All Of Monday’s Reasons - 3
3. Leaving Aquitaine
Map
It was sad getting into the taxi to the station. Lindsay came with us to catch his train to Toulouse. The goodbye my friends sent us off with was as warm as the welcome, but in all honesty it felt good to be moving, which was half the intended purpose of the trip, if there were such a thing at all. I knew I would miss the boys, as it would be a long time before I saw them again in England.
The taxi driver was a fifty year old French man and like many locals was of Spanish descent. He spoke Spanish and German but all he could say in English was “I love you” and “shut the door”.
He said that the UK was more independent than France because it was an island and we agreed that the temperature was hot, but not as hot as yesterday. He said it was a good thing we weren’t going to the Var or the Alpes-Maritimes regions.
“Why’s that?”
“Fires. All over Provence,” he said, “because it’s so hot.”
“It is very hot.”
“It’s mostly arson. We used to cut their heads off, you know.”
“Who’s that?”
“The arsonists.”
“No, I mean who cut their heads off?”
“Oh, the firemen, the town hall.” He took one hand off the steering wheel and sliced it through the air. “Chop! Fires were down ninety percent for fifty years.”
“What happens to them now?”
“They’re let off on the pretext of madness. But sometimes the firemen start fire.” He waited for my question.
“The firemen?”
“They get paid double their money when they’re fighting fires. Otherwise they just get standby money.”
“Scandalous,” I said.
“Eh,” he said, “C’est comme ca.”
When we got to the station we shook hands and he wished us bon voyage.
We caught a train from Agen and changed at Toulouse, where we said goodbye to Lindsay.
“Yeah, and Cliff,” he said, “take care of yourself,OK?”
“Don’t worry.”
As I said this I felt confident that I wouldn’t run into anything I couldn’t handle. I possessed a characteristic of invincibility which older and wiser people had criticized in me before. A lack of experience made me naive, but with that came the arrogance to assume that there was nothing fate could deal me that would throw me off balance for a second.
He caught his train, and Leo and I walked into around Toulouse with two hours to kill and a shopping list. We bought two apples, a bag of macaroni and some grated cheese. We sat in a park and ate the sandwiches we made at Zarya’s house, which already seemed so far behind.
The train was at the station when we returned. It was beautifully small by international travel standards; just four cars lead by a diesel engine. It left on time and soon we were away from any sign of a city.
The dramatic scenery provided a magnificent backdrop to my own illusions of myself as some great explorer headed for regions uncharted. Perched chateaux peeked out from wooded mountainsides as the ambitious engine hauled us up higher into the Pyrenees. We passed several little chalets where families were drinking on their balconies and we waved back as they raised glasses.
Thiers was a porch culture; the families sat on verandas drinking, talking, and laughing. It was like the American midwest back yard. Some of them even dangled under patio roofs in swingin where they may have shared their first kiss. They seeemed friendly through the train window. A girl no older that four, wearing a white dress, waved at the train as it passed her and then went back to playing with her dolls on the blanket in her garden.
We climbed higher into the mountains as the forests grew thin and the air became thin and crisp. The mountain peaks got sharper and the temperature dropped as the altitude increased so I put on my sweatshirt. Leo and I talked as effortlessly as friends can for most of the trip, but neither of us could take our eyes of the thin black river flowing down alongside the tracks.
The railway narrowed down to a single line and the train stopped at a small town called Aix les Thermes, which judging by the name was probably once a hot springs resort. A skinny official entered the car. “Ladies and gentlemen, those of you who wish to proceed should go to the next carriage.”
The seven of us who were in the last car moved up into what became a three carriage train including the engine. We continued to climb as the valley became a ravine with hundred foot high, steep walls on either side.
Through gaps in the rock, the thrill of the scenery started to show on the faces of the other passengers as we approached the Spanish border, where little villages sat perched on mountains tops.
We stopped at the end of the line, at a French border town called Enveitg, a town I had never heard of before nor have since, which sits at just over a thousand metres above sea level. It was a sleepy place, and although there were enough houses to accommodate about a few hundred people, it was remarkably quiet. Wandering through the streets we found a water fountain on a corner. Across the road was a man in his late sixties talking to two women the same age.
I took a few steps towards them and pointed at the fountain, asking them if the water was drinkable.
“You’ll have to come closer, I’m hard of hearing,” said the man, with a friendly, rustic smile.
“Is it all right to drink the water?” I said, perhaps patronisingly loud.
“Yes, of course. Only there lacks the essential element:” he paused, “the Pernod.”
I thanked him and walked away laughing out loud and could hear him chuckling behind me.
We drank and filled up our bottles with the cool water and to the edge of the village. We found a field on top of a hill and I put up the tent in an area secluded by large rocks, before watching the sun set as we made macaroni and cheese on my small cooker.
Leo went to sleep in the tent and I stretched out under the stars with my sleeping mat and bag in a grassy patch between the bolders. After darkness fell the mist rolled off the mountains, and it grew so cold I was shaking, even wearing with most of the clothes I had packed. I squeezed myself into the tent, which was seven feet long by about two wide and one and a half high. We didn’t get much sleep for purely platonic reasons, but I took comfort from the greater surroundings.
Nobody in the world knew where we were and even we had only a rough idea. It didn’t seem like it was me who had been sitting in classrooms three weeks earlier, but that didn’t matter. Nothing really did except for that minuscule moment constantly wedged between space the where the past plays out and the future unfolds.
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