H. sapiens needs help. But he doesn’t want help.
We have endured a long twentieth century and its defeats, its failures and counterrevolutions. Now more than a decade into the twenty-first, it is time to reform consciousness, Bruno said. Not through isms. Not with dogma. But by summoning the most mystical secrets we have kept from ourselves: those concerning our past.
A psychoanalyst looks for clues of repression, of what a patient has hidden from others and, more importantly, hidden from himself. The deepest repression of all is the story of those who came first, before we did, long before the written-down. We must unpack what these earlier lives might mean for us, and for our future.
No, I’m not a primitivist, Bruno said, as if in swift answer to an accusation.
I face forward, he said, and any discussion of ancient history is only in regard to what is to come.
Look up, he commanded, in this email to Pascal Balmy and the group.
The roof of the world is open.
Let us count stars and live in their luminous gaze.
Which is to say, these stars’ deep past, which is to say, our future, bright as Polaris.
THE ROOF OF THIS PLACE was not open, thank God.
But it leaked in two of the upstairs rooms. All of the roofing, which consisted of flat hand-chiseled tiles of slate, needed to be replaced, and there was a dispute between Lucien Dubois and his aunt Agathe over whether to pump money into the house and restore it, or cut losses and sell it.
The house was three hundred years old. Lucien had inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father. I had asked him when his father’s father’s family had acquired the place and he’d looked unsure how to answer, as if the question itself betrayed a confusion on my part.
“It was our family house in, uh, the beginning.”
Lucien’s aunt Agathe was from the other side, his mother’s family. Agathe was not a Dubois. She lived not too far from the Dubois place and had been looking after it. When Lucien was making arrangements for me to come here, he and Agathe argued on the phone about the roof and the future of the house.
I didn’t care what Lucien decided. I was a temporary resident. The house was a perfect headquarters for my purposes here in the Guyenne Valley, despite the leaking roof. The location was convenient to Le Moulin, the group of people on whom I needed to keep tabs. It was protected, with a long private driveway. Any car turning onto the gravel from the little road far below would announce itself to me through the upstairs windows, which I kept open, alert to sounds. And it had a hilltop vantage. From the room I’d chosen on account of the fact it did not leak on this side of the house, I could see the entire valley. (It helped that I had high-powered binoculars with US-military-grade night vision.)
THE ROAD TO THE HOUSE led through dense forest canopy, discouraging anyone who didn’t already know the place was here from investigating the turnoff, which I myself had missed while traveling the tiny and rural D43, upon my initial arrival.
There was no sign, no gate, no mailbox indicating I’d reached Lucien’s family estate, just a narrow tunnel into the woods. As I turned up it, a large rust-brown raptor sailed low between trees in the half-lit undercanopy. I sensed it was accustomed to having this place to itself. Get used to me, I thought at it.
At the top of the road, I turned left, following Lucien’s instructions. There was a row of tall poplars, tapered into points, like feathers. I like poplars. A straight line of them makes me think of driving, of going fast, into low Western sun, its rays illuminating their rippling leaves. Poplars remind me of Priest Valley, a beautiful non-place that I drove past with that boy who took the rap for Nancy. They are trees that remind me of a time when I felt invincible.
I passed the poplars and continued left, crossing through a walnut orchard, untended and ancient, which stretched out on both sides of the little gravel lane, just as Lucien had described.
I parked beyond the orchard, in front of the Dubois family manor, built of yellow limestone, large blocks of it that radiated daytime heat, although it was evening when I arrived, and cool.
The garden beyond the gates, now weeds, was where Lucien had thrown knives as a boy. Where he’d sifted the dirt for prehistoric tools while the adults drank eau-de-vie, water of life, a clear brandy distilled of this property’s summer plums and autumn pears. (Eau-de-vie tastes the same—like gasoline—no matter what fruit it’s made from, I didn’t point out to Lucien.)
I’d had to hear all about his boyhood memories:
“Our report cards came in five colors: pink excellent; blue good; green satisfactory; yellow unsatisfactory; and red failing.”
“My teacher at maternelle had beautiful long brown hair and a soft voice and she wore white sandals with little heels. Her name was Pauline.”
“If I got all pinks, we could stay an extra week in the country.”
It’s the same, whether you’re in a relationship with a man or pretending to be in one. They want you to listen when they tell you about their precious youth. And if they are my age, which Lucien is—we are both thirty-four—their younger boyhood, the innocent years, are the 1980s, and their teendom, the goodbye to innocence, is the 1990s, and whether in Europe or the US, it’s similar music and more or less the same movies that they want to trot out and reminisce over, from an era I personally consider culturally stagnant.
I prefer to hear about the fixations of the oldest generation of European men, the ones whose youth involved encounters with war and killing and death, traitors and fascists and whores, collaboration and national shame: rites of passage into manhood, a true and real loss of innocence. Everyone has their type. And I’m okay with the generation just under them, the ones now in their sixties, because they at least know compulsory military service, or they know elective, extralegal refuge in the French Foreign Legion.
With Lucien and boys like him—who will forever remain mere boys—there is no war nor suffering nor valor. There is only some bland girl, some banal pop song, a romantic comedy, an August vacation.
August was around the corner, but no family was set to arrive. Lucien was grown, and those trips were long over. The trees from which fruit was made into liquor were still in the yard, gnarled, unpruned, their heavy limbs bending into the chest-high weeds.
Lucien had experienced his first romantic tryst here, with a much older girl, a university student from Toulouse, whose family had a place in the area. She wore a cashmere sweater and a heady Guerlain perfume. She had taken Lucien’s virginity, he said, in an empty pig stall of an abandoned farm. I suppressed my laughter, laughed only inwardly, bearing witness to his adolescent memories as if they were not a cliché, and instead, as if they mattered.
Agathe had left the keys behind a dead geranium in a stone cubby next to the front entrance. I fitted a key into the lock in the heavy iron crossbar on the front door. The crossbar slid to one side. I opened both doors. The air inside was damp and cold like air in a cave.
I walked the broad uneven floor planks, my steps voluble, as if the weight of me was waking the floor from a long dormancy. I peered into rooms filled with furniture covered in sheets. Cobwebs wafted along the hallways, soft and dirty. I went upstairs and inspected bedrooms, opened shutters and windows to get a look at things and to dilute the smell of mold.
The ceiling plaster in half the rooms, under the leaking roof, was puckered and stained. Strips of wallpaper hung down like old movie posters dangling from a tack. On the floor of one of the rooms lay a rattrap bottom-up, a tail peeking from its wooden base. I picked up the trap with the rat strapped to it like it was his backpack and threw it out the window.
Each room was less inviting than the one before. They were crammed full of storage boxes and stacks of old magazines, Paris Match, the young faces on its covers water ruined. The largest bedroom featured neither leaks nor clutter but had been vandalized with children’s stickers, cartoon babies, “Les Babies” was the logo, pasted onto the furniture and the walls.
I chose my room for its strategic view of the road, its working electricity, a lack of water stains, and a minimum of “Les Babies” stickers. (There was one on the bedside table, but I could cover it.) The sun had set, and from the windows next to the bed I could see a few stars initiating their night watch through the haze of dusk.
Downstairs, the kitchen had an ancient stone sink. The oven appeared to be fired by wood or coal. Next to it was a hot plate from the 1970s, its crooked burners caked white from use. The Dubois family had given up on ancient traditions and embraced this hot plate. Whatever. I was fine with a hot plate.
After surveying rooms, I ate a ham and butter sandwich that I had picked up in Boulière, light on ham and light on butter and mostly bad baguette, the kind that turns to crumbly powder when it goes stale. Realizing I wasn’t hungry, I left the rest of the sandwich for the rats.
There were a couple bars of Orange.fr cell service so I texted Lucien that I had made it to the house. I didn’t say that his family’s beloved ancestral “manoir” looked like a scene from a horror movie. I said it was lovely here if rustic, and that I was meeting Pascal Balmy tomorrow.
Lucien had arranged this meeting.
He had expressed concern that I didn’t have a career. He believed I was a former grad student who had lost her way. (I was a former grad student, but I had found my way instead of losing it.)
