“Hi,” I said.
“Are you fucking him?”
I laughed. “I’m married to his childhood friend.”
“Is that a Canadian accent? You sound Québécois. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“He’s got an insatiable hunger for fresh meat. New girls. You’re too old.”
“Could be,” I said.
“No one talks about this thing of Pascal and the girls.”
I’d had the thought while sitting across from him, at the Café de la Route, that it would have been interesting if Pascal bucked the trend, broke the cliché, and was in a committed monogamous relationship, and with someone his own age. But Lucien had already suggested this would not be the case.
“They talk about their supposed ethics,” Nadia said, “but none of it applies to him!”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
I could see the tension that was straining her face start to release a little, her features smoothing in reaction to my sympathy, which she had not expected.
“Did he try the whole ‘the affective layer of my Parisian buddies can be felt,’ while a shrew from Brittany, her ‘affective layer’ is hidden?”
“He did try that,” I said. “I wasn’t convinced.”
I personally found her affective layer—if that means “feelings”—boiling away right there on the surface.
“Well,” she said, unsure how to respond to this validation. “I could tell you things that will not make Le Moulin look so idyllic or nice.”
“Okay,” I said.
“What do you mean okay?”
I stopped walking.
She put on her brakes. The car stalled. As she restarted it, I glanced back at Le Moulin to see if anyone was observing us.
The fields were empty of people. They were all in their dining commons, taunting a food-borne illness.
“I mean, I’d like a ride,” I said. “But your passenger seat is piled with crap.”
She began tossing dust-coated items one by one, books, a half-eaten apple, an old sweater, gardening shears, onto the floor behind her seat.
“Happy now?” she asked.
I said that I was, and got in beside her.
EVEN WITH ALL THE WINDOWS DOWN, her car had a pronounced agricultural smell, teeming and microbial. The back seat was piled with milk crates full of limp vegetables, soggy lettuces, their edges brown and gelatinous, and rotten melons, their faces caving in.
I moved a mud-caked boot off the passenger-side floor and put it in the back.
“You think this is a mess? Wait until you see my trunk!”
She stalled as she put the car in drive, started it again, then restarted it without realizing the motor was already running.
Setting off, she let out the clutch too quickly. She was in third instead of first. The car lurched forward, the engine pinging. She realized her error and downshifted to first, redlining the motor. She shifted by accident to fifth, causing the car to sputter, then back to first, the engine screaming.
She found third gear. We were on our way.
I started to tell her where I’d left my car, but she interrupted me.
“I’ll take you to your blue Škoda with the rental stickers. Your blue Škoda which has been parked on the north side of the church since quarter past noon today.”
She looked at me proudly. “I know what goes on. I see everything. The bar closes from two to five. Naïs locks up and goes home for lunch. Afternoons, it’s dead around here, until Naïs comes back and the locals can start up again with their drinking, since Pascal believes it’s revolutionary to supply them with beer and wine. The long afternoon while the bar was closed and no one was around, that blue Škoda was still there and I told myself, Nadia, something is happening.”
“You’re correct,” I said.
“Of course I’m correct! I came down here from the ZAD. To pull off what we did up there, we pushed out the cops! We won! To do that, you have to notice and observe. I’ve been at this twenty years. You learn to sense things. I knew something was up when you appeared on the square today.”
But how had she seen me? The square had been empty except for the tramps with their backpacks and the two workers painting the crosswalk in their state-issue uniforms. Who else had been around? Briefly, the man in the convertible. Had she been in the bar? I’d made a visual sweep of the bar’s interior and seen only the two old farmers, Crouzel and his purple-faced friend.
“I didn’t see you,” I said.
“That’s right, you didn’t see me, Québécois. Because I was in the church. That’s something I’ve learned over the years. Churches are open. Even when they’re closed, they are open. There’s always a way to get in. A church is a nice place to stay out of the sun. Plus, I happen to believe in God. Do you believe in God, Québécois? Or just in Pascal?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. “He doesn’t claim to be a god, of course. That would be vulgar. And yet his disciples, Jérôme and Alexandre, treat him as one.”
