Year In The World Part 8

I'm not very interested in shopping here. I buy an embroidered black cotton blouse and a blue one for my friend Aurora, and slippers for my daughter. Rachid takes me to the ceramics district, and we watch pots and bowls being thrown from gray clay and painted. The Fez blue decorates most everything. I pick up a couple of small bowls for olives.

We stop into a herb store. Rachid says, "The owner is a special person. You will see." Mon Kade Khalid, a pale man with a slight hunch, introduces himself and shows me his oils, hennas, and barks. He holds to my nose something that looks like yellow erasers-the musk gland of the gazelle. "The animal rubs against a tree, and we then gather the gland. It will scent your drawer for two years." He has jars of colored rocks on a high shelf and explains that they ward off the evil eye. I pick out a packet of the forty-spice seasoning called ra.s.se el hanoute, which translates as "heat of the shop."

"How do you feel, madame?" he asks.

"Very good."

"People come to me. If they have problems. I have things to make the baby. I have argan oil against arthritis. I have things also for the cooking. Here, give me your hand." He rubs my hand between his, then holds his hands an inch away from mine, above and below. I feel a definite warmth emanating from his hands. He is staring into my eyes. Oh no, the lure of the exotic. The odd thing is, when he moves his hands away, I feel a sudden s.h.i.+ver. "Now how do you feel?"

"Wonderful," I say. And I do. A fresh push of strength courses down my back, through my legs, like an adrenaline rush. All afternoon I experience a euphoria, a feeling of bodily force I knew in childhood.

We see tombs and museums. I think my feet have covered every inch of the medina. We walk a long way in the heat and stop at what looks like remains of a fortress. Rachid says, "This is Palais Glaoui. Since you are interested in houses." He knocks at a huge wooden door in a block-long wall. A dark, narrow-faced man who looks like a forgotten jazz musician opens the door. They embrace. "Welcome to my family," Abdel Khalek says. "This is my home." We enter a vast tiled courtyard with a fountain surrounded by a grand pool. Weeds grow out of the fountain, and the pool is home to a lone goose standing in mud. The scale of the house triples any house I've seen in the medina. Ballroom-size rooms open on the outer side to overgrown gardens, where I glimpse remains of tiled fountains and scraggly citrus trees. My mind restores the gardens to those I've seen in old Persian paintings. Abdel takes us through corridors to another wing, where his grandfather once kept one hundred women. The hallways overhanging the courtyard sag, but the floral delicacy of the carved plaster still bespeaks the feminine world of the harem.

"Did he say one hundred?"

Rachid says, "His grandfather was a busy man."

Abdel leads us to the palace kitchen, not so different, except for being run-down and dusty, from a big kitchen in an English manor house-a bank of stoves, copper pots, cavernous s.p.a.ce. Then he shows us "the first bathroom in Fez," with English Edwardian fixtures and even a porcelain, not tile, tub. In his room, also a large room with a center door to the courtyard, I see a picture of his grandmother, perhaps age twenty, in a stiff, voluminous white dress, her face young and bright. No veil, no robes-I want to ask who she was in the hierarchy but don't dare. This complex is only one of seventeen adjoining houses, all closed, all verging on ruin. I don't ask, but I imagine that with a hundred women producing children, the inheritances won't ever be sorted out. We sit on long banquettes and are served mint tea and gazelle horns, an almond cookie in a crescent shape. Not a jazz musician, Abdel paints as a vocation and wanders his ancestral home, sometimes showing it to guests the guides bring.

Ed feels like walking out, so we stroll to La Maison Bleue, a fine palace house restored as a hotel. A scattering of French and English tourists are having drinks in the courtyard where two men play crude string instruments. We sit by a fountain, and I drink a gla.s.s of champagne while Ed sips water. Then we are shown to colorful banquettes and a low table. I love the Moroccan style of dining. "Tajine?" the waiter offers.

Ed sinks back and whispers, "Never."

We order couscous with lamb and all the usual salads. Ed takes a few bites; he's on his way but not there yet. The serene beauty of the place takes me far from the rough and heady medina I have come to know through Rachid.

Ed wants to go out on our last morning. Rachid guides us to a taxi, and we get out in the mellah, the old Jewish ghetto. Rachid says, "Give the driver one euro." The low, low prices here continue to startle me. The ghetto, with timbered overhangs, the characteristic windows where women could see out but not be seen, twisted alleys and small shops would seem atmospheric if I had not seen the medina still sunk in its medieval mindset. This ghetto is quite spruced up. We look at a UNESCO-restored synagogue, with a ritual bathing tub underground where the crypt would be in a Christian church. Rachid then leads us through the Jewish cemetery with blinding-white humped graves. Rachid says, "The mellah was formalized in 1438, but Jews had lived here for centuries. The wall around it was actually built for their protection from Arabs but later became a confinement. The Jews were kept to their quarter by the ban on wearing their black shoes outside it. Only in the seventeen hundreds were they allowed a woven sandal, which enabled them to leave."

"What does mellah mean?" Ed wonders.

Rachid says, "Salt. The place of salt processing. This is the old word for the place. And the legend is that heads of victims killed in battle were salted and preserved here so they could be displayed on the walls." He points toward the king's palace.

"Any Jews left?"

Rachid says, "A few. They live in the new town. Everyone lives together in the new town with no problem."

We stop at the Royal Palace, huge and shut tight. There must be gardens-even trees-inside that the sun-struck populace could enjoy of a Friday evening.

In a side street we meet a boy toddling with his older brother. The small one wears a red fez and a white robe. Rachid says, "He is very important. He has recently been circ.u.mcised." He lets us take his picture.

We eat almond pastries and sesame cookies with our late morning tea, then go back to the ma.s.seria to pack. Rachid talks about Joseph Conrad. Ed is limpid and insubstantial, like an angel. Rachid says, "You are leaving two kilos in Fez." The energy imparted to me by the hunched man still courses. We give Rachid four Times Literary Supplements that we brought with us, knowing he will devour every word. We promise to send him books. Perhaps he surprises himself-he gives me a goodbye hug.

Hafid appears with the handcart. Ed is happy that we are not going home with a tajine. We're picked up in front of a hotel, and I am presented with a bouquet of flowers by the representative of the company who stranded us on the road into Fez. We are whisked to Casablanca, where we see nothing but a fringe of harbor, palm trees, and the hotel, which we reach in the dark. In bed Ed recounts the whole movie Casablanca to me. When he sleeps, I think of my sister Nancy. When she married, her husband had just graduated from the University of Georgia and had become an ensign in the navy. They were a.s.signed to a base near Rabat in Morocco. Our family was stunned by this posting. We took out the atlas to see exactly where that remote outpost on the globe might be. She sailed away, knowing our sick father would die while she was gone. He ranted that she would be among people "only three generations away from cannibalism." We were remote people ourselves. Soon the letters arrived with descriptions of Berbers and hot springs in the desert and the bleak navy base. Her son was born there. I was fourteen. I devoured the letters. They were allowed to travel around the Mediterranean on a navy s.h.i.+p that called for several days in Ma.r.s.eilles, Naples, Athens, and Cyprus, a list of over-the-rainbow names. I followed the trip through the rose, aqua, and yellow colors on the map. My mother cried when pictures of Boo, the baby, arrived. He was held by a dark woman with sparkling eyes, jewelry on her arms and ankles, and henna tattoos on her hands.

Now, late at night in Casablanca, so many eons later, I can follow my sister and her husband around a souk, see them young again, intent on buying a leather ha.s.sock. They drive off in their minute Morris Minor, across a plain that looks like an enormous loaf of bread, then through sesame fields, mint fields, the forests of cork oak, back to that dot on the map where they started their life together.

This afternoon we must have pa.s.sed the left turn they took. The loops, the stops, the intersections, the unrolling, the catching up, the intertwinings, the following, the leading in a life-all more mysterious than the rotations of stars. And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk. "When you get the chance," she said to me, "go."

A Paperweight

for Colette

Burgundy Cherries, quail eggs, sweet potatoes, white asparagus at six euros a kilo, plump, erotic apricots, haricots verts (but they're from Kenya), buckets of peonies and roses, cl.u.s.ters of crimson tomatoes-the middle of the Auxerre covered market buzzes with shoppers loading their cloth bags at fruit and vegetable stands, and groups of farm women visiting over their baskets of eggs. We could be at a market in Italy or Portugal. But around the perimeter we could be nowhere but France. The meat displays are as carefully arranged as the gold jewelry cases on the Ponte Vecchio. We gaze at trussed turkey stuffed with prunes, paupiettes of pork, rosy jellied hams, black-footed chickens, and roasts wrapped in lacy cauls. I count twenty kinds of terrines: fish, various livers, chunky pork, layered vegetables, and chicken. The bakery cases offer puffy gougeres the size of softb.a.l.l.s, rabbit pies, and great craggy loaves of bread. Cheese would be reason enough for a trip to France. A woman shopping next to me discreetly pokes several when the cheese monger looks away. Her shrewd thumb knows the stages of ripeness. She leans close to inspect the rind. She then points to her selection, a b.u.t.tery-looking mound soft as a baby's cheek. Ed selects several pillowy farm cheeses, several goat ones that look like chalky elf cakes or coat b.u.t.tons. Two people are taking money. I pay one, and we start to walk away. The other money-taker shouts that we must pay, the one I paid shouts at him, and a big family argument breaks out but no one pays any attention.

Loading the car, we're happy. This is our third day in Burgundy, and we have been turning around as dogs turn before they settle down. We have rented a beautiful, if unkempt, old stone place in the tiny village of Magny on the Yonne River. I wish my friends Susan and Cole could buy the place. They love France and would make the garden into a little Eden. Already the fruit trees are in place. Houses inevitably exude the essential sense of the owners, and so I start to invent narratives about the English owner's Early Ikea bed that smells like someone recently died there, and the news he looked for in his stacks of ten-year-old newspapers. A baronial fireplace and a grand piano, combined with plastic chairs, leave me trying in vain to answer the question why? There's a novel here.

The rental agency's photographs showed a romantically set table and a blurry living room with French doors overlooking the river-the owner's dream of the house as it was before the unfortunate action in the novel took place. The idyllic river is there-I love the smell of rivers. A rowboat lies half submerged at the sh.o.r.e. The telephone does not work (of course by chapter two he didn't want to hear from anyone), and even the cell phones receive no signal. What if one of us trips over a pile of mouldy jigsaw puzzles and needs an ambulance? When we asked the caretaker how to connect the telephone, she said, "Oh, he probably didn't pay the bill." The plot thickens. The owner is too sad to pay attention to basic details. The kitchen . . . the well-equipped and s.p.a.cious kitchen with dining area. I try to see it as a challenge instead of as a place fit only for boiling cabbage. Two greasy shelves, mildew, a freestanding relic of a stove with doll-size burners, and an oven no bigger than a toaster. We shall dine on melamine. I would not be surprised to see a snake crawl from under the fridge. I met an exotic yard-long green and black one sunning on the kitchen doorstep. When I beat the path with a stick, he languidly slithered away. The caretaker from the village somehow started the stove for us without causing an explosion. But the novelistic potential remains-a Christmas tree from several years ago provides a fire hazard in the garage. This image grounds the novel I never will write-a tragic breakup occurred during the holidays. The dried-up tree symbolizes all that went wrong. Perhaps the wife took up with a mechanic in the village. But we are dreamy fools seduced by river light.

We stop to see Auxerre's Gothic cathedral. The town looks appealing and prosperous. A city situated on a river is fortunate, especially when a cathedral soars against the sky. Shoppers crowd the streets, and people lounge at outdoor cafes. We detour to a gigantic French Wal-Marttype megacomplex, where we buy sheets, towels, dish towels, a tablecloth, napkins, and a few cooking utensils. I think I'm dreaming of how my friends in their happiness would scrub and paint this house into its full and lovely potential. Yes, even our open windows, fresh flowered sheets, vases of flowers, and some scrubbing could perk up the rooms.

When Colette was a child in nearby Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, her mother, Sido, travelled to Auxerre every three months. The aura of the nineteenth-century market town it must have been lingers still. She set out in the Victoria at two in the morning in her quest for luxuries: a sugarloaf wrapped in indigo paper, ten pounds of chocolate, cinnamon, nutmeg, rum for grog, pepper, vanilla, and soap. Colette perched on the backseat. I can imagine her intense interest, the b.u.mpy ride under the stars, slowing at first light as they entered the waking town. My mother used to take me shopping in Macon, our Auxerre, when I was little. Suddenly there were things to want. I selected a skirt with wide rickrack. I was able to buy books, not available in my small Georgia town. Once my desires overcame me, and I threw a tantrum in Davison's when my mother would not buy me a stuffed animal that played music.

I came to Burgundy to revisit Colette. We drove our own car from Cortona because Ed wants to take back special wines, preferably those paired with dinners here. I'm hoping to find for my Bramasole garden herbs unavailable in Tuscany: sorrel, chervil, tarragon, and new-to-Bramasole varieties of basil. We brought a stack of French cookbooks and a book on cheese. And then there's Burgundy, land of the Very Rich Hours, to see.

We meander on country lanes flanked by undulating fields. The villages seem ghostly, empty except for cats. We go through the village of Misery twice, and: "Stop, did you see the name of this place? Go back!" The town of a.n.u.s. We stop off "at home" to store the food. An amber light slants across the back garden, once an orchard. I step out onto the balcony to look, but the rusty railings do not seem entirely secure. The sight of the broken, overturned deck chairs reminds me of the owner's saga. Did he consider leaping to the river below? "Let's go somewhere wonderful for dinner," I call to Ed.

After a drive, we walk along the river, then find a small restaurant beside a ca.n.a.l. I look up from the menu. There's our house's caretaker, working as a waiter. She brings us a complimentary aperitif and olives. The slanting light rakes the water. I love the long summer twilights. I'm always happy when I can see blue boats riding on their reflections. A little string of lights comes on, and we feast on simple salads and roast chicken.

When I was studying for my master's degree, I had to select three writers for my oral exam. I chose Keats, the American poet Louise Bogan, and Colette. The department chair called me in to discuss my choices. "Keats is great. Bogan is marginal," he said, "a limited poet but acceptable to the committee. But this Colette? What has she written of value? Wasn't she in the Folies Bergere?"

This was 1975 and hard to imagine from here. I was studying Craft of Fiction with Wright Morris, a writer I revered for his ingrained sense of place and his careful, revealing images. When he handed out the semester reading list, all the novelists were men. After cla.s.s I approached him. "Mr. Morris, I was wondering about the list of books. Why aren't there any by women?"

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, my dear. Oh yes, I thought of that myself. I considered Virginia Woolf, but really, she becomes tiresome. I want to give you examples you really can delve into." Maybe he was farsighted, but he appeared to be looking down a rather proud nose at me, so far, far away.

"So." Pause. "Ford Madox Ford is more important than Virginia Woolf?" My tone was infused not with aggression but with protective coloring.

"More to offer the novice writer, Miss Meyer."

"Mayes."

"Yes, of course. Miss Mayes, our southern belle."

No one avoids conflict more than I. But pushed, I can throw a conniption fit, and I will go to any mat if necessary. I was reeling from this second blow. The next week, carrying a stack of Colette's books, I visited each committee member. I admit to reaching for some southern charm. Finally they relented, probably not out of sudden conversion to the literary merit of my author but to avoid having to justify a decision if a troublemaker student, southern charm or no, forced them.

Colette was new to me. I'd read the Claudine books and Break of Day, which I thought was a cla.s.sic. Soon Colette became my close friend. One of this life's pleasures: a writer's books can intersect with your life and lead you to the next largest s.p.a.ce you can occupy. Her writing catapulted me forward. Even now, each time I pick up one of her books, her perceptions and images continue to wake up my perceptions. Life drenches her prose. She's astute. I know the members of her family as well as my own. I follow every turn of her story, how she made her way alone, her mistakes, her droll perspective. Her story, compelling as it is, would not be enough to bind me to her. Story is not enough. She peels and sections and bites into experience like an orange. She's wise and self-sufficient, two qualities I stand by. Her pa.s.sion for roses, dogs, sunrise, and all the felt sensations of life runs through the molten alchemical process of selecting words. Her prose-immediate and spellbinding-lets me touch the hand of the writer herself. I feel most bound to her when I read about her childhood in Burgundy. Those years sustained her throughout her life. Her original house and garden remained a real and metaphorical world of home, her stern and pa.s.sionate mother, the presiding grace.

My abiding friends.h.i.+p with her is only incidentally affected by the fact that she is dead. I know her intimately. In daydreams, I can sit down for a scrumptious lunch in her adored Palais Royale apartment in Paris. What would we eat? A delicious speculation. Oysters served on a bed of seaweed and ice. A champagne of Colette's choice. A little pheasant stuffed with morels and nuts, a salad of field greens that she somehow managed to find at a street market. For dessert, wild strawberries, of course. What would we talk about? Prose style? Publis.h.i.+ng? No. I'd tell her about the pink h.e.l.lebores I planted under the c.r.a.pe myrtles, how my whole California garden revolves around what the deer won't eat. We'd talk about politics, dogs, the boredom of dogma, winter coats, flamenco. The bouquet of red and purple anemones I brought attracts two bees. We're fascinated to watch them roll in the vibrant petals. The warm hummm . . . blends with a few splats of rain beginning to fall in the garden below. We can watch this in silence.

Ed and I light out for the great medieval pilgrimage towns. Autun's cathedral, boxed in by houses and buildings, is hard to see. Mad twisted gargoyles look down at us. One pokes his rear end outward so that roof water drains out of his bottom. The world's first instance of mooning? I light candles for the desperately ill mothers of my friends Robin and Madeline, then look for the relics of Lazarus. The Romanesque stone carving of the Last Judgment compels me to stand awhile in the cold for a good look at the depicted lineup of humans waiting to be sent to heaven or h.e.l.l. They catch every range of emotion-praying, hand-wringing, eyes cast to heaven, head held in hands. Clearly, they are scared. And graphically, a crab-claw descends to s.n.a.t.c.h each one up a level to the judging. One capital shows Judas hanging himself, his head drooped between two flowers. I've always pitied Judas, who threw away his big chance. Someone practices on the organ but without much force. The music sounds snuffed, as though organ and organist were locked inside a trunk.

I never find Lazarus. This time he's not going to rise.

Pilgrims always come to Vezelay because the relics of Mary Magdalen reside at the basilica that bears her name. Vezelay-the name suits an exotic woman and is as intriguing as the place. The town serves as a grand entrance to the cathedral. Beneath the half-timbered houses and minute shops lining the street, vaulted bas.e.m.e.nts once used to house the hordes who came at the beginnings of Crusades or out of devotion to the relics. The basilica looks small, with its bell tower and narrow facade, but a walk to the side reveals a long, b.u.t.tressed structure with many windows. Inside, the soaring s.p.a.ce feels open because of the white light falling through clear gla.s.s. The psychology of the plan: you are drawn through the long embrace of the nave to the luminous altar. The tympanum, recessed half circles over the front door, fascinates me. A master stone carver portrays an elongated Christ gathering his apostles before the crucifixion. His hands are expressionistic-enlarged and sending forth wavy rays of spiritual energy to his apostles, who must take His word into the world and convert the heathens. The variety of heathens imagined is amusing: dog-headed men, pygmies, people with enormous ears or snout-faces. Ancient cartographers scrawled there be beasties when the known terrain ran out. Here those beasties are given form. This enlightens me. How encompa.s.sing was medieval Christianity-even the fearful dog faces should be converted. Some of the apostles in the group look distinctly worried. The Romanesque imagination requires study. All those carnival, grotesque, whimsical, fanciful, monstrous figures came out of a fertile intersection of the pagan and the Christian. They manifest the rumblings of the collective unconscious, the worries about where the wild things are. One creature looks like a winged cow holding a suitcase.

The carved capitals of supporting columns are masterful. I especially love the one of grapes being crushed in a press, no doubt a metaphor for the blood of Christ. In one of the tourist shops, I buy a book on the carvings to savor later.

Ed spots a patisserie. The French pastry shops-aqua, blue, or pink with gold letters-look like their own confections. The little bell rings, and you're welcomed into a tidy shop with b.u.t.tery, warm smells wafting from the kitchen. The pastries are about form as well as taste. The rich puffs and ruffles and layers and colors form tasty morsels, but they also reward the eye. Ed chooses two or three delectables a day: delicate lemon or strawberry tarts, napoleons, pleated foil cups of dark chocolate, rustic plum galettes oozing juice. After each he says, "Viva la France."

The village houses look private and closed. Lace curtains hang in all the windows. Not traditional handmade ones, these are machine worked with corny designs of gamboling horses, cats with b.a.l.l.s of yarn, and windmills. No doubt made in China. Lace curtains exist solely for a hand to part them, for someone to peer secretly at the street. What's going on there among those others? Especially that Mary Magdalen.

In the characteristic wine town Beaune, we choose the archetypal sidewalk cafe and linger under the plane trees. Henry James in A Little Tour of France describes Beaune as "a drowsy little Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always oblique, and steep, moss-covered roofs." No longer drowsy, the town today perks with energy-inviting shops, the Sat.u.r.day market, and locals out to visit with friends. I would like to photograph all the weathervanes. We find a heavy copper pot to take back home to Giusi, who cooks with us. We probably should go to the Marche aux Vins, which my notebook reminds me is at 2, rue Nicolas Rolin, named for the man who founded the famous medieval hospital here. There you buy a taste-vin, a tasting cup, and then by candlelight sample up to eighteen regional wines. Sounds overwhelming. I could taste three, then my active little buds would shut down.

Ed photographs the glazed orange, green, black, and tan geometrically patterned tile roofs on the hospital, L'Hotel Dieu des Hospices de Beaune. Half-timbered sections, jacquard-patterned gables, and pitched roofs give a toylike appeal to the buildings. The colonnaded courtyard sheltered nuns going from wing to wing, carrying, I imagine, vats of boeuf bourguignon, and loaves of bread tucked under their arms. We walk through thinking of being sick in one of those red-draped beds. Not bad, as long as the illness were not the plague. Rogier van der Weyden's great painting, The Last Judgment, which once hung above the altar in the paupers' section, crowns the hospital's gallery. How sobering from the sickbed to contemplate the d.a.m.ned heading toward an inferno. Fewer in the painting look toward paradise.

The charity hospital was richly endowed, thanks to the fifteenth-century Duc de Bourgogne, who solicited donations to finance the construction and continuance. Sixty hectares of donated prime land proved to be the lasting boon. Thirty-nine vintages are created from these hillsides, and the hospital's benefit auction every November on the third Sunday is one of the most important wine events in France.

In Beaune we're in the heart of Cote d'Or wine country. Pommard is just down the road. In the wine shop the great bottles are lined up like jousting knights: Gevrey-Chambertin, Corton, Meursault, Pouilly-Fuisse, Puligny-Montrachet. A knowledgeable man helps us select a case. I'm already imagining bringing out these wines for our Italian friends.

Colette, with her innate understanding of the natural world, writes about wine in the most elemental way. A great vintage, she maintained, results from "celestial sorcery," not the hand of the vintner. She writes: The vine and the wine it produces are two great mysteries. Alone in the vegetable kingdom, the vine makes the true savor of the earth intelligible to man. With what fidelity it makes the translation! It senses, then expresses, in its cl.u.s.ters of fruit the secrets of the soil. The flint, through the vine, tells us that it is living, fusible, a giver of nourishment. Only in wine does the ungrateful chalk pour out its golden tears. A vine, transported across mountains and over seas, will struggle to keep its personality, and sometimes triumphs over the powerful chemistries of the mineral world. Harvested near Algiers, a white wine will still remember . . . the n.o.ble Bordeaux graft that gave it exactly the right hint of sweetness, lightened its body, and endowed it with gaiety. And it is far-off Jerez that gives its warmth and color to the dry and cordial wine that ripens at Chateau Chalon, on the summit of a narrow, rocky plateau.

While Ed indulges in a chocolate walnut tart, I step inside a cheese heaven. Hundreds of artisan cheeses. The women who work here are dressed impeccably in white, like nurses presiding over newborns. One waves a branch of leaves so that no flies land on one of her charges. She looks mythic. Why was there no G.o.ddess of cheese?

To surprise Ed, I buy a round wooden box of epoisse, b.u.t.tery, runny, tangy, and local. Its pert orange rind, the nurse/G.o.ddess tells me, comes from the marc it's bathed in after it ages for a month. I select two little goat's nubbins, too, both the size of my thumbprint. We find bread and return quickly to our shabby manse. Ed empties the rowboat and dries it with the house's scruffy bath towels. We row upriver to a fenny area and spread a cloth on the middle seat. If the cheese is right, the bread is right, and the wine-this a Pouilly-Fuisse-is right, then a floating dinner with the boat resting on a glissade of light eases us happily into darkening twilight. We propose a few toasts. First I raise my gla.s.s to Colette.

As we hoist the rowboat out of the water, Ed says, "When are we going to Saint-Sauveur? We're not far away."

He knows that I've saved the trip to Colette's childhood town, savoring the antic.i.p.ation. Saint-Sauveur-the crucible. "I'm ready. Let's go tomorrow."

Standing in front of 8, rue de Colette (formerly rue de l'Hospice), with her inspired, pa.s.sionate descriptions in mind, I confront a tall dun-colored house with white shutters. It looks neglected. A doctor's name is above the doorbell, which I imagine ringing-would it be possible to see Colette's room-but don't. She wrote: A large solemn house, rather forbidding, with its shrill bell and its carriage entrance with a huge bolt like an ancient dungeon, a house that smiled only on its garden side. The back, invisible to pa.s.sers-by, was a sun trap, swathed in a mantle of wisteria and bignonia too heavy for the trellis of worn ironwork, which sagged in the middle like a hammock and provided shade for the little flagged terrace and the threshold of the sitting room.

Her perspective: the child hiding while her mother looked for her. "Where are the children?" Sido calls, never looking up into the branches of the walnut where gleamed the "pale, pointed face of a child who lay stretched like a tomcat along a big branch and who never uttered a word." Colette interrupts her description long enough to ask herself, "Is it worthwhile, I wonder, seeking for adequate words to describe the rest?" She then continues in a lyric key: I shall never be able to conjure up the splendor that adorns, in my memory, the ruddy festoons of an autumn vine borne down by its own weight and clinging despairingly to some branch of the fir trees. And the ma.s.sive lilacs, whose compact flowers-blue in the shade and purple in the suns.h.i.+ne-withered so soon, stifled by their own exuberance. The lilacs long since dead will not be revived at my bidding, any more than the terrifying moonlight-silver, quicksilver, leaden-gray, with facets of dazzling amethyst or scintillating points of sapphire-all depending on a certain pane in the blue gla.s.s window of the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden.

The flash of memories accompanies her realization that "the secret is lost that opened to me a whole world."

Time, sun-baked time, time that keeps on slipping, slipping, elusive time, time like the stone Romanesque eyes peering from behind a clump of leaves, the startled pagan looking toward a transformed future. Art historians refer to this recurrent motif of the face in the leaves as "the green man."

My childhood was not edenic, far from it, but the concatenation of first experiences remains a vein of gold in memory. Going back, dipping into those impressions, gives me not nostalgia, no, no, no, but private renaissances. Swinging on the wooden supports of my mother's canopied bed, climbing out the window to play in the moonlit garden, painting myself all over with house paint (my mother shrieking You're going to die), riding on the back of a sea turtle making its way back to the waves, the sweet reek of pork roasting on a pit fire, my sashes tied in bows, my father whispering You can have anything you want, hiding in the hydrangeas, imagining my face as one of the pale blooms-the ten thousand images that compose a childhood, those imprints last forever. Wright Morris, of the Craft of Fiction cla.s.s and the important novels, told me, "If you've had a childhood, you have enough to write about for the rest of your life."

I wonder if the garden once was larger or if her memory expanded the dimensions, out of love for every petal and twig.

The reality of her home must remain a cipher. The present facade reveals as much of Colette as a tombstone tells about the occupant below. I visited the house twenty years ago. I remember a young couple whizzing up on a Vespa. They paused, he revved the engine, and the girl waved to the upstairs window. "Bonjour, Colette," she called as they spun off.

This time I have come to see the recently opened Musee Colette. Too bad they could not buy her family home. The museum, only a stroll away, is in a seventeenth-century chateau, a grander villa than her mother's house. If Colette had come back to Saint-Sauveur in her later years, she might have bought this house. But I suddenly realize that after she married and moved to Paris, she could have, but never did, return to live here. She loved other parts of France, especially La Treille Muscate (The Musk Vine Arbor), her house in Saint-Tropez. She liked in her early adult life to "move house." Intensely domestic, she was also restless. This oxymoron is one source of my identification with her. "Wherever you are, you're thinking of somewhere else," my first husband accused me. Sadly, he spoke the truth. Only later, when I lived in places I wanted to be, did the restlessness cool.

The house on rue de l'Hospice became the lost paradise, endlessly there in memory for replenishment, for revisiting, and perhaps even for reinventing. But not for actual return. This is one answer that solves the riddle of home. Icons from this house and garden are scattered across her books like handfuls of fairy dust: a copper k.n.o.b that used to s.h.i.+ne on her bedroom door, the drumroll played in the village on New Year's morning, a warming pan she took to school, the nectar inside a flagon swathed in spiderwebs, a broken basket of spindle berries, a bouquet of meadow saffron, her hooded cape that casts her in a heraldic role-thousands of images as fresh as the slushy paths in autumn, where she sought the "yellow chanterelles that go so well with creamy sauces and ca.s.serole of veal." Her childhood is almost as real to me as my own: a "skimpy little urchin, brave under my red hood, I would crack boiled chestnuts with my teeth as I slid along on my small pointed sabots." Forty-five years in Paris, she claimed, did nothing to erase the provincial girl in quest of the country home she lost.

Is there a more personal museum in the world? This house is Colette. Slides of her eyes are projected on the stair landing wall, her haunting eyes from infancy to old age, flas.h.i.+ng as you ascend and descend the steps. You come to a museum to look; in this one, Colette is looking at you. On the stair risers, the names of her books are carved in gold letters. Scattered in the marble floor, her many addresses are engraved. She must have been one of the most photographed people of her time. Photographs of her line one room. The frames' mats are colored, giving the room an air of gaiety. Seeing the early photo of her sitting at the piano with her braid hanging to the floor and her creamy shoulders poised, you almost can hear the music. An alcove is filled with photos of her with animals. She always had pets, usually an ugly dog. I'm thrilled to see handwritten ma.n.u.scripts with corrections and her address book written in brown ink. Her pot of pens and eyegla.s.s case echo in the photo behind them, where she is reaching into the same pot.

Around the doors the stone is painted with blue vines, reminding me of her garden in Saint-Tropez. One leads to her writing room and bedroom, copied and furnished from her apartment at the Palais Royale. The designers have managed to make the rooms seem real, not at all house-of-wax. I get to gaze at her library steps, white china dogs made into lamps, feminine slipper chairs with needlepoint panels of flowers, mottled pomegranate and sunflower-yellow walls, and the narrow bed wedged under a window. When she was bedridden with arthritis, this room is where she lived. Under a fur throw, with a neat wheeled desk built over the bed, she wrote, entertained her friends, and regarded her collections of b.u.t.terflies, framed not in rigid rows but randomly as though in flight. She loved gla.s.s objects. Her gla.s.s bracelets and horse are saved, along with a rare collection of Cartesian diver bottles in many colors. I can see her lifting one of her paperweights with an imprisoned b.u.t.terfly or flower as she stops midsentence to think. She often wrote on blue paper and even shaded her desk lamp with a sheet of it. Her blue light in the window of the Palais Royale apartment became famous. Those pa.s.sing below at night would look up and know that Colette was writing. So much of her still lives in the intensely personal rooms lit with the colors of the South.

She would approve of the cafe downstairs. I wish she could join us for pate, cheese, baguette, and a gla.s.s of wine.

What would make the musee a true earthly paradise would be a Colette garden planted from her memories of her mother's, her own, and the garden she imagined when she no longer had one. If a garden is impossible, perhaps a meditative, labyrinthine walk could be constructed. Punctuating the way would be painted signs with quotes so powerful that the real garden could rise in the mind's eye. Instead of leaning to sniff the bountiful roses, one could read: The first stir of spring is such a solemn thing that the accession of the rose, coming after it, is celebrated with less fervor. Yet everything is permitted to the rose: splendor, conspiring scents, petals with flesh that tempts the nostrils, the lips, the teeth. But all has been said, everything has been born already in any year when once the rose has entered it; the first rose but heralds all the other roses that must follow . . . Riper than fruit, more sensuous than cheek or breast . . .

And: Don't ask me where I shall plant the white rose disheveled by a single gust of wind, the yellow rose which has a scent of fine cigars, the pink rose which has a scent of roses, the red rose which dies unceasingly from the pouring out of its odors and whose dry and weightless corpse still lavishes its balm upon the air. I shall not crucify my red rose against a wall; I shall not bind it to the edge of the water tank. It shall grow, if my good destiny allows it so, just beside the open bedroom, the room that will have only three walls instead of four, and stand open to the rising sun.

Even roses she didn't like can bloom vividly on a sign: Roses the color of nasturtiums, with a scent of peaches; starved-looking roses tinged with dirty mauve that smelled of crushed ants; orange roses that smelled of nothing at all; and finally a little horror of a rosebush with tiny yellowish flowers covered in hairs, badly set on their stalks, bus.h.i.+ng out all over the place, and giving off an odor like a musk-filled menagerie, like a gymnasium frequented exclusively by young red-headed women, like artificial vanilla extract . . .

Back at our musty house on the greeny banks of the Yonne, we reconsider the hapless neglect in the light of Colette's loved and radiant ambiance. No one lavishes care on this lovely house at the end of the village. "Can we just go now? It's only three. We could be in a sweet little inn somewhere by dark. Is the map in the car?"

"I can be ready in fifteen minutes."

We drive to Dijon, feast well, and leave the next day for a country relais near Avignon. The heat becomes serious.

Today I buy the herbs I want at a nursery, and some yellow lilies for our room. When we visit the antique market town of ile-sur-la-Sorgue, we are so hot I don't care about looking at fine monogrammed napkins and silver serving pieces. We walk through, drinking bottle after bottle of water, buy nothing, and return to our golden stone mas under a ma.s.sive oak for lunch and a swim.

The room has a fine escritoire, waxed for generations. Ed falls into a late siesta, and I s.h.i.+ft the desk closer to the window for the pleasure of opening my notebook, writing a few words that have been floating in my brain, nidify, pith, efflorescence, tesserae. I keep glancing outside into the oak's spreading branches. A perfect tree for green-eyed Colette to climb. On the trunk, patches of silvery gray lichen look like squiggly maps. A young waiter on break tips his chair back and raises his face to the sun. His smooth arms the color of b.u.t.terscotch dapple with shadow. My lilies in a water pitcher look freshly gilded against the soft blue messaline draperies. Colette so loved the shades, contrasts, colors, and sensations of the world. A wasp hovers over two crescents of honeydew melon on a yellow plate.

From Garden to Garden The British

Isles

Lower Swell-we are at home in a stone schoolhouse that has undergone conversion into a comfortable Cotswold home and enclosed garden. The tiny cl.u.s.ter of surrounding houses looks equally mellow and natural in green, green radiant fields where sheep look as if they are posing for "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and the word chlorophyll comes to mind.

Our schoolhouse seems especially welcoming-three sofas to sink into, long windows where pink mallow branches sway, a table to seat twelve, if we knew so many to invite, and a fireplace. I could settle in for months. I imagine slanting rain on winter evenings, imagine reading the local writers, from Laurie Lee to Shakespeare. Right now in July we open all the windows, page through garden books, and spread our area maps on the coffee table for the pleasure of saying names aloud: Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-on-the-Water, Upper Slaughter, Chipping Campden-all places we will see-and names of places farther afield-Hextable, Wootten-under-Edge, Chorleywood, Plumpton Green, Leigh-on-Sea, Frogmore, Midsomer Norton, Flackwell Heath. These could be settings for novels in which an intended note under the door slides under the rug instead and lies undetected until too late, far too late. The cheerful kitchen makes me want to whip up a batch of b.u.t.termilk biscuits. Maybe it's the sunlight pouring through the door, maybe it's the blue-checked curtains at the window and under the sink, maybe it's the yellow bowl of plums on the counter, or that the four burners on the stove are called hobs here. I like hobs.

We must feel at home because we taught for so many years. I wonder which way the desks faced and where the chalkboard hung. Two staircases branch off, going up to dormer bedrooms. Perhaps two teachers lived here, retiring to their separate quarters at night. From upstairs, the small windows look out at the golden village on one side and onto a walled garden on the other. Beyond, the open countryside lures me to walk in every direction. A road sign cautions to watch for badgers. Travelling in the Cotswolds is the polar opposite to adventure travel. The sheep will part to let us cross their bucolic meadows. Downstairs the garden awaits with drowsy charms. An intimate, informal s.p.a.ce about twice the size of the house, the garden blooms haphazardly; the scraggly beds could stand a visit from those patron saints of English gardens, Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyl, to tidy up and add some flowers and bushes with rhythm and texture. I have planted thyme and basil near the kitchen door. A primitive urge, I think, that instinct to put something with roots into the ground, even though I am transient here. "The garden could be so heavenly-and we could transform it in a week."

"Resist. Just enjoy the spontaneous qualities."

"Actually, it's pretty this way, a jumble, a blur of color."

We have come to visit the great English gardens-to feel, as Edith Wharton said, "the secret vibrations of their beauty"-and my list is long.

We started a week ago in Bath. Bah-th, we said, walking down streets where Jane Austen's skirts once grazed the stones. Our hotel outside town was a former priory with a formal but livable garden of small ponds and boxwood knots, and a good kitchen garden, too, that supplied their restaurant. Immediately, I liked living there. This is jolly England, I thought, the English major's England. The England of my great-great-grandfather's people, although I don't know if they lived like serfs or lords. The drawing room, just so, was lined with portraits and paintings and crowded with the cla.s.sic English-style mix of striped and flowered and velvet furniture and Oriental rugs. We felt like guests at a country house where someone is perhaps poisoned, the inspector droll, and all the weekend guests suspects. The large room opened onto the garden terrace. The staff settled us on a sofa and brought champagne while we ordered dinner. When we were shown to the table, course after course appeared, ending with a trolley of Ches.h.i.+re and Stilton cheeses. Our bedroom was serene and large, furnished in sage and coral with duvets and down and a view of the knot garden and fountain. I realized that the formal terrace gardens were designed not only for strolling but for the pleasure of viewing them from the house.

That first night after dinner we drove into Bath late and saw it empty except for jammed pubs and a few doorways where not-so-innocent teenagers lurked. We'd thought we were tired after the flight from Italy and after the rental car's flat tire in the rain on a lane where we were turning around, having taken a wrong turn. But the curves of Bath's streets, lighted shop windows, and the looming church kept us walking until midnight.

In the morning we walked to the Royal Crescent, then through dignified streets lined with town houses. What n.o.ble s.p.a.ces for living. In the park I stopped to photograph the small raised circular beds of double pink begonias edged with thyme. Among the begonias a few lavender and dusty millers had been plunked down here and there to good effect-they undid the studied look of a park bed. Wallace Stevens liked to insert one "ugly" word, a rough-textured word, into each poem, seamless beauty being boring. The silk-textured petals and the jaunty little pale-leafed thyme-such a simple and inspired choice.

We shopped with the matrons for those delectable local cheeses we'd been served the night before. If I had a kitchen in Bath, I would try the c.o.c.kles and samfire, a seaweed offered in bins outside the fishmonger's. We loaded our shopping bag with scones, buns and fresh breads, and bottles of elder flower juice. Walking back to the car, we fell into step with a brisk lady, upswept hair and linen suit, who hoped we liked Bath and pointed out her black varnished door in a circle of gracious houses around a park with one vast tree. "Don't come in town at night. It's shameful what has happened. Hippies and drugs, the girls are devils, tough as boys. They'll take your teeth if they're false."

At an outdoor antique/junk market, Beatles music blared. Humming "Hey, Jude," I found a starch-and-crochet christening dress some baby wore 150 years ago, four ivory-handled cheese knives (forty pence apiece!), and a pair of tiny horn spectacles, also worn by a child whose eyes are long since shut. Ed found an old level and an unfolding wood and bra.s.s measurer. I overheard a Scottish woman say, "Their junk is different from our junk." By midmorning, the sidewalks were thronged with tourists and local shoppers. Morris dancers performed in a closed street. A homeless man leaned against a doorway reading Wild Spain. The street people are known as crusties. They are cuffy, meaning "down and out."