Carcassonne

     "Carcassonne is like an old lady who has not changed her make-up in fifty years", Jean Lascaux thought to himself as he drove around Place Gambetta.  "The façade is still the essentially the same, but looking a bit worn" he smiled to himself, appreciating the parallelism.

      Driving from Caunes was not difficult, although occasionally something lying on the road caught his attention and he would pull over to have a closer look.  Force of habit, nurtured over years, so many incidents requiring the gendarmerie taking place on roads.  Today he had stopped to pick up a license plate, seemingly new, for a French car, CG-180-EE 34, the last two numbers indicating its registration in Languedoc-Roussillon.  Across the road, he found the decaying carcass of a long-dead fawn, probably struck by a car, dried grass growing through its rib cage, head and teeth intact, one of the front legs  gracefully genuflecting to its fate.  Not too much further away, a brown rabbit's carcass, the well-dried bones of the rib cage shaped like a lovely bentwood basket.  With all the flesh gone, cadavers lost their gory aspect and became, Lascaux thought, just another roadside attraction, unlike the plastic bottles that dotted the roadside ditches, and never became part of the soil.

     He was in Carcassonne to see a tile installer about a repair that needed to be done to an installation of terra cotta tiles on the terrace of the house.  He had not been there when the work was finished, he had been bicycling with his cycling club, and Josianne was the last woman in the world who would question a workman.  "He must know his job, otherwise they wouldn't pay him", she would say.  And Jean, of course, would check the work.  Lascaux relied on her to make sure their menage --the cooking, the laundry, the shopping, the contacts with the family-- all ran smoothly.  He had put a roof over their heads, and those of their son and daughter.  Now he took care of technical matters --the car, the appliances, dealing with the Mairie, taxes, going to the dechetterie with the week's worth of plastic and cans, leaving the household garbage in the plastic bags the Mairie gave out for free, and packing it in the dumpster for pick up three times weekly.   To amuse himself, he cultivated the potager from which they got their vegetables, one among many growing behind the abbey, the plots rented from the Mairie, which kept track of whose plot was whose, not that anyone did not know.

     Lascaux cut across Carcassonne's center to arrive at the tile warehouse, which was near the little airport of Salvaza, on the west side of town.  It was from Salvaza that the Ryanair flights landed, dropping tourists and seasonal residents, many British, within an easy drive of their final destinations.  The big box stores abounded in the Z.I. - zone industriel -- but for once, the GPS in his car got Lascaux directly to his destination.  He liked his car, a Seat "Lion" --the product of a merger between the Spanish company and a German partner.  The parts were available everywhere, not like that new Renault, the Clio 4, a sports-car type of car whose unique battery meant the factory at Flins had to supply the part as a special order.  The Seat was an ugly car, but that made it almost theft-proof, Lascaux had reasoned.  A little like some of the cars the gendarmerie drove in France Outre-Mer.

     Lascaux pulled up easily in front of a large warehouse painted grey with a sign, "Carrelage Carcassonne" on it.  Outside a dark haired, broad-shouldered and deeply-tanned man in a worn red t-shirt bearing the name on the sign was smoking a cigarette.  He saw Lascaux, put out his cigarette, and went into the building.  Lascaux followed him as soon as he turned off the ignition and locked the car.

     Inside, under fluorescent lights, were hundreds of tile displays, affixed to the walls; and, filling the floor space, simulations of dining areas, playrooms, bathrooms and kitchens.  In the middle of the space there was a white module where business was done, and where the smoker now stood.

     "Good day--"

     "Good day, Monsieur, 'What can I help you with?'" the smoker asked, with an amusement, that seemed almost insolent, Jean thought.

      "An installation of tile of the terre cuite variety was done at my home in Caunes earlier this week.  The floor is not level, and this is a problem."

       "Ah, well, we'll see whether you have any redress, although I doubt it--"

       "How can that be?" Jean, said, looking directly at the smoker.

       "That is how we work.  When you are there, it is your responsibility to guide the artisan to your satisfaction.  Did you sign the receipt?"

       "I did not, my wife did, I was away--"

       "Then you should have been there.  I doubt there is any claim you can make--"

       "That seems unprofessional--"

       "Look Monsieur, we do business all over.  We explain our terms before we arrive, when we arrange for the visit to lay the tile.  If you signed, you take the floor as it is, now that the mortar has dried.  You can arrange to have us remove the part of the floor whose placement you don't like, but you will pay for the removal and reinstallation.  Got it?"

       The smoker walked around the counter and towards Jean.  Lascaux was burning with indignation, but he judged the man a brute, so he merely stared at him, his blue eyes, clear as a cloudless sky, expressing little, before he turned, saying,

       "Yes, I 'Got it.' --Good day, monsieur.  Do not expect return business from us."

       As he walked out, he thought he heard the man laugh.
   

Sergeant Créancier

     Caunes is one of the most beautiful villages in France, Sergeant Créancier said to himself as he looked at the case file for the women who had lost an eye the night before.  On the other hand, he concluded, Caunes is as beset, in microcosm, as any ordinary village or town in France.  With Algerians, Moroccans, rosbifs, Americans, pieds noirs, Caunois, and émigrés from elsewhere in France all commingled, the stew is not always tasty.

     There have been break-ins of late, mainly targeting résidences secondaires of part-time residents.  Too, sometimes someone leaves a door open and, invited, a greedy beggar enters and removes the contents of a wallet.  The foreigners, in particular, complain --but if they left a door or window open, it is no concern of his.

     The attack on Irine Fantôme did not fall into either of these categories, though.  Créancier, a large man who had spent his career in the gendarmerie, sitting in cars, patrolling the countryside of Languedoc-Rousillon, thought violent crimes perpetrated against women particularly reprehensible.  A man who would steal nothing, yet beat a sturdy woman so badly she lost an eye must be both physically very powerful and quite dangerous.

     This kind of crime was not perpetrated by the Algerians in town.  They were most usually suspected when property disappeared.  Two sons of one family, raised by an older sister, had linked up with a gang operating out of Perpignan, to raid foreigner's homes.  They were opportunists and found homes with latches unlocked or windows open until one day they decided to try a bigger caper, robbing one of the big homes in the hills.  It had a radio alarm that brought the police there within minutes: Karim and Wassim spent six months in the penitentiary in Béziers before returning to their sister's house and work-release jobs at the SMIC rate at Kentucky Fried Chicken outside Carcassonne .  They spoke of going to Canada, but so far they remained in Caunes.  Neither was violent, Karim younger and less sure of himself, Wassim older and more serious.   Créancier thought they had girlfriends, but after Béziers no illusions about prison or fame, their hip-hop hats notwithstanding.

     Until their capture, Wassim and Karim had been the most enterprising of Caunes' petty thieves.  All the others were just juvenile delinquents.  They stole to brag to their friends, but only wallets, or the occasional stereo from an open car.  Caunes was, Créancier thanked himself, very much a quiet place to live, where everyone knew everyone and one neighbor's curiosity about another operated as well or better than any security system.

     Why, then would Irine Fantôme have been attacked?  She lived on the main street, had for years. Known to everyone in Caunes as a good neighbor, a bit solitary.  Divorced long before she came to Caunes, she set up a notions shop, selling anything you might need in a pinch, but didn't want to drive to Carcassonne for: a needle, an envelope, a bottle of glue, a screwdriver, a plug for the bathtub, all sold    in quantities of one usually.  Thrifty Caunois preferred to visit Irine than spend money on gasoline, particularly these days, when no one had any Euros to spare.  That is to say everyone visited and knew Irine,  because the Caunois are by nature thrifty.  Visitors from the north might laugh, call them ploucs, and hillbillies, but Caunes had not survived for a thousand years because anyone threw away a piece of string.

       It was hard to believe the attacker was from the village.  With the exception of that one Algerian family, everyone in Caunes was neighborly, according to his merits.  Even Cibiche, that pathetic charity case adopted by the Café de la Fontaine, would not so much as pick up a centime that was not his, nor raise his fist in anger against another Caunois.  What could have provoked an attack on a woman at an age that could easily have led to her death, not just disfigurement?

     What provoked men --if not drunkeness, which made beasts of men, but whose effects usually dissipated as the alcohol left the system --to conceive a plan to commit violence that required elaborate planning to avoid detection?  Nothing had been stolen or destroyed in Irine Fantôme's apartment and the entry had not been forced.  Fantôme said she had not left the door open by mistake, but even if she had, a man in black with his face covered does not just happen to open the door in the middle of the night so he can hit you in the face with all his strength.

     The woman talked a bit too much, that was true.  Instead of keeping her opinions to herself, she spoke and acted on them.  When she first arrived in Caunes, wanting to make a good impression, she signaled to the Mairie that the sale of the dilapidated property next to hers at the end of Avenue du Minervois was being sold for a lower than reasonable price, probably because money was passing under the table.  Indeed, the seller and the buyer had come to an agreement that the purchase price would be supplemented by a tax-free payment for the "furniture", which meant the State might have gotten less than it was entitled to.  The Mairie looked into the terms of sale and found that the "antique" dining room table and chairs were worth much less than the 60,000 Euros the buyer paid.  Thanks to Irine, the sale was canceled, the Mairie exercised its right of first refusal, buying the property for the contract price, then selling it at a handsome profit, plus the taxes.  Both the buyer and the seller moved away from Caunes, but everyone remembered the history of the property, now a restaurant that catered to tourists.  

     Irine was right to tip off the Mairie, but she might have done better to keep very, very quiet about it.  Instead, out of moral outrage, she told one of her neighbors, the biggest mouth in town, and when the Mairie took the property, everyone knew it was Irine who had informed.  This, in a town where you had only to mention that a particular house was for sale and most people could tell you who the owner was fifty years ago.      

   

Cibiche

     It was 7:30 a.m. on the first Monday morning in August and Cibiche was wiping down the plastic tables at the Café de la Fontaine off avenue du Minervois in Caunes.

     Cibiche's real name was Jean, but everybody called him after the perennial cigarette stub that hung from his thick lips, smoked intermittently down to the filter.  No one knew his age, nor much about him, other than that he was from Lespinassière, eleven kilometers up the road in the Montagne Noir.   Cibiche wiped down the tables in the morning, moved them as needed, in return for a morning beer, which he drank with the other alcoholics for whom the Café de la Fontaine was a second home.

     Cibiche, with his black hair cut close to the skull, dark eyes and sun-browned skin could have been a wolf-cub in human form.  He spoke little, often growling his words, and everyone knew to steer clear,  although his bad humors were short-lived and limited to epithets, as when he referred to the Café de la Fontaine as that putain bar because Marie-Jo, the barmaid, told Cibiche to put out his cigarette if he was going to stand at the bar.

     It was not much of a bar, but it was the one place in Caunes that opened early and closed late with no afternoon shut down.  The rugby club met there to watch matches, the tourists sat and drank café crèmes, locals bought a newspaper or a Loto or cigarettes.  Once the ban on smoking in bars and restaurants was imposed agents began monitoring compliance, even in small villages in the Midi.  The Café de la Fontaine was closed for several days for not abiding by the regulations.  After that, anyone who wanted to smoke had to do so outside, which gave rise to Cibiche's denunciation.

     Outside, commiserating with the other smokers by a nod of his head, whenever anyone said anything critical of the government or the inspectors, Cibiche took a sip of his beer and felt better.

   

Eyeless

... Promise was that I

Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;

Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him

Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves ...

                                        Milton, Samson Agonistes

     Irine lay in the hospital bed in Carcassonne, wondering what happened to her eye.  Her right eye, the weaker one, where was it?  She could feel the outlines of an enormous patch with a metal surface covering part of her cheek and the sense that her eye socket was not as it had been before she closed her eyes to sleep, lying in her bed in a house on the main avenue in Caunes.

     When the man climbed on the bed, waking her, he delivered a violent punch to her face.  She remembered that she felt her nose cave in, but even startled she was alert enough to start swinging her arms and butting with her head to try to throw the intruder off the bed.  For a woman in her sixties, she was stronger and taller than average, but the man, who was fully masked and dressed in camouflage gear, was strongest.  He punched her in the face again, this time hitting her directly in the right eye, at which time she lost consciousness.  

     She feared for her life, but more, that she would be sexually assaulted.  So after a few seconds, when she regained something like consciousness, she lay still as if dead, hoping the man would ignore her and take whatever he wanted.  

     She heard some tromping around --the man was heavy enough that his boots reverberated on the tile floor-- then she heard a door close loudly.  She thought it was the front door, but she did not dare move yet.  After waiting, counting to one thousand, then two, then three, then four, then five thousand, she was satisfied that the intruder would not return, and allowed herself to try to open her eyes.  Only her left eye was intact, but she could see the phone by the bedside.  She pulled the receiver off its base and punched in "17" for the police, mumbling her address and the word attaqué before she fainted again.  

Inspector Lascaux

Inspector Lascaux brushed the dry leaf from his shoulder and surveyed the the vineyards from the porch of his house at 12 avenue des Cathars.  Even in the August heat, sitting on the porch of the house was all he could have asked for, whether he had a pastis in his hand or not.

     After fifty years serving the forces of order in France --first in Algeria, then Cameroon, then the blissful years in Martinique-- he had returned, with Josianne, to the village he was born in, which had of late enjoyed some success in attracting buyers of the villager's houses from that odd country, le Royaume Uni.  Mainly English, but some Scots and Irish, too, paid good money for quaint houses wedged in close together in the village.  After they put down their money, many found that the tiny ruelles were more difficult to drive in and out of than they had imagined, and that angling their left-hand drive vehicles into crevices to park stripped paint off.  But after a few glasses of the solid Minervois reds, it was all put into perspective.  They could be sitting in a caf, looking at the rain coming down somewhere in the British Isles, or they could be here, helping the local economy and their states of mind.  Once settled here, few Brits ever looked back.

     He, too, scarcely ever looked back.  His work had had very disagreeable aspects --not just the need for force, which was rare; but the aftermath of force unleashed by others against others, which Inspector Lascaux came upon, whether in a bedroom, on a street, in a shop, or in a car, as a mere witness to the detritus of human emotions of the most negative kind willfully given into.  He was not sorry he had retired, he and Josianne.  The fierce curiosity that had turned a young country recruit from the Midi into a cool professional had been a refining fire: the more he worked at his investigations, the more his faculties were engaged, and that engagement bred results, which pleased his superiors and led to promotion.

     At some point, though, he began to sense that he had seen about everything that police work could capture within its net.  The perpetrators appeared less sociological studies than instruments of a malevolent instinct that reappeared over and over again despite the efforts of social workers and defense attorneys to introduce mitigating factors into consideration of the responsibility of the accused.  When he found himself filled with contempt for a ten-year old boy who had, fatally, set fire to the bed his grandmother slept in, he told himself his soul was at risk and he had better get out.

     Here in the Minervois, writing reports concerning break-ins into the houses of part-time residents was the main preoccupation of the gendarmerie.  The foreigners demanded them for insurance purposes, so they were produced by the officers called to the scene.  Their main occupation was riding around the villages, checking to see that no one had inadvertently left a door or window open, a service for which the villagers were glad to pay taxes.  For Inspector Lascaux, buying the home on avenue des Cathars was a return to a distant past, now more prettily remembered because both he and the village had prospered in each other's absence.  He had no more to do with the gendarmerie than any other citizen, although the outlines of his career were known among them.  They accorded him the respect of, if not a senior colleague, of one who had plied their trade beyond the perimeters of Metropolitan France, in places however legitimately of French concern, none of them would have willingly served.

The Epistemology of Père Philippe

Père Philippe sat on the floor of the sanctuary, his legs tucked under him, before the monstrance, adoring the Blessed Sacrament.  His black robe, the grey heart and cross embroidered near his heart, normally hung slightly short over his lanky arms, but he had rolled the sleeves up, the better to sit in contemplation.

     Since he had become a Passionist, particularly since he had become the hermit of the chapel in the Black Mountains, he had found his place.  From the time of his childhood, death had been a familiar: it was not just that he was regularly in attendance at the bedsides of those who had died, whose earthly bodies lay in state, usually in the beds they had slept in in the villages they had lived.  It was the village custom, so he and other children shared the same experience, although his mother was more pious than most, his father not so much, his brothers and sisters still less.

     It was that he was incapable of distracting himself for long from the brutal fact that however one distracted oneself, in the end, whether the casket was ornate or just a pine box, the physical ceased to be.  Watching others (which he did naturally, without judgment) he marveled at their ability to plunge into their studies, or games of soccer, or whatever activity seemed most pressing at the time.

     He was not without a sense of humor, or incapable of affection.  Even as he watched others, he delighted in their natures: some persons were cheerful, others choleric, a few melancholic, still others agitated, or indolent.  Few he thought malicious; most deviated from their resolutions, whether to save more, or work harder, or settle down; but that which caused their natures to, at times, betray them into acts they later regretted, was not something in their own natures, but their susceptibility to false promises, whether in advertisements, on the radio or from salesmen of one sort or another.

     In the end, most lives would be put right, he firmly believed that.  For himself, though, he felt a call that was stronger than that of any advertisement, radio announcer or salesman.  He wanted to be closer to the presence of that he had experienced in the quietest moments of his life, whether by the bedside of a man whose agony had ended in a sigh, then stillness; or the radiance of a bride and groom fully committed to each other on the day of their wedding;, or alone, walking in the mountains around the village, or reading the life of St. Paul of the Cross, the mystic.

     His decision to join the Passionists was not taken lightly.  The Passionists' mission is to teach the world how to pray.  To teach how to pray, one must first know how.  Yet prayer can mean many things: supplication, confession, glorification, are only three of the purposes of prayer.  The prayer the Passionists teach is that prayer that would lead to union with God, a state beyond which there is no more to know.

     Yet to reach that state beyond which there is no more to know is very, very hard.  Père Philippe had been a Passionist for eighteen years and he had struggled at first to understand exactly what he was doing and why.  Even among his fellows, he was unusually solitary.  After ten years in various parishes in cities, he was assigned to this chapel, where he could work alone, an assignment he relished secretly because in an hermitage he could practice his devotions while remaining at the disposal of any villagers who chose to celebrate the Mass with him, rather than in the church in the village.

     In this way, he devoted himself to saying Mass (everyday but Mondays), leading the prayers to Mary, the Blessed Mother; adoring the communion wafer and writing about the Holy Spirit.  He had had some success with his writing: a religious publisher had printed two of his books, one about the Apocalypse, the other about Babel.  His superiors at the seminary and the diocese's office were pleased.: someone so retiring, so ill-suited to running a parish, with its financial demands and intrigues, had managed to draw a following.

     Those who prayed the Mass with Père Philippe would often say that they had never encountered a priest like him.

     "He has the real faith--"

     "When he preaches, he is full of feeling--"

     "He speaks from his heart--"

     "But his books are difficult to understand--"

     He could be said to be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom.  But his approach, which led to detachment  about money concerns, encouraged prayer and simple charity towards others, could be summed up as not so much a way of thinking about the world, as a technique for managing in it.

     That technique involved the development of a finely-tuned interior antenna from which God could transmit.  Everything that interfered with the frequency at which God worked, only blocked the signal or caused it to come in at a weak frequency.  Prayer, such as most were instructed in --the recitation of words of adoration during a weekly liturgy, -- could help, followed by the taking of communion, through which God freely gave of himself.  Yet despite providing a base from which the faithful could take strength, there was more to be had, Père Philippe knew.

     Not everyone was prepared --or needed-- to know God as Père Philippe knew HIm.  When he said the Mass, he frequently did not look directly at his congregants, but upwards, beyond the stained glass of the little chapel in the Black Mountains, to God.  The reason being that when he was saying the Mass he felt the most outward signs of God's presence, invisible but immanent, coming through the ancient stones.

     During the Revolution of 1789 and the Terror that followed, the authorities tried to sell the chapel to have it demolished.  A curé's brother managed to buy it, preserving the building until it was safe again to say the Catholic Mass in France.  The chapel had been a dependency of the 8th century Benedictine abbey in the village and was now almost a thousand years old.  Of course God was comfortable here, Père Philippe thought, which was why Mass was a daily conversation with the Lord, and not an empty ritual.

     Père Philippe looked at his watch: there were five minutes to go before the start of Mass.  He had been sitting on the floor of the chapel for almost thirty minutes, along with a handful of his parishioners. He got up from the floor and walked over to the monstrance.  Lifting it from the altar, he raised it high over the heads of his parishioners, turning first to their right, then to the center, then their left.  He set the monstrance back down on the altar table, opened the cut glass door in which the sacrament was kept and gently removed it, placing it on the paten, on which he carried it to the tabernacle, while his parishioners watched him walk to the side altar.  At the altar, he removed a quantity of communion wafers and added them to the one on the paten.  He returned to the altar table and left them there.

     In one swift movement, he slipped through the side door that led to the sacristy.  It was time to put on his celebrant's attire.   Mass would begin once he returned in his vestments, the assembled standing in a gesture of respect.  As he made the sign of the Cross, God would make himself known again, not as he had in the Blessed Sacrament, but through the person of Jesus Christ, who would then become the Blessed Sacrament, remitting sins and if only briefly, giving those present a glimpse of the possibility they might overcome the finitude of the body via the Spirit.

     Père Philippe prayed quickly, before he began the liturgy, only to God, that he might be His worthy servant.  Only an empty vessel could take the Spirit in, could send it out to others,  Père Phlippe was happiest when he most emptied himself.  It happened rarely, but sometimes he felt himself only an instrument.  At those times he felt also the most wonderful release from anything that had been troubling him.  After so many years as a priest, he had made so little progress.  Yet he felt the call again, each time he entered the sanctuary, a new beginning.  Then and there, at that moment, a new beginning: it called him on.