the wind was saying, “Yes. Yes it is.”
The Café de la Route was on the main square, next to the mayor’s office, a buff-colored nineteenth-century building fringed with paper flyers for community meetings. A sun-bleached French flag, tattered from exposure, hung in strips above the entrance to the mayor’s office.
The leafed canopy of a huge plane tree, the bark of its trunk flaked in patches, arched over the square, creating a dappled light on the cobblestones as I crossed toward the café.
This café seemed to be the main life of the village. Its interior was two storefronts connected by an open doorway. One side was an épicerie, a little market that sold basic provisions, and the other a bar with an espresso machine, a couple of beer taps, a small selection of displayed liquors. The walls of the bar were dirty from tobacco smoke and hung with old photographs, presumably of loyal customers. The place was empty except for two old men in spirited conversation, their noses purple from the grape. (I tend toward white wine, in fear that red leaves such stains if you keep at it long enough.)
Behind the bar was a woman in her forties, topping off the old timers’ drinks. She had thick dark hair pulled away from her face by a headband that showcased her dramatic widow’s peak and even features. She was the kind of woman I’d call “handsome.” She told me to take any seat. I chose a table out front with a good view of the square.
I could hear the two men inside, their raspy cheerful voices. Thanks to Pascal’s strategy to augur goodwill by reopening the bar, they could escape their wives and sit drinking, undisturbed, on a weekday afternoon.
As I waited to order, two people appeared on the otherwise empty square. The man wore a torn safari vest and a faded Mao cap. The woman had black leather cuffs on both of her wrists. They carried overstuffed army backpacks, which they helped each other to remove and set upon the ground, the packs lolling like huge dusty crustaceans turned on their backs. They looked to be middle aged or older, in their fifties, perhaps, but the elements could have wizened them prematurely.
The handsome waitress approached them, asking did they want a table.
The couple shook their heads no, no thanks, and they stepped back warily from the outdoor seating area.
They were too old for this kind of vagabonding, this kind of pennilessness.
They picked up their giant backpacks, carried them across the square, and took up a kind of squatting position against the exterior wall of the church, near that warped little door where a Cagot would have begged for his Communion.
What I didn’t initially understand was that these two were also waiting for Pascal, even if he was not intending to meet them as he was me.
The sun was overhead and there was no shade in the churchyard. The way this couple squatted, they both looked accustomed to pretending that squatting is comfortable, that stinging nettles and spear thistles are not a problem. Their pretending was like the biker who pretends his ape hangers don’t tire his arms as he roars down the highway (but later he relies on Icy Hot, and on me, to slather it on biceps and shoulder).
My biker and these tramps, as people who organize their life around some subculture or other: People can sometimes pretend so thoroughly that they forget they are pretending. At which point, it could even be said that they are no longer pretending.
Monitoring that biker and his crowd was such different work than what I do now. But in its difference, and because it was my earliest job, my first, it has stayed with me. It was basic policework, entry-level and crude. I had infiltrated a northwestern chapter of the Gypsy Jokers, as the “old lady” (his euphemism; I was twenty-four) of a member who was later convicted, with my help, of racketeering charges. For several weeks, this biker was my “old man,” and now he’s a truly old man and in prison in Washington State. It wasn’t real intelligence work, but it led to everything that came after. All I did was wear a wire and wait for the right moment.
The waitress came outside to take my order. There was something about her that I liked, her even features, her thick dark hair and that widow’s peak, her embroidered blue peasant’s blouse. Her movements had a naturalness to them, a certain casual authority.
The man in the Mao cap removed from his safari vest what looked to be vaping equipment and squinted into the sun. The woman produced from a fanny pouch her own version of vaping equipment, and the two of them began to suck on these elaborate contraptions, large handheld objects with curves that reminded me of figureheads on ship prows.
I try to be sensitive to details, but the paraphernalia of vaping will forever remain oblique to me for the reason that I don’t vape. I used to smoke, perhaps on account of some percentage of Neanderthal in my lineage, although I’ll never know what percentage, not wanting my DNA in any database.
I watched as the woman stood to retrieve from her backpack her own faded black Mao cap, identical to his. She put it on and adjusted the brim and resumed her position next to him, the two of them leaning against the stone of the old church, gazing off, sucking on their vape contraptions.
Pascal Balmy was not late. I was early. The couple in their Mao caps was early. As we waited, a man rolled past the café in a convertible Chrysler Sebring.
“Lemon Incest” floated from its stereo. A Chrysler Sebring seemed like an unusual make and model for a tiny remote village in southwest France, a place where you would expect to see dusty little eco-carts, Renault Clios and Fiat Pandas. Citroën panel trucks. I watched as the driver of this Chrysler executed a clumsy eleven-point U-turn in order to park his Sebring, with “Lemon Incest” blaring.
There were two workers on the road beyond the square, unshaven young men in government-blue coveralls, sex symbols of the French proletariat, repainting a crosswalk with rollers on extender bars. You see these men all over Europe, on streets and highways, in their state uniforms, reflective silver material in a thick band around the cuffs of their pants. Such men on roadsides constitute “Europe” just as trucking and pallets and nuclear power are Europe.
The men painting the crosswalk paused and looked over, laughing at the Sebring driver’s slow and impractical attempt to turn his car around.
The disco beat with sexual sighs of “Lemon Incest” continued, the famous father in this duet low and quavering, the young daughter joining in, not holding her notes, but in key, a soprano that was ice-cream-headache high.
The man parked his Sebring, interrupting the music as he killed the motor. He got out and crossed the square. He wore large, tinted sunglasses and a scarf at his neck.
One of the workers laying new paint called the man a French term for faggot. Lemon Incest responded by exaggerating his sashay. One of the other workers whistled.
I understood that he was not a woman to these men in coveralls, but they objectified and denigrated him as if he were a woman, as if their insult were a catcall. Before he reached the curb, he dropped his burning cigarette in the wet paint the men had just laid with their rollers. He stepped on it and pushed his foot around. The workers laughed as he ruined their painted stripe.
He said something to them that I didn’t hear, as he tracked wet paint and turned a corner out of view.
Pascal Balmy showed up at exactly one p.m. He walked toward me in cargo shorts and Birkenstocks, a stack of books under his arm.
The anarchist kids in Paris who had followed him down here to build a commune would, I assumed, be in dirty black, not camp shorts and Birkenstocks. It made Pascal seem cooler than I’d expected him to be that he was dressed like a dork.
The couple in their Mao caps quickly extinguished or turned off their vaping equipment or whatever you do to it and excitedly walked toward him, calling his name. He semi-ignored them (glanced at them and, as quickly, glanced away) and headed for my table.
Pascal and I had not met before this moment. But he walked toward me gently smiling like we were in on something. We were at least in on the fact that he had guessed correctly who I was, or rather, who he believed me to be, based on Lucien’s summary and the photograph of me that Lucien favored (it was the screen saver on his phone) and that Lucien definitely (proudly) would have sent to Pascal.
I recognized Pascal too, his boyish and kind face, round, wire-rimmed glasses lending him a patrician air that seemed out of place here in tumble-down Vantôme.
As he came closer, I looked at him as though unsure if he was the person I was here to meet.
I stood as he approached. “Are you—”
“Yes,” he said, preempting the utterance of his name. “Yes I am.”
He smiled.
I smiled back and we hugged like old friends.
THERE WERE FEW public photos of Pascal. His name came up in Google because of the Times Square incident. Journalists reporting on that case had circulated a photo believed to be Pascal Balmy that was not him. It was a Facebook profile photo of some guy with the same name. That Pascal Balmy was on a jet ski, wearing a life vest and wraparound sunglasses.
