Читать книгу Ricochet - Robyn Neilson - Страница 9

The Hut, Chemin de Verdeleau, Provençe. Spring 2015.

“And what a congress of stinks! Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.” Theodore Roethke.

The Hut is where memories took hold. Where I surrendered to their nagging to be written down, to be re-lived. Because let’s face it, living a vivid life wasn’t fucking happening. Visitors were not coming. Visiting was for the brave. Insistent memories, tired trees, scarified ground and birds retreating from the scalding light or the lashing rain; these are my sole and alien companions.

When, three years ago I first saw the photo of the hut on ‘Le Bon Coin’ (an equivalent trading post to the Australian ‘Gum Tree’) I was both repelled and intrigued. The vague violet contour of hills behind, the vagrant bush and the vast space surrounding the ugly box called to me. To Loup, it was the low rent which called. For a month we had been frequenting caravan parks, searching for mobile homes to rent. They were either wedged between the concrete ramps of freeways, or imprisoned under a giant web of power pylons. Loup needed to be within commuting distance to work, so a prettier rural location was out of the question. Moreover, the rental of these mobile homes was far dearer than even the payments on our little apartment in La Ciotat. But time was running out, the settlement date on the flat was soon. Loup’s anxiety was at tipping point. The precariousness of his business had ambushed our lives. We would do anything to save it.

‘Charmante mobile-maison à louer. Vue impregnable sur Les Alpilles. Un très bon affair!’

Charming was French irony at it’s best. As was the brazen claim a very good deal! Yes, I was charmed by our drive past the autumn-tinted olive groves, vineyards cloaked in white nets and rambling stone ruins. By the sheep and their shepherd in the fields by the canal, by the bridge which led us to a lumpy limestone track, by the old lantern hanging in the dwarf oak tree at the turn off to our new home.

But.

‘Putain,what the hell?’ hissed Loup, on sighting the derelict pile.

‘Sshh,’ I pleaded, ‘look at the setting!’

A man whose burnished skin blended with the tree trunks, a young woman and two girls waited by the fence. The adults incongruously dressed in white pants, and white shoes… the woman hobbling over the stone in her high heels. They both wear heavy gold chains. His hangs across his white t-shirt which said “Droit au But”, also in gold, across the familiar Marseille soccer insignia.

‘Bonjour’, he smiled and in a nasal accent, ‘Monsieur Renard, but call me Léon.’

We followed him to the mobile home. Which was no longer mobile, and had not been a home for twenty-five years.

The walls were vomit-yellow stucco, and seemed to be dripping with a residue of the same. There were large cracks and kicked-in holes and the chassis on which the whole putrid thing hunkered was rusty and riddled with weeds. The windows were broken and their shutters hung skewed, green paint peeling off like sorry scabs. Brown stains leached out from the roof, giving the appearance of the inside of an old toilet bowl.

Definitely not bloody charming.

‘Jesus I can’t even reach the door’ I said to Loup under my breath.

Léon hurried to my aid, ‘Allez-y, go ahead Madame,’ as he grabbed one arm and Loup the other, hoisting me up the 70 cm from the ground. Through the front door is too kind. For a start, only one half of the glass door had actual glass in it. As I kneeled then stood, my hands and feet dislodged whole tribes of insects. Spiders and ants and scorpions and wasps perfectly at home here.

Loup and I looked askance at each other. We could not see the floor or the walls because everything was coated in grime. Black and sticky as bitumen. Ripped bags of cement and piles of rotting timber and broken furniture and fermenting garbage. The once granny-smith- green of the bathtub was now coal-tarred, and where the pipes carrying water had once been, cockroaches and bad odours reigned freely. We jumped back out through the door, to the rush of sweet autumn decay in the air outside. I knelt on a mound of pinecones; pressing bunches of thyme and rosemary to my nose.

‘Yes, we’ll take it’, we said unequivocally to Léon Renard. Our friendly part-gypsy landlord gave us a month of access, rent free, to get the place inhabitable.

‘I love it’ I said unflinching, as a small spider crawled up my leg. Knowing that back home, any spider crawling up my leg was cause for phobic alarm. We drove back through fields of receding colours, traversing one side of Marseille to the other, to pack up our tiny bricks and mortar apartment. In the steps of the three little pigs, choosing to build our house instead on rust and sand.

Quatre saisons in one room.

Summer has by now arrived in the stark hills, merciless and mercurial. Each season imposes a new character on our hut. Like litmus paper, we lie and absorb the onslaught of each new personality. I have learnt that our first season, Automne, was the gentlest. Printemps is always welcome, but there is a price to pay for her crazy youth. Hiver and Été are by turns equally severe.

The south of France is a cauldron, and soon the sky will shatter and fork down, followed by an unprecedented three-day torrent of rain. My first weeks of relentless scrubbing and painting, Loup’s leftover plastic flooring and orange laminex, a miniature pot belly from Strasbourg, colourful cane baskets, the photographed faces of family and a large charcoal drawing of a wolf, have elevated the hut from putrid to homely. In our eyes, at least.

We still have no power or plumbing or water. But we have Nature. To my horror, I will discover a déception: my fidelity to Mother Nature will be tested, as her inescapable presence verges on oppressive.

Looking out at the rain, old memories swell with the wood left out in the wet too long. Lightning memories. When I was a child a neighbouring school playground was struck, and a boy died. Working my first summer job in a fire tower, an electric storm singled out my perch in the sky and as I dropped to the floor, an obscenity leapt from deep in my throat into the communications radio. ‘Death by lightning’ therefore seems an imaginative way to lose one’s life. Either that, or mercenary and simple. Now, Loup tells me of four men killed on the one day in neighbouring Drome whilst out whipper-snippering. And then I hear on the radio of a birthday party of eight-year olds, terrorised and gravely injured by lightning in a Paris park. As if to confirm the alarming fact that children are not exempt from the treachery of nature. Once, exploring in the ranges behind my new home in Auriol, I cowered for hours under thorns, my haunches braking into the sticky clay. The track turned traitor. Lightning stalked. Travelled all the way from that distant day on the red-Outback highway to this slippery slope of European-green, just to remind me of how small I am.

I decided that unimaginative or merciful, are categories of dying I would rather seize. When finally I got mobile reception, I rang Loup, frantic, and he made fun of me. But with concern he offered, ‘Tell me where you’ll be in two hours. I’ll pick you up after work.’ Obsessed by every detail in my new surroundings, I could describe to him precisely where I would descend the hills, so although Loup did not know the country, he was able to meet me just on dark, near the paddock with the white and the black horses where the cedar trees give way to an olive grove leading to the stone shepherd’s hut with the broken lilac gate; along the Avenue de là Sainte-Baume… that is, the point at which the diminutive D45A intersected with the still narrower D45B. Loup needed a less empirical landmark. He reached me at that point on the map now embedded in me, just as the next onslaught of lightning was about to hit.

Since that day, Loup often remarks, ‘Do you notice Frey, whenever we discover a place that we both love, there is a white horse nearby? It’s a sign’. Loup is right. Frequently we do find a horse, alone at the end of our trails. My best encounter was a year later, with a wild chestnut beauty on the sheltered plateau of an Alpine pass. The 14-hands animal and I were alone in the saddle of the mountain. Another year expired before Loup and I could both return there. The same horse was waiting in the same spot. Surrounded by wildflowers, bees and surprisingly, big fat flies, just like home. It let us greet him and Loup stroked his tangled blonde mane.

Since that day when Loup rescued me from the storm, France’s nature is my addiction. Celestial and carnal forces skewer her charm…. authentic Terre… steam rising from horse-manure… an old man berating the sky with his shepherd’s baton… the contradiction of a crazed city… and crazier auto-routes all interlacing…. chaos within half an hour of a 16th Century postcard. Since that day, I resolve that one day Loup will have his dream: his white horse out in the paddock. Just as I have experienced my own Whitehorse: the ice and river-bound birthplace of my daughters. I want to share that place one day with Loup. But he has his own trove of mysterious places. Perhaps it is each other’s strangeness that attracts? Our separate pasts, uncertain and étrange. A paradox: our love described by my friend Agnés as ‘un coup de foudre’. A bolt of lightning.

Today at the hut the storm has given way to floods. The news on France Inter reports storm casualties: several injured in the Alps, four hikers dead after a mudslide on the GR 20, an arduous long-distance trail in Corsica. And there are grave fears for a Danish woman who went missing whilst walking the Path to Santiago, the Chemin de Compostelle in the Pyrénées. I thank Christ I didn’t take off last week. Desperate to leave, to return to the Path… there must be an angel who knows my weakness. Pascal? (Yes, I believe you know my weakness for paths that lead me away from this hut, from the grim misère we have made for ourselves. You should know; you are part of it).

The first time I embarked upon the Compostelle I did not think of myself as a pilgrim. But I returned changed by my encounters with genuine pilgrims. In particular, the older women: women who were accustomed to staying at home knitting for their grandchildren, who nevertheless tackled the long path alone, every year, two weeks or two months at a time. They would confess to me,

‘My husband has given me his blessing, and each year I return to walk another stage. It is something that I want to accomplish on my own….’They invariably ended with an apology for not being athletic, for not belonging to an elite hierarchy of hikers,

‘…même si je ne suis pas une grande marcheuse.’

Those women fill me with hope. I plead for the safety of the lone Danish girl. I crave to be out there, hiking the Path with those women; but instead I return to my mundane pilgrimage. To that journée, almost six years to the day, when I was alone in Auriol, engrossed in my embroidery.