Day Thirty-Seven: Regional Delicacies
Helas, I have quitted Bearn. Madame served me my last breakfast and regaled me with her daughter's circulatory difficulties as I ate. (I scored big by replying, when Madame informed me that she was always too sensitive, "On n'est pas un bete" and agreeing heartily that la sante, c'est la richesse.)
Was fortunate enough to spot a laundromat on the peripheque around Pau -- the state of stink among my habillements being near critical -- and struggled with several inoperative machines and a dryer so hot that when I put on my nightgown that night, it was still warm. Having accomplished this, and filled up my gas tank, and procured a Boisson Frais (it was already promising to be a hot day), I hit the road northwards in the Gers.
The landscape is true farmland, with its sleeves rolled up and no nonsense about flora. It felt very exposed, not to say roastingly hot, after the Pyrenees, but I'm getting used to it. I was vexed for words to name the colors I saw, but now I'm getting the hang of it -- straw-colored soil (because we are so close to the Landes marshland, there is a good mix of sand in the soil, and that slightly briny-razory quality to the wild grasses by the roadside); houses in biscuit and sandy pink and orange sorbet, all with liberal trimming of red brick. An astonishing number of buildings just plain abandoned and rotting away. An equal number of places with holiday-home names like "Monrepos" and "Petit Plaisir."
Beat the lunchtime shutdown by ten minutes in L'Aire sur L'Adour (mostly I recount this because I want to write such a pretty name -- L'Aire sur L'Adour -- although the L'Adour, like all the rivers in the Gers so far, is a liquid mud pie.)
(I am trying to write this in a light rain threatening to become a heavy rain under the putative protection of a big beech tree behind the statue of D'Artagnan halfway down the "monumental stairway" in Auch. This is why things are a little liquid on this page.
(Later) Made my way reverently to the great pilgrimage spot, the chapel of "Our Lady of Rugby." As the Cadogans promise, "it's the art that stays with you." A series of stained glass -- baby Jesus preparing to hand in the ball to a scrum of apostles, baby Jesus looking for an open prop-forward to pass to... the B.V.M. herself handling her Infant like another ball. I suppose we should feel grateful they didn't show her punting.
"Please let there be postcards. Pleeeeeeeeeeeease let there be postcards."
Successful athletes come hang their sweaty jerseys and dirty cleats here as testimony to the divine aid they have received in rubbing their fellow men in the muddy turf. Rarely have I experienced such powerful emotion in a religious edifice (notice I do not specify which emotion)...
Clearly any other sight today was going to be second best, so I found myself casting something of a jaundiced eye on the sign directing me to the "Gallo-Roman Remains at Sevignac." First sign that you may be ready to come home from vacation: the words, "Oh gawd. More Gallo-Roman Remains."
I found a bit of shade and had some pain au choc, which put me in a better frame of mind... and Gallo-Roman Remains aside, it was definitely a good idea to get out into the good exfoliating Landais wind. Sevignac is actually pretty groovy -- they haven't tried to tart it up too much -- some smudges of garden here and there (including some unbelievable burgundy irises), but mostly the look of a working archaeological site -- pits with bits of wall sticking up like molars, raw wooden sheds and rope, little red polyurethane flags pointing hither and thither, explanatory notes on sheets of paper stapled matter-of-factly to the timbers of the sheds.
Sevignac is the remains of a 3rd-6th century villa initially built and inhabited by someone who must be said to have had a mad pash for mosaics. And looking at the results here, you can't see he or she was too far wrong -- beautiful designs of fruit and laurel and vines, in a number of silvery or golden greens, terra-cotta-y reds, cream and black, with looping, frolicking abstracts leading between. More than worth the stop.
Well, now we proceed to the laugh-or-you'll-cry section of the day's escapades: my lodging in Poudenas (gliding over a stop for provisions -- second sign you may be ready to come home from vacation: looking at a canned goods display in supermarket and thinking, "You know, a person could buy anything, bring it back and say it was a regional delicacy...")
I kind of had a feeling that my luck was due to change on accommodations -- I'd had such a run of great places with nice people, that it seemed inevitable (in the turning of this mutable world) that I was going to land in a dump populated by cretins.
Call me Ms. Nostradamus!
Monsieur looks so much like a bit player in Treasure Island that it requires great presence of mind to greet him with "Bonjour, Monsieur!" instead of "Aaaarr, matey." Madame has a wen. Granted, a wen is the sort of thing that could happen to any of us, but my point is that it actually has happened to Madame. And if I learn the name of their son, I'll be able to say "Bubba" in French.
"But what of the facility?" you ask anxiously. "What makes the Hostellerie du Roi Henri plein dump?"
Perhaps you're familiar with the works of Tennessee Williams? If some bright young European auteur wanted to film any of them without the expense of a trip to New Orleans, they should move in here -- Madame would embrace them with wattled open arms. You've got your shabby dark lobby with streaks of damp and fallen plaster and the dim, rusty carcasses of bicycles ridden by little boys grown into manhood and madness. You've got your wide dirty verandah, wood unvarnished and silver with age, ornamented with brave little geraniums and rusty bedsteads and lines of laundry seeming to consist only of lingerie of an orthopedic nature. You've got your big, slow, muddy river across the street. My room is large and gloomy, with a squeaky armoire lined with yellowing newspaper, a brown chenille fold-out sofa so impregnated with dust that I give it the kind of berth a cat gives a vacuum cleaner, a tiny shred of a lavabo behind a curtain in an alcove, a reasonably comfortable bed (the pattern of the sheets, I'd bet money, were named a French equivalent of "Floral Extravaganza"). There are two tiny horrid yellow florescent lights, reminiscent of bug zappers, one above the sink and one above the bed, and otherwise you grope around the murk blindly. The toilet is down a scary dark hall.
And what a toilet it is. To cheer your solitude, someone has kindly left an advertising flyer for a farm that offers foie gras-making tours -- what are they thinking? Anyone who knows anything about how foie gras is made does not want to know any more. I wonder how many people per year are carried out of that tour in convulsions? This flyer is on a little night table with a drawer -- and if you are the sort of foolishly inquisitive person who opens mysterious drawers in public toilets, you will discover that someone has been using it as an ashtray for several decades.
Even the smallest details of my room lovingly support the finely honed image of inert squalor -- the chipped plaster paint-it-yourself jackal recumbent on the mantelpiece, the faux Bill Keane paintings of two little lemur-eyed, shaggy-haired, go-go-booted girls apparently buying pornography and running numbers, respectively... And the translation by Homey the Clown of the regulations in case of fire, "What Its Be If A Fire Breaks."
Outside the room, there is a door labeled (I translate): "In this alcove, Antoine de Bourbon, feeling the beginning of violent ebullitions of love, pestered and chased Jeanne d'Albret, his spouse. From these frolics was born Henri, king of France and Navarre, in 1553." An interesting variation on the old "Jeanne d'Albret slept here" stuff that the southwest is littered with.
Downstairs, I sashay quickly past the Gascon Living Theatre production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," winsome smile riveted to my face like a Noh mask, and parry Madame's offer of dinner -- the thought of what would come out of her kitchen paralyzes me with horror.
Merci, Madame, je ne mange jamais.
(MAHR-see, mah-dahm, juh nuh MANG jzah-MAY)
"Thanks so much, but I never eat."
What's particularly tragic is the presence, practically across the street, of the Belle Gasconne -- a charming little mill freshly restored into a three-star hotel with a countrywide famous table; in its employ, a darkly handsome piece of insolence in Wellington boots who looks at me as I go by... well, if wishes were horses, I'd have a saddle on my back.
But the current circumstances will make it easier to wean myself from France, so I don't complain.