Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (5 page)

If it wasn’t Roland’s horn, I reasoned, maybe it was one of his lost bones. Or maybe it had belonged to another knight who’d died at Roncevaux. Girart de Roussillon, for instance. Why not? His body had been brought up this trail to the abbey he founded at Vézelay, hadn’t it?

Before Alison could call me a fantasist, I knocked the mud off Roland’s bone and dropped it into a zip-lock bag. “Specimen one.”

“Are you planning to carry that horse bone across France to Spain?”

“I might,” I said, stowing it before she could reply. “At least as far as Cluny. This is how relics are born.”

VILLAGE IDIOTS AND THE FRENCH DESERT

Steep, rock-strewn and slippery, secular hiking trail GR-13 snaked down from a plateau into Foissy-lès-Vézelay. The rock-built village of leprous old houses seemed hacked and lifted from the Appalachians, the red-necked heartland of Americana. Hunting dogs howled from fragrant farmhouses. Chickens clucked, reminding us of the etymology of “Gaul”—the name comes from “galli,” meaning roosters in Latin and Italian. A few fearful locals scrambled for cover at our approach, shotguns at the ready. To say Foissy hadn’t yet been gentrified is gross understatement. But conversation was worth the risk: I was dying for a coffee. Our
Topo Guide
—a guidebook with topographical maps—sited a café in the village square.

The café was closed, naturally. Ditto the church and everything else. This certainly wasn’t Paris. A to someone at the mayorwe was ccording to the literature, we’d officially entered the Morvan, an unsung enclave of rural France where amenities are few and people are on the far side. We looked for the exit and caffeine.

A pair of pale eyes behind lace curtains tracked us along the main road, past several ramshackle hovels. I noticed the houses were for sale. As we walked by, a tall, blond man stepped out, speaking in something like English while a shortish real estate agent with a perceptible non-Gallic complexion waved his hands. Never fear. The gentrifiers were coming.

South of the village, a tractor blocked the unpaved forest road. Alison scrambled around it and came face to face with a beaming individual we immediately recognized as the proverbial village idiot. He seemed glad to see us, a carefree man of perhaps forty years with large, rough hands. A yellow corn-paper Gauloise cigarette wiggled on his lower lip as he talked. And talked. And talked. He was herding cows, he said. His real job was gardening.

An ungenerous big-city friend once told me that throughout France, the postwar process of rural abandonment caused by the decline of the family farm had left few “normal” people in the countryside. They were flanked by fossils and the feebleminded—young, healthy, ambitious people fled to the cities. One famous sociologist had written a book in the late 1940s titled
Paris et le désert français
. It wasn’t about cakes but about desertification and the effect it has had on the countryside. However, I’d read recently that the direction of the flow was finally turning. More people were leaving cities for rural France. Expense, pollution, and stress were making big cities, even Paris, less palatable. Apparently, the seniors and mentally retarded of France’s backwater deserts would soon have more for company than wealthy Dutch and Englishmen with vacation properties. Whether these rural-dwellers were happy about the moneyed invasion was another question, one still to be asked in France. Judging by the results of gentrification in prettified Paris neighborhoods such as the Marais—not to mention in rural America—the natives of today’s Gallic heartland were unlikely to be universally thrilled.

CONFESSIONS AU LAIT

The roadside café in the village of Pierre-Perthuis was called Les Deux Ponts—the Two Bridges. It turned out to be a stylish country inn despite its hayseed surroundings. The owner busy behind the bar said his name was Philippe, and that he had chosen Pierre-Perthuis for its nearness to the tourists and spiritual charge of Vézelay, and for its pair of handsome, historic bridges. “I work fifteen hours a day,” he added gruffly. “We love it, but.…” He was too tired to speak, other than to inquire as had Astérix whether we were plain old hikers or bona fide pilgrims. I told him about our trek, two skeptical pilgrims following the Via Agrippa in Caesar’s footsteps; Saint James was too recent for my taste, I added.

As if electrified with painful pleasure, Philippe raised his eyes to the ceiling. “In 1979 when I was eleven years old.…” he began to recount.

With his school cycling club, Philippe had ridden a thousand miles from Le Puy-en-Velay in France’s Midi to Santiago de Compostela—part of the same route we would follow once we had made it to the southwest of France. “I couldn’t appreciate it back then, not in a spiritual way,” he added with wistful urgency, drying and re-drying a cup and saucer. “Now I could, and would love to, but we’re too busy. Too busy. Maybe when we retire we’ll walk it, like you, from the basilica of Mary Magdalene.” Philippe said the bike ride had been a physical cha to someone at the mayorwe was llenge, but what he wanted now was the time to step back and take stock. He wasn’t sure what religious feelings he had, but
spirituality
fascinated him. There had to be more to life than materialism, than foie gras and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, he opined. Sometimes he felt trapped in it, in the world of food and wine and entertaining. “Trapped,” he repeated.

As I listened, an eerie kinship with Philippe grew. I silently counted backwards. Philippe said he was thirty-seven and had another twenty-five years to go until retirement. Unexpectedly he stopped drying the dishes and looked at me with disquieting intensity, waiting for his wife and Alison to wander out of earshot, into the dining room. “I can’t help asking,” he whispered. “Do you know why you’re doing the pilgrimage?”

“Do I know why?” I stumbled for words, prepared to toss off the usual vacation-responder explanation about losing weight, an atheist out for a lark. That’s what most of the people I knew seemed to expect from me, and I supplied it. No one except Alison had asked me why I was really doing this, what my deepest motives might be. Either they didn’t care or didn’t dare, which was fine. Who could blame them? Relationships were superficial by and large, and most people just wanted easy answers, good news, and directions to the best restaurants. Why was I walking for three months? I’d asked myself that question many times, and had come up with far too many partial answers. Maybe there wasn’t one single answer, I said to Philippe. It was a multiple-choice exam question where all the responses are right.

Before leaving Paris I’d met many pilgrims and been told that the unspoken agreement among them was never to ask the “why-question.” That was between you and God, or whatever you took Him or It to be. Had Philippe forgotten? “Do I know why,” I repeated, buying time. I stirred my café-au-lait and stared into middle distance.

“Yes, the real reasons, the deep ones,” he goaded. “What do Caesar and the Via Agrippa have to do with it?” His bloodshot eyes burned. “Why can’t you just say you’re a pilgrim if you are one, and I think you are, even if you’re not religious?”

I stuttered and then realized my lips were moving of their own volition. I told Philippe that the trek was about breaking away from distractions and stripping away the unnecessary things in life. There was my bad health, for a start, and we were both exhausted psychologically by a variety of matters; but there was also something else, something about coming to grips with ghosts and Hitchcockian family issues, spirituality and religion. I’d never been able to get my mind around belief in a God or gods, and in recent years, evangelism and neo-Paganism had estranged me from my family, especially my mother and two elder brothers. I no longer spoke to or saw them. My brothers’ midlife discovery of religion had spurred my ageing, widowed, eccentric mother to rediscover the pantheism of her ancestors. She was a Roman, literally, not an ancient one, but a contemporary Italian war-bride who had never forgiven my GI father for transplanting her from Rome to California. He had died recently and, shortly afterward, she had set about turning his garden into a sacred sculpture grove dedicated to Pan, reminding bemused visitors that her eldest son, the one who’d become a militant evangelical, was named for Dionysius, and that if she could, she would feed Christians like him and his evangelical wife and children to the mountain lions, which roamed her garden at night.

My mother had also hidden my gentle, quietly atheistic father’s incinerated remains in a suitcase in her closet. want to light a candle9HCh I was pretty sure it was the same suitcase they’d taken ship with in 1950 from Genoa to Los Angeles, and reused on our tragicomic return journey to Italy in 1965, when she had unsuccessfully attempted to leave my father and bring up her four children as Italians. The ashes now awaited her own death, incineration, and transfer to a twin-portrait urn she had made and fired in her own kiln. She was, I explained to the astonished Philippe, a sculptor and teacher of art, trained at the fine arts academy in Rome. She also had the charisma of an Etruscan soothsayer, a neo-Pagan or Druid priestess, and was revered by other eccentric artists on the Mendocino County coast of California, where she lived.

“A Druid for a mother?” Philippe nodded gravely, as if he could possibly understand. “What about your wife?” He raised his chin toward Alison, who was across the dining room. “What does she think? Is this a spiritual quest for her?”

I shook my head. “That’s complicated, and she hates it when I put words in her mouth.”

It struck me as miraculous that Alison had put up for years with my hereditary anticlericalism and church-bashing, my hedonism and over-indulgence. It confirmed my fears that she was a closet martyr. As a fallen or lapsed Catholic and the daughter of a diplomat, however, she was too smart and too well drilled in politesse to be pinned down about issues such as non-belief. When we had met in 1987, she had alarmed me with talk of walking to Santiago de Compostela for cultural reasons, saying it would be all right for atheists, meaning the pair of us, to undertake the journey. Now she eschewed “atheist,” preferring the softer, fuzzier “agnostic.” It left wiggle room for spirituality and last-minute changes of heart. We had both lost our fathers recently, I told Philippe, stirring my cold coffee, and both of us needed to come to grips with finitude, mortality, and the big issues we had dismissed in our youth.

Philippe smiled wanly, looking all at once stricken and elated. I thought he might laugh or weep. Before he could say anything else, Alison wandered back from the dining room with Philippe’s wife. We finished our coffees, shook hands all around, and at the door to the café wished each other farewell, like old friends about to part forever.

WET HEART OF DARKNESS

Pierre-Perthuis is named for a natural rock arch—a
pierre
worn through by the Cure River. Past the crumbling fortified gateway and a 12th-century fortress stands a compact church. It was locked.

“What if I’d wanted to light a candle?” Alison asked, half joking.

The encounter with Philippe had shaken me. I was glad to be distracted by the wide, wonderful world and the pressing need to walk.

From a modern bridge spanning the river valley we spotted the rock arch and a sturdy humpback bridge of stone. The older of the two bridges was built in 1770—recent by French standards. It stood at the confluence of the Cure and a swift-running stream. A few hundred yards up the stream another, more ancient span marked where the Roman road and pilgrim’s path continued south. Decisions, decisions.… The riverside Grande Randonnée trail looked even more appealing than the pilgrim’s route. So we backtracked to it, crossed the humpback bridge, and strode south through woods sprinkled with white, star-shaped wildflowers.

By something like a miracle, no paved road runs along the Cure. The setting has magic. Cliffs and outcrops rise through interlacing bowers of branches. The river rushes noisily over rocks and around boulders. I imagined the trout jumping, and stopptext-align: justify; } p.indentedoed to peer into an eddy, my mind tracking back to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and fishing the Yuba River. The mossy shoreline and overhanging willows, even the aspen and birch trees, seemed familiar, and their heady, earthy scent came with memories attached, as if I’d been here before.

Curling itself into a shepherd’s crook, our riverside trail mounted. Through the trees, keyhole views showed tantalizing snippets of the river and, away and across it, a dark, hooded church set in pastureland. Seen from a panoramic point atop cave-pocked cliffs, the village of Cure looked to have been lifted from the land of dreamy dreams. At the top of an abutting hill stood our first Madonna. Her name was Notre-Dame de la Lumière—Our Lady of Light. It seemed an unusual name, but maybe not in the rainy forests of the Morvan. According to our
Topo Guide
, “Morvan” is the modern French transliteration of a Celtic word meaning dark mountain or black forest.

A pink millhouse watched over an old bridge at the foot of the village. Ahead, the medieval towers and walls of a manor signaled that Cure had once been strategic. Approaching the manor, we saw what looked like thick, tangled tentacles spreading in the air. They were the lichen-grown, many-times-pruned limbs of sycamores—limbs so shagged, contorted, and knobby that it was hard to recognize them.

My own knobby knees sprang to mind, and then Wotan, the demigod beloved of Wagner. For reasons beyond my ken, Wotan immolated himself head-down on the sacred tree of Scandinavian and Germanic myth, sacrificing his own life—though as a demigod he could’ve claimed immortality—to give knowledge to mankind. It was a Germanic vision of Pandora’s Box merged with Prometheus and the Garden of Eden and then transferred to the real Black Forest, the one north of the Rhine. Somehow, in my agitated mind, the mythical tree now seemed to be standing before us, upside down, its roots in the air. But I’m no Wagnerian, and I struggled to express my contorted imaginings.

At first Alison seemed to be only half-listening, more intent on taking photos. “I see stumps, severed arms and legs,” she said suddenly, tilting her head. Granted, she loved Goya at his darkest and most brutal. But coming from the mouth of an uncomplaining, indefatigable woman of at times maddeningly positive outlook, her words surprised me. “Limbs with gangrene,” she added, pointing to the moss. I staggered back. “We’ve lived together for twenty years,” she continued, “and I didn’t know you were familiar with upside-down Scandinavian mythological trees.” She finished me off with a quizzical smile that showcased her perfect teeth. “Had you mentioned Saint Martin and the Druids’ sacred tree, the one he ordered to spin around and fall on the Pagans, I might have followed you. But Wagner and Wotan?”