“When you put it like that, it’s all rather dubious, isn’t it,” Pascal said to them, shaking his head in mock disapproval. “Crude and ignorant people who want to dump poison in the earth! But that’s not what a farmer wants. That’s not what he wants at all, and I would expect you, Jérôme, and you, Alexandre, to be more sensitive in your perceptions.”
Pascal was shifting into high oratory. A farmer wants to be able to tend his land, he said, just as his father and grandfather and his great-grandfather had done before him. He wants to impart what he’s learned to his own children, so that they can inherit the land and preserve it, instead of abandon that world and move away. But suddenly, some pencil-neck in Brussels, a bureaucrat in a high-rise building in a foreign country, a person who has not even been elected, a nameless appointee who has no relationship to this land or these people, is telling the farmers that how they do things is wrong, that it must stop, and, according to this nameless policymaker who is not a farmer, they must start doing things a different way.
And it just so happens, Pascal said, that the huge corporate operations have the scale and the capital to easily make the changes that the man in Brussels is demanding, while the small farmers will no longer be able to survive, and so they will have to give up farming, give up everything they are.
“We are talking about environmental policies that only faceless agro-business can implement. Does that seem right or fair to you?”
I WAS SPENDING LONG HOURS in the library, listening to these debates (Pascal always won), and working on translations, which also involved debates—over what to do with certain words, “puissance,” say, or “événementielle.” The first, in their usage, would be more or less “potentiality” but not quite, and the second, almost impossible to transpose, something like “eventness,” having to do with an event in the sense of a political or social rupture.
Sometimes we dedicated whole afternoons to a single paragraph. In addition to that work, I was focused on studying the Moulinards, in order to learn what they might be doing in secret.
I made visits to the Tayssac megabasin project, in search of clues that someone from Le Moulin might be watching that site. At its entrance was a gendarmerie trailer and a few police vehicles.
Once, as I drove the perimeter, I recognized Lemon Incest, his convertible Chrysler Sebring parked on the side of the road. He stood speaking to a couple of police officers who seemed to regard him as a curiosity. I chalked up this scene to a local eccentric who flirts with proletarians, as he had flirted with the men painting the crosswalk in Vantôme.
The heavy security presence at the megabasin, the gendarmerie trailer, the officers standing around, suggested to me that sabotage of this site was past-tense. It had already taken place. I didn’t know what the Moulinards were planning next, but it wasn’t here. There were too many cops.
I was putting in long days and had no time for “unwaged” domestic chores in my off hours. And since the Dubois house was not my own, and I would be leaving it soon enough, never to return, I let it devolve into a mess, with no regrets and no need for robots to come in and clean things up.
I used up all the drinking vessels that had clotted the shelves of the dining room’s various bureaus and sideboards—these Dubois people were hoarders of glasses and cups of different styles and sizes, for various uses and occasions.
The water in the kitchen sink never got hot and I could not find dish soap, and so I drank from the less dirty cups when I made my morning coffee on the crusted hot plate. My process for selecting an unwashed cup to reuse became a kind of beauty contest that I judged. Like that New York real estate buffoon and his Miss Universe pageant, I stood before the dishes crowding the sink, assessing. Most of the cups had a tar of old coffee hardening in their base like bunker oil. Who will be the winner, I’d wonder, as I looked for a less-dirty cup.
I had changed bedrooms upon realizing I could see farther and in more directions from the corner bedroom I’d originally rejected on account of its defacement by children’s stickers.
Now I was ensconced in the Les Babies room, the Salon des Babies, whose images were the last thing I saw before drifting off, and the first upon waking.
Some women sleep in rooms of wallpapered toile vignettes, little repeated pastoral scenes that might come to upholster their dreams and moods. Me, I lived with the babies. Every night, and every morning, it was cartoon babies in oversized sunglasses, with oversized feet, like puppies.
The baby stickers had grown on me. The babies were cute and cheeky, as if knowingly playing the role of babies. They held the hands of even smaller babies. Their conceit was a mimicry of adult life. Les Babies drove trucks. Piloted airplanes. Declared love to one another with bouquets of roses. Les Babies delivered mail, flashed police badges, wore stethoscopes.
The theme of the stickers was an adult world that had been invaded, taken over, by babies, babies who had renounced babyhood and instead pantomimed grown-up life, but playfully, and mockingly.
I took a picture of the baby boy declaring love to the baby girl with his bouquet and texted it to Lucien.
—What is that from, he asked, after hearting the picture.
—your house.
—Upstairs?
I pressed thumbs-up.
Dots followed. Lucien typing.
—This is Agathe.
—putting up these stickers?
—I think she rented the place out last summer without telling me. Families with kids, just letting people have the run of the place, for her own gain. This is unacceptable. Can you take a video of the rooms?
I said I would. I didn’t. A couple of times Lucien re-requested this video, but since such a video would show him that whatever Agathe had done to the place was small potatoes compared to what I had done to it, I said I had tried to send it and the file was too large. The telephone service here was spotty and so he took on faith my reasons for not sending him a video and stopped asking. (I had my satellite router and high-speed internet, but I sent texts to Lucien on the single bar of Orange.fr that was available in the area.)
I had transferred my stocks of beer to the refrigerator, and in the evening, I would fetch a cold one and manage exchanges with my contacts and with Lucien, although he was preoccupied with his film shoot and becoming less needy, less communicative. I checked Bruno’s account daily, which was partly work and partly for my own personal interest.
As I lay on a couch and read Bruno’s emails (I reread old ones if there wasn’t a new one), I pitched my empties into a corner of the living room. My years of living lives that weren’t mine had conditioned me not to concern myself with domestic spaces that were also not mine. I took care of my own things—nightly, I hand-washed my T-shirts and underwear and socks, and hung them in the bathroom connected to the Salon des Babies—but I never took care of other people’s things and didn’t see why I should. When the recycling accumulated a fermenty stink, I rolled closed the pocket doors of that room and switched to the other living room. (There were two, and they were equally cluttered but usable.)
Robert the Sick was resting in his coma, but I remained vigilant for unwanted visitors. I pushed desks and tables against the back door and a side door, so that I could manage security in case someone attempted a breach. These pieces of heavy old furniture left deep grooves from being dragged, as if cave bears had sharpened their claws on the floorboards, had added their signature, as Bruno would put it.
Bruno had discovered an artwork, possibly Neanderthal, on a wall of a cave linked to his own though distant, closer to the lake, under someone else’s property, someone unaware of this cave. If the art was Neanderthal, it was rare for its depictive qualities. It was an image on the rock wall of a cave bear’s face and head. This artwork was atypically figural for the Thal, and yet playful, practically avant-garde.
Much of the Thal’s art, Bruno noted, was patterning. Geometric designs on bone and rock, in ocher red and a black dye whose exact ingredients were still unknown but were charcoal mixed with some kind of animal fat.
Bruno said that what charmed him about this image of a bear’s head, which he inspected regularly by firelight, was that it was a collage, of “mixed media.” There was a natural convex eruption to this portion of rock surface, which resembled a bear’s muzzle. There was a natural concave dip or dimple in the wall, he said, which resembled a bear’s eye. These elements came together, he said, by the addition of a sweeping line, in that mysterious black dye, delineating the bear’s brow and the line of his snout.
Over this likeness of a cave bear’s face were deep grooved scratches, he said, which by their size and depth had to be the work of an actual cave bear, adding a “signature,” or attempting to scratch out this likeness of a bear such as itself. Or, the most probable scenario, these lines were from an animal behaving like an animal, by sharpening its claws with no regard for art. Scratching, as a cave bear is wont to do, and in doing so, leaving its mark.
The effect of the scratches over the surface of this image, Bruno said, was not unlike the effect of craquelure glaze on the surface of a Rembrandt painting: it allowed us to see time, to apprehend the massive interim from a then to a now.
This image on the wall of his cave had three authors, Bruno told them: bear (scratches), man (charcoal), and wall (bulges and dips). It was a work of art that must be read, he said, as a collaboration.
The mind’s eye has its way, and what I pictured, while reading Bruno’s description of bear claw marks, was a white paper bag, the kind bakeries use, its paper dampened by translucent grease spots, the bag weighted with something butter-dense and fragrant, sugary, golden and drizzled in glaze, flaked with thin slices of almond, a paraffin sheet enfolding it, for lifting it from the bag without stickying the fingers: a bear claw.
I miss bear claws. I miss donut shop coffee. I miss California, where I once lived and would like to live again. But I would happily live in Texas. I would live in Virginia.
I miss being at home in a culture. Using English with other native speakers is what I might miss most. For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.
The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.
