“Bruno.”
I said his name out loud. I shouldn’t have.
“Bruno, I feel that way too.”
The act of speaking, of hearing a voice, my own, in this empty house, pulled some kind of stopper.
It let something into the room, some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above, from up near the ceiling of this room, a room I would soon leave forever, as I would leave this false life.
There was a girl below, on the bed, in this room.
She had tears on her face, this girl. And her face was my face, and her tears were my tears.
THE FIRST PERSON I SAW when I arrived at Le Moulin the next morning was René’s woman. She was standing in the area where I parked my Škoda, as if she was waiting for me.
She watched me get out and walk past. Dimples of satisfaction showed around her mouth. She said nothing. There was no need. She’d gotten things under control. René could now slap her around instead of me, choke her instead of me.
Everything was harmonious at Le Moulin that day, my last. It was Friday. The fair was tomorrow. If there were secrets to their planning, it seemed to me they were ready, had done their preparations, and the work now was simply to wait.
At lunchtime, I headed to my car.
“Not joining us?” Pascal asked.
I said that Lucien’s uncle had died. I said something about paperwork at the house that the family needed. We were all to meet in the morning at Le Moulin, before descending on the fair.
And then I was operating on a kind of autopilot, as I traced the route I’d seen Naïs take yesterday, the difference being that Naïs, I knew, was busy now at her taps, and Bruno, if he was home, would be there alone.
The road dead-ended at an unfenced property, a little stone farmhouse and rambling barn in the shadows of fir and chestnut trees. I parked and got out. The wind was still strong, as it had been last night, with gusts coming through and pushing the trees.
Here was Bruno’s barn, vines mounting its sills, windows broken and boarded. This was it, the structure to which he had expelled himself. I peered in. Cavernous, a space that looked to be both empty and a mess. I heard chickens, closed up in a pen somewhere inside the barn.
The house had heavy curtains drawn over its windows. From a vent pipe location, I guessed where the kitchen was, which Bruno had mentioned in one of his letters, the table where he wrote to Pascal and the others on Naïs’s computer, which she used for the café’s bookkeeping. A small satellite dish was nailed to the roof, near the front door. Under it was a jumbled woodpile, an old blue tarp thrown on top, rainwater collected in its folds.
Naïs’s wood, or Bruno’s, was mostly scrap, with old nails sticking out. Warped plastic farm trays were thrown in a disordered stack near the front door. There was a bucket of rotting compost, a crate filled with moldy-looking garlics. A wheelbarrow with a puddle of standing water at its base, furred in orange rust. Bags of chicken feed, one split and leaking, rain spoiled.
The country life.
I’d once been hired to entrap an American couple with a beautiful estate in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City. The owners were fine art dealers. Their place was on a plateau with a view of West Point Military Academy, iconic across the metal gleam of the Hudson. A competitor of this couple had hired me to sell them forged Picasso drawings. I was invited to their estate, decorated by these art dealers, a married gay couple, in impeccable furnishings and textiles. They were subdued men of aristocratic bearing, with the kind of manners that don’t police, that simply model. Woven into their refinement were glints of cutting wit, and thus of great intelligence.
We’d lunched on the terrace. Playing collector, I’d worn tailored English clothes, what Ralph Lauren-né-Lipschitz attempts to copy in the stuff he markets to the masses, but the real version, on expense account, a camel blazer with buttery suede elbow reinforcements and polished riding boots.
After lunch, they had given me a tour of the grounds. They showed me flowering trees of rare origin and lanes of exotic moss—thick, electric green, and meant to be walked on, the couple explained, needing to be walked on, the weight of human steps rousing the mosses, stimulating them to grow. My riding boots, the men said, were perfect for the moss. They encouraged me to step on it. So-and-so in her spike heels—a collector whom the men named—was not allowed on their moss.
I’d been to their competitor’s yacht on Long Island for what he said would be a small gathering, my presence meant to establish my identity as an art adviser. The gathering on this yacht featured champagne magnums and shiny shrimp on tiered platters, guests chatting over piped-in hit songs. The competitor bobbed his head to the music as if he could not help but enjoy it.
The dealers over the Hudson turned down the drawings. They were polite and didn’t suggest there was any question of these drawings’ source, but it was clear to me that they could spot a fake a mile away, whether a Picasso or a woman in riding boots.
Teams of gardeners had tended the grounds of that country estate, trimming and sculpting its hedged order. The roses were fed, sprayed, watered, pruned, and mulched, as if each bush were an elite military cadet. The hickory logs on the terrace where we’d lunched were quartered precisely and stacked just so.
Naïs was too busy and too poor for such order. As I inspected her dilapidated place, I had the thought that it was as ordered as it needed to be, and no more. Its disorder spoke of use.
Confident she would be at the bar awhile yet before closing up, I wandered.
Yellow leaves rustled underfoot and drifted downward as wind sifted through the trees. Autumn was upon us, a transition the Guyenne fair was meant to mark. As it would mark the end of my time here.
I saw the permaculture plot Bruno had mentioned, tended by him and Naïs, uneven rows of old chard or some other fall green. I saw the little stone hut he’d lived in after his daughter’s death.
Beyond the hut, the land sloped downward. There was an enormous rock lodged in the lower aspect like a giant tooth. Bruno had described this rock. At its base lay the entrance to his cave.
I walked down the slope toward the rock.
I’d thought about this place enough that it seemed already familiar to me, a parcel where I had a right of trespass.
I lost my footing on the descent, unsteady, perhaps from drinking more than usual the past couple of days.
There it was, a dark opening in the base of the rock, about five feet high: the entry that the previous owner had boarded, and Bruno had unboarded and explored.
I ducked and entered, using my pocket Olight, wonderfully bright for its tiny size. This cave was shallow. At its end was a gap between the rocks, a crevice a person might squeeze into. Bruno now used a different passage, I knew from his emails. He was vague about where it was. But I was certain this was the gap he’d originally passed through.
It was narrow enough that if you got in, you might not get back out. As Bruno told it, he had reached into the gap. Felt airflow. Suspected a larger cavity below. Went down to find out. From there, discovered a world of more and more underground spaces, a vast network in the earth. Some were dry, some wet, some narrow, others spacious, like underground palaces, or churches, and they went and went and went.
I aimed my light down into the gap. I saw metal anchors drilled into the wall, a rope looped through them.
“Bruno,” I said.
There was no reply. I said it again.
The rope was there to guide you down. I reached my hand in. The walls were cold. I felt the rope. I heard the sound of a car, louder and louder, and then the motor killed. A door open and shut.
