A bed for the night in the Ariége.

I have taken up walking. I had imagined a time when I would really tramp with a sack and a stick like certain Hindus at my age. A lesser version suits me fine, the dark blue gaiters I’ve had a long long time and never used I’ve velcroe’d round my lower legs. They carry the association Turgenev and duck shooting. I found a French Basque shoe maker and bought a tough walking pair called Ayous.

Home is near Pamiers and somewhere up there in the mountains on the horizon are the white nights of Andorra’s consumer paradise and the dark history of the trek down into Spain. I am ready as I’ll ever be for the beyond and I have a contract with a lithographer to do sketches on the way. The object? Explore a foot route south in easy stages. Until last week I had been picked up at the end of each day by my wife, now it is — à demain à Lavelanet — so I have had to find a place to stay.

Welsh drovers 1880's

It is easy to quicken the heart of an amateur etymologist. I wanted to find that Lavelanet was derived from wool (lain) washing (laver) but was enchanted to find instead that it comes from hazel nuts, that early hallucogenic. Lavelanet’s lost fortune came indeed from textiles, much like the small valley towns of West Yorkshire like Hebden Bridge where the death of the industry let in alternative types to re-start the heart. Things don’t happen that quick in France, there are more arrangéments to make but Lavelanet has begun well with an art cinema whose energetic boss gets the makers down to chat.

I picked a chambres d’hôte. It would not be fair to my host to reveal his identity. He did his best to put me off by saying that he planned to re-do the kitchen just when I wanted to stay. I insisted that I could eat in désordre totale. A few days later he put me off again with the weather. I looked at the same local rag as he and saw the cheery sun hidden by a grey chin and slanting black lines. I thought I had been pushy enough. Alright, I emailed, let’s make it the following week.

I was new to the land: humps of forest, cleared patches, hamlets. I was the intruder, the man on passage. Winding up out of one of the hamlets halfway thru the day there was a dog bark, a man’s shout, someone banged on metal, there was a rush of cool breeze then: an electronic hooter? a bird? A horse whinnied and doubled past ignoring me. A string of sounds out of silence that should tell me everything. Information. There was a notice up telling you what to do if you met a Patou the big Dulux ad type sheep protector. You have to pass by yawning and don’t look in its eyes. I tried to remember what I’d read about grabbing their front legs and ripping them apart.

I was slipping between three tribes: the people colonising the countryside with new-build suburban values who see themselves as right thinking downright patriots, the many layers of newbies from straggle haired hippie grannies to hi-tech hipsters playing farmer and the tribe or clan from the time before, time immemorial: the indigenes like the one who surprised me later picnicking. He had a smart pick-up with a brace of débroussailleuses (brush cutters) in the back. His eye was not unfriendly and yet it was hen-like, primitive and shrewd. He was small and aged, settled into the luxury moulded padding. Elves, the flitting indigenes. In a friendly manner we covered the topics of whether it was a hunting day and which path I should take. I believe it amused him to come across this wanderer who could only speak official French.

My host had told me his place was easy to find: number eight by the cemetery. I fell out of the shade of the thin-trunked oak and ash covered hills onto a side road and humped my pack across a riverside meadow as manfully as I could and past shimmering plastic serres and big track mud prints. I could hear water. The river running north below the block of hills I’d crossed is called the Douctrouye whose source near the refuge at Le Coulobre was on my list of destinations. The block of hills is closed along its south western edge by the River Crieu. (In France they distinguish a fleuve which runs to the sea and a rivière which is a tributary of a fleuve). Douctrouyre is a compound of ancient French and Occitan. Both words mean channel. A little to the east runs another river simply called Trouyre.

I crossed the bridge. There was a miniature municipal parking: three places and a handicapped, a carry yer cross guv rough under foot climb to the church and sure enough round the back was the cemetery wall with its noble cypress. I slipped out of my pack and sat down on a bench. The wall ran along the edge of an escarpment, a geological lump at the intersection of the Douctrouye and the Sautel. A hill point settlement knocked together round a church. In olden times so they tell me, when watercourses served as boundaries, this would have been a place where under a good conduct churchly vow, three tribes could meet to settle their differences. How might that be done today?

I got up from the bench by the cemetery. Down below Departmental One hummed and thrummed as folk threw off their confinement sackcloth and got back to being busy bees. Engaged. Number eight was the second — no wait, that’s two knocked into one — the third house along. Thru the amber frosted glass I saw him leap diagonally and pull open the door. He looked at my outfit. I’d topped myself with a gaily coloured Chinese sombrero I’d seized at Emmaus and my copyright courage éspoir and gratitude tee shirt.

He was large and young in play clothes. Straightaway he offered me a beer as I woggled my pack thru the door. I said later, after a shower. He didn’t seem to hear, he offered me water. I felt I had to accept, then he asked me whether I wanted plain or sparkling. We don’t have sparkling water in our life but I didn’t want to be rude so I said I don’t mind which of course was the worst possible thing to do. He brought out two plastic bottles. I had sat down by then at a table. The room was gloomy, the shutters half-closed and the ill-proportioned woodwork was covered with the dreadful shade of brown paint that passed for restful for the previous generation, paled out with white it was rolled over all the walls. I knew these houses with their front rooms of moderate size and then small rooms stacked up like indoor sheds with sections of staircase going every which a way.

“…wouldn’t you like?”

The man indicated a dank, darkly plastic three-piece suite crouching against the back wall,

“…no I’m fine here but I’d like a shower and a rest before eating…”

I looked around, there was nothing that looked good, stale bachelor disorder. There was tension in the air, he was uncomfortable, in fact it was not a chambres d’hôtes at all but just some crazy idea that hadn’t really worked and here I was insisting it was real.

My host half hid behind a room divider, dodging backwards and forwards. Behind him I saw stacked microwaves. You would be amazed at the number of french houses that don’t have kitchens. He came out from the divider and caught his foot on the only picture in the place, a framed popular print of L’Atlantique the record breaking luxury liner of the nineteen thirties. If he had had better taste it would have been the poster for the liner-like hotel at Cerbère. At the laid back film festival there late into the night in the open air with surf crashing (a little) I had caught the Spanish documentary Donkeyote, a man and his donkey tale. Would I have been better off taking a beast?

I made a serious push and asked to be shown my room. It was refreshingly light and plain, I made the usual exclamation. He busied himself with a large cupboard of the family linen type. He explained that those were his clothes and the door leaning against the wall was waiting to be put on. I nodded sagely altho the half of me that is not so sure of its french wondered if he’d said he was next door and would come thru to dress. Friends had warned me, they thought it might be a trap. But I thought I would be safe. I knew by now my staircase was not his, each ex-house had its own which must have given him the idea in the first place to try chambres d’hôte.

He was the Anthony Perkins type, twitchy, needy. I tried not to look at him too much. His web page had said that he was a practitioner of reiki. Somewhere I had a dim memory, wasn’t it Chloe along with her astral travelling? Some sort of pyramid selling structure? He had left Paris three years before. Why? It was not too clear — he was for sometime with his parents in La Rochelle, there had been a girl in Paris he’d left. Then he had spent a year (a year!) in a rural chambres d’hôte before family money cascaded neatly as it does in the french system and he chose this dreadful hole to buy a house in.

I had had my shower and my rest and had come down looking for that beer he’d offered. When it came I sat on one of the two black foam rubber cubes by the settee. It didn’t give too much. He asked me if I minded if he smoked. Then there was a curious thing that gave me pause. He had asked my if I liked the Ariège and I gave my speech about how for me all countryside was more or less the same, country ways and people whether it was the Ariège the Corbières or at a pinch Norfolk. He wasn’t expecting that because he immediately said,

“…yes I too fell in love with the Ariège straightaway…”

There was some disjuncture operating. I said,

“…could I have another beer?”

“…no I’m sorry, there isn’t one…”

“…??…”

It came back to me now that he’d said he didn’t like wine, there would be no wine with the meal — clearly a preference I should have advertised beforehand. He said in fact he didn’t like alcohol. I scraped around in my head,

“…I think you said you have une voisine anglaise, I am sure she has drink, perhaps you could ask her for the loan of a bottle of wine…”

He’d chattered quite a bit about her, showed the terraced garden she’d managed to make from the grudging width the farmer in the field below the escarpment was forced by law to leave. On the wall had been my host’s cat, sad, he said because he couldn’t catch the birds that flew past,

“…but was it different in Paris?”

“…yes they seemed to alight more often…”

We were outside because it turned out altho he smoked he couldn’t abide my cigar. I found out he was short of money because it was not so easy to get temporary work in his profession as it had been in Paris,

“…you know here, they have it all sewn up…”

He made a gesture crossing his arms and shaking his fists in front of his chest. He meant the still strong socialist freemasonry controlling any Ariège enterprise whose life blood is the public purse.

I was glad to be outside, looking across at the enormous hill I was meant to climb the next day. The din of Departmental One was unexpectedly loud at the back of a slummy patchwork of 1970’s bungalows. At the edge, thoughts of the neighbour and whether she’d come thru with the goods. Inside again I watched him cook. It was a question of grated vegetables and a steak he said with a smile. I said I would need,

“…un peu de carbo comme même…”

Noodles came out of the micro-wave just about willing to wag their butterfly ears but no more than tepid,

“…if it is a question of money for the wine I can pay her…”

He went out and came back five minutes later with a bottle of beer, a smaller one,

“…you see, I succeeded…”

Perhaps my appetite was excessive and didn’t I have a walk to do the next day? I settled for the second beer and ate the meal. The steak was good. After idle chat I turned in. I had heard his story and shared some of mine and there was nothing further to do than that. But during the uneasy night a terrible fantasy came on me that I was captured and thrown back into my thirties and had to fight my way out of all those tangles again — like he was doing. A gulf of horror opened, the bed spun, I would have to stay here in this house and pick up the threads of the life of another — hadn’t Hollywood done that sometime?

But the night passed, as it always does and traffic came back and the light of day and I unfolded the map on the big bed and picked out an approach to Lavelanet. It must have been before seven when my body told me it was time to shift and I went downstairs. I found the office-type coffee machine and the coffee and the brown paper filters. There was bread, a good soft loaf and half a goat’s cheese in the fridge. When the coffee was done I carried it over to the table. On the table was a pale green plastic mat in the shape of a fish with a brown burn mark on it. For the thousandth time I asked who designs these things and what is it in us that must have these childish representations of natural objects? I landed the hot coffee flask on the fishes burn mark. There was a sheet of paper with writing and his iphone at the place I wanted to eat. I swept them aside.

Shoddy contemporary animisticisms like the fish intrigued me. The husband of one of my collectors had asked me to think a little about nature et homme so I was doing my best. The coffee hit,

“…it is in man’s nature to be artificial. Man is natures first artificial invention. Man is a tool by which nature can make itself up more amusingly than it could on its own. Nature would say, is saying: throw me those Chernobyls and just watch me play…”

I tried a sequence: nature > language > fiction > artifice. The capacity for speech implies the ability to lie… Then I blocked, my eye fell on his paper I’d swept aside, I read — graines… indica… Barcelona… commandes — I read the whole thing. My host was figuring out a plan. That was it then, the hopeless glitter in his eyes, the refusal of alcohol, the vague references to troubles: he was thinking of commencing dope farmer. And why not you say? Why not give hard pressed, bent cop compromised go-fast gangs a break — make it an internal tax affair. Aren’t they managing in Canada? I tore a strip off his action plan, wrote — prenne garde de toi — slipped a fifty under the jar and was out the door crust in hand.