France Profonde - Southern France

Southern France
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France Profonde Stephen:

Sunday.

The drive to Cezac was time traveling back in time. From Airport to superhighway to highway to road to gravel driveway to farmhouse. The routes got narrower and narrower until at the end we had to put one tire on the grass in order to let oncoming traffic pass us. When we got there the place was so extraordinarily beautiful that I was afraid to look at it straight on. As Dawn got instructions and information, I unpacked our things, sort of keeping my head down and only glancing out at the view sideways because I was afraid that it would all disappear if I stood up, took a deep breath, and looked at it square on. To me it was the fulfillment of every dream I had ever had about living in the "South of France." The view from our bedroom was a Cezanne painting and in fact, I was realizing we would spend the next month in a site of amazing beauty and tranquility.

Since we had little food we us, the Maheu’s graciously invited us to eat dinner with them. The start was a little hectic, as M. Maheu went back and forth between his study and the dining table, wanting to find out the results of the election. It began with a soup of potatoes and radish tops! It then continued with a succession of seasonal vegetables. We added bread and wine. We finished with a question and answer period in front of the walk-in fireplace with mint tea.
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Dawn:

I was stunned by the fact that Isabelle used a different set of plates for every item she served, and each part of the meal was served separately and sequentially. After the soup with a dollop of fromage frais in each bowl, she served white asparagus with homemade Hollandaise. The next plate was for fresh peas (the season is just ending for both these vegetables). The next plate was for the chèvre, in this case a semi-mature goat cheese of the region which is creamy inside with a slightly more pungent, harder outer edge. She then apologized that she had made no dessert but proceeded to serve fromage blanc, which I think is a richer version of fromage frais. Depending on the fat content, all of these taste like anything from yogurt to sour cream. She was about to get out yet another set of plates when her husband stopped her, apparently feeling that the raw honey would be perfectly nice with the fromage blanc. They get the honey in the honeycomb. You chew on a piece of it and suck out all the honey and then discard the chewed up piece of honeycomb on your plate. It is unbelievably sweet. One bite was enough for me, even with my sweet tooth.

Much of the evening’s conversation centered around their very strong belief that foods should only be eaten in season and in the region that one lives. The idea of flying tomatoes in from another county in the middle of winter, for instance, appalled them. Then they went on about the genetically engineered tomatoes from Holland that are bred for beauty and shelf-life but taste like nothing, and the roses that are bred for beauty but have lost their scent. “Some of the best apples are a funny color and have strange shapes, but they taste delicious,” Jean would say, for example.

I was struck by how generous and warm they were towards us. They are about fifteen years older than we, have six children, and several grandchildren. We are their first tenants here, and they worked very hard to get the écurie ready for us. They seem very pleased by how much we love it here, how beautiful we think the old stable is, etc. I am also struck by the fact that I have done nothing to try to promote my work though them, although they are extremely connected in the cultural world. She now picks almost all the artists for La Napoule, and he used to be in the Ministry of Culture and was also the head of the Beauborg Contemporary Art Museum. (Pompidou) In the last fifteen years, whenever I’ve been in Europe, I’ve always tried to hustle my work in one way or another, albeit without much success. This time I didn’t even bring a videotape along. It’s just not what I want to do now.
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Stephen:

On Monday, after the confusion of getting the phone line prepared, we waved good-bye. they were headed back to Paris and we for the town of Cahors. We needed to find the market that they had mentioned. In the confusion of French/English we had some locations of markets and the names of some cities, but we weren’t sure which location was in which city. Driving in Cahors was strange for me. Entering into a city by car seemed to make it more alienated than arriving by train. We passed one huge market, went through town, saw a sign for another, took the highway and found ourselves back at the first one, the Mammoth. It had everything.

The plumbers came on Tuesday, which was lucky because we realized that we didn’t have any hot water in the bathroom. Dawn thought for a moment that perhaps that they forgot to tell us that it was a cold water shower. But no, after they set up the pool cover and replaced a broken valve on the stove, they flipped the switch and said that we would have hot water in two hours. I also used them to find out if I had wired the phone well enough to have it ring when some one called as well as call out. They called from their car phone, but we heard nothing. Ah well, back to the drawing board.
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Stephen:

Wednesday is a market day in Cahors, so we went off to find the open air market. First we had to find a parking space which was difficult especially as we didn’t know what part of town to look for one in. But we found it eventually and it was worth the search. Wine, cheese, fish, meat, vegetables of all kinds overflowed on the tables.   We separated with list and slowly acquired our food. The market is in the square in front of the twelfth century church, and the door was open but we didn’t go in. It was as if doing and seeing occupy the same part of our brain and if you are doing one you can’t do the other. It is very difficult to be a tourist in your own town and I guess Cahors was beginning to feel like a home, at least when we were shopping. So instead, off to the Mammoth for more basics and we were home for lunch.

On an exploratory walk on the ridge above and behind he house, we discovered an odd array of wine bottles. At first, it just looked like a trash dump that you see if you hike anywhere among abandoned farmhouses. The difference was that here there were a couple of hundred bottles, some half hidden in the earth, and none were broken. We couldn’t image that they were thrown out without being broken. Of course, there is no mystery. As I write this I realize that it was most likely the storage place for wine bottles that were to be used again to put wine in. The walls had just decomposed around them. On the other hand, they were on their sides which argues for the idea that they had been stored as full bottles and the elements destroyed the corks and evaporated the wine. Throwing away wine bottles is probably a fairly modern concept.

Rain brings a morning of guilt free reading followed by clearing skies under which I cut my hair. The work never stops.

Enough of the sedentary life. Today we would hike. We had been told that there is wonderful hiking from here. We wouldn’t have to get in there car or even cross a road to begin. We started at 9:15 in the morning with some water, snacks and the car map in our packs and decided to walk to Montcuq and back. We couldn’t quite figure it out but it seemed to be about fifteen kilometers away.

We went back to the road that we had found a couple of evenings before and headed west. We wandered through upland fields, made a couple of wrong turns but eventually found ourselves in Lascabannes. As Dawn said, it was beautiful. There were hundreds of pots of flowers, in window boxes, stairway pots or just by the side of the road. We moved through the small town, up onto the next highland and by 11:30 found ourselves by a small chapel in the woods where we stopped for a snack. A couple was working in the chapel so we waited until they had left and we had finished our snack before going in. We discovered that this was both a church that the faithful made pilgrimages to and a waystop on the larger pilgrimage trail to Campostelle in the northwest corner of Spain. We found flyers from people that offered rooms for pilgrims and corrections to guide books. Also we found notebooks to write comments in. The knowledge that we were walking on a trail that had been used since 800 AD changed our viewpoint completely. We seemed now to be a part of history. It was like following the Oregon Trail, or sitting down to a Seder. Also the day itself now contributed to the feeling, getting hotter and blazingly clear, and we could empathize with those that had come before us as we walked on a chalk white road on a shadeless plateau. It felt as if we had been transported to Spain. In an hour we were back on the asphalt road, and in two hours we were in Montcuq and had rejoined the twentieth century.

I have never in my life been so glad to see a café as when we walked into the town and saw not one, but two across the street from each other. I was worried we would find another Puicheric, cute but useless. It was now 2:15. We had been on the road for five hours. We were hot and tired, and the shade of the large chestnut tree of the Café de France seemed as good as the body of St. James himself. (He remains in Campostelle). We had a couple of beers, found out that there was nothing like a bus going in our direction and the one cab would not be available, if at all, until evening. We walked to the top of the town to visit the twelfth century tower. It was closed but the view from its base was beautiful. We bought some bread and headed back.

It is now about 4:15. I am guessing that if we pushed it would be a four hour return trip and thinking how difficult it might be, but Dawn pulled out her trusty thumb and got us a ride that in ten minutes knocked two hours off that estimate. The woman driver got us down the hill fast and left us with only about 7 kilometers to do. We got in about 6:15 and hit the pool and I began to think about some serious relaxation near a bottle or two of wine when the Maheu’s arrived from Paris with news that Printemps Cahors, the second largest photographic festival in France was opening that night. They produced an invitation for us for the opening cocktail party and. . .

We were off a half hour later on Part B of “a long day in le Lot”. We drove in, found a parking space, lost the invitation, found the invitation, found the reception, had a glass of champagne, had dinner, watched some dance (the whole thing is set up a little like First Night), went looking for the projections, couldn’t find them, got tired and drove home by midnight. The whole thing will be done again next weekend and we will return with Amber more organized and less tired.
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Stephen:

We are now sharing our place in Paradise with the owners for the weekend. A task most pleasant. We hear beautiful music coming out of their house. We see them having breakfast at the bottom of their lawn. They explain the pool maintenance techniques, and then head off to have lunch with friends as we head to the markets to stock up with food because today’s the day we pick up Amber in Toulouse.

Toulouse airport is an hour and a half away. We get there early and the plane is late. But she arrives smiling and all the formalities are soon taken care of after which we head for home talking all the way and arrive before nightfall. Amber has gotten some sleep on the trip so she is amazingly unjetlagged and is full of news and stories and laughter. Is it midnight before we all go to bed?

When visiting small French villages, timing is all. We took a drive on Sunday afternoon over to Castelnau which is the biggest tourist attraction of this particular area, and it seemed abandoned. We walked around a bit and nothing struck us as particularly interesting. We wondered if we were becoming inured. But, we got into the car, and went back to Montcuq where we had hiked to the other day, and it still had the wonderful esprit that we had so enjoyed before. We had Ricards and Amber a kir, walked around and drove home.

Dawn and I had been working on our decision making technique over the question of whether to return the Maheu’s gracious dinner of our first night with a dinner on the Friday of their return or wait until Sunday when Amber was here. I wanted Sunday and Dawn wanted Friday. We had gotten into the habit of pre-digesting the discussions. We both had been trying to figure out the compromise before we had really figured out we wanted individually. Now we were trying to decide what each of us wanted first.

Our decision to do nothing and wait for another weekend was overridden by the news that this was to be their last weekend in Cézac until after we had left. Dawn and Isabelle made a quick decision to make a joint meal, a cook-what-you-have-meal.

It worked out great. We were going to have dinner on Sunday but not have to worry about it all day instead we enjoyed Amber’s first day. So at 7:00, we moved our long inside table out to a nearly level space near their house, found candles, fired up the grill and started thinking about dinner.
Entrees
Grilled trout stuffed with onions and herbes de Provence
Grilled potatoes with sautéed asparagus
Viande
Grilled Spare Ribs with Mustard Sugar Sauce
Légumes Boiled
White Asparagus
Salade
Mixed Green Salad with 4 cheeses
Dessert
Sour Cherry Pie (Clafouti)
Boissons
Vin Rosé
Cherries in Schnapps
Bouteille d’eau

The food came from one kitchen then the other. We talked, learned about their children, enjoyed their company. Afterwards, around 11:00, we went inside their house for a tour, to de-stem some currants, and for mint tea.

For me a magical night of tranquillity, aware of all the sights and sounds, aware of Dawn and happy to have Amber with us. Aware of a feeling of happiness that rose of its own accord, to be measured against nothing else, that reminded me of childhood.
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Stephen:

On Monday a taxi arrived to take the Maheus to the train. The taxi driver was a lady who asked if we were British. No, Dawn said, American. She exclaimed in French, “ Mais vous etes perdus!”, you are lost. That’s what we feel like out here lost to the world. Later that day, we re-entered the world a little by going to Cahors for sightseeing and dinner. We finally went into the church that we had been shopping in front of. It is the first church I have ever walked down into. In the cloister, a couple of guys were smoking weed and snorting cocaine off of a mirror. An improvement over the family playing kickball.
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Dawn:

Actually, I think the lady taxi-driver couldn’t imagine why we would be staying here instead of, say Paris or the Côte d’Azur. “Mais, vous etes perdus!” has become our new motto. Yes, we have deliberately lost ourselves here in La France Profonde with the hope that “Ye who are lost shall be found,” if you’ll pardon the Biblical reference. Having Amber here for a week pointed up the remoteness even more, she being 22 and accustomed to having lots of people around and lots of things to do that only a big city can offer. However, she enjoyed some low-key chilling time by the pool, and I enjoyed being able to catch up with her life and thoughts. We had a nice, modest, 4-mile hike together (instead of the 14-mile shinbuster that Stephen and I did), went to Lauzerte together for exploring, a drink, and a food shop, and with Stephen did a day trip to the bastide towns of Cordes & Albi, and just generally hung out together.
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Stephen:

Madam Pern came on Wednesday. We were out by the pool. She introduced herself and said a few things that none of us understood. Actually, we understood, but we all understand something different. Dawn thought she was going to pick herbs, Amber thought she was going to smoke marijuana, and I thought she was going to cut the grass. Imagine my surprise when a half hour later, I heard the lawn mower start. I took a little victory parade around the pool, but in retrospect realize she had time to do all three, so who really knows.

Later, I went and picked them up after their four mile jaunt. For me a little nerve wracking because Dawn and I have a history of misunderstood rendezvous’s. Once we waited on opposites side of the Charles River in Boston. We took what seemed to be an hour to find each other in the Gare du Nord in Paris, and I worried that we would spend the rest of the evening wandering around, really lost in France Profonde. The gods were with us and we met as if the past had evaporated.
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Stephen:

When you believe in progress, you don’t believe in the present. In France, the idea of progress, even though it was practically invented here, is a relatively new idea. When a king or a farmer built their edifice, they built it to last forever. No one planned for the revolution or a new house. You built for a now that was also the future. America was a new idea from the start. It was populated only by people willing or at least able to throw off the past. A country of second home owners. It is not the case of “Best is the enemy of better”, but rather that better is the enemy of now. So here in Southern France, we find old buildings, because the people only built one house. The houses work, they continue to work, nobody automatically tears them down when they get old.   The American Pioneer spirit demands that we keep moving, looking for a better life, with no mechanism to tell us when we have found it.

Which is to say, I liked Corde. It was old, it was beautiful. Why can’t I live there? It had lured artists there to give the tourists something to buy, but that’s a better solution than trucking in Tee shirts. Also, it had a research center for regional music in which Dawn spent an hour while Amber enjoyed chatting in French with the young shopkeepers.

It is time for all the choreographers on this list to rise up and choreograph more good dances for street festivals. I am seeing too many bad pieces at festivals like Le Printemps de Cahors. The artists here don’t seem to understand the restrictions placed on the work by the situation. The wandering audience member coming onto a plaza, or to an outdoor stage is in a totally different frame of mind than the one who has paid serious money to see something in a theater. It is hard to make post modern detachment work outdoors. Dance is not photography.

Anyway, I didn’t like the two dance pieces I saw here, but I did like the photography. A Japanese man from Osaka, Yasumasa Morimura, did a series a self portraits of himself dressed up as famous movie actresses in particular films. Wonderful. In a beautiful cloister, a white box was set up in the middle to act as a four wall projection screen. The white, silent, rectangular photos against the sepia lit curves and arches of the cloisters was very powerful. It looked as if it could take off or vibrate into nothingness.
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Dawn:

One of the most beautiful visual effects at the festival was the projection of slides on huge sprays of water in the River Lot. Although we were standing next to a young man trying to pick up a young woman in English which was neither’s language, it was still magical to watch the projected figures of such luminaries as Maurice Chevalier seem to float in the wind and evanesce into smoke. What a simple and great idea!

OK, how many of you out there knew that Dennis Hopper was an excellent visual artist? We all remember him in various cult films such as “Easy Rider” which he also directed. Stephen and I were quite stunned by his work at the Cahors Festival. He did huge, close-up color photos of graffitied walls in Venice, Prague, and Florence, all of which looked like thoughtful, harmonious pieces of abstract art. I remember telling my friend Elena in Venice that it’s the color of the buildings that I found so beautiful. Many European cities seem to be characterized by a certain hue, from the ochre of Venice to the “Pueblos Blancos’” white of Andalusia to the pink brick of Toulouse, for example. Hopper focused in on the walls in a way that gave us the essence of the place without drawing it or spelling it out for us.

He also did a series of photographs from the sixties. Some of them were trendy artist portraits like Warhol, Johns, and Rauschenberg. However, he did some powerful documentation of Martin Luther King, jr. in Selma, Alabama in 1965. I stood for a long time in front of the picture of King speaking and looked at the serious expressions of the men surrounding him. It was such a painful and important time in American history and so powerful for our generation. I wondered if the French people there could possibly be as moved as I was by this photograph.
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Stephen:

We took Amber to Le Capoul in Toulouse for dinner the Saturday night before she was to fly out. I had really liked it when we ate there our first night in France, and wanted to see what it was like a second time. At best, a risky business. It started out with a bang. We arrived shortly after 10 PM. The place was nearly packed, but no line. A group in front of us got a good table in the back corner of the terrace, and I noticed that the last remaining table had two gentlemen sitting next to it smoking cigars. Maybe one cigar, or two cigarettes, but two cigars was going to be more than I could handle. I don’t really have any ability to speak French more than to respond to questions or to accompany many gestures and body language with a word or two, so it was necessary to tell Dawn our problem and have her alert the maitre d’. He didn’t miss a beat. His response was a danse d’hôtel. He found an empty table for two, pulled a table section from another table over to it, spied an extra chair at the other end of the restaurant, held it over his head to lift it over to the other side of the table and moved the Carte de menu away from us but turned it so we could read it. All with an attitude of being pleased that we had given him the opportunity to be virtuosic but without showing it. In scant seconds it was over and we were seated.

Dawn had the curried moules this time. I had some pink lamb that was great. Amber had a salad. We all shared some spectacular desserts. Mine was four kinds of chocolate dessert named something that probably translated as decline by chocolate, Amber’s was eight kinds of Sherbet in a pastry shell. Dawn helped out.

I got a chance to watch the maitre d’ during the meal. He was a young handsome blond. He had eyes like a hawk. He watched everything that was going on, in his restaurant and out on the street as well. But he jumped in when necessary. He cleaned tables, parked cars and everything else that it took to keep his restaurant at the level it should be.

When we wanted to have the same dessert of the people next to had had, we explained it to our waited, but were not able to quite figure it out, so we ordered what we thought it was. Our waiter founded that table’s waiter and sent him over to us so he could verify what we had ordered was what we wanted. All in a restaurant that was really just a brasserie, a lively, energetic place to have dinner.

The last surprise of the evening came as we were leaving and the restaurant was closing. They were pulling the table cloths off the tables and lifting off the square table tops to reveal, voila, the classic small round French café table which seems to have only room for two small coffees or aperitifs. We didn’t know which as we didn’t know whether they were preparing for late night drinkers or early morning breakfasters.   We ourselves fitted in between, leaving for the airport the next morning at 5:30 AM, serenaded by a group of young men wandering home .

Things got off to a slow start at the airport, but things eventually did what they were supposed to and we waved Amber through the security gate and headed back for Cézac via Moissac which was another lesson in the timing for the tourist.

We arrived at some god awful hour in the morning just looking for a cup of coffee, the famous tympanum and the cloister. Sunday morning it was another abandoned town. No one on the streets no café to be seen. We had been here our first Sunday in Lot in the afternoon when we were looking for some food. It had been the same then.

After getting bamboozled by one way streets we were an emotional inch from leaving the town and heading home when I decided to park the car and find the church on foot. Since the tympanum is on the outside of the church, I reasoned that we could see it even if everyone in the town was sleeping. We found it fronting a small plaza with a man just beginning to open his café (and his eyes). He said he wasn’t really opened but he could certainly serve us some coffee. So we sat at a table and trained our binoculars on the church. And slowly the square continued to come to life. An old man opened the church doors, soon music wafted from the interior. We went inside. A strange combination of styles with a paint job that looked like wallpaper. We wandered over to the cloister which was just opening and had only to share it with one other couple. We were both amazed at yet another magical space. Dawn took pictures, I just walked. We climbed the bell tower and from a place on the roof just below them listened to morning chimes.

When we came down the tour buses had arrived. There were thirty people in the cloister getting a lecture from their guide. But we had had enough of this wonderful place. We headed back into the plaza from where we followed the crowds to the Sunday morning market. Again food, wonderful food, everywhere, but in fact we didn’t have enough energy to buy much and shortly after we headed home.
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Dawn:

Getting back to the lost and found issue, I find that the longer I am on this voyage, the more questions I have. The “answers” seem as elusive as ever. It’s not that I haven’t experienced, observed, processed, and learned a great deal in the last five and a half months that has greatly enhanced my consciousness; it’s just that this experience in itself does not create clarity.

Recently though, I had another illuminating moment, similar in spirit to two conversations we had in Costa Rica with rural people who impressed me with their wisdom. This time I had decided to take a challenging uphill bike ride to a town I hadn’t visited yet, Pechpeyroux. With not quite fully inflated tires, I managed to do all the uphill without walking once...although I did stand on the pedals a few times. After the long, luxurious downhill run, I crossed the road to Cahors and started heading up again towards Pechpeyroux. The tiny stone church and graveyard sat on a curve, on yet another incline. I decided to get off and walk the bike a few yards up to see the valley view before going down again to head home the long, but flat way, through Lascabannes. As I came around the bend, a lady of about seventy appeared, walking downhill and carrying a pot of flowers.

We exchanged “Bonjours” and then I somehow felt it necessary to tell her that this was the first moment I was walking my bike on the whole route from Cézac; apparently my macho vanity has not died. We discussed bikes and tires and various routes back. “Vous etes francaise?” she asked, totally flattering me that my French could be anywhere near good enough to be mistaken for a French person. I told her I was American and staying in Cézac at the Maheus. We established that I had already met her “belle fille” (daughter-in-law) who does some caretaking for the Maheus. She called herself Mme. Pern, “la vielle” and her daughter-in-law Mme. Pern, “la jeune.” I said, “Oh, you mean, Mme. Pern the young and the younger.” She laughed, but made it clear that she thought she was old, and perhaps that she deserved to be old now. I told her my children’s ages as well as my own, and she said, “If you can ride that bike to here, you are still young!”

It seems that she was going to the cemetery to put flowers on the grave of her husband, dead four years now. She said, “I talk to him, but I don’t know if he hears me.” I told her that my mom does the same and that sometimes she gets angry at my father for having left her. Mme. Pern said, “La pauvre” (poor thing). She continued, “It’s sad, but it’s life. We’re all going that way sometime; it does no good to think about it too much. We go, then God decides. Then I will get to find out if my husband hears me.” I found myself saying to her, “Yes, you’re right, we should think about living.”

It felt as if we both reluctantly took leave of each other. Coasting downhill, then through the quiet town of Lascabannes and past the perfect poplars with their shadows, I hoped I would see her again. I said aloud, “A la prochaine” and found tears in my eyes once again.
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Stephen:

Sometimes the big event of the day is watching the pool cleaner. It is a small wheeled machine that rolls around the bottom of the pool between 8 and 10 in the morning and vacuums up dead bugs. Every couple of minutes, a jet propulsion device on the hose itself pulls the machine backwards to some other part of the pool. I found it fascinating. Could one choreograph a pool full of them?

The rest of the day went by with lunch and nibbling around the edge of the huge nine foot tall armoir filled with books in many languages: Freud’s book on Moses, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Persian Empire, to go along with my own books on Joan of Arc and Alan Turing and “Was Einstein Right?” I wrote also, but to write about writing would confuse me.

We bought wine. We went to a small building on the outskirts of Cahors and tasted the products of the Domain Lagrezette. We were led through this exercise by a charming young woman named Annie. In the United States most of the wine experts in liquor stores are men, the one exception that we remember was a young woman in a store in West Roxbury who seemed to have much knowledge about wines, but we never got the feeling that she drank any of them. This woman was different, she had much enthusiasm. Her face totally lit up when telling us how wonderful this wine would be with Roquefort cheese.

We also heard the most charming explanation of Dawn’s accent. When we told Annie that we were from the United States (it came up in the discussion about taking wine home), she was surprised. She said that she thought that Dawn had been born in France, but had gone away for a long time and now was back trying to relearn the language. I wonder what other explanations she thought of before she settled on this one. I wonder what she thought of me who could mostly understand her explanations of the wine but couldn’t speak a word. At some point, she probably rejected the idea that we were both from Outer Space.
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Dawn:

Actually Annie said that I did not have an accent, but obviously I don’t speak the language perfectly which is why she came up with the idea that I must have spoken the language as a child in France, moved away, and am now trying to retrieve the grammar and vocabulary...which is exactly what my mother did...Are we in the Twilight Zone yet?
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Dawn:

Since neither of us has ever seen prehistoric cave paintings, Stephen and I decided to go to Pech-Merle, a cave discovered in the 1920’s by a couple of teenage boys. The route to the cave, beyond Cahors, became more and more wild the nearer we got to Pech-Merle, following the narrow road through holes blasted out of the craggy escarpments of rock. The River Cele twisted through a steep gorge on our right.

Considering that the paintings were done between 30,000 and 12,000 BC, they are astonishingly well preserved.   The caves are damp and the paintings, really drawings, were done with the charcoal residue from burnt torches, with no oil or fixative used at all. Perhaps it’s the darkness. In order to continue this preservation, the family of the two boys, still the owners and managers of the cave, allow only two hours of light per day on the paintings themselves, and forbid any photography or video. They also limit the number of visitors to 700 per day in an attempt to keep destruction by carbon dioxide to a minimum.

The themes are primarily animal, with bison and mammoths the most prevalent. There are at least two instances when the artist used the natural contour of the rock as inspiration to draw a bison or a horse on this surface, creating a sculptural, three-dimensional effect; perhaps the first site-specific art. It is direct and beautiful. The simplicity of line shows us so much. While some of the work is believed to be hieroglyphic in nature, apparently intending to communicate specific ideas, most of it seems to me to be descriptive of their quotidian dependence on animals. Nowhere did I see any images of weapons or any images of war. Then the guide led us to an engraved figure of the head of a bear which was done much more recently, about 12,000 years ago, but still before the Bronze or Iron Ages, so I asked him what tool the artist used. A flint arrowhead, harder than the rock of the cave walls, was his answer. The bear head did look more modern in a sense, more specific and detailed than the bison and mammoths, but still in fact Stone Age art.

Here is art before there was Art. Here was evidence that someone was representing or interpreting his or her world and sharing it with others. It is theorized that many of the drawings in this cave along with one in a cave 40 kilometers away might have been done by the same person. I was moved by the thought that someone from the Stone Age had the time and motivation to make these paintings when food, heat, and shelter must have been such overwhelming concerns.
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Rocamadour juts out of a cliff on the way to the Dordogne. It’s a big tourist mecca but deservedly fascinating. We spent a few hours there after lunch. We found there a small, twelfth century black, wood madonna and child in the Chapel of Notre Dame. We’ve probably seen at least a hundred Madonna sculptures and a few hundred paintings on the same theme in the last five months. This one was unique to my eye. Primitive and refined at the same time, it looked like it came out of Africa, or maybe Asia, rather than Europe. What artistic urge led the artist so far afield from the European tradition of the time?   Why is it so revered by the people in this town and its visitors that the large votive candle rack needs an exhaust hood to vent the heat from the hundreds of candles? I thought about the cave painter.
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It was 6:00 PM, and although I was really ready to head home, one more stop was necessary, Souillac. It wasn’t that far away, but because of a false start and an unforeseen bridge closure at the Dordogne River, we didn’t arrived until 7:00 PM. Stephen had had enough of old, Romanesque churches, but I was on a quest to see the real “Isaiah", the sculpture of the prophet that stands beside the portal of the Abbey Church of Souillac that I had seen countless reproductions of in art history books, one of which had hung on a wall in my house.

We walked all around the church and found no sculptured portals. I was getting nervous. Then Stephen opened the door and we stepped into a portico that had photos and explanations of the artwork around the portal and on the tympanum. But where was it? Then we opened another door and entered the church to see two people leaning their backs against the last pew and looking up over our heads at the doorway behind us. We closed the door and turned around and sure enough, there stood the prophet Isaiah, legs in a fourth position, body twisted to face us, hands lifted to touch the door frame, his face and head angled and ready to shout the good news about a messiah. Not only my prophet, but also a column with one side filled with a surreal depiction of the story of Abraham and Isaac, including an angel plunging head first, down from heaven and offering a lamb to substitute for the sacrifice of Abraham’s son. The other side is piled up with intertwined bodies, some embracing, some struggling, all touchingly human... perhaps an evocation of the sins and struggles of humanity.

Even though I am not religious in any conventional sense, this sculpture touches me deeply.    A few months ago in Italy, I found myself getting impatient with religious art that seemed excessive and even narcissistic. But now my faith is restored by this work concerning itself with human feelings and ideas...ideas of sin, redemption, fear, love, and obedience. In addition, I resonate more with art that is part of people’s lives, whether in an ancient church that is still used as the local parish church, or in a town square that people frequent every day. While I have experienced some works of art in museums that touched me deeply, I still feel more personally connected to art which lives in the world where people live.

So art lives, whether like cave art it concerns itself with the physical world, or like my favorite religious art portrays us at the height of our humanity, or like much of the art today examines art itself as pure form, color, sound, or movement.   Whether it’s in caves, churches, museums, theaters, or in town squares, people have made many millions of artworks over the years. Some of it touches me deeply; some of it astounds me intellectually; some of it just seems like decoration; and some of it just annoys me. Nevertheless, whether it is making music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, photography, film, or whatever, people have always had to do it, or at least to have it in their world.
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Stephen:

We have been drinking our wine from two ordinary glasses of different shapes. While washing dishes and cleaning out the used mustard jar I realized that one of the glasses we had been drinking out of was in fact a recycled jar. This was really good news because now we could drink wine from the same kind of glass and it would not be so difficult to make sure that we were both getting the same amount. :)
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Stephen:

We were sitting in the Café de Centre in Montcuq the other evening and for one of the few times on this trip I felt like an outsider. I began this trip with the fear that because of the language barrier and a tourist mentality that I might spend much of my time on the perimeter looking in. This has not happened I am relieved to say mostly because of Dawn’s persistent attack on the language of any country that we may be in and also her contagious sociability.

We had gone over to the town to hear some music and had arrived in the square of the two cafés with one humming with activity of a gallery opening celebration and the other nearly deserted. The deserted café was to be the site of the concert, so we went there to have a drink and find out what time it was going to start. The answer was after they eat and when they are ready. So we sat on the terrace and watched them set up the stage (plywood on milk crates) and also kept an eye on the comings and going of the party below us in the other café. Slowly people left our café until we were the only ones left. I felt like the only one not invited to the party. I paid for our Ricards and we left to take a walk to find another restaurant where our faces weren’t so much at the windowpane.

Montcuq is fairly large but not quite large enough to support more than one major activity at a time so there wasn’t anything really happening anywhere else. We got to see a little more of the town, especially the more recent part. We ran through our discussion of what makes a suburb again. Seems that landscaping too decorative and labor intensive combined with too clearly defined plots is what creates the sense of tinkertoyness that is so disagreeable. Overcontrol adds its bit also. I have decided to round off the corners of my too accurately trimmed hedge when I get home.

When we got back to the square the situation had changed. The abandoned café was now full of people having dinner. Kids were running around and the opening party at the other had metamorphosed into dinner. It seemed a party for all. We joined in.

The music was jazz played by the trio. They were introduced by the man who had been taking photos at the opening, I thought he was a professional photographer. When the group finished their first number there was applause from both cafés on both sides of the street. As the evening went on, people came and went. I left to get our jackets from the car, but also to see what the whole thing looked like from the outside. It was a pretty picture. Late evening now, both cafés were lit and filled with what seemed to half the town simply enjoying themselves.

I never did figure out the financial arrangement of the evening. Our dinner was very inexpensive and the drink prices remained the same and we were never asked for money. So who paid for the musicians? And what is the relationship between the two cafés that allowed them so easily to share a performance?

We went back to Montcuq on Sunday morning for the market. It was set up along the same street that goes between the two cafés. Smaller in scale than the market in Cahors, this market gained by its intimacy. Just one lane to walk down and then back. It was now my turn to have a tear in my eye. This is the endgame now and I was truly sad to be leaving this place shortly. I am just beginning to learn about seeing, about joy, about waiting. Can I continue back in the “real world”? Can I remake this world? Will the Red Sox ever win the World Series ?

Next Sunday will be our last day. I hope to come back to the market to take pictures. I’ll use Dawn to distract them while I take the pictures. I must get a picture of the table with two gentlemen selling “British Food”, a display of canned goods in the middle of all this freshness and homebakedness.
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Dawn:

We had two unexpectedly good experiences on Friday night, One was that the jazz trio - guitar, double bass, and trumpet - was excellent. At that particular time and place, it was nice to have the bass handle the rhythm and have no drums at all. Kind of mellow. The trumpet player was surprising, especially as the evening went on. Stephen and I both commented on how quietly, yet articulately he played, with no mute. I felt like I should have been at The Blue Note in NYC or at least a boite in Paris, but here we were, sitting outside in this little town in the deepest France, listening to fine jazz!

We were driving home around midnight when Stephen slammed on the brakes for something in the middle of the road. I thought it might be a fox as we had already seen two. It turned out to be an owl, a small one with a stunning, white, heart-shaped face. It stood smack in the center of the road, fifteen feet in front of us, fully illuminated by our headlights. Either it was confused or it was practicing it’s safe street-crossing techniques, but it stayed there for at least thirty seconds, turning its elegant head methodically right and left, right and left...magical. For you birders out there, we looked it up in the French birdbook here. We think it is called a Chouette effrai, or Tyto alba. The book says it’s a very sedentary bird. I guess so.
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Stephen:

We seem to be in the Cézac rainy season as Monday was our third day of rain. We managed to sneak in a short photography hike between showers on Sunday afternoon. We followed a man on horseback. First he, and then his tracks led us on a nice circle route up into the hills south of our place. Good light came and went, and finally went permanently as we got rained on the last 15 minutes of the trip.

We have been writing our sections of the travelogue separately, but much of Monday afternoon was spent in rewriting and editing Dawn’s piece about Peche Merle, Rocamadour and Souillac. It was the end of an exercise that had begun a day or two earlier with Dawn’s comment that she thought it was too high falutin’. What followed was a complete re-examination of thinking styles, our criticizing styles, with questions about the art of writing itself thrown in for good measure. We survived, although I am not sure we would survive a re-hashing of the discussion here.

Tuesday, we woke to more cold, gray skies. We had heard that it might clear, so we got some bike parts to repair the bike. During Dawn’s previous ride, the front gear had become unattached from the pedals. Fifty cents worth of bolts rectified the problem.

In the afternoon, I discovered a book by the father of M. Maheu. It is his library that we have been reading in the armoire. It turns out that for twelve years he had been the director-general of UNESCO, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In fact, he had worked for the organization since its inception. This explains the library’s breadth and depth of its examination of world cultures. I could come back here just for the library. Yesterday, I read a book researching the correct route that Hannibal took with his elephants through the Alps.

The sun came out this afternoon.
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Dawn:

The bonus at the end of our rainy walk was a huge rainbow with a double arc of violet. The main reason we kept reworking my paragraphs about art was that Stephen didn’t think it was clear. That’s all. We’ll be home next week.
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Stephen:

I think I have reached the limit on cute villages and mysterious churches. This is good. It must mean that the wheel has turned and I am ready for other things. The week that Amber was here, she and Dawn would take walks in the afternoon and I would stay home and write and listen to animals in the roof. If they got too noisy I would take a broom handle and bang on the ceiling and they would move somewhere else and continue that little eating sound that rodents make. I didn’t tell Dawn or Amber and the animal remained my secret. He got older and/or bolder and made an appearance one evening after dinner and evidently took a liking to us because he decided to play in the wall behind our heads as we were trying to sleep. This I think was the night that we also discovered the big spider, but that’s another story.

Wednesday did not dawn sunny as promised so we hung out and I decided to trap the creature. I don’t even know what it is. It looks like a juvenile squirrel, but it also might be some kind of mouse. It has a bushy tail, which puts it on the friendly side of the rodent population. We baited a box, but I realized that he was too fast for me to flip the box over once he went in to eat the peach, so my next device was a wooden spoon with a half a fig on it balanced over a plastic garbage bag suspended by weighing it down with a flashlight. It worked and it didn’t. The squirrel stole my first bait and knocked the second into the bag, but then conveniently fell into it while trying to figure out how to get to it.

I grabbed the bag, jumped out the door and swinging the bag over my head ran down the driveway. After seventy five yards or so threw the squirrel, bag and all over the embankment. Or so I thought. As I looked back toward the house, out of the corner of my eye, I seemed to see the squirrel sneak off the road into the brush. well anyway, I had gotten rid of him.

He reappeared shortly after dinner and although he was polite enough not to run around behind our wall, he did bang on the clean pots in the dish drainer. So today I try again. My second attempt will be with our kitchen waste container. I put it on the counter, place a couple of books next it to provide easy access and wait. Mostly I read. Pretty soon, the beast obliges nicely by climbing up on the books, onto the container and drops down into it. I sneak up and drop the lid on. With this device no need to run around like a madman trying to do something before he escapes the trap. I just take the can outside, put a couple of rocks on the lid and go back to reading. The quiet is nice.

About a half an hour later, he appears again. Now I am confused. Is there a squirrel in the can outside or not? Is this the same squirrel, or a second squirrel or a third? At some point, I realized that the flashlight which belongs to the Maheus and was holding up the garbage bag for the first encounter was missing. I sheepishly climbed down the hill to retrieve the garbage bag with the flashlight in it. So was the squirrel ever in the bag? Is there a squirrel in the can now?

I take the can down to the end of the driveway. I peek in. I see no squirrel. I poke around in the bag. No squirrel. Finally, I catch a glimpse of him lying very still on the bottom of the can outside the bag. I pull the bag out and try to chuck him over the embankment, which I don’t really succeed at, but I do chase him into the woods. So, two down and how many to go?

This guy is smarter, and bolder. We spend a lot of time looking at each other across the kitchen. At the moment, he is hiding and I expect nothing more until I try to go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day.

Dawn was involved in the first part of this escapade, but not the ensuing chases because she took the train to Paris yesterday and is not expected back until tomorrow. The incessant rain interrupted by clouds got to her and she decided to take Isabelle’s offer of the spare apartment to get one more look at Paris before we head back to the New World. She also wants to talk to Malek about some ideas she has about doing a joint concert with him in Paris. She probably wanted to get out on her own a little also. In the last six months, with the exception of my being in Florida in May, we have rarely gotten more than a hundred feet from each other and that was mostly when we were going to the toilet.

It has taken a little time to find myself, but I have succeeded. Took a walk up into the hills during a period of relative dryness. Only about forty five minutes, but very satisfying.

On the way back along the road, I spied a flock of pigeons. Actually, there seemed to be two flocks flying next to each other. They were both circling the beautiful farmhouse that is across the road from us. Gradually, they became one flock. In the process they got rid of some other kind of bird that was flying with them for awhile. They were pretty far away. Mostly what I saw was the sun hitting their wings when they hit the right angle. Otherwise, they were just specks in the distance. I could here their cries faintly. Their flight was not predictable, as if they were having an argument. They would wheel and turn and turn back at themselves but suddenly they all stopped flapping simultaneously and glided maybe two complete circles and landed somewhere out of my sight. As I walked down the road further, I could see them perched on the farmhouse roof. A couple of pigeons insisted on solos by flying off again only to return shortly. A rooster crowed from the farm just to add the finishing touch. A rather ordinary event made beautiful and touching because I had the time to watch.

Here I have no list. In the back of my mind I am developing one for next week when I am back. But I am hoping to make a habit of holding onto irresponsible hours, list free moments during which perhaps I can do things only for the pleasure of it.

I found the shop vac, made it work, and vacuumed the place including all the spiders and their webs. Moving day is coming. Beginning to look forward to the United States. The next adventure,
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Dawn:

It is Sunday. I am back from Paris, and it is still raining. In fact, this is our ninth day of rain, cold, and clouds. Noah, where are you? As Stephen mentioned in his rodent section, I figured if it’s going to be lousy weather, I might as well spend a couple of days of lousy weather in Paris where I can see some friends and get a little culture. In fact, for the duration of the five hour train ride, it was pretty gloomy weather all over toute la belle France.

Thanks to the Maheus again, I got to stay in their wonderful little “spare” flat, on the top floor of their building in the fifth arrondissement on Rue Clovis. It’s only a short walk through the Jardin des Plantes from the Gare Austerlitz where the train arrived from Cahors. The apartment has a view of Paris rooftops, looking north with a great take on the south side of Notre Dame. It must be spectacular when it’s clear. Even with the clouds, it’s a beautiful view at night when the buildings are lit up, or at 6:00 am when I was up to greet the sun.

Thursday night, Isabelle treated me to seeing Pina Bausch at the Theatre de la Ville. Except for the fact that we spent twenty minutes looking for each other at the theatre, it was an inspiring evening. Pina Bausch concerts always sell out in Paris, and people were scrambling around trying to buy scalped tickets. As a choreographer, Pina has a keen eye for the absurd. This piece had a lot more humor in it than some of hers and much American popular music from the fifties as well as English “skits.” She made this piece in Los Angeles, and it’s definitely California flavored. One of the things I like about the company is that she has a couple of old guard performers who are definitely on the same side of fifty as Martha and I are. She’s also got some extraordinary young dancers who blew me away with the energy, subtlety, and virtuosity of their solos. The only problem with the performance is that she gave us too much. At the end of the first half, we were very satisfied, but then there was an intermission and a second half which, for Isabelle and myself, diluted the strength of what we had already seen. Each part was an hour and a half long. We left the theatre at midnight.

As wired as I was, I only slept four hours that night. Friday morning, Malek and I had coffee and talked about collaborating on an evening of poetry and dance. We fantasized about getting invited back to La Napoule to develop this work, but I haven’t had the nerve to discuss it with Isabelle yet. He is one of the few artists who has been there twice already.

I had a lovely lunch with Isabelle and Jean in their apartment. When I speak with him, I guess I get nervous and my French deteriorates. Sometimes I can hear myself using the wrong gender or the wrong tense, but it’s too late; the words are already out of my mouth. I still haven’t figured out if I should call him “Jean” or “M. Maheu,” or if I should be “tu-ing” or “vous-ing.” Since Isabelle has begun to address me in the more familiar form of “tu”, I feel comfortable speaking that way with her, but it doesn’t yet seem appropriate with “Monsieur.”

After lunch, they made a phone call and managed to get me invited (i.e. a complimentary ticket) to the Berlioz Requiem which was being played that night in the huge, gothic Basilique de St. Denis, at the northern edge of Paris.

After a drink with Isabelle and Malek, I rushed off by myself to the métro. (They all had other plans for the evening.) I arrived just after it started and sat in the back of the audience which was arranged with portable chairs in the nave of the basilica. There must have been easily 2,000 people in the audience and three hundred performers, what with full orchestra and chorus. It was the Orchestre de France and the Choeur de Radio France, conducted by Charles Dutoit. For those of you radio listeners out there in Boston who tune into WGBH, WCRB, or WBUR, you will appreciate how special it was to witness Maestro Dutoit live at the podium.

And what music! Berlioz composed this romantic era Requiem as a series of contrasts, in tone color, volume, range of voices, and instrumentation. The Basilica was a gorgeous and appropriate setting for this religious work, although if they taped it live, I sure hope the engineer kept his finger off the reverb switch.

I thought about the Mozart Requiem that we had heard in Prague, in the very austere Bethlehem Chapel, and how different the two experiences were. Berlioz was so French. I started thinking about France as a cultural, social entity. In the time that I was sitting there, “alone” among 2,000 people, I had a moment of sensing what France is. I had a vision of the map of the country and how all its parts make up the whole, and of how that map is a metaphor for the strength of the nation itself. Its history, its provinces and cities, its rural people and their beautiful produce, its urban people and their love of culture - all these combine to make France a very special place.

On the way home, I got yet another aspect of what France is when the métro car I was riding on stopped, and it was announced that because of “les greves” (strikes), this car was not going any farther. So an hour and a half later, after riding a few métro lines underneath the entire city of Paris, I arrived back at my little flat.

So this is it, friends. We’re leaving Cézac at 4:15 am tomorrow to fly from Toulouse to Amsterdam, to sit around Schipol Airport for awhile, and then to fly to Boston. One of the things that we have enjoyed most about the e-mail travelogue is the response that we get from some of our readers, from the appreciation and wish-I-was-there-with-you response to the sardonic, slightly mocking humor of some of our nearest and dearest.
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Stephen:

I caught the fourth squirrel as the fifth disappeared up the kitchen wall. This battle I leave to other hands.

It was great to have Dawn back. It was a simple sweet pleasure to see her get off the train. In a couple of hours I will be dismantling our outpost here and we will not be back online until we land in North America.
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Dawn and Stephen:

Thanks for listening
July, 1997
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