Day Twenty-Three: Alarm and Despondency
Made my adieus to Monsieur and Madame fairly early -- Monsieur most gently insistent that I take the D618 over the Col de Porte d'Aspe for a route tres agreable... Hied me to the environs of the laundromat in St. Girons, and then become embroiled in the fear and loathing associated with trying to find parking in a French village on market day. One kind old gent had to remove half his stall -- trestles of miscellaneous cutlery -- to let me out when a lorry suddenly cut off my frontwise exit. Finally snatched at a departee's spot exactly opposite the lavoir and bundled my unmentionables into the granddaddy machine.
Quickly found a pharmacy where, to my unfathomable consternation and horror, I was informed that one cannot buy antihistamines for common allergies without a prescription in France.
Vous avez me condamner a mourir. Savez-vous la?
(vooz ah-vay muh kohn-DEM-neer ah moh-REER. Sah-VAY voo lah?)
Do you understand that you have just condemned me to death?
What a country! Sedatives handed out like Reese's Pieces, but a goddamn Benadryl kept under lock and key... I went back to the laundromat and tried to imagine a month in springtime without antihistamines. I imagined what a French allergist would do to me to come up with the ever-so-surprising diagnosis of mild allergies to common pollens, dusts and perfumes. I imagined the hearty laughter at my company's insurance agent on the subject of reimbursement for this foreign non-emergency. My soul sickened.
When the laundry had been safely transferred to the dryer, I stumbled out and bought some pain au choc and some extremely fresh strawberries from one of the marketeers. I read and tried to be a brave little soldier, but kept thinking of my antihistamine-less state. Cunningly, I spread the bits of laundry not quite dry after ten francs, on the back seat of the Kid to get the benefit of air and sun as I drove -- and all were indeed dry at journey's end in the valley of the Haute Garonne.
Well, name me a landscape in the French countryside that isn't lovely, but I must say that the H.G. isn't up to the Ariege in my book. It looks more prosperous and self-satisfied -- work is being done to make money rather than to live, robbing the land of the dignity of subsistence. The farming is being done on an industrial scale, with an industrial attitude -- everything large and laid out on a grid. The cows are fatter and less alert. So are the farmers.
Having time well in hand, I took a fancy to head north of Montrejeau to Montmaurion, wherein lies a Gallo-Roman villa of extensive proportions. Actually, I had time so well in hand that I spent about three quarters of an hour lolling around a picnic area close by before it opened for the afternoon -- I cleaned out the car, and read, and fluffed my road-dried laundry. While deep in loll, I saw a fascinating thing -- a long black and yellow snake, perhaps four feet long, gliding along the edge of the field adjoining the picnic area, as clean and gleaming as if it was freshly enameled. Every few feet, it would raise its head alertly. We all know that snakes can't see very well, relying on their hearing and very sophisticated smelling apparatus to get along -- so I suppose this snake was raising its nose into the wind to get a better fix on whatever it was hunting.
I am so glad I went to Montmaurion, because I was getting to be afraid that I was just plain bored of monuments and ruins and cathedrals and castles... But the Villa Urbana I found utterly absorbing -- like going to visit Hearst Castle in the year 4000, when all that's left are marble and tile crumbs. It was obviously designed and built by someone with a great natural eye for beauty and a great natural love of comfort, you can tell from the plantings and the plan itself -- the cunning little wing of southern baths, the inner courtyards of gardens and fishponds, the little dark beautifully proportioned summertime chambers. The stone a beautiful mix of rose and silver gray, with thresholds and columns of a darker gray to contrast. How beautiful it must have been, and how utterly reprehensible the system that built it.
And now lizards scuttle in the house temple, the pretty rocks grow lichen, the dry fish ponds fill with fuzz balls shaken loose from the aspens, spiders run in and out of the cracks of the stairs. And I walk through it alone (give or take a few German children being led in silent protest by their parents through the court of honor).
I drove back to Montrejeau in half a dream, bought provisions (see previous entries), got lost (ditto), and somehow managed to follow my nose (and the River Neste) up here to Mont d'Ares, a former monastery on a hill, now a lovely hotel -- outside all austere pride, inside every comfort.
A neurasthenic youth (who I am morally sure is named "Michel") frittered his way upstairs past the salle communale (which could have been transported whole from a Hotel Splendide on the Cote d'Azur catering to a British clientele in the 20's -- but I digress...) to show me, rapture of raptures, into the Ivy Room. (Ivy is by way of being my totem plant. It is a symbol of modesty, fidelity and integrity, and if you don't pay sufficient attention to it, it will tear your chimney down.)
The suite is charm personified (chamber-fied?). The ceiling, half aslope, in varnished pine, as is the floor. One wall the gritty gray rock of the outside wall, the rest glossy white with green accents (the name would be "Lime Room" if they fell in line with this color more faithfully, but that's a quibble). The bed has a white cotton counterpane with (of course) a white-on-white ivy pattern. Two little windows, with broad sills where you can place your elbows or your books, look out over (respectively): a) a lawn, a ploughed field, red tile roofs, green fields, the silver glint of the Neste, and a distant ridge of beeches and b) the town clock tower in grey stone and more red roofs half hidden by the adolescent greenery of a stand of poplars. I can hear a billion birds, a thousand cows, and one very ill-informed rooster. The bathroom is tiny and spotlessly clean and white -- the bathtub a bit abbreviated but still comfortable for a long soak (I have discovered by experimentation) with a tiny box of a window so placed that the bather may raise her head to take in the sky -- now muttering troublous like an Atlantic sea, now presenting gay blue and white Italian Renaissance frescoes of gods and mythic beings, now a porridge of steady rain.
The one picture in the room is a pen-and-ink of some tendrils of ivy, and this quote from Anna de Noialles:
Voici l'heure ou le pre, les arbres and les fleurs
Dans l'air indolent and doux soupirent leurs ordeurs
Les baies de lierre obscur ou l'ombre se receuielle
Sentant venir le soir se couchent leurs feuilles
Le feuillage, qui boit les vapeurs de l'etang,
Lasse des feux du joir s'apaise et se detend.
(Here, the hour where field, trees and flowers
In the air sweet and sad sigh their odors
The bank of ivy, hidden where the shadow collects
Smells the coming of the night sleeping in its leaves.
Its foliage, which drank the vapors of the pond,
Wearied of the fire of day, grows quiet and relaxes hold.)
Sense of well-being, already so well fortified by surroundings, further elevated by organizing clean laundry (Query: Why should travel be so hard on underwear? Mine are looking positively haggard...) and bestowal of all chattels throughout room in seemly order, to make it mine for however short a time.