Following the Sun (20 page)

All heaven was in a rage. The gods called out to Zeus to do something to save the world, and Earth herself pleaded with the great skygod to save her. And so he thundered and growled, rose from his throne, and came down from Olympus with a handful of lightning bolts. He sought out the boy. And then he drew back his mighty arm and cast his bolt. The lightning struck Phaeton and threw him from his blazing seat. He fell to earth, his hair flaming, and landed, steaming and smoking, in the river Eridanus in central Italy. The earth was saved.

The following evening, a Sunday, we all went out to dinner again at a small restaurant around the corner from Derek's flat. It was not the best of dining spots in the city of Bordeaux by any means, but it did feature lamprey, a famous local dish. The dinner conversation, after the spirited repartee at Saint-Emilion, was lackluster, even a little sad. I had announced that I was leaving the next morning and none of us knew when we would meet again.

In the morning, wishing Derek the best of luck on his novel, promising to stay in touch, and leaving behind, where he would find it at his lonely dinner, a fine bottle of Margaux, I embraced my old friend, mounted my bicycle, and sallied forth toward fresh adventure.

I was headed north again, into the heart of the Aquitaine, where, for three hundred years, the troubadours and jesters and
jongleurs
wandered the same roads singing their poetry and paying homage to the fair ladies of that fortunate country.

Eight

Holy Light

Modern-day pilgrims who make the passage to Santiago on foot, or bicycle, or, as a few still do, on horseback, always complain about certain places along the route. This has been a tradition ever since the twelfth century. One of the earliest pilgrim guides, the
Codex Calixtinus
, written by Aymery Picaud, complained bitterly about the Picards and advised pilgrims to avoid certain spots. Nowadays pilgrims complain about the cities, Burgos, Perigieux, and, if they take that route, Bordeaux.

As a pilgrim of a different sort, I reserve the right to complain about Bordeaux. It took me nearly half a day to free myself from the octopus tentacles of that old fading city center. For all its past glory—or what there was of it—Bordeaux is still a port city. All it really has to recommend itself is good wine, and you have to get out in the country to enjoy that.

Once I was on the road in the countryside, I knew enough to avoid Poitiers as well, having been there before and having vague, bad memories of the railroad station and one of the worst meals I have ever had anywhere.

In between these two busy cities is the pleasant landscape of southwest France. I pedaled up through the Charente, past Cognac, and on into Poitou, through the general region of the pilgrim route that ran south from Poitiers and Tours. It was a country of long, rolling hills that seemed to go on forever and ever. Having surmounted one, I would rest, review the sweeping landscape of mustard fields and vineyards, and then like a bird soar down the slope to begin all over again.

As they moved south from England and Paris, the various pilgrimage tributaries would begin to assemble, and here in Poitou, south of Tours, the English route would join that of the various routes coming down from Paris. This area was much praised by the author of the
Codex Calixtinus
. Picaud claims that Poitou is the most fertile countryside of all and the people are energetic, elegantly dressed, and very handsome to boot. (It certainly helped that Picaud happened to have come from Poitou.) You would not have guessed this from the looks of a disheveled man I met standing in front of a café one afternoon.

“
Boum, boum
,” he said when he learned I was an American. “
Pendant la guerre, vous savez? Boum, boum. Lafayette, nous sommes arrivés
.”

He was referring to the fact that the French used to say that in the Second World War the Americans had arrived to repay the debt they owed to Lafayette for helping the colonies out during the American Revolution.

This man was not quite as drunk as I took him to be, and he invited me back to his house for a glass of something. Why not, I thought, as it was clouding up and threatening rain. He ushered me into a neatly kept little cottage set at the end of a narrow dooryard garden, blooming with tulips and daffodils. The house was decorated with lace curtains and many china bric-a-brac, and my host introduced me to his civilized prim wife, who wore a frilly apron and made tea and plied me with local candies and later a tiny glass of
calvados
. Her husband, rumpled and half-shaven, sat politely smiling and nodding at our parlor conversation.

They both liked Americans immensely because of the war and even had a distant cousin living in Maine. The husband would interrupt every time the word America was mentioned. “
Eh, les américains. Vous savez? Pendant la guerre
…” and at this he would tip his head, wink, and raise a thumb in approval. Madame prepared a little neatly wrapped packet of
gâteaux
for me to carry on the road, and they stood at the doorway and waved as I wheeled my bicycle down the little flower-lined stone path to the open road beyond their dooryard gate. I looked back just as I was rounding a corner and they were still there at the doorway, waving.

After days of pedaling I managed to round Poitiers without undue nastiness and head away from the city on an old Roman road that later became the pilgrim route, and then cut away from this to back roads heading north to Chinon and the Loire Valley. Poitiers was once a lovely city, dominated by a fairy tale castle and originally the site of a monastery founded by the early Christian saint the Lady Radegonde, who later became an inspiration for the troubadour poets who wandered through this region. The city itself is pictured in the illuminated fourteenth-century calendar
Les très Riches Heures
for the month of July, a clustered town, jagged wilderness mountains beyond, and in the foreground farmers cutting wheat with sickles. I knew better than to visit; however, I knew that inside that city in our time were narrow gray streets much fumed with the exhaust of automobiles.

North of Poitiers the rural France of legend resumed, an easy country of vineyards and pastures, with grazing cows and the smell of the sun on fresh-mown hay. This general district, south of Tours, the Aquitaine, the Charente, and east all the way to Provence, was the
langue d'oc
region in the days of the pilgrimages, a section of the world known for its music and poetry and, incidentally, for the earliest freedoms for women of the courts. Northward in the
langue d'oil
, the dictates of feudalism held sway, but here in the south, wandering troubadours and
jongleurs
entertained the populace with songs of love, dance, juggling acts, and magic tricks, much to the consternation of the church. This was the region Keats sang about in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” a country of dance and Provençal song, sun-burnt mirth, tasting of Flora and the country green.

Poor John Keats, locked away in his northern cottage, where but to think, as he wrote, is to be full of sorrow. Those of a solar persuasion may be tempted to suggest that there is a meteorological connection between culture and light. Heavy works of art and literature, gloom, melancholy, and introspection, seem to hang over those sections of Europe that are regularly covered with a seamless pall of gray clouds for most of the winter, whereas in the south—generally speaking—in the sun-blasted sections, ecstatic dances, music, poetry of love, and revels prevail—“O for a beaker full of the warm South” as Keats wrote, “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And a purple stained mouth.…”

No sooner did these thoughts cross my mind, however, than just north of Poitiers, the sky clouded over again and it suddenly grew colder. I forged on nonetheless, through the fields of yellow mustard and fresh green shoots of wheat, for Châtellerault and Lencoître. This was open country and a welcome relief after the endless pines of Les Landes and there were beautiful old stone châteaux and little villages with Romanesque churches and small farms set at the end of poplar-lined drives. At Châtellerault I made the mistake of staying in a youth hostel, which ended up to be an empty school, a large cavernous building of which I was the only inhabitant.

To make up for it I treated myself to a fine meal at a restaurant on the Vienne River. The sun was setting later and later each evening now, and a green cool light was fading outside the window beside my table as I sat down to eat. The waiters were chatty and friendly and recommended the trout, which turned out to be a wise choice. While I was eating, one after another, the shells of a local club nautique winged by on the river like silent, mysterious birds. The waiter gave me a cognac on the house after hearing my stories of the road and later in the evening a whole crowd of male jokesters came in for dinner. This was some kind of comedy or humor club, and during their meal one member after another stood in front of the tables and told a long complicated joke, each one of which raised a great deal of laughter and applause. Not a word from any of them could I understand, even though my French at the time was fairly fresh. It made the evening all the more absurd.

I returned to the empty school and spent a strange and fitful night, listening to the owl calls outside the windows and the creak of pipes, the slam of mysterious doors, and mice or rats scurrying and gnawing in the walls. At one point, I am certain, I heard footsteps approach slowly in the corridor, stop in front of my door, and then continue on to the other end of the hall, echoing as they receded.

I woke up early and saw the benevolent red sun rising through a grove of plane trees and spreading its kindly light in golden spears across the green grounds of the school. I went out immediately and breathed in the spring air. This was almost May, birds were trilling and fluttering in the upper branches and the shrubbery, the lilies of the valley, the
muguet
, were blooming under the trees and scenting the air, the dew and earth were fresh, and the evils of the darkness of the Zoroastrian god Ahriman once again had been conquered by Orzmud, the god of light and goodness.

Somewhere south of the town I had passed the northernmost border of the Moorish advance into Europe. There is a spot somewhere out in the green cow pastures that was the site of the battle at which Charles Martel inflicted the first defeat on the Moors. He couldn't destroy their culture entirely, however, and the sung verses of the troubadours can be traced in this part of France directly to the sung verse traditions of Moorish Spain.

Shortly after I left Châtellerault I came to a very long annoying hill. There was a thin, sheltering forest on my right where cuckoos were calling, and to my left at the top of the hill I saw a decaying château, the type of place haunted by barn owls and ghosts, and seemingly deserted. Once I gained the top of the hill I noticed the gate for this place, a canted wrought-iron, much spiked thing in the Victorian mode. A low stone wall, much beset with shrubbery and young trees, surrounded the property, the winding gravel drive was overgrown with weeds and grasses, and the line of cypress trees was unpruned. Beyond the drive, I could see the gray brown façade of the building, its long narrow windows absorbing the light of this otherwise bright May morning and staring out at me like horrid sunken eyes. I rested by the gate for a while, and then, trespasser that I am, I decided to ascend the driveway to see who was home—assuming, of course, that no one was home but the owls and the pigeons.

The flag terrace in front of the heavy oaken door was rucked and weed grown. On either side of the terrace, the grounds fell away to the tangled briar-strewn slopes of the hill with the road beyond and, beyond that, more woods. It was a strangely deserted landscape for this part of the world, as if the plague had suddenly swept the area and no one had dared return. I stood for a while admiring the workmanship in the corbelled walls, the finely wrought spiky turrets, and the carved window frames and cylindrical towers. I meditated, as is my wont, on the sad beauty of things gone by, the rattling horse carriages that must have pulled in here and disgorged the perfumed, besilked ladies in tiny slippers, and the lecherous old
seigneurs
with roving eyes and gouted feet. Somewhere here on the terraced courtyard, or under the postern, I imagined d'Artagnan himself fought duels with the evil master of this place and skewered the old devil before he had his way with the beautiful daughter of some visiting dignitary.

This was France after all, and here I was in the heartland of the
ancien régime
. Maybe something of the sort did happen here. Why do we have to live always in this little prison of linear time that traps us in the current era? On the heels of these fancies, I turned back toward the drive and there at the edge of the terrace I saw what I first took for a ghost—a small wraithlike figure of a girl, about twelve years old. She was wearing a dark blue schoolgirl jumper and a ruffled white shirt, buttoned at the neck, and had on dark blue stockings. She had silky black hair, creamy skin, and black eyes, and she was holding in front of her a bouquet of wildflowers. I assumed she must be a resident of the old decaying château, but she seemed more a part of the spring woods and fields behind her, more a part of the nature than this emblem of death and decay. But she was alive, very much alive. I greeted her and she politely greeted me, and held out a
muguet
.

“For you,” she said, formally.

I must have hesitated slightly, and this and no doubt my equipage and my appearance tipped her off immediately.

“You are not from here, are you?” she asked.

“No, but are you from here?” I asked, jerking my head toward the château.

“No, the town,” she said.

Which town I wondered. I was now three or four miles outside of Châtellerault. I was about to ask when she dipped in a little curtsey and said
au revoir
.

“Thank you for the flower,” I said to hold her up.