He turned toward me in a way that all but commanded them to get lost. “I’m talking to Sadie here.”
They looked at me with awe and envy and backed away.
The couple had resumed their post among the stinging nettles and spear thistles next to the church, when I asked Pascal about them.
“A lot of people have been showing up recently. They want to escape their life, and word has spread about Le Moulin. They quit their jobs and come down here. Or they’ve been with some other collective, and for one reason or another, they are looking for a fresh start with us. We believe in small societies. We can’t absorb all these people. Those two came up here from the Susa Valley, where there’s been a movement to fight against the construction of a high-speed rail. We told them there wasn’t housing for them, which is the truth. But also, we have to go by feel, in deciding who fits.”
I looked over at the dejected couple squatting in the nettles.
“I don’t want to give you the sense we’re closed off. But the composition of the collective has to be considered. And farming is hard work; not everyone is suited to it. Plus, we do have a housing shortage. We need people with construction skills. And there’s a question of trust. At this point, we don’t trust most people.”
Pascal segued to the subject of Marc Cutler, told me stories I already knew in detail, and I shook my head in dismay at such betrayal.
The couple in the churchyard stood. Pascal kept talking as they helped each other with their big dusty backpacks and trudged off the square.
PASCAL TENDED TO SPEAK in priestly aphorisms, which I found convenient for mental note-taking.
“Democracy is for predators.”
“To live is to live through something to the end.”
“Those who understand extinction is coming can transform the future.”
“A saved humanity will be a mystical humanity.”
Naïs brought out our lunch, two regional salads with fried pieces of heavily salted duck organ.
The duck organ was delicious. I said so.
“It’s the best thing on the menu. Naïs gets her foie gras from a goose farm run by three generations of women.”
Was Pascal not opposed to the foie gras industry here? I said I’d read it was controversial—not traditional Guyenne fare, and requiring yet more sterile corn to overtake the landscape.
“I used to believe that whatever wasn’t a deep tradition here was a mistaken direction. But I’m starting to see that it’s unrealistic not to be open to change, if change is what allows older modalities of life in the Guyenne to continue. So people grow corn instead of grapes. They raise geese instead of cows. They mechanize, instead of keeping to an old way of farming that is less efficient and more picturesque. Still they live with seasons, in preservation of agrarian life. That’s Jean’s perspective, anyhow.
“You’ll meet Jean,” he added, before I could pretend to ask who Jean was. “This is the main split between him and Lacombe. Jean is focused on pragmatics. On the farmers finding some way to survive. They have bills to pay. Equipment to maintain.”
Naïs came back with a basket of bread and an oil-and-vinegar caddy and went back inside.
“She lives with her father?”
“On Lacombe’s property, yes.”
The same property where her little sister died. Maybe that event had made her how she was. It might rain Saturday. My new hens are not good layers.
“Does she have children?”
If I knew who lived there, I could see the place better.
He shook his head to indicate she didn’t, but his “no” also seemed a dismissal of this line of questioning. He wanted to focus on his aphorisms and not on Naïs.
“The key question for Jean is not how you farm. He believes that working the land is fundamentally anti-state, because the state’s true lifeblood is the city.”
“Cities are a false world, and one that convinces its denizens there is no other.”
“The culture of cities rose in the East. It is setting in the West. Coming to its end, in a condition of slow but certain collapse.”
“ ‘Occidere’ means to kill, to tear apart.”
As Pascal made these statements, I studied this childless daughter of Bruno’s, who stood in the doorway with a hand in her apron pocket.
Perhaps she’s like me, I thought. I had no interest in other people’s children or in having one of my own. I had an IUD, and at most another decade to be careful. The only scenario I could imagine in which I’d become a mother was if I found a baby, orphaned, crying, maybe in a dumpster. In that scenario, I am walking down a street in some city, and I hear this “waaah, waaah,” issuing from a helpless little bundle of warm life in a heap of trash.
I have imagined that. It’s a mental tic. It has no meaning. But it has created this uncomfortable feeling that someone, somewhere, is going to need me at some point.
Pascal said that it was Bruno Lacombe who had drawn him to this area.
“But your family had a house down here, no? That’s what Lucien told me.”
“Near La Grèze. It was sold long ago. My parents used to come to the Guyenne. Like Lucien’s. But we stopped visiting when I was ten. I came down on my own, as a young adult, in hopes of talking to Lacombe. I knew he had been close to Guy Debord. I contacted him and we struck up a correspondence, but when I tried to meet with him in person, he put me off. I knew there was another old leftist in this area—Jean Violaine. Since I could not see Lacombe, I went to see Jean instead.
“That visit with Jean changed everything. I knew the Guyenne from my childhood, but I knew it as a bourgeois, as someone who used the countryside as a site of leisure, and then returned to Paris. Jean connected me to the people of the Guyenne and their peasant traditions, to something that is stubborn and fierce. He taught me a lot. I have also learned a lot from Lacombe. And the irony is they don’t speak to each other.”
I nodded as if absorbing this for the first time.
The two old men emerged from the bar interior, shouting goodbye to Naïs. There was a pandemonium as they greeted Pascal.
“Still sick over your heifer?” one of them asked Pascal, sending the other into a fit of laughter.
