The ocular migraine is not that big of a deal. On occasion, there’s something at the edges of my vision on both sides, if I am tired, or have had too much caffeine or too much to drink. An eye doctor told me this was a vascular event, and when I asked what that meant, he said it meant I could ignore it.
Bruno found in the crimps to his peripheral sight something meaningful. I did not find the crimps to my own sight meaningful. I ignored them as the doctor advised. If the crimp was there, it lasted maybe thirty minutes, and I waited for it to subside. I never could later recall the moment when it did subside. I only noticed that it was gone.
LE MOULIN COMPRISED eleven hectares that the group had been developing. There were forty-five of them living there now, give or take a baby or two, Pascal said. They believed in a loose head count for the purposes of kitchen prep and work assignments, and no records were kept, as they were against records. Pascal said he liked to think that when people took up residence at the commune, they fell off state surveillance and also self-surveillance, in the form of social media and the various sorts of digital tracking that were inescapable in city life.
When they had first acquired the property, there’d been a failed Christmas tree farm over there, Pascal said, pointing to a hillside that still had fuzzy evergreens dotting its slopes. The Moulinards were now trying to redevelop the hill into a stepped fruit orchard, mostly quince.
I asked what they did with the quince, a fruit that to me has always seemed useless. Quinces look like apples puckered with blight, cannot be eaten raw, and when cooked have no flavor.
“Some of the women are making preserves and selling them at the Saturday market in Sazerac. Everything we grow is for our own use, and for our elder assistance program, delivering food around the village. The rest we sell at market. Our biggest operation is walnuts. We are refurbishing old machines for crushing them and expelling oil, which we also sell. Everything we generate in income is pooled and shared.”
They also pooled checks, he said, that came in for those who qualified for state assistance. There were times, especially in winter, when some at Le Moulin had to seek work beyond the farm to keep things going.
We passed three young people weeding between rows of squashes, two women in sun hats and a guy with a T-shirt wrapped over his head as a makeshift visor. A man on a tractor tilled soil in an area that had not yet been planted. Over the roar of the tractor, Pascal told me that the local farmers had helped them learn how to fertilize naturally, what crops should be planted next to other crops to decrease infestation, how to irrigate without losing topsoil.
He said that Lacombe, whose book he’d given me (reminding me who this was, in case I’d forgotten), was against the use of tractors.
This made sense: it was the weapon of his child’s death.
Lacombe, Pascal said, felt that tractors destroyed too many of the dirt’s microorganisms. He had renounced even the violence of the plow, if you could call that violence, Pascal said, and he himself didn’t. They had to till the soil. They had people to feed.
I sensed that Pascal had no awareness of the animating reason behind Bruno’s rejection of tractors. Bruno who had once owned a tractor, driven his tractor, believed in it, until the accident, terminating his association with tractors. But Pascal had no dossier, no news clipping, and perhaps he was a less sensitive reader of the emails, even as they were written to him.
We were going to see the woodshop, run by a man named René with a helper called Burdmoore, who was apparently American.
I hadn’t been informed of an American and was eager to cross-check for intel when I had the opportunity.
The woodshop was in an unfinished barn with a poured concrete floor. Near the entrance, Burdmoore was cutting lengths of board with a circular saw. He was a man of about seventy, his face and arms and bald head stamped in large, square freckles. He had a big round belly, the kind that looks hard rather than soft, which the French call a bidon.
Pascal introduced me.
“Where you from?” he asked, as he blotted sweat from his face with the neck of his T-shirt.
I told him California.
“Right on. That’s cool,” he said, as if “California” meant something specific, instead of a huge assortment of different terrains inhabited by forty million faceless people.
“You gonna be around much, California? I get tired of frogs, even if I love these guys. Pascal might have told you I’m not fluent in frog talk.” He had a strong New York accent that flattened out and flared the ends of his words.
Pascal said that Burdmoore was working on housing. “But he’s not working fast enough,” Pascal added.
“Says the man who never cut a board in his life. When I first showed up down here,” Burdmoore said, addressing me, “I was in a canvas tent. On shipping pallets. No floor. Sleeping in a puddle of rain. I started helping out in the woodshop. Not ’cause I’m good at it. I was hoping to jump the line for a dry place to bed down.”
The shop smelled of heated metal and fresh-planed boards. It was a drafty structure, with a warble of wood pigeons coming from its eaves. Sun angled in from a dirty skylight, sawdust floating in its shaft.
A shirtless man with a cigarette in his mouth minded a huge machine, his smoke mixing with the airborne sawdust. This was René. His arms and chest were lean and tanned. He had pronounced cheekbones and white-blue eyes like a wolf’s, which filled with light when he looked up. He looked at me with total indifference, spoke only to Pascal.
“I could do this job better without him here,” René said to Pascal in quick French, confident that Burdmoore could not understand him, and not caring if I did. “He cut everything to the wrong measurement this morning.”
Oblivious he was their topic, Burdmoore turned to me.
“Jean speaks a little English, luckily. Although he doesn’t live down here at the Mill, as I call it. You met Jean?”
I said Pascal had talked about him, but no.
“Oh, man. You don’t know Jean?” He smiled, amused by my purported ignorance.
“Me and Jean, we’ve been through similar stuff. Jean was underground. I was underground. I was involved with a group in New York. Jean in Paris. Same years, late sixties. Then a whole bunch of shit happened to me, three decades of trouble with the law, trouble with women, money woes. I fall in love with this French chick, move to Paris. She dies. I’m alone. The saddest I’ve ever been. I’m sitting in a bar feeling sorry for myself when I meet this guy. We start talking. Turns out we know some of the same people. We keep talking—this is Jean—and he says, Come down to Vantôme, and my friends will look after you. It’ll be better. It’ll be a home for you. Up there in Paris, I was working lousy jobs, doing demolition and for peanuts. I split. I’ve been here three years.”
Three years, and he had managed not to learn more than a few phrases of French.
As Pascal and I left the woodshop, Burdmoore groaned about having to go back to work. I could see he would have been happy to spend the afternoon talking in his New Yawk accent. René was at his machine, some kind of band saw, which let out a deafening shriek.
Next on this tour was the communal kitchen. Lunch was over and a crew was cleaning up. A slight boy with dark curly hair was washing enormous pots with a high-pressure sprayer on a hose that hung from the ceiling and snapped upward like a Poma lift when he let go of it. The room was suffused with the close, humid odor of drain-trap food scraps. Women were carrying dirty plates from the dining area. The plates were dipped into two side-by-side tubs on a stainless counter in the kitchen, one tub presumably soapy and the other for rinsing. The expression “food-borne illness” floated across the surface of my thoughts like the stray bubbles that floated on the surface of the tubs.
Behind the kitchen was an outdoor area with a sandpit and a crooked old metal swing set. A little girl in nothing but loose underpants was pumping away on a swing like she was training for something, or trying to get someplace by swinging there, back and forth, back and forth.
One leg of the swing set popped out of its hole in the ground as she surged forward, and sank back in its hole as she swept back, the entire rickety apparatus strained from her athletic pumping and threatening to topple over.
Three young women sat at a table ignoring the children in their midst. One was hand-rolling a cigarette. Another was smoking a factory-rolled cigarette. The third had a toddler in her lap and another toddler standing at her knee, crying. The diaper of the crying toddler sagged heavily. His face was flecked with some kind of food residue. I felt sad for this child, who didn’t know that his lament was being undermined by how ridiculous he looked, with crud caked around his mouth. I had the thought that public embarrassment starts at the beginning, before a person even knows to feel a sense of it.
Pascal was explaining how the crèche functioned, that everyone at Le Moulin volunteered.
“Childcare is challenging from zero to five,” he said. “And here, no one is alone in parenting. Children can look to any adult, they are not stuck with the destiny of two people.”
I’d been with Pascal for three hours now and he hadn’t once mentioned his own children. He had at least two that I knew of, neither of whom he was raising.
“In cities, there is no support for parents. They’re stressed and isolated and exhausted. Their children absorb that stress and enter adolescence in a state of repressed rage. The health of a society can be read through kids’ emotions.”
