Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (36 page)

Thrilled by the visit, but worn from the heat and an overdose of history, I eased myself into another garden chair under what must be one of the world’s largest oak trees, and lounged there, thinking of eternity and Alison, until a gaggle of geese chased me away. The time for action had come. I plodded to the gatehouse, wondering where I would find a gendarme to report that my wife was missing; but lo and behold, there she stood, maddeningly insouciant and—luckily—wholly undamaged. “I stopped to take a picture and,” she said blithely, “I guess I walked across a field and took the wrong road and.…”

BROTHERLY LOVE

Knowing that Cluny was too far to reach in a single day from Saint-Gengoux, we’d reserved a room at a B&B in the still-distant village of Salornay-sur-Guye. Once Alison had shown up at Cormatin, only slightly bedraggled by her three-mile detour, we set off together, veering west. According to our maps, Salornay was almost as far away as Cluny, and turned out to be even farther. But there was a big advantage in going there, and both of us knew it. By detouring, we would avoid passing through Taizé, headquarters of Brother Roger’s spiritual community, where the lone pilgrim at Mercurey, the wild-eyed Irishman, was headed. He and god only knew how many others. Questers like him, and tens of thousands of teenage Eastern Europeans, have turned the district around Taizé into a sprawling Boy and Girl Scout encampment, nowadays run by the ageing acolytes of the late charismatic friar. We’d been to Taizé more than once and had even met Roger Schutz, the monk’s real name. To his followers, Frère Roger is a martyr. A madwoman from Romania murdered him, leaping up during one of his evening prayer sessions in August 2005 and driving a knife three times into his back. The monk was ninety years old. More than 2,500 of his followers had watched in horror.

Brother Roger’s effigy is everywhere in southern Burgundy, not that he’d encouraged followers to worship him. His organization had taken over several semi-abandoned villages and hamlets, unwittingly driving up real estate prices and antagonizing longtime residents, who resented the crowds of newcomers. The manner in which many visitors to Taizé revered the monk, the way cult members I’d known in California had revered their gurus, had always troubled me, and zealous crowds of any kind make me itch.

I couldn’t help wondering what it was that had made California and Burgundy centers for legitimate and loony questers, monks, gurus, neo-Pagans, and Buddhists, from the Druids to the present day. California and Burgundy could not be more different physically, topographically, and historically, the one sun-baked, dry, hot, and bereft of antiquity, the other a moody, damp, green place, a place of emptyness, of layered history and apparent timelessness, the timelessness so dear to the world’s
passéistes
.

Happily, before I could get lost in meandering thoughts, the sunwashed Roman road appeared again, as if by magic, and marched us from Cormatin across the valley to a ford in the clear, rushing Guye River. With joyous shouts we crossed it on glistening stones, the same stones Caesar had laid his jackboots on, or so I liked to think. As we reached the river’s western bank and spotted the ruined church of Saint-Hippolyte, a TGV high-speed train flashed by?mime=image/jpg" class="svg1" alt="image"/>dCh, heading north to Paris. Cattle grazing near the railroad munched stolidly on, apparently unmoved by the geyser-like swoosh and deafening roar. The train topped 200 mph on this stretch, I knew from the experience of riding it many times. Had the locals, too, grown used to it? We’d often read of NIMBYs fighting the bullet train, but the government had prevailed, as governments do in France, and the sizzling, electrified scar had steadily transformed southern Burgundy into Paris’s back yard. It was our back yard. Mea maxima culpa, I muttered. We were typical TGV riders.

Somehow we made it uphill several more miles and hiked through the stonebuilt village of Bonnay, reaching Besanceuil shortly afterwards, where nary a Frenchman appeared to live. Dutch, Swiss-German, and English rang in our ears, and Dutch, Swiss, and English flags flapped over a castle and several tidy kitchen gardens. A contemporary art gallery had taken over a farmstead. The fields were scattered with hard-to-classify artworks, many the size of tractors, and dinosaur-shaped cutouts, studies in rust. They reminded me of two things—Richard Serra’s octagon of steel in Chagny, and the long shadow of Paris’s art establishment. In a rare moment of disgust, Alison wondered aloud whether the exhibition was titled “Tetanus Galore.” I held my tongue. She’d said it all.

After the unpronouncable Besanceuil, the trail mounted steeply and tunneled through deep forests to the west, forests few humans had entered in recent years, or so we thought we understood a stag to say in his own non-verbal language. He stopped his barking and roaring and stared at us, pawing the forest floor and wagging his magnificent seven-pointed antlers. How had we strayed this far off the wheel-worn road?

A cloudburst opened while we were under the canopy of trees, and it was dark and cold, and we were soaking wet by the time we found Salornay-sur-Guye, tramping around it in mounting frustration for half an hour before at long last finding our B&B. It was in the village château, but the château was cleverly hidden by trees and high walls, and someone had removed the signs pointing to it.

FOR WHOM SALORNAY’S BELL TOLLS

Exhaustion is no guarantor of sound sleep. If dinner at the Auberge de la Guye and the evening at Château de Salornay are but a vague memory, experienced like a dream, I put it down to the meticulously organized sleep deprivation we experienced. A wedding party, another one, occupied the rest of the rooms in the B&B, a charming and handsome property lovingly restored by a retiring, pious family. Less a château than a cozy, small manor, it was, we saw in morning light, wrapped in a park crowded with mature trees, all of them budding. Our room occupied the upper floor of a stubby tower, which had been built in the 1400s, according to the owners. The nuptial party’s comings and goings through the night would’ve delighted monks bent on mortification of the flesh, I told myself, trying to pull my thoughts together and drive myself from bed. It added another set of purses to our dark, badger eyes.

Before dawn I found my fingers in the dark and counted them backwards and forwards. We had another ten miles to cover before reaching Cluny, where we planned to rest for several days and see a dentist and physiotherapist. Alison could no longer chew without discomfort, because of the breach in her molar. My stride had slowly metamorphosed into a limp. Over breakfast, the B&B’s owners must have thought me an ape as I fumbled with the homemade jams and almost broke a fine porcelain plate. Somehow I could not wrap my mind around the conversation, starting with the fact that the mild-mannered owner, who still worked fulltime in Paris, was in charge of the European Union scheme to dism to someone at the mayort said.antle mothballed Soviet nuclear submarines. I shook my head and asked if he could repeat that. Rocket science was a piece of cake compared to cleaning up the radioactive, toxic Russian mess, he explained. How had the couple wound up in Salornay-sur-Guye, far from any ocean?

“Family roots and affection,” said the nuclear scientist. “We love Salornay.”

Salornay. Salornay? Why did I know that name? The penny eventually dropped when, after our breakfast, we explored the village church, kittycorner from the château. A hulking sanctuary of Romanesque origin, many times rebuilt, and in excellent condition, it brimmed with fresh flowers. Dong, dong, dong, rang the soulful bell, reminding me quite suddenly of gluttony, waywardness, and a vow I’d made. I stuck my head out of the church and glanced down the road. There it was, the doctor’s office where, several years earlier, I’d been diagnosed with steatosis and hepatitis, and declared a walking foie gras. Like Bibracte, where I’d had visions before collapsing, Salornay was my private pilgrimage site. I’d come full circle, but by all accounts still had a long way to go.

CHEESE THIEVES AND A DUD MADONNA

Salornay seemed remarkable not only for its butcher shop and deli, and its pair of multiple-arched medieval bridges. It also appeared to be bracketed by the largest concentration we’d seen so far of modern tract homes. As we headed toward a place marked “Roche” on the monk’s trail to Cluny, the old song about San Francisco wormed its way into my ear.
Little houses on a hillside, little houses made of ticky-tacky.…

In comparison to these semi-detached banalities, the ticky-tacky developments of my distant hometown looked downright attractive. The reasons why Salornay and villages like it across France have suffered an outbreak of semi-detached ticky-tacky are complicated. The standard explanation is that wealthy Parisians, Lyonnais, and foreigners have snapped up and restored
les vieilles pierres
, driving prices for vintage properties beyond the range of locals, especially the young, and so ticky-tacky, cheap residences spring up to meet demand. This was true, but left unanswered one small question. Why had the countryfolk of France let so many of their historic houses fall into ruin in the first place, and why had they sold them to outsiders?

Vineyards spread their budding vines above Salornay, and the monk’s road ran between them. It became a magical time-tunnel through forested hills, easily as mossy and Druidic as any we’d seen in the Morvan. Along the flanks of a hollow cupping the hamlet of Sirot, the pastures were swirled with buttercups and milkweed, and daisies as white as the lambs nibbling them. Thick forests shouldered along the ridges. Giant trees hundreds of years old shaded a broad, drumlike round tower and the fortified manor flanking it. Across the dirt road, what had obviously been a winery was now being used as a barn. Hay bales spilled out of it. A tractor sat out front.

“Phylloxera,” I said. “Sirot was where the monks of Cluny made wine.”

As in Chastellux-sur-Cure, trout swam in a bathtub-like pool, the hamlet’s former washhouse. Up the road from it, a woman of mature years gazed down at us, her arms folded over a cotton apron. A dog barked in the yard below. She was framed by the porch of what had once been a winegrower’s house. “It used to be nothing but vineyards around here,” she said pleasantly, in answer to my question about the winery. She said her name was Henriette Touzot and she waved at the woods and pastures. “They put up crosses at the crossroads, and a Virgin of the Vines, up there.s head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo” She pointed again, but we could not see the Madonna. “I guess it didn’t work.”

Near her porch hung a large cage made of wood and wire. It wasn’t full of birds. “Goat cheese,” she confirmed with a winning smile. “I still air-dry it. You’re not supposed to anymore, not safe, they say, but nobody died eating goat’s milk cheese dried this way, not in a thousand years.”

Henriette got her dog to calm down enough so that we could lean on the stone wall of her yard and hear her better. In a singsong Burgundian accent, she took the opportunity to tell us the history of the hamlet, not since time immemorial, but circa 1934, when her husband’s family bought the stone house she lived in. Not many people were left, she remarked, glad to exercise her rusty voice. Only a handful. The youngsters decamped to the city decades ago, she added, and no one had moved back. A truck loaded with bread passed three times a week, and the baker who drove it also sold other things. Foreigners had been buying up the hamlet down the valley, a place called Flagy, full of artists and fancy folks, she said, all nice enough but not from here. Now that her husband was gone, she and the farmers with the trout in the old washhouse were about the only ones left. Sirot was pretty quiet.

Henriette sighed and adjusted her apron, scolding her tired old dog. “You’ve got to wonder who’d come all the way out here to steal my cheeses,” she said, shaking her head. Twice she and the hound had caught malefactors in the act, but they’d run away.

“Your cheeses must be especially good,” said Alison, brandishing her camera. “May I?”

Henriette watched, bemused, as the city folks with funny accents immortalized her goat’s-milk cheeses, some fresh and fluffy and white, others yellow or blue with age and mold.

We bought one, a nice, fresh, creamy one, to supplement our picnic. It had a good goaty flavor, the flavor and nose of hay, we discovered. We ate it at the top of the hill, on a mound of rocks, the kind the monks piled up when clearing fields and making vineyards a thousand years ago.

Between us and Cluny stretched another five miles of achingly beautiful countryside, a tuck-’n’-roll patchwork. We crossed them without encountering a single living human. Cattle, birds, and the dead seemed present in a reassuring way—the ghosts of monks and Caesar, for instance, flitting along the road, leading us off the beaten trail to a chapel in a hamlet called Collonges. That wasn’t its original name. Try Colonica instead. It had been founded in the year 898 by two monks from Mâcon, as a refuge for pilgrims and itinerant artisans, the cathedral-building stonemasons of the Middle Ages. The chapel was only seven hundred years old, stated a notice inside, and recently restored by the kind of neorural types who’d fixed the village houses, raised foreign flags, and displayed photographs of Brother Roger of Taizé.

I sat resting in the chapel, listening to Alison read out the historical report card. The complicated process of colonization, decline, restoration, and gentrification, repeated again and again over the centuries, felt like a continuum, a wheel turning slowly overhead. The primeval forests had become pastures and then vineyards and were now pastures and forests again. I closed my eyes and forgot my back and knee. We were into our fourth week of walking, a week when the spirit was supposedly no longer shackled by the body or mind. I felt the wheel turning inside me and wondered what lessons I’d learned so far, if I’d walked and thought enough. Enough for what? The answer was, I still didn’t know. The phrase
assailed by doubt
welled up and I held it in my mind, meditating in a pleasant daze, repeating it like a magic formula.

“If you can’t find it within yourself to answer Him,” I heard Alison reading aloud from a book left open on the altar, “He will respect your silence.” She paused, letting the words sink in. “Doubt, at times, is none other than the flip side of faith.”