The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
and immediately began to calculate.
‘Do you realize we’ve already hiked 15 kilometres? Dear God, that will make 26 altogether.’
‘Ooh, that sounds impressive.’
‘Impressive? It’s insane. That’s over 16 miles! No wonder my feet hurt.’ It now dawned on me, belatedly, why I hadn’t come up with Annie’s triangular itinerary on my own. It’s always been dangerous to let her plan hikes and parties: I lacked her fabled stamina in both realms. A farmer working sheep with a rambunctious Border collie – the lambs had tails like pipe cleaners – warned us it was a long way to Conques. ‘Downhill, though,’ he added cheerfully. Blossoms that Annie had just identified as evening-blue cornflowers were startled at our approach and flew off together, revealing themselves (we caught our breath) as butterflies. Wild thyme scented our footfalls.
It was a Rouergat paradise, but even so, once I’d worked out how far we’d walked I began to whine: my arches ached, my hips’ ball-and-socket joints felt like those of an old German Shepherd. Annie, however, marched on relentlessly. For a while the route held to the top of a high ridge, the south face of which fell away dramatically, culminating in the valley below in a perpendicular fan of woolly-wooded, peaked fissures. Patches of oxblood earth showed between gaps in the forest. Finally we began to descend. This is how the stone had come, too, atop wagons hitched to twenty-six pairs of oxen. We were following its tracks. It had been a tradition with medieval pilgrims walking to Compostela to carry stones as a penance (a variation on walking barefoot, or in chains). Sometimes monks put this practice to use, encouraging pilgrims to transport not just any old rocks, but to carry cut stones from quarries to ecclesiastical construction sites. I fingered the piece of schist in my pocket and trudged on.
Some time later Annie broke the silence by asking if I’d rather run a marathon or take heroin.
‘Right now?’
‘Yes, you have to do one or the other right now.’
‘Take heroin.’
‘Thought you’d say that.’
As we neared Conques we came upon a sign pointing toward a detour to a Point de Vue, overlooking the great concha of the Dourdou (Hannah Green translates concha as ‘valley’; others argue that it is the shell-shaped enclave on which Conques is built that lends the village its name). ‘Shall we?’ asked Annie in ready tones.
A look from me sufficed. ‘Ah, well, you get out there and find it’s only an opinion anyway.’
‘How dare you have the strength to be funny,’ I growled. Ancient apple and plum trees, woven with mistletoe, guided us back to the village: we’d been gone for seven hours. That night Annie treated me to a dinner of sea bass with chanterelles – the lacy mushrooms the French call girolles; along with groseilles (red currants), they’re a staple of summer markets – which we downed with a bottle of Gaillac, rounded off with Cognac, at the three-star Hôtel Ste Foy. It had become increasingly difficult for me to speak French in her profoundly English company, and I’m afraid our waiter suffered the consequences. Lucy and Kingsley had lunched in the same place; ‘a heavy meal, of much meat’. Later that night we went to a concert of ‘Chasticovitch’, Mozart, and Schubert, held in the abbey.
The clarity of sound in the big, white, clean space of the church was pure and true. Wayward lines of melody explored the nave, climbed its pillars, ribboned down the arches, while harmony felt its way along the dark side aisles with my eyes, or perhaps ears, in tow. Music and stone were old partners here, still searching together for common ground, joined tonight by the cries of house martins swooping in through the open door and whirling around the nave. Later I asked Annie if she’d picked them out amidst the Schubert.
‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘They balanced it out. A fairly pleasant disharmony, didn’t you think?’
My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going 30 mph on a smooth road to a 12th century cathedral.
Henry Adams, 1902
On 22 July 1920 Lucy and Kingsley Porter found their friend Bull Durham waiting for them at the Spanish border. They had commissioned Bull to drive their new Fiat over from Italy, and together the three made their way into France along with Anfossi, the Porter’s chauffeur, and Lucy’s maid Natalina. The Porters had just spent two months in Spain photographing churches, eating too much, dressing in what they considered rags, and enjoying the good, earned weariness that comes from spending active days in fresh air. ‘We sleep in one stretch,’ Lucy wrote, ‘like a baby.’ As she did every night of their trip, she meticulously noted in her journal how much they paid for their hotel room and midday and evening meals, always taking care to add whether or not the wine was included, and how much extra they spent on Natalina, who ate alone.
Compostela had pleased them. Lucy was satisfied to find St James on the altar instead of Jesus: ‘It seems right Christ should take second place here.’ She thought the sculpture fine: ‘The South passageway interests me the most. The devils are exquisite … the nude figure (soul) held by the leg, head forward, is perhaps the loveliest of everything. I feel here how polytheistic the Catholic religion is! … It is a much more rational explanation of the existing universe than monotheism.’
By the time they reached France they were worn out. ‘The Spanish trip has left us in a condition of physical and mental exhaustion,’ wrote Kingsley to Bernard Berenson and his wife in Italy. Still they purposefully ploughed ahead, making their first stop in France at the Romanesque abbey of St Michel de Cuxa, just outside the town of Prades. From here it would take them nearly a month to reach Conques.
Travelling slowly, only laxly following their route, experiencing no punctures nor lengthy respites for camera repair, it would take me two days. (Lucy, I believe, secretly enjoyed the punctures; it provided an opportunity for exercise – she fretted about the effects of overeating – and to walk ahead alone with Kingsley in the ‘glorious air’ of the French countryside.) By contrast I endured only one hindrance en route to the Rouergue from a side-trip to the Pyrenees, at a roundabout coiled between gnarled vineyards just outside Castelnaudary. The police were stopping all northbound cars in a breathalyser sting. I hadn’t tried the local sparkling white, called Blanquette de Limoux, which had been much praised at lunch, but was nervous none the less. The gendarme had to demonstrate how to breathe into the tube, which I then tried to do as he presented it to me. ‘Non, alors!’ he snapped. ‘You take it!’
This I did, blew, and was pronounced sober. Distracted by my ineptitude, he hadn’t taken in my accent, leaving my identity as a foreigner to become apparent upon the presentation of my Massachusetts licence.
‘Voila une Américaine!’ He called his partner to the car and my heart sank. I wondered which French law I had openly flouted. The partner took my licence and addressed me gravely. ‘Have you, madame, yet tasted the cassoulet of the region?’ I shook my head. ‘Ah, well then. You must try it!’ As drivers fumed in an ever-growing line of cars behind me, the policemen first debated, then concurred upon, the best place to experience the wonderfully adaptable white bean stew of southern France, and gave me directions. We parted with a question about Boston baked beans: they are rumoured to be sweet – can this really be so? (Yes.) The gendarmes shook their heads in disbelief.
My nerves, it occurred to me, were a residue of the day’s drive. I had spent hours following the River Aude northward on a crumbling, thirties-era highway through a desolate park in the Pyrénées-Orientales. No cars trailed behind me, nor could I see any ahead. Clinging ferns and mosses and the dense over-storey above brewed the air into a shade and scent much like that of green tea. The bedrock muscled its way into my lane and would have forced me into oncoming traffic, had there been any. Farmhouses were rare, and empty; old resort hotels, advertising geothermal baths, had been long abandoned. I willed the foothills to fall to their knees but they complied only by eroding into individual, towering formations,