Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

But it may be in the quiet center, among the bankers of Netanya and the carpenters of Nazareth, that the real history of a place is written after all. As another carpenter from Nazareth observed a long time ago, it is the meek who shall inherit the earth.

11

Cherchez la Femme

The rented Renault made an ugly sound as it struggled up the mountain incline. Outside, little pinhead snowflakes fell gently from a steel-gray December sky. In the highlands set back from the coast, the famed mild winters of the South of France can be raw and bone-chilling.

I raised my voice over the engine’s wheeze. “ ‘Motte d’ Aigue,’ ” I read to Tony. “We’re looking for a village called ‘Lump of Points.’ ”

Theoretically, St. Martin de la Brasque would lie just beyond. But it was hard to be sure. The village didn’t make it onto any of the local maps. And no one seemed to have heard of the place.

On either side of us the mountains of the Lubéron rose green in their year-round sheath of oaks and cedars, pines and stunted thymes. Rows of vines, hard-pruned for winter, quilted the valley floor. Their leaves had turned red, then yellow, and fallen. And the saws had been through, turning summer’s generous sprawls into two-armed skeletons shaking nubby fists at the louring sky.

It was Cézanne’s landscape, and I loved it, as I continued to love so much that was French: the poetry, the novels, the films, the cuisine, and the beautiful little corner of the Alpes Maritimes where Darleen and Michael had built a whitewashed house on a couple of terraced acres. On a brilliantly sunny December day in 1984, Tony and I had been married there.

But there was so much about France that I had also come to despise: the murderous arrogance of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, the corrupt self-interest of French foreign policy in the Middle East.

I was living in Sydney in 1986 when a French government bomb blew up the Greenpeace protest boat, Rainbow Warrior, in a New Zealand harbor, killing a young Portuguese photographer. At the time I was working for an Australian weekly, the National Times, and I wrote a cover story on the bombers that was illustrated by the Tricolor of France, scrawled with the French word for shit, merde.

The day the issue appeared, I got a call from the local Le Monde reporter, who thought her readers would find this flag desecration arresting. She wanted a comment on what it revealed about Australian attitudes toward France. I told her that most Australians saw the French as scumbag international outlaws, and then I invited her over to my place for a garlic-studded gigot wrapped in fresh rosemary.

Sylvie turned out to be much more the sort of correspondent I’d had in mind when I wrote away for a French pen pal in 1968. She came to dinner with her partner, Jean-Pierre, who had actually been a cobblestone hurler of that angry Paris spring, one of the beaux étudiants avec colère I’d admired on the TV news.

Jean-Pierre had tossed his engineering studies to become a Maoist intellectual, one of the founders of the leftist newspaper Libération. But by the time I met him in the mid-1980s, France’s conservatives were once again in the ascendant. Jean-Pierre’s tousled curls had started to turn silver and his little boy was about to turn two. He sat at my table, swirling the wine in his glass as the gigot turned slowly over the open fire. “Paris,” he said. The boredom in his voice turned the word into a sigh, followed by a sound that defied accurate transliteration—part raspberry, part jeer. “It is finished for me.”

He yearned, he said, to encounter “something primitive.” He proposed to explore the Outback. I saw them off from Sydney—their toddler Benjamin clutching the last baguette he would see in months. I hoped that what they found wouldn’t be more primitive than he bargained for.

In central Australia they were bewitched by Aboriginal art—the richly colored Dreamtime maps through which individuals passed on pieces of the store of tribal knowledge. The paintings spoke the language of the desert landscape with a fluency few other works had matched. At a time when only a handful of Australians appreciated these paintings, Jean-Pierre and Sylvie became connoisseurs. Soon they were mounting major exhibitions back in France.

When an invitation arrived for the first big show in Montpellier, I smiled. I thought about the day my sister had taken me to see the Rodin sculptures. I wondered if there would be a little girl in Montpellier whose love affair with art would begin as she stared at those powerful, mysterious images of a faraway desert and a life at the ends of the earth.

In December 1995, France exploded in the worst unrest the country had seen since those heady days in 1968. Everywhere, workers were striking and rioting in protest at government attempts to dismantle social security and favorable work rules.

Tony and I read accounts of the unrest with growing interest. During our years as Foreign Correspondents, arriving in places just as other people rushed to get out of them, we’d learned that troubled times often made for great tourism opportunities: empty hotels, uncrowded sightseeing, bargain prices. It was close to our wedding anniversary. We could have a romantic visit to the site of our nuptials, catch up with Sylvie and Jean-Pierre in Montpellier, and do what I’d longed to do since finding Janine’s old letters: search for the elusive village of St. Martin de la Brasque in the foothills of the Lubéron.

EN gRÈVE read the hand-lettered sign at Marseilles airport, where a strike by customs officers left no one to check bags. EN gRÈVE read a similar sign on the unmanned tollbooths of the autoroute, where no one waited to collect the usual fistful of francs. And, just as we’d anticipated, since everyone was en grève, no one was en vacances.

Our hotel, a