Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (23 page)

I asked if he were descended from the ancient Gauls and could pronounce Vercingétorix. “I’m collecting words,” I explained, playing dumb.

The man seemed skeptical but eventually agreed to speak into my recorder. “I’m descended from Dumnorix,” he wanted us to know, splaying his legs like a gunslinger. “Vercingétorix was Arverni, not Aedui, he wasn’t from here at all.”

Dumnorix-Dean struggled with our map and soon gave up trying to pinpoint where we were in Boudédé, which seemed to be spread all over the valley and hills. He waved at the thick, wet forests, instructing us to return to the chestnut, cut right at the beehives, and head south by southeast. “You might have to climb over a few fences, but you’ll get to the farm eventually,” he chuckled. “Watch out for the bulls. Look underneath.”

“Look underneath?” Alison asked as we hiked east. “What does he mean?”text-align: justify; } p.indentedo

Some historians claim the Gauls invented the art of weaving live beech branches into impenetrable hedges or “living fences,” as they’re sometimes called. Whoever first grew them, the hedgerows of Burgundy are formidable barriers. We followed Dumnorix-Dean’s directions, crossing hill, dale, and fence to a boulder-strewn Druid’s site ringed by pastures. “Now what?” I asked, glancing from the hedge to the mud that reached to my knees. The herd of large white bovines at the top of the dandelion-spangled pasture had spotted us. “What do you see underneath?”

Alison paled. More than mere teats dangled. A bull!

Doubling back, we circled the valley clockwise on a dirt road. An hour later, we tramped filthy into a farmyard muddier and filthier than any other I’d seen. “Help!” I cried, hoping this slum wasn’t our B&B. “Au secours! Where are we?”

“You’re Americans?” asked the grizzled man who teetered out toward us moments later. “I haven’t seen Americans in fifty years! Okay, okay!” He pronounced the word
oh-keye
.

Before we could speak, the man shushed his howling dog, shuffled around a rusting Citroën, shook our hands, and latched on to Alison’s right upper arm. Oblivious to our queries and clear state of tired disorientation, he was going to tell us about the war and the Americans and how they’d driven out the Germans, he said, peppering his words with
oh-keye, oh-keye
. He had been nineteen years old then, he explained. Now he was over eighty. And he remembered everything. Everything.

Mr. Okay spoke in a fluty tenor, doggedly hanging on to Alison. She blanched. The geezer’s calloused free hand felt its way over her body, as if milking a cow. He was groping her. The dog barked and leaped, restrained by a slender chain. “Oh, we liked the
corned boeuf
, we liked it
okay,”
he sang now in an accent so thick we could hardly understand.

Corn-ed boeuf?
The penny dropped. He meant canned corned beef—SPAM—army rations.

“It was good,
oh-keye
, and we were hungry, we called it monkey meat, and in their kits the soldiers also got other things.…” He winked and smacked his lips. “Monkey meat and two condoms right in there with the
corn-ed boeuf!
Just in case. And do you know how many Americans had nice little ‘wives’ while they were here?” He grinned, showing his dentures. “And then they left, they went back to America to their real wives.”

Alison eventually extricated herself by saying she wanted to take a photo. I stepped closer, not sure how to calm things down. The farmer was, I realized, the archetypal dirty old man, a lecher, but far too old and fragile to belt in the chops. “The priest,” he said, when he learned we were on the pilgrimage route, “the priest has seventeen
communes
on his beat, and you know how many women he has? I’ll tell you, he has three. A priest! And three girlfriends! He has to service all three, I swear he does, and does a good job of it, too. And here I am, a widower, with no woman at all.”

We managed to extract enough information between the salacious stories to confirm we were within half a mile of our B&B in yet another part of Boudédé. Apparently the hamlet spread for miles. To keep him off Alison, I got the farmer to talk into my digital recorder.
Corn-ed boeuf
, he said several times, laughing. “We called it
le rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and singe
, monkey meat, and it came in tin cans.…”

As Alison and I backed out of the farmyard, the man shuffled after us, telling us how he’d been saved by the Virgin Mary twice, in car crashes, and if we invoked her we’d be all right wherever we went, as long as we were believers. “Making love is a form of prayer,” he called out through cupped hands, sounding like a character from a film by Fellini. I turned as we hiked up a twisting paved road between massive boulders. The codger was still grinning and waving.

“What do you think he did during the war?”

“Chased skirts,” I said, “and ate monkey meat.”

OLD MACDONALD HAD A FERME

The fireplace at Ferme de la Chassagne was big enough to roast an ox in, or enough monkeys to fill several cases of army rations. For the time being, logs crackled to the ticking of a grandfather clock and the warbling voice of a vintage crooner. Was it Edith Piaf or Barbra? A painted wooden rooster stared out from among knick-knacks on heavy wooden furniture. The air smelled of burning oak, beeswax, stew, and coffee.

We were too muddy for the armchairs, so despite exhaustion we stood warming our backs by the hearth, gazing at the vast room’s thick ceiling beams, stone walls, and gleaming flagstone floors. Our hostess, Françoise Gorlier, bustled in with steaming mugs and homemade cookies.

“Back in a few minutes,” she chirped, in turn adjusting her checkered apron, eyeglasses, and pink rubber gloves. “Time to milk the goats,” she added. I did a double take. They weren’t gloves. Her forearms and hands were bright pink from hard work and cold.

After bathing, napping, and changing into our best wrinkled evening attire, I was composed enough to recognize that our nicely furnished bedroom under the peaked roof could easily swallow an entire Paris apartment such as our own. Broad uprights and crossbeams held aloft a cathedral ceiling. Sunshine poured through skylights, illuminating a desk, overstuffed armchairs, and our giant bed. I could get used to this. Maybe we should stay a few days and regain our strength?

Before joining Alison in the farmyard, I stood at a south-facing window with a surveyor’s map spread open before me. Theoretically at the far end of the river valley below was Toulon-sur-Arroux, the resting place of the valiant Helvetii. Two Celtic roads from Arroux mounted toward Bibracte, edging Boudédé.

So far, our journey seemed to be a hike not to Santiago de Compostela but backwards in time and place to ancient Gaul and Rome. All roads led to Rome as usual in Europe, forming a funnel to convey wine and blood to the Eternal City, the blood of Christ, the blood of slaves and captured warriors. Wine and blood metaphorically flowed on the countless rutted roads of the Empire. Had Rome really disappeared, or had it simply mutated and evolved?

Mallards quacked and ganders honked as I stepped outside onto the porch. Jutting from the foundations was a boulder. A mortar had been scooped from it, god knows when. Françoise saw me staring at the mortar. “Neolithic,” she said, appearing beside me. “At least that’s what one archeologist thinks. The house is only from the 1600s.” Apparently, the area was pocked with marks from antiquity. “Later this evening, my husband will show you some aerial photos if you like,” she said. “You can see walls and roads and the foundations of Roman villas scattered around.”

Cows and calves mooed, horses neighed, donkeys brayed, porkers oinked, and sheep and goats bah- to someone at the mayorwe was ed and bleated, trying to get Françoise’s attention. Clearly they adored their mistress. Her pet animals seemed to be everywhere, in pastures, courtyards, and pens, all of them tidy and proper. A tune started up in my head.
Here a cluck, there a cluck, everywhere a cluck cluck
. I sang it under my breath as Françoise told me how she and Jacques and their then-teenage children had found the semi-ruined farm and spent the last decade rebuilding everything. She’d been a hospital administrator, the daughter of farmers. He was a maintenance engineer in charge of buildings and roads on Mont Beuvray, and also came from farm roots. Neither had had hands-on experience raising animals. “Our parents dreamed of educating their children; I dreamed of recreating my grandmother’s farm,” she said, smiling. For a moment she seemed the incarnation of Ma Kettle.

In their own way, the Gorliers had traveled back in time—to the subsistence farms of their youth, before big agribusiness had reconfigured the world. For them it really was a dream come true, with dreamy views, honeyed flowers and tree-ripened fruit, a vegetable garden, clean air, and 24/7 responsibilities, meaning never a day off. Jacques still worked fulltime. They both had pensions to look forward to a few years down the road. In the meantime, his paycheck and the B&B kept the dream afloat. The farm was self-sufficient, Françoise explained. The family and guests like us consumed everything it produced.

We talked statistics while walking toward Françoise’s next farmyard task. Everyone knew, she said, that France received around $15 billion per annum from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Program. That was twenty percent of Europe’s total farm subsidy. But eighty percent of France’s share went to twenty percent of France’s farms, all of them giant agribusiness concerns. Since the end of World War Two, these factory farms had transformed France into the world’s second-biggest farm-products exporter, after the United States. And it was precisely the big farms that were resisting environmentally friendly practices. They got government money to buy chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery, and used it to tear up hedgerows and build facilities for battery chickens and other animals raised using intensive breeding methods. Françoise shrugged. It was a shrug from which hung many a tale.

We found Alison across the farmyard, talking to three adults and a child while rubbing her left shin. “It looks like a petting zoo for children,” Alison laughed. “I hope I don’t get a big yellow bruise.”

Françoise frowned. “Was it a cow?”

“Albert the billy goat butted her,” said a thirty-something man, offering his hand for a shake. He and his wife owned the neighboring farm, and were real live Burgundian locals, he said. “We’re more Vercingétorix than Caesar,” he said when asked about his roots.

“You look more like a Saracen than a Gaul,” said their friend, a plump, middle-aged Parisian wearing camouflage safari gear. The boy with him was five or six years old and had a cappuccino complexion under a wavy Afro mop. He smirked and bridled. Straw had gotten stuck in his hair. The contrast was striking. I wondered if he had any idea what Saracens and Gauls were.

We teased the group about France’s ancestor-worshippers, from Mitterrand to Dumnorix-Dean, and superficially compared our various genetic heritages, concluding that we were all the hodgepodge children of Rome, Gaul, and the Near East. I smiled inwardly. It seemed too complicated to anatomize my extended family, spread across several states. One sister and one brother had mtext-align: justify; } p.indentedoarried African-Americans, with five offspring to their credit. Another brother’s five children were Mexican-Americans. These cappuccino nieces and nephews of mine had added Asian, Latino, and African units to the primarily Scottish, French, and Italian bloodlines that had filled our veins for the last two centuries or so. They in turn had had children. I’d lost count of my great-nephews and great-nieces, only two so far from a Caucasian union. “We are the world,” I hummed, using one earworm to drive out another. “E-i-e-i-o.”

FROM FARMYARD TO TABLE

“You were there when the calf was born?” The woman’s tone merged urgency, disbelief, and guilt. “And the cream? From the calf’s mother?” By now she’d finished her portion of utterly unkosher, creamy veal-and-mushroom stew. She gulped. “But the animals, they’re like pets, they’re so … cute.”

Jolly and roistering until now, the table fell silent.

Françoise was unflappable. “That’s what happens on farms,” she said. “You don’t raise livestock for the fun of it.”

Jacques, her husband, a stocky, boisterous man well past fifty, confirmed that everything on the table came from the farm—the orange-yellow freshly churned butter, the goose pâté we’d had for starters, everything. Even the mushrooms came from the woods. “Okay, we didn’t make the wine,” he laughed, pouring liberally from an old-fashioned demijohn and looking like a modern-day Bacchus. “It comes from a friend’s winery in Mercurey. He makes it without sulfur, so it’s practically organic. Drink to your heart’s content!”

Our fellow diners took Jacques at his word. As the Mercurey refilled the ten wine glasses ranged around the big, square table, I could see the moment of you-killed-the-calf crisis passing. All six paying guests and four family members sighed almost simultaneously. Yes, the dream farm-life had its unpalatable flipside, populated by slaughterhouses and butcher knives. But even the sensitive, inquisitive Belgian lady with qualms about veal-in-mother’s milk allowed Françoise to serve her a second time. It was quite simply the most succulent homemade veal-and-mushroom stew that I or anyone else at the B&B had ever eaten. We took turns saying so, some of us with crocodile tears. The goose pâté had been excellent, too, and it struck me as odd that no one wondered if Françoise had played Mother Goose before wringing the bird’s neck. Patently there was a hierarchy in our affections. As the conversation ranged wider—from Brussels and Santiago, Gaul, and Rome to the inevitable America, Afghanistan, and Iraq—I felt a twitch of heartburn, wishing we wouldn’t always be taken for ambassadors of our country’s democratically elected administrations. Françoise’s fresh goat cheese came to the rescue. It was tangy heaven on earth. The delicate apple tart untainted by corn syrup and artificial anything had a buttery shortbread crust as flaky as snow, the fruit filling still firm. I refused not to enjoy them.

Later that night, back at the window overlooking the valley where Caesar’s 30,000 had slaughtered and enslaved 370,000 Helvetii, I reflected on what the Belgian woman’s personable husband had said after dinner, out of earshot of other guests. “It must be terrible for you,” he’d remarked thoughtfully. “Not only did that man in Washington wreak havoc in the Middle East. He also undid the goodwill your country built up for decades, and the sympathy we felt after September 11th.”