Bruno understood the need for hope. He said that this need alone, quite human, must have accounted for Jean’s ability to convince himself that when farmers campaigned for market protections it was revolutionary. It wasn’t. Bruno said he sensed danger ahead. He hated to see Pascal get drawn into a pattern of defeats.
What Jean envisions, Bruno said, is the same old dreary world, which Jean believes people should struggle toward with unions and strikes and collective bargaining—a fight they will lose. Deep down, Jean, too, knows they will lose. But he pours himself another drink and enjoys his camaraderie with the old farmers, his camaraderie with his young disciples.
I feel a sympathy for Jean, Bruno wrote, but I won’t mince words. Whether in a rural outpost or an urban core, trying to dismantle capitalism from within capitalism is a dead end. (It was the first time I’d noticed his use of underlining.)
It is not unlike waiting for Jesus to arrive, to both abolish and fulfill biblical law. In both cases, Bruno said, the waiting is the thing, and the commitment to waiting is bound up with a refusal to acknowledge that what you wait for is not coming (he was back to his italics).
Whether Christian or communist, the real goal of believing, falsely, in a better world, was to energize people to keep going, to keep on trucking (he wrote this phrase in English, suggesting Bruno was fluent in our cultural idioms). Keep on trucking, he repeated, toward the return of our Lord and Savior. Toward a future that will draw away from you, in lockstep with your advance.
Even if you “win” a battle with the state over the question of water, Bruno wrote to Pascal, the farmers of the Guyenne are dependent on the state. The state is their lifeblood. They cannot compete in an open market! They depend on state subsidies and price protections.
You fight for a lost status quo, he said, and your victory is what? A slightly more functional capitalist relation. That’s all.
But, he said, I understand that Jean’s way, the tireless organizing, the debates, the little victories, is more straightforward than what I might propose, than what might constitute “my way.” Plumbing the depths inside yourself is not easy work. It is difficult work. But I am convinced, he said, that the way to break free of what we are is to find out who we might have been, and to try to restore some kernel of our lost essence.
Bruno did not call this essence that was deep inside of people the salt, but it was what he meant. He was talking about the salt.
I HAD BEEN STUDYING a map of the lake, the parking lots, the D79 and its connecting routes, the hills above the lake. I had added elements: the dairy farmers’ blockade; the direction from which police would come, when they learned that a state official was caught behind a line of protesters; the location where Platon’s driver, Georges, would park the car and wait; the route I myself would take, once Platon was trapped and my work was done, to get out, out of Vantôme, and out of the Guyenne.
I had found, on Google Earth, what looked like a steep fire lane that went from the lake straight uphill, and then connected to the D79 farther up. It was marked on the map as Chemin des Pêcheurs or “fishermen’s path.”
I would need a clean escape as police descended. I was hoping to hide the Škoda on this little fire lane I’d located on Google Earth, so that it waited for me while I finished my job. When everyone at the fair was trapped and kettled, just as Nadia predicted, I planned to be far away, on a major highway, fleeing north.
I visited the site, disappointed to discover logs and branches had fallen across it, and there were deep ruts that looked impassable. I walked the length of the road, surveying the work that would have to be done to get access. I needed Crouzel to clear it with his tractor. Whatever the canton paid him, I could do him better, but Crouzel was on the inside with Pascal. Between him and his ubiquitous mother, they were not keeping any secrets.
Along the flatter, lower part was an old logging site, with huge piles of stacked logs. A sign warned that climbing the logs was prohibited. The sign was accompanied by an illustration of a person being crushed by tumbling logs. It had been designed as a visual warning that could be understood in any language, but in French read “DANGER: it is prohibited to climb on logs.”
On both sides of this old lane, under its pines, were patches of wild nasturtiums. A wind came through, stirring them. Their circular leaves, like large green faces, nodded “yes” in the wind. But in the next gust, those same leaves jiggled and jostled from side to side, saying “no.”
I continued toward the lake, where I’d parked the Škoda.
It was twilight, and the tall grasses in the meadow that wrapped around the backside of the water were in shadow. As I neared the grassy field and the bench where I’d sat with René, I was mesmerized by these tiny white clumps hugging each blade of the tall grass. They looked like little lice on thick strands of green hair. I thought of what Bruno had said about his own lice: problems leave when they are ready to go.
This wild grass, bending in all directions as wind swept through, was covered with them. Upon close inspection, the tiny white blobs were small snails attached to the grass blades. They had overtaken the meadow like invading aliens.
My vision was focused low, on these little snails, and I hadn’t noticed that there was someone seated on that bench, mine and René’s.
It was an old man, facing the lake. He had white hair to his shoulders. The old-timers here do not have hair to their shoulders.
I stared at him. As if he sensed my presence, he stood from the bench and turned to face me. My heart was pounding.
He looked like Bruno Lacombe. The long hair. The serene face. But his gaze was penetrating, and not serene. He turned, his hands in his pockets, and walked toward the parking lot. He headed right, going slowly down the D79 on foot.
I went to my car and got in and made a right onto the road.
He was walking along the shoulder.
I slowed as I approached, with no plan for what I would say.
I put on my brakes and lowered the passenger window.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening,” he replied. He had stopped walking.
The photo of Bruno on the back of his book was twenty years out of date. I could not be certain. But I was already sure in a way that didn’t allow me to conjure a scenario in which this man was not him.
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“You live nearby?”
“Not so close, no.”
My car idled, the window down. This man looked like Bruno.
“In the hills above the lake?”
He shook his head. He had the comb-over.
“Sir, you are not Bruno?”
He shook his head.
“But you know who I mean? Bruno Lacombe?”
“No, I’m sorry. I am Frederic Peyrol. I live in Le Petit Sazerac.” He pointed down the road as if pointing homeward.
