La Couarde

I pedal blithely into the village and stop next to a church, lock my bike and wander inside.  I examine the leaflets on the table, vow to remember the title of one, to make my friends laugh later:  La Fidelite:  Mission Impossible?  I step quietly down the middle aisle, follow a side aisle back, look at a model of the church, read some comments in the little book left there for that purpose.  I find one that's memorable:  "Returned and retrieved lost helmet."  I wonder if the priest of this church read that message, imagine him passing the helmet and worrying about the well-being of the person who left it, hoping they would return to retrieve it.  But you don't always know where you've lost things -- that's why they're lost.  I hate losing things, hate being lost.  I'm on a small island, so if I know what side the ocean should be on I'm not lost, not really.  These villages, though.  Several times I've gone to visit a village and gotten completely lost trying to get out.  I dart around, trying different ways out, like a sparrow in a train station.

A man enters with two young boys and they dip their hands in the holy water.  The boys look anxiously at their grandfather as they first watch him and then do it themselves.  He seems to be showing them how for the first time.  His eyes are averted, his expression resolute, ready for them to fail.  I feel the need both to leave them alone and to escape. 

The church releases me -- it could take me or leave me -- and I wander in the growing crowd, past artisan and clothing and toy and shoe stores.  I pick up a newspaper and have a coffee at a café.  A child at the table next to mine launches into a temper tantrum.  He doesn't want to wear his hat.  He uses the only means of persuasion at his disposal:  repetition.  "I don't WANT to put on a hat.  I don't WANT to put on a hat.  I don't WANT to put on a hat."  Repeating it, and repeatedly being ignored, inspires him in the direction of primal rage. I understand him.  More than anything else, I find, being ignored when you speak does inspire rage. 

"You can cry," says his mother.  "That will change nothing."

As he screams, I read about terror and heightened security and Arabs being spit on while out taking a walk on the Promenade des Anglais in their hometown.  I read about the things people are saying about the attacks in Nice, Munich, Rouen.  After something terrible happens there is panic, confusion, incoherence, and then silence as people gather their thoughts.  They decide what to say, and then start saying it.  People are saying things and other people are recording the things they say and disseminating them indiscriminately, democratically, and the people who read and listen to them then think of their own things to say.  I fear they resonate in the wrong ears.  I know that a good deal of it does.

Marine LePen says, (triumphantly, I think), "They are killing our youth, assassinating our police, and cutting the throats of our priests.  Wake up!"  Donald Trump says France wouldn't have this problem with terrorism if people were allowed to carry guns.  The Turkish press says that Obama was behind the failed military coup.  The boy at the table next to me says he doesn't want to wear his hat. We should be listening to that boy, I think.  Choose your battles, I want to tell his mother.  I’m with the little boy.  Some people just don't like wearing hats.

On my way out I realize I've left my glasses somewhere and retrace my steps.  I get irritable when I lose things, and have to take a deep breath and rehearse my question in French before asking, ever so calmly, "Did you find a pair of glasses?"  I ask at the bakery, at the little souvenir store where I bought my friend a ceramic spoon rest for her kitchen, go back into the church, where the grandfather and the two boys are standing in a chapel gazing at the candles in their little red pots.  Is someone sick, I wonder?  Dead?  Or are they simply attracted to the flames?

This time, it turns out the people at La Maison de la Presse, where I bought the paper, folded my glasses up and placed them on top of the register when I floated out, stricken by the dire headlines.  They all seem immensely relieved when I enter and ask after them.  I'm touched.  Such a simple thing:  to fold up a pair of misplaced glasses and place them, hopefully, on top of a cash register.  They hoped I would return for them, and now I have.  We rejoice together.  "Now you can see!" they exclaim. 

I say goodbye, exit the store thinking:  things like this should matter more. 

When it comes time to leave the village it seems to have swallowed me.  I can't get out.  I ask a woman selling striped sailor shirts.  She points and says uncertainly that she thinks it is that way, but "the bike path, I don't know.  I come by car." 

I ask a woman in the street who looks local.  I can spot the local people by the way they seem to hold their heads at a different angle, taking it all for granted.  They chat with the painters and masons and carpenters who work inobtrusively inside open doorways.  They indulge those of us who have flown in from other places to roost in the sun, to ride bicycles in trembling lines, calling to each other, sprinting into the ocean and being thrown out again by its waves.

She points and says,  "You go straight, straight, straight.  Then there will be signs.” 

I go straight, straight, straight and come to a T.  There is a sign with a double arrow on it, pointing both left and right, and above it a sign with an image of a bicycle.  She said there would be signs – not that the signs would be helpful. 

I push on, delving into street after street.  And then, in a breath, there.  I'm out.  I see a sign for Saint Martin.  I know where that is. 

As I pedal, I come up behind a woman riding side-by-side with a small boy wearing a striped sailor shirt.  I ride behind them for a moment, too shy to ring my bell, listening to their conversation.  They're hurrying to meet Papa, who is waiting for them at the windmill.  Then they're to go eat, all of them together.  The woman turns her head and notices me.  She reaches down, places her hand flat on the boy's back, and gives him a little push. 

"Move over," she tells him.  "Let the lady pass."