Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
T
hey say this region was once under the ocean, many millions of years ago, that the rocks were shaped by the tides, and the stones contain the outlines of forgotten sea creatures from the dawn of time. I would say there are days when all history stands still and all the spirits gather.
You can feel it when the air in the valley is so hot it ripples the horizon. The blue hills rise and fall in waves, a mirage of the sea, and the breezes rush and expire like rollers as they form and collapse on distant shores.
Bénédicte’s voice breaks here. She takes some deep breaths. The audible suck of air into her lungs is imitated by the pull and hiss of the tape moving through the recording machine.
This is important. She must go on.
She must remember it all, not only the bad. She must not let herself be defined by the worst, not when there was so much that was good, and there is so much to teach.
A
fter Pierre came back, I knew I had to find a way to ground myself in the present. Forget the past. What was real now was bad enough.
There was silence when I opened up the cottages, four in all, to assess the condition of the damp and the cracks. Spiders and scorpions rule the cool, musty emptiness, and dead insects crunch underfoot. The human inhabitants are long gone, to the towns, to the bad, to the sky. No guests come to stay. The bread oven is a locked storeroom, stacked with pieces of wood and iron that might once have come in useful.
Above the main house, the roof is falling in. The walls are weakening and the worst damage is in the stairwell, the walls that form the height of the house where the staircase winds up to the bedrooms. The staircase itself is breaking apart; the cracks in the banister wall and between steps are as wide as my thumb. Plaster dust has begun to seep out in thin streams like sand in an upended hourglass. One day, the whole staircase, the four half-flights up from the kitchen, is going to give way in a roaring tumble of bricks and plaster and tiles.
I have moved most of my possessions down to the ground floor. All that remains in the rooms above are wood-wormed cupboards and iron bedsteads that are impossible to move, since the screws that hold the struts and sides together have rusted so badly they will not turn. The beds that once held the family are fused black skeletons, too large to fit through the doorways. Abandoned, and trapped.
What a big, rambunctious family it was, not only the five of us but all the others who lived here with us. I miss them. I miss them all so badly sometimes, even Pierre.
The house is already full of ghosts, friendly ghosts. Wherever I look, in every corner is the outline, in my mind’s eye, of a person who once occupied it, of an object that once stood there, right back to Grandfather Gaston and Mémé Clémentine. Papa so strong and silent and hardworking, not a particularly tall man, but, like many of the subsistence farmers here, wiry and tenacious. Our gentle
maman
with her soft, wide face and the smile that lit up our enclosed little world on the hillside. The tenant families. Old Marcel in the sheepfold. My friend Arielle. And here am I, the only one left, the one who was so clear about where her duty lay and what tradition demanded.
Outside, the figs fall, the wasps drone at the sugar bursting on the ground and on the branch, the scents of summer are overblown in the heat.
W
hen I was a child, we were lucky in so many ways. It’s only now I realize how poor we were and always had been. Such was the pride of the Lincels. Set apart on our land with our buildings and tenants, the family seemed like ruling nobility, to us at least.
In summer, the hillside was a kind of paradise.
By mid-June, great, white candelabras of blossom opened on the catalpa tree, and waved acid-green leaves like flays against the clean, new blue sky to mark the return of the long, hot months. Mulberries dropped from a soaring tree by the sheepfold into an obscene river of plenty. Arielle and I would cram the fruit into our mouths, letting the watery sweetness burst on our lips and tongues and stain our faces and hands purple. The plum trees and olives on the terraces below the main house were loud with birdsong, drowning out the first feeble cheeps from the cicadas.
In the mornings, we woke early to a warm shock of the brightness that suddenly filled the room as the shutters were thrown open, and the deep blue of the morning outside. Hearts singing with the knowledge that there were no school lessons to detain us, we tumbled downstairs to grab whatever was on the breakfast table.
A splash of coffee in boiled milk, a hunk of bread dipped into it, and we were out at our chores while the air was still cool. Later, as the hillside heated up and duties were done, we were off and away, out across the tough, hardy grass that soon scorched to hay, into the infinite sunshine. The hills were so blue it seemed they had soaked up the sky. Eagles and hawks hovered, riding the thermals, puppets suspended on invisible wires. The thyme and rosemary and lavender patches released their musky incense. Tender puffs of wind were silken on the skin: a gorgeous
vent roux
from the southeast.
As children, we spent whole days in the woods above and below the house, collecting treasures, climbing trees, watching the insects: complicated towns of ants, scarab beetles, copper-green rose beetles, and the hummingbird-like hawk moths.
Marthe and I once sat for an hour, observing a huge hornet dragging a cicada up the stony wall of the courtyard barn. Twice it almost reached the top but then fell at the last obstacle with a scratchy flop at Marthe’s feet.
We shared a capacity to stay very still and just look, and touch, and smell. Toward the end of summer, we would lie facedown in the courtyard. After the brief, hard rainstorms of late August, the earth was caramel-sweet and spicy, and the warm, smitten flesh of fruit gave off a smoke of incense. I may be imagining this, of course. Perhaps memory has rendered these interludes larger-than-life, but it’s true we did spend hours simply looking and inhaling, feeling life slowly, in close-up, burrowing into our surroundings, eating vanilla pastries with dirt on our fingers.
Marthe loved to talk about the scents and smells of the farm. My sixth sense was never as acute as hers (as I said earlier, my imagination has always been poor, which leads me to worry that the present situation is indeed precisely as I fear) but I could almost always smell what she smelled. Perhaps there was a family nose we both inherited that enabled us to read aromas, some small quirk of nasal membrane or nerve setting that provided an extra sensitivity. Old Marcel up by the sheepfold always claimed he had no sense of smell at all. Well, that went without saying; there’s no way anyone else would have chosen to live in that fetid, dungy quarter.
Marthe wasn’t blind then, or if she was, she never said.
O
f course, there were many other hours (more hours than any child these days will ever know) spent working: gathering fruit and picking vegetables; washing and scrubbing; digging and clearing irrigation channels; sewing and mending for us girls as soon as we could hold a needle, and knitting in winter; running errands and taking messages between our farm and the others and the village at the top of the hill. That was thirsty work, in this country of drought. In the summer, we rushed back to Les Genévriers for great, gasping drafts of the pure, cold spring water.
It was precious stuff. Some years, in other hills to the south, the wells would run dry by May and the locations of springs had to be kept secret. At times like that, so it was said, the men used wine for shaving, though none of our menfolk would ever admit to such a thing, even if it was the rankest brew.
In any case, we were lucky. There was always water at Les Genévriers: there was even said to be an underground river beneath the house, though this was never proved.
What we had for certain, linked to our abundant water, was progress. The pride of the hamlet was a large brass tap in the lower kitchen-cum-laundry. My mother and the other women of Les Genévriers no longer had to traipse up to the village with their bundles to sit at the communal washing place, that mysterious, echoing stone room open to the street where mothers and grandmothers gathered to gossip around the long, pitted trough.
It helped, of course, that the house was situated on a hillside, so the pipe from the spring could be laid downhill, ending in that magnificent tap. When it first went in, groups of neighbors gathered around it for weeks after, marveling at the engineering and ingenuity. When we were children, our showers were a hose attached to that tap and hung out of the kitchen window over the alleyway between the big house and the row of workers’ cottages. The wastewater ran down the hill and fed one of the vegetable patches. For other, more personal ablutions, there was a toilet built in a kind of sentry box attached to the side of the barn.
There was something else that was special about Les Genévriers. As our father had told us, “There’s treasure here.” Right from the time when he first started telling us stories: “A legend says so, there is hidden treasure.” It was a subject he particularly enjoyed, and the ensuing conversation would be a variation of the following:
“What kind of treasure?” we all wanted to know.
“No one can say for certain. Most people say it’s a cache of gold coins. But it might be jewelry, or Roman swords and cups. The Romans were here, you know.”
“So why haven’t we been looking for it?” asked Pierre, skeptical from a young age.
“Why do you assume we haven’t?” countered our father.
“What if someone has been and stolen it?” asked Marthe. That was always her concern, and probably well-founded.
“It might have been, but surely we would have noticed the hole where it was dug up.”
“So it’s buried!”
“That’s most likely. It must be in the ground, or beneath the stones of the house.”
But why? But how? But when? And so we would go on, round and round in circles of perplexity as the light faded. The oil lamps would be lit. Inside or out, the method of generating light was the same. In Marseille and other great cities, they had
le gaz
, but we children had never seen it. We relied on the lamps, which drew flying insects and moths to butt hopelessly against the glass, and candles set in jam jars, in which they finally succeeded in killing themselves.
Papa sucking on his pipe, nodding as he apparently gave serious consideration to all our theories. None of us really believed it, but it was fun to dream.
I
f there was ever any trouble caused by our free-ranging activities, and in those we were no different from any of the other children in the surrounding countryside, it was inevitably caused by Pierre. He was the one who fell off walls, was injured by loose rocks, and tumbled off a bicycle he stole not knowing its brakes were shot. His thin legs were always notched with cuts, scrapes, and bruises.
Once, he broke his wrist at the abandoned chapel when a cord of ivy failed to hold his weight. Another time, he was bitten by a fox and his hand swelled right up. Next, he went missing for a day and a night until someone heard his cries from a well, the rotten rope he had lowered himself with had frayed and pulled apart, leaving him unable to climb the slippery, moss-covered sides.
“The boy is a liability, a danger to himself,” Papa would say. But he was never as angry as I thought he would be. Nor did anyone seem to consider he might be a danger to others, although, as it turned out, they should have.
I
n between his climbing games and insect-torturing interests (my brother had recently acquired an apprentice in the form of a
prégadiou
, a praying mantis, which had a formidable record as a vicious slayer of butterflies, including the elegant swallowtails that wheeled around the garden; he and the mantis were learning a lot from each other), Pierre had a scam running.
It involved old bits of machinery, screws and bolts, broken pots, odd plates and cups, a framed picture from a raid on the attic. The objects were nothing important in and of themselves; no one ever noticed. Things were always appearing and disappearing; it was a facet of having so many people threading their way through the house, needing things and taking them, forgetting to put them back in the right place.
But these weren’t simply disappearing in the usual way. Pierre was taking the objects and going into town to sell them on market days, when he was supposed to be at school. I don’t think he even bothered to lie about his absence to the schoolmaster, M. Fabre. He told him he was going to market, just like that, and naturally it was assumed that he was working the family stall. This was the country, after all, and it was understood at that time that there were certain students who would not be in the classroom on a market day.
He took these items down to a junk stall, and was allowed to keep the price they fetched in return for a morning working the crowds for the stallholder. And Pierre kept a little bit more than that, as it happened, for the
brocanteur
was an inveterate tippler and spent most of the morning in the Lou Pastou bar, and wouldn’t have noticed if Pierre had stolen twice as much as he did.