At Home in France (27 page)

I tripped down the stairs. Madame Trémouille. So, the woman who had inherited the house in 1966 lived in Carennac! I savored this new bit of information, feeling like Nancy Drew.

The next day I went back to Madame Sanchez. The lunch hour was fast approaching—as usual when I have important business.

I told her I would like to meet Madame Trémouille.
“Elle habite Carennac, n’est-ce pas?”

Madame replied that she was just about to close up and that she would lead me to the house.

She locked the office and we set off at a brisk pace around the corner toward the center of the village. I was breathless. I hadn’t quite expected such immediate action and was suddenly tremulous at the thought of actually meeting the woman. We walked along the street, one that I’d strolled along time and again, that led to the church. When we reached the house, she rapped on one of the doors, beautifully carved in wood with a brass hand for a knocker. No one was home. I was half relieved. Now I had time to prepare myself.

Madame Sanchez and I parted, and I drove home for lunch. The weekend slipped past and on Monday I drove into Carennac to Madame Trémouille’s house. An elderly woman, perhaps in her late seventies, opened the door. She had snow-white hair, but was tall, sturdily upright, and robust. I introduced myself and she invited me in. I’d always been curious about the interiors of the village houses. (In fact, I’ve always been curious about the interiors of houses in general, harking back perhaps to the Christine experience.) The door opened directly into the living room, with its stuffed chairs and a general clutter of magazines and newspapers. When I explained my purpose, she smiled kindly but said she remembered very little
of those days. It would be better to talk to her older sister, Madame Virginie Lasfargues. She lived in Mézel, around four kilometers away. I thanked her and bowed out. This was somewhat disappointing, and baffling. Why couldn’t she tell me anything? Why would her older sister know more than she?

I located Mézel on my map and drove there directly. The village was at the end of a steep incline. I parked Charleston and approached several workmen smoking in the sun by their truck. They pointed up a narrow footpath that climbed even higher. I struggled up the rocky passage. At the summit was a small house with a stone patio. I rang the bell, which set off the usual dog alarm. After some minutes the door opened a crack. Madame Lasfargues was stooped and wizened, surely in her late eighties.

I explained, slowly, rather loudly, for her head was pitched forward and tilted as if she was hard of hearing, that I presently owned the house in which she had grown up.

She replied in a raspy, quavering voice that she could hear me quite well. What I felt would be extraordinary news to her seemed of little interest.

Over the yaps of the little white mutt, I asked her if she could tell me anything about the house.

She closed the door behind her and toddled to the stone wall that overlooked the valley. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall; in her loose gray dress and brown shawl, she was a mere sparrow. As we stood in the sunlight I could see the gray film of her cataractous eyes behind her glasses. She looked off to the distance, as if she’d forgotten my purpose. I followed her gaze to the river below.

Her grandparents, she said, had owned the house. Did she know who had built it? She had no idea. Her grandfather had been a tenant farmer, who worked on land across the
causse
. Perhaps he had been
en métayage
, I suspected, sharing the crop with the owner. After his death, the house passed to his son, her father, who was also a farmer. Her family included a younger sister and brother, she said. I remarked that it was a small house for five people. The present garage, she explained, had formerly been another room.

She had been born in the house, while her sister had been born in Gintrac. Both she and her sister had married and moved away from home. When her parents died, the house quite naturally passed on to the son, her brother, who by then had married. (Madame Sanchez’s records had skipped a beat.) When he died—no, she couldn’t remember the year—she and her sister decided to sell the house, since they’d established a life with their husbands elsewhere. The Pinckneys bought the house. (So, it would seem, Madame Bru’s speculation about the house’s being moved from the valley was ill-founded.)

She fell silent and stood dazedly, snared in the cobwebs of memory. I bent down and commented on the beautiful view of the river from her house. She took off her glasses, as if to take in an unfiltered perspective.

“Même avec ces vieux yeux, ”
she said wryly. Even with these old eyes.

I
n the fall, I was back at the
mairie
. It was a crisp, sunny morning. The fog in the valley, which I always regard with despair from my bedroom window, had already burned off, as it usually does, to my continual amaze
ment. The muffled chant of the schoolchildren swelled from the classroom. The trees in the courtyard were just turning color, rustling in the strong breeze. (I can never look at such animated trees without thinking of my friend Leslie, who, as a child, thought the leaves stirred up the wind, rather than the reverse—a brilliant child’s interpretation of a phenomenon of nature, it struck me, and a cornerstone of her particular brand of wisdom.)

Madame Sanchez agreed to continue digging into my house’s history, but she said that she couldn’t offer a great deal of hope. The records might not go much further back than we’d seen before. Out came the books, and like a groundhog she began tunneling through them again, one by one, back and forth, peering down through her green-and-blue-speckled bifocals.

After a half hour or so of this, a tall, handsome gentleman entered and joined her behind the counter. She briefly explained her mission to him. He smiled at me in a sympathetic, mild-mannered way and started perusing the books himself, as if he’d caught our fever. Eventually, between them, they traced the ownership of Jean Frene further back, to 1824. But that was as far as the books took them. Then, having identified the plot of Pech Farguet as No. 854, they resorted to maps, plowing through a stack in a cabinet by the window. At the bottom, the oldest map, from 1816, indeed had the number etched in a faint chicken scratch of ink. I ran my hand over the rough, heavy, cream-colored paper in awe. Shouldn’t these be under lock and key, in a climate-controlled storeroom?

That was the best they could do, they said in accord, with a shrug of shoulders. Monsieur said that in all likelihood, the house predated 1816, but surely would have been owned by Frene or his father. I was satisfied.

I bowed to Madame Sanchez and thanked her for all the time she’d spent on my behalf. Tracking down the previous owners of the house gave me a sense of continuity; the specific names and dates were the building blocks on which I stood. I felt a link with the past, rooted. I nodded to Monsieur and said, congenially, that I hadn’t realized that he worked at the office along with Madame.

Yes, he said, as if he’d swallowed a frog, I work here because I’m the mayor! He extended his hand. Evariste Marty, he said, introducing himself and managing to maintain his aplomb.

Madame’s smile was a perfect red bow.

“J
e suis crevée de fatigue,”
I announced to Raymond when I met him at the station. It was an emphatic way of stating my feeling of exhaustion—literally, I’m croaking from fatigue—that I’d recently learned in my French class. It was the perfect moment to test it out, jet- and train-lagged as I was.

“Nous disons ‘morte de fatigue,’ ”
he replied, with emphasis on the
morte
, as we headed for the car. I understood this as a sort of minor correction. Raymond’s version was exactly as we’d say it in English: dead tired. But why hadn’t my expression worked?

(When I later told my teacher, Huguette, who is from Paris, she was tickled. “Ah,” she explained, “there’s Paris French and there’s country French. They’re often more proper in the country.”)

It was October 1994. As we drove off, Raymond took a route other than our usual one from St-Dénis to Carennac. I asked him why he was taking this direction.

“À cause du film,”
he said, with a sideward glance.

A film? This escaped my understanding.

Oui
. He nodded vigorously. A film was being made in Carennac.

My first reaction was one of horror—the film industry descending on, invading, the village!
My
village.

Raymond, however, was ebullient. He explained that the film was for a television series that would be aired in the spring. It was based on a novel,
La Rivière Espérance
, the first part of a historical trilogy by Christian Signol, who, he said, is one of France’s most popular and prolific writers. The river, he related, is the Dordogne. The story is about the coming-of-age of a thirteen-year-old boy named Benjamin Donnadieu, who joins his father, the captain of several barges (
gabares
, as they were called), in his business of shipping wood from Souillac to the viticulturists in Bordeaux. Souillac would not do as a setting for the film, however, because the town had been modernized. Carennac had been chosen for its resemblance to villages of the early nineteenth century, where the story is set.

I winced again. Would the film transform Carennac somehow? I had a vision of zealous television viewers piling in the family car for a look at the site, of entrepreneurs setting up boutiques, of fast-food franchise operators, of God knows what.

Then, in a rather shy aside, Raymond mentioned that he would be appearing in the film. I shrieked in delight:
“Une vedette!”
No, he was no star, he said gravely, apologetically—he hadn’t meant to mislead me. He was only in the background. He explained that months prior to the filming (they’d only been shooting for a week and expected to continue through the month of October), placards had been posted all around and advertisements
had appeared in the papers for locals who might want to apply for bit parts. Three hundred had applied and sixty-one had been chosen; only a half dozen were women, who had to have long hair to qualify. Priority had been given to residents of Carennac. He had had to fill out a form stating his name, age, identity number, profession, and clothing size; this had to be accompanied by a photograph. He’d been chosen to portray an old man of the village who watches the goings-on at the port; his costume consisted of pantaloons, a
chemise
with pleats and lace cuffs, a vest and jacket, and a linen cap. He’d been asked to grow a beard. He didn’t know what the pay would be, but he’d heard that one of his neighbors, who was required to drive a tractor, had been handsomely compensated.

It would be like Raymond Hironde, I thought—the most gregarious and adventurous of my neighbors—to be the first to sign up. My worry about the ruin the film might cause evaporated. This was going to be great fun! I’d planned to take an excursion to the Auvergne for a few days at a mountain spa, but I immediately scratched the trip. The spa would be there next year. I wasn’t going to miss this.

We approached the village from the far end. Raymond pointed ahead to the string of trucks lining the road, which, he explained, were all connected to the film: one for makeup, one for costumes, and so on. A big canteen was stationed by the abbey. They were in the process of filming at the moment. Did I want to stop and have a look?

Raymond parked the car and we walked up the road to the village. It had started to rain, a fine mist. There was a small cluster of people on the bridge, the women huddled
under umbrellas. I gasped at the sight far below on the shore of the river. Several
gabares
, with their sails lashed, were anchored at a newly constructed pier. A number of figures in period costume—a woman, several young children, a man—moved idly around the pier. Two donkeys stood with bent heads, munching nonchalantly. Raymond said that the boats, the pier, and a wooden warehouse
(entrepôt)
that I couldn’t see from this angle had all been especially built for the film. A stern voice suddenly trumpeted
“en place”
through a megaphone and the crowd on the bridge, tittering, echoed the command.
“Silence!”
a young woman standing at the end of the bridge and armed with headphones, hissed officiously.

The mist and the gray, waning light created a romantic atmosphere. The stand of trees on the island formed an Impressionist-like backdrop. The village had been returned to what it once was. I stood transfixed while Raymond chatted with his friends.

On the drive to the house, Raymond explained that he was constantly on call. They filmed every day; it was possible that he’d be called tomorrow, a Saturday. The hours were long. He might be summoned for two o’clock in the afternoon and have to be on hand past midnight.

After marketing in Brive on Saturday morning, I drove immediately to St-Céré to pick up a copy of the Signol book. Not surprisingly, it was prominently displayed at the bookstore, along with the other two books in the trilogy,
Le Royaume du Fleuve
and
L’Ame de la Vallée
. It was a large paperback, with an aerial-view color photograph of the Dordogne. A short biography of the author stated that he was in a long line of great popular romantic writers in France and lived in Brive. I greedily considered buying all three books, but restrained myself.
La
Rivière
would be enough to keep me occupied through the week.