At Home in France (26 page)

Off he went. I was becalmed. I refused to think any more about Singe and the
problème
. I got out my binoculars and stood on the patio, training them on the cows feeding in the Salgues’ barn in the valley, an idyllic sight. The faint clanging of their bells against the troughs carried up the hill. Evening was closing in.

*   *   *

N
o one was at home at the Bézamats’ when I arrived to pick up the keys in October. By prior agreement in such an event, I found them secreted under the metal milk container on the stone ledge by the front door. Bobbie was beside himself, confounded as to how he ought to behave. He recognized me, yet he was duty bound to defend the property in his family’s absence. As I mounted the stairs he rolled on his back on the grass, his tail wagging, all the while growling ferociously.

When I pulled into the house, I noticed that the grassy area in front was churned up, as if it had been plowed. The
compteur
was not by the road. I walked up the hill and stood on the patio. The
compteur
, miracle of miracles, had been relocated to the most desirable position, within the stone wall and within reach of the
cave
. This was beyond belief. I’d come steeled for the next round with Saur and here it was, a
fait accompli
.

This had to be Monsieur Bézamat’s doing. But how had he accomplished such a feat? The next morning I stopped at his house, a bottle of wine in hand. He was tinkering in the garage. I saluted him, with the wine bottle raised on high in victory. He came forward, with a shy smile of satisfaction, the cat who’d swallowed the canary.

I grasped his hand and shook it vigorously. And how had he done it?

He placed his bottle of wine on the hood of the car and nonchalantly tucked his hands in his back pockets. He’d driven to Figeac, he explained offhandedly, and stopped at the main bureau of Saur.

You drove to
Figeac!
I exclaimed. It was nearly an hour’s drive.

Well, he had had a little business of his own there, he said dismissively.

You spoke to the
chef du centre!
I went on, incredulous.

He nodded sagely.
“Eh, voilà.”
The bureau chief had had to face the fact that the
compteur
wasn’t on my property. There was no choice but to rectify the situation. He shrugged at the overriding and obvious logic of this position.

I was dumbstruck that he would have put himself out to such a degree. I had underestimated his fidelity.

He ignored my astonishment and urged me to arrange with Bru to proceed with the
branchement
. He tipped his hat and took a half step back, reminding me, as I slid into the car, not to press on the gas pedal when I started the car. (He had witnessed me do this on occasion, resulting in the engine being flooded.)

Monsieur Bru stopped by that evening. Between him and Bézamat, he said, the job would be finished in the spring, without fail. Bézamat would dig the trench and he would follow up with the connection to the cistern. He smiled broadly and gave me a reassuring clap on my shoulder, the first intimate gesture he’d ever made. Now that the job was in familiar hands, my doubts dissolved. Water, water, everywhere—come spring.

T
he dictionary’s definition of identity is the “sameness of essential or generic character in different instances.” Yet geographical identity can be an elusive thing. If I were asked in New York where I was from, I would reply, “St. Louis.” If I were somewhere else in the United States and was asked where I was from, I would say New York. But if I were on Mars, it wouldn’t dawn on me to say I was from Carennac, France. For though I now feel at home, I will never feel indigenous. Nor would I ever contemplate moving to France permanently, as people suspect when they discover I have a house there. Eventually I hope to spend more time at Pech Farguet, however. It’s constantly beckoning. As soon as I get back to New York from a trip to France, I’m dreaming and planning of when I can go back.

At some point my two worlds took on a seamlessness. Buying the car contributed to a sense of belonging. I no
longer felt like a visitor. Charleston gave me permanence.

Life in New York now flows easily into life in France. I don’t have to make a pack list anymore. It has become routine. About a month or so in advance of a trip, I book the usual Air France flight, leaving Newark on Thursday evening at six-thirty
P.M
. and returning two weeks later from Orly at ten-thirty
A.M
. I have figured out how to get to and from the Paris airport for the price of the
métro
, and know by heart the usual hours for the departures of the train leaving Paris from Austerlitz and returning from St-Denis. The arrangement with Raymond goes like clockwork. My initial feeling of awkwardness and indebtedness to my neighbors has long vanished. We are friends.

And, after twelve years, the house has become like a pair of well-worn shoes that now comfortably fit the contours of my feet. But, unlike a pair of old shoes, Pech Farguet has its own presence and soul. When I close up the house after a visit, I take one last look around and bid a silent
good-bye, house
. It is a living, breathing sentinel that awaits my return. It saddens me to leave it alone and I fear something will befall it in my absence.

Pech Farguet has eyes and ears, too. And what had it seen and heard in the course of its nearly two-hundred-year history? Whom had it watched come and go before these foreigners—the English couple and now this American? Who had called it home? Finding out who my predecessors were would provide a kind of genealogy: I would know where I came from. And I now felt I owed this house something: honor and respect for what it was.

Since the house is so small, I had imagined it as a former worker’s cottage, or perhaps a storage barn of a larger estate or farm. There was also an intriguing passage in the Pinckney letter: “According to Madame Bru
the old cottage was moved up from below about seventy-five years ago. Personally, all I think they brought up was the large cornerstones and most of the woodwork. I have never encountered any conclusive evidence on the subject.” What on earth could this mean?

The questions began to dog me. Who would know?

I started with Madame Sanchez at the
mairie
. It was late morning and no one else was there requiring her attention. She rose with a smile of recognition, though it had been nearly three years since we’d met over the water business. I stated my purpose: to track the owners of my house. I half expected a sigh of hopelessness: there would be forms to fill out, a bureaucratic maze to negotiate, months—years?—awaiting approval, and so on. Instead, she nodded agreeably. From the back room, she brought out several enormous, ancient books, which looked to me as if they belonged in a museum. Yet she leafed and riffled through them as if they were no more precious than paperbacks. In elegant brown script, the properties were listed according to owners.

Madame Sanchez had the bloodhound instincts of a born researcher. In fact, she became so caught up in her quest that she seemed to forget my presence. I didn’t say a word as I watched her work: mumbling names and dates to herself, scurrying back and forth from the back room, digging out more documents, and making hasty notes on a piece of paper. This went on for over an hour. I was diverted by photographs of Carennac schoolchildren hanging on one wall, from 1918, 1928, and 1931. I find old photographs of people both riveting and disturbing, as if the camera stopped life, froze them in time. They stare back at us across the years: once we were young, they say, with the world before us. Now we are
old; some of us have passed away. This is the only testimony to who we were.

If I could find out who had lived in Pech Farguet, the records would stand as testimony: this is who we were.

At one point during Madame Sanchez’s research, a young gentleman, apparently a salesman of computer equipment, dropped in. He didn’t get far with his pitch. She was too busy, another time, she told him distractedly. An elderly gentleman followed on his heels; she greeted him enthusiastically. Perhaps he could shed some light on the mystery of who had lived at Pech Farguet? He shook his head disconsolately at the unreliability of his memory. It was too long ago. She never asked this gentleman’s business, and after a patient ten-minute wait he went away.

Eventually, Madame Sanchez organized her findings on a single piece of paper and handed it to me. Her handwriting was in the same rather florid style of the Bézamats’ and Hirondes’, as if they’d all learned penmanship from the same nun. Here’s how it read:

I pored over this amazing list. Madame Sanchez reviewed it for me. Monsieur Jean Bayssen, she explained,
probably had two daughters; Antoine Malbet and Jean Bouat would have been his sons-in-law. At Jean Bouat’s death, his widow inherited the house, but, she added, she hadn’t lived there. The house was unoccupied for years and years during that period. (This would accord with Gabrielle Servais’s recollection that during the war my house had served as a refuge, which made sense given its high vantage point and camouflage of woods.) When the two daughters inherited the property at her death, it continued to remain unoccupied, since they had married and lived elsewhere with their husbands.

Could she guess what the men’s occupations would have been? I asked.
“Paysans,”
she said simply. Farmers. What would they make of me? What would they think of the transformation of Pech Farguet? I imagined them standing in a line outside the house, their faces ruddy and weathered, their rough hands soiled from labor in the fields. Jean Frêne, Jean Bayssen, Antoine Malbet, Jean Bouat.
“Je suis heureuse de faire votre connaissance,”
I say, in my proper schoolgirl’s French. They extend their elbows out of politeness. But I shake their hands, feeling the gritty earth. I invite them in and they are surprised, amazed at the look of the place. They nod at me, smiling in approval.

I thanked Madame Sanchez for giving me so much time. Come back, she offered, when she had more time and she would trace it further. The house was much older, of course, surely dating back to the early part of the nineteenth century.

I’d never experienced the pleasure of research before—my education had been one long process of rote memorization, it seemed—and I’d caught something of the thrill of it. It was akin, I guessed, to an archaeological dig, unearthing the mysteries of the past. Madame Sanchez’s
efforts had yielded a bare outline. I wanted flesh and bones. Perhaps there was more I could ferret out.

I decided to pay a call on Jean Mas, the
notaire
whose office is on a nondescript side street in Puybrun and who officiated at the closing of my house. Perhaps he could add to these skeletal details. I rang the bell and soon heard footsteps trundling down the stairs. The old wooden door was opened by a middle-aged woman who escorted me up the stairs to the waiting room.

Monsieur Mas is a tiny, pencil-thin man, but he has the presence of a giant, with a frigid air that instills in me a sense of inferiority. He dresses impeccably, with vest and silk tie. Yes, he remembered me as the
propriétaire
of Pech Farguet. He invited me to sit in the stiff leather chair in front of his desk. He remained standing before me in a posture suggesting that I get to the point. I explained hurriedly that I wanted to trace the history of my house and who had lived there. He pursed his lips and clasped his hands in a prayerlike gesture. He explained that he had drawn up that information for Mr. Pinckney, but that it had been a costly procedure. He was not in a position to divulge this same information to me.

I was stymied. Should I offer something for access to this information? Couldn’t he pass it on to me—he’d already done the research, after all—for some nominal fee? Or was there some fuzzy moral issue involved here that escaped me? Confused and uncertain, I merely expressed my regret. What might he suggest? I asked him, if I wanted to pursue this.

“Madame Trémouille, à Carennac,”
he said, in a low tone, as if in an aside to someone else in the room. Nothing more. Just Madame Trémouille, at Carennac. Then he drew himself up and anointed me with an officious smile.
“Bonne journée,”
he said to conclude our meeting.