The broken capillaries on their faces seemed to have traveled from their noses to their cheeks and ears.
“It’s tough, but this is how it goes.” The man patted Pascal on the back. “She’s ‘in a better place,’ as they say.”
“You were white as a ghost, Pascal!” the second man said, continuing to laugh.
His friend scolded him for teasing Pascal, and the two of them commenced a lighthearted debate.
As they left, continuing their boisterous talk, I realized I could not understand what they were saying. I later figured out they were speaking Occitan.
Pascal explained to me that they’d had a milk cow at Le Moulin with a breast mastitis. Jean Violaine had suggested calling Mr. Crouzel. That was the name of the man who asked Pascal if he was still upset. Crouzel was a local elder who could be relied on for help with animals. He came to Le Moulin to make an assessment. He had bent over their poor cow, who was lying on her side, her udder distended, and while Pascal waited for Crouzel to examine the cow and make his recommendation—perhaps he would suggest massage, heat, antibiotics—Crouzel had taken a revolver from his coat pocket, placed it at the cow’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The church bells rang two times for two p.m., each ring a clanging sortie that reverberated over the village and its blue banner of cloudless sky.
Pascal had been saying something about violence as the bells rang. When they stopped, he continued.
He declared that some acts, Crouzel’s, for instance, were borne of pragmatic sympathy. But the purest and most logical violence, he said, was without sympathy, and also without antipathy. He talked about a mysterious tribe on an island in the Indian Ocean. This tribe, he said, had killed a fisherman illegally poaching. They had threatened to kill every anthropologist who had tried to study them, had attacked every ship that grounded on their reef. Pascal had seen a documentary about the tribe, who were one of the last “uncontacted” communities on earth. He told me the title of the documentary, and he spelled the name of its director, in expectation that I would want to go and watch it later. He’d been naming books and thinkers and stopping to make sure I wrote them down. The couple in their Mao caps, with their eager scribbling, seemed to be what Pascal expected and was habituated to, in response to his talk. I was happy to comply.
The poacher, who had been fishing for mud crabs, got drunk and drifted into a lagoon of the island. Tribesmen waded out and pierced him with arrows, dispatched him like a French farmer might dispatch a wild hog that was threatening his tubers.
“The most innocent man in the entire world,” Pascal said, “is the person who aimed the arrow that killed that poacher.”
Perhaps he meant to shock me, but I could not resist making him understand I was not shocked. It seemed a good opportunity to encourage a space, eventually, for franker talk.
“Violence is a reasonable response to a certain kind of threat,” I said. “In the case of the tribe, the threat of annihilation.”
“That’s right.”
His enthusiasm seemed a little performative, and later I wondered if my contacts weren’t overplaying their focus on Pascal, who could not even handle the scene of an ailing cow put out of her misery.
Lunch was over. We settled our bill (we split it) and got up to walk to Le Moulin.
“Is the commune far?” I asked, pretending not to know. (It is 2.2 kilometers on a footpath that follows the river before veering up to a plateau, as I’d already mapped on Google Earth.)
Naïs nodded a curt goodbye.
“After you moved here, did Lacombe ever agree to meet?”
We were crossing the square under the leafy shade of its giant tree.
“When I made that trip down to try to talk to him, there was a lot I didn’t know. For starters, that Lacombe had stopped seeing people in person twenty-five years ago.”
I did a calculation. After his child died, the other daughter.
PASCAL AND I CROSSED an iron bridge that spanned a slow muddy river. After the bridge, we turned onto a narrow footpath of powdery dirt that was lined on both sides by waist-high grasses and wildflowers.
We rose in elevation and skirted under the limestone overhang of an enormous rock. It was not colored like the magical rocks near Lucien’s house. These rocks were gray, with curious notches that looked man-made, little squares carved into them like hand-sized cubbies.
I said the notches were curious.
“They used them to attach the skins of animals. They hung down like this”—he gestured to the lip of the cliff—“and functioned as walls. We are standing in people’s rooms.”
I got a funny feeling I didn’t like. As if the ancient people Bruno talked about were here with us. Not contained in my mental diorama, with their big faces and their weak chins, but invisible and everywhere, ghosts run rampant.
We ducked out from under the rock shelf. There was a steep hillside above us, covered in dense trees.
“Do you see that place up there?” Pascal gestured to the top of the hill. He was pointing to the Château de Gaume.
“What is it?”
Pascal gave me his summary of the Cagots, the religious wars, the persecution, the uprising and the slaughter, the château’s later conversion to a prison. He was unaware, of course, that I knew all this history. In fact, he had some of the dates and details wrong.
Pascal said the Cagot was both real and a kind of myth, but that when people believe a myth, that, too, is real. It is a real belief.
“Lacombe says there are remainders from another world that might still be here,” he said. “Figments of an older species that never integrated.”
Or figments of someone’s imagination, I did not say.
“This is among Jean’s disagreements with Lacombe. Jean deplores Lacombe’s interest in prehistory, his talk of species. And so we’re like the children of a divorce, at Le Moulin. It is on account of these two figures that we came here, and in the ashes of their split, we sift to find our own direction.”
The river was far down below us. I could hear people in kayaks and canoes, voices calling to one another, and the hollow sound of oars knocking against fiberglass hulls. Some of the people in the boats had gotten out to pull them through the shallows.
“You might have heard about the water issues here,” Pascal said. “The government wants to divert our river, which is already so much lower than I’ve ever seen it, because of drought, and because the big growers irrigate from it. If they cut off this river, they will rob this entire region of its life.”
I asked what could be done.
“It will be up to the people of the Guyenne to answer that. I consider myself an outsider. The problems here have to be resolved by the locals, not by anyone at Le Moulin.”
He’ll admit nothing to you, Lucien had said of Pascal.
