Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (39 page)

Due east and far below us rose the Roche de Solutré. From this angle its cliff face looked vaguely like the prow of a steamship ploughing into waves of russet, white, and green. The soil was russet in places, white in others, and the unfurling leaves of the grapevines footing the rock were a fresh, almost acid green. Overhead, a hang-glider circled the cliff, swooshing silently on alternating layers of hot and cold air. Mesmerized, we watched it go around and around as our hostess, Karin, plied us with nuts and thimble-sized goat’s cheeses, and poured glasses of cold water and beer. “Veni, vidi, vici,” I said, to someone at the mayort said. feeling at once victorious and on the verge of defeat. The Saint Bernard gnawed on a bone and watched us with drooping eyes. “What’s his name,” I asked, “Caesar or Vercingétorix?”

“He looks fierce,” Alison joked.

“He is,” said Karin. “That’s what’s left of last night’s guests. Yukka didn’t like them.” Karin laughed from the heart, a sincere, unself-conscious laughter that exposed her gums and small, white teeth. “What part of the country am I from?” she asked in response to the question I’d slipped in. “You mean, which country? I’m Swedish, you know.”

No, I didn’t know. Her French was perfect, and maddeningly unaccented. But genetics explained her physique and Nordic coloration, and perhaps her cheerful temperament too. We’d met many a chummy Dutchman on our walk across Burgundy, and a handful of English, but Karin was the only Swede. How a recently retired former IKEA manager had wound up here I couldn’t imagine. “Widowhood and reinvention,” she remarked. “I started all over again.”

“So it wasn’t because of Mary Magdalene, or the Druids, or François Mitterrand, or Brother Roger, or the primordial Buddha, or Caesar and Matisco?”

Karin shook her head and laughed. “I’m afraid not.”

Her partner, a blue-eyed, gray-haired man named Guy, turned out to be the maker of the goat’s-milk cheeses we were snacking on. We’d glimpsed him earlier. He was of local stock, Karin said. Guy’s family had owned the farmstead across from the B&B for the last two hundred years.

There was something about this place, I couldn’t help feeling, trying to avoid the word “magical” that seemed shopworn and not quite right. Something about the isolation of the hamlet atop a ridge inhabited since antiquity, and the view. Across the two-lane country road, the steeple of a Romanesque church poked into the air, a church no longer consecrated, said Karin. Near it flowed a spring, a sacred spring, she added, used since time immemorial. Around here, that meant a very long time. Guy lived in front of the church, a few hundred yards from the spring. The water welled up in the pasture where the grass was a brighter shade of green, like the buds of the grapevines below. The goats and cattle ate the grass nourished by the spring. The cheeses were made from the milk of the she-goats that nibbled the grass and drank the water. I had to wonder, was that why the cheese was so good? Was this the proverbial pasture where the grass grows greener? Maybe there was no need to seek elsewhere, and we’d come to the end of our pilgrimage?

South of the Roche de Solutré, in the Sâone River Valley, trucks beetled by on the
autoroute
. A TGV train flashed along its inclined track. Low-income housing projects, occupied primarily by immigrants from North Africa, hedged Caesar’s Matisco—modern-day Mâcon. The real world was down there, far enough away to be unthreatening, but I knew it awaited us.

As the cliffs of Solutré turned from yellow to orange and the sky colored itself indigo, I had the same kind of inkling I’d had in Bibracte of what “spirit of place” might mean. La Grange du Bois radiated sympathetic magic, the friendly, life-giving magic of quiet, green, uncontaminated places. It seemed to me that spirit of place wasn’t the same thing at all as spirituality, which suggested an ability to transcend earthly realities and ascend into a presumptive world of the spirit. Spirit of place had nothing to do with crucifixes, the effigy of a guru or confirmed thatoic, and a revered monk, or the words and gestures of a neo-Druid. My body was tired, and I knew deep down that I had to stop walking, but my spirits were as lively and receptive as they’d ever been. It struck me as ironic that now, on the threshold of some kind of revelation—I wasn’t sure what kind—I would not be able to walk much further. The body would fail, not the spirit.

“Would you like to visit the farm?” Karin asked. Alison agreed before I could say that I was too tired, my back and knees were shot, my mind full of disquieting thoughts.

I leaned on Alison’s arm and crossed the road. Like Karin, Guy’s cheerfulness was contagious. “Two hundred years?” he snorted, goats bleating and goat-bells tinkling around us. “That’s when my family moved into the farm. But we’ve been in the area much longer than that.” Used to this refrain by now, I asked if he thought he might be descended from the ancient Gauls. Like Astérix, Dumnorix-Dean, and others we’d met, the diminutive Guy swelled with pride and in stature. But he added that he felt no animosity toward Caesar. Guy professed himself an unabashed lover of Graeco-Roman culture, like his ancestors. What he meant was the cultivation of grapevines. He filled and quickly refilled glasses with a local white wine, and swore that he wasn’t a neo-Druid. “I know a few,” he admitted. “They’re more interested in what you’d probably call animism or nature-worship than human sacrifice, and they also like wine, and speak French.”

“I know the type,” I said, thinking of Mendocino County, California.

Back at the B&B, I propped myself at a table and examined the wrinkled contents of a sweaty envelope. “You have a postcard view,” I said, flourishing the card I’d picked up in Cluny, the one with François Mitterrand’s head floating above the Roche de Solutré. “Have you ever seen this?”

Karin said yes, she’d seen the postcard many times. “Mitterrand came here often,” she said, handing Alison the bowl of tiny goat’s cheeses. “He may even have lived in your room for a time.”

Alison glanced at me. I looked at her and felt my backbone tingle. “We’re supposed to be walking on the Way of Saint James and feeling spiritual,” she said, “and we keep running into Caesar’s ghost and François Mitterrand. Did Mitterrand stay here when he hiked up the Roche de Solutré each year for that phony photo-op pilgrimage?”

I recalled the images, broadcast each year on French TV and published in the papers, of Mitterrand looking presidential, the great Résistance hero, the heir of Vercingétorix, marching to the cliff and gazing meaningfully out across France.

Karin laughed. “This place isn’t fancy enough for that. He came here during the war. The owners were his … friends. How to put it? The owner himself was his friend. Susanne, the wife of the owner, was his mistress.” She paused. “Mitterrand was an admirer of Lamartine. People used to follow in the footsteps of the poet. Now they come to see where President Mitterrand slept.” She added that she’d been told by parties involved, parties now deceased, that Mitterrand hid out here, in our room, in 1943, after escaping several times from Nazi POW camps. How he went from POW to Vichy bureaucrat and back to POW again, and how he finally escaped, if he did escape, as opposed to being sent out as a spy or double agent, was unclear. “The French Résistance was supposedly born here,” she said, “in this building, possibly in your bedroom.” confirmed thatoic, and

“An eleventh-hour birth,” commented Guy wryly.

So, I reflected, patting the Saint Bernard on his head, Mitterrand and his PR flaks were thinking not only of primeval Solutrean man when they organized the yearly pilgrimage up the outcrop; they were also beating the drum of the Résistance, the great foundation myth of postwar France.

RETREAT OR DEFEAT?

It wasn’t a question of our feet. With twenty toes between us, we hadn’t grown a single blister in something like two hundred miles. Caesar had risked defeat at Gergovia and beaten a tactical retreat. Critognatus the wily Gaul, more realistic than heroic Vercingétorix, had tried to convince his besieged brethren at Alésia to do as their ancestors had and “keep themselves alive by eating the flesh of those who were too old or too young to fight.” Napoléon had retreated after claiming Moscow before a superior enemy: winter’s deadly cold. Mitterrand had collaborated with the Occupier until the time was ripe to join the Résistance and fight back. Or so he’d claimed. Live to fight another day—that was the message. Live to fight, learn to compromise, or wind up dead and possibly crucified.

The answer to the question in my case was less dramatic. It came to me at dawn as I carried my pack down the ladder-like staircase of the B&B. Clearly, the Gorges de la Canche and Pierreclos were taking their revenge. The damage to my knees and back wrought by my fall in the gorge had rung my number at Pierreclos, when I pulled the bell-pull, reviving structural weaknesses that had dogged me since adolescence. It felt like someone was slipping a greased lightning rod down my back. How would I break the news to Alison? Solutré was the end of the line for me.

We said farewell to Guy, Yukka, and the Swede, and as I hobbled down the steep trail, my eyes automatically searching for bones and arrowheads, I wondered if François Mitterrand had enjoyed the view as much as I had. From our bedroom window we’d watched the cool pink sunrise behind the outcrop, and felt the dawn wind rising, stirring the goats and roosters and cattle below, moments more magical even than the twilight of the night before.

Gravel and rocks, polished by fifteen thousand years of scuffing feet, now slipped under my boots. I picked my way down on the ancient path, my mind drugged from pain and lack of sleep. How could I sleep in that room, looking from the same window that Mitterrand had looked through, watching the Nazis trundle up and down the valley, past Matisco, where Caesar’s armies had camped, where the amphorae of wine had entered Gaul on Roman ships? How could anyone sleep with just one night to look upon the black silhouette of the Roche de Solutré, the lair of migratory hunters, the mysterious stalkers of wild horses those many millennia ago? Where had they come from? Where did they go? Did they worship the Earth Mother and keep the eternal flame burning, camped among dolmens and menhirs? My ignorance of history and religion was vast. I could spend my next lifetime exploring layer after layer. If only I could believe in a second or third lifetime, or a reincarnation.

Following behind Alison, I limped through the prehistory museum at the foot of Solutré, unsure whether I was dreaming or really seeing laurel-leaf spearheads and arrowheads fashioned from flint, and ingenious weaponry made of stone, bone, or antler. The hunters of Solutré hadn’t herded their prey off the top of the cliff, from the spot where Mitterrand always had his picture taken. The truth, we learned, was less exciting. The hunters had simply lain in wait at the bottom of the rock, surprising horses and elks that trotted by. The paleolithic wandererss head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo never set down roots here, or so our current state of ignorance suggests. They’d been forever on the move, following the herds, in tune with the four seasons. Climate change had slowly altered their habitat, until the herds had disappeared, and the men of Solutré could no longer eke out an existence. If that wasn’t a lesson to be learned, quickly, then what was learning for?

Alison waved her arms and looked down at me from the top of the cliff, egging me on. A Mirage fighter jet darted over her head, its engines spewing flames. On his pilgrimages, Mitterrand and his entourage had used helicopters, walking only the last hundred yards or so, preceded by journalists and camera operators. Alison had walked all the way to the top, all the way from Vézelay, in fact, but I would not be able to join her.

By the time I stopped climbing, I’d hauled myself almost halfway up the hogback. There my legs refused to obey me. I thought of Donkey Hotey and the windmills of my mind, but could not summon laughter. Judging from my own unscientific, non-representative sample of life experiences, two things seemed clear. First, I could go no further and would probably have to be removed by helicopter. Second, reason was in control of only one small part of my brain. Reason was one of the many gods clamoring within. Related to that ree narthex of t

EPILOGUE

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

BASKING IN UNIQUENESS

The Pyrenees Mountain to someone at the mayor, evolutionyhamlet of Huntto at 1,700 feet above sea level is aptly named. Hunters’ blinds surround it. Hunting had been a leitmotif for the last month. It was the main reason we were now equipped with tuneful brass bells dangling from our packs. During our zigzag approach to Huntto, several dozen acolytes of Elmer Fudd had roared up and down the winding panoramic roads in four-wheel drive vehicles bristling with gun barrels. Not a one of the dark-eyed, beetling Basque occupants had waved at or spoken to us, not even the pair who grazed us with their side-view mirror. Could they have guessed we preferred our wildlife alive?

We checked in for the night at Ferme Ithuburia, a pilgrims’ hostel perched a third of the way up the mountainside. This was our last stop in France—or so we expected. Actually we’d already left France when we entered Basque Country a week earlier on October 10, four months after our train ride back to Paris from Mâcon way back in May. We’d restarted our trek in the town of Le Puy-en-Velay and had been hiking again for nearly two months. Now we were on the homestretch of our little saunter: another twenty miles or so and we’d made it.