Sabbatical One: Prologue
"Your winsome smile will be your sure protection" (--Fortune cookie, 26 March 1996)
Midnight -- the witching hour. It seemed like an appropriate moment to stiffen my spine and aim my newly refurbished three-years-of-high-school-French at an actual native. I scooched a little closer to the phone and checked the country code again. My task was to confirm the reservation for my first accommodation, a small auberge in the Gard outside of Nimes. The husky clump of foreign dial tone, and then, “Allo?”
Me: Bonjour! Je m'appelle Carol James. Je dois confirmer ma reservation.
Them: Deblerdeblahdeblerdeblah?
Me: J'ai une reservation pour une chambre. Je dois confirmer?
Them: Deblerdeblahdeblerdeblah!
Me: Excusez-moi?
Them: Deblerdeblah telephonez a onze heures et demi. Hein? Telephonez a onze heures et demi.
Me: D'accord!
At onze heures et demi (2:30am)...
Me: Bonjour! Je m'appelle Carol James. J'ai une reservation pour une chambre. Il faut confirmer?
Them: Deblerdeblahdeblerdeblah arrive.
Me: Le premier Avril.
Them: Non, un peu lentement. Deblerdeblah... debler responsable debler.
Me: Encore une fois?
Them: La responsable n'est pas arrive. Le proprietaire n'est pas la... Telephonez encore beblerdeblah apres-midi.
Me: Ah, je comprends. Je vais telephoner encore apres-midi. Ca va bien. Merci.
I hung up the phone, shut off the light and got into bed, without any actual expectation of sleeping.
Whatever had I been thinking? It had sounded plausible by daylight -- I had a six week sabbatical coming to me, courtesy of my never-to-be-overpraised employer, I was working on a novel set against the backdrop of the scenic Pyrenees in the southwest near Spain, what could be more natural than combining relaxation and research? Using the wanderings of my heroine as a backbone made planning an itinerary both challenging and fun. I took a refresher telecourse to bone up language skills, bought guidebooks, cultivated a good travel agent who bent herself backwards to get every possible ounce of value out of my peon's budget. It was almost too easy -- every day there was something rapturous, like a flight on the appropriately Byronic French airline "Corsair" priced at a dollar figure you'd normally associate with Greyhound, or a postcard from an inn in St. Girons which promised I would be able to jouer le ping pong during my stay. Friends and co-workers green with envy, my sabbatical was the talk of the town. Tomorrow I was to be feted with champagne and gooey cake at work -- the day after, packing -- the day after, off into the blue.
Three days before I'd start life as a deaf mute. Why hadn't Robert or Mireille or the kindly rumple-haired professor from the telecourse picked up the phone at the inn in the Gard? I knew I could understand them.
Language has always been my strong suit. In school, I'd never taken a test of verbal ability without blowing off the top of the scale. What was I going to do, with the vocabulary and comprehension of a six-year-old?
I turned over, to stare at a different dark wall of my bedroom. Driving. I expected I was going to be driving in a foreign language. How I boasted about how off the beaten track my trip was, how far from public transport and tourist helps, "only two bus runs a day in most areas, at dawn and in the afternoon, for the farm laborers and the schoolchildren..." Oh, I was going to be a real adventurer. And alone, of course -- didn't want any distractions while trying to work. Didn't want to subject anyone to my idiosyncratic agenda. I would socialize with French people. French people speaking French.
And my reservation was still unconfirmed. Seven in the morning -- their apres-midi. Haggard and rumpled, I picked up the phone and punched redial. It rang and rang and rang and rang.
Greeeeat.
My feckless Egyptian ex-husband Khaled, who I am obviously still on good terms with, agreed to house- and cat-sit for me. While knowing the full extent of his domestic vagaries (the oil traps on top of the refrigerator made a significant item in the divorce papers), I figured at least he knew where everything in the house was. I wouldn't have to waste time breaking some hapless stranger in to the idiopathologies possessed by any San Francisco flat with pretentions to character -- "Well, you have to remember to open the right window rather than the left window in the bedroom, because it's almost impossible to relock the left window and you have to lock the windows on that side of the house because they're almost at street level, and of course you need to be sure the screens are set solidly to be sure the cats don't go flying out. I'm really serious about the cats not flying out part..."
Khaled was happy to help out, but emotionally he was pretty ambivalent about me going away. Every six months or so, he suggests we get married again -- my peals of silvery laughter are no deterrent to his fond hopes, but the last refusal had particularly rankled as it had been coupled with my going out on my first Date With Another Man. Divided between an Eeyore-like certainty that I was going to be unfaithful to our non-existent relationship with every Frenchman I met, and an optimism so rampant it might be called psychosis, he insisted I wasn't really going to be gone for seven weeks. "You'll be done before then," he assured me. I labored to convince him that sitting motionlessly under clear spring skies in the French countryside sucking down pastis is not an activity you get "done" with... in vain.
Memoirs of a Treacherous Daughter was the working title of my novel (as of 2011, re-titled A Perfect Hatred) -- the usual 16th century feminist Huguenot amorous publishing revenge melodrama, with wadges of sizzling gypsies. Its narrator, Magdalena des Malineux, the strong-willed, privileged daughter of a landowner in an obscure corner of southwestern France, was born in 1541 during the early days of the Protestant Reformation. Before the pressures of intense sectary violence directed against the Huguenots -- massacres, sieges, confiscation and destruction of property, sexual violence -- caused the group to adopt a more military, hierarchical organization, the early church of Calvin was remarkably open in structure. The doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” meant that anyone -- man or woman, master or servant, -- could administer all of the sacraments of the Church -- could preach, could teach, could create song and liturgy. Constraints on social behavior were also administered by the community at large, rather than smaller groups of elder “elites.” If any problem seemed too large to handle internally, well, you just wrote to Calvin in Geneva. He personally answered all his mail.
At sixteen, Magda has been singled out by her father, a man of both the new faith and the old patriarchy, to be “collaborator” and amanuensis to the book that will sum up his intellectual and theological beliefs. She is also being pursued by a cousin who yearns for a life of scholarship rather than the trade-bound future his family has mapped out for him, but who has very little in the way of actual brains. As Magda tries to navigate her divided loyalties, she comes to see how limited her actual “privilege” is -- and how much of her life and desires is outside that circle of privilege. She makes the daring, damning decision to consent to her cousin’s plan to steal her father’s book, have it printed as his own, and start a new life together in Paris, far from their provincial families. The plan works -- with the slight alteration that her cousin marries someone else.
Dull with grief and self-hatred, Magda tries to erase the memory of her failure in judgment and her love for her cousin by going on a rampage of self-punishing promiscuity. One day she comes dawdling home after a dalliance with a wandering farm laborer named Louise in her father’s barn, when she is confronted by the simplest evidence of her treachery -- a printed copy of her father’s book, with her cousin’s name on the title page. Her enraged father beats her until the grass in her hair and clothes litters the floor. Before her disaster comes to involve her brothers and sisters, she flees Les Malineux.
Louise, Magda’s afternoon playmate, and her companions offer Magda a kind of sisterhood among the brutalities and humiliation of being homeless women in a society rooted so deeply in defining women by family and hearthside. They work their way across the southern farmlands, picking crops, shearing sheep, doing anything that will earn them a few coins -- including occasional prostitution. While these migratory women offer Magda her first view of a genuinely open, tolerant and loving community, the daily degradations of their lives takes its toll on her, and she finds herself seeking “honest” employment in a Protestant household in the Cevennes mountains above Avignon and Nimes. Among her fellow servants is a young stableman named Jean who is studying to become a pastor. She initially rejects his advances, being as she says “not made for love any longer.” His persistence gradually disarms her barriers and much to her own astonishment, she finds herself in a happy marriage with him.
Her old girlhood hobby of playing with dyes and fabrics gives her the opportunity to start a small business of her own, as Jean attempts to establish his own work in the community. Her trade grows -- they have children -- she is able to receive news of her brothers and sisters back in Bearn. This new contentment is shattered in the autumn of 1572, when the Massacre of St. Bartholomew results in the deaths of tens of thousands of Protestants in Paris and the provinces, and destroys for a generation the possibility of peace for mixed Catholic/Protestant communities like Magda’s. Her husband’s work in the reformed church makes him particularly vulnerable to sectarian violence -- faced with Magda’s increasing fear and depression, he agrees to find a less visible position. They decide to go to one of Magda’s sisters in Paris.
This is a spectacular piece of bad judgment, for anti-Protestant hatred in Paris is at an all-time high. The south has erupted into a new round of civil warring, so going back there is not practical either. Reluctantly, Magda and Jean choose exile to the Netherlands as the best option for their young family.
While in Paris living with her sister, Magda encounters her cousin the “scholar,” who is delighted to see that their “youthful foolishness hurt no one.” Transfixed with rage at his complacency, she arranges to give him an old manuscript of her own before she leaves for Holland, “for old time’s sake.” “It’s not as if I’ll ever use it,” she says, gesturing to her sleeping children. Her cousin is delighted since by his own intellectual powers, he’s been unable to produce any writing of his own in the intervening years, and this has seriously limited his ability to gain promotion. He is also unable to discern that what she’s written is rank heresy by the standards of the day -- and that the instant it’s published, he’ll be thrown into prison for shameless unorthodoxy and the corruption of youth.
And who’s going to believe it was really written by a young provincial girl in the wilds of the Pyrenees?
Magda meets with success in exile. She owns her own linen business, employing two young Bartholomew orphans, raises her own daughters, is a helpmate for her husband's ministry and a pillar of the community of Huguenots in exile. She never returns to France again.
How troubled she is about the discrepancy between her sins and her rewards is a theme throughout her story. Trying to provide her daughters with a truthful, whole account of where they came from, leads Magda into disconcertingly dark back alleys of her past. And yet at the same time there is exhilaration in reclaiming memories that she hasn’t allowed herself to experience for years.
When I first assembled this plot -- before I knew what Magda or any of the other characters were like, when I only knew what was going to happen, not how or why -- I had two concerns. I was afraid that it was going to be too dry, and that it was going to be too dark. How exactly was I going to make a story hinging on the shifts in definitions of heresy between the reigns of Henri II and Henri III accessible to modern readers without “dumbing down” my commitment to historical accuracy? Who was going to want to read this thing other than me?
I’d researched quite a bit -- had read over the events of the Wars of Religion over and over again, through the eyes of many different authors with many different perspectives, until I’d come up with my own opinions and viewpoints. Before starting, I just wanted to finish up a few short stories. I was also set to attend a weeklong women’s writing workshop in Oregon.
Everyone was clicking on the assignments our leader was giving, except me. I resigned myself to just having an unspectacular week, enjoying the progress of others and continuing to chew away at my last short story projects. Then we were given an in-class assignment on “place.” Five minutes. I wrote what is the first page and a half of the novel, without a flicker of premeditated intent. I read it, astonished and delighted. I read it aloud to the group. They were astonished and delighted.
Magda’s voice was a surprise, a gift -- lively, sensuously exact, slyly funny, mobile and discursive -- moving so quickly with the need to find words that a sentence could loop through several different trains of thought before reaching its destination. She wanted to tell her story so badly -- it was impossible to shut her up. For the rest of my week in Oregon, words dripped off my pen like water. Easier than water.
Things might have been very different -- I might have continued riding that wave of words, finished up before ever my sabbatical had arrived, and thus deprived you of this deathless prose. But what was awaiting me at home in San Francisco was a derailment -- Khaled wanted a divorce. When the reverberations from that trauma finally died, the World, the Flesh and the Devil still had many other hurdles to throw in my path.
In addition, it quickly become clear that there were some rules attached to this gift of voice. Magda did not take kindly to me doing further research -- I think she felt that it meant I didn’t trust her -- and to do her credit, virtually every detail I checked up on later, she’s been right about. It was also forbidden to press her on certain subjects -- she would get to describing her relationship with her father before it soured, for example, when she was damn good and ready. When I tried to force something that she wasn’t ready to impart yet, her voice deserted me, and the difference in style stuck out like a sour thumb. There was no keeping her to a chronological narrative.
When I refer to her as if she was a real person, it isn’t because I have any sort of mystical sense of her being “out there”, but because practically speaking, that’s what worked. Her likes, dislikes, frustrations, fears and hopes had an impact on how the work progressed. My job, it soon became clear to me, was much more translating and editing, arranging pre-existing material, than creating. I grew to fear the day when a real editor was going to ask for changes, and I, poor noodlehead, was going to be explaining that I couldn’t change what happened.
The itinerary for my trip grew very naturally out of her life travels. It made sense to start at the more urban, accessible settings of her later life, and gradually work my way westward to the mountain fastnesses of Bearn, the then-independent principality between France and Spain, where Magda’s family home, Les Malineux, was located. I would fly in to Paris, TGV down to Nimes, make a northerly sidetrip up into the Cevennes, then swing down into the farming and shepherding region of the Ariege. Creeping westward over the toes of the Pyrenees, I’d reach Bearn about midway through my trip. After thoroughly going over the ground there, I could spend my last couple of weeks in moving leisurely north through the Aquitaine to Bordeaux, where I would drop off my rented car and return to Paris. My goals were to discover the landscape, natural and social, of Magda’s part of the world, as well as startling the heck out of the curators of local folklife museums. Simple pleasures... The Cadogan Guides to Gascony and Southwestern France were my mentors and my companions.
As a special free bonus, Useful French Phrases will be included in the course of the text.
For it turned out, my friends, that once I was there, my French was mostly just fine. Anglo-Saxon Francophones have an eminent but rarely used role model for good pronunciation: Pepe Le Pew. Take Pepe for your guide, and you will find the eyes of your concierge will sparkle, the cheek of the baker will redden, the cafe waiter may even be civil. Good French requires a certain degree of mugging it up that embarrasses English speakers -- wriggling those lips, rolling those rrr’s, mushing that palate, employing the phrase “oooh la la” without irony. The best thing I ever did for my pronunciation of French was dropping all interest in anything but getting my rrr’s to roll like Eartha Kitt. Camp it up, and you will be understood.
Frankly, it is much easier to talk with someone about the Albigensian crusade than how to get your parking ticket validated.