Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (31 page)

“That’s right,” said the pilgrim, sitting up. “On the Way of Saint James.” I cupped my ears, trying to understand him. His accent certainly was not American. “First to Taizé and Cluny I shall go.”

I repeated the stilted syntax in my head as I studied him. Definitely not from California. He was about our age, thoroughly sun-bronzed, and gamey enough to smell at ten feet. “Have you hiked here from Germany or Switzerland?” I asked.

“Dublin,” he blurted. “From Dublin I’ve come.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit up, and blew smoke over his shoulder. “Off I go, then,” he announced pleasantly. Before we could exchange another word, he leaped to his feet, slung his pack and scallop shell across his sweaty torso, trilled something like “ta-rah,” and rushed uphill, swinging his beads and humming loudly.

Now I understood why, in Italian, the word for pilgrim—
pellegrino
—also designates an oddball. Is that why so many locals had fled at our approach? What would it be like to hike to Santiago de Compostela on a pilgrim’s route filled with such questers from Dublin? I winced at the prospect and began to plot out a route that would avoid Taizé—the famous ecumenical-spiritual community about ten miles north of Cluny, created soon after World War Two by a monk who called himself Brother Roger. Taizé may once have been a place of inspiration, but in recent decades it had been overrun by tens of thousands of earnest young seekers who wore their faith like a scallop-shell badge, strummed acoustic guitars, and car?mime=image/jpg" class="svg1" alt="image"/>dChried well-thumbed breviaries which were usually written in Romanian or Polish. Religion was fine, but religiosity got on my nerves, especially the holier-than-thou variety. Made curious by his fame and the tales we’d heard about Taizé, we’d been there and done that, years ago, when Brother Roger was alive and preaching. I for one would not do it again. Reportedly, the scene at Taizé had become even more ritualistic and less enlightening since Roger’s dramatic death. But there was no time to think of Brother Roger now. The sun was high, and Mercurey awaited us over the ridge.

At the trail’s highest point on a bluff above the vineyards stood the ruins of a windmill. I waved. But the Irishman bounded off the crumbling walls and scampered away as we neared. “He’s even stranger than I am,” I said. “Get thee to Taizé and Cluny, shall thee, ta-rah,” I cried, watching his jostling backpack disappear down the trail ahead of us in a cloud of dust. Clearly he had even less interest in getting to know us than we did in him.

By noon we were sipping coffee in the shady back garden of the Val d’Or hotel on Mercurey’s main street. There’d been no sign of the elusive, nicotine-scented Irishman anywhere in the village. “Let him get ahead,” I said. “He certainly won’t be hiking to Aluze with us on the Via Agrippa.”

The hotel’s yard was pleasant, the coffee delicious, and I couldn’t help staring at part of the garden wall. It incorporated what looked like a neolithic mortar, the kind sometimes reused in the Middle Ages as a holy-water font. The building the hotel occupied was modern—only two hundred years old, said the owner, a mild-mannered gentleman about our age named Dominique Jayet. “Nothing Roman in the hotel or restaurant, I’m afraid, not upstairs anyway,” he said. “But the property does straddle a creek that runs through the cellar in a culvert, alongside ruins of what was the ancient Via Agrippa.” He smiled around unsettling teeth and stated the obvious. “Mercurey is named for Mercury, the ancient Gauls’ favorite god.”

“Nothing to do with Romans, then?”

“Oh, the Romans also worshipped Mercury, but the temple has yet to be found.” Jayot smiled again and eclipsed himself like Jeeves.

The Val d’Or had an excellent reputation, particularly as a restaurant, and I’d long wanted to eat here in my unregenerate, gluttonous heyday. Our upstairs bedroom was attractive but had been conceived for dolls, and I wondered how a standard-issue American or a descendant of the Teutons would turn around in it. There was no number on the door, bur rather a name, La Lévrière, “The hare’s warren.” Game, as in gamey? Fair enough, I said to myself, taking the hint, and thinking again of the gamey Irishman. I showered quickly, filled our water bottles, donned my pack, and caught up with Alison in the lobby. We’d picnic on the way to Aluze, which was about three miles away.

Outside the hotel, the noon sun beat down on the Via Agrippa, conjuring visions of chariots and centurions. Once upon a time, the ancient highway ran from Rome across Gaul via Lyon to the Atlantic, terminating at what’s now Boulogne-sur-Mer, which was probably the source of the oysters that those oyster-relay runners carried to Roman oligarchs in a mere four days. The original roadbed passed through Mercurey but is now buried underneath an asphalt highway. Part way through the village, the ancient road resurfaces and veers south, climbs a hill, runs by a high school, and then disappears again underneath the vineyards.

We followed the Via Agrippa slowly, draggin while studying Political Science at 9HChg ourselves uphill in the heat. Amid the dusty grapevines, sitting on upturned Roman paving stones, we pulled out a bag of apples, cheese, and crackers, and splayed ourselves in the shade of a pine tree. “I believe a Roman pebble is stuck in my boot,” I said. Before tossing it away, I made sure the pebble wasn’t a votive offering or tiny, precious sculpture.

After lunch, we headed off again under a scorching sun, the heat unheard of for early May. Our goal was the hilltop village two valleys over. Our reasons for going to Aluze were several. We knew it to be of remarkable antiquity. Second, we’d driven past it in a car years earlier, found the scenery to be particularly appealing, and swore we’d return one day for a closer look.

The trail ran through meadows, pine forests, and rolling vineyards. At the bottom of a gully we crossed a stream and began the climb to the village on what felt like a section of the Roman road. I had Agrippa on the brain, and as usual couldn’t keep my eyes off the ground, confident that fortune would smile upon me. This time it did. Lying on the shoulder of the dusty, unpaved road, a smiling stone face stared at me. I stopped and smiled back. The face was dirty and green from algae and moss, triangular in shape, and about an inch and a half thick.

“A face,” I exclaimed. “I’ve found a face!”

Alison had heard this before. She’d seen stones and bones. Done stones and bones. Stones and bones were not funny anymore. She took the face from my hands, disbelief writ large in her eyes. “You really think it’s a face?” She turned it over. “You know, you may be right. It is a face. I thought you were joking.”

“My god,” I stuttered. “Seek and thou shalt find. Picasso was wrong. It’s just like those faces stuck on houses or churches to scare away evil spirits.” Despite the ache in my back, I did a jig, unable to believe my luck.

How had the face found its way to a dusty roadside at the bottom of a ravine? Simple: even I with my bad eyes could see the collapsed walls of a building rising among boxwood and wild plum trees nearby. An abandoned house had fallen down. The face had come off the façade and tumbled downhill. It had sat here, run over by tractors and carts and stepped on by horses and goats and sheep and men for decades, centuries, millennia perhaps. And then I’d come along, seeking. Was it just another metaphor for our quest, or a real, bona fide stone face?

Alison turned it over one more time. “Even if it isn’t an authentic anthropomorphic carved head, it looks kind of like one.”

I felt the air rush out of me. “You skeptic,” I said. “Anthropomorphic or not, I’m going to keep it. I’ll show it to an expert. You’ll see.”

“Like the bone? I suppose you’re going to carry it with you across France?”

“No worries, I’ll carry it. I haven’t asked you to carry anything, have I? I carry the water, the picnic, the clothes, the first-aid kit, the bone, and the face, okay?”

Alison sighed. “I think you should give it to someone at the mayor’s office. For one thing, if it is authentic and if you don’t hand it over, you’ll be locked up for looting antiquities.”

“Nonsense, it’s just one of those faces on old buildings, and it’s getting run over by tractors all the time. I’m saving it from destruction.” Alison relented, I nestled the face into the bottom of my pack, and we marched on. at 1,700 feet above sea level heoic, and

At the top of the hill, a trio of farmers were talking and smoking on a stoop that looked like the entrance to a neolithic cavern. We waved at them, walked slowly over, making sure not to spook them, and reassuringly admired the village and surroundings to soften them up. Alison remarked how wonderfully ancient everything seemed.

“Ancient? You don’t know what ancient is,” said one of the men, swelling with pride. His looks reminded me of Astérix and Dumnorix-Dean back in the Morvan. “Aluze is older than Mercurey, older than Bibracte,” he added. “You’ve been to Bibracte?”

We explained where we’d been and where we were going, using a grapevine cutting to trace our path in the dusty front yard. They peered down at us suspiciously. One of them said he’d never seen pilgrims around here. Another of the men said that he and fellow winemakers and farmers like him often turned up Roman, Gallic, and pre-Gallic artifacts. “Some people around here have rooms full of things,” he boasted, glancing around. “There’s been a big find recently—it’s going to make Solutré look like nothing. This is as important as Tautavel Man.”

The village of Solutré was due south on our route, about one week away, and we were familiar with the Flintstone-era Solutrian Phase of the Upper Paleolithic. Once upon a time, everyone read about Solutré in history books, even in California, I said. Who could forget the image of horses being herded off cliffs by clubwielding prehistoric hunters? But the archeological site of Tautavel was less familiar to us. Alison said so, and we both grinned like the foreign ignoramuses the farmers took us for. They seemed delighted: nothing worse than a smart-alec foreigner, especially an American.

Tautavel is a place in the Pyrenees, they said, taking turns to tell us where and what the Pyrenees Mountains were, way down on the edge of Spain, a country south of France, you know, or possibly you don’t know, seeing that you’re foreigners. The skull of a Homo erectus from 450,000 years ago was found there, at Tautavel, in the Caune de l’Arago. “And what we have here is just as important,” said the most talkative of the three men, spreading his arms. “But I can’t give you details, because the research and excavations are still going on.” He waved vaguely at the vineyards due north of the village.

The men seemed torn. They were clearly eager to tell us more, but it looked as if they felt they’d already said too much. “So,” I asked, “are you by chance descended from Agrippa, or possibly Vercingétorix?”

The trio of farmers crossed their arms one after the other and chuckled. “Certainly not Agrippa,” grumbled the talkative one. “Dumnorix,” he said. “Vercingétorix wasn’t from here, and don’t even mention Bibracte or Alésia. We only talk about Gergovia. You know what happened in Gergovia?”

“Naturally,” I said. “Your armies resisted Caesar there and almost wiped out our legions.”

“Correct,” Dumnorix said, clearly disappointed. I wasn’t quite as ignorant as he’d hoped. “We would’ve defeated you in Alésia if only our reinforcements had come through, if only those German mercenaries hadn’t sided with Caesar.”

“Such a shame,” I remarked. “We might’ve avoided the World Wars.”

“America wouldn’t exist, my friend,” he quipped. “We would’ve taken Rome.” Mirage fighter jetdCh

I nodded. “I’m sure you’re right,” I said amiably. “But just think, you wouldn’t be speaking French, and you wouldn’t be making wine—or have forks, for that matter.”

Half an hour later, we ran out of banter and said our good-byes, wishing them many a happy Gergovia in resisting globalization and fast food. I could feel my stone face smiling in my backpack as we hiked up to the village church.

The church was shut, as expected. That was only right in such an ancient place where Christianity was still a novelty. I considered giving the face to someone at the mayor’s office, but the building was locked up tight. On a billboard outside I spotted a notice about upcoming village events. A documentary film would soon be shown, titled
From Roman Bridges to the Bridge of Millau
. Star architect Norman Foster had designed Millau’s spectacular new suspension bridge. But the town was also where anti-globalization protestors led by José Bové had dismantled a McDonald’s restaurant. Well, I’ll be, I said to myself. Was there a Roman road in Millau, I wondered? But I knew the answer. Of course there was.

Reading on, I discovered that the local mid-July extravaganza to celebrate France’s day of independence on July 14th would include live music, a barbecue, and a movie projected on an outdoor screen.

“What movie?” Alison asked.

“Guess,” I teased. She shook her head. “Astérix and the Vikings.”

HARES AND WHITE RABBITS

We were late for a very important date. How had we forgotten the time? The truth is, I could barely remember what day it was. How many weeks had we been walking? My feet had become clay, welded to the earth. My breath was one with the air. Every step felt like a meditation, a prayer alloyed by the minor martyrdom I’d known since adolescence: my knees. Compounding the usual pain in my knees and lower back, I also had sunstroke and was beginning to wonder whether I might require hospitalization.

A handsome, elegantly dressed man in his late fifties was waiting for us in the lobby of the Val d’Or hotel as we clomped in. “Here they are!” said Dominique Jayot, rocking onto the toes of his polished black shoes. “The pilgrims.”

Before we could beat the dust off, Jayot introduced us to Bertrand Devillard, owner of Château de Chamirey winery. I was momentarily confused, but then remembered. When reserving our room, I’d asked about visiting the château and talking to the winemaker. Apparently, our wish was someone’s command.

“Take your time, please,” said Devillard in a velvet voice. “Shall I come back later?”

For us? There must be some mistake. Devillard was rich, and he was also famous among winemakers. Blue blood coursed through the vein visible on his lean, muscular neck. His sports coat and slacks were perfectly cut. He had the features of a French Robert Redford, the quintessential gentleman. We tramped upstairs to the hare’s warren, freshened up, and rushed back down full of apologies and slightly less musty.