Greg Gerke
Because almost everything shut down on Sundays, around ten in the morning on Saturday, I walked to the main road and hitched the seven miles to Châteauneuf-les-Orgues. My tall figure in those dirty jeans and a green Eugene Celebration T-shirt—the raggedy, torn, and holey one I wore during the week—marked me as the outsider, a Brit, or, an American, if they knew their minor U.S. cities.
The hub of the commune's population of under a thousand was the circular centre-ville, with a few ruins from the consecration time of the area's most notable landmark (thirty kilometers away), Notre-Dame de Lure, an abbey from the twelfth century. Within the centre-ville's traditional round layout was a main square, though traffic circled it in an oval. In the square's mostly vacant middle, a farmers market took place every few days, though André kept to selling in larger cities—Carpentras, Orange, maybe Sisteron—to make the travel time worthwhile. To appear ordinary and not just linger, I would buy a few carrots and some lettuce—the first of the season, some offshoot but upgrade of Boston lettuce. It was so buttery-tasting, I blotted olive oil on it only once from my small vial. I sat on a public bench in the square, munching these vegetables and what was left of my Friday-morning baguette for lunch. I'd never say anything beyond the order and a merci, and would then sit, eating slowly for almost an hour, a book open for show on my lap. If I wore sunglasses, I'd be more suspicious-looking. Yet people left me alone. Some seemed to know what I was doing there and that I worked all week just to have this.
Even if I couldn't articulate it then, a strange apprehension kept following me around: I wouldn't be very surprised if someone did kill me. They wouldn't have a good reason—I was often quiet and respectful—but they wouldn't need one. Because if they decided to end my life, what could I do about it? Maybe it wouldn't have to do with my quietude—they couldn't read into that so well. Maybe I'd come to take their wife or daughter into my arms and make them crazy. Yes, America had ruined me, and I would ruin them. My only antecedent to this living was my few years in small-town USA. But the more ill-at-ease cliques there worked in sham-minded superstitious torpors, with gossip sloppy and pitiful whether deserved or not, and whatever the ideas, being reconciled to truth was very low on the list. Even when I was visiting the community called "The Farm" in Tennessee, all the people other than my lover were always surly, mistrustful, and moving away. Well, I did have a sign pinned to me: Stay the fuck back.
Baguette, carrot, and lettuce infused, I filled my water bottle at a public spigot and hustled over to the D113 Road to hitch a ride to the abbey up the grade. Cast in the higher hills like so many prominent structures of lost times, it was heavily shaded by a stand of large beeches, possibly planted around the time the abbey had been designated a pilgrimage site in the 1700s. Inside, a dour atmosphere: a narrow chamber with two rows of pews facing two long windows, and a couple of statues, some candles. No sound. No spectacle. Get on your knees or get out. My meanderings around this eight-hundred-year-old structure became ritual enough for some weeks. Behind the abbey were large patches of grass where one could escape the onslaught of tourist's cameras at the front framing the stark line of the bell, the oculus, and the front doors, one on top of another and between trees, to preserve a harmonious pose for posterity. In the back, I sat zazen or lounged otherwise, a millimeter of denim separating the earth from my oily skin (often next to a garden full of lavender, domain of the caretaker). The abbey's hindquarters had a few rectangular additions mounted over time, and walls of white rock, with a roof made of small stone tablets assembled in fish-scale patterns, extending to cover each new station. Beyond it were denser beech forests, on ground gradually ascending, almost by steps, and sometimes I would take up a covert position on a small rise with an arching view of the abbey's back side. I listened in on the sound bites of visitor language, most of which I could understand—when we are confronted with beauty, words are at their most un-unique and quickly crest and drown away, ashamed at their frivolity. C'est beau. No shit.
In my European journeys I'd often ended up at old churches—a touristic commonplace. Once I took a cheap slow train out of Lisbon, to get to the not-quite-famous Templar church in Tomar, installing myself at a primitive campsite, though they sold grilled cod, so I could be one of a couple of dozen people on that day to visit this lesser-known but guide-marked site. I wanted to be near a history so far removed, it would make my pilgrimages worse than futile—all my longing would be eased, and, I hoped, with it, my need to exist. What would I do with those experiences—become the lovelorn guy who takes excruciatingly exquisite black-and-white pictures of ancient cathedrals? Uploading my hobby to the internet for all to see, even offering prints for sale? For bragging rights? I never had a camera with me on these quests, but I could still switch to this mythical man in spirit. Perhaps I already had done so? Having grown up on technology and celebrity worship, I could never drop the omnibus of our collective egos, dry-drunking my way in the last hours of the twentieth-century. Those traveling days had already grown sepia-toned. Days of looking and exploring, mostly tight-lipped. Watching the people around me, afraid of them and yearning for them. Soldiering on in front of the dusty, bitter-scented tapestries in the Palais des Papes in Avignon, wishing I could say to someone, What do you see? Pretty goddamned interesting wouldn't you say, if you could speak my tongue? These unhappy fantasias of comparison must be how experience infuses feelings with some deeper, apocryphal sense of worth—a subjugation few would call better off than the deliberate squandering of life. Youth is not wasted on the young, because that green consciousness doesn't recognize regret, it doesn't greedily page through past time with the growing mold of the middle years.
There I sat, my sit bones going weak, but not jellied enough for me to upbraid myself to stretch. I had to keep fixed in faux penance, looking at that rear view of the abbey with its crusty Middle Age entablature. No dome, no gaudy views. White and nothing else. Quiet, powerful, and apart. Not like the most famous church of my youth. It jutted up beaconlike after we were coasting down a decline of I-94 in a southerly direction, just after the downtown's Marquette interchange, with its nexus of major freeways twisting and spiraling in a debasement of what the French can do with concrete—rounded with a bouquet of a yeasty flatulence from the many breweries nearby. Around the Basilica of Saint Josaphat (though we said "Josapfat" instead of "fit") lay the sprawl of South Milwaukee, with the steeples of smaller churches marking the landscape every few miles or so—while beneath and undetectable were the famous bars and beer halls of an area heavily populated by the working class. The basilica was constructed in 1900 in the Polish-cathedral style as a church aimed at Milwaukee's growing population of Polish Catholics, who were just behind the Germans in immigration at the time. We spoke of the basilica in hushed tones because there was nothing else like it in our crestfallen city. Trips from our house to this district, only two miles away, were infrequent, though a great-aunt lived nearby. And one tends to ignore what one's town is known for—I passed the basilica in a city bus every morning and afternoon for four high-school years, but it never stood out, because I was at the beginning of that great phase known as "I hate most everything now that I'm old enough." One couldn't see its splendor from the restricted view of a bus seat anyway. The Pope declared the basilica a pilgrimage site in 1929. It's still there, full of some kind of dybbuk power. Lately, the online reviews of the basilica are positive: "Amazing church with amazing liturgy," and "You just feel the presence of God." The algorithms even tell you that on Mondays around two p.m., the church is "usually not busy."
When I was taking in the medieval confluence of the thatched pigeon-colored sloping roofs of the abbey, memories of Saint Josaphat's assaulted, though the basilica's model, St. Peter's in Rome, was still three-hundred years away when Notre-Dame de Lure had been built. Was it strange how I had to go across the earth to find that my roots and my butt-of-many-jokes birth city mattered more than I thought? I took in those underordinary roofs and compared them to the basilica's dome not by necessarily remembering the latter, but by conjuring my family—at the time I might have been introduced to the basilica, say the early years, when my memories begin to track month to month, instead of episodically until age five. And when I studied the abbey's bare backside, over the course of those Saturdays, the oscillating temperature of the spring winds sometimes pushing me to put on or remove my brown fleece, I remembered, more keenly, blunting my mind to pull the needle through the thread and behold the peeling granite cheeks of my father or the high, piercing tone of my mother's exhortations for me to do something around the house. It happened in a rush. I became further from my parents while not being old enough to see that these people were more a part of me than my limbs. In communing with that relic of Europe's bloody religious history, I foolishly cast myself as apart from—not better than—and in concord with the duplicitous Jim Morrison "I never talked to my father again" bullshit that is as widespread as it is dispassionate—a false badge of honor—good only for an insert of dialogue in a movie or television script. I was thinking a new chapter of my life was beginning. It wasn't, I still wasted time, even if it was only the weekend, abounding in fruitless searchings, reviving out to seed memories, and gardening sparely among the eclipsing lights inherent in sun-drenched youth. And as usual when someone plunges about too much in the shallows of the mind, finding no way to the depths, I did what so many do—I hurried away to have a drink.
Bar Mirceau was one of the two establishments I found. More rightly a saloon, it suited more of my needs. In the first pages of Crime and Punishment, a sad one in Saint Petersburg is described. At basement level, it is a quiet, dank place of menace: "Unbearably stale, the atmosphere…so thoroughly soaked with alcohol…" I spit on the idea of the American sports bar with multiple TVs blaring, giving our robotic sides eye candy to ignore the living. In France, people sat and drank, some talked. I required the forced anonymity of silence or shell-shocking improvisation. I figured that in these small French towns, the watering holes I would find might resemble my preferred—a place fostering a stout enormous man who tugged at his megabeard, an older woman who'd put on too much face glowering at everything with a heartbeat, and the other provincials who smelled like piss or cat piss, along with the meanest drunks imaginable. At Bar Mirceau I scored my fantasy, and from that dream I made more daydreams. The space: not too big, but wide enough for me to disappear in a corner. On the walls, small old landscapes, a marooned schooner on a beach, something green, gray, and slurging, like a Courbet but nowhere nearly as fine. Here or there a cobweb in the underseat of the bentwood chairs. The bar had a long mirror, flashing me back to Manet's famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, something that I'd once thought fructified the sanctity of French culture—no, new doubts darkly swarmed. Even if made at roughly the same time, Dostoyevsky's Saint Petersburg bar might not have such a grand mirror, but beyond this I would never sit at the bar, only at an open table. A sweating barrel-chested barkeep with a full scalp of impeccably kept silver hair nudged his eyebrows up in expectation. I would order in an oarlocked manner, in a cotton-mouthed accent, having to repeat my request for a simple beer until the fourth Saturday. To my mind, with that first pour, he went from disinterested to more grandfatherly, though his eyes scoured the grill under the taps, toggling between accepting his life and blaming customers for it.
Over the course of those first weeks I equivocated, too, stoking the combustibility of a very old ugly feeling: being unwanted. Did the barkeep really contain his shifting countenance, or had I created it? I bowed, I walked to my table, I drank. These concerns didn't struggle to leave me. But time moved them back on my shore, because I didn't want to plumb that sickening question of my pusillanimity. Then I'd turn and see him in a presumptive light, bending forward on the bar, the white towel on his shoulder expertly folded, doing one of those puzzles in the paper. He was just a worker, and he had made his life his own. A wife, a kid or two—and no one was happy at work. Nothing special, just a guy. Then, slowly, a gauze would plainly overtake his features because of the one determined to make a better nest on mine. I couldn't get to the core of him, and I'd never know someone who would help me to. I'd need to figure it out alone, and by my second beer, I'd abandoned such hope, preferring a quagmire. I didn't know it all amounted to finding out about my lonely self. Who else could make my life come to truth?
Sitting at the small short table that the tops of my thighs would lift up if straightened, I decided to drop the poseur spell I displayed at the square and the abbey. I took out a lined notebook and a pen to muse, to dabble. A free-spirited aunt who'd lived in France told me that once I was armed with my writer paraphernalia, people would leave me alone—they'd know I was just another American in love with van Gogh's myth, searching for inspiration. I had nothing to write—everything I thought up I immediately judged as puerile, merely coping. I'd have to talk to someone, but if I had the notebook and kept writing down misremembered phrases from Shakespeare's plays, no one would touch me. At that age, in that bar, I couldn't clearly see the face I made to those around me, despite the mirror, which I had to avoid—and I did so by superimposing the Manet painting where I would be if reflected. If I switched from a frown to a half frown, I didn't know how long I'd been frozen in the former. But I wasn't there to be seen, only to see. I supposed people would know that. And I didn't want to get drunk, I didn't want to make myself fall to or find a woman of the night, some sloe- or doe-eyed beauty to save me. So nearly everything about my attendance in this quiet, unswept bar came out to an improbability— something tarnished, without honor or accreditation, worse than using an exercise tape to exercise; potlatched, a ruse only a nutty American would come up with, led by his own unhinged assertions of reality. What I did might attract a few women who dug the Orpheus vibe, probably because they'd been raised on whiny eighties British pop, but the people I would want to care about me would never envy those month-long, sparks-before-courting fuckscapades.
At that time, early evening, unaccompanied men much older would walk in purposefully. After a day of Saturday work, they stood at the bar because they were there only for a brief time before they had to get back to their unalterable lives. They took no more than a minute with their liquor—a complete about-face from the tendency of my countrymen to hunker down as if in a den and imbibe continuously, deepening their depression, celebrating their swamp. The European stands, coarsely but meditatively. When you encounter one, you might think how arch and fastidious, feeling yourself being silently put in your place. No. To stand is the best approach to their problems. Once, aboard a four-hour train from Toulouse to Marseille, I witnessed a man, well-attired with no comb-over to his thinning hair, take a stance at the window side as we left the depot. Leaning into the breeze, he smoked and skirted his attention across the passing landscape for every minute of the journey. Although it was irksome at the time, I now recast this incident as a thing of beauty—his endurance, his willingness to absorb the latest injustices dealt to him in that posture, called up those heavy, heaving gladiatorial bones of the Gauls, some meters under that speeding train.
The men in Bar Mirceau weren't slapping the bar or asking the barkeep to make them happy in any backhanded manner. They drank and left. Or drank two, then three, then left. Unknowingly, I believe, I'd chosen a "men's" bar. Though I never came in on any other day of the week, I'd peek, when with André on an errand, to see the same barkeep or a different man, with a similar body, along with mostly checkered male ensembles. Women were just scarce, or they didn't exist as public drinkers for ten or twenty miles. Yes, the odd couple would come in and delight in two glasses of wine, but a woman as a type of life-size-piñata center of attention, as in American bars—no, not there, though I didn't dwell on this then, a few months into my skimpy tenure.
One late afternoon, sitting with my first beer at a different table than my usual, I noticed a man straddling a stool in mixed attention. I'd not seen him before. He appeared local, yet his face didn't. His face lacked the French-male features—what they were I couldn't fully describe, certainly not the swelled aquiline nose of the region. And then a word floated up to me like a long, slithering piece of help: Minnesota. I hardly ever saw him in the bar again, but when I met him months later, in André's village at the harvest celebration called Bénichon, he said, Michigan, with a shy smile. A Midwesterner who'd met a Frenchwoman in the Peace Corps, then got married, had children, and here he was. He told me why he left—the hypocrisies, the bestial manners—but didn't push me to stay gone, too. I was able to recognize the breadth of his character and respect him for it.
I stayed at Bar Mirceau for no more than three hours, but to sit for even one was morose. If my buddies could see me now—that phrase flitted around my brainpan until I became so hot, I decided to never think in such a fashion again. That false breastbeat—it equaled a fishing for envy. I should have been ascertaining my outward makeup, but I choose the past. Dostoyevsky kept creeping back to me then, shifting me to my late teens. I fondly recalled coming home from supper one summer night to continue reading Crime and Punishment, to sit in my childhood living room and inhale it in the gray light of an endless June evening as I turned the small, brittle, almost moldy pages of that pocket paperback—it was the original from my father's bookcase. I thought Dostoyevsky would appreciate my reading his work in probably the same unelectrified eveningsong many scenes took place in, the same light he wrote it in, and in the summer setting of the novel itself. Wouldn't he like it more if I wrote about it? Write about reading when young?—but I couldn't pivot into even a consideration of that question. Some of us need to remember our life over a course of years before there is material. And if I thought like this then, I wouldn't have done the age-appropriate work—the watching and listening, losing oneself on the road to the slaughterhouse. Those un-American days, hours—they made me, and sitting at the foot of Notre-Dame de Lure or in the bar counted as the first spate of events I remembered with a yen toward living in them at some future hour.
I did not mine the harvest then, but maybe a decade later, just after meeting my future wife, some time before our daughter's birth. A few times a month I would recall that matrix—not a specific scene in the novel, just the act of reading, but as if I had read the events of Dostoyevsky as I lived them in small-town France. There I engaged in a cerulean mien and came alive with the lived art passing over my consciousness, a kaleidoscope I slowly turned to absorb all the translated words describing not Raskolnikov, but me—and I would wish to share this memory in vivid language with my lady, my life. But if I ever had recourse to tell, later at dinner, after it had bubbled up in the afternoon while writing, I would summarily dismiss it, feeling it campy and overwrought. I may have been protecting myself from not getting the response I wanted or perhaps keeping it concealed as part of my secret world that no one would ever know, because it hadn't been catalogued on paper or on computer or in email. Do you enjoy being enigmatic? my wife said at some bend in our relationship, but I waved it away—just then coming upon what the main character should do next in my latest novel destined to be unpublished. I had intercalated that time with my year in Chateauneuf-Les Oregues like tightly bound pages jammed into great sheaves, like cards shuffled by a beginner trying to make the deck look pretty.