I have quick reflexes.
The downside of my reflexes can be overreaction. (I had peed on my sandal and foot.)
Later that day I found Boulière, the largest town in this part of the Guyenne, with a ring road of car lots, tractor dealerships, and a couple of supermarkets. I stocked up on grocery basics and unrefrigerated six-packs and headed due west into a remote river valley, toward the Dubois family estate, which was not far from Vantôme and Pascal Balmy’s radical farming cooperative, Le Moulin.
Vantôme was not on my way to the Dubois place, but I detoured to have a quick look around.
The housing stock was grim little dwellings of gray cinder block. There were no gardens, no signs of care. Many of the buildings looked abandoned, their windows broken, stone walls toppled, trees growing through caved-in barn roofs.
From what I’d gathered, the main industry in the higher elevations had been logging. The hills above Vantôme were scattered with bald areas, like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition. The nicest feature was a lake just beyond town, perhaps man-made, but pleasant, with a large and grassy recreational area. A few old men were dispersed along the lakeshore, still as statues, their fishing poles over the water.
I took a road that bordered Le Moulin and saw the commune’s sun-singed squashes, their scraggly lettuces. Their land did not border a creek or river tributary and would be difficult to irrigate. The soil here was rocky. Only activists from Paris would take up subsistence farming in a place like this.
Much of the population had fled this region for its lack of jobs, its stagnancy, its disconnection from modern life. There was no future here, and so young people had moved to cities, to Toulouse or Bordeaux or farther, to seek jobs in factories or in the service sector, to get an education, try to find a pathway into middle-class life. There were still a few small dairy operations, but most of the locals who remained here had given up on farming, acquired satellite TV, and drank all day. With the butcher and baker in their villages long gone, the people in this valley had to drive to Boulière, to shop at Leader Price.
Corporations from outside the region were buying up land for large-scale farming of seed corn, as part of a state-led initiative to revitalize the Guyenne with a monocrop economy—corn, corn, and more corn. These operations needed water. The “megabasins” the state was planning would dedicate the region’s water to megagrowers. Between Boulière and Tayssac I had seen this corn, vast fields of green, sterile as a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon. I had driven past the new megabasin where equipment had been destroyed. Construction barriers blocked the view, but the site was active. I heard machines. Dust clouds boiled upward. There were temporary trailers for security, and gendarmerie parked at the entrance to the site. The perimeter fencing was covered by sheeting printed with vague slogans, “no water without management,” “no future without water,” and “let’s work together.”
There had been rioting and violence over these megabasins in other parts of France, with serious casualties—people who lost an eye or a hand, and scores of police vehicles torched. What began as a peaceful demonstration tended to end with masked activists throwing Molotov cocktails toward a phalanx of armored riot police, who responded with ferocious volleys of pepper balls and beatings and arrests.
After the excavators in Tayssac were torched, Pascal Balmy had been suspected. An investigation was opened, but local residents did not give tips. The people around Vantôme and Tayssac proved uncooperative. They seemed to regard the anarchists at Le Moulin as friends, or at least not as their enemies.
Instead, the locals treated the corporate farming operations, the contractors building the megabasin, the police, the representatives from the Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Coherence as their enemies.
II
PRIEST VALLEY
MY INITIAL CONTACT with Lucien Dubois had been a cold bump. I had approached him in public, stranger to stranger.
That was six months ago, in Paris. He was at a bar near the Place des Vosges, playing pinball in a fedora like he thought he was in a French new-wave film from 1963.
I knew plenty about him, and that he had a kind of mannered affection for old Paris, that he conceived of reality as stage-directed in black and white. The truth is that even when Jean-Luc Godard and people like that were making those movies in black and white, with actors in fedoras who talk like gangsters, they were already an affectation.
I went into that bar near the Place des Vosges, sat down, and ordered a pastis. I was wearing tight jeans with suspenders. My white T-shirt was worn and thin and transparent, the suspenders framing my large breasts, which do not require a bra.
Are my breasts real?
Does it matter?
I sipped my drink. Lucien got an extra game. I sensed it was for me that he was playing so well, bringing his whole body weight into his command of the flippers, as he sent the little silver ball up the rails and watched it make its way back toward him like a loyal pet, before being shot back up to ricochet from bumper to slot.
He continued to play. I ordered a second pastis.
Watching Lucien work the flippers, hold this machine on either side of its narrow end in order to guide the ball and control the game, it seemed to me that this posture, of man and machine, recalled some ancient form: a man behind the box that he steers—a plow, perhaps, or cart. Boys playing pinball in pantomime of an old world where men drove plows over fields, steered carts that were filled with hay or manure. In this old world, those unlucky men who had no land to farm, no hay to cut, no animals to rear and abuse, pushed carts filled with junk for sale. “Tinkers,” these men were called, the dreaded and wretched tinker, an outcast and thief who wandered the countryside pushing his cart and ringing his bell and selling his broken and stolen wares.
The pinball machine seemed to me some stationary and atavistic workhorse wagon, the old work reformulated as play. No longer a plow or a tinker’s cart, this old box was now in a Paris bar, a game for boys and men to play. It enticed, with its pulsing lights: activate me.
I don’t waste my time on games. I don’t know if this is because I’m not a man, or because I’m not into games.
Lucien was out of coins.
The bartender, drying glasses with a cloth, asked him, “Is that it for today, boss?”
“It depends,” Lucien said. He was staring at me.
I smiled shyly and looked at the bottles lined up behind the bar, and at Lucien in the bar’s mirror.
He came over and sat down next to me.
“Hi.”
“Hello.”
“I’m Lucien,” he said.
“I’m Sadie,” I said.
I even had an American passport with that name.
REGARDING PROMETHEUS, we could ask if early man such as Thal, Bruno wrote to them, had been bestowed with special qualities. And if it was only modern man, H. sapiens, who lacked them.
The strong jaw, the big brain, the heavy bones and large face, these were positive traits. Perhaps Thal, he said, was a man graced with good qualities, and H. sapiens, in his plunder and advance toward the devastating dawn of agriculture, was a man with no such grace, a man without qualities, who substituted violence for the hole at the center of his heart.
But this business of Prometheus was of course a detail from the Greek account of human history. Here Bruno italicized “Greek.” His emails, I noticed, contained quite a bit of italicizing, meaning either that he was helping them interpret his emails by deliberately emphasizing key components, or he had just discovered the shortcut key Command-I, which sent his words slanting rightward, and he found this combination of keys and their applied effects fun.
Bruno Lacombe was born in 1937. An elder’s turn toward, his embrace of, technology is perhaps akin to the fresh perspective of a child: to misunderstand the adult world, and to misuse it, are the precursors to innovation.
While the members of Le Moulin were mostly people in their twenties and thirties, a generation pinned under the crosshatched straps of the technological harness that now held the world in place, Bruno was not pinned under those straps, and in his lack of computer proficiency, his accidental use of 24-point font, or a repeated resend of the same message or a blank message, such glitches were perhaps by-products of Bruno Lacombe’s freedom from what enslaved most people. At the same time, he was an old person trying to use email.
