Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (33 page)

The industrial sheds, colza fields, and rusting railroad tracks along the highway didn’t bode well. But hiding down a driveway amid mature sycamores with mottled trunks, and tender-leafed horse chestnut trees, stood a hulking, fortified millhouse ringed by stone walls. The façade was tangled with purple wist while studying Political Science at 9HCheria, the roof topped by terracotta tiles clotted with lichen and moss. A pair of Geisha eyes peered down at us from a bull’s-eye window. “Bonjour,” piped the voice associated with the eyes, speaking English. “I’m coming down.”

The woman who introduced herself as Miki Manabe did not actually have a clothes clip on her tongue. With shy, balletic motions and delicate peeps, the lithe young Japanese hostess led us into the millhouse, plied us with cool drinks and hot coffee, and told us of her transformation from computer scientist in Tokyo to budding winemaker in Givry. Wine was about tradition and ritual, she whispered, shyly answering our questions about how she had wound up here. Japan had tea, she added. France had three-star restaurants and peerless estate wines.

Miki eclipsed herself with bows and blushes when the B&B’s manager strode in. He was named Romain, he said, and indeed he looked like Julius Caesar or Agrippa, a strapping fellow with a Mediterranean cast. Before we could climb to our room, Romain led us back outside, along the millrace and through a shady grove. Moulin Madame was built circa 1380, he said, delivering the short history of the property. A reclusive biotech billionaire exploring the ethanol potential of colza had bought the estate and saved the millhouse from ruin, turning it into a luxury B&B.

I joked that Miki wasn’t in Burgundy to make ethanol. “Miki is allergic to colza,” Romain explained, “which is one reason she’s moving on as soon as she can.” Were there others like her who had come to study wine but were thwarted by this new development, Alison wondered? “She’s going to make wine,” Romain remarked, “and frankly she’s a little too timid to be a hostess, so it is probably for the best. We thought it would be good to have someone who spoke English and Japanese, but it turns out what foreign visitors want is a French host, even if he speaks bad English and no Japanese. The feeling is what counts, the appearance of authenticity.”

The ceiling timbers of our room were too far up for me to distinguish details, and the carved stone fireplace was of the type we’d seen before—apparently designed for spit-roasting sides of beef. Behind a movable screen lurked an oval bathtub. We took turns sinking into it, and emerged around sunset lightened of dust. By then, Romain had uncorked samples of local wine, donned an apron, and cooked something resembling a curry. Whether or not the spices exalted the wine seemed unimportant. Romain’s passion for ladybugs and hand-picked, organic grapes won us over, and his descriptions of how some clever local winemakers keep a special “Parker Barrel” of fruit-forward wine to hoodwink the supposedly omniscient American critic Robert Parker, came as an entertaining surprise. As big as a barrel, and overflowing with self confidence, Parker roamed the vineyards of the world, judging wines and making or breaking wineries.

According to Romain, “Parker Barrel” wines are made for export to countries where they will please the infallible Parker and the palates that share his florid tastes. Essentially, they go to America, England, and Germany. The same château’s same vintages sold in France might be different, more nuanced and less oaky. “People drink Givry wines here and love them,” Romain said good-naturedly. “They go home, they buy what they think are the same wines, and they say ‘Hmmm, why are they always better when you drink them on the spot?’” He paused for effect. “Is it because wine doesn’t travel? No! It’s not just travel or even psychology, it’s actually a different wine. Winemakers here have learned how to please Monsieur Parker. Consumers want to believe Parker. Mirage fighter jetdChParker has his criteria. He gets what he wants. We get to keep what we want. Everyone’s happy.”

DAILY FLOPPY DOLL

Early the next morning, Miki set out our breakfast with the skill of a computer scientist executing a tea ceremony, except that we were drinking coffee—mugs of it. After the usual polite banalities about rain and sunshine, I couldn’t help asking her whether she was glad to be “moving on,” as Romain had put it. Miki turned the color of her homemade raspberry jam. She agreed that a change was for the best. She would soon be making wine, not serving guests at a B&B. Transitions were difficult.

By Japanese standards, Miki was a rebel. She’d given up a career and a family and left the country. “Now, may I please ask you a question?” We prepared ourselves for the usual queries about pilgrimage and religious belief—or lack thereof. Miki surprised us. “What is the exercise regime you do in the morning?”

Alison grinned with relief. So did I. Our morning stretching and muscle-building was based on yoga and Okinawan Daruma Taiso. We’d learned the Daruma Taiso from a Japanese master of Shorei-Kan karate. After about twelve years of it, Alison had reached the level of brown belt with three stripes—one exam away from a black belt. I’d managed to make it into the black-belt category, but after being struck by optic neuritis I had to quit. I was proud to have been among the world’s worst
first-dan
black belts, permanently scarred by bruising, cracked ribs, and loose teeth. “But we both keep up the Daruma Taiso,” I finished explaining.

Miki tittered, covering her mouth. “I am so sorry, but I do not know this term. Daruma Taiso?”

“Isn’t it Japanese?”

“Oh, yes,” Miki said. “But it makes no sense. It means ‘daily floppy doll.’” She tittered uncontrollably, and pantomimed a floppy Raggedy Ann.

Daruma Taiso wasn’t about building muscle. The goal was to become agile, quick, and loose-jointed, to be able to turn an opponent’s strength against him, as in Aikido. Metamorphosing into a floppy doll or Raggedy Ann made sense. Miki nodded. “Yes,” she said, shaking our hands and bowing. “That is a powerful philosophy.”

As we climbed back up through Givry’s budding vineyards I felt stiff, not floppy, and couldn’t help thinking about the paradoxes of Japanese and French society. Success in Japan was about combining flexibility with wiry tensile strength and solidity. Metaphorically, this took the form of traditions, ceremonies, and belief systems anchored to Buddhism and Shinto. It might also explain why the Japanese share with the French a great respect for rituals and traditions, such as the rigorousness of training and education, the professionalism of engineers, waiters, chefs, and the physical solidity of stone houses, châteaux, vineyards, and wineries. Certainly, the Japanese admired the apparent flexibility of America, and the dynamic potential of floppy rootlessness. But they were in awe of France. They understood that, like the Japanese themselves, what the French feared most was the loss of their traditions, a model of society fashioned centuries ago, based on patterns thousands of years old. I couldn’t help wondering if the Japanese had their own equivalent to Janus, the god of thresholds and paradoxes, and if he were straining his neck nowadays keeping an eye on China and India.

HEARTY BURGUNDY

It may have been exhaustion. It may have been elation. Or maybe it was the intoxicating spring blossom at 1,700 feet above sea level heoic, and s. Whatever the reason, as we hiked through the ridgetop hamlets of Russilly, Jambles and Moroges, with vineyards splayed below, I felt something akin to runner’s high. Gone was the pain in my knees and back. Was this the long-awaited epiphany, an intimation of spiritual awakening? The succession of Romanesque churches, thick-limbed old trees, barking dogs, and reclusive natives swam in my head, mixing with the airborne white cows and tilting rooftops in a seamless, bright panorama. It was gorgeous, beautiful, stunning, magical. Then somewhere between Moroges and Buxy, just after the trail split, I tripped and fell into a hedgerow. Before standing up, I stared at my boots and realized that I had stumbled on a fossil the size of a football. It was cracked open and revealed a cockleshell within, a shell left behind when the Mediterranean retreated millions of years ago. I couldn’t help laughing. I laughed hysterically, slapping my thighs as I rolled to my stomach and did a push-up to get back on my feet. First a bone, then a face, and now a cockleshell. Hello, Saint James! I bent over again and picked up the fossil, feeling my vertebrae click, and a spasm about to come on. The petrified symbol of Saint James must’ve weighed about thirty pounds. Alison caught up with me in time to see me hefting the fossil and wiping tears from my cheeks. Her eyes swept from the fossil to my backpack. “You’re not?”

“No,” I said, bending my knees carefully and putting the fossil down where I’d found it. “I’ll come back for it one day. But it’s some kind of message.” She waited long enough to decide whether I was joking. “The proverbial message from a flounder,” I said, and laughed again.

I was still chuckling when we hiked downhill through the grapevines, past a pair of mossy manors and a clutch of picturesque hovels, and then around the perimeter of freshly built tract housing development. We wound up on the semicircular road marking the former moat of medieval Buxy. Sycamores unfurled fresh leaves on either side of the road. Under the trees were grocery stores and gift shops, a newsstand, bakery, butcher shop, restaurant, and cafés. “That one,” Alison said, pointing to a cluster of outdoor tables where locals were drinking and chatting. While I stocked up on food, water, and Buxy’s sweet specialty—nougatine with hazelnuts or pistachios or chocolate—she headed for the towering village church and met me back at the café on the boulevard.

It was blissful. The heat had calmed. The scenery was pleasant. We had cool water and hot coffee and a table under spreading old trees. The only minor drawback was the company at the next table. A shrieking toddler sat in a dirty stroller surrounded by three teenage girls, all of them smoking and drinking beer. Two of them were in advanced pregnancy. One of the pregnant ones was the baby’s mother. His name was Jimmy. The girls pronounced it “gee-me” and took turns swearing at the toddler and describing to each other the unpleasantness of pregnancy, childbirth, and housekeeping.

Jimmy’s mother had a tattoo on her arm. I couldn’t make out what it said. Alison tilted her head and read it. She wrote the words out for me, using my notebook.
l’Amour c’est comme la mort, ça fait mal
. Love is like death, it’s painful. It sounded like the lyrics of a soupy song, something by the ageing French rock idol Johnny Hallyday, for instance.

Alison picked up the café’s copy of
Le Journal de Saône et Loire
, the regional newspaper. Splashed across the front page, headlines screamed. The article below recounted the tale of Aimée and Edmond, an aged couple who’d been attacked in their home by an unknown assailants head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo in the sleepy village of Saint-Yan in southern Burgundy. It was a modern-day
Crime and Punishment
, though the perpetrators had little in common with the philosophical, tormented Raskolnikov, and the reporter wasn’t exactly a Dostoevsky. By the time Alison had finished reading me the grim tale, I’d realized why so many people along our path had shuttered up their houses or fled. It wasn’t because we were pilgrims and they didn’t want to give us water or food. They feared something darker, perhaps rightfully so.

“They thought we were murderers, posing as pilgrims.” I couldn’t hear Alison’s rebuttal, because just as she opened her mouth, three teenage boys roared up to the café on dirt bikes that spluttered and buzzed and spat out blue smoke. The boys settled in next to Jimmy and the girls, lit up, fiddled with gold chains and lighters and cellphones, ordered beers and hard liquor, and went through the broad, hormonal gestures of acting out a 21st-century French version of
American Graffiti
. It was as if global warming from greenhouse gases and lung cancer from cigarettes had yet to be discovered. We’re young and invincible, the boys’ scripted machismo screamed,
vive
Vercingétorix.

On the way to our hotel, we paused to peer into the window of a gift shop, where fossils and minerals propped up a fading Kodak sign. I thought of Eva Fage and Miki Manabe. Change was difficult, yet sometimes it was for the better. To each his own version of change.

Buxy’s claim to fame as a Protestant stronghold in the Wars of Religion was that of being ransacked and destroyed by Henri IV himself, aided by his valiant men. It was a strange tale, for Henri had begun life a Protestant and had only embraced the Vatican’s religion for political reasons. In any case, by the time the king rode out of Buxy, carrying the good wine with him, all that remained of the 10th-century walled town was a moat filled with rubble, a city gate, and parts of a few wrecked towers.

In the dusk, after a nap at the grand-sounding but blessedly simple Château Fontaine de Baranges, we trawled the town’s alleys and then poked around the church, another sturdy edifice rebuilt in the 1800s. A single taper burned inside, near a finely carved 16th-century sculpture of Saint Anne. We had the church to ourselves. “Do you want to light a candle?” I asked. “You certainly could do with some help from the tooth fairy.”

“My molar is okay,” Alison sighed. “Go ahead. I’ll catch up with you.” She waited until I’d stepped through the door. Creeping back inside, I watched her drop a one-euro coin into a trunk. She lit a taper. Something was going on. In two weeks, she’d invested at least five euros on votive candles.

DEAD RELIGIONS AND FORGOTTEN BORDERS

Château Fontaine de Baranges is wrapped in a pocketsize park on Buxy’s southeastern edge. When we first arrived and staggered in, the overeager, overly educated desk manager had poured the history of the place—and of Buxy—into us. His words, delivered with a rubbing of his dry hands, came back to me now, over breakfast the following morning. From its origins as a private villa dating to the late 18th century, the château had done service in a variety of incarnations, from Catholic seminary and girls’ school during the post-revolutionary religious revival of the early 1800s, to a hotel in the 1990s. The cricket-like manager, who’d formerly rubbed his hands together in a bookstore, had casually added that, to his mind, it had taken France two hundred years to kill off state-sponsored religion, and that the hotel had followed the fall and rise an?mime=image/jpg" class="svg1" alt="image"/>dChd fall again of Catholicism with uncanny parallelism.