Le Moulin’s book (Pascal’s book) Zones of Incivility contained a short section on “the gratuitous acts of children.” In rich countries, the book argued (Pascal argued), you find trends of children who snap. In Japan, this phenomenon had a name, “kireru.” But it was America that was the capital of “kireru,” where kids committed murder or suicide, or shot up a school. These lost children, by erupting into acts of extreme nihilism, were unconscious actors in an imaginary army, according to Zones of Incivility. They were symptoms of society’s ills. Reading the anonymous authors’ analysis (Pascal’s analysis) of school shootings as logical responses to modern alienation, I had the thought that you’d have to be French, and fairly sheltered, to develop such a fetish for American violence.
Two little boys sat in the sandbox, throwing handfuls of sand at each other. Flung sand has weak momentum. The little boys kept at it, until one of them scrunched his eyes and put his hands to his face. After a moment of quiet, he wailed. The boy who’d thrown the sand that hit its mark looked bored and uncertain as the other boy cried. Would he be in trouble?
Pascal barely noticed, so intent was he to sell me on the idea of this collective day care.
“There have been, here at Le Moulin, people who have advocated for ‘the abolition of the family.’ I’m against that; I find it silly, to be honest. Familial bonds are a source of independence and ethics, a harbinger against the state, against its predations. Still, children are better served when they aren’t limited to the nuclear structure, and instead are part of a larger family, their community.”
The little girl on the swing had stopped pumping and sat still, her bare feet in the sand. With one hand she held the chain of the swing. Her other rummaged in her own underpants. She had a pensive and private look on her face, as if the feedback from the hand in her underwear had muffled the cries of the boy with sand in his eyes.
The young woman rolling her cigarette was now licking the seam of glue on her rolling paper with patent finesse. She stood up and strode over to the two boys, the rolled unlit cigarette between her fingers. She wore the timeless hippie look of an old random faded men’s T-shirt of no particular size over an ankle-length skirt and no bra, her breasts stretched tragically low for someone her age, so young—and pretty too—but with these long breasts swinging around under her shirt.
As she attended to the boy with sand in his eyes, and admonished the other, the two women at the table spoke in low and serious voices and never once glanced toward the sandbox.
I was certain these women were not discussing children, even as one had a toddler in her lap and another at her knee. They were criticizing some man or assassinating the character of a commune sister, hashing out some intrigue or annoyance among the piles of annoyances that would crop up for people attempting to live communally.
Children who were not yet school age could be dropped off here, Pascal was explaining, and there was a sheet on which people signed up for shifts.
“These women are volunteers? The kids aren’t their own?”
Pascal looked around and said that these women who happened to be here right now were the mothers of the children who were also here, but this was incidental. It was a day care, collectively run, even if those here at this moment were the parents of the kids who were here.
“It’s better for everyone, than being isolated at home.”
This way the kids could throw sand at each other while their mothers smoked and complained.
I pointed out that it was all women volunteering here. It’s good to be a little skeptical. It can arouse suspicions to be too credulous. Real people have judgments.
“That’s true,” Pascal said. “And we are not the first group to discover that a division of labor between the genders reasserts itself when you try to live in a communal structure. Middle-class wage earners in cities, of course, can delegate their own domestic labor—the childcare and the housework—to nannies and maids. Well, we have no nannies and maids. And nor do we believe that it’s a true feminism to pass off your domestic work to people who earn less than you do, and are more exploitable, who clean your house plus their own house.
“We are doing everything ourselves here. Someone has to split logs and maintain farm machinery, while someone else looks after children. The men end up attending to the blown head gasket on our delivery truck, while the women are canning tomatoes. Both types of work must get done. We don’t have a magic solution. It’s a challenge we face, with no easy remedy.”
We had left the crèche and crossed a walnut grove toward a set of outbuildings where they pressed nuts to make oil. I followed Pascal through these buildings as he told me about the walnut harvest, explaining the sorting process, the various machines for grinding and expelling the nuts, the three grades of walnut oil they produced. The tools they had fabricated in order to repair their own machines, which were one hundred years old and came from Bordeaux, equipment slated for obsolescence that they were reviving.
He kept talking as we exited the final outbuilding, but I had stopped listening. The heat was suddenly getting to me.
As we passed back through the walnut grove, I looked into the lacy shade and wished I could lie down. The trees were spaced in a geometry that was pleasing and regular, each with enough room to stretch, but not too much room. On their trunks were irregular patches of purple-brown moss, thick as sheepskin. Bruno had written that the base of an old walnut tree is the best place to daydream. Carpeting the ground under the trees was chartreuse baby grass. With the exception of Pascal’s voice, it was quiet here in this orchard. I could not hear the racket of the walnut sorting machines, or children crying, or saws from the woodshop.
I didn’t know what to make of the growing evidence that Bruno had insinuated himself into my thoughts, Bruno whom I called Bruno, and Pascal kept referring to as “Lacombe.”
Lacombe. Pascal said it as if they didn’t know each other. As if Bruno wasn’t even a person, a man, with feelings, a first name. Pascal said “Lacombe” like he was referring to someone absent or dead. He said it like he might say “Hegel” or “Marx.”
A breeze stirred the limbs of the walnut trees, whose shadows made frolicsome patterns on the ground.
I looked up at their leaves, so bright, a pure, chlorophyll green. They shook and twirled like silk ornaments. They seemed to be vibrating.
As I stared at the vibrating leaves, I understood that I was having one of my vascular events, here in this walnut grove.
The flutter and play of light and leaves was breaking down along the edges of my vision. It would pass, I knew, as it always does. But it had not yet passed. It was happening now, as if proving that Bruno, whom I had thought of here, as a presence in this orchard, was somehow actually here, in the confetti of light and shadow, in the tremble of the leaves.
LE MOULIN’S LIBRARY, a former barn with rough walls of stone and mortar, metal floor-to-ceiling bookshelves bolted to them, was cool and dark. An electric fan riffled the pages of Clairefontaine notebooks, which lay open on a large table in the center of the room. The notebooks belonged to the four young men seated around the table.
Pascal pulled up two more chairs for us, and at my request he got me some water to drink.
My vision had calmed. I guessed that the heat had brought on the disturbance. And a touch of dehydration. All that wine I’d had yesterday, on my drive north from Marseille.
Pascal introduced me to these four who worked on the collaborative writings. They were all about the same age, early thirties, and all four had short stylish haircuts and glasses, and they wore a polo shirt or a clean, plain T-shirt, dark jeans, a watch on a thin, delicate wrist. Nice boys—like Pascal, like Lucien—from nice Parisian families.
A young woman, still in her teens, or twenty at most, with long blond fine-grade hair and a gloomy manner and too much kohl eyeliner, came in with a tray of coffee for us. No one introduced her. She set the tray down and adjusted the fan so that it no longer squeaked.
“Thanks, Florence,” Pascal said quietly as she left.
From a window I could see a group of men working in a garden behind the library, sweat-soaked as they installed fence posts with a huge postholer, heaving each time they drove it down into the hard ground with a dull metallic “clunk.” It did not sound like they were making progress.
I had the thought that the boys in the library were like higher-status monks in a medieval monastery. And that Burdmoore and René and the ones driving the postholer into the earth, they were the lower-status monks, the ones who do the backbreaking labor, forgo sleep, and endure inclement weather and unpleasant tasks. They dig irrigation canals, or carry stones up a hill, while the educated monks stay inside where it’s cool in summer and warm in winter, recopying Bible passages, a monk who cannot read running their tea tray like Florence ran ours, although I was sure that Florence could read.
We discussed the translation of their book. I would work here in the library, with Alexandre (a dirty blond in wire-rimmed glasses) gathering sources for me, so that I could see what they quoted from. Jérôme (with dark hair, in horn-rimmed glasses), whose English was very good, would look over my work and flag sections that might call for discussion, for nuance of transposition.
With their plain and preppy look and their soft serious voices, these people were different from the West Coast eco-warriors with their piercings and their food-coloring hair dye, T-shirts whose logos were supposed to help define some micro-split in movement ideology. Nor did these boys resemble the anti-globalist window smashers of Genoa, the milieu in which Pascal had been radicalized, among people who wore all black. (Then again, Pascal didn’t look like that either.) But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics, or they cultivate, instead, a strait-laced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate. It is meant to reinforce who they are (who they consider themselves to be).
People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth distribution or climate policy or the rights of animals. They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old-growth logging, or protest nuclear power, or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics, to its knees. But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric—the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present—is to shore up their own identity.
It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity, given how fragile people are underneath these identities they present to the world as “themselves.” Their stridencies are fragile, while their need to protect their ego, and what forms that ego, is strong.
The boy with the chin-line beard who had delivered the fertilizer had told himself he was taking a stand to protest the cruel treatment of animals. He wasn’t a poseur. But still his real motivation was libidinal: he did it for the promise of love. Love confirms who a person is, and that they are worth loving. Politics do not confirm who a person is.
People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.
What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them?
