It was Crouzel’s ancient mother, in a dusty Peugeot hatchback, tut-tutting from the town square. She rolled down her window and yelled that Crouzel was behind her, warning us to make room.
A giant tractor appeared, with Crouzel perched in its high seat, in faded overalls and work gloves. We filed to the side of the narrow road. Crouzel put on his brakes and yelled to Pascal over the shuddering racket of the tractor engine. He was doing trail clearance, he said. They finished their exchange and Crouzel moved past us at a slow clattering roar.
“The secret to a peasant’s survival,” Pascal said, “is the little assignments he gets from the canton.”
He said Crouzel was paid by the state to maintain public walking trails. The trails were part of what was called “the green belt,” which no one used except tourists, and in this part of the Guyenne, there weren’t any tourists. Crouzel and his friends fought every year over who got the assignment to maintain the green belt, Pascal said, but Crouzel always ended up with it, and some people suspected it was because his mother went into the canton’s administrative headquarters ready to go to blows over the issue.
We sat at a picnic table on the deck of Jean’s small ramshackle house. Jean sucked on a cigarette and poured us eau-de-vie from a plastic gallon jug. Pascal didn’t touch his. I sipped mine, but only to be polite; eau-de-vie is poison. Burdmoore and Jean both downed theirs and refilled their cups.
Some of the dairy farmers were planning to block the entrance to the fair from the D79, Jean said. They would empty their milk tanks. Not all of the farmers were on board to participate, he said, as there were a lot of internal disputes in the dairy union. But he guessed it would be at least thirty breeders, and thirty tankers.
“Each tank holds six thousand gallons. You can do the math if you want, but the point is: we are talking about a megabasin of milk.”
Jean suggested that the Moulinards might create a human barrier beyond the tractors and the tanker trucks, to prevent the police from getting through. They could assist with a milk giveaway, which the Périgourdine farmers had done, in addition to their milk dump. A giveaway did not contradict a dump, Jean said. A giveaway, connecting one tanker to a hose and filling gallon jugs and handing them out to anyone and everyone, this flooded the market with free milk simultaneous to flooding the roads with wasted milk.
I’d heard a rumor, I said, that a government official from Paris was coming to the fair.
Pascal and Jean both looked at me.
I was not on script. This was real-time, and I had to make quick decisions. I had to act.
“Paul Platon is making a surprise appearance at the fair.” I said this in French, though we had been speaking in English, on account of Burdmoore’s presence. But I wanted Jean to understand me perfectly.
“Platon is that deputy minister they chased out of Nantes, no?” Jean asked Pascal.
Pascal said it was. “This could be quite the moment. No one likes that guy! He’s truly repugnant. Does he think he’s going to seduce the people around here with a PR campaign? Hilarious!”
“But how do you know this,” Jean asked me, “if it is not announced?”
Was this a stumble? It was too late.
I took a sip of alcohol. It tasted like nail polish remover. To set the mood, I visualized that maid in Vincennes, kicking the little white dogs that belonged to Platon’s mistress. I would have kicked those dogs too.
“When I first got to Paris, I walked dogs for a living.”
“Lucien told me this,” Pascal said, and added, smiling, “he said you don’t even like dogs.”
“That’s true,” I said, laughing. “But I had no work papers, and it was a cash job. I had a client out in Vincennes, this woman Hélène de Marche. Sometimes she asked me to stay for an aperitif when she returned from work. She had a lover, but he was married, and this was her great lament. The lover was Paul Platon. I had to hear all about it from her. After the affair was made public, he stopped coming to see her. These people, they pay you to walk their dogs, but really, it’s counseling on the cheap. Now Hélène is frantic, because she thinks Platon has a new mistress. She told me that he’s bringing her to the Guyenne.”
“But how would she know?” Jean asked, confused. A bit too reasonably confused for my comfort level, but Pascal dealt with Jean’s question, and better even than I could.
“A jealous woman,” Pascal said, “is on a fact-finding frenzy. Her mission in life is to know, and no obstacle will deter her knowing.”
“I had mentioned to her that I would be in this part of France,” I said, “at Lucien’s family place. They’ve never met, but it’s like I’m her only friend or something. When I saw her number on my phone yesterday, I was hesitant to take the call.”
All of this took place in French, while Burdmoore refilled his cup with liquor. He seemed aware that something important was being discussed, but he did not speak the language well enough to follow.
“Are you certain about this?” Jean asked me. “It might call for a change of plans,” he said to Pascal. Jean should let the farmers know about this development.
At which point Pascal once again did my work for me, without any prompting on my part.
“Jean, you cannot say anything to them! This has to be secret. If Platon finds out that news of his appearance has been leaked, my guess is he’ll call it off. He doesn’t want another Nantes. He thinks he’s coming here to drum up popular support for the megabasins.”
Jean was convinced.
For now, Platon’s appearance at the fair would be kept quiet.
“At least until we figure out how to use it,” Pascal said. “If, for instance, the dairy farmers formed a line beyond the fair, after his arrival, Platon would be trapped.”
“And a lot of people would be injured and arrested or worse,” Jean said, “when the state arrives with a massive show of force.”
“Or so many people will join us, take our side, that we make a zone of occupation and push the police out.”
Jean and Burdmoore had drained the last of the eau-de-vie. Jean padded inside in his destroyed espadrilles and emerged with a bottle of pastis in one arm and a large wooden crate in the other.
It was getting dark. I felt the evening was over, as a private objective had been met, to get them excited about a confrontation with Platon—perhaps they would even plan something risky all on their own, without any suggestions from me—but Jean was focused on showing us, or showing me, as the guest, what was in this box, which contained prehistoric relics he had found while digging in his yard.
“You don’t have to go live in a cave to be in touch with the past around here,” he said as he set down the box. “Live in a cave, and then send long emails about it.”
“Jean,” Pascal said with gentle scorn.
“I’m too busy working in my garden to bother with sending emails. If someone wants to see me, they come up to the house. If they want my opinion, they ask.”
I felt a little sad for Bruno, who wasn’t here to defend himself against his old rival.
Jean arranged the contents from the box on the table’s surface with a haste bred from familiarity, like a chess master setting up his board. Or a boy putting out his toy army guys or his Lego pieces.
Jean said that if he ever got desperate, he would sell these things to the big museum up in the Périgord.
