Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (9 page)

We crossed a modern causeway, pausing to admire the lake’s blue waters, so worryingly low. Then we found the dirt road to Marigny and started to climb. The road looked suspiciously straight, like the Roman road to Bazoches. Had Caesar ridden up it? Had I always been obsessed with Caesar and Rome? If so, why? The answer seemed straightforward enough. It wasn’t merely my Roman genes and the idyll I’d experienced while living in Rome as a child. My fascination stemmed from the eerie, disturbing similarities between the Roman Empire and contemporary America.

Reading between the conqueror’s lines, Caesar operated much like contemporary Russian or Sicilian Mafiosi or African warlords. What the Romans wanted were recruits and a cut—protection money, a slice of the tax action. They called that “paying tribute.” If you paid tribute and respected Rome’s laws—including ritual sacrifice to the gods and, later, to the divine emperor—everything would be all right. Blond or black-haired and brown-skinned, it didn’t matter: you were a friend or citizen of Rome. Rome would civilize you, give you Latin, straighten and pave your roads, provide a new pantheon of gods, and teach you how to build with hewn, straight-edged stone. Not hypocrites, Caesar and his minions didn’t call the process “spreading democracy.” He called it Romanization.

HOME SWEET ROME

As we lumbered skyward on what was proving to be an interminable straightaway, I thought of the Biblical metaphors of pilgrimage and the kind of civil and military engineering Caesar and Vauban had perfected. The concepts were related. The straightand-narrow was all-important to Roman commerce and conquest. Rectilinear roads and hewn-stone cities divided into quadrants along the east-west
decumanus
, and north-south
cardo
—the word that gives us cardinal points—were the objective correlatives of rectitude, rightness, correctness. The Celts’ roads and bosky trails were different. They’d looped and woven, like their hedgerows and the randomly scattered wooden houses they built in watery, wooded, dark places. The Romans worshipped light. The Celts worshipped darkness. Their most powerful god—according to Caesar—was named rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and Dis, the god of night. They even measured time by night, not by day.

Another thought swam up from the depths. It was the orderly, hierarchical spirit of Rome that infused the Catholic Church. As the Empire unraveled, the pontiff took over from the emperor—who was also known as the Pontifex Maximus, a semi-divine “bridge builder” between man and the gods. That’s precisely what “pontiff” meant. The divine-right, Catholic kings who ruled France for over a thousand years, from the breakup of Rome to the French Revolution, had been Caesar’s heirs. In tandem with the Vatican they’d continued the pontiff’s bridge-building work.

So, was it the spirit of the Celts—the dark, meandering anarchic spirit of pre-Roman, pre-Christian days—that had infused the French Revolutionaries and
their
heirs, the militant secularists of today?

Maybe.

No wonder, I told myself, turning to look back to where Alison was framing her 516th photograph of the day. No wonder loony French nationalists simultaneously embraced First Nation causes and admitted to institutionalized anti-Americanism. America, the New Rome. That’s how they saw us.

In the twenty-plus years I’d lived in France, I’d rarely encountered a Frenchman of whatever political persuasion who actively disliked individual Americans. A certain kind of Frenchman resented
America
and what it stood for. Why? Simple: what could be more objectionable to a descendant of the anarchic Gauls than the distant rule of the bright, brash, pushy New Rome? What the tribal Celtic Frenchman saw, filtered through a long and bloody history unfamiliar to the rest of the world, were the proselytizing, puritanical, plutocratic militarists whose neon-lit, grid-block cities, straightaway Interstates and oligarchic multinational corporations smelled of the corruption of Late Antiquity.

America: the New Rome and its military-industrial, neo-Mafioso Empire, an empire with global reach. Is that what they saw?

My head hurt. I needed coffee.

We continued to slog uphill on the straight, putative Roman road as more rash thoughts sprang to mind. My temples and eyes ached. I was an addict, a caffeine junkie. It occurred to me, thinking back to what the tortoise had said in the dining room, that we and the Romans had something else in common. They’d used wine as WMDs—Weapons of Mass Drunkenness. An amphora bought you a Celtic slave. More recently, we had used narcotics and prescription drugs to the same effect. Clearly, the mafia was us. We’d morphed from guys with submachine guns, into legitimate businessmen. We’d diversified into pharmaceuticals, defense, fast food, entertainment, gaming—into corporate America’s myriad incarnations, some good, others iffy, still others downright dangerous.

My temples throbbed harder with every step. Luckily, before I could embarrass myself with further outlandish thoughts, I spied the steeple of Marigny l’Eglise. My fatigue-induced, delusional ranting ebbed. Once we’d slipped off our backpacks and washed up, the soft-spoken innkeeper at our B&B put us on a coffee drip, and all was well again. No one had heard my thoughts. No one was listening. There was no military-industrial complex, democracy and freedom of expression were safe from marketers, and I did miss Google. Unfortunately, the B&B was not equipped with either a computer or an Internet connection. I couldn’t download or upload the sounds I’d recorded—the Cure River rushing over rocks, the bells of Vézelay, birds, cows, Mirage fighters, and Donkey Hotey braying and gnashing his teeth.

NÉ want to light a candle9HChO-RURAL REALITY CHECK

“We’re
néo-ruraux,”
said the proprietor, a tall, thin, dark-haired man in his forties. He was also named Philippe, like the man at Pierre Perthuis, and he’d visibly survived trauma. Much of his lower face had been removed, it wasn’t clear why. With his wife Armelle, Philippe had left Paris in the year 2000 to reinvent himself in a rural setting, much as the tortoise had. “Something healthier, saner than big-city life,” he added softly, pouring more coffee.

In Paris, Armelle had been a manager. He was in publishing—an editor at the defunct, formerly prestigious Presses Universitaires Parisiennes. That explained the quality of the books in the century-old house they’d transformed into a B&B. The plank floors shone, the understated contemporary furnishings offered genuine comfort. A sculpted Buddha’s head on a pedestal appeared to be listening to us. Were the couple spiritually inclined, I wondered, like the other Philippe we’d met? Had they sought enlightenment and discovered Druids, or the big and little wheels of the Buddha?

I didn’t dare ask, fearing we’d wind up in the land of crystals, horoscopes, and Druids and New Age solutions to the crises of middle age. So once Alison had disappeared into the kitchen with Armelle and the couple’s newborn baby, I quietly queried Philippe about the local inhabitants, wondering if they had welcomed him. He shrugged. “To them we’re foreigners.” There were 342 residents left in Marigny, a
commune
spread over many miles. However, Philippe and Armelle had befriended the other six neorural Parisian colonists who’d also bought rundown properties in the village and restored them. “The mayor is nice,” he added. “He lived in Paris for years and understands.”

What the mayor understood was the “neo” phenomenon—the neo-ruralists, neo-nature-lovers, neo-pilgrims, and neo-retirees, who together were bringing life back to abandoned French regions. “People like you,” Philippe ventured, “people who need to recharge their batteries, reinvent themselves, not necessarily for religious reasons but because they feel an irresistible need to re-energize in a rural context.” He turned his head, making an unnecessary effort to hide the disfigured side of his face. I felt deeply sorry for him, but stopped myself. He seemed to be regaining his health, he had a lovely wife, a newborn son, a wonderful house, and his spirits were high. There was no need for me to pity him.

“You haven’t embraced Buddhism, by chance?” I raised my finger toward the bust. “I understand there’s a major Buddhist community in Burgundy.” Something about Philippe’s detachment and quiet optimism reminded me of two childhood friends in California. After lives of sun, fun, and skirt-chasing, one had become a Buddhist, the other a Quaker.

Philippe shrugged again. “I’m not sure. You begin to seek answers and make changes at a certain point. Sometimes it’s too late. For me, it may have been in the nick of time.” He paused and watched me nod my head—his words sounded familiar. “I’m not sure I buy the reincarnation story, and I have difficulty imagining a primordial Buddha manifesting himself on earth for our benefit. It sounds a lot like Christ the Messiah, doesn’t it?”

I nodded. The similarity had occurred to me before, but I really didn’t know enough to draw comparisons. Buddhism predated Christianity by about five hundred years. It was conceivable the Christians had taken elements not only from Judaism and Paganism, but other religions too. “I studied marti important stopover or starting point on fa nal arts for a long time,” I confided, “I meditated and did yoga, and listened to our karate master talk about some fairly arcane subjects, but nothing ever stuck.”

The truth is, when Alison and I did karate and yoga, my knees hurt so much that the pain had overwhelmed everything else. My congenital skepticism had also helped keep me at a distance from spiritual evolution, if such a thing existed.

“It sounds as if you might be seeking something,” he said, “though you don’t seem to know it, and probably wouldn’t admit it, which is fine. I was like that, a rationalist, a certified Parisian secularist intellectual. It’s fashionable to disdain religion, and there are plenty of good reasons to do so. I snorted at spirituality, preferring philosophy and ethics. Sometimes you need to wander. The meandering seems pointless, but it isn’t. Nothing is wasted, nothing is pointless, and nothing comes from nowhere.”

The silence held us for a full minute. “I think I know what you mean,” I started to say, filled with dread and unexpected urgency, the same earnest need to talk that I’d felt back in Pierre-Perthuis with the other Philippe. Since leaving the Bay Area nearly twenty-five years earlier, I was no longer accustomed to the touchy-feely confessional, and I disliked the idea in any case. Dissecting spirituality, whatever it was, had never thrilled me. “Alcoholism and obesity are like that,” I said at last: “there’s always a cause, though it’s hidden.”

“There’s a cause in the personal and the wider sphere, from problem-drinking to war and terrorism. We all have trouble facing ignorance. You see, for me atheism was easy—you don’t believe in God or the church, that’s fine, most of the world doesn’t believe in the same God, and the church is corrupt and retrograde, burns heretics, believes in miracles, and so on. But then you ask yourself, are you the hardcore kind of atheist, the real, authentic scientific skeptic who can say with confidence ‘It all started in the primal sea, from nothingness’ and believe in nothingness? That may be. But good luck explaining to yourself where nothingness came from and how all of this,” he spread his arms, “came from nothing. I’m not sure science really claims to know everything. Science knows it has limits.”

Armelle called from the kitchen, bringing us back to earth. Philippe smiled with difficulty, cupping his jaw, and said he had to help prepare dinner. They were expecting a crowd tonight.

SAINTS ALIVE

From our upstairs bedroom I pulled back the curtains and watched the rain pour down. Mist shrouded the tower of the out-sized church. It rose over the rooftops and was by far the biggest building in the village. Would the bells toll all night, waking us over and over, as they had in Cure? In Paris, near our apartment, the bells of Saint Paul’s church ring on the half hour, 24/7. How is it they get away with disturbing the peace like that? And why were religion and spirituality such taboo subjects in France, I wondered? Everywhere else I’d lived, people handled faith without undue drama. Everyone was a nominal Roman Catholic in Italy, for instance, and swam in it like anchovies in the Mediterranean. Most Americans wore their beliefs like comfortable, elasticized jogging clothes—exception made for the radical Christian right. The French were different. The practicing Christians I knew—not to mention Jews, Muslims, Animists, Buddhists, and others—were careful, sometimes secretive, about acknowledging their faith, especially the Protestants among them. Religious persecution had marked them. The French Revolutionary heritage of anti-clericalism to someone at the mayorwe was had survived, and the cult of the secular Republic had supplanted religion. A Frenchman’s first allegiance was expected to be to the Republic, not God, whatever name God or the gods or their messengers might bear. Paradoxically, that didn’t stop the church bells from ringing at 3 A.M., or prevent Christmas, Easter, and Ascension from being holidays. Now that I thought of it, almost all Frenchmen’s names are saints’ names, often in surprising cross-gender combinations such as Jean-Marie for a boy or Marie-Pierre for a girl. Until the end of the 1990s, French law actually forbade the use of names not belonging to Old Testament figures or saints. And to this day, no religious symbols, including the cross, can be worn ostentatiously or displayed in public offices, hospitals, or schools. To me, the arrangement had always seemed like a civilized fudge, an imperfect but functional compromise to carry forward the rival French traditions of Christianity and Republican statist secularism. It codified not freedom
of
religion, but rather freedom
from
religion. The French had had their violent Wars of Religion in the 1500s and 1600s between Protestants and Catholics, and at least in modern times had succeeded in avoiding anything like the Troubles of Northern Ireland. Why wasn’t the compromise working anymore?

Clearly, the cult of the secular Republic hadn’t foreseen globalization or the arrival of five million Muslims. Some wanted to wear headscarves in public schools—something that was strictly forbidden by law and frowned upon by nearly all French people—and a few swore allegiance to radical Islam. I couldn’t help regretting how a few thousand uncompromising Islamists were driving otherwise civilized Frenchmen toward intolerance, xenophobia, racism, and unsavory nationalism. As far as I could tell, what most French appeared to desire was not racial or religious tension but the freedom to name their children after soap opera and reality show stars, wear religious symbols as fashion statements, benefit from subsidized, secular education, retire early, and buy SUVs—the ultimate symbol of aspirational materialism in a country where gas typically costs about $10 a gallon.