Love it is teasing and love is enticing,

Oh love come beside me and keep me warm;
But when it grows older, love it turns colder,

And it just fades away like the dew on the rose.
                         (Scottish trad.)

A long trek to Paris and an old suitor . . .

Saturday, May 25

Taking off by bus for New York at 10:30 PM to catch a flight to Europe the next day, everything stowed away in my backpack except the dulcimer. Camera I can happily do without; music, no! Also passport, youth hostel card, spiral notebook, a pair each of blue jeans, slacks and shorts, two shirts, two knit tops, a sweater, windbreaker, raincoat, swimsuit, poncho, dance slippers, red skirt, sneakers, socks, underwear and (on my feet) hiking boots. Total weight on the bathroom scales, 20 pounds--not bad. The problem with the dulcimer, of course, isn't weight but shape and fragility. Almost a yard long, its slim "pretty girl" curves protected by a homemade, padded cloth sack, it's an awkward object to be toting around the countryside. But a great psychological prop, this adopted bit of Appalachia! Something I can play, something special.

In Huntington's dirt-encrusted bus depot, I'm keyed up with a spirit of romantic adventure--and beset by a few qualms. It's one thing to take off footloose and fancy free at twenty, I think as I study my face in a cracked mirror (and wiggle the reconstructed nose with its high bridge that I've never learned to like). Will I feel a little ridiculous at forty, a responsible mère de famille forsaking husband and children to follow a foolish fantasy--thumbing my way across France and overnighting in hostels?

Luckily "youth hostel" is a very loose term, except in Switzerland and Bavaria, where they figure you ought to have amassed enough wealth by the age of twenty-five to pay for a hotel room. But it isn't the money, damnit, it's the dreary isolation. And there's something else too: hostels don't expect you to enter with a man on your arm; like folk festivals and university classes, they are havens of the unattached.

But, of course, I am also counting pennies and trying not to spend any more "family funds" than necessary on this spree of mine. Why do I act so defensive about it anyway? So defensive and insecure around Alex about everything I do? I attempt to justify it on the grounds of plunging myself into the French language and bcoming a better French teacher, but that's a silly excuse. I don't even have a job yet. Besides, my student teaching problems had nothing to do with the language--and everything to do with me: my funny accent, my funny clothes, the funny way I got upset and talked so fast that no one could follow me. I felt like a relic from another age.

"Nobody sings those old songs," said one girl, gazing at me from under violet eyelids. Is she one of the group hitting the cultural high spots of Europe this summer?  How interesting it might be to meet in France, though I doubt our paths will ever cross. No, I'm not envious of her circumscribed, conformist youth. It is my own headstrong freedom, my remembered young girl magic that I am secretly, foolishly perhaps, hoping to recapture. But I remember too, with chagrin, my feeling of pity twenty years ago for some "older women" who were lodging in the Vienna youth hostel, constantly complaining and pathetically out of the swim. Was I previewing my own crumbling dreams?

Too late now for second thoughts. With a contrite, consoling kiss, I promise Alex to return (perhaps changed for the better). We both usually talk a lot and say very little that matters.  Now, at least, I do not lie and say I wish he were coming with me.

"And see that Edward helps out too, Alex." I know his sisters will. They took over the housekeeping for three weeks after the car wreck. That was five years ago when they were, let's see, only seven, nine and eleven. But under their father's direction they had weekly menus, shopping lists, meals-on-schedule.

"Yeah, we'll get organized tomorrow." He brushes lanky black hair out of his eyes and frowns. Is he worried about clen shirts or about my undefined, vaguely bohemian travel plans? I haven't told anyone that I plan to hitchhike (but Alex knows, I think) because it sounds so wild for a respectable housewife. "Inappropriate" is the word he'd use, and he may well be right. He usually is, damnit, and I'll probably feel like a fool standing by the side of the road and watching cars whiz past me. But I have to try it, to find out what happens . . .

"Do you have enough traveler's checks?" asks Alex. Yes, $300 is plenty. And so we have nothing left to say to one another. Is this bus ever going to move?

It rolls out of Huntington at 11:15. In time for me to catch my plane tomorrow? "That's in God's hands," said the dispatcher with a shrug. "And you'd better hold onto anything you want to take with you to Europe." So I clutch both pack and dulcimer through two bus changes and a long, wakeful night. Why am I putting myself through this? It isn't as if we were paupers. Alex, of course, would have flown to New York; but then he's earning the money, and that makes a difference. Maybe it ought not to, but it does.

Sunday, May 26

A pity my seatmate has to get off in Philadelphia. A tiny old gentleman, he thanks me with old world gallantry, and a slight foreign accent, for the "unexpected pleasure" of my company. He must be European. Would an American male have imbued a discussion of linguistics with those courtly overtones?  A foretaste of France, I hope, and decide that Greyhound isn't so bad after all.

A jolting New York subway and a packed bus out to Kennedy Airport. Just how much longer will I have the stamina for this pennypinching way of getting across the Atlantic? Time I started earning some money of my own and traveling in a style befitting my age and station in life. Middle-aged professor's wife--isn't that what I'm supposed to be? What I am in Huntington?  I remember that exercise in one of my education classes, where we were supposed to describe each other as cars. Other girls (fat ones too) came out as Jaguars and Pintos, with racing stripes and bucket seats. I, as a gray Studebaker.

Service is slow on this cheap Icelandic flight, and dinner, promised for after take-off at 7 P.M. (and I was ravenous then) comes trundling down the aisle at 10 o'clock. By now, having struck up a conversation in German and imbibed a couple of daiquiris, I'm feeling no pain; America, language and all, is receding nicely into the distance. What a relief to be in the air and know that nothing can keep me from Europe!

A lot of students on their first trip over must be feeling the same way--deserting their proper seats to form little knots of excited talk and laughter in the night that never really comes. My watch says 12:30 when a pink-gold ball floods us with rosy light, and the few middle-aged passengers still trying to ignore the carnival about them give up all pretense of sleep. Should I have imitated them? Impossible when I'm as jumpy as any of the kids.

In Iceland the stewardesses make sure we're awake by herding us off the plane. Not that anything is open at this hour, whatever it is, except a dismal coffee bar; but I sneak outside the designated waiting area to view the surrounding expanse of mud. (Nothing like the picture postcards of the island!) And shiver. Back to the sky . . . rolls with Icelandic butter . . . more chit-chat in four languages from our friendly pilot--his recital of altitude, flying speed and landing times in Icelandic, French, German and English forming a sort of singsong lullaby . . . and a descent from the clouds to the rumpled green duchy of Luxembourg and its patch of a landing strip.

Monday, May 27

Very difficult to sort out the days when they flow into one another without sleep! How many has it been? I stumble off the plane into brilliant sunshine and half-wittedly wait in the terminal for my pack to appear on the conveyor belt. Just one item, and of course it's the last thing off the belt. Now to buy a map at a souvenir stand near the parking lot. My fellow passengers are lining up for a bus into Luxembourg; I want to shake free of that English-speaking horde, and the open road is right at hand. With two pack-laden youths already beside it, darn! Besides, that main road into town is unshaded and hot. I walk across to a smaller road, also marked for Luxembourg, which winds through cool woods. No other hitchhikers in sight to witness my humiliation in case this doesn't work out. It's been a long time. . .

What do I do, anyway? Twenty years ago Europeans waved their hand up and down; Americans just stuck out a thumb. I compromise by both waving my hand and extending my thumb to an approaching VW, while trying to focus a bright smile on the driver. ("You can't just stand there," Alison used to lecture me. "You have to work at hitching.") And he instantly brakes, hooray! Was it the funny gesture or the smile?  My floppy brown cloth hat? (an eyecatching hat really helps) or perhaps the red-and-blue-striped dulcimer sack dangling from the green backpack? (People do wonder about that sack!)

    "You are American?" The man in a brown corduroy jacket lifts my gear into the back seat as I slide into the empty one beside him. So I'm pick-up-able but still recognizably American. And I've barely said a dozen words yet. That galls.

    "Ich bin ja amerikanerin," I persevere. What do they speak in Luxembourg anyway? Surely something other than English.

My driver turns out to be Belgian and much more at home in French than German. He's a bit confused about my origins by now but relieved to find a language we can agree upon. And although he is seeing me at closer range--modifying his initial impression?--he doesn't seem at all surprised at my hitching my way into France.

    "You will have no difficulty if you-wish to reach Paris this afternoon, madame. Ah, you have a friend there?

    "Yes, but I'm not going straight to Paris. I like the country."

    "So you will repose yourself in the country first--very wise. And Luxembourg is a beautiful land." We're passing through rocky ravines, and I agree with him; it is an enchanting landscape. The town, too, with its crooked ramparts...     "The old city of Luxembourg, madame. If you wish to explore it . . ."

    "Thank you so much, monsieur." I recover my gear and wave him goodbye. How simple that was after all! I could have ridden farther with him, but from Luxembourg roads branch in all directions. It's a good spot to stop and mull things over.

So far I have one fixed date: a folk festival at the end of the week. Maria will be driving to it with some French folksingers; if I want to come along too, I'd better be in Paris by Saturday. "I expect you'll putter about in the provinces first and get your bearings," Hal wrote. Of course! I didn't come to France to dash right for his apartment, and besides, I don't much care for big cities. I especially want to visit Brittany and the Auvergne. But, darn, they're on the other side of Paris.

So where am I going to be for the next few days? My brain refuses to take the question seriously. Instead, perched on the ramparts high above the Petreuse River, I sit strumming the dulcimer (how nice that the children aren't here to say, "oh Mother, do stop!") and gazing down on the terraced gardens that form neat geometric patterns between river and rampart. Wild flowers sprout from sheer rock wall, and a horse chestnut thrusts its heavy limbs out over the gorge. What would it be like to live here in a house crammed into the rock? Two pinafored urchins stare at me from the front doorstep that is their "yard"; rooms glimpsed through an open casement window are small and dark. But swallows swoop and turn in the ocean of space where the walls drop off. I follow their flight, lightheaded and exhilarated.

Or am I merely giddy with hunger? That breakfast in the sky was hours ago. I've walked up and down interminable fortifications since then, past swatches of soft green turf where I long to lie down. But something drives me on. I blunder into a labyrinth of metal--where a blue flame burns for the dead of two wars--then tramp downtown over a great arching viaduct in search of food. Into a small grocery, where 5 French francs (about $1) buys two crusty "little breads," a hunk of cheese and three "blood oranges"--something to munch on while I figure out what to do next

I don't have a hostel handbook to guide me because I didn't feel like spending $5 for information I knew I could get for free in the first hostel I hit. But where is that first hostel? Where am I staying tonight? I don't know, and I seem to have reached the stage where it takes more energy.to decide to stop then to keep on going, like a stupid rolling stone. I call it the inertia of motion, mindless motion that's so much easier than thought.

To Paris then, where Hal and Maria have a bed for me? But the main road to Paris stinks of car fumes; I mean to enjoy the sight and smell of the countryside, to soak up some of the French art of living, I tell myself, before knocking on their door. It isn't as if I wanted to get there today. Let's see--the forested.Ardennes are to the west, aren't they? I walk westward out of the stuffy town center. Into the aroma of countless small gardens, where velvety red roses, peas clinging to twiggy cut branches, and neat rows of strawberries, radishes; onions and lettuce bring my own untended garden to mind.

And my untended family? They will "disentangle themselves" very well from the situation, agrees the married Frenchwoman who next offers me a lift. Mary at almost sixteen is no baby, and if Edward still fancies himself one at eight, then it's time he grew up a bit. The Frenchwoman tosses her well coiffed dark head and says it's a good thing to get away from husbands too for a while. "If only more wives could do what you are doing,... ."

   "Perhaps some of them do not have the need," I murmur.

   "We all do sooner or later. Courage, madame, and good traveling!" What an ego-bolstering ride! There's something in the frank approval of another woman . . .

On this winding secondary road, I'm in no hurry to get to Paris--rather scared, in fact, of meeting Hal, whom I haven't seen in ten years. For that matter, I'm in no hurry to get anywhere. It's a tactical error, however, to confess this dillydallying state of contentment to my next driver, a local shopkeeper who develops a sudden enthusiasm for country lanes and the beauties of nature .

"What's growing in those fields?" I ask, and we veer off on a dirt track between them. The car stops, and the field of orge (or is it avoine?--I get terribly muddled on oats and barley) is blotted out by a stubbly, sharp-featured face as the man grabs me. His brown mustache tickles. This isn't helping my muddle one bit, and I'd better do something fast if I don't want things to get completely out of hand. I push away and invent a pressing new objective: Paris this evening. Indeed I talk so convincingly that he drops me like a contagious disease at the very next village.

Not much of a village: inward-turning stone houses sulking behind their stone walls; no public toilets, but the woods are close by. . .  Not much of a road either, now that I've talked myself into striking directly for Paris. And traffic is discouragingly slow on this rural byway (just what you wanted, wasn't it, Jean, to escape from the noise and the fumes of the main road?) until three speed-loving teenagers take me swinging through the Ardennes. My next driver is a swarthy trucker from Marseilles who bewails the absence of vineyards as we roll past saintly looking white cows. Then a truck with two more routiers, who drive me out of Reims and its industrial belt even though it's out of their way.

What nice people truckers are! It seems they even have a radio station (LRSS or "les routiers sont sympathes") to coordinate riders and drivers.

    "But certainly you are making a mistake not to stay in Reims and visit the champagne cellars," says the younger one. We're on the same wave length, as he doesn't bother to mention the cathedral.

     "Perhaps, but I prefer Moselle." And a playful debate is on. A charade of sorts, for champagne is really very nice; but it's fun to mock a hallowed French drink. And were we discussing wines or my plans for the evening, I wonder as he hands down my pack and wishes me, with a wink, "bon séjour à Paris."

How pigheaded of me to keep on the road at suppertime (and doesn't Reims have a youth hostel?), but here I am walking along the highway out of town. I come to a fork (French fashion, both roads are posted for Paris) to wait and wonder about my sanity. Skipping meals is a strange way to learn the French "art of living." I'll never achieve pleasing plumpness at this rate. Or Paris either. Damn, isn't this fork ever going to get any action?  The sun sets late here in early summer, but it does eventually set. And hitchhiking is a daytime activity.

A sporty Peugeot approaches the signpost, pauses . . .

     "Vers Paris, monsieur?" I quickly accost the driver, who flashes a toothy grin and moves plaid blanket and sports jacket from the plush bucket seat.

     "Ah, vous êtes américaine? J'adore l'Amérique . . . les Américains . . . la musique américaine. How do you say it--I love America!" Conversation larded with bits of his favorite language continues in this uninspired vein, with loud support from a car radio blaring American rock. But he is actually driving all the way into the suburb of Meudon on the west side of Paris, where Hal and Maria live. And delighted to have a live American in his elegant car. What luck!

According to my map, we are now on one of the main routes to Paris; one would never know it from the giddy curves. France has open-road speed limits (until recently there were only town limits) which I feel sure my happy-go-lucky driver is exceeding. Would it be ungracious to tell him so? I'm wearing the seat belt required by French law, my feet braced hard against the floorboard in frozen response to what seems like quite mad speed. Still, I must admit that my cheerful traveling salesman drives very skillfully and even slows down a bit corkscrewing through narrow village streets--though not enough. Pedestrians and bicyclists scatter wildly as he approaches, and his singing drowns out the torrent of epithets in our wake. "I love you, yeh, yeh, yeh," he wails, as we race against the setting sun. Conscious only of the lateness of the hour now, I am silently urging us ever faster. Whatever will Maria think of me anyway, arriving unannounced in the middle of the night?

Paris is much farther than I thought, and darkness falls before we're engulfed by its sprawling suburbs. Across the heart of the city--the Champs Elysees still fluttering banners to welcome France's new premier--and on into the sleepy middle-class suburb of Meudon. Number 163 rue Jean-Jaurès turns out to be a cluster of small apartment buildings set in a walled park. We locate the one where Hal and Maria live. I think. And it's almost 11 PM.

      Am I sure that my friend is here?

     "Very sure, monsieur; thank you a thousand times." With a brave show of confidence, I shoo my escort off. Very easy to do really, for in spite of his deplorable tastes he's still a Frenchman, with a Frenchman's sensitivity for any sort of romantic intrigue. And I don't think I told him that Hal has a wife and three children.

Into a dim lobby, up five flights of stairs to a gleam from under a door marked H. Hartman. I tap once and listen intently, my courage oozing away. After two nights of traveling and a day on the road, I certainly don't feel at my brightest and best. I feel, in fact, like a damn fool. Leaving pack and dulcimer outside the Hartman door, I walk downstairs and then up again, working up my nerve for another knock. Suppose they've already gone to bed? Worse, suppose Hal hasn't told Maria that I'm coming? The intruder . .

I can't stay crouching on the stairs all night long, though, and I cannot turn tail and run home to Alex as I did seventeen years ago.  We were living near the University of Chicago then; it was our first real bash after a postdoctoral year abroad, and I made pizza after pizza for a bunch of student friends, Hal among them.  But the atmosphere grew stale as Alex recounted story after clever story, and at 11:30 people started leaving.

   "Come on, let's go to my place for a real party," I heard, and longed to follow them all out the door. Instead I went dutifully to bed, but I could not sleep beside my soon peacefully snoring husband. Did marriage mean the end of good parties then? Of late night talk and music? At length I crept out of bed, dressed and slipped out the door into the cold January air. A mile away I stood outside a darkened apartment building and heard the murmur of voices from a lit basement window. In the lobby was a buzzer marked "Hartman." Dared I press it?  But how could I explain myself to them all? Explain a public slap at the father of the child (the second child!) that I now bore? Somehow, hearing Hal's voice from within and knowing that that I could lean on his more-than-sympathetic shoulder, find comfort in his loving (still single) heart, made the betrayal even worse. No, I dared not press the buzzer. A coward in that cold Chicago night, I crouched on the pavement by the lighted window for a long time, listening to half-caught snatches of conversation, fearing and hoping that I would be discovered--my marriage revealed as a fraud. So alone and shivering, I finally walked home and slipped in beside my sleeping husband.

Am I still a coward? Come on, Jean--the longer you wait, the harder it will be. I knock once more, the door swings open and a semi-stranger stands there. A picture of the mad scientist, with tangled gray-black beard, spreading paunch and bare feet.

   "Jean--you're here!" Hal takes my pack, and I giggle weakly. "Come in, come in," he says, and I step into the cluttered apartment. Maria is out and the children in bed. Hal's gray eyes bore into me, and I quail, knowing full well that I must have changed even more than he. I'm conscious of looking a wreck, of talking very fast and acting very silly. I tell him about my "funny rides" and he doesn't look in the least amused. Hal is disappointed in me, I'm sure. And I in him? But it was never his good looks--it was something between us that stirred me once, and is naturally gone. It must be gone, I tell myself and chatter wildly on.

   "Hi, stranger!" Tension goes out of the air when Maria returns from her folk club. She has the same compact curves--well, maybe not quite so compact--straight black hair and calm face that I remember from our U. of Chicago days. And her common-sense talk--"Have you. shown Jeanie the cot in Amy's room?"--makes my apprehensions seem very silly. She even tells Hal to stop criticising my "terrible American accent"--after three years in Paris his own is pretty atrocious, says Maria.

   "Yes, but it's different for Jeanie--she should . . ." I should be flattered, I suppose, that he cares enough to criticise, but it hurts I've fallen so far short of what he remembers--or is it what he wants to remember? An illusion that never could have withstood the wear and tear of marriage? Yes, the accent must go--at least I can do something about that, Hal. But how?

   "You could try listening for a change," he says. "Listen to Amy and the boys." Ah yes--Amy. Will she remember chaperoning her father and me? The misty meadow, the tears and the kisses? I hope to God not.

Tuesday, May 28

I wake up to sunshine streaming in on a jumble of clothes, books and pictures of horses. Do-you-like-horses?--ah, a safer opening than do-you-remember?

  "Oui, j'adore les chevaux," sighs Amy, uncoiling herself from the bedsheets and stretching pantherlike in the middle of the rug. Is this sleek creature really the same age as my Janet? Janet with her straight-up-and-down body, her little girl voice and wispy mouse-brown hair. Her mother's daughter. We grow up slowly in my family, and it has always seemed entirely natural to me. Only now I'm beginning to wonder if I shall grow old before I finish growing up. An undignified prospect.

"We tried to clean up before you came," says Maria as I reach over the heads of the two boys for a hunk of bread and the jam pot.  But why? I can see that Hal and Maria are both snowed under with work--the nitpicking final stages of Hal's doctoral dissertation and certainly one reason he looks so wild and woolly. It's clearly a terrible time for me to have come barging in on them, though Hal insists that I'm always welcome. (Now if Maria were to say that . . .)

   "Do you want to meet me for lunch, Jeanie?"

    "No, no, of course not, Hal! I'll be exploring Paris--no telling where I'll be at noon." Besides, you're much too busy to bother with me. You're only asking out of pity . . .

   "Take along our Michelin guide," says Maria. An excellent idea--and naturally I walk out the door without it. Into Paris by commuter train. No, I don't look like the other women on the train. Something about that red nylon skirt and tattered black windbreaker . . . Why didn't I pull out the nice London Fog raincoat that Mother gave me just before I left, and I promptly buried at the bottom of the pack?

I switch to the metro at les Invalides . . and get off at the wrong stop for the youth hostel. Where the hell is it anyway? My questions lead me at last to low building behind a gravel court, almost deserted at this hour, but I get what I came for: a map showing the towns with hostels and a sheet of addresses, descriptions of facilities, etc. Now I can make proper plans!

I said I'd pick out an assortment of French children's books in Paris (another "justification" for the trip?)  So on to the dusty bookshops of the Latin Quarter and an hour of dithering indecision. What's wrong with me today? I do manage to buy a sleeping bag liner ("sleeping sheet") for 20 fr. and a filet for another 20 fr. That's an exorbitant price for a simple string sack, but I felt so stupid buying food without one yesterday (as if I expected the shopkeeper to hand me a paper bag). And even more stupid remembering the filet I'd left back home. Did you plan this trip at all, Jean?

I hate "shopping." But I love old-fashioned markets and, properly equipped now, I plunge into the marché de la rue Mouffetard. Maria said that one of their visiting friends brought a tape deck to this narrow street just to record its vying food vendors and haggling housewives. A pity that I'm not here as a housewife myself.  So many things I've never cooked! Skinned rabbits hanging in a butcher's stall, furred feet obscenely emphasizing the naked bodies. A tray of rognons blancs below--pretty objects with their lacy white-on-pink pattern, but what precisely are "white kidneys"? "When the little veal is cut, madame . . ." Cut?--oh, that means castrated. Oh! "And amourettes, monsieur?" Another euphemism, for a different delicacy. . . Fascinating! And utterly unsuitable for a picnic lunch (in the nearby zoo), which is what I came here to provision for. Now if I can only concentrate on bread and cheese and ignore that whiff of the sea from the next stall over. The tiny curled crayfish, the sculpted coquilles Saint-Jacques . . . To the fishmonger's chagrin I sensibly settle on a long stick of bread, a ripe Camembert, a fresh Gervais (cream cheese that isn't mucked up with vegetable gums), three tomatoes, two oranges, a wedge of flan and a bottle of red wine. Perhaps it is, after all, rather a lot for one person, but I'm recovering from famine on the road.

On to the Jardin des Plantes to watch the animals. Which includes a group of school-kids, hopping about with detailed lists of zoological classifications in their hands. The French sure believe in structure! I do too, but I wish this place weren't quite so prim and proper. Nobody sits on the grass; it's probably forbidden. So I sit on a bench for a bite of bread, a bite of cheese, a swig of wine, a bite of bread... How nice that I still have my own teeth! I remember them loose and shoved back in my mouth and then Jill's beautiful smile as she held my hand (to keep me from poking about) and kept on saying, "It's all right, Mother, it'll be all right"; I remember Janet's muttering as she marched off down the road with a white sock, "It could have been worse, it could have been worse." You never know how your children will react to a crisis until it happens--how nice that they didn't fall apart (as, at critical moments, old movies used to show women doing--a cliché that irritated me no end).

Hal knows how much worse it could have been. I bet he'd be shocked could he have seen how quickly I forgot how lucky I was and how much time I spent examining my face in the mirror, pushing at the nose, measuring nose to cheekbone, cutting my hair, buying a wig...  A perfectly good face really, but was it mine? was it the face I wanted? That was not a happy state of mind, no more than the time Alex gave me a cheque for some much needed livingroom furniture and I went around for two weeks in a haze of house-beautiful decorating schemes. Wanting more and more, and liking whatever I had--liking myself--less and less. The face-beautiful bit was just as empty. So I was glad, in a way, when the doctors stopped messing about with it.

"It's pulled together," says Alex. "Time helps." Or does it only blur his vision? I watch the youngsters racing past me and wonder if, at forty, time is still on my side.

And where is Hal eating? He could have been here. Ah, it's so easy to make these gestures of independence and so hard to live with them afterwards. People believe what I say instead of what I want them to hear but am too proud to say out loud. Stay with me. Talk with me. Will Hal and I ever talk freely to one another again? Probably not. I feel so awkward, such a fallen idol around him . . .

The wine must be making me maudlin. Saving half the bottle and a bit of Camembert for later, I drift down to the book stalls along the Seine and argue Watergate with a cynical old bookseller, who says that like all Americans I'm a hopeless idéaliste.

Across to the gardens of the Tuileries, where twenty years ago I met an old lady promenading her pet hen. The authorities hadn't thought to pass a law against this bizarre pastime. They have, however, thought to legislate against playing music in the parks. Défense-de-jouer-dans-les-parcs, says a fussy gendarme to the boy with a guitar, although God knows, these sterile, raked-to-death gardens where people sit like statues could stand some livening up!

The Louvre, I see, is thronged with camera-laden tourists, but I do not join them. I can't muster any enthusiasm for museums. The past wearies me today, and I would break free, if I could, from its cold grip. I am searching for life in France, for something high flying and free, a lost, vital part of me. But the longer I tramp around Paris the more bedraggled, the more anonymous, the more lost I feel. I see myself reflected in dirty shop windows and in the blank stares of hurrying pedestrians--as another harried tourist. Paris isn't helping--it's time to flee to the provinces.

And to leave Hal, with whom I slump into familiar English and familiar arguments. "Why don't you teach Mary and Jill yourself?" he asks, when I complain about their French instruction in school.

  "I tried, and I think they resented it . . ."

  "Nonsense! You must try harder." He will accept no excuses; he thinks I can do anything. Yes, I knew there was a reason why I didn't marry Hal. He always wanted the impossible from me, and we would surely have fought as we are fighting now. I really find Maria mbetter anyway; how does she put up with his Utopian idealism? Hal irritates me to death. And yet I look for something in his eyes: a reflection of my-self, a bright image of what I should be. And all I see is an aging enfant terrible

Out to a school program this evening with Hal and the three children. "La Source" is a progressive private school with strong traditional French underpinnings--a happy blend of creative energy and clear, structured thought. I'm truly impressed, even envious for my own four. Also illogically and unreasonably depressed. How else could I be visiting the Hartmans except as a friend-of-the-family? How natural that Hal and I should be seated in the packed auditorium with two of his children on our laps. And how wrong it all feels! To watch Hal's hand stroking Amy's rounded arm, her long black hair brushing his cheek. As mine brushed it when we sat in the middle of the festival crowd and were alone together. Hell, Jean, do you want to stir that up again? No, no, of course not! Just to know that I could . . .

Tomorrow I will take to the road again. I've arranged to meet Maria on Saturday in a meadow near Vierzon (100 kilometers south of here) for my first French folk festival. But I'll be heading westward first toward Normandy and Brittany, which means away from the festival site. Lousy logistics, but I cannot stay here any longer.

              ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's a health to the blackbird in the bush

 And likewise to the merry, merry doe;

  If you'll come along with me

  Under yonder flowering tree,

I might catch you a small bird or two, bird or two;

I might catch you a small bird or two.

    (English trad.)

 

Roaming the Normandy countryside and learning to cope with its  hazards

 

Wednesday, May 29

Out to Porte de Saint-Cloud by bus for the main road west. Then a bit of walking--pack and dulcimer light on my back, the warm sun on my face--to a spot where I can start hitchhiking. As I recall, this is an important part of intelligent autostop: to find a road important enough for cross-country traffic, but where cars are sufficiently slowed that drivers can safely stop on impulse. Also where one isn't competing with other autostoppeurs. Unfortunately the last condition often conflicts with the first two; but I've always considered it both discourteous and poor strategy to crowd the competition, even if that means staking out less than favorable territory for myself. Now it means that I must tramp past two youths rooted to bulging packs and up a long hill. The narrow shoulder vanishes as the road disappears into a tunnel--not a promising hitching spot at all.

A truck pulls over almost at once, though, and a brawny arm tosses my pack to the rear. We haven't gone 100 meters before it becomes clear that it's fun and games again. My driver, a handsome and cocky young man, seems interested only in my sex and nationality--in adding une Americaine to a long list of easy conquests. Yes, the tawny hair does indeed curl beautifully over the nape of your neck, but I don't really want to run my fingers through it. Could I have my hand back, please? That was a mistake, as his hand is now free to wander (a good thing I'm wearing blue jeans!). We drive slower and slower; my companion describes "girls I have laid" and hints of extraordinary sexual endowment, using words I have never heard before, or at least not in this way. "Ton petit chat"--that's "your little cat" of course or . . . My, what a fascinating linguistic coincidence that English and French should use the same smutty words, and dear me, what a dreadful turn our talk is taking! Should I pretend not to understand? Oh no--then he'd try to show me!

We grind to a halt in deserted, faintly rolling Normandy farmland. Grabbing my gear, I jump down. He does too. He pushes his fleshy face into mine and forces a kiss on my lips, then releases me. "You know I could have had you," he sneers, and swaggers back to the truck. A perfect pig of a man! I wipe his kiss off with my shirtsleeve and assess my situation--alone on a long, straight stretch of fast road. A chateau converted into a hospital is on one side of the road, a field of enormous French swine, white and floppy eared, on the other. Another unpromising stand, and this time a long, long wait. What a stupid place to get out of the truck, not that I had much choice in the matter! Solitary picnicking and dulcimer playing by the roadside isn't what I came to France for, I hope . .

I walk on, and a small car brakes. The trim, black-mustached driver is much civilized than my last one (more typically French, I tell myself) and gracefully accepts the fact that I don't want to flirter. The word evidently has a stronger meaning in French, and I decide that it saves a lot of trouble to get some things straight from the start. Am I getting better at explaining my mixed-up bourgeois-bohemian mentality? In any case my Paris flic (his dark blue uniform is neatly folded on the back seat) becomes very good company and manages, without abandoning his flattering interest in me, to talk about. something other than 1'amour. Would my teenage daughters be wise to travel like this? "No-o," I say, and he agrees: "They might feel pushed into things they're not ready for.  Girls need time to ripen." (A comforting sentiment for forty!) And what effect does wearing a uniform have on him? "I feel bolder," he says. Indeed? "Yes, men are always on the make," ("dragging" is how it's expressed in French slang) "and a disguise frees me ... ." 1'll have to remember that!

This conversation, oddly enough, makes me much more aware of my sex than the conversation that centered on it. My new driver sympathizes with the trucker's intentions, of course. But he considers the man rather stupid to have persisted so crudely, thus depriving himself of "your charming company." And making up for his ungallant compatriot, he conveys me four kilometers out of his way to the small, white-walled Alençon-Damigny hostel. A wonderful princess style of arrival, but I wonder if it's quite in the spirit of youth hosteling (theoretically restricted to active travelers). Is it enough to carry my pack from car to hostel door?

Into a hallway plastered with scenic posters of France, deserted kitchen and rec room on one side, the père aubergiste's office on the other. He looks the same age as the boys he's arranging to rent horses for. (Some hostels cater to sports appropriate to the region; this one evidently goes in for chevauchées champêtres.) Taking my card, he casually waves me on up the narrow staircase to the dormitories.

According to hostel regulations, there're separate ones for filles et garçons--just as the hostel doors are supposed to close firmly at 11 PM. But this is France, where I recall that rules and regulations are often blithely ignored, especially by swinging young "hostel fathers." And that wave of the arm was marvelously vague.

Upstairs.I pass through a large cot-filled room where a bearded hosteler is already sacked out. Then through a washroom with hot water and showers and flush toilets. This must be an 8 fr. auberge bien amenagée, then, as opposed to the ordinary cold-water hostel costing 6.50 a night. (And what on earth does the YH literature mean by a 5 fr. simple relais? One where you fetch water from a well or a spring?) A small room under the eaves is next--four cots squeezed under the slanted ceiling, two already with packs on them. Is this the dortoir des filles? Peeking into a pack doesn't tell me a thing. I hate to ask--and be laughed at for my Anglo-Saxon prudery--but I don't want to shock some American or German Boy Scouts by waking up among them in the dortoir des garçons next morning. That could easily happen if I go exploring and return late at night to a darkened dorm.

But the boy in the other room--an American hitchhiker--revives and says he's seen girls passing through. So I claim a cot and leave him nursing sore feet. "A hell of a lot of walking today;" he complains--the problem of being a bearded male?

A lot of hostels are on the outskirts of a big town like this. From the village of Damigny it's a two-kilometer walk past unexciting urban sprawl to the shops and cafes of Alençon. On the other side of the village, however, stone and mortar soon peter out in green fields, orchards and woods, with dark hills rising in the distance. A lure to my cramped leg muscles. And I love the magical hours of early evening, when the hedgerows are alive with birds. (Very frustrating to envision my Peterson's bird guide sitting uselessly on the bookshelf at home.)

Back to the roadside, where a pretty blond woman offers me a lift to the Forêt d'Ecouves, seven kilometers off. And invites me into her peak-roofed, parquet-floored new home on the edge of the forest. She tells me about horse farms in the area and looks at pictures of my children. Not the sort of thing I go shoving at strangers as a rule--in fact I don't usually carry them with me--but I'm beginning to feel that I need some proof of motherhood. I say I have four children; I'm not missing them, though, or worrying about them. And nobody's trying to make me feel guilty about leaving them either!

"They will appreciate you all the more when you return," She goes on to tell me how happy she was to move out of Paris three years ago. No happier than I was to get out of it this morning! I don't suppose that running away to the woods really solves anything, but I'm breathing more freely, feeling more buoyant already, as she shows me the path leading up to the forested hills. "I have supper to make now--belle promenade!" She waves and turns back.

Ah, not having to think about supper, just giving myself over to the mysterious twilit forest. Lovely! Packless and lightfooted, I ramble up past a woodland pond and through an oak woods where night birds are calling . . . along a footpath lined with fern and foxglove, two pinafored children skittering away from my strange presence . . . past the forester's cottage and out onto a dirt road. Inside walled courtyards the farms are teeming with life too: not the scurrying, hidden life of the woods, but the reassuring domesticity of barnyard fowl--chickens, turkeys, guinea fowl, ducks and geese--of kittens and watchdogs, rabbits in cages and children playing before bedtime. I wave to a small boy on top of a haystack.

     "ca va, mon petit?"

     "Je suis indien!" he calls defiantly back. Of course. How insulting of me to call an Indian brave "mon petit"! (Indians play the favored role in France, always beating "les cowboys.") I should have known that he'd be in his fantasy world too.

Could I stay on one of these farms? Sleep in a featherbed and drink creamy milk? I ask a woman in the next village, who says that no one takes in paying guests except regular inns. No bed-and-breakfasts here as in England. I give up the idea reluctantly, for there is something special about this land below the brooding forest. The Normandy cows--handsome beasts with their shapely heads and comical dark eye blotches--seem more frolicsome than ordinary cattle. Or is it the magic of the hour? The orchards are filled with apple blossoms, and hawthorn, pink and white, flowers along the roadside. I hear a cuckoo calling from the woods and turtle doves cooing; two partridges explode into the air at my feet.

Hunger and darkness finally send me back to the town of Alençon, riding with two local boys who suggest a cafe-bar for inexpensive food. It also has a jukebox and noisy bowling alley on one side. Not the ideal place for eavesdropping (Hal did say I should listen more), but the kitchen staff is helpful; they confer over my sprig of pink hawthorn until someone pronounces it aubépine. And for 11 fr. they feed me bifsteack (that's just how it's spelled on the menu), frites (chunkier than "french fries"), salad (not the tasteless iceberg, which I've never seen in France, but something more like Bibb or Boston lettuce), bread, cheese, fruit and wine. Standard restaurant fare, and it tastes great. Someone else, not me, has taken pains over this banal meal, and the world on a well filled stomach seems a fine place.

Wandering homeward, I fall in with a group of Dutch tourists who've been living it up--and who greet another German-speaking tourist with open arms, "You like to dance; fraulein?" asks a reeling, middle-aged Dutchman. I love to dance, but do not take this for a serious invitation until a motherly, gray-haired woman draws me aside. "Do you want to spend the night with him?" she asks with a perfectly straight face. A broadminded wife, apparently, who's willing to indulge her husband in a bit of holiday sin. Good grief, no! Surprised to discover that beneath my gypsy ways lies a very proper hausfrau, she grins approvingly at the joke on her foolish spouse; and exchanging chummy confidences, we steer him back to their hotel. "Tanzen," he whispers in my ear, still set on dancing (and sex). She, meanwhile, toys with the wonderful new idea of leaving both her teenage children and her husband at home the next time she travels. What a subversive influence I seem to be having on European family life!

Gallivanting about the city streets with the Dutch merrymakers has completely messed up my sense of direction; I'm alone now in a dark and deserted town. I love walking in the dark, but I'd also like to find the bed that awaits me somewhere, two kilometers away. (Since the père aubergiste is young, I trust he will not have locked me out.) At an all-night garage I finally get directions to Damigny and, walking along the moonlit wooded roadside, even get a lift with a somewhat startled Frenchman. "It isn't every day I find a roadside nymph," says the handsome computer analyst. He listens with a smile to my dim-witted explanation for midnight wandering--I blame it on that long, bewitching twilight--and assures me that I am not scatterbrained at all, but utterly charming. And that au clair de la lune is also a magical time. . .

By the light of the full moon, I am strangely tempted. Drawn to unexplored, illicit delights. I'm seduced without a touch--by a caress of the voice, a curve of the lips, a play of flattering phrases . But the ride is a short one; and soon, with a desperate grip on virtuous thoughts (and also a prosaic desire for sleep) I retreat through the white hostel door.

Thursday, May 30

A desire for what?  Of course I didn't sleep!  Instead I squirmed in the narrow "sleeping sheet" and thought about the man who'd said nothing I couldn't have repeated in an eighteenth-century drawingroom, who'd proposed nothing as concrete as 1'amour. And yet I knew that he'd wanted to make love to me; and, caught in the gossamer web of his half-uttered thoughts and veiled desires, I tried to imagine him doing it. His hands, his lips... God, why had I been such a fool? Was I confusing virtue with an old habit of saying "no"? I might just as well have let him introduce me to that "moonlight magic" as to spend the night in fatiguing, unfaithful and oh-so-frustrating fantasy. Damn, damn, damn!

I doze off at dawn and awaken hours later to an empty room. My roommates, whom I've never seen but must have bumped past in the dark, are evidently wholesome, early rising types--already on the road while I'm still coming to life in a hot shower. A coed shower, I presume, since this washroom serves both dorms. Somehow it doesn'seem a terribly important point.

Last night I walked in on a group of carousing German boys. They're carrying food out to the long tables for a communal hostel breakfast now. The père aubergiste joins us, and conversation wavers confusingly between two languages as I smear butter and jam on inch-thick slices of crusty bread. And pour hot milk and hot coffee {there are also pitchers of hot chocolate) into my bowl. A bowl and not a cup is what we all drink out of--it holds more. And I drink bowlfuls of café au lait.

"Wie fährt man denn hin . . ?" The Frenchman looks blankly at me and says he doesn't speak any German. Wasn't I speaking French to him just now? I reconstruct my words and realize that I wasn't. Oh dear, I have a way of doing that: rattling on in the wrong language, calling people by the wrong names, misconnecting in how many other little ways? And then wondering why I am misunderstood. Perhaps this business of listening is more complicated than I thought. Listening as I talk, hearing myself as others hear me--I have a feeling it will hurt.

To stay here or to push on? Undecided, I pay up (3 fr. for breakfast, 8 fr. for the night) and shoulder my pack. With the poncho on top--I don't trust those clouds--I'm off to search for Percherons. For I love the brawny beauty of draft horses. I've watched them rolling in the morning dew and galloping free (as young stallions) in the Austrian Alps; cheered them laboring to budge a thousand pound sledge in a county fair "pony pull"--straining forward with bowed necks and bulging haunches, sinking to their knees while they strive as no tractor will ever strive. And the horses that originated in the hills of le Perche not far from here have a very special appeal. The story goes that they have a hint of Arabian blood from horses the Crusaders brought back--a heritage shown in their clean limbs and the (preferred) dapple-gray coats.

"There aren't many left; tractors are cheaper," says my first driver of the day, a local veterinarian, clad in rain slicker and boots. He shares my enthusiasm for the vanishing big horses and invites me to come along on one of his morning visits. What luck! And how strange to enter a farm courtyard on legitimate business. I shake hands with the well-fed farmer and his lanky Irish groom, then watch a sick foal receive an injection while the groom restrains the agitated mare. Traces of an old Roman road lead us to the pasture, where the vet examines a Percheron mare (she lost her last foal, and the farmer says he won't breed her again), standing immovable as a black rock. "Bouge un peu!" He slaps her rump, and she takes a single step. Perhaps after all, stallions would be more exciting.

My friendly vet agrees, and he maps out a route for me through the Forêt d'Ecouves to a central stud farm. Not the way he's going--but by a scenic side road which will be more fun, he says. If I'm a good walker.

"Oh yes, I am, monsieur!" I wave goodbye and shed my sweater before starting a long climb through stands of mixed hardwoods, splashed now and again with stubby yellow gorse. Up and up. The pack feels twice as heavy now; the shirt sticks to my back, the jeans to my legs. I detour to a spine of rocks looking out over the tree-tops and unbutton my shirt to let the wind blow me dry. Ah! Now down, down to the village of Fontenay-des-Louvets--to apple blossoms and ruminating cows beneath billowing clouds, the forest continuing hazily on the far side of the stone cottages.

A square Norman bell tower is ringing out the noon hour as I descend; I'd love to stop and eat in this perfect spot. But the villagers answer my questions with closed faces and monosyllabic grunts; they're no help at all on the subject of food. The few drivers who pass seem equally suspicious of a solitary walker (especially a female walker?). Even the clouds turn a leaden gray, and a fine drizzle falls as I quicken my pace through the next deserted village. Its inhabitants, lucky dogs, must be all indoors eating their noonday meal.

This is turning into one hell of a day! The rain really pelting down now, I retire into a farm shed to pull out the poncho and try to drape it over me and my gear. A difficult maneuver to execute singlehanded. I finally turn to an old man who's been watching from the open farmhouse door and ask if he can help me please. The hard mask cracks. "Of course, ma petite, but you will take a glass of refreshment first?" He frees me from my dripping gear and motions me into the kitchen, where people are eating around an oilcloth-covered table.

"Refreshment" indeed! I start with home-brewed cider--like captured golden sun-light in the decanter--and go on to soup. The farmer's wife hesitates at first to offer me their plain peasant fare. "C'est b'en dur," she warns as I take one of the enormous chicken legs. And "tough" is right; these free-ranging fowl must get a lot of exercise! But I'm hungry and obviously appreciative. (In fact, I prefer her round brown pain de campagne to the baguettes of white town bread.) "Mangez, mangez, ma petite!" She urges me to finish the frites and the salad, to take a larger piece of cheese, another glass of wine, some "pudding". . .

I eat and bask in a flow of unintelligible conversation, for they speak dialect here when they're not making an effort to speak "proper French" to me. I gather that the two hired hands, in from the fields in high boots and breeches, are discussing a car accident. (A two-car accident--on this lonely road?) Pictures of three handsome boys look down from the wall. "Our sons," says madame. They've all left the farm to pursue professional careers (so much for the myth of the locked-in-his-class French peasant!) and the youngest, still a student, is now hitchhiking around England. I bring out pictures of my children next, and the men proclaim my daughters "ravissantes." But "quat' enfants!" exclaims the woman as she shows me back to the toilette (a simple hole in the floor). Her own girlhood buried in heavy flesh, she cannot quite see me as mother-of-four.

By two o'clock the field hands have tramped back to their chores and the Normandy countryside has regained its pastoral charm. Wonderful what a little food and drink will do! I'm all ready for another hike, possibly in the rain again, but the farmer insists on driving me to the main highway. For "no one will ever pick you up on this back road." He wouldn't have picked me up. And I'm beginning to understand why. I'm a stranger--or I was a stranger until the poncho maneuver--and the countryman's fear of strangers cannot be overcome with a brash gesture, or with brash questions either. Did I talk too fast and too loud when I asked for help earlier? There's obviously an art to approaching people--and maybe not only French peasants--that I need to learn. Not to impose myself on them. Or, as my supervising teacher put it, not to be always "coming on at a mile a minute." Oh dear.

No problem getting a lift on the highway, and I'm soon speeding past white-fenced paddocks to the state-run stud farm of "le Haras du Pin." Good grief, is this what my vet was talking about? I pictured something along the lines of our county agricultural stations, not a palace of a stables built over 300 years ago under Louis XIV. And I pictured a few more horses in it. At the moment most of the stallions are dispersed around the countryside, "doing their work," says an official guide. He leads a group of us sightseers past magnificent carriages, gilded trappings, impressive trophies. And one lone Percheron stallion. The beautiful four-year-old dapple-gray with snowy mane and melting dark eyes is called Espoir; does that mean "hope" for the race?

My map shows a hostel in the town of Vire toward the coast, so I start hitching again in the rain. And mostly in trucks, which have the great advantage of high seats. So as we pass through close-faced villages, I can spy into orchards and gardens and farm courtyards right in town. I love these gray stone walls that shelter espaliered fruit trees and climbing roses.  That's France, I think: the hard facade and the hidden warmth. A challenge to the visiting foreigner!

The land is getting rockier and hillier now, the farms smaller, and towards six o'clock I see cows everywhere being milked by hand. "Do you want to stop?" asks my black routier from the Antilles. Obliging of him, but do we have time? "I'm staying in Vire tonight too--my last delivery." Oh. He pulls over, and we walk into a hummocky pasture to chat with an old woman seated on a one-legged wooden milking stool and surrounded by her Normandy cows. To my mind they're a more beautiful breed than the bony-faced Holstein, but to the old woman all cows are the same bovine tyrants. "We're slaves to the cows," she says. And the young people are fleeing to the towns.

Vire is an old fortress town on a hilltop. My driver delivers his packages and then tries very hard to find the hostel for me. But nobody seems to know anything about it. Most odd! Three times we labor up and down the same steep hill before I catch sight of a small YH sign. "That's it! Thank you so much for all the trouble you've taken--yes, I'm sure I'll be fine here--au revoir, monsieur." And I wave him gaily off.

It's starting to rain again, and I'm not nearly as sure as I act. Especially when I find the door to this strangely deserted hostel locked. I knock, and it opens a crack. "L'auberge de la jeunesse?"--"C'est fermé." But how can a hostel be closed, I protest as the rain comes down harder. There's a whispered consultation behind the door; then it opens all the way. "Entrez, entrez."

   "Are you hungry?" asks the blond young man whe seems to be in charge here. The two girls stare at me, and over a meal of sorts--no one is going out for food in this weather--we find out about each other. Michel has the key to the place because he has an engineering job in town and official permission to lodge in a closed hostel. (Oh yes, if I'd checked my YH literature, I'd have seen that Vire is a "peak season" hostel, open only in July and August.)

   "And what are you doing here?" ask the girls (Michel unlocked the door for them a little earlier, and perhaps a little more eagerly, than he did for me). Traveling in France to improve my French, I tell them. "I've just finished my teacher training." Do I even mention family? Somehow it doesn't seem like the time to establish myself as mère de famille.        

   "We're studying science at the University of Caen," says the older girl.

   "Not languages, so it's a good thing you speak French," adds Isabelle. Or "Isalaide," as she introduces herself with a giggle. "Isa-ugly," with her dimpled face and long black hair? Hardly. She doesn't have Martine's self-assured good looks, though, and "Isabelle" is certainly too staid and respectable a name for her tonight.

What a night of thunder and lightning, torrential rains and giddy hilarity! First our skimpy meal, to which I contribute margarine and cheese and dry bread; then a sooty struggle to clean out the blocked pipe of a potbellied little black stove. It's the least we can do for him, says Michel, after invading his lodgings like this; to show some housewifely zeal and light him a fire. It's freezing in here! "Travaille, fille de chambre," he chides Isebelle, who giggles again as she shows me her grimy arms,. A flibbertigibbet chambermaid indeed! We seem to be spurring one another on, like a couple of schoolgirls, to heights of silliness: she and I, the youngest and the oldest here. Michel and Martine share our merriment, but I think they regard me, at least, with some puzzlement.

When the stove is ready for fuel, Michel fetches coal from a bin by the back door while Isabelle and I find kindling stashed away next to the toilet. (It flushes with a roar of gushing water when she pulls the cord, and a thunderclap explodes simultaneously overhead--God, what have we done now?) We light a match, and smoke billows into the kitchen; Michel adjusts the damper and blows feeble flames into a red-hot blaze. Ah, glorious warmth!

Our resident engineer has already got a proper bed set up next to the warm kitchen;. it collapses only if you sit on the edge. So Isabelle and I investigate the "dormitory," an icebox of a room in which the stove sits disconnected from the stovepipe and iron cots are jammed up hard against one another. Crawling over this log-jam of cots, we extract a heap of mattresses and blankets--for we've no intention of sleeping here. Much cozier on the kitchen floor by a crackling fire. But is this quite what someone had in mind when he described youth hostels as places "où règne une ambiance sans façons et détendue"? I read that sentence out loud, and Isabelle and I both collapse in helpless laughter. "Casual and relaxed"--the YH literature really is a masterpiece of understated wit!

It's a long time since I felt so silly sixteenish. Not since I was twenty and filching cookies from the college kitchen by climbing through the transom. Or looking for mischief on board ship (they hadn't told me not to climb up the mast to the crow's nest, and it was a marvelous, swaying view up there). But perhaps I'm regressing too far in this business of recapturing "lost youth"; certainly Martine and Michel, talking together with an occasional glance at me, don't think that I'm acting my age. I wish I knew what they were saying...

 

Friday, May 31

To the steady drumbeat of raindrops on the roof, we pile mattresses back onto cots, breakfast on dry bread and café au lait made with powdered coffee and my tube of sweetened condensed milk, and watch Michel set off for work. Leaving "his women" to do a stack of dirty dishes. That's fine with us. Last night we were in no mood to scrape pans and wait for water to heat on the two-burner cookstove. but now it's a way of putting off going out into the rain.

Whither today? Martine and Isabelle are waiting for clear skies, but I decide to push on, knowing full well that tomorrow I'll have a long dash back eastward (to the festival). Bother this rain! I slosh past children skipping puddles on their way to school, satchels strapped to their backs; past a small truck filled with fresh caught fish, the hardy sole palpitating like brown autumn leaves. In a loud and, to me, unintelligible voice, le poissonier cries out his wares, and the housewives come running. How handy for them! "The supermarché is cheaper, yes, madame," says a woman as she counts her francs, "but this fish is brought in on the morning tide, you see..."

Three rides in quick succession, and each time, before I can even take off the pack, I must extricate myself from the clinging poncho while my driver waits. Embarrassing--and dangerous, too, because the drivers don't always pull off the road. A university prof on his way to morning classes, a trucker transporting cement to Brittany, and finally two Frenchwomen on holiday. They're driving to the coast--and right across the causeway to the island fortress of Mont-Saint-Michel.

A single narrow cobblestoned street, jammed with chattering tourists and chintzy little shops all selling the same stereotyped souvenirs, winds up and up, turning into an irregular stairway. ("I've counted a hundred steps so far," wails an English voice.) My pack and dulcimer keep bumping people here, and I happily shrug them off for a guided tour of the abbey at the top of the rock. There are, of course, English speaking guides, but in the interest of linguistic immersion I choose a trench-coated French guide, who tramps us up and down three storeys of what was at different times and in different circumstances abbey, fortress and prison. He rattles off names and dates spanning over a thousand years; and my mind, always slow on numbers, is generally a century behind him. Should I have bought one of the booklets on Mont-Saint-Michel's history from the souvenir stand outside? Instead, two rousing ecological calls-to-save (or as the French put it, "not to destroy any longer") caught my eye. I couldn't decide between N'abîmons plus nos terres and N'abîmons plus nos rivages, and so I bought them both, leaving my caverns of historical ignorance undisturbed.

"Alors, madame," says the guide, pulling me away from a cloister garden high above the sea. Mist drifts across the arcaded cloister walkway, while coral bells and Christmas ferns embroider a low box hedge around a square of delicate grass and tiny pink and white daisies. Do they mow it or snip it by hand? I wonder. "I cannot say, madame; I do not concern myself with the gardening arrangements here."  (As usual I'm asking wrong questions. Gardening questions belong on garden tours.)

And of course he doesn't take us to the chapel of Saint-Aubert, although he mentions the founding saint's arrival on the rock in 700 A.D. (Aha, I got that one!)  So I slip out of the town walls by myself and clamber to a mustard-tinted, lichen-covered point where the saint's effigy stands atop a sturdy chapel. Praying, or perhaps merely looking at the riot of pink and yellow rock flowers below. Tourists, who've already routed the monks from their "sanctuary" above, don't generally penetrate this far. But the waves clearly do, and a fine gray sand covers the steps leading up to the rounded chapel door. It's locked.

Do I wait here for the waves to come racing in "with the speed of galloping horses"?  The tide is out, exposing a depressing expanse of gray. And tiny sand flies are biting. Our guide said that the old saying was a slight exaggeration; and anyway, doesn't the tide come in just as fast down the coast at Saint-Malo? Besides, damnit, I'm hungry, and Mont-Saint-Michel is no place for an honest meal. In fact, I'm afraid it's one of the places I felt I "ought" to see and, having seen, can now cross off my mind. Like sugar or flour from a shopping list. What an uninspired spirit!

So it's back across the causeway with a stiff wind in my face, gulls screaming overhead and an occasional backward glance at those storybook spires that from a proper distance really are an incredible sight. But everything is making me think of food now, especially the fat sheep grazing on the salt meadows of the mainland. As I remember from French class, they're called prés salés and much esteemed for their tasty flesh...

A car stops, white (honeymooners') ribbon fluttering from the door handle. My luck again! This couple is on their way to Saint-Malo. And radiating goodwill--"Oh haven't you eaten yet?"--they pull over to a country inn, where, too late for lunch, I order casse-croute. The new husband orders a bottle of Breton cider, which I drink up while he caresses the friendly assistant--a furry German shepherd. . . "Ton pantalon, cherie," murmurs the bride, looking at the sprinkling of tan hair on her husband's neatly pressed blue trousers. Ah, a caring but not a nagging wife. Except for their youthfulness, they give the impression of having been married for years. None of my romantic giddiness, but perhaps that is all to the good. (If Alex and I had been less "in love" and better friends--yes, and better enemies too!--would there be this gulf between us today? If I'd stood up for my right to be upset without being called a "mental case," fought fair and square instead of storing up festering grudges, never giving Alex a second chance to hurt me . .)

We take a secondary road hugging the coast now, past abandoned windmills (with their "wings" removed sometimes converted into modish dwellings) and thatch-roofed cottages in various stages of decay. One roof looks brand new; the owners must be rich to be able to pay for fire insurance, says my driver.

Through an open portal in the walls of Saint-Malo--very constrictive to modern traffic--and into the inner city where I leave the newlyweds. . . Walking on top of the city walls. I look out over the tide that must have sneaked in when I wasn't looking and down on a town filled with hotels and candy shops, bars and restaurants. Perhaps the port will be more exciting. But the port, too, is a disappointment. It's a modern, efficient facility, and the only fishing boats that put out from here are factory ships that stay out for months on end and return with their holds full of poisson congelé. True, I buy frozen fish at home and thus support the new technology--but how sad to see the traditional hunting of the seas turned into a programmed massacre, leaving nothing for the gulls or the human eye to feast upon. And precious few fish in the sea--"We have to go farther and farther each year," says a blue-capped sailor.

What a depressing effect this town is having on me! Am I running out of steam already? Now I remember the woman on the edge of the Foret d'Ecouves--"Come back if you have time," she said, and why didn't I? What is this urge to go on to new places and new people but an effort to escape to escape my own discontents? It isn't working.  And I'm running out of clean clothes too. Will the youth hostel have hot water? I ask directions from a local resident, who takes his car out to drive me to a perfect Hilton of a hostel on the edge of town, banners flying from tall iron gates, a courtyard full of packs and kids waiting for it to open--as it does on the button, at 5 PM (the gates close promptly too, at 11, and yes, there's hot water).

Assigned to a six-bunk room with two French and two Canadian girls, I ask the Canadians where they learned their fluent (but strangely accented) French.  "C'est notre langue maternelle." Oops!  None of us cares for the aggressively cheerful music which the management insists on piping into our rooms, and we agree that this place is excessively règlementé.  Still, it's nice to shower, shampoo my hair and wash my dirty clothes in the wash basin. Will the pants be dry by tomorrow morning if I hang them outside? . . . The 9-fr. dinner served in the large dining hall includes beer--which I've never learned to like--and of course no clean-up duties; employees do it all here, with an institutional-size dishwasher.

Ebb tide at 9:00 P.M., so in windbreaker and skirt (an unwashed and therefore dry garment) I cross the broad beach to explore tidewater pools. Too wet for shoes, uncomfortably cold barefoot. I meet a wild-haired woman gathering seaweed for her "algae paintings". Also a Great Dane loping along the wet sand on a long lead, with a VW on the other end!. . .

I follow the sands back into Saint-Malo, shoes back on frozen feet now, past sounds of revelry from cafes and hotel bars, snatches of song and laughter. The singing is loud and off-key. Moneyed drunks, I tell myself and draw nearer to the merriment I have no part in, a shut out, envying schoolgirl again. . .
   "Tu veux danser, ma belle?" a man calls from a lit doorway, and I retreat to the shadows, hearing mockery in his voice, suddenly seeing myself as he must see me. Grown women don't behave like this, Jean!  Roaming the streets in search of . . . of what? Something wildly improbable like that moonlight lift two nights ago? Ah, but that was unsought, and unfinished too. Because I was afraid where it would lead me?

A shabby figure has been following me for some time now, whispering and making furtive gestures. "Speak up like a man!" I turn on him in angry French, ashamed of us both and feeling no hints of delight in his tired, inarticulate lusts. No threat either, as I easily outwalk him--my solution to all problems?--and return alone to a sleeping hostel. What a stupid way to spend an evening! I left home to make a pathetic fool of myself like this?

______________________________________________________________________________________

"Dance all night and fiddle all day, That's the soldier's joy they say."
                                                                       (trad. American)

             Festival madness 'mid heather and broom . . .

                                                                                                                  

Saturday,June 1

Up early to begin my trek to the festival. The jeans aren't quite dry, but I pull them on anyway, figuring they'll dry faster on my legs than in the pack. They feel cold and clammy (and are probably picking up all the dirt I washed off) as I tramp down the side of the highway. Obviously the urge to launder should be held in check if I want to stay warm on this trip!

It turns into a day of fair weather and marvelous good fortune, with cars stopping sometimes literally at the snap of a finger. Four hundred kilometers to travel, and I never once feel enslaved to the road.

My first ride drops me off in Vitre, where, trying not to let hitchhiking interfere with a broader view of France, I tour the feudal chateau. And following some distance behind what I take to be a group of well-dressed sightseers, I am about to tag along into a chamber of the adjacent Hotel de Ville when the solemn words, "consentez-vous à prendre cet homme . . ." suddenly register. Good God, an exchange of vows! Unseen (I hope), I beat a hasty retreat and fifteen minutes later find myself in the town square across from an imposing Gothic cathedral. The bells start pealing; is it noon already? No, they're ringing in the marriage that I almost blundered onto. The bride, on her father's arm, walks to the cadence of the bells up the many stone steps. To the church doors where the priest awaits her in robes of white and gold, while the wedding party follows in pairs behind her white train, the bridesmaids in gaily flowered long dresses.
    Why do I feel like crying now, when I never cared for weddings as a girl and considered women who wept at them soppy old fools? Perhaps it's the bright promise that brings back my lost dreams. Is that why women weep at weddings, not for the bride but for themselves?
   

An old lady standing beside me points out the bridegroom in drab black at the foot of the colorful procession. "Just wait," she chuckles. "He comes out where he belongs," married at last in the eyes of both church and state. And the French, with their usual logical tidiness, separate the two rites.

An uphill walk out of Vitre for my next ride, with an attractive auburn-haired mathematics student who's driving to her home in Laval for the Pentecost holiday weekend. She's preparing to teach in the lycée, the same level that I did student teaching at home, but will first have to take a year of education courses. "They're imbéciles," she says; the same in America, I tell her . . .

When we get into Laval at 12:30, it seems like a good time to start civilized autostop--i.e. staying off the road during the hot middle of the day and eating a proper lunch. Can my companion recommend a place in town? "You are welcome to dine with us if you don't mind simple food," she replies. So I clump after her into a sun-filled apartment for a leisurely déjeuner en famille. With her well-groomed, unflappable mother, graying father (home from the office), younger brother (home from the lycée) and bent old grandmother. Maman excuses her efforts as being nothing special, but this repas très simple clearly didn't come out of a can. And of course it requires people all being home at the same time to eat together.

At 2:00 PM papa, who drank wine along with me instead of mineral water with the others, lies down for a nap; daughter goes to the library with a sheaf of notes, and in a euphoric glow I take to the dusty road again. It's very apparent when I reach good hitchhiking territory, where five autostoppeurs have already staked out their claims. The first one says he's been waiting for two hours--horrors!--but perhaps things will move a bit faster for an autostoppeuse. Wishing them all good luck (and first go at the traffic), I walk on and am barely past the last forlorn male when a truck screeches to a halt. I can feel daggers in my back as I scramble up into the van.
   "Why didn't you stop for them?"
   "Bearded men, ah non!"

In spite of this unreasonable prejudice--and I can't talk him out of it--my black-haired (clean-shaven) routier is a very nice man who plays the game of innuendo with grace and skill. And though I explain right away my very proper intentions, he still seems to enjoy our verbal jousts and apologizes profusely for having to continue on to Paris with a load of Breton pork while I branch southward to Orléans. Business, unfortunately, before pleasure. He even points out a shady hitching spot just past the fork. There I can comfortably watch the long lines of cars creeping out of Paris, for the three-day holiday weekend and feel lucky to be traveling in a different direction. (At least, under a white-gloved gendarme's supervision, this traffic is moving. It's not one of the kilometers long bouchons that the radio has been announcing all day.)

I stick out my thumb, and an expensive sports car pulls up. But the blue-suited driver is a taciturn boor, hot hands and sluggish tongue, and the ride is a short one.
   "Alors, on vous laisse là, madame?" he grunts, pointing to the deserted roadside where he proposes to drop me off for my uncooperative spirit.
   Only too happy to be let out anywhere, I thank him ever-so-politely for being "too amiable."  It's not easy to maintain the insouciant air that goes with this sort of sarcasm while struggling to extricate pack and dulcimer from the back seat! But I feel like a favorite of fortune, even if the price I pay for not wanting to be pawed is an unpromising autostop stand--a narrow road squeezed between two straight rows of poplars.

But on this day it doesn't seem to matter where I stand. My next driver, clad in overalls, is a much better conversationalist and also a "lover of nature." I don't think he knows his birds or trees at all, and I decline his invitation for a walk in the woods. Yet we manage to remain good companions, even drinking a glass of wine together after he reaches his garage-cafe.
   "Pas de rancune?" He smiles and clinks my glass. No, of course not. How could I bear him any hard feelings after those ego-bolstering verbal passes? Autostop à la française is beginning to feel like a very fine way to travel indeed.

Only a couple of hundred kilometers more, and now a fast-driving, heavy-set type reels them off with pop music, for a change, instead of conversation. We're traversing la Beauce, the "breadbasket" of France, and its expansive fields of wheat allow long straight stretches of road. A prosperous land but not (at this speed!) a monotonous one. To the north of us rise the spires of Chartres cathedral, which I approached slowly and hungrily twenty years ago and which impressed me tremendously . . But we're too far south for a return pilgrimage, and besides, I'm not interested in retracing actual footsteps in the past; it's their blithe spirit I am reviving today--when it really does seem as if I can accomplish any goal I set my mind to.

I part with my rapid transit at the Orléans bypass. A tricky spot for hitching: heavily trafficked and high speed. Most cars couldn't stop even if they wanted to, but a puttering old VW has no trouble, and the three shaggy students who pile out tell me they're on their way to "la Couturanderie," as the festival site is called. Hurrah! "Don't get your hopes up--the old crate may not make it that far." But of course it will, I assure them, now that they have my good fortune with them!

"Tu fumes du marijuana?" asks the tall skinny one, and I feebly explain that, no, I never learned to smoke at all. But everyone at French festivals does, they insist.  Does this mean that I'll be stumbling over a lot of inert bodies later on in the evening? Well, at least they're moving now.

We're passed by every other car on the road, and our pokey speed lets me appreciate a new landscape--a flat country of pine and birch woods, of heather and fern, ponds and marshes and variegated fields. "La Sologne," one of the students calls it, and I rack my brains trying to fit it into my fuzzy mental picture of the old French provinces. Like Normandy and Brittany and the Auvergne, all broken into départements almost 200 years ago but still alive and kicking in French minds. And la Sologne? "It's just a name," he says. Oh, how pedantic of me to think that everything has to fit into the same grand scheme of things. Perhaps I belong in the university, after all. Oh dear.

"Tu n'es pas pressée?" No, I'm not rushed. Befuddled on my geography but confident of reaching the festival meadow only 20 kilometers away, I feel I have all the time in the world. By all means, let's stop for refreshment. We pull over to the curb, and another beat up VW comes to a screeching halt beside us--Paul and Elise, festival-bound fellow students from the University of Paris, who join us in a sidewalk cafe. For coffee, which Paul, red-eyed from lack of sleep, needs desperately. He says he stayed up all night writing a paper so that he could leave for the festival today. 

Elise, in jeans and full sleeved peasant blouse, looks at me with curiosity. "Une autostoppeuse américaine," says someone. "Elle joue au dulcimer." Ah, so that explains me. And now for a peaceful hour in the cafe, listening to the students' rapid-fire slang and to church bells ringing out another wedding. (Yes, Saturday is wedding day in France.)  It's a good thing we met Paul and Elise because the others confess some uncertainty about how to proceed on to la Couturanderie. But Paul says he knows the way. If he can stay awake.

"En route pour le festival!" With the sun dropping, we squeeze back into the VW and rattle off the remaining kilometers to Vierzon, where we leave the highway and follow a narrow woodland lane into a mess of cars and their disgorged contents. For 25 fr. I'm stamped on the wrist and thereby officially admitted to the festival. So waving goodbye to my drivers, who disappear for good into a swarm of pack-, bedroll-and instrument-laden youth, I go looking for Maria. (She said she'd bring along an extra sleeping bag.)

Wandering into the milling meadow, where stage and dance platforms have been erected, and through a couple of sprawling open camping spaces--a familiar scene if I could replace the French with a southern mountain twang (and ignore the variety of food offerings!)--I float from cluster to motley cluster. No Maria. And, more important, no sleeping bag.  How on earth did I expect to find her in this crowd anyway? There must be a thousand people here. . .  Rethinking the problem, I try searching instead for a VW camper with New Jersey license plates; there can't be many of them about.

"Voilà madame!" Yes, here I am, instantly recognized though I've never set eyes on this crew at the back of the VW camper. Maria appears and presents her "old college friend." Perfectly true, I suppose, and so much more suitable than "my husband's old flame." She also hands me a telegram from home: the student exchange for my eldest is all set up for next year. So that's settled. (But how did Alex find the Hartman's address? I didn't exactly hide it from him, but neither did I give it to him; now I wish I had. My behavior must look guilty as hell!)

"Come on, the music's starting," says Maria. We grab tape recorder, blanket and sleeping bag ("You'll need it if that's all you're wearing") and head for the meadow. "Too bad you missed the Breton dancing this afternoon, but you can pick it up this evening. They go on all night."

For Breton songs and dances are enormously popular here.  Especially songs-to-be-danced (chants-à-danser).  Danced partnerless, in circles or long lines, with interlocking little fingers. When sung in Breton, the words are completely unintelligible to me, and to most French people too, for Breton is a Celtic tongue like Gaelic--"and even more like Cornish," says Maria (which doesn't help one bit!). But the crowd loves all things Celtic, from the "Boys of the Loch," who play lilting Scottish-Irish songs and "explain" them in awful fractured French (the comedy effect, I think, is unintended) to a group described on the program as "folk-celtique-Cornish-Breizh" (that last word means "Breton" in the Celtic tongue). The group hails from Lyon, in the south of France, and is lead by a dynamic Cornishman (from the rocky bit of southern England which vies with Brittany for ownership of the Arthurian legend). How confusing! And so is their music--traditional ballads played on jazzy, electrified "folk instruments." A dreadful stick-in-the-mud about some things, I hate people messing about with "my" ballads. And the Cornishman does it so well, which in a way only makes it worse.

Distractions . . . like the boys on the next blanket over, who're very curious about my age and nationality. "Américaine"--that doesn't hurt to tell, though it's fun to make them guess a while. But "quarante ans"?  Ouch! So I answer at last, with corny coquetry, that I am "femme éternelle." Why do people keep asking anyway? Is there a dreadful discrepancy somewhere?

Officially the concert lasts until 1 AM, the dance which follows 'till dawn. But the kids don't wait for the dance platform to be lit; and some of us need to exercise to keep warm! Not me, at first, snuggled in the cozy sleeping bag; but the music makes for itchy feet, and soon I, too, am up on the creaking boards. "Please don't break them yet," beg the loudspeakers. "Un peu moins fort, s'il vous plait!"

A couple of boys start singing American cowboy songs--chilly, undanceable stuff--so I go looking for Maria and the sleeping bag again. Where were we in this sprawl of bodies anyway?  Finally locating our next-blanket-over neighbors, I hear that "Your friend went to put the bag back in the camper." And yes, there it is in the locked camper--my nice warm bed. What now? I wander about, shivering in sweater and windbreaker, and then plop myself down by one of the many campfires. A circle of strangers huddled together for warmth, our faces half revealed in the flickering firelight. And I start crying.

Like a big baby, Jean!  But how stupid! For the colored lights over the platform switch on, and a Breton chant-à-danser starts up. Didn't Maria say something about that? I don't care anymore. I'm too overwhelmed with frustration and loneliness and, yes, a sense of desertion. I wish Hal were here, but he clearly isn't interested in at-tending any more festivals with me. How sane and sensible of him to pack me off with Maria!

And tears unleash a flood of hurting memory. Of the Newport festival ten years back where Hal told me that he still loved me. And apologized: "I knew what you wanted me to be, Jean, and I didn't think it was worth it then. I'm sorry--I should have tried harder." Could he really have willed himself into stardom? Did I really want him changed: narrowed and driven and dedicated?  But yes, oh yes, Hal--you should have tried harder!

Assailed by the insistant, hypnotic rhythms of the Breton dances, I replay that pearly morning when we walked out of town together and imagine the mad, wonderful things we might have done--and gone on to do--if it hadn't been for Amy. (Was that why he brought her along?) Kicking over the traces, running away together--impossible, of course. We were both too damn responsible. But earlier, when we were both free, if I hadn't been such a stiff-necked puritan, such a silly romantic fool. "I didn't think your notions of love were silly at all," Hal assured me in the misty meadow. "I thought they were beautiful." That belated approval is cold comfort to-night, when I can't help wishing he had somehow overridden my resistance and wondering if I would have stayed with him then . . . Wanting his arms around me now, when he no longer wants me. Serves you right, Jean!  You treated him like dirt.

I hug my knees, rocking with the music and remembering . . . Remembering Canada on the eighth day out, how I woke up in the tent I shared with my brother Ned and found myself locked within his muscled brown arm. I couldn't see his face; it was buried in the sweater (the sweater that Solveg had knitted) rolled up for a pillow at the head of his sleeping bag. And he was gripping me as if he would never let me go. I tried to escape at first, but his arm tightened; so I lay very still and in the half light of early dawn dared to make believe that I was another girl--that I was Solveg--and to wonder what it would be like to be her, to be loved like that. . . I lay there a long time, a wondering prisoner, and then as Ned loosened his grip, I slipped away.
   "Did you know you were holding me?" I wanted to ask him all morning. "Who did you think I was?" It was a question as haunting as my brother's gentle strength. For I still feel his arm, a steel vise across my breast--and hours later his hand locked on my ankle as we sink together in the stormy lake, and I kick, I must kick free. Forgive me, Ned. I had to do it . . .

Oh how I ache to be held fast, to share the heartbreaking beauty of the night. This strange night, with its pulsating lines of dancers spilling across the meadow to wind around dying campfires and hunched figures, the music throbbing on and on . . . Yes, to be held, to be loved and to be freed at last from a phantom's embrace. Who can banish him? Not Alex, for I have lain beside him weeping and sensed his bewilderment. And this keening music will not let me forget either.

   "What if, what if?" it wails. That eighth day, on a morning of white clouds scudding across a fresh-washed sky, what if Luke and I had kept in sight of the others?  If we hadn't tossed off our packs in mid-portage to admire the waterfall, so sure that we had worlds of time ahead of us, so carefree and confident--while Ned waited for us on the lakeshore and waved the others off.  If, if, if . . . a futile, bitter word.

A girl stares at me from across the glowing embers. We have exchanged stares and not spoken a word all night long. I wish she would speak to me, so locked in my grief, so unapproachable . . . At dawn, with wisps of wood smoke joining the early morning mist, I stretch my stiff limbs and go bump into Maria. "Where were you?" she asks. "I thought you wanted to dance."

Sunday, June 2

Impossible to sleep later than 8:30--with bright sunshine streaming in, the camp alive with noisy grownups, dogs and small nude children. Except for one tot I ssensibly attired in hat and shoes, period. In spite of the cold nights, the day gets downright hot here, and at the water faucet girls wash up unselfconsciously stripped to the waist--and with no one gawking at them. Curious that the French consider this casual nudity (which Maria says I'd see a lot more of in really scorching heat) to be an American import. Overexposure, perhaps, to pictures of Woodstock?

A young friend of Maria's comes by for a dulcimer session. "Le dulcimer" is apparently all the rage in French folk circles (I saw several in shop windows in Paris). Henri has had his for a year and was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the "expert from Appalachia." Me, in other words! He now teaches me a Breton folk song and an "American air" (Over the Waterfall) which he plays with the melody crossing from string to string. I think he must find my technique of using one melody string and two drone strings pretty primitive (could I get away with calling it ethnic?) but is too nice a boy to say so.

Maria drove down from Paris with a couple who sang together on last night's program, John Wright and Josephine Perrier. John is English, a fierce-looking man with furrowed brow and gruff voice, but the tunes he plays on fiddle or mouth harp are gay and lively. Josephine is French, with untamed black hair falling into dark eyes. A fine Anglo-French partnership, and Maria introduces me to an assortment of their French and English relatives. I meet John's white-haired parents. "A little tiring sometimes, dear, but I do so enjoy seeing different ways of doing things," says the pink-cheeked Mrs. Wright. "This is my first trip to France, you know." Her husband adds that before the next trip he really must brush up on his French. They're camping in style, with cots and folding chairs, and probably retire before midnight--but still, what pluck!

Josephine's older brother, Jean-Paul, is here with his pretty young wife, Marie-Jeanne, and seven-year-old son Roland. We see rather a lot of Roland, who's discovered the camper as a source of food; Maria seems to be operating a sort of commissary from the back of it. Meanwhile Jean-Paul sweats over a fire in the hot sun, turning a spitted gigot. It turns out deliciously different from my mother's lamb-and-mint---the outside charred and the inside flesh still rosy pink, the whole thing washed down with quantities of red wine. From the festival "market" stands, we also have tomatoes, fromage frais (a decided improvement on cottage cheese) and other goodies. The French clearly don't consider a festival any reason to neglect their stomachs!

Ambling barefoot along le chemin du festival, I read the signs for various folk instruments: épinette (native to France and much rarer now than its look-alike, the borrowed dulcimer), cornemuse (yes, bagpipes at a French festival), vielle à roue (the hurdy-gurdy from the Auvergne), guimbarde (the truly pocket-sized mouth harp), accordéon, violon, etc. Of course people don't stay neatly grouped--"hootenany dans la nature" is the official term for the happy melée about me--but at least I find out what the words mean. And discover another nice feature of French festivals: a crèche for young children, which advertises for help on the camp bulletin board, tapping a gentle blow for women's lib ("if papa would lend a helping hand . . .").

Back to the meadow for a "spectacle de danses folkloriques" accompanied by vielle and cornemuse (i.e., what we were sparing the poor platform for.) The costumed dancers perform courtship displays, animal imitations, feats of strength and stamina . . . and look ready to expire in the afternoon heat. We're roasting, just sitting here watching. But when they stop, someone pulls a pennywhistle out of his pocket--"Hey, do you know this one?"--and, gluttons for punishment, we form our own jiggling lines on the turf.

    "Do you go on this way in Brittany?" I gasp to the boy on my right whose finger is locked in mine. His elbows are bent, his wrists up, his arms pumping in a mysterious rhythm that I haven't quite mastered yet (as I can tell by that strained little finger).
     "Even more," he insists. "In the train station, on the platform, into the train . ." He has gone quite mad. And I?  In blue jeans and a clinging knit top, I'm dripping great beads of sweat. A friendly Breton student offers to lend me a lighter top, and we run over to her pack to change. "I hate to dress up in those hot costumes--to make a show of myself for the tourists," she declares.. And the others agree. To hell with the onlookers--we're dancing for ourselves!

Time to prepare for the coming cold, while there's still light to wash off my grimy feet at the water faucet before pulling on socks and boots and another layer of clothes.

Le concert this evening is interrupted with useful tidbits of information: rides back, misplaced people, lost or stolen articles. Someone's sleeping bag has vanished, and the thief is begged to return it to the "bureau of stolen objects." Anything to do with the clown who's been pouncing on other people's bags, examining the protesting contents and crying out, loudly and feelingly, for his 300 fr. duvet? (I don't suppose he's trying to be funny; it's no joke to lose your bed . . .)

The distinction between concert and bal seems a bit academic as the French haven't specialized yet, thank God, into "folk-singers" and "folk-dancers." Besides, the dancers are perfectly capable of providing their own chants à danser. And after last night's emotional binge, what a relief to concentrate on the small, precise steps of these danses bretonnes! (At least, they should be small and precise--"you're bouncing too much," says Maria.)

There are also bourrées from the Auvergne, polkas and walzes. All requiring partners. Will anyone ask me? I hang back, remembering those awful high school affairs where I stood dying to dance and trying to look as if my mind was on higher things. "You ask," says the Breton girl. "We all do at festivals." And it works! Once I get up the nerve--starting with other girls and progressing to men--I wonder why I was acting so silly before. Feeling old and rejected and probably looking it. Middle-aged misery, of course people flee it! But nobody seems to be fleeing me now, and I don't even have to ask anymore . . .

"Oop, watch out for the broken board!" My partner and I stand still for a minute, and the world rocks around us. "Un bateau ivre," I giggle, drunk myself from that last bourrée (a very simple dance once you figure out the direction you're supposed to be spinning in). "Perhaps we should try the grass instead," though it doesn't have the lovely shipboard feeling; it doesn't bounce. . .

The loudspeakers fall silent at dawn. But one group doggedly dances on, their leader in a black felt hat chanting out the song. A stray fiddler takes up the air  .. . and the musicians on stage relent and wearily pick up their instruments again. The footwork is getting pretty sloppy, though, and my own feet, even with boots kicked off, feel like lead. Is this a dance or an endurance contest? Weaving around the sleepers on the grass, we're also holding up one dead weight: a journalist covering the festival for a local paper. He's the awful bore I met earlier at the buvette, where he'd obviously been overimbibing--and is only "dancing" now because the buvette closed.

At 7 in the morning, as "la belle Emmanuelle" of the curly red hair sings a gentle song without words, I leave the shining meadow. The song follows me out . . .

Monday, June 3

The festival's all over today, but neither Maria nor I am in any hurry to rush off. Besides, I must first recapture Emmanuelle's berceuse, which my slumbering mind has treacherously let fly. She doesn't remember it either; an impulsive creation, it sprang full-blown into her head and now, she says, is gone. Did anyone have a tape recorder going at that hour? Incredibly, yes! The sound is very faint, to be sure, but I'm able to scribble down the bare notes--and realize how much of the song's haunting loveliness lay in the melodic interweaving of voice, vielle and violin. It doesn't reproduce--at least, not for me--on the dulcimer.

Almost noon now. Too late for morning hitching (I tell myself), and too early for the afternoon--any excuse to extend this state of contented lassitude. It's too hot to move. Besides, we can't leave without John and Josephine, who've disappeared into town with Jean-Paul's car.

So I sit in the shade of the camper and listen to Maria fiddling her way through a collection of old rondeaux, gigues and bourrées. (She's also an accomplished banjo and guitar player; Hal married a fine musician!) But Jean-Paul has already pulled down his tent and sits fuming over the delay: "just like my dear brother-in-law to take off like this . . ." A man of order, with neatly trimmed beard and dashing wide-brimmed hat, Jean-Paul enjoys his bohemian pleasures in their proper place. "It's over, isn't it? What are we hanging about here for?"

His wayward sister reappears at 2:00 to tell us that some of the musicians are assembled at a small restaurant nearby, and do we want to join them? Yes, of course!  But it takes three quarters of an hour to round everyone up. John has wandered off again, Maria goes looking for him, Josephine goes looking for Maria; then John reappears and goes looking for Maria and Josephine, while Jean-Paul and Marie-Jeanne go looking too . . . I do not look for anyone but stay put in the camper for a serious conversation with Roland, who enumerates the presents he received on his last birthday and tells me very earnestly that people need ten hours sleep a night. What curiously rigid ideas the very young do have!

The scattered troops return, and we drive off in two carloads through still woods and sun-baked fields. Arriving, hot and hungry, in the cool back room of a small family restaurant just as the Boys of the Loch are leaving. "We left some wine for you."

Pale green sunshine filters through a grape arbor outside the open window, and white curtains flutter in a faint breeze. But where are John's parents, who were supposed to meet us here? Muttering into his beard, John goes off once more, while the rest of us sip the leftover wine and the knowledgeable ones confer with the patron over what we should eat and drink. Terrine cuite à la maison? Asperges? Gigot? Jean-Paul, after grave consideration, approves it all and orders two more bottles of wine. We are tucking into the crudités (a refined and amplified version of what my children call "rabbit food") when John returns with his perspiring parents. He found them in a stuffy cafe on the other side of the village. "Such a silly mistake," says Mrs Wright, "and, of course, not speaking any French, my dear . . ."

But the meal makes up for everything! "See the fat-lined casserole?" says Maria. "You can tell this terrine really is home-cooked." They usually aren't, for who has time nowadays for cooking and grinding all the different meats? "Des asperges, madame?" I'm prejudiced in favor of green things, but this fat white French asparagus is surprisingly tasty and very tender. After all, there's always salad for greenery. "Finish it up, Jean." Maria passes me the gigot again, more evenly cooked than yesterday's but still faintly pink.
    "Oh no, I'm making a pig of myself."
    "So you are, but you don't get this at home, do you?"

(Is it so obvious? And what are they eating at home today? As I mop up the empty platter with a crust of bread, I feel a twinge of conscience. My family's very good at not starving, even at preparing fairly nutritious meals. But dining?)

  "Encore un verre, Jeanne?"  Jean-Paul is filling our glasses with vin gris now. Gray wine? It looks pink to me, but perhaps if I drink a bit more . . . And where does the blowsy blonde sitting across from me fit into this extended family feast? I think we were introduced yesterday--she seems to know me--but who is she? "Josephine's father's housekeeper," whispers Maria. Oh.

The bill at last. I reach for my wallet--there're times for splurging, and this was certainly one of them. But Maria stops me.
   "Our folk club is paying."
   "For me too?"
   "You played the dulcimer." She's stretching a point, but I won't argue.

Outside we all exchange addresses and goodbye kisses--"Yes, Roland, I promise to visit you on my way down the Loire"--and I climb into the camper with Maria, John and Josephine. We're heading back to la Couteranderie, and none of us suggests breaking camp. Even if it weren't 6 PM, I'm much too high on food and wine and good company to trust myself with strangers on the road.

Tonight only the faithful few remain; the camping spaces are given back to the yellow broom ("bosquets de genêt" says the festival handbill) and to the wildlife of Sologne (i.e., the rabbits and pheasants I saw sitting by the roadside on the way down here--and haven't seen since, haven't even looked for, though the woods must abound . . .) We cluster around the one permanent building where invited guests are lodged and fed. John and Josephine, the Boys of the Loch, the "folk-celtique-Cornish-Breizh" singers, a jolly Flemish group fittingly named "Rum" and assorted hangers-on like me. Well, maybe not quite like me. Most of them are much younger.

I don't usually think about it--or I try not to--but I'm sometimes rudely jolted into a consciousness of my age. Like yesterday afternoon, when a boy called me "madame" and was instantly reproved by the Breton girl who'd lent me her top.

   "Why are you calling her that? She's one of us." But I know that I'm not really one of them at all. . . And now, when another girl talks about middle-aged American tourists "with their painted masks, pretending to be young girls," I feel very peculiar indeed. Flattered, of course, that she's talking to me. as if I'm not one of those ridiculous women--but maybe I'm even worse. Actually acting like a giddy young girl instead of just painting my face to look like one.  "They don't look natural," she says. But when does the natural look become the dowdy look?  How much longer can I get away with this anyway?  Acting like twenty--and treating my face and body as if they were ageless?

I tuck the question away for future worrying. Tonight is for restful talk (with Josephine. who seems instinctively to understand my flight from home and husband), for music and merriment. The Cornishman has an enormous repertoire of dirty songs, and gales of laughter from a rosy-cheeked, flaxen-haired Flemish lass and her fun-loving comrades spur him on. "What a bore!" grumbles Colin, the trim little Irishman who plays tunes of pure gold on a simple pennywhistle. His friends don't take their music nearly as seriously as he does, though.
  

  ". . he played a tune and he danced it round below the gallows tree," Colin leads us through MacPherson's Lament. "Aye, now there's a grand song," the Boys of the Loch all agree, passing the bottle of whisky after eight tearjerking verses. A moment later their lead fiddler is standing on a rickety chair and exhorting us "brothers and sisters to reach into our hearts . . ." while the Cornishman, a strapping six-footer, grovels on the ground, repenting his numerous sins and begging the Lord "to take this poor weak body . . ." The chair collapses. . . .

  "This is terrible," mutters Maria. "They're ruining the music. I want to listen to Colin." So do I if I could only stop laughing. And Colin is in a music-making mood; he keeps retiring with a small group of admirers and being overtaken by his comrades' contagious clowning.  It's frustrating and funny as hell!

The group thins out after midnight until finally only Colin and I are left.

    "Come on, let's talk," he says, grabbing my hand (also the abandoned sleeping bag I've been sitting on) and leading me into the bosquets de genêt. Where the bright-eyed Flemish lass disappeared a couple of hours ago? She and her lusty Cornishman probably had a nice uncomplicated lay in the broom, but what in God's name are we doing, nestled together on the sleeping bag?
   "Rest easy, lassie," murmurs Colin, his body pressing down on mine, his nimble fingers roaming caressingly--unbuttoning, unhooking, unbuckling. . .

   "No, stop--"

Incredible, I suppose, in this day and age. Utterly ridiculous. But I'm just as unprepared for this sort of thing as I was twenty years ago. Of course, I didn't bring anything along! "I'm not going to France for that," I told myself. Meaningless sex-without-love. It just won't happen. Because I don't believe in it, because I'm not prepared for it. And if it does happen, at least it's not planned. Ah, a lurking desire, after all, for wild, unpremeditatedsex? Not something I can plan for or even want to plan for?

    Yes, that's the mad way I thought, if it can be called "thinking" all, about the possibility of sexual encounters on the road. So I tell Colin, "I'm not protected." And he doesn't press me any further.

But why, even after two abortions, am I still "unprotected"? Why--knowing that the pill messes up my metabolism and hating the mechanical intrusion, the fuss-and-bother, the whole paraphernalia of thwarting babies--why indeed don't I do something about it? (like have my tubes tied.) I suppose, when it comes right down to it, I don't really want to change the way my body functions. And that's crazy too. That a woman could not want any more babies, not want them, that is, when faced with another round of motherhood--and yet be loath to give up the possibility of conceiving another child sometime, somewhere . . .
    So here I am, having preserved this marvelous talent for conception--having let it, in fact, nigh well run my life--refusing to shut the door on a dream baby. (Alex is always complaining about how I leave doors ajar, drawers half-open.) And what for? To keep me on a path that has become a prison? To make me say no when I am feeling yes? How irresponsible and, at forty, how foolish! I'm acting as if life ran on forever--and beginning to realize that it doesn't.

Colin takes my "no" too easily for me to regret having said it. For he has his fear too, and it is as outdated as mine: the fear of hurting something sacred with the sort of casual screwing around that the other members of the group indulge in. "I couldn't play anymore if I acted like those chaps. I wouldn't be good enough for the music." And I understand that Colin is his music, and that if it is to be pure and beautiful, he must preserve a kind of innocence. Or so he thinks, and who is to say that he's wrong? Not I; he plays divinely.

    "Are you comfortable like this?" he asks, pulling his tweed jacket closer around me. He couldn't be very comfortable with my weight pressing down on his slight body, but the sleeping bag just isn't wide enough for a side-by-side-counseling session.  What our cuddlesome chat is fast turning into, with me as the authority on sex and marriage!

    "Do you think I should get married?" Colin wants a woman, and he wants her in the traditional set-up. It would suit him. But good grief, no! If any woman is ever that important to him, he won't bother asking. Would he be asking my advice, anyone's advice, about his music?

Streaks of light appear in the sky as I crawl into the camper and Maria opens a groggy eye. I bet the Flemish girl got more sleep than I did. Talk is terribly tiring.

________________________________________________________________________________

His gear may buy him kye and yowes,
His gear may buy him glens and knowes,

But me he shall not buy nor fee,
For an auld man shall never daunton me.
         (Burns, trad. Scottish)

 

Chateaux-hopping down the Loire, I catch a cold and try all kinds of cures

Tuesday, June 4

"Someone pinched my sleeping bag last night," growls a rumpled John. He found it this morning after a night on a borrowed bed, but he hasn't forgiven the thief. "Colin and I took it," I pipe up in a small contrite voice. "We didn't know it was yours." (What a perfectly idiotic thing to say; a sleeping bag is always somebody's.) John glares wrathfully at me, and I decide not to try to explain my unconventional night. Maria seems to have a pretty good idea of the situation, though, for when I mumble something about Colin being dedicated to his music, she says, "Yes, he's a natural Irish priest." No need to to explain to her that things aren't quite what they seem. (By liberal standards they're worse of course. My psyche must be in lousy shape!)

Someone has the camp clean-up well in hand today. The meadow is spotless, and crew of dungareed boys are now dismantling the various stands and spading earth back into pit latrines. Erasing all signs of the festival hordes.

It's a long drawn out roundup of our passengers, for today we really are leaving. With difficulty. Josephine has as hard a time prying herself loose from festivals as I do, but we finally get her into the camper, along with two girls looking for a ride back to Paris. (One of them very pretty but with eroded and discolored teeth. Maria says she sees a lot of this in Paris.) The Boys of the Loch have already pulled a tousled Colin into their car and driven off, singing and jesting. We're next.

For me, the ride is all too short. I could, of course, continue with them all the way to Orleans and then hitch just twenty kilometers down the Loire to the hostel at Beaugency. But puffed up with my recent hitchhiking success (and lightheaded from lack of sleep?), I get out much earlier, at Vierzon. "A shortcut," I explain to Maria as I haul out my gear and they all shout goodbye and good luck. It's a mere hundred kilometers to Beaugency from here, across the heart of scenic Sologne.

Haven't I learned about back-roads-and-bad-hitching yet?  I do indeed see a lot of the countryside, traversing it in short infrequent lifts and thinking of the comfortable ride and the good talk I could be having with Josephine instead. Cars speed by as I tramp down a narrow road cutting through dry piny woods. Are the late nights finally beginning to tell? Does my face look haggard even from a speeding car? If I had a mirror, I'd check. Not that I could do much about it with a single tube of lipstick. (Perhaps I should imitate my compatriots and start painting my face, or at least go to bed a bit earlier?)  Damn.

With parched mouth, I drag down a woodland path. No flowing streams in this dead-flat country, only stagnant puddles to splash over my hot face. And no hospitable farmhouses either, only these seemingly barren fields where pale asparagus hides in the heaped up furrows. I lie down for a roadside nap, lulled by the buzzing flies and the hum of passing cars, then stirred out of a half-sleep by two girls who ask, "Are you bronzing yourself?" as they go cycling past. How I envy them! I'm sure the landscape would improve immensely if I could just cover it a bit faster.

At last a hitch into Beaugency--on the hard floor of a jolting panel truck. Up front are a baker, his wife and their son, who's off for his year of service militaire. "Are you comfortable back there?" asks the baker.
    "Of course, monsieur." Ouch! (It hurts to be skinny.)
    "You will have a drink with us?" He insists on carrying my pack into the cafe by the Beaugency train station. 

      Yes, thank you. But what?  "Un coup de rouge," I suggest and everyone looks pained. Wine between meals is so passé.

     "De la bière, madame?" Oh dear, has France turned into a nation of beer drinkers? "Du Coca-cola?" Oh no. . .
     "Ah, I know just what you will like, madame." And a glass of sickly yellow, vile tasting liquid is set before me. Pernod! I should have remembered how I hated that aperitif and always forgot its name. Next time I'll be a country hick and stick to wine. After all, foreigners are permitted certain eccentricities, especially foreigners with strange musical instruments. For the dulcimer evokes comment, and of course I must play a song. "Auprès de ma blonde, qu'il fait bon dormir, dormir"--even my music is banal today, but I sing the refrain with real feeling. For sleep. Perhaps Roland was right, and I should try going to bed before dawn.

It's a long walk to the forlorn-looking hostel on the edge of town. And the black-bearded young "hostel father" shrugs his shoulders when I ask which of two barrack-like empty dormitories I belong in. They're across a sandy courtyard from the main house; an adjoining washroom has cold running water. The toilets, however, are next to the bicycle shed on the other side of the courtyard. Not at all what most Americans are used to, these porcelain-coated "squat toilets"--two raised spots for the feet, a sloping hole, a pull cord for flushing the whole thing down with water. So much more sanitary than a communal seat, and think of the good exercise! (At least that's how I view it when my spirits are up; right now it all looks rather sordid.)

No meals offered here, so I set out for provisions in a mental fog. I even forget my string filet and presently return clutching to my bosom two oranges, six tomatoes, one sausage and a little jar of instant coffee (but no milk--how stupid of me!). Back to the hostel kitchen, where the père aubergiste is now dining with a traveling Frenchman lodged in the private rooms upstairs. They offer me ragout and asparagus and wine; I share my tomatoes. A pretty French girl, traveling solo like me, comes in; Gabrielle slings off her pack and shares in the food and the festive spirit. For this hostel may not have much in the way of plumbing, but with more wine, music from a scratchy record player and vases of flowers on the long red-and-white checked tablecloth, well, the ambience has definitely changed for the better!

Pierre (the père aubergiste) says that owls and nightingales call in the woods behind the hostel. Have I never heard a nightingale sing? It's almost too late in the year (for they only sing in early summer) but perhaps if we step outside . . . No nightingales, as it turns out, but there is an eclipse of the moon. . .

This hostel also offers bicycle rentals at 8 fr. a day, and the accommodating Pierre suggests I borrow his map of the back roads. A grand idea after today's dismal experience. I'd love to cut loose from cars! More hostelers arrive, including two more French girls and a couple of Americans: a boy who's been studying in Germany for a year and a girl who's been hitchhiking through Europe with a medium-sized dog for six months. We steer clear of English, though, and force the blonde Californian to exercise her meager German. (She doesn't speak any French, but I figure she ought to have learned something in six months.) She, too, wants to rent a bicycle but is worried about her dog. "Can I carry him on the bike?" I translate, and Pierre gives an eloquent shrug. Crazy Americans!

Bedtime, and the company (for we've all piled into one room) is fine. Nct even particularly risqué, as nobody goes in for filmy nightwear here; we just peel off the outer layer of clothing. But I seem to have lost the knack of sleeping at night, instead entangling myself in the damn sleeping sheet. Hostel regulations require that we encase ourselves in this sack (to keep the blankets clean); but if the dog can just curl up on top of the blankets, I finally decide that I can too . . .

Wednesday, June 5

Blue skies this morning. I pull on shorts for cycling (all wrong for hitching of course) and trade instant coffee for milk and bread . . .

This place could stand some cleaning up," say the French girls, looking at the grimy linoleum floor. So Pierre sets us to work with scrub brushes, mops and pails of heated water.  Gabrielle and I scrub the kitchen and entrance hall, while her compatriots clean the dorm and gather fresh flowers from an exuberant mock orange out back. We labor for an hour, Gabrielle remarking at intervals how much less time it would take if everyone participated. For the Californian seems blithely unaware of what's going on.

     I finally tell her and her hitchhiking companion for the day (it doesn't seem to bother the girls so much that he hasn't been helping) straight out in English: "Look, we do morning chores around here. Could you lend a hand?"

     "Oh . . . sure." They pitch in without any great enthusiasm, but I must admit that non-French-speaking hostelers haven't been made to feel particularly at home here. And the girl is evidently used to the hotel-like German hostels, where "morning chores" are unknown.

Done at last, and the floor is certainly a lighter shade of gray. The room smells of soap and flowers as Gabrielle and I fling open the unscreened windows (are there really fewer flies in France?) . . . and pedal virtuously off on our own two wheels, glory be! Saddle bags go with the rented bikes; they carry cycling weight better than the packs we leave behind.

Ah, today I'm awake to see things. The graceful curves of a low bridge that we cycle back over into Sologne. (Local legend says it was built with the aid of the devil, who demanded in payment the first soul to cross; so the townspeople sent a cat across, and the devil left in a huff.) The Loire itself, meandering lazily between sandy willow-shrouded banks. An old woman, minding her cows on the levee with a long stick, tells me to be sure to visit the wonderful new power plant downriver, and I thank her for the warning . . .

Yes, we've managed to leave the tourist traffic behind on this peaceful country lane, but I soon discover that the racing bicycle I picked out is a bit small for my 5'8" frame. And it feels smaller and smaller the longer I ride. When I can ride.  Slithering about on clean white sand, I fall and scrape my elbow. The fault of the too-small bike, I tell myself, which sometimes I cannot ride at all, but must push along overgrown ruts, tufts of long grass catching and tangling in the spokes. . .

Is Gabrielle still pumping along on her sturdy touring bike? We made no plans to stick together, but now I wonder if perhaps she's a better map reader than I. If I hadn't ridden quite so impulsively, alternately racing ahead of her and dawdling behind . . . Darn, after my last tumble and cleanup at a barnyard pump, I seem to have lost her easy company for good. Ah well, at least I'm back now to a more navigable lane. To the smell of wild rose and honeysuckle, the cooing of turtle doves, the warmth of the sun on my back as I roll past fields of wheat and barley and scattered poppies (a weed, but one I love--I miss its splash of red in too well tended fields, and they do seem better tended than they did twenty years ago). Grapevines, cherries, strawberries, plums . . . a bit of everything, in fact, in this land of little properties . . .

I straighten my cramped back as a large crested bird rises into the air from an open field. A bird so striking that by pestering enough people with a verbal description I will later be able to identify it as a vanneau ("lapwing" says Peterson). I assume it's the same creature that's been fascinating me with its aerial acrobatics and piercing cries and that, amazingly enough, nobody else seems to have noticed. (I shouldn't be amazed, though, considering my own inattention to people.  Will I ever live down the swim meet where I said, "name please" to the small girl on the starting block, and she cried out, "Mother"?)

Pedaling silently on through the forest preserve of Chambord and hoping to surprise something really large (roadside signs warn of cerfs and sangliers), at high noon I naturally see no game at all. Signs also tell me not to "derange" the breeding wildlife by wandering off the designated paths, so I do, to no effect. Red deer and wild boar must be here in great numbers, though. Once hunted by guests who lodged in the 440 chambers of the chateau de Chambord, I'm told they're now trapped in nets for repopulating forests elsewhere.

But the chateau, oh yes--that's what I came to see, what I can hardly miss seeing. This "very symbol of the French Renaissance" (as the guide books put it) stands on an open space in the middle of the forest, its roof--a veritable thicket of balustrades, frilly turrets, spires and chimneys--exciting "oohs" and "ahs" from gaping tourists. It looks like a housekeeping nightmare to me, but then I'm obviously an incorrigible barbarian.

And an impoverished one if I don't get to a bank soon, for I'm almost flat broke in terms of French money and don't even have the 3 fr. for a ticket into the chateau. Admit it, Jean--you don't like the place only because you can't get into it! A case of sour grapes and a situation that Alex would never put himself in. He's much too provident, much too cautious (and damn it, his nitpicking, tortoise-slow preparations do sometimes get us places faster than my impetuous haste) ever to find himself with a few centimes in his pocket and only a small hunk of cheese and a bit of bread in the saddle bag. Well, it's better than nothing.

I sit on the forest edge and watch some French tourists picnic in elegance: pâté, little filled pastries, a bottle of wine--but nothing to open it with. So one of the men wraps the bottle in a napkin and taps it against a handy tree trunk until the cork pops out. Aha! Alex can't believe the havoc I wreak with a simple corkscrew; just wait till I show him this neat alternative!

No dawdling now as I push on towards Blois (a city that 's bound to have banks); I only stop to stretch my cramped leg muscles and to admire some homes along the way. Architectural gems on a smaller scale than Chambord but of the same vintage and so much more livable. I breach their walls of privacy with the drink-of-water excuse. (Some hikers carry a canteen and never have to stop and ask for a drink; they never thirst, but I think they miss a lot.) For added pathos I even rub a little fresh dirt onto the scraped elbow before knocking on the door of a turreted stone farmhouse. Which turns out have been a stopover point for Catherine de Medicis and her "flying squadron" of court ladies on their jaunts about the countryside. The farmer's wife points out the solid spiral staircase; she says it was "taillé en masse"--carved, centerpost, steps and all, from one huge tree trunk! "Pauvre petite," she murmurs as she washes my elbow and drips stinging iodine on it.

My thighs are turning pink, and my face--in spite of the indispensable cloth hat--feels as if it is too, as at 4 PM I cross over the bridge to Blois. And yes, the banks are still open.  Changing another $50 into 240 fr. I figure out that I've only spent that much in ten days. Time for a modest splurge: a bottle of white wine, a wedge of pale yellow Brie, three eggs that I nestle into a saddle bag, cherries . . .  I take it all up to the yellowed chateau where Catherine de Medicis once held court and meet a busload of tourists from West Virginia. I show them a low box hedge, crawling with snails, and they all gather round to view escargots in their natural state. "And where did you learn your perfect English?"

How funny that they think I'm French!  I don't disillusion them (though if the French thought so too, it would be much more of a triumph).  It's kind of a game being a foreigner, the outlander who is allowed, even expected to be different.  But a foreigner to everyone, everywhere?  Ah no . . .

A sudden thunderstorm cools off the road before I pedal out of Blois in the six o'clock rush-hour traffic. Heavy trucks roar past, but I claim a narrow strip of roadway as my right of way, and with eyes riveted to my front wheel, I pray that the truck drivers will observe my claim. They do.  To the centimeter.

Five kilometers downriver, past country homes hidden behind stone walls and high iron gates, to the Blois hostel. It sits on a wooded hillside, with outdoor tables, a neat clean kitchen and a resident older couple who would clearly be much happier if the bothersome hostelers just stayed away. Rules of the house include a ban on packs in the dormitories; they must be deposited in a separate salle de bagages downstairs. The shower is out in the bicycle shed, and the toilet is around back in a little shed of its own, with a pitcher of water for flushing down the hole in the floor. (Better to find these things out before it gets dark!) And the place is swarming with Americans who pore over maps and count kilometers after supper, their apparent objective to cover as much territory in as short a time as possible. Nothing for once to distract me from catching up on the journal. Not that I feel like writing--is my head reeling from too much sun perhaps?--but I bribe myself with glasses of wine. At least I'll sleep tonight . . .

"So you're keeping a proper record of your travels," says a bespectacled boy at my shoulder. "That's very sensible; you'll appreciate it later." Later, in my drearily sensible old age? In the come-uppance that was once eerily predicted for me?  It came from a gloomy corner of my student roominghouse, when I walked in one winter afternoon: "Dried up and brown like the autumn leaves--that's what you'll be, Jean. Dead and dry . . ."

     Poor Clarissa, drunk again, I thought and tried to slip past my landlady, crouched in her favorite armchair with her uncombed gray hair sticking out in all directions. Did she resent me because she couldn't get under my skin with her suddenly sharp tongue and her instinct for the jugular? Did my cavalier treatment of Hal, the way I seemed to skate over the surface of life, untouched and unhurt, remind her of the carefree, sought after student that she had once been? She's jealous, I told myself as I fled to my room and the voice droned on: "Like the autumn leaves, Jean. You'll be sorry . . ."

Thursday, June 6

Not much sleep after all. Whatever did I do to earn this awful stopped-up nose and sore throat? The wages of decadent living?  Perhaps that's the trouble with not having to take care of other people; you don't take care of yourself either.

But hostels don't encourage you to lie in bed and feel sorry for yourself. In fact, you're generally forced to leave in the morning, as most of them close during the middle of the day; this one certainly does. So I must take measures: out to the bicycle shed for a hot shower, into the village for fresh milk to share with some English hostelers who load me with Kleenex and ascorbic acid, back to Blois for a nébuliseur to keep the now unclogged nasal passages open, and on to Beaugency. I have a vague faith in the restorative powers of physical activity, for if only I can get my body moving again, I feel it will somehow be spurred to throw off the germs. (And if it doesn't, at least I'll be distracted from their debilitating effects.)

Today I'm on the opposite side of the river, and again I find a dirt road on top of the dike. It commands a fine view of the flood plain of the Loire and does not degenerate into an overgrown rut. First stop is the small chateau of Saint-Denis-sur-Loire, not marked on the map and not open to the public. But the gardener gives me a drink of water and a tour of the grounds: the ramparts, pierced at intervals with diamond-shaped meurtriers (for "murdering" the enemy) and partially surrounded by a cool green spring-fed moat; the twelfth-century chapel now used as a storeroom, with smiling cherubim looking down from a fire-blackened ceiling; neatly laid out beds of flowers, fruits and vegetables.

     "And what do you do about those 'snails without shells' that eat the strawberries?"
     "Ah, les limaces, madame!" (Even the word is slimy-sounding.) "I put out poison for them." He also places nets over the ripest rows to keep off the birds and thus save the crop for jam-making. It's the current project, judging from the cauldrons of red-gleaming fruit I saw in that fortress of a kitchen . . .

From the dike, I look back at the chateau through two sentinel trees: a spreading "evergreen-oak" and a craggy pine tree that the gardener said was planted at the birth of "madame la mère du vicomte. She's 98 years old today, you know." Never uprooted!--how strange that seems. I'm told I was very unhappy about moving every year as a little girl, although I only remember being proud of my "gypsy" family and sorry for the poor kids who'd lived in one place all their lives, whose grandmothers even lived there. Could I stand the cozy certainties of this secluded little world between the two trees? I leave with regret.

A brief detour to Madame de Pompadour's residance, the Chateau de Menars. Cold and imposing, it isn't open now, but I'm really more interested in food anyway. So it's back to the dike road with picnic supplies, including two little plastic pots of yaourt (part of the contemporary French trend toward low-fat foods). The road is deserted except for a predatory male pedestrian, who asks what I am doing all alone.
     "Exploring France," I answer. He grins and grabs me, evidently thinking that because he is French and therefore irresistible, all foreign women will fall into his arms. That's what they come to France for, isn't it? Infuriating swarthy arrogance! I bite his tongue (hoping he will catch my cold) and pedal off fast and far before stopping for a huge healthy lunch on the riverbank. Food to fight off the sickness, wine to help forget it.

Away from the dike are small villages on higher ground. I come to a Place de la Fontaine, where an underground spring issues from a stone wall and flows under a peaked wooden pavilion--dark brown pebbles gleaming like agates through the clear water--before running downhill to the Loire. This is the lavoir, where village women traditionally did the family wash, an outmoded custom today. Or is it?

For a stocky, red-faced woman comes pushing a wheelbarrow heaped with wet laundry. It saves on water to rinse the wash here, she says, standing on the narrow walkway that spans the captured stream and poking at the soapy clothes with a stick as we talk. Her two little girls float twigs down the current, and one tumbles in--"with your new shoes on, too," says the vexed mother. When the water runs clear, she and I haul the clothes out onto the high stone benches. Am I ever out of shape when it comes to wringing heavy overalls!

     "You have an automatic washer at home, don't you, madame?"

She sounds wistful--but not resentful of my riches or of my strange unfettered freedom, so different from her dawn-to-dusk round of households chores. They've left their mark; although she must be my age or younger, she looks a lot older. Yet somehow, I doubt that she grieves for a lost girlhood. as I did when the children dug up a twenty-year-old snapshot and asked, "Who's that?"

     "Are you sure it's not your sister?" said Alex.
      "But it's me," I cried--or wasn't it me anymore, not even in anyone's mind? Was the thread broken? I've always been a poor souvenir collector, a sloppy keeper of records, and our walls are bare of the posed family portraits that adorn the rudest peasant hut. But I wish now that we had taken wedding pictures. And framed them and kept a scrapbook and done all the corny, sentimental things that I claim to scorn. I bet this woman has a wedding photograph in her bedroom . . .

       "Do you come here in the wintertime?" I ask her. Yes indeed, for the water always stays the same temperature. "It steams in the cold--that's beautiful," she says and pauses for a moment to look about her. Ah, so the lavoir is a place of beauty for her too.

A few kilometers on is an old mill house encircled by an icy, spring-fed moat. A farmer spading by the side of the road.

   "Would you like to see inside the gate? I have a caretaker job in there."

    But of course! (Any excuse to get off that cramping bicycle.) We walk over the drawbridge and into a sunny courtyard, where I am shown the tasteful (and hideously expensive) modernization and restoration work that the new owners have directed. Husband and wife are both physicians and can thus afford this simple country retreat.

   "There should be flowers," says my guide as we come out of the pigeon tower that now serves as a wine cellar. "They need a proper gardener."

This is la Beauce again, with its tradition of large property owners--very different from the mosaic of fruits and vegetables just across the river in Sologne. And storm clouds are building up over the fields stretching away to the horizon, so I put on some speed and turn into the Beaugency hostel minutes before the rain comes pelting down. Surprise! The two American girls who were discussing terribly complicated travel plans last night at Blois are here. They came by train and were about to take off on rented bicycles . . . Both were firmly rooted in English yesterday, but tonight, in the relaxed Gallic atmosphere of the Beaugency hostel, they reveal their competent French. Also a spirit of giggly festivity in which the California girl, who comes in with her dog five minutes after the storm breaks--both drenched to the skin--does not share.

Pierre's friend (his business turns out to be inspecting factory kitchens) joins us for supper. When I tell him about my day, he says I'd "better stay away from deserted dike roads"; and now that the rain has stopped, he invites us out for a spin in his little VW.  Pierre too.

    "You can take care of the hostel while we're gone," we tell the still sopping Californian, "if you're sure you don't want to come along too." (I don't think her dog was included in that half-hearted invitation; it is only a VW.)

So off to Chambord! There's no problem in seeing the game at this hour; from an observation platform on the edge of the forest we can view red deer and wild boar grazing like cattle in the twilit meadow. More exciting to drive on to Chambord itself, where we elude shouting guards and scuttle around the chateau, which is being prepared for tonight's son et lumière spectacle. Leaving the grounds without paying is harder, but we convince the guards of our poverty, and they watch to see that we really do leave. If my head would only clear and my nose stop dripping, I'd really like to stay and see this extravagant bit of wedding cake all lit up, hear its history recited in the grand manner of the Comédie Française.  But silly gaiety is all I'm good for tonight.

Friday, June 7

Another stuffed-up, uncomfortable night. Damn, doesn't exercise work? And another housecleaning session, this time with the two American girls. They're nice kids but not nearly so energetic nor as meticulous in their cleaning efforts as the French girls. Too accustomed to mechanized housekeeping?

I'm hitchhiking down the Loire today, with my destination of Tours only a hundred kilometers away. A restful day is what my cold needs for a change . . . Ah, a driver pulls up--a crisp-looking middle-aged man, conservatively turned out in a proper brown business suit and a proper black Peugeot. A traveling salesman (of what I never do find out), M. Dupont says that he normally disdains hitchhikers but I looked intriguingly different (whatever that means). What's more, with an abundance of time and expense account money on his hands, he offers to introduce me to the proper chateaux. How very nice of him, especially since he seeks nothing in return; we settled that question right away.

    "How refreshing," he purrs, "to meet a woman with whom I can simply share the pleasure of civilized conversation."

But which chateaux?

    "Mais naturellement, with your romantic, feudal tastes, Chambord would have no appeal." He suggests Chaumont or Azay-le-Rideau, perhaps Chenonceau and certainly Chinon. Which side of the river would I prefer to be on? For with most of the chateaux perched on the south bank of the Loire for the next hundred kilometers, I must choose between visiting some of them and the scenic view-from-across-the-river of them all. M. Dupont--Marcel by now--says he has an appointment in Blois with a client; he proposes that I meet him in half an hour and let him know what I've decided.

   "And may I suggest, madame, that you leave your pack and musical instrument in the car while you visit the chateau de Blois?"

It would, of course, be more enterprising of me to take my gear and hitch another ride. More enterprising--but am I planning to spend my day hitching rides? How nice just to sit back and follow someone else's lead for a change! Besides, other people look at the insides of these places; maybe I should too. So I agree to his plan and walk off packless to the chateau. . . closed for the noon hour.

Time for reflection as I stroll back to the cafe where Marcel is waiting.  For I'm beginning to feel a bit odd about my course of action--my course of laziness?--although it will certainly take my mind off the cold to be wined and dined down the Loire in the company of an educated Frenchman, who, as it turns out, is also an ex-pilot. To be sure, the best way of chateau-viewing is from a small plane flying low over the countryside. If he'd only met me twenty years ago, he sighs. . .

I opt for the south bank--"I thought you would," says Marcel--and we cross over the bridge at Blois.  But who is the blonde girl-with-dog I see by the roadside

    "You should have told me," he says after we're safely past, and I belatedly claim acquaintanceship with the dusty Californian. "We could have given your friend a lift." 

Yes, I suppose we could have. And how mean-spirited of me to be relieved that we didn't -- didn't pick up a witness to my decadent new style of travel, to my newfound chumminess with a man who lays on the charm with a trowel. A man of limited chateaux-viewing energies too; he's huffing and puffing by the time we've walked up the long beech-shaded drive to Chaumont-sur-Loire.

    "But it's worth it, chère madame, to share your delight . . ."

And I'm not faking it. I do like Chaumont's air of an impregnable chateau fort (though it wasn't built for military defence at all--it simply copies the air of earlier fortresses for artistic effect); I like its feeling of security and spacious serenity, its cream-colored towers nestled high above the golden sandbars of the Loire.  The guide tells us that Catherine de Medicis (Henry II's queen) found this a better spot than Blois for star-gazing, so she installed her bevy of Italian astrologers in one wing. But coveting Chenonceau next--"Oh, could we see that too, Marcel?"--she eventually forced Diane de Poitiers (Henry's mistress) to trade chateaux with her. I would have kept Chaumont, I think, as Marcel overtips the guide and steers me past an incoming tide of tourists, including the familiar girl-with-dog.  She stares, and I wave a vague greeting, hastily disengaging myself from Marcel's arm.

     "Another drink, my dear?"

My, but along with the painless culture I do seem to be imbibing rather a lot of brandy!  I don't really care all that much for it (and even less for that last aperatif) which makes this a truly wasteful outlay of somebody else's cash.  How decadent!  And all this drink without solid food must be downright unwholesome. I 'd thought that the troublesome hoarseness in my throat might dissolve with alcohol, but that tactic clearly isn't working.  The company of my ex-pilot is beginning to pall too. Would I have already broken away in a more vigorous state of health?  

Marcel's conversation has its moments, though. I learn that during World War II he was a member of the same air squadron as the legendary writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and he draws an irreverent picture of "Saint-Ex" for me, evidently considering my hero a bit of a fool to have disappeared on his last mission at the very end of the war.
    "He didn't have to go, you know. He was getting too old to fly anyway--just showing off . . ."

Is Marcel jealous of the other man's glory? "You know I have a lot of stories in me too. Don't you think, if I just took the time, I could turn out something?"
    

   "No, you couldn't," I whisper. For by now I am voiceless, to the vast amusement of my companion who finds a mute intelligent woman a rare spectacle (épatant, I think, is the word he uses).

Supper at a restaurant in Tours: truites meunières (the trout looks reproachfully at me and tastes delicious), crêpes flambées and as an afterthought (ordered when I turn to gaze at a strawbery tart being wafted past me to another diner), tarte aux fraises.  But the meal is a mistake.  Seated by a cage of rainbow-colored finches and trying to keep my hiking boots tucked away under the folds of the white damask tablecloth, I can feel myself sinking into a sinful, sensual paradise, a fallen woman already, no doubt, in the eyes of the other diners. And certainly a gluttonous one. It's a lovely feeling.

Outside the restaurant, Marcel confesses between kisses, "I am afraid, my dear, that I cannot drive you to the hostel tonight." For the hostel is on the other side of town, and of course he knows the dangers of driving after drinking. "But I promise not to touch you . . ."

How silly this sounds when I know full well--and doesn't he too?-- does he think I am made of ice?--that I desperately want him to make love to me.  That the only way I can thwart my own racing desires is to leave. Not to take those few steps to the little hotel. Never to enter the yellow curtained room with the soft double bed that I fall onto, boots and all, daring him to act . . .

Saturday, June 8

In the harsh light of the morning after, I'm plagued by a rotten conscience. Hell, I don't even like the guy--slack-bellied, gray-faced and, when it comes right down to it, a disappointing lover. No, I don't want to feel that I belong to him. Yet I do feel it, and it seems to me in the hotel dining room (as he sits back with arms crossed on his chest, watching me fumble for a croissant) that our humiliating sexual bond must be apparent to the whole world. To the carefully courteous desk clerk, to the smiling waitress who serves me what my tight throat cannot swallow, to the hotel manager who bows us out with a grave "bonjour m'sieur et madame." How could my flip-flopping stomach, my turned-to-jelly intestines not show on my face?

And my fears too, for I certainly don't want his child. "Pas possible," he told me last night, and I hope to God he is right. It would be more reassuring, of course, if he'd used a condom rather than relying--as I think he must have, though I wasn't in a terribly analytical frame of mind!--upon the technique that is said to be standard practice among responsible Frenchmen (and that I suspect was part of my disappointment): coitus interruptus.  In any case, one thing is right this morning: the infection is gone. But I must leave town alone if I want to regain custody of my body.

     "Are you sure you don't want to accompany me down the Loire after my morning appointment?" says Marcel. "Be reasonable, chérie" And he reaches into the car for a small gift wrapped package--some sort of company sample?  Dumbly shaking my head, I shoulder my pack and walk away.

Minutes later, on the bank of the Loire, I see--oh no, not again!---girl-and-dog walking toward me over the bridge. It's not one of my shining moments as she asks, "Who was that you were with yesterday?" and I stammer something about drivers that are hard to get rid of.  (It doesn't help to recall our last conversation on the "trials of solo hitchhiking" and my own breezy words about "knowing your own mind"--ouch!--is she recalling it too?)

    "Nice hostel here," she says, and I wonder just where it is, anyway.  Too embarrassed to ask--eager simply to escape her staring eyes--I pass it on my trek out of town and realize I could easily have walked myself over last night . . . if I'd really wanted to . . . as I obviously didn't . . Oh hell! And there's more time for self-recrimination when I get to the main road, and a long, long wait. How unjust that my return to self-respecting autostop should be so completely ignored by French motorists! Do they have to rub it in that I'm behaving like an ass?

Hey! I know that car . . . good Lord, it's my ex-flyer, my middle-aged amant. He goes whizzing by on his way down the Loire, looking straight ahead (though he could hardly have missed seeing me). Damn! I had hoped to stay ahead of him and certainly not to be ignominiously overtaken on the road like this.  Damn, damn, damn . . .

A lift at last to Azay-le-Rideau (for I still trust Marcel's impeccable taste in chateaux). Balm to my bruised spirits, its smooth white walls rise out of the placid waters of the Indre like a mirage. Inside, windows are recessed to a cool two-meter depth; in the park outside, big trees soak up the heat of the sun.  A cool and lovely place.  So I picnic by the Indre and try to sort things out.

Is it infidelity to Alex that's bothering me (when I lost his ring years ago, unexpectedly got it back--and promptly lost it again)?  Or simply the betrayal of my own better self, the bright image that I sought in Hal's eyes--how disappointed he'd be to see me falling for yesterday's stock comedy set-up! And the thought of material gain--of actually profiting from disappointing sex? I guess I don't like to feel like a "bought woman"-- especially in front of waiters and innkeepers, not to mention other self-respecting hostelers.  Apparently I prefer to suffer a bit. . .

A lift to Chinon on the river Vienne. Or rather, to where (sweating my sins away?) I climb up to its crumbling hilltop relics.  The relics of a real chateau fort.  Here, during the Hundred Years War the heir to the French throne took refuge; and here, in search of him came a peasant girl from Lorraine who called herself Jeanne d'Arc. That she was able to recognize her uncrowned sovereign hiding in a crowd of courtiers was seen, at the time, as something of a much-needed miracle; and standing in the "room" where it happened--now roofless, bare and windswept (only one wall remains; the rest were destroyed centuries ago)--I'm stirred anew by the story.

Listening to the wailing wind, I begin to regret my lost guide too. Darn! Why couldn't I have kept our relationship on a strictly verbal level? Solitary promenades--however virtuous and even romantic in a dry, literary way--do absolutely nothing to improve my French. And solitary rambling through the countryside isn't much help either.  (How can I listen more, Hal, when no one is talking?)  Only 28 kilometers separate Chinon from the hostel downriver at Saumur, but 28 kilometers on foot and with a pack on my back is a long way. Well, not quite all on foot. I do get a lift with a ruddy-faced young farmer, who says he first has to stop off at his home not far from la Devinière, where Rabelais once lived.

   "You will come in?" he asks at the door of a rambling old farmhouse. Of course. I always do. But where is madame in this dim interior?
   "Madame is not at home," he says and plants a probing kiss on my mouth. Overwhelmed by the logic of the situation--or is Rabelais' earthy spirit infecting me?--I kiss him back.  A clean-smelling man with simple direct lusts, not one to waste time on kisses, much less conversation, he scoops me into his arms and marches up a flight of steep steps to what I presume is the master bedroom. A huge room with a four-poster double bed on which I am unceremoniously dumped.

It's one hell of a time to start resisting after he's locked the bedroom door. (In case madame should return?) But as my pants jerk off, I have belatedly come to my senses. Or gone mad, from the farmer's viewpoint. Do I doubt his power, his ability to give a woman pleasure? In overalls he looked pudgy, but not now. Those enormous hams are all muscle, and as for what he proudly calls "ma petite bobine" . . . good Lord! No, I obviously cannot force my way out of the room. But neither, it seems, can he force himself past my locked thighs, at least not with any pleasure (and he thought this was going to be fun) so he finally heeds my tearful pleas, grumpily pulls on his overalls and opens the door.

Why did nothing like this ever happen to me when I was twenty, I wonder as he drives me back in silence to the river road. Whatever happened to the "distance" I used to be so good at maintaining with men, unconsciously and in the most compromising circumstances? And to think that I once gained the nickname of "Jeanne d'Arc"! Something must have drastically changed in the signals I'm sending out!

Back to solitary rambling in my beige elastic-waisted slacks, now somewhat the worse for wear. The practical solution, I suppose, would be to admit my depravity and prepare for it (contraceptives, you ninny, unless, of course, it's already too late). But I have a feeling that wouldn't really solve anything. That it isn't just a round of "simple sex" I want. What do I want, anyway? Well, a ride to Saumur, for one thing . .

By 8 PM my spirits have sunk to a new foot-dragging low. On this rural road along the Vienne, the occasional drivers wave cheerfully at me and keep right on going. I turn off to ask for water at a group of farmhouses. Dogs bark, and a prickly hedgehog pushes through the tall grass at my feet. But no one answers my knock.

I am considering sheltering for the night in a barn (if I can get into one) when from around the next bend I hear frolicsome fiddle tunes. A country dance in a little roadside hall and--what luck!--a bustling inn across the way. For it's Saturday,,wedding-day, and I've blundered into a wedding festivity--catching up at last with the guests who passed me by on the road ("Was that you back there?"). Could I have something to eat?  "Of course, madame!" And over a sustaining supper I watch and listen and answer a few questions . .

Everybody, I learn, joins in a wedding fete. "But yes, madame, you too!" And yes, I can have a room for the night! Revived, and for the first time today truly grateful that I'm no longer with my banal traveling salesman, I run upstairs to change into red skirt, clean white top and dance slippers and then skip across the  road to the hall. I`ve already been introduced to several guests, starting with the older women--which does wonders for my respectability!--and one of them has even given me the address of a young artist couple to visit in the Cevennes.

The world is certainly looking up, though the music has stopped for the moment while the musicians are eating. But not the action! We cheer the groom as he vaults over the banquet tables in pursuit of his disheveled bride, her long white gown half unzippered and casually held together with a safety pin. "It was too tight for the wedding supper," someone explains. Un peu trop serré, I'll have to remember that useful phrase. . .

The musicians return: an accordionist, a guitarist and a fiddler who plays with incredible verve, occasionally even jumping down from the platform and circulating among us. And they sing. It's not quite the bal folk of the festival, but there are polkas and walzes and the traditional "carpet dance" (a sort of grown-up "spin the bottle"). All larded with bits of conversation: "You're not from around here, are you?"--"No, America"--"How did you find us?" By midnight, when we break for more food and wine, I'm beginning to feel it was indeed wonderfully clever of me!

Now for les enchères à la jarretière. "You don't see this so much anymore," says an older woman as the bride sits down on a chair in the middle of the room and hoists up her skirt to reveal the garter tied around a shapely thigh. "Regarde ça!" "Can we bid on the rest of it?" The comments fly, fanned on by two of the groom's friends, who pass a hat around for us all to toss the cash "bids" into. A last bidder (male, of course) proffers the hat full of money to the bride and, kneeling, receives the blue jarretière in exchange. Bride and groom then presumably take off with the loot, and the musicians take up the music again.

They really must have invented some of these dances! Like the one around 3 AM announced as ladies' choice. I pick a cavalier, who is shortly instructed to kiss me "sur la joue droite." Pretty tame--it happens all the time when French people meet. But as we change partners on musical cues, the kisses get more esoteric (though not necessarily more erotic) as they work their way down the bumps and declivities of the female anatomy. "Sur le nombril," I hear and wonder what body part I should present now; he aims at the navel. "Sur la fesse gauche"--aha, I know what that is (in Voltaire's Candide Cunégonde sacrifices one of her fesses to save her companions from starvation; it's a narrative detail, along with the French word for "buttock," that you never forget. . .)

The older women who aren't dancing gaze on approvingly, for this is all very properly gay and relaxed--détendu but not out-of-bounds--and they are happy to see the visiting foreigner enjoying herself.   "Vous avez bien dansé?" asks a gray-haired matron as I collapse onto a chair at 4 AM. Time to fall into a bed of my own, and to wonder why I bothered to bring along those silly pink foam rollers for the hair (still at the bottom of my pack). I never use them at home and am certainly not about to stay awake putting them in now! You can swing without being soigné, you really can!

Sunday, June 9

My first good sleep in days! I wake up to blue and white skies, to a new day and a clean slate. Even the 32 fr. bill (supper, bed and breakfast) is painless; it was a happy splurge.

Stepping out of the inn, I prop my gear against a tree and wander up a steep footpath toward a cliffhanging chateau. There's the tiny village of la Falche, dug into the hillside for a sort of natural cellar effect (a common rural construction hereabouts). The stillness of a host of small sounds fills this upland other-world: bees buzzing around the rambling sweetbriar, crickets chirping in the dusty road. The paved road follows the river; up here are only country lanes bordered by overgrown hedges and crumbling stone walls, fields and farmhouses, vineyards and orchards, and the occasional punctuation point of a church steeple or small chatea

I toy with the idea of walking cross country to Saumur, but pack and dulcimer--still down by the river--will undoubtedly have a dampening effect on my lighthearted wanderlust. And when I ask directions, the country folk try to steer me back down there, as if I were an alien, disturbing influence in their settled world. Another time perhaps, and with a lighter pack . . .

Back down to the river to start hitching, or maybe walking, into Saumur. I'm quickly picked up by a local farmer, who I don't think had any intention of driving into town but was merely seeking Sunday entertainment. Oh no, not again! He takes a scenic route up and down and roundabout the rolling vineyards. I don't see Saumur on any of the signposts we pass, and I do hate to sound nasty and suspicious, but is monsieur sure we're on the right road?

    "This is a more interesting way, madame." Indeed it is. And I have yet to meet a Frenchman who is actually malhonnête. If he says he'll convey me to Saumur, then he will . . . if I can only keep his attention on the road. "What about a little bise d'amitié?" he asks (I've learned enough slang to know that he wants a kiss). Perhaps, I hedge, after we've arrived at our destination, when I can trust that the "friendship" bit won't be misinterpreted.

Saumur at last, and at the entrance gates to the chateau who but the two American girls from Beaugency! Hailing them as long-lost friends, I haul my gear out of the car and profusely thank my crestfallen driver. Is that playing quite fair, Jean? But I'll be damned if I'm going to give the girls any more grounds for speculation. They are already looking at me with open curiosity: "What's hitchhiking alone in France like?" they ask.

    "Well, it all depends. . . ," I say and join them for a tour of the chateau. While dutifully if somewht irreverently

absorbing historical lore (it all seems to center around horses), we feel heavy raindrops and dash past a startled guard to rescue the dulcimer on the grass below. "Who do you suppose he thought we were fleeing? A  philandering Frenchman?" Their giddy laughter plunges me back into a world of blessed innocence--and pouring rain. Happpily two black caped gendarmes give us a lift to the gaily modern youth hostel on an island in the middle of the Loire. It would have been a long wet walk, or a short swim from the chateau, which sits high on the opposite bank, right across from our dorm window. Rather romantic from a distance.

Now to continue my good behavior and fulfill my promise to little Roland--a visit to my festival friends, the Perriers. They live somewhere around here but have no phone, so I call Roland's grandfather in nearby Angers.      "But of course they will be delighted to see you, madame. Jean-Paul has just lost his driver's license for ten days--for speeding, what else?--and he's probably having a home vacation. Bon voyage!"

It's 4:00 already, though, and the Perriers' village will not be easy hitching. Better to spend the night here and see the famous old riding school that the gendarmes told us about. That's why the chateau was such a horse museum; horses are Saumur's claim to fame. A two-kilometer walk in the drizzle past the military barracks, and I'm about to walk past more barracks-like, concrete structures, when I see piles of hay. So these cavernous manèges are the stables. They stand on both sides of an open square; on the third side a statue of prancing steeds and two sentry boxes flank an imposing stone edifice. The place is deserted except for a few tight-lipped, stiff-backed écuyers--the high priests of Saumur--who tell me curtly to come back on Friday morning if I want to see the dressage. But in the Manège Marguérite two lanky stablehands are more talkative. . . "Do you use stallions like the Spanish Riding School?" I ask, "or, well--" How do you say "gelding" anyway, I wonder and fumble about with "a stallion that has been, um--" "Cut," says the groom with classic French simplicity. They're all geldings here, for the emphasis is on group maneuvers. A pity.

Suppertime, and I enter a dingy cafe in town featuring a meal of crêpes bretonnes for 5 fr. The clientele is exclusively working-class male--playing cards and drinking red wine. Twenty years ago I would have been too intimidated to enter, but I seem to have acquired a thicker skin with age. Yes, there are a lot of stares at first, but four large crepes stuffed consecutively with egg, ham, cheese and jam (and washed down with a carafe of wine) luckily take a good while to consume.

The first three are made of sarrasin, or "black-wheat" flour; froment, or white flour, is saved for dessert crepes. And I make them last as long as possible, for of course the meal is only a means to an end: meeting people.

   "A votre santé, madame" . . . It's a nice informal atmosphere here, but surely a mistake to sit isolated in a corner, where I can't eavesdrop on other people's conversations. The whole point of this expedition was to immerse myself in the language, wasn't it? At least that's how I explain myself to a group of card players when I get up enough nerve to ask if I may move over to their table.
    "vous permettez, messieurs?"
     "Avec plaisir, madame," says the dealer, refilling my glass.

Two hours later I understand a lot more of the game. And the talk. But what does the man in the black beret mean by "Vous n'êtes pas fière, madame"? That I'm a pleasant person who doesn't put on airs, or that I'm a tramp? Better perhaps not ask.

"I'll drive you back to the hostel." On the sidewalk outside he pats the seat of an old motorbike, and his friends add, "Oh, you're in good hands there," and "You can trust Raoul--an old married man like him!" Well, why not? It's a long time since I rode en amazone (in Italy yet!) and I'm told later that this side-saddle technique is illegal in France. But with the wind in my face, my legs demurely crossed to one side and an arm around my chauffeur's waist, it feels gaily and gloriously ladylike. Even in my state of dreamy euphoria, however, it soon registers that the trip is taking much longer than it should. I'd forgotten, of course, that the hostel was on an island. So what are we doing jaunting down the bank of the Loire? It doesn't look at all familiar; surely we've gone too far. Raoul agrees, and stops by a hedge bordered field.

"Isn't your wife waiting for you, monsieur?" Apparently he doesn't care, but I do. Clinging fiercely to my idée fixe--of getting back to the safe, secure auberge de la jeunesse--I finally, after a bit of shoving and pushing, get us on the road again. Back down the Loire and over one bridge. When we pull up at the hostel, inexplicably lit up like a Christmas tree, I leap off the bike, give Raoul a quick bise d'amitié (what an awful coquette I am being--and how delicious it feels!) and dash for the door.

But where are the hostelers? And who are all these strange men who keep shoving glasses of what looks and tastes like champagne into my hand? Impossible to describe the next half hour without having it sound like some kind of orgy. I cannot quite believe what is happening, but it is very, very funny and really perfectly innocent with all these people around. Even some girls, who, in an interlude of talk, admire my "chic" blue jeans.
   

   "Someone wants you upstairs, madame." Oh, the two American girls? "This way," say the boys who've been plying me with champagne, and I dutifully follow them--straight to the boys' dorm, where they pull me into a room. "Remember me?" murmurs a flushed young man, pinning me against the wall. Half smothered, I suddenly recognize him as one of my cavaliers from last night. But what a change in his behavior! Yesterday evening, he shrugs, that was la bonne société. Tonight we are entre nous--"just ourselves," with no gray-haired matrons observing from the sidelines. I'll say we are! I wriggle, laughing, out of his arms and into another man's . . . Good grief!

Over in the other wing, the American girls are washing and rolling their hair. They look up in astonishment when I burst into their room with my mussed clothing and babbling tale. "Come see for yourselves!" But my pursuers have mysteriously vanished--who were they anyway?

    "Oh, just the local soccer team celebrating a victory," says the père aubergiste (and where was he half an hour ago?). "We close at 11, so of course they had to leave." Of course. The playing field is right across the road, and the hostel is the obvious celebration hall. I must have arrived just in time to be the trophy!

The rest of the evening is a let-down, as the girls pump me for information about what I've been doing in France. Was I once afraid of being pitied by them? How long ago that seems.

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He kissed her on the lily breast
and held her shoulders twa
And aye she grat and aye she spat
and turned to the wa'
      (Scottish trad. ballad)

        Gaining some wifely aplomb in a French household and losing it on the road . .

Monday, June 10

My early-morning visit to the stables is a washout, for the best men and horses have departed for an exhibition in Paris. Darn!  So it's back into town to find out how to get to the village where Jean-Paul lives. All I know is that Saint-Aubin-de-Luigné is 25 kilometers from Angers and not in the squiggle of tiny names on my map.      

    "It's somewhere on the other side of town," says an old man, so I walk over the two bridges before discovering he meant on the other side of town. I'm getting a bit tired of crossing these bridges and of asking the same old question about what is beginning to seem a mythical village. (Alex, of course, would have found out where it was beforehand.) A discouraging day, and I haven't even begun hitching!

A car pulls up beside me on the busy street, and a friendly suntanned face leans out: "Saint-Aubin-de-Luigné? I'll take you there." Does everyone in town know where I'm headed?  But how marvelous to sit back and leave my driver--a local winegrower--to find the way, which turns out to be elusive indeed. For he stops at every crossroad to consult his map, then at an inn to seek advice and offer me some cool Anjou wine, on impulse by the roadside to pick me a sprig of luzerne (is that alfalfa? and are we getting anywhere?)   Now we stop at his own vineyard to admire a gnarled 98 year-old grapevine stock. All out in the open and under balmy blue skies, so much more wholesome than come-up-and-see-my-etchings! And educational too. He tells me about the blight of 1868, which would have wiped out French vineyards if the winegrowers hadn't been able to graft onto blight-resistant native American grape stocks--a nice exchange for the French grape stocks that founded the California vineyards in the first place!

But this lane of aubépine and eglantier is leading me into more pastoral pursuits than I'd bargained for. Blooming hawthorn and wild rose--the perfect setting for the knight-and-gay-lady encounters of old English balladry, where the knight (forester, shepherd, farmer--or winegrower?) is instructed not to "fear the dewy grass nor the rumpling of her gown, oh." My slacks are already rumpled, the dew is well burnt off the tall grass, and having received a good grounding in songs of this sort, I really have no excuse for not entering into the spirit of the thing. Indeed I am feeling very peculiar impulses to dalliance, and the hard loins pressed against mine tell me that the encounter will move with traditional swiftness if I don't grab hold of myself. Now, Jean, while you're still on your feet!

My baffled winegrower is a very civilized man. "Si tu ne le veux . . ," he says, shrugging his shoulders, and conducts me amiably on to Saint-Aubin-de-Luigné. What luck to have got here in one extended ride! But I'm thankful to be leaving the road for a time; men are becoming much too attractive.

That wasted, licit double bed at home . . . How could I have been such an iceberg with Alex? I ache for him today--at least I hope that ache is for him. But would I be feeling the same desire if he were here with me (or worse, if I were back home with him?) For certainly the way Frenchmen talk to me and look at me is a part of my dreadful state of mind. Wanting a stranger's caresses and a husband's constancy, wishing that Alex were here making love to me and glad that he isn't around to spoil things. I hope it will help settle my mind to stay with a proper French family and stop meeting men on the make.

Is the row of connected little houses up ahead la Saulaie? A small boy digging in the dirt says "yes" so I knock on one of the doors. "Quelle surprise!" exclaims Jean-Paul, pulling me through a dark hallway to where Marie-Jeanne is clearing away the remains of lunch. "And what good timing!"

For the Wrights left for England the day before yesterday, and the rooms they occupied are now free. Jean-Paul leads me outside again and in at another door to their two-room "guest house." Stone floors and whitewashed walls, a two-burner cookstove and small sink across from the fieldstone hearth and sturdy table; in the next room a billowy feather bed, an old-fashioned wardrobe and, tucked into one corner, a plastic-curtained shower. Everything but--

    "The toilet's in the other part of the house," he says a little apologetically, as we pop in and out of some more doors . . . What a confusingly split-up home! And the sections they bought (a year ago) aren't even continuous; a peasant family, very resistant to change, owns the intervening bit.

    "Perhaps," sighs Jean-Paul, "when the old man dies . . ."

Do I have any dirty clothes to wash, asks Marie-Jeanne. How did she ever guess? We dump my duds into her washing machine and peg them out on a line across the road, next to a hayfield, while we talk about haycrops and husbands and hitchhiking.  Which she's done too, but this black-haired, free-spirited young woman says she now prefers to travel by train and avoid les ennuis. (I haven't told her the half of mine.) Not a bad idea at all. Yes, by train and bicycle, unbeholden to strange men, that is how I will travel when I'm a little richer. Will I still get into these messes?

At 5:00 Roland and his four-year-old brother, Joujou, are home from school for a snack of bread and jam, while Jean-Paul conducts me on a little illegal motortour along the valley of the Layon and back to the butcher's to pick out three hefty cotelettes de boeuf. With a proper Frenchman's regard for his stomach, he has already discussed the evening menu with his wife; they've decided that the too-tough asparagus should be made by her into soupe aux asperges, the meat to be fetched and grilled by him on the open dining-room hearth. If Jean-Paul is at all typical, French husbands take a very nice and active interest in the household affairs--and not just the food, although that, of course, is central.

There's the garden too, mostly bare dirt still, but he's setting out red and white petunias around the naked gray house walls. With the garden hose running through an open window to the kitchen faucet and Marie-Jeanne calling impatiently, "It's getting cold in here--can I close the window soon?" he pats the last plants into place. "In a little minute, dear."

It does get cold when the sun drops and Jean-Paul finally stops grubbing in the dirt to light a fire in the dining-room hearth. Roland and Joujou are tucked into bed by now. Instead of singing to them, I suppose I could have been watching Marie-Jeanne in the kitchen. Ah well, at least I come down in time for a small lesson in salad prep. "No, no," she says as I jiggle the wire basket full of washed lettuce leaves. "Regarde!" and she swings the basket in a vigorous, stiff-armed circle without losing a leaf (a simple matter of centrifugal force). The salad is dressed in the usual oil and vinegar and mustard fashion (wherever did ketchupy "French dressing" come from anyway?) and served, along with the soup, the cutlets, the frites and a good white wine "from the neighborhood," on a low round table before the glowing coals. I'm ensconced there too, in a cushy low chair that seems to have claimed me for the evening. Talk about comfort!

   "Un petit point linguistique, Jeanne . . ." With scholarly precision, Jean-Paul points out flaws in my overly creative French.  And he analyses me too. I squirm with delight, glad he didn't know me at fourteen, when he says that of course I never had the doubts about growing up female which I describe my youngest daughter having--that I am, in fact, extremely feminine. It is also evident, he continues, that I love to frôler le feu (as my children have noted too--"Oh, don't show Mother that sign," they once said of a "dangerous trail ahead" notice in the Berkshires; "she'll have to follow it.")   Yes, that's just what I've been doing lately--and obviously enjoying to the hilt: flirting with danger (or "skirting the fire").  Which means that I'll keep on getting into these messes? Oh dear . . .

Tuesday, June 11

I sleep until 9:30 in my soft hollow, breaking a solemn promise to see Roland off to school. Now Marie-Jeanne and I attack a stack of dirty dishes, and she lends me needle and thread to repair the waistband of the abused beige slacks. "The elastic's given out," I mutter, and hope she will not wonder why. For I'm sure this pretty young woman's life is in much better order than mine and that she would be appalled at the graceless situations I get myself into--myself and unsuspecting French drivers.  They are generally civilisés, she says, and I agree brightly that all you have to do is to say no. And act it. That sounds so simple and I feel so resolute in this well-run French household. A proper home--and how I want its mistress to approve of me!

Marie-Jeanne has more time to spend on household and husband (and herself!) than many American mothers, for both children are gone all day, Joujou taking a long after-noon nap at his école maternelle. Public nursery schools for three-to-six-year-olds seem to be here to stay; indeed, walking through French towns, I've been struck by these attractive child-care centers, oases of color and cleanliness in the most sordid neighborhoods. Without denigrating men or sex, Frenchwomen do seem to have achieved results that their militant American sisters might well envy.

   "Maybe we could work out a child exchange one summer--much better for them than expensive touring," says Marie-Jeanne, while Roland assures me that French is a very easy language that my children will have no trouble learning; he's astonished that Edward, at eight, doesn't yet speak it. A fine idea! I like the Perriers' style of living, the way they manage to lead a rather free and unconventional life ("but our neighbors are so easily shocked--we need that garden wall . . .") while retaining some solid middle-class habits. A settled routine for the children, for instance, which is why Joujou wasn't at the festival. "Too upsetting for a small child," says Marie-Jeanne. "He stayed with my sister in Angers."

Jean-Paul, too, is a traditionalist in some appealing little ways. The Wrights have already initiated him into the mysteries of elderberry winemaking, and Marie-Jeanne shows me a cloudy yellow infusion fermenting away in the kitchen. "He'd really like to plant grape stocks, of course . . ." A traveling salesman for pharmaceutical products, (and does he pick up hitchhikers?) her husband almost apologizes for this bread-and-butter job, obviously considering his true vocation to lie rather in what he does, I gather, every evening between 6:00 and 9:00--cultivating his garden. "Next year we'll have roses up the house wall."

Grand-pere was wrong though. His son-in-law may not be wedded to the job, but losing a driver's license doesn't keep him from going off on a borrowed motor scooter for morning calls, returning home at noon to fetch sausages for lunch and sarments to grill them on. The winegrower next door is happy to let us burn these dead grape-vine prunings, and they give a fierce, fast blaze. For her coleslaw, Marie-Jeanne has already beaten oil and egg yolk and lemon juice into mayonnaise ("oh, do you buy it ready-made?"). For dessert she brings out store-bought caramel custards which we unmold from their foil containers onto our plates, Jean-Paul carefully covering his custard with Kelloggs corn flakes ("a most interesting combination of textures, my dear."). There's Irish coffee and conversation as I sink deeper and deeper into my cushy armchair . . . Past 4:00, and I intended to take a long hike today . . .

But first Roland, home from school, must lead me on a route des vins. Rather like having a friendly puppy dog as a guide, and like a wriggly puppy he falls laughing on top of me when I sit down by a decrepit hay wagon. "C'est beau, 1'Anjou, n'est-ce pas?" Yes, it's a beautiful, gentle land, though part of its charm, no doubt, lies in my well-fed state of sensual contentment. No pack, no boots, no danger in returning Roland's warm embrace. (And is my youngest missing me? For Edward, too, is a warmhearted child--the one who most needs the mothering that I seem to do less and less of.  Growing out of mothering before they're ready for it, Jean?)

There's even the pleasure of watching others work, mostly older men and women tramping up and down the rows of staked vines with their stubby pruning knives. And when they die? "We're seeing more and more abandoned vineyards in the Anjou," I remember Jean-Paul telling me; "the ones with lots of foliage and little fruit."

I'm on my own at last, as Roland goes hallooing across the fields, "Jou . . jou . ." (is that child ever called Julien?) By the roadside a dark-garbed young woman is gathering sprays of fragrant chèvrefeuille. She says she's on a week of prayer and meditation at one of the many religious retreats that dot the Anjou (as if wine and religion had a natural affinity). "You'll come to it on down the road," she says. . . Past vineyards and hayfields and checkered stands of grain, I do indeed come to a handsome gabled building. Deserted. Are they all out gathering honeysuckle? Enjoying the gentle tail-end of the day away from the kitchen? Ah, an advantage of the religious life that I've never properly considered before. Perhaps those older women who used to retire into convents were simply tired of cooking.

Next to the deserted retreat are the ruins of a fourteenth-century chateau, ready to slide down the grassy hillside. Roses sprawl up one wall; wild flowers, grasses and ferns thrust their roots between the proud stones. I skid downhill as the setting sun turns the towers above me red-gold . . . Should I return along the banks of the Layon and its white saucers of elderberry blossom? But that way means stripping and swimming across the river. I test the water with a toe . . and retrace my footsteps through the upland fields, small scurryings and twitterings all about me in the tall grass . .

Back in my own little "house" by a fire of sarments, I write a letter to Alex. "I miss you." How trite that sounds. And how hypocritical, when I'm not proposing to come back any sooner than necessary from the land that makes me so deliciously, painfully aware of being a woman. In fact, I'm planning to stay a bit longer. .

Wednesday, June 12

A lesson in child-rearing this morning. We've carried tea, bread and marmalade out to a rickety wooden table in the raw-looking back yard. But with the Bach "Magnificat" playing through an open window, the smell of new-mown hay and crushed mint in the air, the neighbors vines marching in neat rows up and down his undulating fields--it seems like a wonderfully civilized way to breakfast. Until Roland, standing by the house wall, makes a mischievous gesture, and his little brother promptly pees against it.

    "Naughty boy," cries his mother. "Do you think we want to eat where you have done pipi? That smells!" And turning even more angrily to Roland, "You put the idea into his head!" Roland drops his head to the table, ashamed of being scolded in front of me, ashamed of his part in polluting our breakfast air.  For Marie-Jeanne conveyed no larger sense of "sin," no shame in the human body--only "Ça pue!"

She's dressed for town today in a long cotton skirt and black knit top. Bra-less like the French girls in the hostels, who're beginning to make me feel like a sappy victim of the American garment industry, trying to give myself a  shape I don't really have. Marie-Jeanne is small-busted too and looks attractive and perfectly proper as she ties up a worn carpetbag with string. "Just so it holds together till Angers," where we're all expected for lunch--if I will be kind enough to drive. "You do have a driver's license?" (Any old one will do, it seems.) Marie-Jeanne will then take off for Paris, the children will stay with relatives in Angers and Jean-Paul will continue on to a conference in Brittany. By train, of course, unless . . . A thought strikes him: since I'm going to Brittany too, why don't I drive him to the conference and keep the car for a few days? "What do you think, Jean?" Marie-Jeanne doesn't second the suggestion, though. I think she's relieved when I explain my propensity for watching bird life instead of oncoming traffic and decline the frightening offer!

The whole family helps me to navigate right up to the squat towers of the chateau d'Angers. Here a nervous Jean-Paul takes the wheel, preferring security to legality as we steer for grand-père's city apartment, where we lunch with an assortment of Perrier relatives. The food is delicious and the conversation of an astounding Gallic frankness. Isn't it a pity, they all urbanely agree, that Marie-Hélène with her "pretty little breasts" has such enormous hips; a detailed discussion of Marie-Hélène's anatomy follows. Unimaginable in polite Anglo-Saxon society, but in French it seems in perfectly good taste--a friendly, analytical exchange of views on a topic of absorbing general interest.

This seems like a good opportunity to telephone home; I've decided to postpone my departure on the forty-five-day excursion fare as long as possible. I had planned to be back on June 28th, Mary's sixteenth birthday. But how can I leave France in two weeks, when I haven't visited either Brittany or the Auvergne yet? Surely the family can survive a bit longer than that without me, though I feel I should at least check it out with Alex. And point out to him what a waste of money it'll be to dash back to the U.S., having spent more on air fare ($300) than anything else. (That argument will appeal!)

Oops, I've forgotten our area code, and the French operator refuses to believe in the state of West Virginia. "Oui, oui," she agrees, "la Virginie de 1'ouest" and connects me with some total stranger in Virginia. So Jean-Paul picks up the phone and, talking as if to an imbecile, succeeds at last in ringing our home. But by this time Alex has left for work, and I have spent 37 fr. to converse with a laconic twelve year-old who doesn't even sound impressed by the miracle of Mother's voice.
     

      "THIS IS MOTHER," I shout.
      "Yes, I know," Janet replies, evidently wondering why I'm making such a fuss about it. "Cooking is easy," she adds, and I wonder what they're eating anyway. Nothing, I'm sure, like the strawberry cream tart we just devoured. A guilt-inducing line of thought that I drop right away, but I can see that trying to communicate with the family when I'm wandering about France is going to be a pain in the neck. Communicate in a two-way fashion, that is.

I change airline tickets anyway, before it's too late to do so, and Jean-Paul drives me out of Angers onto the main road westward to Brittany. It's now 2:30, time for two uneventful hitches. The first with a friendly woman my age (yes, some of us do stop for hitchhikers), the second with a slick salesman frankly seeking a companion for the night. How easy to say no to him!  He drops me off outside of Vannes on the south coast of Brittany, and I congratulate myself on my new-found equilibrium.

Now a large white American ambulance makes a U-turn and stops. "You didn't see me waiting up ahead, so I had to come back for you," grumbles the big man at the wheel, who says he drives this monstrous vehicle for his own pleasure during off-duty hours: "I like its power." I don't think it holds the road nearly as well as a Peugeot or a Citroen, but do not express this churlish criticism.  And it turns out that we disagree on a lot more than cars . . .
    

     "People are just things," he says.
     "I, at least, am something special," I answer back, for we've somehow become embroiled in a pseudo-philosophical argument on the nature of man--and more especially woman. Me, a meaningless cog because I don't endure like a stone? And is this line of thinking supposed to appeal to the older woman: that sex is sex is sex, so get it while you can, lady? How very unpoetic and how un-French! Perhaps the occupation of ambulance driver is mind-warping.  Ah, but I am misinterpreting him, he protests, when I insinuate that he must treat women like cows. "Au contraire," as he would be only too happy to demonstrate. Shall we discuss it over a glass of wine? 

So we stop at a country inn, where he admits that other girls he's picked up have occasionally shared my stupid, anti-pleasure attitude. Cold types who meant what they said--he doesn't believe that I do. And that's true in part, for while his notions are so abhorrent that I cannot resist doing battle with them, the verbal joust is arousing and his cocksure conceit unsettling. There's something both very exciting, and very hateful, about this fleshy, heavy-footed man with the hard hands and the cold gray eyes. What next? I wonder as I follow him back into the ambulance.

     "Eh bien, ma petite Jeanne." He pulls into a grassy lane, steps down and reaches for me. "But this is ridiculous, monsieur. You know I don't want"--he cuts off my words with a long, thrusting kiss. "No more talking, Jean!"  He throws a dirty car blanket onto the grass and pushes me onto it.  Hey, wait a minute!  I just repaired those pants. Off they come . . . worse, off come his, and my sexual ambiguities are suddenly resolved.

     "It's too late--you no longer have the right to refuse," he growls, pinning my arms to the ground and pressing his hairy body on mine. Like hell I don't! The harder he struggles to subdue me, the more he becomes an enemy to be fought tooth and nail, except that pinned (or slammed) to the ground I can't really use either teeth or nails.  All I can do--it happens of itself, as it did four days ago, and I'm not sure it qualifies as "fighting"--is to go all stiff.  To lock him out with clenched thighs.

 Is all this shoving and pushing his idea of lovemaking?

    "Arrgh, it's your fault, you know, for making me so angry." But I'm angry too, and anger prevails over sensible fear.  Afraid of a man's brute strength for the first time in my life, I still cannot yield. I cannot, even as I'm flung about with rib-jarring thuds and the heavy hand tightens over my throat, and the thought flashes across my mind: "this is how silly women get themselves killed."

     "Donne-toi, donne-toi!" I hear the impossible command through a choking mist. And when he releases my windpipe, I hear myself too, yelling for help, though how I would explain my predicament if help did come, I really have no idea.  And I don't care.  I'm beyond caring.

Perhaps my driver cares, though, perhaps he's shocked at his own violence, for the moment of darkening vision for me is the moment when he gives up.  He comes to his senses, lets me put myself and my scattered clothes together . . . and we part on the roadside, open enemies.

   "Méchante fille!" he calls as he drives off, and I think any French court would agree with him. Agree that I'm a "bad girl" and deport me as a public nuisance?  No, they probably wouldn't go that far.  But the guy has a point. It was a train wreck that I saw coming, that turned out to be a lot more than I bargained for--or that he bargained for either, I bet. A humiliating experience for him, a scary one for me. Never again, Jean, do you make a fool out of a man when his pants are down!

In fact, making a fool out of a man in any circumstances is no longer a game I want to play. I used to sing with great zest (with altogether too much zest, thought Hal!) a long ballad about a "lady gay" who talks the "modest lad" who caught her "dipping in the brook" (skinnydipping, that is) into escorting her home unmolested--and then mocks him for his want of enterprise  By her lights, I suppose my ambulance driver was a proper man of action. And I hate his guts.

I'm also appalled at my own provocative behavior. No, it isn't a game anymore, not when it lands me in a spot like this! I'm still 28 kilometers from the hostel on the tip of the Quiberon peninsula. Should I even try to hitch that far? Should I be here at all? How reassuring to meet an old man who steps up to offer friendly advice on hitchhiking and to commiserate with my "bad luck." He speaks French as if it were a foreign language to him, as indeed it probably is. (I've been told one can find old people in isolated Breton villages who speak no French at all!) Kibitzing by the road-side seems to be a great amusement for him: telling hitchhikers where to stand, guessing which cars will stop and which will not.

    "There, it is one for you. Good girl--run on now!" and he beams broadly as I climb into a car with two local boys. Who assure me gravely that the hostel at Quiberon is closed and suggest alternative possibilities. A leg-pull? I've always been a gullible soul, but today I have lost all faith in my powers of judgment. So I decline the possibilities and tell them to drop me off anyway on the road to Quiberon.

It's a tremendous relief when a Breton fishing family takes me into their panel truck, and I collapse onto the mattress in back. "Pauvre petite, how tired you must be from carrying that heavy pack!" says the dark-haired wife with pixie Celtic features. Tired? Say rather in a state of shock, and thankful to be conveyed in the setting sun right up to the hostel door. It is open.

Still shaken, I meet Christiane, who has been having her own troubles on the road and is all ears to hear what happened to me. "I1 vous a attaquée?" she asks incredulously, staring hard, I think, at my bruised throat. (Though when I check in the mirror I see no marks.) "Well, you see," I hedge, ashamed to confess that the "attack" was provoked and perhaps a well-earned rebuke for my teasing tongue. In any case, we're both tired of single hitching and agree to join forces on to Lannion, where the youth hostel is also a center for "cyclotourisme." (She's already investigated bicycle rental here in town and found it to be twice as expensive as the hostel rate.) One side of my chest hurts as I lie on the cot and talk--an aching reminder of my stupidity, and can I possibly have fractured a rib? Christiane is a student of psychology; she seems terribly competent and worldly-wise. Much more grown-up than me, though I suppose she is all of twenty-four or -five. "I think many students take up psychology far too young, analyzing life before they have lived it," she says. That's clearly not my problem!

Thursday, June 13

I'm off early before breakfast for a liter of milk, only to lose myself on the way back. What a curious peninsula of sand and rock and pine! But new summer homes and hotels are going up everywhere; the old walled gardens, half-hidden behind their pine and cedar windbreaks, razed to make room for ugly slabs of concrete. And a good part of the undeveloped land is a military reservation. Nothing to hold us here. "Allons-y, Christiane!"

I'm obviously safer today. But it seems to take longer to find a ride, and where I would walk farther out of town, Christiane, on convalescent leave from a recent operation, tires quickly, so we stop. Oh dear, is hitching with a girl going to be a drag? Her pack is heavier and bulkier than mine, but I have the awkward dulcimer. How to position all this gear so it won't scare off the drivers? "Your funny hat will catch their eye," she says . .

Ah, a local boy pulls over, and Christiane talks him into finding a bank in the next town and waiting while we both cash checks. "You see," she whispers, "a nice guy." Also a jack-of-all-trades and a fund of knowledge about the sea, he tells us that you can swim off the cold côte sauvage here, "if you eat a good meal first for strength." With a small boat in Quiberon, he often takes hostelers out sardine fishing. "It's too bad you're not sticking around here. . ."

"Formidable," says Christiane, but we're both set on reaching the north shore and the freedom of our own two wheels.

On our own again, we picnic between rides in a roadside cafe, eating our own provisions and splurging 3.50 fr. on a bottle of cider. Whatever did Christiane say to the garçon just now? For he brings the bottle chilled in a silver ice bucket and uncorks it for us with a flourish: "Bon appétit, mesdames!" This is definitely the right sort of cafe, and the apple wine makes up for all that standing-by-the-side-of-the-road. Now that so many orchards have been chopped down to clear space for summer homes, it's scarcer and dearer than vin ordinaire (often imported from Algeria). And inebriating--oh my, yes--but we tear ourselves away at last from the crumby table, waving goodbye to the nice waiter . .

Damn! Instead of providing sprightly conversation for our next driver, we find ourselves dozing off, lulled by the curves of the road into a cidery haze. Suddenly we're speeding past a bypass and into downtown Quimper.

   "How stupid drivers are!" cries Christiane as we trudge out of town and back to the main road, our lazy euphoria vanishing under the hot sun. We don't even detour to the double-spired cathedral, as delicately decorated as the lacework that old women sell on its doorstep, said our well-meaning chauffeur. But why blame his bêtise? How stupid of us to rely on someone else's naive good intentions instead of doing our own thinking. Perhaps cider and hitching don't mix, after all.

   "Toward Brest? Hop in," says a man in a little Renault. It turns out that none of us particularly wants to go to that industrial port on the main coastal road. Our driver promptly proposes a scenic shortcut through the interior. Christiane, sitting up. front with him, nods assent, so it must be okay; though from where I sit, some of this talk sounds quite wild. Mont-Saint-Michel? Is that on our route too? Impossible. Ah well, no doubt Christiane knows what we're doing, and there are two of us.

It is indeed a much more interesting route, light traffic and unspoiled countryside as we twist up and up the sheltered southern slopes of the Monts d'Arrée. We overtake two cyclists straining to scale the last steep rise.

   "What hard work!" says Christiane. Yes, and what a glorious ride they'll have coasting down to the sea!

    "Voilà, mesdames!" So that's what they were talking about, I think as we leave the car to scramble up to the high point of Brittany. The Mont-Sant-Mikael, a weatherbeaten little chapel dedicated confusingly (in Breton) to the same saint as the Norman island fortress! And how different from that tourist-ridden "sanctuary" is this lonely spot of pilgrimage, with the mountainside sweeping grandly down to the northern sea. A savage, rocky landscape of heather and bracken and gorse, it carries me back to the Scottish Highlands and to  Hal kissing me on a heathery muntain, where we could see for miles around ("As private as any bedroom," he assured me.  Yes, it would have been so easy . . .)

Our helpful driver--an innocent soul, after all--drops us off for good in tamer surroundings: a shop that features Breton crafts. Something for Mary's birthday? But I don't think she wants lace or linens, and what I really want is the blue and yellow hand-painted pottery that I can't quite see stuffing into my pack. Carrying everything on one's back certainly puts a damper on impulse buying!

Another drowsy ride, with me missing more and more of the conversation up front. (Are they really talking faster, or is my brain slowing down?) It takes us to the door of the Lannion youth hostel--a three-storey gray building, right in town and close to the river and a bustling riverside clothing bazaar. The hostel kitchen on the second floor is painted a striking orange and pink--an enthusiastic volunteer paint job, we're told. On the third floor are several neat, empty dormitories, but when père aubergiste Michel comes back from the seashore, he tells us the beds are all reserved for a school group. Shaking sand out of his pockets, he says, "But don't worry--I'll find some place for you to sleep."

Christiane has a blister on her foot and a headache from the sun, so I go out on the town alone. And eat elegant, overpriced crêpes bretonnes at an establishment recommended by Michel. Ty Breiz ("Breton home") it calls itself, but very few customers are here to drink from the folkloric painted pottery bowls, and they don't look like regulars. Cold and classy. Not the sort of place an unescorted woman feels comfortable in. Is Michel getting a kickback?

Back to the hostel, now overrun by a herd of thundering school children. Our gear has been moved down to a recreation room on the second floor, where two tired English cyclists chivalrously offer the one sleeping couch to Christiane and me.  We really ought to flip a coin, but Christiane's already sacked out--and she is convalescing.

A friend of Michel arrives bearing a bottle of what he calls "champagne bretonne"--i.e., good hard cider. Christiane revives and conviviality reigns until 11:30, when it occurs to us that the two non-French speaking cyclists ensconced in their sleeping bags on the bare floor would appreciate some peace and quiet. "You should come meet my wife," says Michel's handsome friend. "She's from Philadelphia." Unfortunately, Michel lives outside the hostel and will be locking the door when he leaves--which means we stay in (if we want to sleep here) and they go out.

________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Over hillways up and down,
Myrtle green and bracken brown;
Past the sheiling, through the town.
All for sake of Mairi.
         (Scottish trad. song)

   A safer way to go--chasing after Breton weddings and other folkways on bicycle . .

Friday, June 14

Tramp, tramp, tramp. The herd of little elephants awakens above us and proceeds to rampage up and down two flights of stairs. Every last child must be making at least one trip to the toilets, in a row of booths outside the back door to the left. The bicycles are to the right. (I'm still trying to figure out this bicycle-plumbing connection.) How wonderful that French school children get to go on extended, low-cost excursions, and no wonder Michel sleeps elsewhere! "And how inconvenient having to wait 'till 8:30 to rent a bicycle," says Christiane. "When we've been awake since 6:00 . ."

Kids all over the kitchen, so I opt for croissants and café au lait in a nearby cafe.  When the post office opens at 8:00, I cable a pithy message home (CAN I STAY?), a yes-no reply to be sent back to the same post office. This strikes me as a brilliant solution to the thorny problem of transatlantic communications, since I'll have to return to Lannion with my rented bicycle anyway. How simple!

Now for my transport. "You're off early," says Michel, yawning as he opens theshed on a collection of brand new Peugeot bicycles. Wow! What a change from the clunkers in Beaugency! I pick a trim green vélo de course (in my size), Christiane a heavier touring model. We're both taking a one-day warm-up tour of the jutting bit of coast beyond Lannion and leaving most of our gear behind. "Au revoir, Michel!"

My sturdy racing steed leaps forward--a sheer delight to ride, and its four speeds handle the long, long hill out of town almost painlessly. Christiane's having a tougher time, but she clearly doesn't expect us to cling together, especially when our bikes are so unmatched. "Don't wait for me, Jean--I feel fine!"

Aha, a side road toward the sea. This heavily trafficked main road isn't much fun, and I hope Christiane has the sense to leave it, too. No signposts anymore, so I resort to asking directions (I don't want a dead-end downhill road to the sea!) as I pedal past whitewashed cottages with steeply peaked roofs and gaily colored bedding draped out of the bedroom windows. (The French believe in airing the bedding instead of dirtily tucking it in every morning.) Past doors that are wide open to let in the salt-and-pine-laden breeze. I suppose it is easier to welcome moderate French summers into the home than muggy American ones. But I think we get a bit carried away with sealing things up . . .

Roses clambering up cottage walls and peeping in at the windows, lupine spires in a rainbow of pastels. An old woman is even cultivating the top of her low stone wall. She points out the different flowers in her garden; "des capucines," she says, and the banal nasturtiums transform themselves into worldly French friars with blatant orange and yellow cowls. Yes, the marvelous thing about a bicycle is that it's so easy to stop. On the merest whim--a flower, a scent, a bird-call . .

Ah, down to the sea! La côte du granit rose appears as the road dips precipitously.  Not pink but granite-gray in this light,  the coast is beautifully craggy and convoluted, the sea studded with rocky islets. Much more interesting than the bland, sandy beaches of the southern coast, though the water is said to be glacée. But a bit of cold never used to bother me . . . so in a handy shed I pull on a swimsuit under the shorts, just in case that blue stuff down below is swimmable. Should I lock up the bike and carry along chain key, wallet and passport in my town-touristy leather handbag? Hell no!--tomorrow I'll leave it with Michel and buy a cloth shoulder bag instead.

Sliding down a scraggly trail to a point of rock and knee-high bristly gorse--ouch--I scramble onto the furthermost slanting slab of granite. With waves breaking about me, rushing between the rocks and sucking out again, suddenly this is as wet as I want to get. Water that looked invitingly cool and frothy from the road above is both frightening and fascinating me close range. It reminds me how cruelly changeable even a landlocked lake can be, how quickly the pretty whitecaps can swamp a frail canoe and the joking comraderie of clasped hands over an upturned hull turn into a nightmare of rolling boat and tossed bodies . . . calm descending, too late, too late, with the gentle rain, their fine boy-strength already extinguished by the chilly waves, while I with terribly girl-toughness endure. . . Yet I still love the sea and would not want its waters tamed any more than I would wish mountains leveled or men made predictable and controllable.  Perhaps at forty I am learning caution, though. And the tide is advancing. So I move off the rock.

On to the beach at Trébeurden, where I search for the top to my pot of fromage frais --darn, now I have to eat it up all at once--and wipe sticky tar off my feet.  And where's that shore road? Here we go again--past a bicycle-bestrewn youth hostel, along a salt marsh and out onto the "island" of Ile Grande. Small boats sit on the mud flats of its old port, flanked by moistly kelp-covered boulders . . . Two amiable brown draft horses browse by the road, wandering into the path of a very occasional car and nibbling tentatively at my bicycle. "Hey!"; I break off my roadside scribblings to remove the tasty Peugeot . . . then abandon it to visit a band of gypsies encamped on the dunes. There are no men in sight, only long-skirted, dark-skinned women and a horde of little children, all very interested in America--the land of instant wealth!

  "Some pretty lace, madame?" They throng about me and cannot believe I've brought no money. A handy excuse, for I'm truly uninterested in lace, even if it is the thing to buy in Brittany . . .

   "Of course, if you wish to see la vraie Bretagne," says an old lady gathering wild flowers a little further on, "you must get away from the coast where all the tourists are." Ah, I wouldn't mind leaving the chintzy folklore behind--summer cottages and inns proclaiming themselves "Breton homes" in the only Breton words I've heard so far: Ty Breiz.

    "And where did you leave your belongings, dear madame?" ask her two companions. "Nowhere near those thieving gitanes, we hope."

What uncharitable suspicions! But I hasten back to my gear and push on to Trégastel . . and its semi-circle of fine sand between two rocky headlands. A swim at last, I think, wading through waist-high water which gets even shallower as I near a stray islet. It isn't as cold as I expected, but this does seem rather a silly activity. Does a wet swimsuit count for "swimming"?

Homeward bound now and finding it harder and harder to tear myself away from diverting sideroads, a cloister garden, an abandoned orchard . . . That's what makes cycling so slow! There's the piny gorge of the Ploumonach River; the fishing village of the same name, lovely and smelly at ebb tide; a twisty route des corniches high above the shining bay. People sit on benches here and watch the sun sink into the sea. Time I stopped shilly-shallying about, so it's down to the big port town of Perros Guirec and up the other side for a ten-kilometer sprint inland to Lannion--the last two kilometers of effortless free flight worth all the uphill toil!

Leaning low over the handlebars, flying into the wind and past the pokey cars, I lose myself in the joy of pure speed and coast into the hostel at 8 PM, only ten minutes after Christiane.

   "My first really good day," she says. "So much better than autostop! Tomorrow I will rent a bike like yours." I agree that it would be a lot less work.
    "But I am very curious about you."
    "About why I didn't stick with you today?"
    "Of course not; I didn't think you would. But why are you here in France alone?"

Married Frenchwomen may find my solo vacation entirely understandable, but Christiane does not. She prods me with questions . . . and I find myself describing a cycle of rebuff and feared rebuff, of silence and subterfuge, of locked-up, tongue-tied desires that I couldn't convey to Alex even when there wasn't an ocean between us. In fact, to talk to him at all on anything that really mattered, it sometimes seemed as if I needed that distance. So I couldn't tell him face to face I was going to France; I had to wait until he'd left for the university and then call him on the phone--after I'd already bought my plane ticket and applied for a passport. I felt I had to do that first, to commit myself while I still had the courage. As if Alex were some sort of ogre. An ogre that you imagined into being, Jean?  For, of course, he said none of the things you'd dreaded to hear, only "why not--you need to get away. But why do you always wait 'till the last minute to tell me your plans?"

     "That's true. I do spring things on him, Christiane." (How did we ever get into this anyway?) "Because I hate having him throw cold water on my enthusiasms, unnerve me, diminish me . . . It's happened before, and now it doesn't even have to happen for me to imagine it all in my head. To feel hurt in advance, hurt and afraid to talk."

Expressed in cool, logical French, how idiotic (and how cowardly) this all sounds!

    "Will you be able to talk to him when you get back?" she asks.  I hope so, I hope I have the courage. For it takes a terrific effort for me to pose some simple questions, when I'm convinced the answer will be "no" or, worse yet, that deadening "what for?" It seems so long since Alex said, "Let's go to Florida!" and we just set off the winter before Mary was born. Before our lives became complicated with home ownership and investments-for-the-future and we both became super-planners and super-savers. Everything went wrong on that long ago trip down the Shark River in a little outboard motorboat, almost getting swept out to sea for one thing, but it's a good memory all the same--the sort of impulsive adventure we haven't shared since. And does Alex miss those adventures too, Jean? Is that why he's so surly-silent when you come back from festivals, out of envy? It never occurred to me.

     "I am fascinated by these conjugal misunderstandings," murmurs Christiane. Somehow I don't think she's in any hurry to get married.

Saturday, June 15

A slight miscalculation on milk this morning. Drink it up, Jean, the whole liter! No telling where you'll be tonight or tomorrow or the next day . . . And I pore over the route into the interior that Michel has mapped out for me, noting that hostels are few and far between in the "real Brittany."

A 100 fr. deposit? Michel isn't as trusting as the père aubergiste at Beaugency, but then the bike rental here is only 6 fr. instead of 8 fr. a day. "We're not thieves, you see." He hands over a racing bike to Christiane, who wants to explore more of the spectacular coastline. But first a practice ride: a fall and a scraped knee. "Par for the course," I tell her and pedal off into town for another bundle of francs, sun cream, a blue cloth shoulder bag and--oh yes, it's Saturday--a wedding procession. The church is next to a covered market . . . but my stomach's still sloshing. And no sense loading the bike with heavy food now, with that long hill looming ahead.

All the roads out of Lannion lead uphill, it seems. I take one up to the village of Ploubèze, where an ancient church, tiny pink flowers sprouting from its lacy open bell tower, stands cheek-by-jowl with a modern kind of "merry-go-round" (at least, the French call it that--manège): an arena full of little go-carts where lunatics go bashing about against other lunatics.) I wonder which is better attended on Sunday anyway?

A side trip to the chateau de Coatfrec, like a Mayan ruin in the Breton woods, this ivy-smothered relic. Crawling into one tower through a low hole in its base, I find crow feathers littering the muddy floor and hear their gutteral croaks. What a gloomy place! Another world from the farm courtyard where I left my trusty Pegasus propped against a haystack. I hurry back to it--to the good barnyard smells, the bright sunshine, the gulls soaring overhead. . .

I'm trying to follow Michel's directions, but signposts are confusingly filled with names that don't look at all French. There's that foreign k, for instance. "Kerfons" says a sign, and I coast downhill to a chunky Celtic church. "Oh no, madame, you want the other road," says a helpful farmer, so back I  pump. . . The summer cottages and dark pines of the coast are gone now, and so are the neatly tended gardens, replaced by roadside fern and foxglove. The tourist traffic is gone too, and except for an occasional farm vehicle, I have the road to myself. A cyclist's paradise of hay-fields and pastures--hedgerows marking everything off, allowing me only intermittent glimpses of a shimmery green countryside.

The road plunges into cool woods and down, down to the river Guer and a flash of blue kingfisher, across a bridge and up the opposite bank to the ruins of a real chateau fort. This is the twelfth-century military fortress of Tonquédec. Remarkably well preserved, and uncluttered with devices to educate or protect the tourist. A modest sign "invites" us to observe "la plus grande prudence car le ménagement décline toute responsabilité en cas d'accident." How diplomatically put! (And more effective, I bet, than the flat-footed "défense de jouer sur les murs"--which would arouse in any child of mine a great desire to play on the forbidden walls. They look like a perfectly marvelous place for hide-and-seek or follow-the-leader.) Four country men drinking real cider in the courtyard assure me that the warning is superfluous--"pas de danger, madame." Still, I think I'll climb first and imbibe afterwards.

Past a single gaping hole of a window, a dim stairway cut into the stone wall leads to the bare tower top. The top of the tower wall, that is, since the roof is long gone. No guard rails, but it's six feet wide at the narrowest point, so there's really no danger. Is there? I look down on the silver sliver of the Guer and out over the toy farmhouses and cattle of neighboring plateaux, then lying flat on my stomach, I peer into the dank depths where nesting crows flap and squawk. Suddenly this doesn't seem like such a marvelous play-place, after all. Or the second tower either, which is even higher, though somehow less forbidding . . .

"Gesundheit, fraulein!" Drinking cidre bouché with some Germans in the courtyard down below, I learn that the higher tower was the tour de guet (for spying approaching enemy forces), the first tower the donjon. This stronghold, says their educational booklet, had its own drawbridge and could be defended even when the rest of the chateau had fallen. And when it went, well, there was always the subterranean passageway communicating with the chateau de Goatfrec, six kilometers on the other side of the Guer. A "haunted tunnel" for local children until the entrance caved in some years back . . .

Will a walk in the beech woods clear my head? These nice back roads permit dreamy, but not tipsy, cycling past feathery larch and weeping willow. Toward Belle-Isle-en-Terre, which lies in the right general direction and has a lovely euphonious name (but naturally no youth hostel). "Lannion--10 km." reads the signpost when I cross the main road (I've successfully avoided it since leaving Lannion at eleven this morning). And it's already three in the afternoon--incredible!

Should I try traveling in a slightly straighter line? My squiggly route must have tripled the actual distance. Still, I'm not in the Tour de France. I'm not even coming into a regular hostel tonight, to be asked "and where did you start from today?" by muscled youngsters who take their cycling seriously. And aren't you just as proud of your muscles, Jean? Yes I am, and if I chose to prove something, if it weren't such a glorious day for dallying . .

I roll silently on in a gauzy green dream, a summer haze blurring the outlines of trees and bushes. Belle-Isle-en-Terre isn't posted on any of the signs; does it have a different Breton name perhaps? I keep stopping to ask directions, but soon forget them as I cannot envision how these spoken names are spelled. (An academic failing, no doubt, this dependence on the written word.) Coasting lazily into the valley of Belle-Isle, I think I could happily stop for the night in this truly "beautiful-island on-the-land"--if I could only find the right sort of inn.

   "You will have better luck in the smaller villages," say the townswomen in their black dresses. "A little farther on, dear madame, assuredly . . .

Twelve kilometers farther, in the village of Plougonver, a chain of conversations and refreshments revives a slumbering notion. Isn't it Saturday night and time I gave fate some assistance in the matter of wedding festivities? I am encouraged by the way people seem to approve my desire to dance (I express it as "a deep interest in their traditional songs and dances"--le folklorique).

    "Why don't you go talk to monsieur le rectaire?" says the old lady feeding me cakes and wine. "He'll know about weddings . . ." So in my dirty white shorts I knock on the door of a fine country home, and a maid leads me in to the white-haired rector, who seems warmly interested in my quest when he finally understands what I'm saying over the yapping of his little dog.

  "Tais-toi, Michou, I'm trying to talk to the good lady!" And he tells me there's sure to be a fête following the wedding banquet of a young couple in "Melcaré."

   "Could you write that name down for me, please?" Ah, Maël-Carhaix! But at 7:30 in the evening, he wonders, isn't thirty kilometers perhaps bit too far away? I assure him that my boundless enthusiasm for Breton dances and my intrepid vélo de course will conquer all obstacles.

   "Merci mille fois, monsieur!" Now for some serious cycling--a headlong race, in fact, against the setting sun. I keep my hands off the brakes on the long downhill stretches and my mouth firmly closed against flying insects; but I can still admire the land laid out below me, a richly variegated, rumpled green carpet as far as the eye can see. And what a peculiar way to savor the quiet twilight hours, I think as I fly past old men p1aying at bowls, children and dogs, women knitting by their doorsteps. The men shout encouraging comment at my hard-working thighs--"oh la la, quelles cuisses!" Up and down hill . . . thank God for the good surface of French back-country roads! (And the notice of chaussée deformée that warns of the very occasional pothole.)

Mael-Carhaix would be on top of a long hill--it doesn't seem fair! My legs turn to rubber halfway up, so I get off and push in the fast-fading light. The town clock strikes nine. Ouf, I made it! Now where is this fête de noces? It's obvious, for everyone under thirty is heading there. But what a mess I must look! When I ask about lodgings, the patron of a small bistro says, "No food or lodging in this town." Period. His customers all look blank too. So it's back to the street . . . and a huddle of black-clad older women.

     "Would you have the goodness to tell me, dear ladies . . ." They cluck sympathetically; one of them takes me under her wing and after some consultation produces a room in a private home for 15 fr.

Now to wash up and change clothes and to eat crêpes and saucisses in my landlady's kitchen! The dance itself is a comedown, though--nothing like last Saturday's fête champêtre. This is a much larger, more formal affair in an overheated, smoke-filled hall, with a band set up at one end, a bar at the other dispensing (for a price, of course) wine and cognac, beer and soft drinks. And the respectable matrons who helped find me a room aren't here. I know no one, and I feel a shameless interloper. Will I be, as the French say, "making the wallpaper" all evening long? How dreary!

   "Don't we know you? . . Oh, you're from America? Formidable! Hey guys . . ." Suddenly I'm surrounded by a gang of young men and promptly led onto the dance floor by a boy with slicked back, greasy black hair. Dance after dance in the same sweaty embrace, and between numbers Jacques brings me a bottle of orangeade. Dammit--he's apparently staked out a claim on the American adventuress, and his friends aren't about to jump it! How can I extricate myself from this sticky situation, except by leaving the dance for good? (Sorties into the fresh night air don't help; Jacques doesn't understand that I just want to breathe.) Impossible for a French bal to be really dull, though, and even in this bourgeois bash these are occasional Breton line dances. Lovely and lilting and partnerless.

   "Tu m'aimes, Jeanne? Tu aimes les Bretons?" Escorted back to my lodgings at 2 AM (and thank heaven they're so close!), I try to tell Jacques that my love for Brittany is of a very general nature, not necessarily extending to individual Breton men. "Alors to n'aimes pas les Bretons," he says with a reproachful puppy-dog look. "Love"--what a confusing word! And an anticlimactic evening.

I fall into bed, wondering if I should have tried quite so hard to assist fate . . But yes, it was a fantastic ride!

Sunday, June 16

Whither today? St. Guen has a 5-fr. simple relais to the east of here in the midst of the lake country that Michel said I should visit. But do I have to take the main highway? Stiffly swinging off my bike--somehow it doesn't feel as much an extension of my own body today--I stop at a house on the edge of town to discuss the matter. . And leave with the husband's hand-drawn map of the "scenic route" to St. Guen in my pocket. Also with a better understanding of what I'm looking for in the dance line: the Breton Fest-noz, which means fête de nuit or a night of traditional Breton music and dance and not the similar sounding but very different fête de noces. I was evidently confusing the two (and so perhaps was monsieur le rectaire?). Of course, a wedding fete can be fun too, but if you want a real bal folk . . .

    "Check the Thursday or Friday papers," said the man. "They're announced for the weekend, you know--bound to be one somewhere on a Sunday night."

    "And if you come back this way, remember, we have a spare bed," added his wife.

First stop on my map is the hamlet of Locarn, clustered halfway up a sun-splashed green hillside. And what's the meaning of flower petals strewn from the church door up to a roadside altar? A wedding on Sunday? No, it's the pathway that the procession for the Saint Sacrement will tread after morning mass is over; "and the old-fashioned ceremony for the Sacrament of the Last Supper is very beautiful," says an old lady in a corner cafe. "Why don't you stay for it?" Why not? I feel like being lazy today. Passing a sociable hour with French tourists and checking the newspapers for Fest-noz. Aha, one is indeed scheduled this evening slightly to the west of here (and another one I must have whizzed past last night on my way to Mae1-Carhaix, darn!). Will I be able to get a lift from St. Guen and back again to my 5 fr. hostel? How awkward to want to go in two directions at the same time, but typically, of course, I will give up on neither.

"Here they come!" The priests in their rich robes, the village elders holding an embroidered canopy above the Host, the white-gowned children carrying huge wax candles (blown out, one by one, by a mischievous breeze), the congregation following behind in full song . . . "It's only a ceremony," I tell myself, pretty words I don't even believe in, all about "le sacrifice pur et saint, le sacrifice parfait, pain de la vie éternelle et calice du salut . . ."

  "Alleluia," chant the villagers, stopped before the altar. "Je suis le pain vivant . . ."

So why do I resent the clicking cameras?

"It's only a ceremony," I told Mother when she asked if I wanted to attend the funeral up in Canada. "Why waste money flying me up there?--it won't change anything." I wish I'd gone now, though perhaps that simple Canadian service wouldn't have helped. I craved much more: a pew-thumping black Baptist orgy of grief, a keening Irish lament, a flaming Norse funeral pyre. . . Dad would have been shamed and shocked, of course, had my fantasy funeral rites ever materialized, had I ever succeeded in turning his deepest hurt into what he would surely have seen as cheap theatrics.  The sort of self-glorifying, self-indulgent show that Grandmother reveled in? It's a line of thought that leads me to suspect my own tears. Are they shed for my own monstrous ego? Do I have these binges of grief because I enjoy playing the tragedy queen?  I cannot answer the tormenting questions; I only know that nineteen years is too long . . .

Time to move on!

Next on my "scenic route" is the Gorges des Courang, accessible by a trail along the river, or so a local farmer says. I search for an hour, then return to the farmhouse for shelter from a sudden downpour and further directions.

   "We'll take you," say the farmer's two teenage daughters. They pull on rubber boots--I pull off soakable socks--and for two hours we tramp through soggy fields and woods and huddle under a rock ledge as the rain pours down again. It clears, and we scramble over huge boulders jumbled into the cleft of the gorge and listen to the torrent running buried beneath. "C'est beau, n'est-ce pas?  Our brother'd like to come back from Paris if he could get a job here. It's tough . . ."

Back to the farm for crêpes and cider and coffee. The farmer reminisces about the war years in Brittany, with the partisans in the woods and the Germans in the towns. "And us between the two," says madame. He talks about hiding downed allied fliers and smuggling food to "les notres"; but she seems to have preferred the Germans. "They paid for what they took, at least!"

    "And where are you going from here?" Clearly not on to St. Guen, since it's now 5 PM. The family, approving my "intelligent style of touristing," says I have ample time, however, to cycle the fifteen kilometers westward to the village of Carnoet and its scheduled Fest-noz. Their directions are clear enough, if I could only distinguish real roads from kilometer-long farm entrances, invariably leading down from the ridge. Pumping back up the third false turn-off (these are very long kilometers), how glad I am not to have yesterday's glorious ride to do all over again! I've lots of opportunities to chat with local farmers, though, and each one suggests a different route to Carnoët; sometimes the farmer's wife offers her route too . .

Up the last long hill to a village bubbling with the high fever of a bicycle race. Cyclists whiz round and round streets from which cars have been detoured, but not pedestrians--they're supposed to dodge. Wild cheering as the loudspeaker blares out the winning coureur cycliste. and I retreat for some quick repair work with comb, washcloth and water from the village pump. I'd better look halfway presentable if I want to find a room here.

"Impossible," says everybody, and by now I could spout the formula right back at them: il-faut-aller-dans-une-grande-ville-chercher-un-hotel. Hell no! A big-city hotel in the last thing in the world I want. So I smile sweetly and resolve to answer the défi; hospitality to the wayfaring stranger may not be one of France's strengths, but by God, I know I am staying in Carnoët tonight.

"Why don't you ask madame Lapouce?" suggest two nice old ladies. "She must have rooms." Madame Lapouce turns out to be a gap-toothed crone who runs a cafe full of uniformed militia. "Moi, je ne suis pas moderne, madame." She stares at my legs with icy disapproval, and the soldiers stare too.

"I don't think she wants to rent to me," I report back to the old ladies, who concede that madame is ninety years old and perhaps a bit intolerant of new ways . . . A passing farmer says he's living alone and has plenty of extra room, but maybe that isn't what I had in mind? No . .

"Ah, why didn't we think of it before!" My old ladies remember the village convent-school, the right door at last, though I don't think I'd have had the nerve to come knocking on my own hook. "Do come in, and how can we help you, dear madame?" Charmingly apologetic for not being able to offer more commodious lodgings, the sisters confer to produce a little room and narrow bed for me--just what I wanted! Have I somehow preserved a vestige of that blessed innocence? Or is everyone who knocks on their door-in-the-wall so warmly welcomed?

They're very interested in my travels, surprised (but not shocked) at my leaving husband and children to travel alone through France. "But naturally you will be dancing all evening and coming in very late." (Which is why they couldn't put me up with the children, of course.) For they know all about the Fest-noz and even sponsor one on occasion themselves to raise money for the school. I do not mention hitchhiking, however, when I borrow needle and thread to repair the pants once more. No point in straining that gentle tolerance.

Now to change the immodest shorts for jeans and a clean top, and to throw a sweaty bra into the pack. Let's see what it feels like without! Then into town again in search of food; it seems a very different place than it did half an hour ago. At Tante Jeanne's, where I was turned down flat on the matter of lodging, they're serving a prix fixe dinner to a lively all-male crowd. May I join them? "Servez-vous, madame."

I plunk myself down and discover--who else?-the coureurs cyclistes and their fans unwinding from the race and revving up for an evening of dance. They all seem quite mad, especially Francis sitting next to me, who claims to be a "true Breton" but keeps harking back to a childhood in Italy. In fact, the whole meal (for 12 fr., complete with wine, brandy in the coffee and Cointreau) is a bit daft. Seated at a long table with le vrai Breton and his rowdy comrades, I'm assailed with incomprehensible questions and my confused replies greeted with gales of laughter. Have I forgotten French all of a sudden? No, I'm awash in a sea of Breton. "It's our own patois," explains one of the boys in a burst of clear-as-crystal French. "A so much cozier language, plus naturel, plus sympathique que le français." And more fun to bedevil me with.  Perhaps it's just as well that I don't understand some of these questions . .

On to the dance hall, mes amis! And here the mother superior comes running up with the key to the convent front door, so I won't have to ring the doorbell at an ungodly hour. Apparently it only just occurred to her! But what a perfectly marvelous testimonial to my good name--and in front of old madame Lapouce (she's here too) who found my clothing so scandalously "modern"!

As she hands me the key, the mother superior apologizes in advance for the quality of the dancing this evening; it won't be as good as some Fest-noz, she says, "because people have been drinking too much." So they have. Are there any festivities where Bretons don't drink too much?  And does it ever impair their ability to dance and sing? At any rate, with the backing of the good sisters I feel impeccably virtuous tonight no matter how much I imbibe, no matter how delightfully unclothed my chest may feel.  Jiggling away elbow to elbow with two boys who don't even notice my flimsy blouse, I call out "Ça va, madame?" to madame Lapouce shaking a bony leg across the room. She grins back, showing all three teeth, as the boy on my left steps on my foot with his wooden sabot. Ouch! Should I have worn hiking boots?

From 10 'till 2 AM we dance and drink and dance . . . To the wail of bombarde and biniou (the Breton bagpipe) or, even better--that is to say, an even more soulful wail--to the voices of two men, two women or a man and a woman. The singers stand with their arms around each other, swaying as one body to the song that weaves back and forth between their two voices--chant et réponse merging and separating, on and on, as if the whole song were but a single breath. Songs to which I must either dance or weep . .

What's wrong with me anyway? The bar's right next door, and liquor flows; but I don't think my stripped-raw feelings have anything to do with the wine or the brandy or that lovely honey-apple liqueur called chouchenn. It's the dances themselves: their insistant rhythms and small repetitive movements, their keening sound. I suppose some people--even some Bretons--find them incredibly boring, but with this crowd they seem to induce a kind of collective "high". And how fortunate that this strange emotional intensity is collective and not attached to a particulier cavalier. (In fact I find myself joining the line of dancers to escape sticky male entanglement.) I don't feel very responsible for my actions tonight; it seems like a huge joke every time I explain that I'm mother-of-four and lodging chez les soeurs. A masquerade of virtue that keeps my desires romantically vague, my actions deceptively proper. Well, almost proper. I kiss my escort goodnight at the convent gate--a long mushy kiss--and run inside.

Monday, June 17

The mother superior inquires about my evening and is pleased to hear it was not spoiled by brandy and wine. Nor is my head affected; does exercise forestall a hang-over? She feeds me breakfast (with butter and clotted cream from the convent herd), conducts me around the garden and the schoolrooms (where a pair of canaries have just hatched two naked babies) and refuses to accept more than 5 fr. for everything! "We wish that you might keep beautiful memories from here," she explains with a smile. How could I not?

"Oh yes, madame, everybody sees Huelgoat," says the little nun who opens the gate for me. "C'est très beau--un paysage magnifique." And it's closer than St. Guen, which counts for a lot today--I'm still stiff. "You should stay here in les Côtes-du-Nord;" insisted my drinking companions last night, but Huelgoat in France's westermost département (le Finistère) sounds alluring. For surely the farther from Paris, the more unspoiled the country.

Hey, what happened here? Great piles of chopped-down hedgerows lie along a denuded roadside and between now wide-open fields. This must be the remembrement des terres hotly opposed by French conservationists on the grounds that it destroys bird nesting sites and increases the risk of insect plagues. (Scientific backing for my purely poetic response to the land?)  "N'abîmons plus nos talus" is their rallying cry, to which I say "amen" and think how funny "save our scree" would sound; talus evidently refers to more attractive landscape features than jumbled rocks littering the base of mountain slopes--I suppose the fields slope too. . .

Frightful shrieks and squeals now, intermingled--as I approach the source of this extraordinary noise--with the curses of two men struggling to get a load of pigs up a chute and into a large truck. Bound for the butcher's and the pigs know it! They kick and bite and squeal to high heaven, while the farmer, standing with ripped overalls and bloodied wrists in the churning, fear-maddened mass, tries to grab hold of an ear here, a tail there. He jabs with the electric prodders, and a screaming pig--the sound suddenly an octave higher--lunges forward onto the backs of his fellows; now a dozen white bodies barrel back down the chute and push past a stout plank that the farmer's wife tries to hold in their path. Les salauds! Aren't you on the side of the poor pigs, Jean? If only they weren't such unattractive animals in the flesh (nothing like Wilbur, the endearing pig hero of Charlotte's Web!). And still only half the size of the fat swine in the fields.

   "Those are breeders," says the farmer during a lull in the battle. "We don't mess about with them . . . And oh no, it's not usually this bad--they just got it into their heads . . ."

On to a large bird that I flush from the roadside and hunt (but never see again) in a blueberry-oak wood; down to the river Aulne and on to the Argent, where I talk to a little girl playing with her kitten by a three storied old mill house. Any excuse at all to get me off the hard seat! God, does that part of you ever get calloused? The Argent flows south, and I'm heading north, which would.be fine if the river and I could just keep meandering along the valley. Darn! Huelgoat had better be worth this climb,

Yes, it is a place of great natural beauty: twisting torrents, cavernous gorges, dark forests around a mountain lake. And candy wrappers, bottle tops, people debris of all sorts . . . Everything labeled and accounted for; somehow it all seems terribly civilized and stale. Even the giant boulders. "Ça bouge, madame," says a boy leaning hard against one. The rock tilts, and he puts his hand out for a tip.

Or is it I that have turned stale? Why didn't I at least get some names and addresses last night for a week of song collecting? A goal--something to fortify me on a dreary Monday afternoon. There's always food, of course. But as I walk the streets of Huelgoat, shops close in my face, rolling down their slatted outside blinds for the noon hour that lasts 'till 2 PM. I push a cat aside and grab some cherries before the greengrocer's joins the baker's and the butcher's and the dairy in a blank wooden stare. And heavy gray clouds blot out the sun for good.

Where's the nearest hostel? For I'm no longer interested in the game of finding independant lodgings; I want to go where I belong, where I'll be taken in without any special pleading. My map shows a hostel in Morlaix, on the other side of the Monts d'Arrée. Those hulking high hills up ahead, their tops hidden in ragged curtains of mist? Christiane and I crossed over them so easily four days ago, and I remember envying the cyclists we passed. Surely nobody's envying me, as I ride into the mist that turns into a fine, penetrating rain. Why didn't you put on the poncho, stupid? Too late now--I'm already soaked to the skin, so I pump as hard as I can, up and up to where trees give way to heather and gorse. Savagely beautiful, I called this land the other day and thought of kisses in the heather. That was with sunshine and dry clothes. To-day I shiver and wonder if the hostel down below has hot showers.

Down, down the mountain. I'm ready to shelter anywhere, anywhere at all. Aha, civilization at last: an ugly gas station with a lovely modern restroom where I strip off wet clothes. And give my aching shoulders a rest. (That's where hill-climbing hurts for me, not in the legs but between the shoulders.) Down the road is a cafe, with chairs up-ended on red-and-white-checked tabletops as the waitress sweeps the floor. She grudgingly produces a cup of hot chocolate; clearly the middle of the afternoon is no time for cafe conviviality. A very poorly planned day, but I'm determined to stay healthy at least. And the road sign outside is cheering: "Morlaix--15 km." All blessedly downhill and on dry road. The sun shines too, ah! Food and shelter and maybe even a hot shower--here I come!

Cramped between steeply rising hills and its estuary to the sea, Morlaix has narrow winding streets that might be fun to explore some day. But right now my thoughts are prosaically centered on hot water and soap. How lovely le confort moderne will feel, if I'm lucky. And I think I am. The hostel here is very ordered, with boys' and girls' dorms on separate floors, and hurrah! hot water taps in the showers. I relay the gladsome tidings to two Irish cyclists and head back into town; cherries and chocolate sure wasn't much of a lunch. "I have the hunger of a wolf," I tell the shopkeeper as I buy strengthening provisions for supper. And then stop at a crêperie on the way back for a before-supper snack. ("Was that you at the fete in Mael-Carhaix?" ask two staring teen-agers . . .)

Supper at the hostel: my pàté, my fromage frais, my tomates, my salade de carottes "and have some stew," say the Irishmen. Did I perhaps buy a bit too much food? "I'm taking a shower," I smugly announce and run upstairs to peel off my clothes. Oops, no soap. On with the clothes and down to the kitchen to beg a bar of soap from Sandy and Tim, A French girl also offers shampoo. Another eager unpeeling of clothes and dash to the showers, where I turn on the hot water tap and wait . . . while the water runs cold as a mountain stream. Damn! This isn't my day for meeting the challenge of a cold water shower.  Instead, feeling very grubby and very cowardly, I creep unwashed into my bunk.

Tuesday, June 18

Hot water from the kitchen faucet this morning. Also hot showers, says the père aubergiste. "It's cheaper when the water heats up overnight on low night rates," he expains. So I run back upstairs for another shot at a clean body--differential utility rates certainly do mold human behavior!--and find the shampoo still out, the water really hot, but no soap again. Of course--I returned it. And is it overly demanding of me to want them both at the same time, hot water and soap? "Please can I borrow your bar again?" "Keep it," says Tim. He and Sandy suffered the same icy disillusionment as I did last night, but met it more manfully; they claim to have washed and, in any case, are leaving too early to take advantage of the lovely thrifty showers. "We'll send you a bill for the soap," says Tim as they wheel out their bicycles.

An hour later, steamy-pink and clean, I'm off too. Past fields of artichokes looking like great overgrown poppies, in and out of port towns marked by sudden steep descents (it seems an awful waste of stored-up energy to apply the brakes, but suicidal not to) . . . A family gathering kelp to spread over the fields tells me how it used to be dried and burned. Just like peat in Scotland . . . Another of Brittany's pig farms and a sow with suckling piglets encased in a sort of form-fitting metal cage. "To keep her from rolling over and crushing them," says the farmer.  (Another unattractive feature of domestic swine?)

     "D'où venez-vous, madame? Ah vraiment, 1'Amérique?" The patronne of a small alimentation announces triumphantly that I'm the first American she has ever seen. First sighting of a exotic animal! And now she knows who my accent reminds her of: the singer Petula Clark, of course. I'm getting a bit tired of being told that I sound like this popular singer with the banal name--well, almost with the name--of my least favorite flower . . .

Down the long hill to the Lannion post office and, I hope, an all-clear for three more weeks in France. "Rien, madame." No reply to my telegram?, I can't believe it; there must be a hang-up somewhere. "Could you double check on that, please?" Nothing at the central office either. Damn, damn, damn.

No point hanging around Lannion just waiting and kicking at the sidewalk, though. Let's move on to the seashore.

The sun promptly ducks behind a cloud, and a gusty head wind fights me all the way to the coast. Hell! With a steep hill at least you know there's the down part waiting. But you can fight a head wind all day long and then turn around the next day--and find it's turned too. Naturally this wind won't shift; it's having a ball trying to blow me to a standstill. Wishing I knew more swear words--my two standbys are totally inadequate for the occasion--I pedal grimly on towards the hostel that I seem to remember passing last week. Wasn't it set on the dunes outside of Trébeurden? I must have gone too far already . . .

   "Ah non, madame; c'est plus loin," says a man by the bit of road I just retraced. "It makes itself seen." I bet I can still miss it, though, with the luck that's dogging me today. How much further did he say?

Voilà! Two tiers of concrete and glass stacked on the rolling sands, picture windows looking out over the sea, the stereo playing something swingy and gay, dum di dum. "I'm starving--aren't they ever going to feed us?" cries a sunburned Swedish girl. (Ah, so I am in time for supper!) She's spent the day on the seashore; the bronzed German boys, too, who're talking about some boat . . . A day or so of lazy beachcombing--will that set things right between me and the world? I've come to the right place.

"Patience, mes enfants," counsels one of the live-in helpers (they look just like the hostelers). "We're feeding the school kids first." For, oh yes, there's the usual French school group stuffing their fat faces; we try to watch the sun sinking into the bay instead . . . "Le diner est servi," he calls; we rush for our seats, and platters fly.

Someone lights a candle after supper, and I borrow a guitar . . . only discovering at midnight that the schoolgirls have usurped my bunk and thrown my sleeping sheet onto the floor. Hey, this is carrying school excursions entirely too far! It's pretty late to assert my prior claim, though; much simpler to take another bed. But where?

  "Pas de problème," says one of the French boys. (Which of them is the père aubergiste anyway?) He shows me an empty bunk in the boys' dorm, where a shocked foreigner--he couldn't be French--stares at me with round eyes and mute tongue.

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  Come boat me o'er, come ferry me o'er,

  Come boat me over to Charlie;
  I'd hear the call once and never again

  Tae carry me over to Charlie.
                (Jacobite song)

A long consciousness-raising session aboard a Breton fishing craft . .

Wednesday, June 19

I wake up early, but not early enough; the Germans rose at 4 AM to go out with a local pêcheur. "Just a friendly fisherman they happened to meet in port," say the French boys. What port? For my lazy beachcombing has at once assumed a purpose. Now I know why I've come down to the coast: to put to sea in a Breton fishing boat!

"Try the fishing village of Ploumanach, madame." But the tide is out this morning (and Ploumanach is a high water port), so I cycle down to the kelp-covered rocks of Landrellec to scavenge for seafood instead. A provident ebb tide activity! Of course I've no idea how to go about it; but a middle-aged Frenchman in shorts and sneakers, wire basket in hand, seems to know what he's doing.
   

  "Pardon, monsieur, do you mind if I follow after you and contribute to the basket?" He smiles (at my optimism perhaps?). "With pleasure, madame." But the crabs--for that's what he's catching--have other ideas, ouch! "Du courage, madame." I learn to nab them anyway; it's an exciting game flinging back the cloak of kelp and sliding my arm under the rocks--hide-out for all sorts of scuttling beasties. Learn to place a small stone between the pincers when I'm clambering, prey in hand, after the Frenchman and his basket. Is this lovely green 3-incher big enough? For the fruits de mer soup he says he's concocting, yes. But don't I want mine back to cook for myself? "No, put them into your soup, monsieur." I wish he'd ask me to share in the eating of it, but six little crabs aren't really much of a contribution to the pot,.

The tide's coming in again, so with singleminded nonchalance I start searching for a hospitable fishing boat. A real quest--I've got a feeling that like the fishermen's work it will take time and patience and a lot of luck. Where to begin? Where else out on the sun-baked quay of the Ploumanach harbor, where fishermen gather to mend their nets and an old woman oversees them from a rickety quayside chair. She turns to me and my out-spread lunch. "Alors to fais le pique-nique, ma petite?" Yes, eating's a great ice-breaker; I borrow a fisherman's pocket knife, and he grins approvingly as I smear my bread with gobs of butter. "Before it melts," I explain, but gluttony needs no apology here.

The long lazy afternoon brings tourists, who ask questions and move restlessly on, and two water-shy young Newfoundland dogs, whose owner finally pushes one in with a great splash. "Doucement, doucement!" protests the old woman. "That's no way to teach anyone." She's well aware by now of my intent--I've asked enough questions!--and says with some amusement that the fishermen will "adopt" me if I hang around much longer. Progress?

"Ah, ça commence!" With the rising tide, boats can enter the port and unload boxes of araignées de mer (do those "spider" legs pinch?), langoustes (like overgrown crayfish), dormeurs (too "sleepy" to use their mighty pincers?), crabes, fish and more fish. "There's a boat for you now--le chalutier!" The men point out a small trawler that they say is putting to sea with the evening tide. "Allez-y, demandez au patron," they urge; so I ask, and the patron replies that he's already taking a group on board. "On est déjà complet." Darn!

"Our nets will be mended the day after tomorrow," say the men on the quay. "You can come out with us then." Double darn! Watching a boat actually prepare to leave port--loading provisions, coiling ropes--makes it very difficult to be patient. How can I wait 'till après-demain?

"Keep on trying," whispers the old woman. That chalutier would be much more interesting for you; the men here will only be setting their nets."

I hate to let the trawler out of my sight, but maybe a different tack . . . What did the patron say just now about un groupe de jeunes? Something to do with 1'auberge? I race back to the hostel and meet--as I sneakily hoped I might--a group about to depart on a fishing boat. Is there room for one more? Yippee, yes! Or, at least, maybe yes. I'm acting terribly pushy, of course, especially since the "group" boils down to two other hostelers and the boat in question is clearly the trawler that's supposed to be déjà complet.

    "Did one of the marins have a bushy black beard?" asks the pretty dark-haired French girl. Indeed he did. "I met him in a bar," she explains. "And he asked if I wanted to come fishing . . ." Ah, so there were other places to hunt besides the quay. . .

"Allons, la mer est belle; embarquons-nous pêcheurs," runs the Arcadian fishing song. Yes, it is a beautiful shining sea. Not that I'm a real fisherman (and pêcheur, of course, is definitely "fisherman"); still, I can embark with them, or I hope I can. 

We gaze over the bay, its islets ringed with gold as the sun dips lower and lower. "You sure he's coming?--he's over an hour late," says Davide, the husky French-Canadian boy. "Perhaps we'd better start walking."

"He'll come," says Colette. We start walking anyway and meet blackbeard on the road. "You again!" he exclaims as I climb into his stripped down panel truck. And off we rattle to the harbor, where the patron--a bigger man than I remembered--gives me a long hard look and doesn't hide his astonishment that grand'mère at her advanced age ("quarante ans, n'est-ce pas?") is allowed to stay in the youth hostel. But he lets me board. What a relief!

And how interesting that the Breton fishermen are the first Frenchmen to guess my precise age--or at least the first ones to state their thoughts so frankly. They believe in calling a spade a spade, and in their eyes a forty-year-old woman is, or should be, a grandmother. "Grand'mère," said the patron, and it sticks. Well, they can call me whatever they please as long as they don't throw me off the boat!

We're all on now: the three fishermen, my two fellow hostelers, a gray haired Parisian in a lovely thick "fisherman's sweater" and me--the excess baggage. "You'll need these," says blackbeard, tossing us high rubber boots, but there're only six pairs of rubber pants. . . No matter. I'm still pinching myself that I'm here, as we cast off at 8 PM to a crowd of cheering tourists. How can they not want to be in my boots, heading into the fiery horizon and the open sea? Too late to throw me off now, I exult as we pass the last rocky isle and start hitting the first gentle waves, the spray flying . . .

No time to stand and stare, though. "Harder, grandma, and get those corners!" The patron points out a smudge I missed on the plastic fish trays. "Great teasers, aren't they?" says the Parisian tourist; I don't think he's getting all his corners either, and somehow he doesn't look nearly as nautical as Davide, who hoses the deck with sea-water, greases the winch and sloshes about like a real mariner. But then the Parisian--"call me René, my dear"--did bring along wine and cold cuts. "You like charcuterie, chérie? It will be a long night, you know."

A land light twinkles to the east; a silvery glow lingers in the western sky. The radar says we're over les sands now, and the men play out a weighted chalut to drag along the ocean bottom. "Ah," murmurs René, giving me a conspiratorial hug. "When the net comes back up, what a moment! Are you warm enough? Hey, don't run away--attention!" And a brawny arm--not René's--shoves me back from the singing steel cable. There're two of them attaching the heavy nets to a winch on deck, and they reel out fast. Obstacles when still--you can't go anywhere on the foredeck without hopping over or scraping up against the darn things--and real hazards in motion. Stand clear, Jean! You'd be a lot less trouble if you just stayed in that landlubber's arms. Though perhaps if I perched on the side of the boat instead, out of harm's way . . .

A lull in the action. We squeeze into the cabin to eat crepes, bread and cold cuts and to drink cider, beer and wine. Waiting for the magical moment. Everyone but me adds another layer of clothing, but I'm already wearing my all: shirt and sweater and windbreaker. And shivering to keep warmer. "Here, ma petite Jeanne,"--at least he's not calling me grand'mère!--"my coat's big enough for two." So it is, René, and the cold Atlantic's no place to be stand-offish. But what am I doing kissing you? Honestly, Jean, just like a cat, cuddling up for comfort!

"Quick, hold a lamp!" The winch groans as the chalut rises dark and dripping from the sea; two men rush forward to heave its swollen mass over the deck and let the trapped treasure drop with a soft thud. Long brown ribbons of kelp--is that all? Or do I see something stir? Lots of things, once we start pawing through the kelp to the glinting, wriggling creatures beneath. Slithering fish and scampering crabs and assorted undersea oddities . . .

"Attention!" The cables sing out again, the net sinking into the sea, the fishermen jumping about with their catch underfoot.  And now they can help us to sort it. "Sea worm," says the patron and throws the segmented shellfish overboard; "sea spider"--the long-legged crabs go into a tub of seawater; "sea wolf"--we lay them in plastic trays, where they quietly expire. Not like the slippery sole--funny flat fish with two eyes on the same side of the head and a wonderful grip on life, they flip out of the trays and all over the deck with me in flat-footed pursuit. (The boots are too large, of course.) Fresh sole fetch a fine market price, and we wouldn't dream of speeding their demise as we do with a few super-muscular, over-sized fish which the fishermen dispatch with a single whack against the side of the boat. I try whacking, several times, and everyone laughs. "Like this, grand'mere!

How humiliating to play the feeble female! Didn't I learn to gut my own trout up in Canada?   But at least I'm learning how to deal with sole. "Regarde, Davide!"--his fish just flipped out of the tray again, so I grab it behind the gills and lay it carefully pale side up (i.e. eyes-downward) in the tray. "She'll stay now," I boast, rubbing my sticky hands together.  But where's Colette? I don't see her in on the fun. "She got sick," says Davide. Mal de mer on this rock-a-bye-baby sea?

Washing the fish and hosing down the foredeck comes next; then about midnight we troop below to visit the sick, with blackbeard leading the way. "Tu souffres, Colette?" She doesn't look very suffering in that cozy couchette, but he's come to comfort her anyway.

   "Why don't you lie down on the other one," suggests René, and for sure it's a better place to rest than the rail if I don't want to fall overboard asleep. Off with the boots then! My, it's warm down here, downright hot in fact with all these clothes on and the warm-bodied Parisian--who doesn't seem inclined to leave with the others--pressing against me.

   "Va-t-en, I want to sleep!"
   "But how unnatural." And for my body type, how unfortunate. He's already explained that some women will gain curves only with lots of lovemaking. Therapeutic sex, so to speak. "Those two have the right idea"--Colette and her shaggy fisherman disporting themselves under a gray blanket, his boots by the bunk-in-the-wall ready for sudden topside duty. So long as a man can leap into his clothes, I guess the patron doesn't object to sex on the job.

   "Why not, chérie?" Because--and I don't feel like arguing about it. A kick conveys the message much better. "Je veux dormir, René, je veux dormir--"

   "Eh bien, je te comprends, madame." And he leaves. To tell the fishermen about my "abnormal" behavior? Their jibes are sharper when I pop up on deck two hours later; grand'mère has turned--ironically, I'm sure--into la belle Américaine. A cheat, they would say, and an unconscionable flirt.

   "Tu as dépassé l'age de la coquetterie, madame; tu n'es plus gamine," growls the patron; and I have to agree. I'm not a giddy gamine anymore; I should know the rules of the game--know what the Parisian, wrapping his nice warm coat around himself now and staring morosely over the waves, had every right to expect?

    "Si tu étais vierge . . ." he said. Yes, that they could all understand and respect--a protesting virgin. Hal used to say that virginity was irrelevant today, but it's a phrase I keep hearing: "if you were . . ." And with four children I'm obviously not, so why the maidenly resistance? It isn't as if I were a respectable matron either. No, I'm too adventurous for a good wife, too wedded--if only to a feeling of faithfulness, a wanting to "belong" to someone--for a good tramp. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. And the Breton fishermen don't like misfits.

But they lay off the lecturing to begin another grand sweep across the sandbar: playing out the two cables at different rates to keep the drag-net spread wide and the weights on either side from entangling in it as the boat turns. A tricky maneuver, this; and the minor crisis of a tangled net calls for real muscle power.  Davide's too. He helps the fishermen to wrestle the swinging bundle of rope and wood--tugging and shoving and grunting and finally freeing the net--while I keep out of their way.  Clearly it's not just a "sexist" convention that fishermen have long been men.

Ah, a glow on the eastern horizon. I clap my frozen hands in delight. "Toujours gai," mutters blackbeard; "let's give her some work. More fish, la belle!"

Hey, we just got through with the last batch! Are the catches getting bigger, or is it the extra time we spend rewashing the fish and repacking them, neat and clean for market? And capturing the escapees, of course. . .

Two araignées climb out of the tub to end up in a pot of boiling water. Breakfast at sea, yum. But how the devil do you get at it? Seated on a coil of rope with the friendliest--or is he simply the quietest?--of the three fishermen, I borrow hammer and knife. Sweet crab meat in my stomach now, the sun dazzling my eyes . . . and the pot to scour afterwards. I sing as I scrub away.

   "There she goes, singing and laughing and tossing her head," says blackbeard; and to cure my unseemly high spirits he picks me up and holds me out over the waves. Oh, my ribs (they still hurt from last week)! But I don't struggle lest he drop me in.

Please no more catches! Where will we put it all? The deck's already stacked high when the last netful spills out at 8 AM and we wearily fling the rejects to an army of screaming sea gulls. The screaming rises to fever pitch as we approach the harbor entrance, and the men take out their knives to filet the space-consuming rays and gut a few of the other large fish. Fresh entrails for the dive-bombing gulls--that's how you get them to herald you into the harbor!

Colette's looking a bit green about the gills. (The "feminine" response to blood and guts?) "I1 faut que je pisse," she moans. Oh!  And God, yes--now that she mentions it--I need to go, too! This boat has no toilet facilities at all, not even a chamberpot. Everything goes over the side, which is fine for the men . . .

First trip to the quay is for the catch--"oh, please hurry!"--the next for us. In the rowboat, they're still scolding me for my "girlish" behavior. "I1 faut laisser ces manières de jeune fille, madame. A ton age . . ." But what am I doing, anyway?

  "Ah, there you go doing it again--looking at me like that!" Looking, so they say, as I look at all men: from under lowered eyelids, provocatively, teasingly. And they must be telling the truth because I remember an American boy remarking the same unconscious mannerism when I came back from Europe twenty years ago. Then I was delighted, but now? Good God, Jean, no wonder your daughters find you an embarrassment!

A few yards from the quay, Colette throws her fisherman lover's little black dog into the water for a joke. The dog's a fine swimmer (and a fine sailor--he slept all night in the cabin), but black-beard threatens to dump us all, and I half hope that he'll do it.  We could pee in the sea then . . .

Come on! The panel truck's filled with fish, so we pile into an ancient 2CV and go jouncing back to the hostel, where Colette and I dash for the toilets. "Never again!" she says. "Mais regarde ton pantalon, madame." Yup, my pants are a mess, and that black cable grease doesn't come out either, though I go through the motions of washing clothes, then drying them in the bright sunshine while I nap on the sand. Ah well, who can worry about dirt on a topsy-turvy, wonderful day like this? I did it, I did it . . .

It's down to earth with a jolt at the Lannion post office, where the clerk hands me two letters. (I don't suppose my frugal husband thought of cabling) They answer the question of the hour in an equivocal "yes-but" fashion. Yes, you can stay, but everyone else's plans will be messed up (though I can't exactly see why). In fact everything is already a mess, judging from his tale of woe. Nothing I can do anything about, but splendidly guilt-inducing. Oh hell!

No good stewing over it. I hop on the bicycle and pedal downriver, a new and unexplored direction for me. The road--clearly not one of the main routes out of Lannion--quickly deteriorates into a narrow footpath with the bank eroding away beneath it. Just the distracting challenge I need! The bicycle wobbles more if I'm nervous, of course, so I try not to look down at my feet. Afraid of a wetting, Jean?  There's no paved road along the savage seacoast either, and I regretfully return to Lannion by an inland (hill-climbing) one to the north, drowning my frustrations in a half bottle of cider along the way.

Well, well--Christiane's back too! We swap stories and share supper with two other hostelers. "Let's go out on the town," someone suggests. A town that goes to bed at ten o'clock, at least it does tonight.  Tomorrow will be different, I'm told. "You're staying for the fête?"  No, I'm heading for Dinan.

_____________________________________________________________________________

  So come all you young ladies my warning to hear
  If you meet a brave soldier in the spring of the year,
  Don't let him detain you, he wants just one thing:
  To see the waters a-gliding, hear the nightingale sing.
                          (English trad. song)

             Dinan--a walker's delight . . .

Friday, June 21

Fifty years ago my mother lived with a French family for three months in the old city of Dinan. She remembers it with great affection, "but you must never go back," said a French friend. "The automobile has changed everything . . ." Well, I'll check it out for her since the town's less than 150 kilometers away.

How fast they go by lazy autostop! Lazy but sensible, for I'm curbing my tongue today and steering clear of agriculture and philosophy. I come to a standstill, though, on the 20-kilometer spur road north to Dinan. If only I had the Peugeot back! There's food and chitchat in a village cafe, but no one driving into town, darn!--paved roads are made for wheels. At last a lift with a young couple who stop in Dinan to ask directions to la Vallée de la Fontaine des Eaux--yes, that's the youth hostel's honest-to-God address--and drive kilometers on to deposit me at a rambling old house by the side of a small stream. A harebrained thing for me to let them do, as at 3 PM this hostel is utterly deserted. And the "valley of the fountain of the waters" may be a lovely sylvan setting, but it's clearly a long walk back into town.

Ah well, the place is open, at least, and comfortably worn, with tree-stump stools around the raised stone hearth where I shed gear and change into sneakers. Where am I going? I've no idea, except that it's in the opposite direction from the way I came. A country lane follows the stream, which runs out of the woods, through a cow pasture and into a broad river. And what's this cluster of homes, cafes and shops a hundred meters downstream? "C'est le port de Dinan, madame." Impossible!--how can Dinan be so close? Besides, who ever heard of strolling into a 20th-century town without a single car passing!

It's how you stroll into Dinan, though, if you're lucky enough to be staying at the auberge. With no junky intrusions--not even a gas station--between grazing cows and the first 16th-century homes along the Rance. Now for wine and conversation at a sidewalk café across from the ticket-stand for excursion boats going downriver to St. Malo. The patronne brings out letters from a daughter in America and calls the ticket seller over to join us--"another glass, madame?"--while I gaze up at what looks like a Roman aqueduct spanning the valley. "C'est la route nationale, voyez-vous." So that's where the cars go. Certainly not on the narrow, cobblestoned Rue du Petit Fort, which mounts steeply to the town proper a few steps further on. "Circulation interdite," it says, which means that drivers have to take the very long way around to the river, ho-ho!

My friendly feeling for Dinan grows by leaps and bounds as I meander uphill--dodging people and pushcarts, peering at shop windows and pocket-gardens and the half-timbered, projecting upper storeys of houses gay with flowering window boxes and fanciful hanging signs. These are emblems of their inhabitants' trade: a weaver's shuttle, a potter's wheel, a chisel, a saw . . .

    "Our workshop is upstairs," says a young man smelling pleasantly of sawdust. "If you'd like to take a look." He tells me that fire has been the great destroyer of these old houses, and many of them have had to be "restored" to a suitable semblance of 14th- or 15th-century old age. "It cost dear, but of course the government paid."

My, what a time it's taking me to reach the Porte du Jersual (gateway to the Isle of Jersey?), to walk the ramparts around the "old city" (I'm over the viaduct now), past the chateau de la duchesse Anne and down to the Jardin des petits diables.  Here kids clamber on and off a tethered gray donkey, feed clumps of grass to a companion cow, call pleadingly to a family of fallow deer in a wooded paddock . . . A more casual (and playfully instructive) park than the sharply terraced "English garden" on the other side of town, but just as old, I suppose.

   "Oh no, madame. Our last mayor created this 'garden of the little devils' from wasteland. He was a butcher by trade, you see, and loved children and animals."

My informant is the shopgirl at the boucherie chevaline, well supplied with American horsemeat. Dinan is the second ville fleurie in France, she says, and new building is very strictly controlled both in town and for quite a distance outward, at least in some directions. Holding the 20th century at bay? But the town's no stuffy museum piece. "You know about the fête de Saint-Jean tonight?" A little neighborhood party, she says--"pour le quartier."

Into the Restaurant de la duchesse Anne (her name is everywhere) and out again. I'd like a crowded working-class eatery, not white-clothed empty tables (but maybe that sort of place isn't allowed in a "flowered city"?). Well, you have to eat somewhere, Jean! I settle for the slightly seedier Chez Marie and pen a quick note to my mother: "You can come back to Dinan."

Did that girl say the fête was at 9 PM? By the Porte de St. Malo--another gate to survive the automobile age!--two lines of children hold branches hung with colored paper lanterns and a military band plays, while we wait for the mayor. Le voilà! A portly man in pin-striped suit, he leads the swelling procession through Dinan's tight little streets to an open field outside the city walls, where a scarecrow labeled with someone's name sits on top of a huge haystack.

   "Who is it?" I ask the handsome soldier beside me; he shakes his head. Now scarlet-and-black-clad firemen stand by as the mayor and other pillars of Dinan society advance with flaming torches. The kerosene-soaked haystack ignites with a flash, and they retreat in haste. When the blaze dies, fire-works shoot into the night sky to the accompaniment of exuberant military music and cries from the crowd--how the French adore feu d'artifice! The last flare explodes, the children light their paper lanterns and, after a few unintended fires, lead us back to the Porte de St. Malo and the loud rock music of the "Gypsies." French youth are already madly gyrating; the handsome soldier pays 6 fr. to pass the barricades and join them, and I see him asking local girls to dance and being turned down. He doesn't ask me, though I've paid too. Damn, just to stand and watch?

"Vous voulez danser?" I sure do, even if it means robbing the cradle for a partner! Only how to keep a properly distant demeanor after an hour or so of close body contact with this downy-cheeked recruit? (There must be a caserne around here.) What is this, anyway--a sort of socially acceptable public lovemaking, I wonder as, thigh to thigh and stomach to stomach, we sway back and forth. Francis doesn't go in for fancy footwork.

At last! We retire to a cafe, where his Communist comrade engages in verbal battle with a fresh-faced, very sincere young girl who's also a Jehovah's Witness. It starts over 1'amour du prochain--the boy frankly stating that he does not love his neighbor. "Je le sais bien," he says, tossing lanky black hair out of his eyes. "I know I'd never risk my skin for another man's. I swam ashore alone once because I was afraid to help, to come close to my friend . . . J'avais tellement peur."

Fear. Is it my failing that I never thought to fear for my own skin? Or for anyone else's either until the nightmare began to unreel. And then there was no time to fear. Only to grab Ned's hair and try to lift his head--God, what is he doing there underwater and why is he so incredibly heavy?--even as a minute before I'd tried to right his half knocked off glasses and he'd looked at me as if he didn't even know who I was and batted my fumbling hand away. "We must help Luke to hold on," I'd wanted to tell him. To seek his counsel. For Luke was only nineteen, and I heard a tired-unto-death despair in his "I'm so ashamed, I'm so ashamed." So I feared for my fine, proud cousin, but not for Ned.  Nothing could happen to him.  Or so I thought until that horrible, blundering moment of the skewed glasses, when I saw how out of touch we were, I and this almost-stranger, this poor dumb creature fighting so hard to hang onto a rolling canoe . . . Until he dragged me down, and I felt my lungs bursting for air and gulping the dark water instead . . . I see Luke's wiry arms flailing away when I come up, and yes, I'm afraid for myself at last, afraid to swim over . . .

"I couldn't have lived with myself," says the girl, her clear blue eyes gazing into the boy's stormy face. And the two continue their debate, disagreeing on every topic they touch and leaning closer and closer to each other. Fascinating, this French passion for argument! But Francis is bored and keeps trying to pull me away. I don't think he has a very inquiring mind.

He insists on escorting me back to the hostel, which is much too far away for this cozy promenade à deux. "I'm old enough to be your mother," I tell him as we lurch down a tunnel of trees. He's trying to steer us into the grassy declivities he feels sure are hidden somewhere in this bucolic gloom, while I am trying, not too successfully, to keep us in forward motion. He pulls me to the ground--it is mud, I knew it, and stones--and I slither free. Teasing again, Jean? Where on earth is the hostel anyway?

Very, very late I find it--too late to turn on any lights if indeed I could find the switch--and bark my shins on those damned tree-stumps. Ah, here's the pack; now for an empty bunk upstairs . . . "Jesus Christ," comes a muffled male voice from a protruding bedstead. Let's try another room . .

Saturday, June 22

Roommates of both sexes this morning: three girls, who leave at what must be the crack of dawn, and a bearded late-rising American. "This was a boys' dorm when I came--the girls moved in yesterday," he explains with a laugh. "I'm staying on of course." (So am I.) I laugh too and wonder if he's hinting. But how gauche to move out now because of him! How prudish and un-French. Better to let him decide for himself if he feels uncomfortable. And in the meantime, Jean, a roommate is a roommate is a . . . "I'm a weaver," he says as we pad down to the washroom with most of our clothes in our arms (do mine ever need washing!). And for two weeks now he's been negotiating for a loom. "A real buy"--his mid-Western twang drifts into the steamy shower--"if I can just get it home. How much do you think it'll cost to ship 300 lbs.?"

I take a slightly different route today--up the Rance, across the old low bridge and into the home-workshop of a dusky weaver-woman (femme-tisserand?) who prefers undyed wools to the lacy linens that les Bretonnes have long worked. Her walls are draped with fleecy, earth-hued hangings that I covet and can't afford; she says to look around and come back when I'm rich someday. "See that square I wove to hide the ugly outlet box? Though, to be sure, it was very nice of the government to put in electricity for us." And heating? What's it like here in the wintertime? Lovely, she says, with the thick walls and a crackling fire and the quiet. (Well, at least no chatterbox tourists like me around to disturb the clackety rhythm of the loom, captured in a snatch of song she sings for me.) Yes, summer is better for business, but in two weeks time you'll hardly be able to walk up that jam-packed Rue du Petit Fort, sighs the young woman, deploring, too, the proliferation of chintzy "Breton" tourist attractions across her beloved Brittany. "Que je déteste ces crêperies banales!" Oh dear, she means the places I've been frequenting.

Another dawdling, discursive walk up to the open market stalls of les Halles. Only food here and what food! I'll never manage to save up for a wall hanging if I succumb to those dead-ripe strawberries artfully bedded on grape leaves. ("Six fr. madame, merci, madame.") France has a way of making one rethink one's values. No, good food isn't cheap here, and why should it be? But I need something to go with the berries. A creamy-soft Camembert, a salade de carottes from the charcuterie (the "pork-butcher" has certainly diversified his trade!) and a stick of bread.

Where to eat my impromptu lunch? I follow a doddering old man (he must live close by and know the local hangouts) into a café by the Porte de St. Louis. Here 1.60 fr. brings a quarter-liter of red wine and two-and-a-half hours of neighborhood society. Also the loan of knife and fork, for it pains the patronne to see me eating like a savage, although she approves my picnic provisioning. "It's what I do myself on trips." A big-bosomed, motherly type, she plunks herself down beside me during a business lull and discusses her overweight problem. "C'est 1'effet du chagrin, voyez-vous." Not my reaction to grief, but I feel an instant bond. And how I wish I could find something comforting to say about her 20-year-old grandson who died a year ago in an accident. Comforting and true. Instead I pat the sleek golden retriever at my feet, gently nudging me for a handout.

   "Diane!" The patronne's voice is more of a caress than a reprimand, and Diane just thumps her plumy tail. "She was his dog, you see. He brought her in one day, a bedraggled stray, and fed her. I'm afraid I spoil the animal, madame." Ah, a living remembrance! (Ned left us faded snapshots and old clothes. Knit shirts and a green wool jacket that was too big for me. I wore them all threadbare, hanging on . . .)

The friendly locals have sampled my Camembert and strawberries, and I'm sampling their liqueurs--Cointreau, crème d'abricot, crème de cacao--when an ancient chasseur de sanglier stumps into the cafe and starts telling a long tale of the hunt. At least I thought it was a hunt; now he's describing a wounded wild boar charging an automobile on the road. Or is the automobile charging the wild boar? The words blur . . .

Up-a-daisy, Jean!--that's the hard part--then out the door and across the street to the chateau, where I fall in behind a flock of giggling Scottish schoolgirls. Poor kids, only in Dinan for a few short hours and missing the best part of it! Though I wouldn't want the job of shepherdng them down the Rue du Petit Fort. Much safer, I suppose, to keep them viewing old looms and other "artifacts of the culture" gathering dust behind protective railings. To hold them captive to the droning monotone of our fussy old guide. Does he think his tip depends on word count?

    "Please," says the schoolmaster as faint rumblings sound overhead, "couldn't we skip some of the history? The girls want to get back before it rains."

So the guide turns his undivided attention to me. Ugh! Actually, as my mind revives with the exercise of tower climbing, I've been ingesting bits of his spiel--all about Anne de Bretagne, who brought the duchy of Brittany into France when she married Charles VIII . . . But does he have to go grabbing hold of my arm and talking right into my face? I suppose pushing me into the hard stone confessional chair of the duchesse Anne is a sign of exceptional favor, too. As more tourists surge in, I duck out--without tipping--and make it back to the hostel just in front of a black thundercloud.

    "Lay round the shack till the mail train comes back, then I'll roll in my sweet baby's arms"  What's this? Encamped on the hearth, a band of local bohemians play bluegrass on banjo, autoharp and dulcimer, while a small child--I think he's theirs--bangs away on a spoon.

    "Is it yours, le dulcimer? You will play with us then?" The skinny blond kid hands me back my instrument, and his friends ask if I know la musique des New Lost City Ramblers--"c'est le folk américain, n'est-ce pas?"

    "Et bien," I hedge. And find myself strumming along as best I can to les Johnson Boys ("they knew how to hug and kiss 'em; hop up, pretty gals, don't be afraid'--ah, quelle gaieté amoureuse!"), Old Dan Tucker, Sally Goodin, and the linguistic confusion, at last, of le Gambling Man.

    "C'est 1'homme qui voyage, n'est-ce pas?" asks Philippe on the banjo.

    "Mais non," I protest. "C'est le rambling man qui voyage; le gambling man, c'est 1'homme qui parie."

A short silence, while they mull over the song? (" Mother, oh dear Mother, you know I love you well, but the love I bear for that gambling man no human heart can tell...") No matter--l'homme qui parie or 1'homme qui voyage, maman le désapprouve.

    "Wah!" cries the child. "He's hungry," says Philippe. "Wish we could stay and learn more folk américain from you." Huh?  "Dinan is so terribly dull, you know, très, très bourgeois." And off they go in their VW, with the rain lashing down. How deserted this place seems now, even after I cook supper with a German girl and meet her American hitch-hiking companion--a brash college student who suggests we "get out of this dump" by donning ponchos and hiking into town. Well, why not?

   "Just like the good ol' U.S.A.--same TV programs, same pop tunes, same folk music!" In a stuffy café, Larry holds forth on the Europe he's "covering" with gratifying speed; and seated in the booth with him and Lisa, who talks less and less (and always in the language of the dominant male), I wonder why he bothered to cross the Atlantic. Why I'm even here, feeling completely outside of France for the first time since entering it. Surely not just because of speaking English all evening?

   "They have their own songs, if you go hunting," I tell him, only half-believing it myself. For my prospects of finding anything seem dimmer and dimmer the longer I listen to his hectoring voice. And mine too, contentious and unsexed, trapped in this talk of "aggression" and "violence" and What's Wrong with American (even more of course, European) Society, of innate response vs. cultural conditioning . . . How different from the passionate argument in the café last night, though it, too, ranged all over the globe. No passion in our dreary debate over empty dialectics and strawmen. And no erotic overtones either--hell, Larry would probably consider it a compliment (as the American I once heard so praising a colleague, obviously did) to say "I don't even think of her as a woman."  Give me a French Communist any day!

___________________________________________________________________________________

But if he will leave me, I'll not be forlorn
And if he'll forswear me, I'll not be forsworn;
I'll dress myself up in some right high degree,
And I'll walk as proud by him as he walks by me.
                   (American trad. song)

 

My second time through Paris and the disappointing effect of my new finery

Sunday, June 23

"Vous voilà, madame! Where did you disappear last night?" asks a twinkly-eyed young man dunking bread in his cafe au lait. "I was looking for you." That must have been just after I left the hostel for a stupid evening in town. Damn! On a Saturday night, too. You flubbed it, Jean!

Thumbing in the rain today, back to Paris. And I begin badly--by restraining an iii-spired impulse to stop and talk to two men working on a docked boat.

  "We just bought it," they say when they pick me up on the main road an hour later, and I drip all over the plush blue seat covers. "For getting completely away from Paris. Oh yes, we're driving home, madame." My driver twists the ends of his black mustache, and his friend adds quickly, "but not directly; you see, we're making a little detour for lunch . . ." Afraid of being stuck with a sorry-looking roadside stray? That's me, all right, after my hour of tramping up the road in the wake of splashing cars. So they drop me off about noon at a village cafe in the pouring rain. . . And it's still pouring when I don the clammy nylon cape and walk out of the village, listening hard for the sound of a decelerating motor. As if anyone would want to stop for my hunchbacked form (the hunch is the dulcimr--at least it's covered)

What a lovely day to stay home with a good book! This wandering business puts an awful burden on the sun to shine. And on me to strike up with strangers, to start out each day afresh making transitory human contact . . . Human contact, hell--all I want now is a dry car.

   "Ah, quel temps, madame! You haven't been waiting long here, have you?" The young couple in a little Renault cannot imagine anyone passing by a hitchhiker in the rain, and I hate to disillusion them. "We'll find a better place for you to hitch from Alençon," promises the husband. That's a bus-stop shelter on the edge of town, where we scramble to haul my gear out of the trunk before we're both soaked. "Bonne route!" They drive off . . . and return half an hour later, waving my hat. How nice to get it back! (I have a recurring nightmare of leaving something really essential--my passport, say--in a perfect stranger's car.)

But hitching from a shelter isn't working. Do I look too comfortably rooted to the spot? Anyway, it's depressing just to stand and watching the cars slosh past. Be more aggressive, Jean! See that Mercedes with a license number ending in 75 (Paris!) waiting at the traffic light up ahead? If you run . . .

  "Pardon, monsieur, but would you by any chance be going . . ." The poor man can't say "no", though I'm sure from his startled look that he'd never have stopped for a soggy hitchhiker on the road. Plenty of time to dry out in his warm car, though, as we're bottled up first in an accident-related traffic jam and then in a run-of-the-mill weekend jam. God, why did I pick a Sunday to return to Paris? I guess I just wanted to get home all of a sudden, and Hal and Maria are somehow my home-in-France (even if it's one I can't abide for long). I'm tired today, tired of being cold and wet and homeless. But I keep my wits about me, recognizing the St. Cloud tunnel in time to jump out and board a bus for Meudon. Neat! Perhaps Hal will even have dug his way out of the thesis by now.

A vain hope. He's still typing away, while Maria draws chemical diagrams on the dining room table. (What was that rubbish Hal told me a few years back about her "laziness"?) And my cot's still set up in Amy's room. "No bother," says Maria. "It's part of our general clutter." The Hartmans count themselves lucky to have found this cool, green retreat from the city and at a price they can afford--but its five rooms are bursting with books and papers and tapes and musical instruments. "I keep thinking of our house in New Jersey," she says, sweeping her papers onto a pile by the window. "This was only supposed to be for six months, you know." And our ten rooms in West Virginia? I'll trade you, Maria.

Monday, June 24

O.K., Jean, let's fix this ridiculous communications hang-up with Alex. Could I dial home at night rates and clear up the whole mess? A snag: the phone belongs to an upstairs tenant, who's afraid she'll be saddled with the bill and doesn't want the phone used late in the evening and says you have to go through the operator anyway. "Why don't I run down to the Meudon post office early tomorrow morning, before day rates go into effect? It'll be simpler for everyone."

Now into the Gare de 1'Est to drop off my grease-smeared pants at a nettoyage à sec; the train station is a good place for fast, cheap service of all sorts. Then on to American Express, just in case Alex has had any encouraging second thoughts he wants to share with me. It's a depressing American hangout, and of course there're no letters for me. (Alex, as it turns out, is still sending them to the Lannion post office!) What was I felling so guilty about that I didn't give him the Hartmans' address? He found it for that first cable and hasn't used it since; I wonder why? But what tedious complications my scruples have created for me. A harmless friend-of-the-family now, managing to reap the inconenient wages of sin without even indulging in the pleasure. It's a trick that only you could pull off, Jean. So forthright with strangers, so devious and evasive with a husband.

Hal suggested the student cafeteria as a very cheap and possibly interesting place to lunch. "Jeanie doesn't want to eat there," exclaimed Maria, and I'm intrigued enough to hunt it down. "Just ask for the Halle aux Vins," she said, but no one seems to have heard of the "wine market." Until a university professor walks me to a tower-studded square (where they used to sell wine, he says, before these strange "floating" towers were built). It is, I suppose, the closest thing to a campus that the scattered university has. Students of all colors and garbs gather round as a couple of boys on a soapbox exhort us all to break the bonds of tyranny.

  "A bas les militaristes, à bas le service militaire!" shouts one of the révolutionnaires, and his friend shoves his French army képi down over his eyes. Today they're obviously just horsing around, but to-morrow?

"La cafetéria, monsieur?" A Libyan math student leads me to it--through an underground parking lot, up a flight of stairs and down a long corridor. Maria was right as usual. The food really is dreadful; watery mashed potatoes, tasteless stew, colorless "green" beans. But the Libyan's on a government stipend that hasn't kept up with inflation. "Where else, you tell me, could I buy a 5 fr. meal?" he asks in his halting French. He came to Paris speaking none at all--"and what a cold place it was, but I'm doing fine now, madame." And he tears off a meal ticket for me too . .

Books, books, books! My last time through this huge librairie by the Place de 1'0déon, I never got beyond indecisive browsing; today I plunge determinedly on to the cash register with a stack of French children's books. Five o'clock already? I'm pooped, perhaps because the whole thing seems so hypothetical, even futile. An unemployed teacher "enriching" a course she may never conduct--not an encouraging outlook.

And the prospect of hauling my heavy sack onto the rush-hour métro? Ouf! I dump myself and my books down in a sidewalk cafe while the métro clears, and the life of the rue Mouffetard flows around my laden table. Workers, shopgirls, students, housewives . Out on the square some local hobos are clowning about as they fortify themselves for a cold night with a jug of wine. "Ah, les clochards," says a woman who stops at my table with her doll-clutching daughter. "On s'amuse, n'est-ce pas?" We watch them enticing two large dogs into a rough game of keep-away; they toss a tattered hat back and forth, the dogs occasionally catching the hat and releasing it only after a vigorous tug-of-war. Yes, very entertaining--but these men will be sleeping on the curb tonight, which doesn't strike me as a fun activity at all.

The university folk club, "le Bourdon," meets somewhere around here; I could meet Maria if I knew where, instead of traipsing out to Meudon again. For after supper she throws banjo, fiddle, guitar and dulcimer into the camper, and we take off for Paris, leaving Hal to work on his thesis revisions. Down in a dimly lit cellar room, I recognize the crew from la Couturanderie: shaggy Phil and his red-headed Emmanuelle, Jean-Loup and Yves, the trim Breton who sings on perfect pitch and dances with neat, quick steps. There are chants à répondre--and we sing the "responses"--chants à danser--and we hook thumbs with Yves. Also a very funny French "folk tale" that I suddenly realize is Pete Seeger's "Abiyoyo" (even improved, I think, in the transliteration). . .

"Tu vas nous jouer quelque chose?" Will a play-party song do? Something with silly words that don't need translating, unlike the ballad Maria just finished explaining--"c'était un vieux chasseur de sanglier qui s'appelle Old Bangum . . ." Now I ask Yves to teach me the song that's been haunting me ever since the festival. A jiggly dance tune and a refrain of "non, non, non, je n'aimerai pas; je serai fille sage" was all I could remember on the road. It clearly wanted a bit of elaboration, but what a very appropriate line for me to be reciting! A way of singing myself back into a "good girl" state of intransigent innocence? Come on, Jean--that's not the way Frenchmen heard it. They know what such protestations usually mean and credit the singer with every intention of yielding to desires that are neither "good" nor "wise." Who are you kidding, anyway?

Maria and I drive Emmanuelle partway home, and I tell her of my plans to visit the Auvergne. "Ah, that is the region of France I have the greatest desire to know," she sighs. But with an impecunious student husband and two-year-old Matthieu--oh yes, that fat-bellied little boy clinging to her skirts at the festival--she's much more tied down than I. How lucky to be past that stage! It's one of the joys of forty--realizing how grown-up and responsible my own children are and how much more freedom I have than the mothers of these delightful, demanding toddlers. High time I put it to good use . . .

Tuesday, June 25

At 7:45--fifteen minutes to make my phone call!--I leap out of bed and sprint to the post office, feeling rather foolish as I join the other postal patrons waiting for the doors to open at 8:00. When the day rate starts--an obvious fact that we deep thinkers all overlooked. What-the-hell-it's-only-money, I tell myself as the clerk waves me into a little booth, where I have the unanticipated pleasure of a second transatlantic conversation with my youngest daughter. (Alex, as I should have remembered, is now in Canada.) YES, YOU CAN STAY; MARY WILL LEAVE FOR WYOMING ANYWAY. I get her to repeat the wonderful words twice before hanging up. It's settled, hurray! If I can just wrap and post those two packages of books, I'm free to take off for the Auvergne tomorrow.

I'm freed, too, of that awful "could I be pregnant again?" feeling. Limp with relief, in fact, as I run back to the apartment for a tampon. Times have certainly changed! Twenty years ago, when my periods stopped for five months in Europe, I knew that my body was only cooperating splendidly with my travels.

    "My God, haven't you seen a doctor yet?" I remember another hosteler exclaiming when I told her about this marvelously convenient state of affairs.

    "What for? I feel fine," I said, staring back at her and pitying her insecure, evidently catastrophe-prone existence. My life, of course, as I dreamed my fairy-tale dreams and slid unthinkingly from faculty child to faculty wife, was better planned. And I must have put up a pretty good show for a while.  "I always thought you and Alex had the perfect marriage," says a friend from our Long Island days. "Alex with his work, you digging and cooking and singing, the girls barefoot in the trees . . ." Ah, how easy it is to fool others! But not myself anymore, not when I'm so catastrophe-prone. Though for this month, at least, I've escaped the shoal of pregnancy. I will not, thank God, have to say "no" to another nuzzling baby.

   "You see, Jean, cafeteria food doesn't have to be a disaster," says Maria as we lunch together at the Bellevue lab where Hal works, and she introduces me to some of his co-workers. "Have fun in town now." I intend to. And I'm getting pretty adept, if I do say so myself, at this train-and-metro routine--following the color-coded maps and whizzing directly to my destination without backtracking and unnecessary transfers and asking questions that most Parisians are too rushed to answer anyway, especially in the frenzied underground.

Destination Montmartre. I've every intention of doing the proper tourist thing to-day: the walk up the long stairway, the view-of-the-city from the steps of the white hilltop church . . . But the foot of the hill is thronged with shoppers--French shoppers--pawing through the clothing that large cut-rate stores spill forth in sidewalk bins and racks, while smaller shops display 1'élégance Parisienne behind narrow glass fronts. The garment district of Paris? I catch my reflection--of a low-grade American tourist in my oh-so-practical dacron knit skirt and top, hard and artificial looking. French girls wear loosely woven cotton blouses (from India) with their beloved blue jeans, and I remember Christiane pulling out of her pack a flip of a dress that I wanted to own on the spot. High prices (80 fr. and up for a pair of jeans!) have kept me from temptation 'till now, when I'm seized with clothes-fever. Not that you need more clothes, Jean, but Mary's birthday is coming up; you could try on some for her . . .

The fever mounts as I enter shop after shop on the trail of an undefinable look. I only want a blouse or two (one for Mary, one for me?) and "une petite robe tres simple" that is naturally impossible to find. "Non, madame, pas le shirtwaist . . . non, pas ça . . pas ça . . ." At last--two embroidered Indian blouses (20 fr. apiece) and a little flowered dress, more elegant and more expensive than what I had in mind (it will not, I think, be stuffed into the pack for the Auvergne), but I cannot bear to take it off. The patronne lays on the flattery with a trowel; when I mention my bad conscience over the matter of presents for the children, she says, "but of course the nicest present madame can possible bring home to them is their maman looking so young and pretty in her new dress." (Okay, that might just work on Edward . . .) I cash a $20 traveler's check and splurge 15 fr. more on white sandals, as the dress looks a bit odd with sneakers. Delicious frivolity!

And reckless too. I'm down to $30 in American money (plus 100-odd fr.) and I don't give a damn. For the first time, I belong in Paris; I can tell by the admiring glances of male passers-by as I parade my finery through the rush-hour crowds and a sudden thunderstorm. (How curious, though, that yesterday's expenditure of 110 fr. was such a tiring task and today's far greater outlay of 160 fr. an exhilarating adventure. Vanity obviously outweighs my enthusiasm for children's literature.)

"Do you want to go to a school covered-dish supper?" asked Hal this morning. "With me and the kids?" Of course I said "yes" and now have to figure out where "la Source" is. Somewhere in Bellevue . . . Aha, here we are, and here's Hal and the food, a flowing variety of wines (lemonade for the children) and very little in the way of organized meeting. Nothing that we have to attend anyway. We chase after platters of cheese and cherries, pastries and chicken, while Hal waylays his children's teachers. "Mes felicitations, monsieur!" The math teacher congratulates him on John's unconditional pass, not something that's taken for granted in French schools. (Many students repeat a subject or, more commonly, do extra vacation-time work on it.)

"Do you want to see their classrooms?" With the children off watching a film, Hal shows me through their deserted rooms; and I make suitably admiring sounds at various class projects, feeling sillier and sillier all the time in my flippy new dress. Hardly the thing for this scholastic tour. Has Has noticed the new, chic me? Does he approve, I wonder as he goes on and on about Cy and John and Amy. My, what a commendable interest he takes in their education! And is he also latching onto a safe topic?

"Here's the model that John's room built, Jean." Grandmother would have got this conversation onto a very different tack by now. Her "shameless flirtations" scandalized my mother, who once described to me how "that woman" threw herself at someone else's husband--"perching on the arm of his chair, touching him, making eyes . . . Of course the wife never invited her back." And of course I'm too proud to indulge in an obvious bid for attention like that, though perhaps my aims are just as unscrupulous. Admit it, Jean; you wouldn't be satisfied with a simple "how nice you look"--you want affection, devotion even. And from another woman's husband, just like Grandmother! Maybe it isn't even pride, only a kind of ineptitude that keeps me so primly apart from Hal, shifting from foot to foot as I stare at the model lodge. "Built to scale, Jean, after the place they stayed in on their school trip. See here where . . ." Damn, what am I, with my visage massacré, doing in this girlish dress? It would probably look better on Mary anyway. Hal must wonder what got into me.

"Viens vite, papa!" Ah well, I couldn't expect that film to hold the boys forever. They lead us skipping over puddles in the courtyard to a school play--very hard to follow, what with the noisy comings and goings of unrestrained French schoolkids. "Papa, papa!" Cy and John race him to the car afterwards, while Amy tells me my dress is chouette--an approving bit of slang that has nothing to do with owls but seems to mean something like "nifty." She's wrong, though, I think.  It was a flop.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Glory, glory, what a helluva way to die,

Glory, glory, what a helluva way to die,

Glory, glory, what a helluva way to die,

And she ain't gonna climb no more.
      (to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic")

 On to the Auvergne and a real workout for my boots . . .

Wednesday, June 26

I'm lightening the pack today. Out with the London Fog raincoat, the heavy leather handbag, the never-used aluminum eatingware which the YH handbook said I should carry. (But in goes one of the new Indian blouses for some après-autostop chic.) I even propose leaving the dulcimer behind. "But I think you'd be crazy not to take it," says Maria, and she has a way of being right about things.

A late start, made later by my messing up on the metro. By the time I reach the Porte d'Orleans, it's 9:30--a dilettantish hour to be hitching out of Paris, with the summer influx of footloose students in full spate and all of them, it seems, standing on one short stretch of road feeding into the autoroute. AVIGNON, NICE, MONTE CARLO, ROME--a forest of placards and packs and outstretched thumbs. I walk on and the pavement disappears, shouldered aside by a concrete wall. Back to my competition with an eyecatching song-and-dance act? No, that army of hitchhikers would put off any driver. I detour around to a minor entrance road instead, one with no other autostoppeurs and almost no autos, then slowly work my way up to the forbidden autoroute itself. These superhighways are the only French roads where hitchhiking, for obvious safety reasons, is strictly illegal. But by fair means or foul now, I'm determined to wrench free of Paris, and a car luckily stops before the police see me.

Ho-hum . . . I leave the soporific autoroute with a thin-faced teacher from Montpellier, who's driving home via the Auvergne and delighted to break the monotony of a long trip. How odd!--he actively resents the existence of Breton and Provençal and indeed would like to replace them with one universal language. Basic English? Yes, that would be fine with my non-chauvinist friend, who says he'd be perfectly happy to have learned English instead of French as a child. Anything, as long as we all spoke it, All the time. None of this gabbling on in cozy dialect, when people could perfectly well be talking in some intelligible tongue.

    "I always suspect they are talking about me." He sounds affronted, just thinking about it, and I laugh. Why that happened to me so often when I was growing up--not knowing what other people were talking about, not fitting in--that I can hardly resent their actually speaking a different language. Perhaps, in a way, it makes things simpler.

   "One habituates oneself, monsieur. And of course one must make an extra effort . . ." Ah, the strength of the misfit? 
  "Mais quelle surprise," he exclaims, "to be carrying on a real exchange of ideas with a foreigner! I was afraid our conversation might be somewhat limited when I first heard your accent." Ouch! We're now approaching historic Nevers.

  "A marvelous town that I'd love to show you about, madame. Are you so pressed that you cannot stay for more than an hour? There is so much to see."  Hating to say "no" to any enrichment of mere autostop, I murmur assent and with no little difficulty he parks on a narrow side street. As we discuss the question of when--or is it whether?--I will arrive at the hostel in Clermont-Ferrand, however, the implications of this little sightseeing jaunt begin to penetrate my thick skull. Perhaps, after all, we should go on. . .

He drops me off at a gas station on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand, and I catch a bus into the center of town. The youth hostel stands next to the railway station, nice and central and filled with chattering school children. An officious young man takes our cards without cracking a smile, though I do get him to recommend, grudgingly, a nearby family restaurant. Where I hang up the dripping poncho and sit at a long table. "Le prix fixe, madame?" A tureen of soup appears, and I serve myself--three brimming bowlfuls since lunch was somehow forgotten today--before progressing on to a platter of ragoût de lièvre (wild hare, I presume, rather than farm rabbit), a bowl of salad, a fourme d'Ambert (from a town in the Auvergne--pungent and blue as Roquefort), cherries . . Complete with wine, it all comes to 10 fr.!

Back to the hostel--definitely a more interesting place now that three German motorcyclists have arrived. They describe a fantastic after-the-storm sunset over the mountain peaks, which I missed of course (though approaching France's central mountain mass in the car I did see lightning striking the peaks, bolt after bolt--quite a sight!). But they missed supper. And when they start rattling pots and pans, the père aubergiste comes running. "Fermé, fermé," he cries, waving his arms about. "What do you think this is anyway, a fancy club? The kitchen's closed." At 9:30?  Definitely not one of your friendlier hostels.

Thursday, June 27

I want to set up a visit with the Belgian family Mary will be living with next year. (Alex expects me to do something useful with all this extra time, and Belgium is almost on the way to Luxembourg.) So on to the post office that's rapidly becoming a second home to me. I do like talking directly to another human being--the post office clerk--instead of through a faceless operator. The clerks here take a lot of trouble trying to find a phone listing for a M. Sèvres in Antwerp, but in the end I simply send a postcard announcing my arrival ten days from now . .

"De la musique tra-di-tion-nelle?" The frowning young man behind the counter of the local syndicat d'initiatives sounds as if he has never heard of folk music or dancing. And certainly not for the tourists his bureau is set up to help. "Nothing like that in Clermont-Ferrand," he says and hands me a stack of flossy brochures. Well, it doesn't hurt to ask.

On to the parc des vulcans. I luck out with an unsolicited lift right in town, two routiers driving me up the gorse-tousled lower slope of Puy-le-Dome--the nearest and highest peak in this chain of old volcanic mountains. (My driver yesterday said that puy comes from the French puits and refers to their "well"-like summits.) I'm let off at the spur road leading up to the peak, but the foot trail, of course, starts elsewhere--three kilometers further on as a matter of fact, at the Col de Cessyat, where two school buses are pulled alongside a small inn. I picnic on the terrace while children gambol about the windy pass, begging their teachers to lead them up the mountain.  "Mais non, mes enfants--it will rain soon." Aha, so I have the trail all to myself!

Pack and dulcimer I've left with the innkeeper. He said it was an old Roman road--this soft, broad path of pine needles that finally emerges into the lowering clouds and the wind, which seems to be trying to blow me off the mountain. The trail--a rocky track now--has a continuous concrete support, and sometimes this "support"--surely not Roman!--forms a neat beam over small gullies. Over switchbacks now and widening gullies. Sitting on the edge of one, I watch a group of older school children clamber messily toward me, down one bank and up the other, their middle-aged teachers stumbling after. How inelegant! I wait until they're gone before trying my way--and finding it so teetery that, after a lot of arguing with myself and gazing at the suspended support, I scooch across on my rear. I never did shine on the balance beam. . .

What's this? The ruins of a Roman temple to Mercury next to a modern souvenir stand. Also an observation tower which neither I nor three teenagers from Clermont-Ferrand--they walked up the road--feel much like climbing. So this is the mountaintop, and quite wet and windy enough as it is. Looking southward, we see a chain of puys--bare-topped, skirted in dark green and appearing rather puny against the surrounding expanse of flatland. How disappointing! Is this little string of "wells" (they turn into prosaic "podiums" when I check up on the word) all there is to the Auvergne? "Oh no," says the boy, but I'm skeptical.

"Alors, on descend?" Wet clouds follow us down to the inn, where I pick up my gear and look at a map. Will the hostel at Mont Dore be any friendlier than the one at Clermont-Ferrand? It's fifty kilometers away--at 3 in the afternoon and with a fine rain misting the mountainside. I'm tempted to follow one of the forest trails--they all go down--but hitching is faster, I suppose.

Much too fast! My driver's out of the trees in minutes, then past a village and a corral of cavorting young horses. Percherons?   Damn, now if only I were walking . . . I gaze out of the car window, thrilled and frustrated by the unreeling landscape that I cannot touch, cannot enter. Bright green meadows and jutting gray rocks, dark pine and yellow gorse, huge slabs of granite carved as by a giant hand, and the mountainside falling away from the road as we climb up and over another pass. Are these the peaks I was calling puny?

My last ride takes me up a narrow valley to Mont Dore--replete with casino, mini-golf, thermal establishments and cable car. The first tourist development I've seen since leaving Puy-le-Dome--how nice it's so concentrated and therefore so easy to escape! But a youth hostel here? Not exactly. At the head of the valley and well out of town, with Puy-de-Sancy ("the highest peak of the Massif Central, madame") towering above, are ski lodge and lift station and the hostel too--hidden in a grove of firs by the side of a clear-running stream. Picture windows downstairs and gay six-bunk dorms upstairs look out across it to a herd of horses grazing the mountain meadow. (They're lodged on the lowest level.) A dream of a hostel!

And a deserted one. Are those scraps of color on the mountain hostelers taking advantage of the good weather? (For of course it stopped raining as soon as I started car-riding.) I'll shed the pack and take off too. It's early yet; the misty peaks beckon. And as if to urge me upward, a sign at the trailhead says, "Sommet--2 km."

The family's warned me about climbing mountains alone, but this isn't really mountain climbing. In fact the zigzagging trail is practically a public highway--just look at that scuffed turf. It curves in toward a ravine and small waterfall, and I step over a rail blocking the path. "To warn off skiers in wintertime," (when trail and barrier are probably buried) I say to myself and continue blithely on. A patch of grimy snow shows in a cleft, the trail steepens and loose rocks slide out from under my good vibram soles. Say, this is getting pretty hairy for a solitary hiker. Should I turn back? Retrace my hard-won steps? (And going back down will be worse.) No, I'll just have to be very cautious getting up and out of this damned ravine.

I could tackle that rock face over there--a quick way out--but a slip would send me plummeting thirty feet down, and I'm suddenly feeling very mortal. So I keep scrambling up sand and scree--a messy but surely a safe route to the lip of overhanging heather at the top of the ravine. The slope is steeper and scarier than I expected, and slippery too. I test all hand- and footholds, for most of them pull out quite easily from the wet sand--annoyingly wetter the higher I climb. And I listen to those "holds" bouncing down the rocks, feel a quivering in my calf muscles. If only I could stand for a second without fighting not to fall . . .

Oh dear! From up close the overhang is also more than I'd bargained for. (Of course, silly--a simple case of perspective!) Can I make those last few feet? I pressure my way up, grab hold of the heather and roll myself onto blessed terra firma. Very inelegant climbing technique, but who's watching? At least I've spared my family the embarrassment of having Mother scraped off the rocks. "We told her so." I can hear them now.

I lie on the soft turf--and how wonderful to be able to assume that posture!--then stroll across the daffodil-dotted fields of what might--or might not--be the summit of Puy-de-Sancy. (In this mist I can't see enough to tell.)  But it's easy to find the proper path again and follow it down to the ski station. No sweat when you do it right . .

"C'est un sentier très dangereux," says a woman selling postcards. "Didn't you see the barrier, madame?" Well yes, I did. . . Tomorrow, when I hike over the mountain to the unspoiled Vallée de Chaudefour I promise to stick to the regular tourist path   Showing me pictures of lush high pastures and nestled hamlets, she says that on a clear day "c'est une belle promenade."  But the mountain itself is "un centre des perturbations atmosphériques," in other words, a good place to get struck by those bolts of lightning that provided such a spectacle yesterday evening.

Ah, I'm back at the hostel in time for supper. Luckily the girl across the table from me is preserving sa ligne and doesn't take her share from the platter. I eat and eat . . .  then talk to a staid schoolmistress, herding her teenage pupils through the Auvergne. "Why don't you talk to the village school teachers about your interest in traditional music?" she says. Of course--the teachers on the other side of the mountain! It's early to bed for this marvelous questing hike, but at ten-thirty a dozen teenagers of both sexes (her pupils?) pile into my room and for the next two hours engage in stifled--or not so stifled--hilarity.  Once I have to answer a knock on the door and tell the management that I'm just going to bed now and sorry to be so noisy about it. The footsteps retreat then, and the kids' staccato, telegraphic talk resumes. Very difficult to follow, almost a different language from the speech of the schoolmistress, but so comfortingly alive . . .

Friday, June 28

I wake early to a blanket of fog--damn!--just when I was all set to drag myself from a warm bed and start hiking toward a mountaintop sunrise. Well, no one's going to see the sun rise today. Back to sleep . .

There's no hurry over breakfast either. "Quel temps abominable," mutters one of my last night's visitors as we watch the horses vanish into swirling mist. "Tu veux faire la cure avec nous?"

"Taking the cure" means spending the morning in Mont Dore's steamy thermal baths--for their asthma, the kids say. Today it's also a way of escaping the mist that's turned into a drizzly rain. But isn't there anything else to do except take a bath? Ah yes, the quest! Why not hunt for folk music and dance on this side of the mountain? I'm so glad I brought the dulcimer along to the Auvergne, even if I do leave it behind on a wet day like this. Later, when I find the right people . . .

Past curious cows and a cluster of little brown summer cottages, I tramp the two kilometers into Mont Dore. Rain or no, it's market day and black-caped women throng the open air stalls. "Fromages d'Auvergne, madame? Here, try a piece." My conscience bids me buy at last a goat cheese and a fromage frais (starting point for the mellow Saint-Nectaire, it's made in an hour from this morning's milk). And I start knocking on doors.

   "Monsieur le curé?" The old parish priest invites me in out of the wet but isn't much help on the whereabouts of traditional music and dance.

  "There's a dance teacher in the next village of Bourboules, chère madame--or is it mademoiselle? She might know something . . ."

So might a local schoolteacher, but where to find one? The maisons d'enfants where I knock next have nothing to do with education; they're simply health care centers set up for children who're here on extended "cures" (and at state expense too!--Mont Dore doesn't seem such a haven for the wealthy sick anymore). At the foot of the village, below the 19th century Etablissement des Bains Thermales and its billowing vapors, I find a real school. And in his cubbyhole office, monsieur le directeur.  Briskly helpful, he writes down the phone number of an inn sponsoring soirées folkloriques and the number of a folk radio station back in Clermont-Ferrand. He also tells me that the woman in Bourboules teaches "American-style dancing," which as he describes it consists of drum majorette routines. Well, there's one lead demolished . . .

In the syndicat d'initiatives of all places (they generally just have standard tourist stuff), I learn of two towns with what the French term "folk clubs"--Rochefort and Latour d'Auvergne. From the friendly post office I telephone the inn at Olloi and learn that the soirée folklorique is an expensive tourist spectacle. And sold out for this weekend anyway. Well at least I'm finding things out. And feeling very resourceful about it, too. How sad to have nothing to do in bad weather but amuse yourself! I have a sustaining goal, I think, as I roll up my jeans so they won't get any wetter. Latour d'Auvergne is only fifteen kilometers away, on a secondary road winding invitingly into--not over--the mountains. (No danger of lightning.)  And "folk club" sounds so much more promising than soirée folklorique. Let's go, Jean!

I like this gentle rain. It deepens the color of the evergreen forest and brings out the smells--of resin and rotting logs and cut timber, and a sudden sharp whiff of some animal. Fox maybe? Judging from the impressive girth of the trees, this must be typical weather for the Auvergne--le vrai temps auvergnat.  And how lucky that I have the sensibility (the inner resources?) to appreciate it!

Hitching in a very desultory fashion and eating up my fromage frais as I imbibe the mistily romantic spirit of the region, I manage to arrive in Latour d'Auvergne about noon. And quickly discover that "folk club" means a group that performs for tourists. "En costume," says the butcher, whose wife belongs to this tight little club along with the baker's wife and the postman and the mayor's wife . . . "C'est très folklorique, madame." Darn! It's the wrong sort of "folk" (as I could have expected, given my source of information.) And the wrong sort of inn across the way, where I'm the only customer and the hard-faced patronne grudgingly pours me a glass of wine to go with my cheese and bread and cherries, while muttering under her breath about the high cost of living and "rich Americans."  Have I established myself as one of them? I suppose so: that I'm here at all, and eating cherries to boot. . .

Good to escape into the rain again. But where to? A Virgin Mary of drenched white marble beckons on the opposite hilltop; down the road are the ruddy, long-horned Auvergnat cattle, I stand there admiring them as it comes pouring down with a will--onto the poncho, down my bare legs and into my boots. They're audibly squishing.  I'm not properly equipped for this rain (inner resources, hell--it's gaiters I need!), at least not for staying out in it. Tourists and local inhabitants alike are surely sheltering indoors, and surely I could appreciate this excessively romantic weather much better through the misted windows of a friendly inn. Will a farmhouse do?

No one answers the door, and the dogs won't let me into the barn. So I huddle in a shed with some tolerant chickens and a rusty tractor. Remove my boots, pour out the water, wring out my socks and gaze at the red cows. Rather a dreary situation and not very promising for the quest. Folk means people, silly!

The farmer--a big pleasant fellow with an agreable barnyard smell--returns at last in his pick-up truck and offers me a lift. Oh yes, thank you! I'm not sure where we're going exactly--he seems to have a great many errands to run all over the countryside--but I'm moving and out of the rain at least. "You want to go out with me this evening?" No thanks. He calls me tu, just like the kids, but with him it sounds a lot more familiar.  So I pay some attention to where we're going, and at Bourboules ("oh, you turn off here?") pull on my wrung-out wool socks and sodden boots, say goodbye and climb down from the pick-up.

I tramp into the syndicat d'initiatives because it's right there, not that I expect anything . . . "Oui, oui, bien sur, madame; vous voulez participer," says a discerning young man. "Une petite minute, s'il vous plait." He makes a few brisk phone calls and comes up with my first real leads for shared folklore: "la maison du peuple" in Clermont-Ferrand on Thursday evenings (the very day I arrived!) and "la bourrée d'Aurillac," which meets (he thinks) on Wednesdays. I take down both phone numbers and suggest he instruct the staff at Clermont-Ferrand in aiding oddball tourists.

On to Mont Dore, where the sultry blonde proprietress of a beatnik-type boutique proves très sympathique but not very helpful on the folklore quest. Provençal by origin, she's nostalgic for the sunny south and the open, warm southern temperament. The Auvergne, she confides, has a very "closed" society. "Ah, que je déteste ces petits esprits, ces coeurs glacés!"--hearts chilled, no doubt, by the inhospitable climate, minds centered pettily on money.

   "Why don't you take off for Avignon?"--the city of the popes, of warmth and gaiety, song and dance. "And there's a festival this weekend, you know." That's where I'll find what I'm looking for, she's sure of it. Yes, the Auvergne is a tough nut to crack, and Avignon certainly sounds cheerier. But dammit--to be driven out by a bit of rain! Whatever happened to this morning's "sustaining goal" anyway?

I slosh back to the hostel with a bottle of white wine to share at supper. But first the météo, on TV. It calls for éclaircissements, and I hope they are right; the rain no longer seems at all romantic. It must be my wet boots . . .

"Ah, you play too?" Messing about on the dulcimer after supper draws a guimbarde player. What fun, until a string snaps and I find I have no replacements. "You'll probably have to go into Clermont-Ferrand for that," he says. And on to Avignon? For the Provençal woman has made it seem enticingly close. . .

____________________________________________________________________________________

Bonnie lassie, I'll lie near ye now,
Bonnie lassie, I'll lie near ye;
An' I'll gar all your ribbons reel
In the morning ere I leave ye.

       (Scottish trad. song)

         Flight from wetness--to the blue skies and open arms of the Midi

Saturday, June 29

More rain, and the mountain I want so badly to climb still shrouded in clouds. It lets up long enough for me to start striding jauntily into town--with all my gear today, as I'm not sure I want to hang around--then comes down again in torrents. As if it were just waiting to catch me out in the open and give my dry socks a good drenching. Damn!

Running into the first small roadside hotel, I bump into a well-dressed American guest.

  "Out in this weather!" she exclaims. "How are you traveling?" When I tell her my half-formed plans, she sighs--"ah, how I would love to be able to take off for Avignon on the open road!"--and I suddenly realize that she's envious, this pampered woman with her sculpted coiffure, of me, looking like a drowned rat!  Her paunchy husband offers no comment, but I think he disapproves of me. He surely wouldn't want her engaging in any such undignified conduct. (Are husbands always more convention-bound than their wives? Or are they simply more realistic about the hazards?)

The storm slackens and I dash for the boutique, where the friendly Provencal woman again urges me on to the blue skies and warm hearts of the Midi. "You'll be in Avignon by nightfall," she says and writes the name in bold letters on a square of cardboard. "Did you say you knew someone down there?" (I had a letter of introduction somewhere in this pack. . . ) All her friends are pretty footloose, except for a boy friend who's in the Clermont-Ferrand prison for refusing to do his service militaire. "If you wanted to stop by there . . ."

Feeling very cowardly--and without even checking the festival dates--I pick up the placard and start hitching to Avignon, some 400 kilometers away. Why? Well, (a) a festival sounds like fun, (b) I need a new dulcimer string and (c) my feet are wet. Of course the sun peeks out as I leave the mountains; and between rides I'm soon unrolling my pant legs to let them steam dry in its lovely warmth. Peeling off layers of clothing. But reconsidering my decision? No, like a mechanical wind-up toy, I'm on my way to Avignon.

I've luck on my side, or at least a succession of talkative drivers, like the young man who's just finished a walking tour of the southern Auvergne. He calls it le Cantal--"a marvelous land to hike," he says, "especially if you have a gigantic appetite for eating and drinking." How enticing! Indeed the more he tells me about the land I fled, the more I long to return. (My boots must be drying fast!) I can see now that the weather which chased me out also saves the Auvergne from disfiguring summer-home sprawl; tourists want to be close to the baths, the cinemas, and the cafés when it rains. Very understandable, but I'm not in full flight any more; it's only a strategic withdrawal.

My next driver stops in Saint-Etienne for a ten-minute errand, while I buy new strings (banjo strings work fine) from a handy music store. We cross over le Col du Grand Bois--a semi-wooded, rolling plateau between the headwaters of the Loire and the full-grown Rhône--and swing down into the broad valley of the Rhone itself, spanned by a spectacular double rainbow.  Surely a good omen! On and on I ride, lulled by my driver's talk (he's an expert on industrial wastes) and a beguiling landscape of orchards and vineyards. Hey, shouldn't I be getting onto the autoroute if I want to get to Avignon tonight? (It's going down the Rhône too, you know.) At 7:30, after a bus ride and a long dreary walk through the town of Valence, I finally hit it. Not exactly the way my Provençal friend meant me to perhaps . . .

Ah, but my rainbow is still showing over the valley. I'm home free--just one more ride now . . .

   "Avignon, monsieur?"   

   "Bollène is only fifty kilometers from it," says a gray-suited driver; and I climb in, only too happy to be in a speeding vehicle again and too witless to ask him to let me out at a rest area. That's the logical, easy place to look for a ride on the autoroute, not the minor Bollène exit where I step out an hour later. Imbécile, Jean! The autoroute is a real trap; you can go fast and far, or find it impossible to go anywhere at all, even to leave the road if you're so imprudent--and I am--as to walk along it. The route is fenced off between exits with chain link, sealed off for the cars that are going much too fast to ever pick me up . . . A trucker brings his huge rig to a screeching halt. He speaks no French and I no Spanish, but I make out that he isn't going to Avignon; he just couldn't resist stopping for a woman! I wave him off in the gathering gloom. Only fifty kilometers, hell! I could be on the other side of the moon from Avignon--it wouldn't be any more inaccessible.

I escape by crawling under the fence down onto a dirt road. No town in sight; Bollène must be on the other side of that awful autoroute. And now? Pack straps cutting into my drooping shoulders, I plod past dark violet, aromatic fields and wonder where I am going to stay tonight. The scattered shacks I pass don't even look inhabited.

Suddenly,  a voice from behind me: "Ça va, ma petite? You are looking for someone?" A dark young man with bushy black hair and wheeling an ancient bike is at my side. "I am called Ali. What is your name?" He flashes white teeth and falls in step with me, while I try to act as if I were simply out for an evening stroll.

   "You're not from around here, are you? Where are you walking so late?" Another wide smile. I see an underpass ahead and quicken my pace. "Bollène? Ah, that's a long way. And are you sleeping in a hotel there?"

Oh dear. How do I answer that question? I have a feeling he's the sort of stranger Alex says I have a perfect gift for picking up. Like the pretty woman in Munich who was room-hunting the same time we were (and who told me how important a pretty bedroom was (that's when I wondered about her profession). Or the time I stepped off the plane in England in a very happy, trusting mood and promptly struck up a conversation with an Irish con man . . .

What nasty suspicions I'm entertaining! But I'm also too tired to keep up an aloof facade for long. "No," I say, "I don't have a place to stay yet."
   "The hotels in Bollène are very expensive, very bad. Why don't you stop with me and my friend and have a bite to eat?"

Why not indeed? I'm longing to rest my limbs--just for a bit, of course. So we retrace our steps to a boxy cinder-block structure set on the edge of a field. Ali pushes aside the curtain that serves as a door and introduces me to his roommate, who is cooking supper on a campstove beside a grubby sink. He's older than Ali (who seems hardly more than a boy, with his round face and impish grin) but has the same swarthy complexion and kinky black hair. They're both from Morocco--on contract for a year of low-paying factory work; and they've both left wives and children at home, in accord with France's guestworker policy.

The quarters they share are bare. Raw concrete walls and floors, no heating or plumbing (except for a cold water faucet), a tiny cluttered kitchen table, two wooden chairs and an orange crate around it, and two beds of a sort in the next room. Scanty provisions too--a starchy stew and a loaf of bread--but the Moroccans are embarrassingly generous and refuse to accept any of my fruit or cheese. "You will need it later," says Ali. "France is very expensive."

And they're sympathetic to my wanderings, up to a point. Ali has no trouble understanding my leaving a husband behind, but he's profoundly shocked at my "abandoning" the poor children. His own young wife, of course, would never do such an unnatural thing (though she might well be unfaithful, so he left her safely pregnant). He shows me a picture of her--fine dark eyes and a strong nose--his friend hands me pictures of his wife and eight children, and I produce my four. How homey!

Now Ali offers to introduce me to a Belgian girl in town who's been drifting for six months on no funds--living, I presume, off the men she encounters--and I wonder if I'm drifting too, into company I will not feel very comfortable with.

   "She says I am very good in bed," he confides with a grin as he comes in from the trip outdoors that's part of the bedtime routine here. Make up your mind, Jean--are you pulling your boots back on and hiking into town, or sacking out here as Ali suggests?
   "I could make you very happy."
   "I don't think so; I'm a very complicated person." Hell, are we getting into one of those debates again? I don't want to argue. I don't want the hassle of looking all over town for a cheap hotel and coping with a snippy clerk. I just want to lie down.

But where? Ali points to the wider of two lumpy beds, dashing any hope for a platonic disposition of beds and bodies. His friend smiles reassuringly from the other one--"don't worry, Ali won't hurt you"--and flops over with a grunt.

What the hell, I think as I crawl fully clothed onto the bed and squeeze up against the wall. I've slept uneventfully enough with a man at my side, and I'm tired enough . . . Ali isn't going to sleep, though, and neither am I.

   "You know, your pants are making us both very uncomfortable," he murmurs, pushing hard against my crotch in a way that's impossible to ignore. Impossible not to respond to, as the pants slip off, and with single-minded zest he is on me and in me.

  "Ah, ça va mieux." He's right; it is better, much better. (The knit top stays on, though, Ali dismissing my breasts as of no interest to a grown man.)

I pull the dirty gray blanket over us, not that it stays--or that I want it to stay--for long. Did I think there would be something sordid and degenerate about all this?  Loveless cinderblock sex?

   "Tu m'aimes?" asks Ali, panting as he reaches a part of me I did not know could be touched like that. "Tu m'aimes? Tu m'aimes?" He is determined to storm the last citadel--to force a cry of love from my lips.  A lie, of course, for what does this gut-stirring, almost impersonal lust have to do with love anyway? Nothing . . . and yet today, it seems, everything. No, we're not lovers, Ali and I; we play none of the titillating games that Alex and I resorted to (and were they the true obscenities, those coldly conscious, lawful lays of mine?) This is a pure animal thing, with the boy's sure animal power for once, dear God, matching my own surging desire . . .

   "Oui, je t'aime," I pant back, and in the pitch darkness I do not begrudge Ali the triumphant grin that I know adorns his handsome face. But I've won something too, I think, and fall into exhausted sleep.

Sunday, June 30

Ali's appetite for sex is almost insultingly impersonal. "Tu le veux?" he asks when we waken, and I nod with shameless gluttony. Ill-timed gluttony too, for I was mistaken about my period; it hasn't quite stopped.

   "Tu saignes!" he exclaims, and I suddenly realize what an easy excuse I had last night if I'd honestly wanted one. This bed may not be very clean--laundry's not easy here!--but at least it was untainted with female menstrual blood.
   "Alors ça ne vaut pas la peine," Ali says and rolls over.  So I'm "not worth the bother" of laying, after all--out of season, so to speak, for a fastidious Moroccan? Ah well, time for me to get up anyway. There's a hot sun and a piercing blue sky today. A glorious day to go with my glorious new sense of sexual well-being. And I can't wait to leave.

   "You don't want to stay and meet the Belgian girl? You'd like her," says Ali. No, I don't, and it's not that I'm feeling guilty. Far from it, but I don't want to talk to anyone, especially not to Ali and his friends, about my awoken body. This is something between me and the warm earth, something I don't want to spoil with cheap chitchat--hell, to touch it with words at all. . .

So I walk off. Perhaps it was cowardly of me not to stay and meet la belge--she and I might have a lot in common. But she sounds like a follower of Jack Kerouac's On the Road--a book that has always seemed to me more of an exercise in aimlessness than a call to revolution.  I don't want to identify with her. I'm a rambler and not a drifter, I tell myself, a passionate fallen puritan in a sort of moral no-man's-land. . .

   Ali might put it more simply: I think too damn much.  And I'm certainly wearing too much! In a thicket off the road, I change into shorts and sneakers and the floppy cloth hat, which lends my outfit (so Christiane told me) the eyecatching chic so important to successful autostop. Perhaps the white shorts are a bit too eyecatching though, for drivers on the secondary road between Bollène and Avignon are unanimous in demanding l'amour as a carte d'entrée into their vehicles. An aspect of the warm-hearted southern temperament that my Provençal friend neglected to mention? It's very off-putting.

Well, there's always the noonday bus to Avignon. It leaves from in front of the sidewalk café where Ali and his friends (quite a colony of Moroccans!) are drinking and laughing--highly amused, no doubt, at my re-entry into town. Poker-faced, I clamber into the bus and stare in the opposite direction. How rude of you, Jean! But I want to enjoy, alone, this wonderful semsual feeling. Not to talk, not to think--just to soak up the hot sun and breathe in the smell of lavender, like patches of reflected sky in the farmers' fields.

"The festival, madame? It starts in ten days." I should have known it! I'm out of time and out of place here in Avignon, belonging neither to the unwashed hordes sprawled in the town square nor to the dedicated tourists trudging through the Palais des Papes. What on earth am I doing in this town? Oh yes--music, song and dance, sunshine and blue skies. But the noise from the lounging guitarists is "American folk" with a fevered rock beat. There's the pont d'Avignon jutting halfway across the Rhone, but naturally no dancing on that relic of a bridge or anywhere else. (Nobody looks energetic enough for it.) And now that I'm thoroughly dried, the sun's constant glare is a bore; a scudding cloud or two on that painted saucer of a sky would improve it immensely.

I'm wondering whether I want to bother even looking for lodging--or to hightail it back to the Auvergne--when I hear something from a little square behind. the papal palace. A barefoot, bare-chested young man sits on a stone bench making strange music on an outsized stringed instrument. "De la Turkie," he explains--"a friend gave it to me."

Then he pulls out a guitar from a commodious green truck. Tourists gather as we swap songs for an hour; he claims my virtuous "theme song"--yes, I'm still singing it--is from his native Normandy. "Non, non, non, je n'aimerai pas," we carol, and he, at least, certainly doesn't mean a word of it. Not with the kittenish girl at his side, who just emerged from the truck shaking a tangle of long yellow hair from her sleepy eyes.

   "Now this song I wrote about the beautiful music we make together, she and I."  Hey, two's company, Jean!  But I stick around, making sounds of intelligent interest (I hope) in the underground theater he thinks he'll contact through friends here in Avignon. And pass on any hot tips?  Oh yes. But where will I find you? "Oh, the truck stays parked around here; it's our home," he says, as he and the girl take off  "for a drop of wine." And I go hunting for a place to stay.  Perhaps this town has possibilities, after all.

No youth hostel in Avignon? The pack-toting youth are camped out on the opposite bank of the Rhône, but they have sleeping bags. My musician friend suggested I look for a cheap hotel in the quarter back of the Palais des Papes--a rabbit warren of twisting alleyways tucked under the high papal walls. Ah, a fifth-floor walk-up, with a lovely view of other people's underwear strung across a tiny inner courtyard, for 16 fr. I dump my pack on the bed, change clothes and ask the patronne to please write down this address.

     "How very sensible of you, madame! One poor foreigner left his wife and children in the family car just a short distance from here--and couldn't find them for hours. . . Such weeping and wailing . . ." Of course that won't happen to me, she adds, because I speak the language. "And it's really very simple--you turn left behind the church up the alley."   I'm glad I have it down on paper, though: 16 rue de la Croix.

In skirt and gay Parisian blouse, I skip off to find first food and then my barefoot musician. But he's gone, and the truck too! Damn! Did his little amie persuade him to flee? Stop being paranoid, Jean!--maybe they just wanted a change of scenery, a spin in the country; maybe they had a sudden craving for the Alps or for the Riviera . . . It doesn't matter why, the glum fact remains that I've lost the green truck.

From the papal gardens--a vantage point for spying on town traffic--I watch the sun set and the swifts turn somersaults in the air. And I get involved in stupid conversation with some roving Spaniards who've come to Avignon for factory work. (These are the "migrant workers" of Europe--Spaniards, Portuguese, Moroccans, Tunesians--Avignon is full of them.)
  "So you like Frenchmen, madame. Et les Espagnols?"
  "Je préfère les Français," I answer, and a sidewalk debate on Spanish manhood is on--if their banal passes and my scarcely veiled insults can be dignified with the term "debate." Of course I'm not meeting the cream of Spanish society here, and I'm rapidly acquiring a terrible prejudice against les Espagnols.

Two of them escort me all over town--it's a free sidewalk, I say--and still no green truck. Finally, with my escort reduced to one frizzy-haired, arrogant fool, I make some rude remarks (wonderful how one's command of the language improves with anger!) for with the failure of his irresistible Latin charm, it becomes clear what he was seeking all along: a place to sack out. Not my body, after all, but my 16 fr. bed for the night. "Where am I going to sleep then?" he asks in a plaintive, little-boy voice. Not here, brother! Tough luck, but I know I'm just not the maternal type.

____________________________________________________________________________________

"Since ye've laid me doon,

  Come pick me up again,
  And since ye've ta'en the wiles of me,

  Come tell to me your name."
            (Scottish trad. ballad)

Back to the Auvergne in a terrible state of mind for hitching and a wonderful one for music-making

Monday, July 1

I'm on my way back to the Auvergne with the blue sky, hurrah! I must be the wrong sort for the Midi--after only one day here, a bit of highland reserve is beginning to seem a most attractive personality trait. Besides, I said I'd return. On to the southern Auvergne then (where at least I will meet Frenchmen), via the rugged Cévennes. Difficult hitching maybe, but all I have to do to get started is walk across the Rhone.

Oh-oh . . . My first two drivers are what I'm coming to call "southern types": slow driving, one hand on the wheel and with only one topic of conversation. What a bore--1'amour, 1'amour, l'amour!  A fascinating topic elsewhere in France, but then most Frenchmen aren't so heavy-handed about it.

My second driver of the day, a small, dark man, is even malhonnête. (Tsch, tsch--a dishonorable Frenchman?) After failing to detour us to le Pont du Gard ("The old aqueduct?--I've seen it," I say in as bored and philistine a voice as possible), he drives right past the turn-off I said I wanted to Alès and on instead toward Nimes--where I clearly said I wasn't going! It's the first time I've ever tried to switch off the ignition of a car in motion (though I've often wondered if that would be the Thing to Do). And it proves an effective gesture, the little man grabbing my hand and pulling angrily over to the side of the road.

   "You know what that does to the engine? It's foolish of you to provoke me; I'm in excellent physical shape, you know." I get out without arguing the point, and stamp off without thanking him for the ride either.

Good grief, is the whole day going to be one long battle? Is there something a little too come-hitherish about my appearance? I was careful to put on jeans this morning, though shorts would have been cooler. My bosom is well covered too and even less eyecatching--if that's possible!--since I stopped bothering with uplift. So it isn't a provocative shape that's causing the trouble; it must be those "inappropriate mannerisms" the Breton fishermen told me about. I really must mend my ways.

Success! Or perhaps the driver of the little Fiat has other things on his mind. A clean-cut young surveyor, engaged to be married next month and late for an appointment, he drives very, very fast and with both hands on the steering wheel. A pleasant change, but isn't there a happy medium between creeping lechers and speeding maniacs?   Swooping around a sharp curve and swinging out to overtake a slower-moving vehicle, he tells me that he's Provençal himself and sees the Provençal culture dying. A car looms up ahead, and he presses hard on horn and accelerator; it yields ground, and we squeeze around just in time. I let out my breath, and he continues, unruffled, "It's those masses of foreign laborers they bring in--and with Frenchmen out of work, too."

   "Don't the labor unions object, monsieur?"

   "Mais naturellement, madame, but you know who runs this government--a bunch of tight-fisted Auvergnat bankers. All they care about is profits."

We're following an even more interesting route than I'd planned--along the serpentine roads of the coastal Cévennes, through the parched thickets of the garrigue, past stunted olive trees and crumbling stone walls, up and down the stony hills of the Ardèches. This land was evidently more populous at one time "and extensively cultivated too, madame--imagine, even a silkworm culture . . ." We zip past one small herd of chocolate-brown goats--"there used to be a lot of them, but no one wants to bother today . . ."  It sounds like a sorry state of affairs all around; I can't feel depressed, though, not when we're flying along so splendidly. My whirlwind driver really does know the road (and the psychology of other drivers) very well.

At eleven o'clock he deposits me in the town of le Vans, more than halfway to the Auvergne. I stride jauntily on . . . to a sunbaked fork in the road where all the traffic seems to be bearing right, and I want to bear left--or do I?  Darn, did I leave the map in his car? Time to stop at a farmhouse for advice and perhaps, since it's almost noon . . .

At last a cluster of farmhouses, but where to knock in this hodgepodge of doors and stairways? From up a flight of stone steps comes the murmur of voices. I walk up and knock, the voices fall silent and the door swings open. "S'il vous plait, monsieur, un verre d'eau?" (That's no phony drink-of-water excuse either--I'm parched.)

    "How fatigued you must be, walking with a pack in this heat! You will rest a little?" The bluff, middle-aged farmer sweeps me into the kitchen before him and pours out a glass of frothy, pink-red wine. "Of course this isn't properly aged yet, but some people prefer it."
    "It's good, my husband's wine, very good," says his ruddy-cheeked wife, her broad face nodding as she lingers on the twangy nasals ("c'est bieng, le ving"). "And will you take some soup?" With bread, and cheese too. M. and Mme Lanno aren't from around here, though; they're native Berliners, which gives me a chance to try another language . . .

    "Wie wunderbar," madame exclaims with clasped hands. "Pense-y, Félicia--to speak all three languages!" Oh dear, I've impressed their dumpy teenage daughter quite enough already; she's been staring at me ever since I entered the room. The girl is fascinated by my dulcimer ("n'y touche pas, Félicia!"), my clothes, my taille de jeune fille ("young girl shape"--what a nice way of saying "skinny"). A large, wiggly-nosed brown rabbit hops out from behind the stove, and Félicia carries him around in her arms like a baby. Oops, carries her--for outside in a hutch are progeny in all sizes and colors.

   "Wouldn't you like to take one home with you? Do your children like bunnies? Oh, please choose one!"

   "N'insiste pas, Félicia!," says her father. "How can madame carry a bunny in her pack?" Félicia's pleading face falls; her prolific pets are clearly a problem. Unthinkable that they should go into the family pot; but the farmer's wife, in her husky voice, confides that she has begun to sell them surreptitiously to the local butcher. "What else can I do?--there are so many of them" . . .

  "Quel est vot' instrument, madame? Ah le dulcimer." The upstairs renter Mme Duclos invites me to play for them on her vine-shaded terrace (and to sample the raspberries her two little girls picked for jam-making). "I know a song too," says seven-year-old Natalie. "Ne pleure pas, Jeannette," she sings in a clear true voice, admonishing the heroine not to cry for her true love Pierre, for she'll be married soon to someone of much higher station, and then--"tra, la, la, la, la, la, la "--saying that Pierre is finally hanged, and her too (since she is so insistant on sharing his fate): "et sa Jeannette avec, et sa Jeannette avec."  My, my, and the song sounded so lighthearted, just like a children's skipping ditty! I must write it down, words and (with numbers) notes too, before I forget them . . .

  "There's a retired American couple living next door; you might like to pay them a visit." Des retraités américains--mais quel ennui!  But it's not a bore at all, rather a delightful surprise when Mme Lanno takes me over to meet 1'Américaine. 

  "They all call me that," says the lively little lady in fluent French. "Wodelam is such a mouthful in French, voyez-vous. Et que faites-vous ici, madame?" I explain my wanderings; she explains her transplanting to the land of her forefathers . . . and it's suddenly five o'clock. "Must you go, Jeanne? Or can you stay for supper, and overnight too? Ça nous ferait vraiment plaisir." A real pleasure for me, too.

When madame retires inside with the provisions that monsieur Harold--another circumlocution for that unpronounceable surname!--has brought back from town, Félicia's two-hour vigil by the Wodelam gate pays off. "Le dulcimer," she says, pulling me impatiently along. "It's still in the kitchen, you know." And so is Mme Duclos, with a pot of raspberry jam for the farmer's wife and a bowl of raspberry foam (skimmed off the top) pour les enfants--i.e., Félicia and me.

  "Tu vas jouer?" she begs when we've licked the bowl clean. Yes, I'll play at the drop of a hat, especially the Breton chant à danser that I'm still learning.  After five times, through all fifteen or is it sixteen verses, for assorted sets of neighbors, I really think I have the song down pat: "non, non, non, je n'aimerai pas . . ."

   "Do you like to dance?" asks Félicia. She's disappointed when I tell her I cannot stay for her birthday fête at the end of the week. "But perhaps you could leave your dulcimer?" Poor kid, she sure hangs onto an idea once she gets hold of it . . .

Back to the Wodelam's for a late supper on their terrace overlooking the mountain valley--candles and wine and food weaving a kind of enchantment. Cécile and Harold feel like old friends, and I haven't even stepped into their home yet; indeed it's close to midnight when I finally carry my pack inside and see the huge living room fireplace with a cachette on one side (where either monsieur le curé or monsieur le pasteur--according to the swing of 16th-century religious wars--might well have hidden). And I learn that the place is part of their own family history.

   "Grand-grandpère sold this house years and years ago, but we found it on the market and bought it back before Harold retired." They've done just the right things to it too. Mostly in the kitchen and the beautiful big bathroom, where I steam myself pink and wonder if this is all a dream . .

Tuesday, July 2

8:00 AM and it seems like the middle of the day when I  breakfast out under a bright blue sky with Cécile and Harold. Is he really a retired chemist? With that roughhewn face and grizzled handlebar mustache, he looks more like a retired British army officer. "You'll have no trouble getting back to the Auvergne today if Félicia will let you go," they agree, (the words coming out, for a change this morning, in English!)

   "Félicia's still asleep," sighs her mother when I run over to say goodbye. "But I will tell her you are coming back some day." She pats my hand and brushes a plump cheek against mine as I climb into the little Citroen with monsieur Harold, who's driving me on to the route nationale at Villefort.

   "Much better for hitching than around here," says his wife. "And don't forget the eggs, dear."

As we snake up the mountain, Harold points out dying chestnut trees. Gaunt gray limbs projecting from pale green, tasseled new growth--still beautiful and some of them still bearing, for the ground beneath is littered with furry brown nut casing. (Or scorched black where the farmers have burned off the old casings.) But there'll be no more nuts if the blight--actually two blights, says Harold--isn't halted. Only picturesque skeletons. And it seems all the sadder when he tells me how the villagers used to haul baskets of mud up from the valley to nurture the young chataigniers. All that work and now this?

Sorry chestnuts give way to beech and then pine woods as we climb over the pass and down to Villefort. "Au revoir," I tell monsieur Harold (and not goodbye, for of course I will see him again).

From Villefort the route nationale winds between reservoir and high rocky cliffs. I saunter dreamily along it, riding a wave of good fortune and wonderful well-being. And picking the scab off an old wound, too. Why did you tell them about Ned last night, Jean? Now, in the midst of stark natural beauty, I'm dwelling in bittersweet memories of my lost Eden. The Algonquin where I stirred the pot and tended the fire and trampled down raspberry canes in my bare feet . . . and where even Andy, a fourteen-year-old pain at home, turned into a willing worker.

   "So what if we leave a few cans behind?" he asked. Once. "We bury them," said Ned. "Come on."
I remember an arc of silver droplets from my paddle dipping in and out, in and out, the crick of pain between my shoulder blades . . . the current drawing us into our first rapids, my trembling knees, the onrushing rocks . . . "whoopee, can we do that again?" . . . the cry of the loon in the dying light, Luke's dreams burning high and bright as we paddled out together on the still lake (and he kidded me on my early morning rambles: "You can't wait to be up and living, can you, Jean?") . . . horseplay and poetry around the evening campfire. And Ned's quiet voice saying, "This is where I'll bring my bride for our honeymoon."
   "Suppose she doesn't like to camp?"
   "Don't worry; she will." I believed him, too.

Stop it, Jean! It's over and done with; practice your new songs instead. But "Ne pleure pas, Jeannette" is no help at all; even the tra-la-la's sound mournful today. Luckily the road's too twisty for drivers to stop and see my tears. And for whom am I weeping anyway? I no longer know if it's for a long-dead brother or a never-found lover, only that my heart is exposed and expectant, my senses tuned up like taut fiddle strings . . .

What a horrid old man! He picks me up between two curves and asks a lot of impertinent questions: "How many lovers have you had? How long since the last time . . ." I won't answer, so he starts talking about his own experiences--in what would be very graphic detail, I think, if I understood all those interesting new words. Your hand, monsieur! I sit up hard against the car door and get out at the very next village, with a nice clean smell of wood shavings and new-mown hay. Goodbye and good riddance, old man!

The road climbs more steeply now, skirting the craggy, pine-forested parc national des Cévennes. Pine scent in the air and blue flowers alongside the road . . .

"Montez, madame. I'm going as far as Mende . ." This traveling jazz musician asks some pretty impertinent questions too--impertinent if they weren't so darn provocative. (And why not answer? It isn't, he reminds me, as if I were going to meet him again. I can be honest.) In our brief quarter-hour ride, he advances the conversation from musical tastes on to sexual ones and concludes in measured tones: "Tu as énormément besoin de caresses." A line he hands out to all women, this "enormous need" of mine, or the simple truth behind my mad misconduct at forty? Alex would never believe it.

Something's different about Mende, more northerly . . . ah, it's the gray slate roofs. "A matter of law," says the owner of a café on the river Lot. "Red tile is forbidden in Mende, madame. The roof regulations are very strict."

The Auvergne begins on the other side of the river. And what did my driver the other day call the region he'd been hiking? Oh yes--le Cantal, where you needed un appétit de géant--and this land of giant appetites is my goal today. Over the river and up to the lime-rich pastures of le Causse de Mende, where sheep graze on meadows sprinkled with purple and blue flowers and lichened boulders erupt from a sea of heather and fern.

My new driver is a broad shouldered, wavy-haired Auvergnat carpenter, returning home from a fishing expedition. Thirty-nine years old, with a wife and five children. It is all he says for a long time, and my own tongue falters as his eyes come to rest again and again on my flushed face. I sink into a moody silence--wrapped in revery, breathing his scent of wood-smoke and sweat. And always aware of his searching gaze.

Without speaking, he pulls off the road and pulls me toward him. No surprise in the long, mouth-bruising kiss--was I expecting it all along?  No argument either, when he grabs a scrap of burlap--"viens"--and steers me through the pines with one muscled brown arm.

"Dessous la fougère, bergère . . ." goes the classic pastoral script, and here I am on the classic bed of bracken, a very unliberated shepherdess indeed! For it seems I must either kiss and flee, or kiss and cling; and today I am madly, hopelessly, stupidly clinging. Objecting, not to the speed with which matters have proceeded thus far, but to their ever ending. How awkward for my brown-eyed Auvergnat lover.  I'm just no good at casual sex.

  "Mais non, I do not find you ridiculous," he says, kissing my tears away and holding me fast again. At first to comfort me, and then to make love to me, and then to comfort me . . . Can't you make up your mind whether you want those pants on or off, Jean?

    "Shall I see you again this evening?" he asks and my heart leaps up. Yes, oh yes!--but where?--for a long night and a proper bed. A gnat stings, a buzzing fly lights on my ear as I wipe beads of sweat from the broad chiseled face gazing down into mine. I have no idea where I'm staying yet, as there's no youth hostel in Saint Flour that I know of. "Do you know the town?" I ask, and he shakes his head. So I can't even make a decent rendez-vous. What utter ineptitude!

   "We must go now." And this time he really means it. The afternoon sun is sinking fast, and his wife--how I envy her!--is probably preparing supper. Shaking twigs from my clothing and hair, I make my legs walk back to the truck--my hand in his, but my eyes averted for fear I will go to pieces if I actually look at him, that I'll throw myself into his arms, collapse at his feet, do something stupid and hopeless and horribly embarrassing for him. For of course he must leave.

He's turning off at the next fork in the road, while I must continue on to Saint Flour. Must? Yes, for that's where I said I was going--and has he suggested anything different?  Is there anything different to suggest? We reach the turn-off in silence, and much, much too soon. Open the truck door, Jean, (it's the hardest door I've ever had to open) and haul out your gear!

    "Je te comprends," murmurs my driver, with a gentle farewell kiss. And perhaps he does understand, but what can he do about it?

Thank God my next lift isn't a lone man but a vacationing family of four, in whose chatty company I can almost feel like a normal human being again. "You have been in France long, madame? And how do you like the Auvergne? . . . We're going on to Aurillac, but yes, we can drop you off at Saint Flour." In fact, they drop me off at the foot of a steep hill and I walk up the narrow Chemin de Chèvre (much shorter than the road!) to the Cantal's old capitol. An impressive sight from this old "goat trail"--like a hill-top fortress with the square towers of its feudal church thrusting into the evening sky--at least so I tell myself as if to distract my mind from its body-memory of unforgettable caresses, remembering that I do have other interests. . .

Lodging comes first. There turns out to be, after all, a hostel-type maison des jeunes on the far side of town. I check in and (remembering my quest) telephone M. Ferrel, head of the "bourrée d'Aurillac."

    "Ah yes, madame, we are meeting tonight at 8:00." Tonight? In fifteen minutes, that is, and eighty kilometers away. If I'd stayed in that last car now, I'd be there. . . My organized search for folk music and dance is obviously falling to pieces--not that I'd care a fig for either, if only my Auvergnat lover were to reappear. I know it won't happen, but just in case, I walk back to town after supper, to stroll round and around the town square.

     "No, monsieur, I'm not looking for anyone . . . yes, I have a place to sleep." Damn, I seem to have arranged things rather neatly to have the worst of all possible worlds tonight. No lovemaking, no music. And no company either, for the boys at the maison des jeunes leave its huge, empty dortoir des filles to me. All those unused beds, when all I want is one bed . . . and one man. A perfect stranger, Jean? Yes, yes, I say to the excitement and the power and the surprising tenderness. But to that awful, inevitable parting?--God no! I bury my face in a dirt-and-bracken-stained shirt and wrestle the scratchy blanket, for hours, trying to conjure up a man who never even told me his name.

Wednesday, July 3

Gray skies overhead this morning when I walk next door to a small haras stabling three stallions. The groom's young wife warns me about hitching in the Cantal ("Didn't you hear about the poor man who was shot to death last week?") as her husband pens up a slim bay mare and stilt-legged foal. He leads a snorting roan stallion forward, "pour la faire saillir." What on earth! To make her "gush" is he saying? The stallions are all trumpeting now and the mare hammering away with her hooves as the roan reaches over the barrier for a nip; she plunges away and the foal scrambles over the four-foot-high boards in a panic--one hind leg hung up on them for a few frantic seconds.

   "Assez!" calls the groom, and the mare is led out, untouched (but prepped, I gather, for a real breeding).  Still, what a dirty trick! And it encourages a train of thought that can only lead to more hitchhiking complications.

Back to business, Jean. I return to Saint Flour to exchange my last $30, and feeling suddenly wealthy again with a pocketful of francs, I splurge twenty-five on a book called Chemin Faisant. For with this "on-the-road" book--the journal of a middle-aged French writer/hiker Jacques Lacarrière--I can truly identify, especially when it comes to the matter of finding lodgings for the night in an off-the-beaten-track French village. To my surprise, he comes up against much he same barrier to "ourtsiders" that I do; indeed he could be writing about me, I think--except for my encounters with the opposite sex. Hmm. Is it somehow less complicated to ramble as a man?

Trudging out of town with my nose in the book, I pick up an odor of cheese and follow it uphill to the local laiterie. May I watch the cheesemaking operations? "Mais oui, madame. Entrez là-bas."  Propping my pack against the wall, I step into a large, metal-floored room, awash in whey. What a good thing I put on boots this morning! Seven or eight rubberbooted workers are busy on the first stage of the lean cheese they call, of course, le Cantal--not too busy, though, to answer my questions and to pose some of their own.

Cheesemaking is really very simple. I learn that it starts with several large vats of warm milk mixed with a curdling agent (rennet, I think, pour cailler le lait). Meanwhile the workers learn that I'm married and, more important, traveling through France toute seule.
   "All alone?" inquires a dark-haired young man with a bushy mustache. "And how long have you been in France then, madame?" He looks at me as if he feared for my health--"Five weeks away from vot' mari!"--and plunges his hand into one of the vats to feel if the mixture is sufficiently caillé. "Go ahead," he says, and I plunge my hand into the slippery smooth stuff too; it feels just like junket and cleaves clean and sharp. The man winks at me as he hands me a towel--"Do you miss him very much? . . ah, but no doubt you have found distractions"--and lowers a many-pronged mechanical fork into the curdled milk. Round and round it turns, drawing lovely geometric patterns and leaving tiny bits of caséine floating at last in a sea of watery sérome. "One distracts oneself very well in France," he murmurs.

They all approve of my pokey traveling.

   "We hope you are stopping often to repose yourself and become better acquainted with les Français," they say (clearly meaning Frenchmen).  Am I looking so very "slept with" I wonder as they drain off the sérome and someone purrs, "How very wise of you, madame!" Now the mass of curds is cut into blocks, thrown into a shredder and mixed with coarse salt. "Taste it." Ah, that's more like cheese, but it still has to be shoveled into cloth-lined cylinders, pressed slowly (with weights) to extract the remaining whey and aged for months in the cellar.
   "An art rather than a technology, n'est-ce pas?" I remark, doggedly sticking to the subject of cheesemaking.

   "Comme 1'amour!" triumphantly exclaims the dark-haired young man. He smiles conspiratorily as he straightens up from the shredder and throws in another handful of salt.

Was that what I meant after all? Who started this conversation anyway? Twenty years ago it was an amusing game, but today I am terribly aware of a certain yielding softness in me. Of runaway cravings that must be signaling, loud and clear, through my dirty blue jeans and a drab long-sleeved shirt . . .

   "You wanted to go to Sailjant? I live there, madame; I can give you a lift if you wait." No, Jean, you're not going to start picking up handsome dairymen! And an hour and a half of this pungent atmosphere is quite enough. You need a walk . . .

Sailjant's small chateau perches on a rock above the village; a few steps on, a waterfall cascades into a hidden pool. What a lovely skinnydipping spot, I think.  If only the sun were a bit more constant . . . Wondering if the handsome dairyman really does live around here, I move to a roadside cafe on the edge of the village, to eat my provisions on a table outside. He drives past and waves--on his way to a strengthening home-cooked meal no doubt--and a half hour later overtakes me on a side road, to offer a lift which against my saner judgment I accept.

   "Let's not waste time," he announces in the next grassy lane. "I only have fifteen minutes." What does he take me for anyway, a mare in heat? 

He's got something right there too. I am somehow hormonally prepped for sex, indeed almost ready--what did that stable hand say (though I don't think he meant it quite so literally)--"to gush?"  Feeling a real kinship with other female animals, something that's never bothered me (I'd be more bothered did I not feel it). Still, I'm human enough to be offended at my handsome dairyman's clock-watching haste.

   "Non, je ne le veux pas," I stammer through the tickling black mustache; its owner steps back and buttons up his fly

    "Eh bien, je ne profite jamais de la faiblesse d'une femme," he says, implying rather smugly, I think, that if he were not too gallant to take advantage of a woman's "weakness," he could very easily overcome my silly resistance. And the galling thing, for a change, is that he could. And I know it. 

The whistle sounds for the one o'clock laiterie shift, and he drives off. Damn that whistle!  (Don't I mean, thank God?)

Crusty casse-croûte at a café in the village of Roffiac, and talk with two local girls who think there is indeed traditional music in the next town of Murat. A German family traveling through are happy to pack me into the back seat of their car along with two plump teen-age daughters. How restful, though I can't hope to hitchhike for long and avoid lone Frenchmen . . .

   "Voilà Murat." It sits on a rise of ground between river and mountain, curious "organ pipe" rock formations jutting from above a jumble of thick slate roofs peaked at all different angles and bowed with old age. Train tracks along the river . . . aha, the night train to Paris! Why didn't I think of it before? Maybe I could take the train back and salvage some remmants of my eroding sexual self-respect (I'd gain an extra day in the Auvergne too). At least I can check prices with the ticket agent.

   "Sans réductions, madame?" Students, the aged, railway employees, large families and God knows who else, pay sizably reduced fares.  But we can find no category to fit me, and with 120 fr. to last the rest of the week, an 85 fr. train ticket to Paris is going to be very difficult.

On to the syndicat d'initiatives--an informal affair here in the village library, staffed by two teenage girls. No, they don't know of any cheap lodgings. But they do discuss with some understanding my quest for live traditional music. "It is very difficult for an outsider," they agree, and I strongly suspect they could tell me a lot more if they wanted. But why should they, especially to a brash visiting American?  "American folk" has rather taken over the French scene. And entertainment-seeking tourists are a dime a dozen. Yes, in their place I might well clam up too.

Words are cheap, Jean. It's time to show this town that I really do belong here. And six o'clock is a perfect time to take out the dulcimer and start playing softly in the village square: "dance all night and a-fiddle all day . . ."  In twenty minutes a small group has gathered, joining lustily in the refrain of the Breton song that I played over and over only two days ago: "non, non, non, je n'aimerai pas . . ."  How nice that it has so many verses!

   "I play the dulcimer too," says a shy-looking boy. "Perhaps you would like to come up to the café where I work. There's going to be a little get-together later on."

   "With pleasure, monsieur!" He leads me past a score of cafés to one with a resident white German shepherd (ah, an easy identifying mark) and a suspicious patronne (not so identifying).

   "Elle joue bien?" I catch a scrap of their talk over a glass of red wine and thank God for all that practice in the Ardèches; I do at least play one song rather well. "Alors, to peux 1'inviter."  So he needs her permission to invite me? It was a close call, I think as the boy walks over to say yes, please do come back this evening. The café will be closed, but if I knock . . . Ah, have I cracked the hard shell of the Auvergne at last?

   "À ce soir!" I wave goodbye and in a warm glow of triumph set off to solve the matter of lodging. Oh dear, French schools let out at the end of June, so the cheaper hotel rooms are all booked.  All of 35 fr. for a bed? (plus 85 fr. for the train ticket)--I wish now that I hadn't felt quite so rich this morning. For innkeepers and cafe owners, curate and schoolmaster, all echo the same discouraging story:

   "Of course Murat should have a hostel, madame, but at present . . ."

And then I meet eight girls carrying sacks of wild nuts; it seems they've come to town as part of an international workcamp to help the needy.

   "Et que fais-tu? Do you play that instrument?" Babbling away in the two languages (the Finnish girls speak no French, the Hungarian girl no English), they walk me to their nearby dormitory and point to two empty cots. "Why don't you use one of these?" Ah . . .

But a moment later le directeur appears, an earnest young man named Michel. He's concerned about maintaining a delicate relationship with the town authorities, and local innkeepers certainly wouldn't be happy with my occupying a free bed.  

   "No," he says, "definitely not in the dormitory." Perhaps I should keep on looking; I don't want to get them into trouble.

   "But of course you'll stay and eat with us," exclaim the girls.  "Don't worry. Michel will think of something."

He goes off with some of the boys while I help the girls put food on a long table. And learn how they spend their days--gleaning anything that can be turned to a profit. "There's money even in trash if you collect it on a grand enough scale," they say. The boys return, we join hands to recite a short creed--"from those who have bread to those who are hungry" (it rhymes very nicely in French)--and fall to. Soup and bread and beans and salad . .  Then the English girl pulls out a guitar. Darn, if I weren't itching to get back to the cafe . . .

   "Allons-y!" Michel has indeed thought of something. He takes me now to the school courtyard and a well-stacked heap of old clothes, torn blankets, split cushions . . . Not quite as substantial as a good haystack, but this grand collection of junk (the fruit of their rag-picking labors) makes up into a sort of hamster-style nest, with a lean-to roof overhead yet! "You do understand that it's only for tonight," says Michel with a worried frown. Yes indeed! What would the town fathers say!

   "Did you find a place to sleep? I'd almost given up on you." Bernard, the boy with the dulcimer, welcomes me back into the café; and I murmur something about getting a roof for the night with the workcamp group. "Oh I wondered if you'd bump into them," he says, "but I didn't think I should tell you . ." Just like the girls at the syndicat d'initiatives? One of them is here tonight; she grins from across the room as Bernard introduces me to a bent old man from the hills who dances a little jig when he plays the harmonica, and to Jean-Louis, a dark young man who runs a record shop in Aurillac and collects folk music on the side with his tape recorder.

   "Do you have one too," he asks. "We could exchange tapes by mail maybe . ." It's certainly the only way I'll learn the quick bourrées and rondeaux that Bernard plays so well on his dulcimer. Too many notes, and the ones I capture tonight will probably be gone from my head in the morning.

Is that disapproving look permanently affixed to the patronne's sallow face, or are we talking too much (I was, after all, invited for music-making).  For Jean-Louis has sprung another idea. I must get down to the village of Fons, he says, to visit a marvelous old woman who sings and an old man who plays la cabrette (the Auvergnat bagpipe). And he'll take me there--if he can round up a friend with a car. Will I meet him when he closes up his shop in Aurillac tomorrow evening?  Indeed I will!

   "A demain, Jean-Louis!" The village is dark when I leave the cafe and walk downhill to my pile of rags. It's lumpy too, I find, as I burrow into my sleeping sheet and curl up tight against the cold night . . . ah, but tomorrow! I hug the thought.

Thursday, July 4

I wake up early from my open-air slumber, stiff and cold and happy. There's a pure blue sky overhead for what is evidently going to be market day in Murat; this must be the marché aux volailles I pass on my way out of town, with its crates of rabbits and pigeons and assorted barnyard fowl. Kicking and squawking, they're unceremoniously hauled out of their crates and stuffed into the baskets of early-rising shoppers, an occasional bird flapping loose and leading a merry chase across the cobblestones. Very lively for 6:30 in the morning!

With Aurillac only 60 kilometers away and this whole glorious day to get there, I choose a roundabout secondary road. It leads steeply up and out of Murat, past a row of crosses marking the pilgrimage route to one more hilltop statue of the Virgin Mary and on toward the highest peak of the Cantal--Puy Mary. But what a lot of cars I meet, all heading, I suppose, for the Murat market as they come rattling around the bends and beeping at me to get out of the way. Not at all what I had in mind when I planned this little jaunt!  So I take another look at the map for a different way to hike over the mountains to Aurillac--ah, a faint dotted line across the peak of Plomb-de-Cantal. That means hitching a ride back to Murat, easy enough to do, of course, with a market-bound family . . .

"Attention, papa, à droite--non, non, à gauche . ." (The poor man's blocked in both directions.)  What a nerve-wracking place Murat is to drive into now that it's wide awake and swarming with shoppers and sightseers. But it's fun to be part of the crowd, to see cars and trucks so hemmed in by us that they barely creep along. The carousel sounds its tinkling music, children squeal and housewives haggle as I walk by stalls of suede wallets and purses, of rakes and brooms, of cheeses and sausages, past les spécialités d'Auvergne: game pâtés, ruddy hams, fruits and nuts embalmed in liqueurs. With the train ticket to Paris firmly in mind, though (it is beginning to seem quite possible after all), I buy only bread and cheese and tomatoes. And catch up on the journal in a small café . . .

Shall I try for Aurillac once more? Down the valley this time, and up a nine-kilometer, dead-end road winding into the mountains to the south. How grubby I feel when everything about me is so fresh and green! I change underwear behind a hedge and picnic by a spring-fed trough in the last tiny hamlet before the evergreen forest closes in.   And beyond the forest is the broad green sweep of Prat du Bouc. Is that "Billygoat Meadow"? A venerable grandfather goat with long wavy brown hair and twisting gnarled horns is indeed wandering about the parking lot at the end of the road. He and his female companion look friendly enough except for their way of dipping their horns at me, which I hope is just a polite goat greeting.

Oh, but it's bulls I'm supposed to be watching out for. "Attention aux taureaux," say the signs as I follow a zigzag trail up the lush mountain slope past peaceable brown and white cattle. Deep-throated bellowing from a distant cleft--rampaging taureaux?--is the only sound in the high stillness for over an hour. Until I near the summit--then twittering swallows flying low over the hummocky ground give way to chattering tourists who evidently rode a cable car up the other side of the mountain. (It does seem cheating.) "Quelle vue magnifique . . . quelle scène panoramique!" But darn, I can see entirely too much of the world from here: a highway cutting through the pass below, a huge parking lot and a clump of tourist facilities. "C'est pour le wintersport, madame--l'installation de Super-Lioran." And "installation" is the word all right!

Yuck, now I sink into the open gashes that are ski runs in wintertime and muck up the trail in the summer. In fact I lose the trail completely, which makes no difference as (unfortunately) I can't lose sight of my goal for long: the parking lot, and beside it a jutting glass and steel highrise condominium. God-awful looking. (And how did it ever get past those finicky French building codes? Because it isn't in a town at all, or because it's so revenue producing?)

At 3:00 PM I reach the lot.  Did I think it would be a snap to get a lift to Aurillac from here? It isn't. Everyone seems to be going to Murat, only fifteen kilometers to the north. "We're driving south," say a friendly middle-aged couple at last, "if you don't mind waiting a few minutes for our son and daughter-in-law to come down the mountain." Apparently they all rode up in the cable car, and then the younger generation decided what fun it would be to walk down. They come limping in at 4:15; "it looked so easy," wails the sun-burned blonde, kicking off her mud-caked shoes and socks. And when did Jean-Louis say he closed?

We're moving now at least--down, down the steep gorge, which gradually flattens into a broad valley. Aurillac is the first major industrial town on the river, and I'm dropped off, by blind luck, not far from Jean-Louis' shop. In the nick of time, too.   "I've arranged a ride for tomorrow morning," he tells me as he locks up, "and where will you be staying tonight?"

Aren't there any hostel-type lodgings in Aurillac? Jean-Louis says no, and when I explain about the train ticket to Paris, suggests I take the commuter train with him out to his home in the country.
   "You do have enough for the fare? It's 5 fr."

   Mais naturellement, Jean-Louis!  I'm not a complete sponger. It's embarrassing, too, that I don't know whose home exactly he's talking about. I mean, are we going home to momma or . . ?

Yes and no. For the moment this two storey stucco dwelling, with its spacious kitchen garden, is a bachelor pad. But after we've picked and washed and eaten what strawberries the slugs haven't already devoured, for the dessert of our potluck supper, Jean-Louis picks up the phone and calls maman to let her know, among other things, that we and the limaces have eaten up her berries.

   "And where does your mother live now then?"
   "In Murat of course. You met her, remember?--the patronne at the café." Oh! And does she mind my sleeping here, I wonder. More to the point, is this supposed to be coucher ensemble? Not that this serious, bespectacled young man has made any passes at me. Not that I want him to--heavens no!--that would mess up what promises to be a fruitful friendship. But perhaps he will feel that the situation calls for more than food and music. He may feel forced, as a matter of national pride, to make a gesture, and then . . .

What an overactive, purient imagination you possess, Jean! Jean-Louis has nothing of the sort on his mind. "Better get to bed--we have to wake up early tomorrow," he says, switching off the record player. "Do you mind the cat on your bed?" For tonight is a swing back to solid, middle-class comfort: a hot shower and a real bed of my own (the whole goddamn ground floor to myself in fact), shared with a handsome chat d'Espagne. (And why should calico cats be "Spanish"?) Disappointed, Jean? But virtue, even if it's only by default, is very restful.

Friday, July 5

   "Allo, vous vous êtes réveillée?" Yes, squeaky clean and replete with sleep, I'm awake to another cloudless day. In seconds I've donned my gay, non-hitchhiking attire--red skirt and Parisian blouse, what else?--and amazed Jean-Louis by bouncing upstairs in plenty of time to catch the 7:00 bus into town. "And I was afraid we might miss it. How fast you dress!"

Jean-Louis suggests I leave my pack in the shop, which a teenage assistant will manage while we're gone. "Et le dulcimer?" That I should take, says Claude, the tawny-bearded friend-with-car who's brought along his own recording equipment on the back seat. We all pile into the front and go hurtling southward on sinuous, tree-lined country roads. I feel very pampered indeed, sitting at ease in a "commissioned" car, flitting in and out of the dappled sunlight. ("Cursed trees," says Claude as we plunge into another allée.)

After an hour of headlong speed, and with the ground sheering off more and more precipitously, we stop at a stone cottage set into the mountainside: Mme Reichler's. Gray-haired and bright-eyed, with a sturdy peasant vitality about her stout form, she shoos the chickens away from the door to welcome us in. "Cher Jean-Louis!" She hugs him, she hugs Claude, she hugs me. We step into an all-purpose room with a huge fireplace like the Wodelams', only here it's outfitted with stove and chairs to make a cozy cooking alcove. An old man nods by the fire.

   "Stand up, old man, we have guests!" Madame introduces us to her birdlike little husband and then comes straight to the point. What will we have to drink? What should she prepare for lunch?  "De la soupe? de la salade? du jambon? une omelette aux cèpes? des tripes?"

  "Non, non, madame, I'm not really hungry," I murmur, embarrassed to be putting her to so much trouble. (It is only ten o'clock.)
  "Vous n'aimez pas la salade?" she accuses me. But yes, I love salad and omelet and mushrooms . . . and even tripe sounds intriguing. So, seeing what pleasure my enthusiasm for food gives her, I frankly say yes to the whole list, and her broad face cracks an approving smile; "on mange bien chez moi, n'est-ce pas, Jean-Louis?"
  "Oh, she'll fatten you up all right," he says. Both he and Claude are drinking the local apératif, with bits of gentian at the bottom of the bottle ("for strength," says Claude), but I find it terribly bitter and switch to Muscatel wine.  M. Reichler refills my glass as madame reads aloud a postcard from the U.S.--"from my good friend, Joséphine Perrier, on tour là-bas. Ah, do you know her too?" The mantelpiece is plastered with postcards. "I have friends all over the world, you see."  Someone even went so far as to give her a new VW, in which she now junkets about the countryside, leaving her husband to water the chickens.
  "She's doing too much," he mutters. "She's almost eighty, you know. Time she was staying home . . ."

"Don't listen to him--he's getting too old for festivals himself." The big folk festival last year was held down the road in the village of Fons, and madame is just raring to go for another one--pestering the two boys to set the date and let her get out the music. She makes it all sound so simple . . .

   "Allez-y, mes enfants!" Madame packs us off to the village for errands and visiting, while she gets down to the serious business of cooking. We drive the six kilometers into Fons and pull in by an old church, its yard a mess of rubble.        

   "C'est le nouveau parking," says the shopkeeper. . . . Now on to the home of a renowned cabrettaire, who still plays the Auvergnat bagpipe with a treble drone that others have discarded. Higher pitched than the Scottish bagpipes and with the windbag pumped bellows-like under the elbow rather than blown, it produces an unforgettable sound. Sitting only three feet away, M. Serverie demonstrates, and I decide that the cabrette would make a wonderful mountaintop instrument. . . . We recover over cakes and wine.

   "Alors, vous allez nous jouer quelque chose?"  Should I? The boys nod, so I run and fetch the dulcimer. "C'est 1'histoire du gitan qui s'enfuit avec la chatelaine," is how I explain the old chestnut of "Black Jack Davy." Funny how shy I used to feel about playing and singing like this, when I really want an audience as much as the old piper.
  "He certainly knows his own worth," whispers Jean-Louis as M. Serverie shows us his oil paintings next. And hands each of us a picture postcard of himself en costume de cabrettaire before walking us over to the village café for more drinks, of course, and a proud tour of their newly completed boite. Good God!--is this the latest thing in swinging village nightlife?  Lovers' nooks separated by "spider web" netting, crumpled aluminum-foil ceiling, a lascivious red tongue hanging out of the painted "mouth" of the bar . . .

   "Very popular on weekend nights," says a local man we seem to have acquired as a guide. "A pity that madame cannot stay longer . . ."

We come out into the bright sunshine again, and I breathe in the clean mountain air. It does seem a pity to leave. Is there a kind of magic working here? On cakes and wine I feel fatter already. And very sensual. Somewhere along the line our companiable guide proposes I adopt the "old Auvergnat custom" of taking a mari supplémentaire.

   "In order to appreciate the other" (husband), he explains. A joke, of course, or is it?  In Fons, anything is beginning to seem possible.

At 1:00 we're back at the cottage for more socializing. "Vous ne parlez pas le patois?" asks a neighbor woman. No, I don't and neither does M. Reichler, but everyone else carries on in the old language of the Midi--Occitan as Jean-Louis calls it . . . The neighbor woman trots home with a jar of madame's plum jam, and we all sit down to lunch.  Bread and soup for starters.

   "Ne vous gênez pas," madame insists, pulling a large round pain de campagne from the table drawer and holding it up against her bosom to cut. Nobody stands on ceremony around here, that's for sure, and I'm thankful for the non-constraining elastic waistband, especially after three fat slices of ham make their way onto my plate.

   "I smoked it in our chimney," she says, "and monsieur gathered the mushrooms for this omelet.  Here, take some more." Mmm, yes please!--these mountain cèpes are much tastier than cultivated champignons. But M. Reichler just groans.

   "Mountain-up, mountain-down--it gets steeper every year," he mutters in his native German. ("She doesn't speak it, you know.")  His wife ignores the small note of rebellion; she's busy dishing out tripe--not the spicy tripes la mode de Caen, but cow stomach which has simply simmered and simmered . . .

   "For twenty-four hours," says madame, who doesn't appear to be eating at all herself but keeps urging us on: "Allez-y, allez-y!"  Urging me on now (for the boys have dropped out) as if I were a long-lost starving daughter.  I'm driven to heroic efforts by her threat to throw the remaining strawberries and cakes to the chickens; indeed one large black hen--une poule bien nourrie if ever I saw one!--is already hopping through the half-open door and clucking at me impatiently.

   "Go on, ma petite, finish them up," says madame.  I do, and she praises me for the final effort. "Good girl!"

All this food washed down with quantities of white wine feels great, except when I laugh. Then it hurts.  And is this comedy of the henpecked husband re-enacted for the benefit of all visitors? (I do hope it's only in fun.) M. Reichler is deaf in one ear, but his wife makes sure he doesn't miss any of the more absorbing topics of conversation. Once when he's looking slightly vague, she gives him a sharp jab in the ribs and shouts into his ear, "Wake up, old man; we are discussing the Pill."

    He revives dramatically: "La pilule, hein? Oh-ho, bien sur, la pilule! Have you heard the story . . ."
   "Play us some music, old man," says madame. But as soon as he picks up the accordion, she tells him in no uncertain terms what an atrocious noise he's making and how much better he plays when no one else is around.
   "Eh bien, madame, what about singing for us yourself?" pleads Jean-Louis.
   "How can I sing after that awful trip to the dentist's the other day? I can barely open my mouth. Besides, I want to hear the dulcimer," she says.

What a coquette! Should I, too, invent a polite malady of the throat? More jousting, and then Mme Reichler, with a quick glance at Claude's finger on the tape recorder, launches into exuberant unaccompanied song. Her husky voice carries conviction, but she sings in the patois so I miss most of the story.

    "It's about a woman who cuckolds her husband, and when the other man jumps into bed with her . . . but Occitan humor really doesn't translate very well," sighs Jean-Louis. "The French words sound so grossier. . ."

Une plainte d'amour follows, and then une chanson de malmariés, at which madame stops singing and turns to me (do I look so very "mis-married"?)
    "I1 est bon, vot' marl?" she asks. Hmm. What are the standards for a good husband here anyway? Apparently they're very simple. "I1 vous bat?"

    I answer no, he doesn't beat me, and she looks pleased at my good fortune. "I1 y a des maris, voyez-vous . . ."

My turn for a song now, but Jean-Louis takes a look at his watch. "Déjà 3 heures!" he cries. "We have to get back to the shop." Do we really? And me too? Yes, I left my pack there (and I did send a postcard to the Hartmans with a scribbled "I'll be back Saturday"--but wouldn't Sunday do just as well?). Ah, if only Mme Reichler were to suggest it, I'd happily wave goodbye to my rapid transport and stay on. She wants me to--I feel the unspoken question hanging in the air--she doesn't ask it though. She only hugs me, and I let myself be led out to the car. "Au revoir, ma petite, and come back soon!"

Whisked in a golden, singing haze back to the shop, I listen moodily to Jean-Louis' records and, as the wonder of Fons recedes into the distance (i.e. as I sober up), I kick myself for being a coward and a fool. I should have asked  for myself.

Later that evening, Jean-Louis drops me off at the train station, surely the dreariest place in all of Aurillac. Two hours to kill now. In a small cafe across from the station, I write in the journal and down glass after glass of wine. Did I order the first one? I don't remember ever paying, but I do remember explaining my tristesse--at great length--to some sympathetic male listeners.

"But there is no problem, madame," says a jovial teddybear type in a black leather jacket. "I would be glad to drive you to Fons." One short spin in the country cures me of this mad notion, but I've the devil of a time persuading him to return me to the cafe. The cafe and the company of more musically inclined Frenchmen . . . "Que donneriez-vous, belle, pour avoir votre ami?" The train comes in on the eighth verse (of my fifth ballad), and two faithful music lovers escort me onto it. They even find me a compartment where I can stretch out on a whole unoccupied bench. To be rocked to sleep on the chattering rails . . . and to dream. Did Hal say something about taking me swimming when I got back?

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I will give my love an apple without e'er a core,

I will give my love a house without e'er a door;

I will give my love a palace wherein she may be,

And she may unlock it without e'er a key.
                      (English trad. song)

           Paris--a hateful place until Hal takes me for a long walk . . .

Saturday, July 6

How stupid of me to have come back so soon to Paris. Bete! bete! bete! And 0h how hateful it is after the dream of Fons--dirty, cold and depersonalizing. I can feel myself shriveling up inside, while people's glances slide over me, through me, as if I'd suddenly ceased to exist. Snap out of it, Jean!--big cities are like that, and maybe they have to be . . .

   "So you saw Mme Reichler!" I didn't have to tell the Hartmans about my trip to Fons; they knew right away where I'd been.

   "I could tell from the glow on your face," says Hal. "Why didn't you stay?" adds Maria. "You're not expected in Belgium until Monday, you know. Here's the telegram."

Hell! No reason after all for me to be back in Paris today--they haven't even got my post-card, and it obviously makes no difference to Hal, still tied to the thesis, whether I'm here or not. But since I am back and they've been invited to a wedding party tonight, well, could I sort of babysit? A perfectly reasonable request, and it rubs in the salt.

   "Don't make a point of coming home early, Jean. The children are hardly babies," Maria assures me as I step out the door. But what is there anyway to hold me in town? Nothing I see compares with the vision of a small sunlit village. And I do try, making it this time all the way up to 1'Eglise du Sacré-Coeur, the Montmartre museum, the arty shops and wandering bards. Hordes of dreary American tourists complaining about French toilet paper or raving about wild Montmartre night spots . . . I can't blame Paris, though, if I'm so wanting in emotional ballast. Where have I left my "inner resources," my fighting spirit, that I can dissolve into such a mushy mess on the streets of Paris? Not that anyone notices.

Back at the Meudon apartment, I explore Maria's collection of French ballad books and write an impulsive postcard to Mme Reichler. I hope it doesn't sound too maudlin, but I'm afraid she will remember only a nameless Américaine au dulcimer if I don't do something. And what does Amy make of my woebegone face and funny cracked voice, I wonder as we prepare supper for the boys. Or rather, as she prepares it and I blindly assist. Who's babysitting whom here anyway?

Sunday, July 7

Maria's song collection was a lifesaver last night--and still is, until I break away to visit the local covered market. Maria has announced her intention to make pancakes, and I've offered to fetch strawberries and crème fraiche for a really scrumptious brunch. Too late for the strawberries--they sell out early--I come back with kilos of mushy ripe peaches and apricots. Also a large pot of fromage frais. Fresh cheese instead of the fresh cream that I'd intended to buy. Maria says consolingly that people do it all the time, but I know better. Or I thought I did.

  "Want to come for a swim with us, Jean?" Ah, a chance to wear the skimpy swimsuit that Jill considers so unbefitting to my age. There's nothing improper about this outing to the local piscine with Hal and the children though, chaperoned as we are by their darting black eyes and quick voices. "Papa, viens voir, papa!"

   "She swims like a porpoise, doesn't she?" says Hal as Amy bobs up beside us, tossing the long black hair from her face. "You game for a race?"  Indeed I am, and determined to beat his dolphin daughter. (Envious of the loving attention she gets, Jean? Yes I am, dammit, more envious of the daughter than the wife!)  I win the fifty-meter length; but when we progress to underwater maneuvers, Amy is the hands-down champ, wriggling untouched through two sets of straddled legs.

Oh, why did I ever start this silly debate over "fun swimming" versus competitive team swimming? My girls get quite a bang out of being on the local swim team (and get themselves to all the practices too--most of the kids get driven), but Hal implies with infuriating liberal righteousness that they swim for very base, authoritarian motives; that they show a sad want of originality in listening to the swim coach rather than figuring out for themselves the principles of motion-through-water and . . . Oh hell!

   Maria smiles at our strife, which has persisted all the way to the apartment. "Why do you bother arguing with him? You know what Hal's like." I guess we both do.

A thrown-together supper this evening. "I really can cook, you know, if we ever dig ourselves out of this damn thesis." Maria needn't apologize. I can cook too, but not three times a day. Sometimes not even once a day. (It seems I can only produce in the kitchen--really cook, not just set food on the table--when I'm productive elsewhere. And then, of course, I'm too busy to bother with meals. It would be nice to strike a happy medium.)

At eleven o'clock Hal shoves back his typewriter. "I need a break. Let's take a walk, Jean." Without the children? I look over at Maria, who says she is going to bed and that tomorrow is a workday. But Hal and I seem to have unfinished business.

I recall our strolling hand in hand through a long ago night as we set out on the deserted streets of Meudon. But what on earth do I do with my hands now? Now that the enchantment has worn away, that I have turned into quite an ordinary mortal after all?  I could jam them into my pockets for a careless, casual look if these pants only had pockets. Or perhaps if Hal stopped galumphing along, if he were used to the easy formal gestures, I could anchor my hand on his arm. Hand-on-jacketed-arm, so much less intimate than hand-in-bare-hand! But we never learned to walk like that, so I let my arms dangle at my sides and wonder what will happen next.  

How much easier it would be to talk to Hal in French, to feel I were playacting a bit!  

   "I'm a disappointment to you," I say, swallowing hard.

   "Not any longer," he answers and takes my hand. And suddenly I know that the enchantment hasn't altogether worn away.  "You've changed since you've come to France, you know. You're the Jean I remember, only better."

Well, yes, I do feel different from when I came. I remember from twenty years back this same crazy excitement, this certainty of things that were going to happen--no, that I would make happen to me. But not the out-of-controlness of it all! I'd discovered then that I was attractive to men, but I wasn't all that attracted to them; so I could dip my toes in the water back then, while now . . . Is this what Hal means by "better"?  I don't dare ask because maybe he doesn't yet know about my new-felt vulnerability.  Maybe he'd be disappointed in me all over again. . .

We walk into the wooded park of Meudon, our feet treading an invisible path. I can't see Hal's eyes, but his voice and his touch are reweaving broken threads--resurrecting the girl-woman of his youth. Me, with my rampaging desires?  Clearly I'm not her any longer, and I'm tired of posing as that unobtainable ideal.  I'm tired of lying fantasies, both mine and his--high time I smashed the image of noble love, sent Hal back to a hard-working and under-valued wife. What self-serving sophistry, Jean! Can't you say what you mean: that you want Hal to make love to you?

    "I shouldn't be taking advantage of you," he says as we sink onto a bank of dry leaves. Taking advantage of me?  Poor Hal, does he need the reassurance that he is the aggressor, when clearly it is I who am taking advantage of him? I who am determined to find out what it is we've been putting off for twenty years? . . . It turns out to be nothing so extraordinary, after all, and what did I expect after his burning the midnight oil for weeks on end?  Overwhelming passion?

   "I can be a much better lover," he apologizes, and I believe him, but it doesn't seem to matter any more. There's a satisfaction in bringing our frustrating fantasy fireworks down to earth at last--in killing the dream, that dream at least. Perhaps all I ever really wanted with Hal was this comforting closeness.
   "I've wanted comforting too, Jeanie. I can get pretty discouraged sometimes." Hal needing reassurance from me?  Hal as lost and lonely in his own way as I in mine? So where do we go from here, I wonder as I rummage through the leaves for a red hairband. Appalled at this awful state of affairs and wonderfully content.
   "It's really very simple," says Hal. "You now know that you have two men who love you." That's simple? When I clearly don't love either one--not with the consuming passion I once imagined love to be. . .

Out on the streets of Meudon again, I'm uncomfortably aware of a missed opportunity in the park and start veering toward deserted town gardens.

   "Not here, Jean," Hal keeps saying, dragging me on and on. How much seclusion does a bursting bladder need at three in the morning anyway?   "Oh, is that what you meant?"

Sitting on the apartment steps just as we once sat in the dormitory entranceway, we talk and talk, with Hal offering helpful comments on my life, like "I finally met the man you ought to have married." English, of course. That's all he'll say.

The sky is lightening, warning us to get in before the rest of the family wakes up if we want to continue this friend-of-the-family charade. Somehow I don't think I am playing it very believably. Tiptoeing into Amy's room, I see that the cot has vanished, so I curl up on the floor as she opens a sleepy eye.

Monday, July 8

What happened to the cot anyway? Perhaps Maria isn't as broadminded as Hal claims. I sure as hell wouldn't be! Besides, no matter how little she cares whether he shares her bed or not, there are still the proprieties of family life--and I have certainly overstepped them.

Oh dear, how I'd welcome a gust of old-fashioned anger from Maria! To know exactly where I stand! For if, as Hal said last night, she cannot presume to "own" him, then surely he can't presume to tell me that "of course she doesn't mind."  How the hell can he know?

And this polite duplicity (or is it a complicity?) between Maria and me--it's even worse than when we were discussing French autostop and agreeing how quickly drivers could be turned off by an unequivocal NO. I felt then that I was masquerading as a respectable, negative-signaling female and wished that Maria could see through me. But maybe she did, Jean, and was too polite to let on, just as she's not about to rip the mannerly social fabric by saying what she really thinks about last night.
  "Did you take away the bed because I was sleeping with your husband?" What an impossibly gauche question to ask! But I wish I knew . . .

Hal helps me on with the pack as the children gather up their school books. "Don't wait so long next time." He shakes my hand, then turns and follows his brood through the door.
   "Well, Jean . . ." Maria and I have already balanced some borrowed francs against the ballad books I've agreed to send her. But she claims I still come out ahead and hands me 50 fr. and an apple. "For the road," she says, and we look at each other for one uncomfortable moment. Without another word, I'm out the door and down the stairs.

On the road again. I'm leaving France today and hitchhiking to Antwerp to visit the Belgian family my daughter Mary will be living with next year. The Sèvres probably expect me arrive by train; I hope they won't be too shocked at my arriving by autostop instead--anyway, this morning I'm happy and very sure of what I'm doing. With euphoric confidence, I brush off my first driver's boorish passes; the next three drivers are more civilized, and the last, a nice Flemish trucker, deposits me on the Sèvres' well-scrubbed doorstep: Arthur Goemaerelei 68 (what a mouthful Flemish street names can be!).

I ring the bell bravely, and explain who I am to five sun-tanned youngsters--four boys and (the eldest) a girl of Mary's age, who says that maman et papa will be back shortly and how delighted they will be that I have arrived.  To be sure, when their parents hear that "la maman de Marie est arrivée en autostop" they think the children must be joking.  But surprise is tinged with relief that I'm so obviously not the wealthy sophisticate, "touring American mother" that they were all dreading ("with a poodle, voyez-vous").
    "You look so healthy!" exclaims Mme Sèvre, a dark-haired woman with finely chiseled features and smoothly coiled chignon. So does she, and soignée too, in a simple, unslicked up fashion--a marvelous model for my Mary. Her own daughter will be an exchange student in Americal this fall, so mine will be a kind of substitute daughter. With four ready-made brothers yet--surely Mary won't feel homesick for long!

I feel right at home already as papa, who works in a naval shipyard, tells me about the boat that he's building for the family. And his kindly Flemish face creases in a lopsided smile as he confides to me that once a year he kidnaps his pretty wife--and "kidnap" is the word he uses--for a week away from the children. . . .  A lively bunch, they're all expected to rally around their mother in the kitchen. Papa sets a splendid example himself, chopping and slicing, suggesting and supervising. Tonight it is he who oversees the delicate operation of whipping egg yolk, oil and vinegar into mayonnaise, while madame adds tiny pink shrimp and spoons the mixture into the scooped out tomato halves.
   "Perhaps a bit more parsley. Not too much," he cautions.
   "De temps en temps," she sighs, "I wish that Robert were not quite so expert."

A delicious dinner, and we leave lots of dirty dishes. The boys try fleeing to their third-floor bedrooms, but papa's booming sea-captain voice recalls them. Ah, this will be a good home for my daughter! There's a sense of real family here . . .

At nine o'clock the head of the sponsoring club for the student exchange program drops in for a chat. We're agreed on all points: that the Sèvres should be maman et papa to Mary from the start, that they could speak only French to her (madame speaks no English in any case) . . . All very sensible and sleep inducing.
    "That long day on the road--how tired you must be," she cries as I stifle another yawn. I'd better not tell her about last night . . .

Tuesday, July 9

A day of sightseeing and visiting with papa and mamie (the boys shorten this to something that sounds very like "mom"). The high spot of the day for both of us is the drama of a wild mother duck crossing the autoroute with three downy ducklings in tow. Papa dodges them, and mamie and I watch horrorstruck out the back window as the family continues its suicidal waddle into three more lanes of traffic. But at the last minute two cars heading straight for them veer to an exit. We hug each other and cheer madly. Her cheeks still pink with excitement, she recounts the incident to the children at lunchtime as an edifying example of 1'amour maternel.
   "Just think! She refused to desert them by flying across, and so she was almost crushed . . ." É-cra-sée!  Mme Sèvre falters on the terrible word, and I have a vision of horribly crushed mother duck. Of bleeding, mangled mother. "Just think what I would be capable of doing for you," is what she is really saying, and her voice trembles as she warms to her glorious calling.
   "Leek soup again, mom?" says the youngest, who clearly doesn't get the message. Of course she would never desert them, and why make such a fuss about it? But I'm already passing my bowl for seconds; narrow escapes rouse the appetite, and this one . . . What soppy sentimentalists we both are, Mme Sèvre and I!

And I, too, have heroic fantasies. Flights of wishful fancy in which I rewrite the past and save my brother--and my cousin too--this time almost perishing in getting us all to shore. A fantasy of almost-self-sacrifice (impossible to imagine not surviving) that makes what really happened seem like a very badly written play, a theater of the absurd, senseless, stupid . . . When the wind died, oh why did it have to be so ridiculously easy--mere child's play--to swim ashore? How could I still have unspent strength, when it was good for nothing now but to pound my fists against boarded-up cottages and scream at the tree-tops? To call out my brother's name, again and again, as I walked down the railroad ties, alone with my burden of failure. . . "I tried to save him, I tried . ." That is the one-sentence speech I rehearse all night long, waiting for the seaplane which will bring the fathers to Cedar Lake in the morning. And I know it is not enough, that it will never be enough . . .

   "Ready, Jean?" After lunch we're off to the Flemish girls' school that Mary will be attending next year. Which entrance should we try--the business entrance where madame la directrice awaits us, or the students' door, which is probably closed for the holidays?  M. Sevre predictably drives right to the business door.

   "But my dear," says his wife, "Mary's mother naturally wishes to see the very door that her daughter will walk through every morning." With a martyred sigh, papa starts up the car again and drives around the block to a little wooden door set into the stone wall, locked as he'd said it would be. And his wife points out that now, at least, I have a picture of a door to cherish in my memory.

Just how much will I miss Mary anyway? It's very pleasant to be called la maman de Marie, but I'm beginning to feel a bit of an imposter again. And very envious of this loving, properly anchored wife. Will Mary sense the difference between us?  Could her new maman belge ever be driven to my graceless roving?  I can't imagine it.

Wednesday, July 10

Up at the crack of dawn for the long drive to the Luxembourg airport. Piling into the little Citroen (Jean on his mother's knees--"it feels fine," she keeps on saying--Michel hunkered down in the luggage compartment), the whole family comes along to see me off, solicitously checking in my pack, searching out a country inn for a sustaining last meal in Europe, watching over me in the airport waiting room. As if I were one of their own children . . . or perhaps someone mentally defective, not quite to be trusted on her own?

We exchange goodbye hugs and kisses before I join the crowd of Americans plodding lockstep up the loading ramp like herded cattle. Let's get on with it!--not that I want to fly back to the home corral, you understand . . .

There's another maverick on board: a sixteen-year-old boy who plops down across the aisle and proceeds to regale us with the wonders of his forty-five day ramble through rural Sweden. This was his first trip to the homeland of his parents, and he appears to have fallen head over heels in love with the Swedish countryside, Swedish village life, Swedish food, Swedish girls. . . The banal words come tumbling out as he struggles to convey how clean and pure it all was. How he hates to leave it behind.
   "You have no idea!" the boy cries, flinging back a hank of yellow hair from his flushed forehead. "Nobody understands." Ah, but I do.  He doesn't know how lucky he is, though--returning to a home he can leave when he pleases, while I am returning to a husband and four children. A much more complicated situation, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

My song for the road asserted, most unconvincingly, that I would steer clear of men. "Non, non, non . . ; je serai fille sage," I sang between follies. Now I've switched to a version of   "À la claire fontaine" which proclaims at the end of every verse (and it is a very long song): "Ah, je 1'attends, je 1'attends, je 1'attends; celui que j'aime, que mon coeur aime." After a while I decide that this refrain is getting on the nerves of my fellow passengers, so I just hum it under my breath: "Waiting for, watching for, hoping for him that I love, for him my heart yearns for." Somehow I need this song. I need desperately to believe that I do yearn for Alex, that my heart is indeed committed to a constant, caring husband. For I crave that safe anchorage. If it's wonderful to find myself a desirable, desirous woman again, it's not wonderful at all to feel myself drifting, willy nilly, into a round of loveless lays. And as Hal reminded me, Alex is the man I'm coming home to. The man I'm singing for?

Perhaps what I mean to say is, "him whom I want to love because it would make things so much simpler." So much more the way they ought to be. Am I singing myself into a fervently-willed delusion? Or singing the truth? For surely there is a kernel of true affection in my aching need for Alex's caresses. Surely it is more than a momentary itch.

Tomorrow I will know. Or at least I will begin to find out what manner of man I am married to--and what he can be, perhaps, if I will let him. If I believe in him.

"Ah, je 1'attends, je 1'attends, je 1'attends . .

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Reprise

So I'm home again, the runaway wife enfolded in domestic reality. A changed reality, I think, as Alex pulls me away from the kitchen sink. "The supper dishes are Edward's job now. You'll ruin morale." My, my! I know that I'm a different woman, and Alex does too; but he accepts the sensual stranger without a question. Enough that she is here. Kitchen kisses, lingering love in the morning, the bedrock affection that I yearned for in France. And yet . . . and yet the dream intrudes.

I recall my rapt oblivion in the arms of a pleasure-seeking Frenchman and wonder why now, in the arms of a man intent on pleasuring me, I should feel so much less. Desiring and aroused, yes, but also consciously manipulated and ultimately cheated. Our studied passion begins to seem so complicated, so willed, something we must incite and prolong with teasing play. And it is I who tease, I who prolong. Because I fear the inevitable disappointment?

   "Teach me," Alex pleads when I confess my sense of letdown. "Tell me what I am doing wrong." And I cannot answer. I cannot find the words. But an image springs to mind, as it has during past moments of cruel clarity.  An image I have always thrust angrily aside; yet it persists, like the toothache, an unpleasant truth that will not yield to good intentions--of an eagle mated to a dove. A fettered, enfeebled eagle, to be sure, who once tore at her mate in her thwarted rage to soar--or hunched in sullen silence, tearing at herself instead. And now, after her exhilarating burst of freedom, is she demanding impossibilities of him?

    "You complement each other so beautifully," I hear from the sidelines. "Your brilliance and his steadiness." (Someone to pick up the pieces is what my mother means, I think.) But does complementarity really work on a gut level? The operative word in sexual studies today, of course, is "partner"--with the implication that it makes no difference which is the man and which the woman. That the sexes are always psychologically interchangeable. Ah, if only they were! If only I did not feel this nagging desire to yield to a force greater than my own . . .

   And why should matedness matter so much anyway, I wonder after weeks of stewing over a problem that begins to seem more and more adolescent. Dammit, must my relationship with a man be the fulcrum of my existence? Does a flawed union mean I cannot stretch my own wings? High time you grew up and stopped leaning on a man, Jean--stopped blaming him for the things you never accomplished or even attempted. Husbands make such easy scapegoats.
 

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I'm not using Alex as a scapegoat anymore. Or living off his earnings either (after muddling through to the point of being paid to go to graduate school).  Yet I am still using him--avoiding a straight answer when he asks, "what are your plans?" (meaning "do they include me?"); I'm still trying to reconcile a desire not to "come home" in June with the possibility of sometime, somewhere, sharing with him a real home. I'm touched that Alex should cling to me with such long-suffering patience--and pulled up short by a wave of relief when (back for the summer, after all) I find myself locked out of the house one night. Had Alex read something I'd written? At last, glory hallelujah, he surely wanted a divorce! But he didn't, as it turned out. Dammit, it was all a misunderstanding (but the wave of relief was real).

Who's clinging to whom anyway here? Alex, or me to a kind of emotional safety net? I thought I was being so resolute when I accepted the fellowship, but of course it was no final step. Do I have the guts for a real parting? If only I could feel angry or hurt .  . . instead of picking up the pen in cold blood, like an executioner (and finding the word "divorce" surprisingly difficult to write). What makes it worse, too, is that I've waited so long.  Almost a quarter century.  I always was lousy at saying goodbye . . .