Day Twenty-Six: The Cows Come Home
Observation on French Life and Culture #23: Query -- why are the toilet paper dispensers in French hotels almost invariably broken? It seems like a funny item of furniture to trash...
Anyway. Got underway in good time -- swung south past St. Aventin (it was preying heavily on my conscience to have a postcard without actually having gone there) and the Col de Peyresorade -- a strangely lunar landscape of clotted bare earth and a few dead trees. Snaked south to Bagneres de Bigorre, another spa town, where I beat the lunch closure with minutes to spare in purchasing provisions for lunch. Headed west.
And this is what happened. I came over a ridge at Lourdecein, a few kilometres east of Lourdes near the border between Hautes-Pyrenees and Pyrenees-Atlantiques... and found myself staring at exactly the landscape I'd been seeing through Magda.
Exactly. The color of the soil, the height of the hills, the spacing of the trees, the slope of the roofs. Everything exactly as I'd pictured. The trees in flower, mixing a hundred shades of green powdered with white and rose and mauve and occasionally a luscious red or purple. I laughed, and then I pulled off the road to cry a bit too.
There's a Macdonalds in Lourdes. Betcha that's the center of the universe for tackiness...
I reached Pau just before two. Took a skillion years to park -- they have hideously diabolical little parking areas that just simply end, and you somehow have to figure out how to reverse yourself out through the eye of a needle, practically.
Pau, in small quantities, will be charming. A very provincial, very bustling city -- after mature deliberation, I've decided it's the San Jose of Gascony -- that veiled aggressiveness about its cultural scene, its faux cosmopolitanism, its self-important business folk with fake gold watches rushing by in a hurry for their three-hour lunches. All I have to do is tell them about the whole "Tapestry in Talent" concept, and the good burghers will be handing me the keys to the city. There are lots of shops selling expensive, useless gadgets and geegaws -- the aforementioned glittery-but-not-genuinely-valuable watches, "chic" dresses and ensembles for grandmothers of the skinny and tan variety, snootiest of snooty patisseries, an inordinate quantity of pens and leather-bound desk furniture stores.
Well. My mission was to find the English language bookstore and beggar myself restocking, for I have only one hundred pages of The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns before I must start rereading or die. The Cadogans promised there was an English bookstore called Scribes on the Rue Glaisson. First frustration -- finding the damn Rue Glaisson -- tramped halfway across the center of town, then found it was half a block from where I parked. Then I walked and walked and WALKED looking for the bookstore... At a certain point, I decided I was just going to have to go back and get the car -- then I noticed that the long and winding road wasn't even the Rue Glaisson anymore. (Insert language unsuitable for mixed company here.) Careful consideration of the real Rue Glaisson, inch by inch, revealed not a whiff of English bookstore. The Cadogans must die, and I will thank you not to remember this if anything unpleasant should befall them upon my return.
So it was time to purchase the usual suspects -- er, I mean provisions, and head in search of the sheltering arms of the Auberge de Lausset in L'Hopital St. Blaise. Not for the first time did I find myself remarking hopefully, "Well, I've got plenty of gas and hours of daylight."
I couldn't exactly tell you how I got here, but it couldn't have been a prettier drive. The greenery is well advanced here, far thicker and lusher than in the east or in the mountains. The cows -- black and white or red -- hmmm, that sounds like the start of a riddle, don't it? -- are so lively and expressive, with legs as slender and nimble as deer.
So well before sunset, I found the auberge and settled in. The room is all comfort, but an awful lot like my mother's idea of what my bedroom as a little girl should have looked like, all pink and cream. The wallpaper looks like the gift wrap on a wedding present. But it is as clean as mortal hands can make it, with a cunning little desk, and the smallest bathroom I've ever seen outside of Manhattan, and a beautiful shuttered window facing a) the 12th century Mudejar church and b) the miniature golf course.
If only Madame did not have so lavish a hand with starch in the towels, I'd say it was perfect for a base in Bearn.
I disposed my goods, and showered, and regaled myself with mousse-in-a-cup and strawberries du pays, fresh enough to have grass stubble sticking to them, and planned and rested and read until the cows came home.
Yes! At 6:30, the cows come home! I heard a peevish lowing close at hand and looked out the window to see half a dozen pretty fawn-colored cows lolloping down the road between the church and the putt-putt green. The cows's grandmother stood at the top of the lane waiting to receive them, swishing a stick and saying something in dialect that probably means, "Keep moving, you damn cows." The cows skittered out of sight. Eventually, the cows's grandpa came bicycling up as rearguard, and now we are all safe at home tonight in L'Hopital St. Blaise.