I was on a bench in view of the Café de la Route, which was closed up for the afternoon, when the couple appeared on the square, still burdened by those huge backpacks.
They were in the same clothes as the night before, the man in his safari vest and the woman in black with her leather wrist-cuffs, both in their Mao caps, each holding a vape contraption. In their unchanged appearance, I had the sense they were waiting to be activated, to be given a purpose.
I saw them notice me and share a glance.
I waved at them.
The man—“Mao I” as I’d dubbed him—pointed at himself in a questioning manner.
I beckoned him with my hand.
He started walking toward me.
The woman—“Mao II”—followed him toward me across the square, but more slowly. Her halting steps were like those of a stray cat that has smelled food a stranger holds out: the cat wants the food, is going to eat the food, but thinks that its slow pace will protect it from the danger it moves toward.
So she was the cautious one.
I introduced myself to Maos I and II as the wife of Pascal’s oldest friend, and a comrade working with Le Moulin.
“Yes, of course,” the man said.
They were like the Moulinards in this way: You’re meant to know things. And even if you don’t know them, you act like you do.
“I don’t have much time, so I’ll be direct,” I said. “Things are shifting at Le Moulin. And we might need your help.”
“Our help?” the woman asked doubtfully. She was now standing just behind the man, her pack looming over her.
“We came all the way here from Bussoleno,” she said. “We came as comrades. Pascal did not treat us as comrades.”
The man turned and put his hand on her arm, an ancient gesture employed in every epoch of history by gullible men attempting to calm strident women beset by reasonable doubts.
“Pascal has to use caution,” he said to her. “It’s like I told you. They’ve been burned. It’s difficult for him to know who to trust.”
“That’s true,” I said. “There are people watching the commune. Watching everything.”
I thought of Lemon Incest speaking to the gendarmerie in Tayssac, Lemon Incest and his implausible car, to enhance the truth effect of my point, that they should be discreet, that there were suspicious people around. Even as I was those suspicious people.
“The guy in the convertible on the square that day, before I met with Pascal, he was seen talking to police. We have to be careful,” I said. “An action is being planned.”
Mao I and Mao II had names: He was Denis. She was Françoise.
They had hitchhiked here all the way from the Italian border, down out of the Alps. It had taken them weeks, because so few vehicles were headed to the remote Guyenne, and especially this part of it, so far from major highways. Their funds had dropped to nothing by the time they reached Sazerac. From Sazerac, they walked. They had arrived in Vantôme on foot, exhausted and destitute, only to be shunned by Pascal. They were camping, and waiting for the autumn grape harvest to begin, so that they could earn some money and perhaps make their way to Grenoble, where they might stay awhile, because Françoise had an adult son who lived there.
I said I knew they were respected veterans of the struggles in the Susa Valley. I said others knew this as well.
“Yes, we were in the valley,” Françoise said, “for the occupation of Maddalena, to prevent the military from taking the land, to stop the TAV train. We liberated that place.”
“The police surrounded us,” Denis added.
“Denis was arrested and charged,” Françoise said. “He spent a year in Italian prison.”
“A very difficult year for both of us,” Denis said, looking at Françoise with gratitude and remorse.
These two were a study in codependency.
When Denis was released from prison, the Italian and French governments both placed a territorial interdiction on him: Denis was forbidden from the entire region of the Susa Valley. They had no choice but to leave.
“We have comrades in the valley,” Françoise said. “But if we return there, they’ll send Denis back to prison. And he can’t survive it. At his age, it’s too difficult. And so we have had to become sojourners, fugitives, looking for someplace to settle, to make a new life.”
She was in tears. “We came here to share knowledge, to contribute,” she said, shaking her head. “Pascal was a real shit to us.”
“You aren’t the first to have that experience of him,” I said.
“You saw it,” she said, her eyes red, her cheeks wet. “That day we tried to talk to him on the square. It was humiliating. I had not yet faced up to things.”
Watching her, I had the thought that when people cry, their most rudimentary tools of self-comfort, from their deepest and earliest self, are called upon.
“You hear this stuff about Le Moulin,” she said in a steadier voice, as she wiped tears and sniffed, putting her crying self away, back on its shelf.
“People say, ‘they’re really doing it, making something happen, creating their own society,’ all of this, but then you also hear that Pascal can be a prick and a chauvinist. Someone had warned us that the whole project is about youth, that there’s a kind of ageism, in assessing people, and whether they want you, whether you’re useful to them as an able body. And if you’re older, and you aren’t from their inner circle, good luck.”
Up close, they were older than I had realized. She was maybe sixty. And he could have been a decade beyond that.
“We should have listened,” Denis said, cracking a smile.
Françoise was not smiling. “He rejected us like draft horses that can no longer pull their load!”
I shook my head. “We won’t make it as a cult of personality,” I said, channeling Nadia’s discourse on leaders. “Le Moulin is not a fiefdom.
