Jean Pierre Dutour is eighty, sitting at the table next to me, we are drinking wine and I am eating olives, waiting for the dinner bell to ring. He is speaking to me, first bit in English; which I understand fine. We...do...Did... the first three words or so in English, and then he will say some words in French that I know, like theater or table, and then he will begin going in French, which I do not know so fast, until he is laughing and waving in his joyfullness.
Jean Pierre was in theater for years and years and years. There are masks all over the living room, costumes in the attic, a stage in the basement. He is writing and rewriting a stage play in his office, every day. How to say? He is easy to understand. He talks with his whole, wise old body face. He talks with his eyes, looking woefully at something in the next room. He talks with his hands, weaving them like birds, or pointing quickly at some precious air. He talks with his mouth, pouting, roaring, laughing, pooting. I dont know what pooting is, but I am sure Jean Pierre would.
He is laughing, and then he calls to the next room, NANCY, and Nancy comes, his wife who is the light of this LightHouse. Traducer, he says, and she translates, what he has just been telling me, which is often something like "Jean Pierre says that, there are not many Dutours in this country, but the craziest and the most famous live in this house."
I stayed in Thore La Rochette for 10 days, until Kim and Joe returned in their bed/van. We climbed into the cave riddled hills, with ropes and harnesses and cookies in baskets on our bikes. We took headlamps into the long dark corridors, past the places where the weasel left his skull, past the buried mine cart and the bricked up passage way. Through the underground where German soldiers hid guns and ammunition after the war, where some teenagers blew up themselves, as the rumours go.
I climbed up alone to the upper floor, and Nancy gave me her camera, and by its flashing light I crawled into a pit cavern. and Just like an old Dungeons and Dragons game, I never knew what was around the bend. FLASH of the camera. Another tunnel. FLASH a small room. FLASH a stone bench. So I sat there in the dark. Jean Pierre said there used to be a fortress, and there used to be a cult, and those caves have been habited for thousands of years.
Kim and Joe and I drove to Mont Saint Michel, the city on the island with the Abby of the Angel shining over the rising and falling tide. We visit Kims home town of Dieppe, walk along the beach where the Scottish regiment died round Dday, where the Canadians died. Where the fighting was. Dieppe is a new town, because the old one got bombed. The north border of France. The closest place to England.
And then back to Paris, to pick up my sister. An all night party in Paris. Guisane and I dancing in the streets, sleeping on the steps of some Cathedral, waiting for the Metros to run again.
And tonight I am again at Malakoff, where we have spent the last hour with the Devil in our hands, that is, a cart for carrying heavy shit. How do we say it in english? A dolly. Here a dolly is a devil. We carried the Devil around Malakoff, picking through the Poubell, that is the trash; because it is Sunday and that is when the trash goes out. We took our favorite trash in the devil, and put it in the basement of the house at Malakoff. That is where I will sleep tonight.
Bon réve. Good dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment