Notes from the Cévennes, page 14
Even keen aficionados like my friend M. Barnier, a retired letterpress printer who once produced poetry pamphlets for my one-man publishing house, agrees that disgust is a legitimate reaction. For three generations, in a street adjoining ours, his family printed the city’s bullfighting magazine on an enormous Heidelberg Platen, which continued to wheeze and clatter until a few years ago, and which now resides in the Musée des Cultures Taurines, a poem by the Irish poet Vona Groarke (from the last of my pamphlets that M. Barnier produced) frozen in lead in its frame. He and I often cross paths in a café in the pretty Place aux Herbes, and discuss the joys of feeling the print like faint braille on the paper and the shoddy nature of so many recent books. His main complaint about bullfighting, however, is that the Camargue bulls have weak knees unable to support their vast tonnage when the going gets rough. ‘It makes it safer for the torero,’ he says, with contempt, sipping at his espresso.
The pros and cons of the corrida is a subject to be avoided in this city, if you wish not to fall out with those you have always regarded as friends. It is, I suppose, a kind of code of silence. Nevertheless, anti-corrida demonstrations are becoming more frequent. The latest, outside the amphitheatre itself, featured the Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson draping herself for a few minutes in front of the life-size bronze statue of the legendary Nimeño II, which was subsequently sprayed by ‘an orange liquid’. The presence of a Hollywood star (‘just there to show her cul,’ commented one aficionado) ensured a febrile international media attention. Nimeño was tetraplegic after being tossed by a bull in 1989, and subsequently hanged himself in his garage in an outlying village ‘like a washed-up farmer’, as L’Observateur put it. I did once see the superbly brave Sébastien Castella, whom I first watched when he was a teenager, have his thigh snagged on a horn. This is potentially lethal, but the horn missed the crucial artery.
For the past few years, the arena has hosted historical re-enactments of Roman games, including chariot races and gladiatorial combats, with a cast of hundreds: these have included the battle of Actium, in homage to Augustus, the city’s chief benefactor. This in itself is accurate: the Romans would flood the arena for their re-creation of famous sea battles, the gallons piped directly from the castellum divisorum. Maybe this was all the excuse they needed to spend five laborious years and a fortune on the aqueduct. The brainchild of Eric Teyssier of Nîmes University, les Grands jeux romains might, in the bold if realistic view of the Midi Libre, eventually replace the city’s twice-yearly bullfighting feria, during which the arena’s sand is thumped by the bodies of some 50 bulls and the streets run with booze. Like many living in the centre of town, we escape to the hills. The idea of a replacement is appealing, although the absence of real blood and unabashed cruelty makes these re-enactments, at heart, very un-Roman; I doubt Jo’s cousin would be terribly interested, for all their painstaking accuracy. Bar the odd forgotten watch or pair of glasses among the leather-skirted soldiery, you are looking at something theoretically indistinguishable from the real thing.
Among the many books about Nîmes printed by Lacour-Ollé, there are lots on bullfighting, including Daudet et la tauromachie. The author was an enthusiastic spectator, but the book includes his eyewitness account of a young banderillo – a handsome local – being eviscerated against the barrier on a single agonised scream, ‘still holding the two banderilles, which quivered for a moment like a signal of distress’.
A few days ago I went into the shop for pens, paper and salvatory paperclips, squeezing past the fading maps and curled postcards in their outdoor stands. A tabby cat similar to our own, curled over the unfaded OLLÉ fired into the nineteenth-century glazed floor-tiles, got up to brush against my legs. It had turned up a month ago and wouldn’t leave. The antique fan, suspended from one of the blue-painted ceiling roses, revolved slowly in the summer heat. I asked one of the staff for the cat’s name.
‘Alphon—’ she began, instantly correcting herself with a laugh: ‘Auguste, I mean.’
Between Caesar Augustus and Alphonse Daudet, the city’s shadows still flit and waver. Meanwhile, for the last month or so of summer swelter, Auguste has appeared on a Missing poster, a spectral presence looking out at passers-by in the arcade’s half-light with what is, one hopes, a merely teasing air. When I asked about him last week, old Madame Ollé, now in her nineties and still serving customers, told me a story of the war. She and her family were bombed out by the Americans (‘they never much cared about what they hit’) and again by the English (‘they were much more precise’). They moved four kilometres away, from near the marshalling yards to the safer side of Nîmes, taking their cat with them. Then he disappeared for a month. ‘That’s how long it took him to find his way back to the bombed-out house,’ she said. ‘My mother took food every day, since he didn’t want to leave, even though it was a ruin. I think that’s what has happened to Auguste. He’s upped and gone back home, wherever that is. Home is so important, n’est-ce pas?’
Wherever that is. And that’s the mystery. I nod a touch too enthusiastically.
18
Defending Wolves
The worst thing about the wolves, say the shepherds, is that you don’t see them. They prey on your mind, because you can be certain that they’re out there somewhere. Perhaps behind that juniper bush. That oak. A whole pack, maybe, beyond that low tussocky hill where you’d take a bite to eat in the old, wolf-free days. You know it for sure when the dog, usually afraid of nothing, dedicated to defending the flock, is suddenly shivering against your legs. Refusing to go a step further. Ancestral memory, this, because no shepherd around here has faced the wolf menace for six generations. Never mind that some 150 generations of local pastoralists had to live with it before; it’s now been forgotten. Finding the disembowelled lamb and its mother, stragglers both, fleece torn, insides spewed out, is a deep psychological shock. It’s personal, the shepherds say – those of them who can express their emotions freely. Others just bottle it all up, then have a nervous breakdown a year or two later. This is what the doctors report.
Like many people, I am fascinated by shepherds. Many years ago, before the wolves were anywhere near our mountains, I remember meeting a wizened berger tending his flock in a steeply sloped chestnut wood, the air November-damp. The sheep were munching eagerly on the chestnuts, muzzling them free of their spiky armour, their neck-bells translating their excitement. ‘It keeps their fleece oily, protects them against the cold and wet,’ he said, leaning on his knobbled stick, watching as they ate. During the war, and other hard times, whole communities were kept from starving by chestnuts, just as they have been for many millennia in China. The ‘bread tree’, as it was known here from the sixteenth century, grew well in granitic areas where olives and cereals were not suited to the acid soil or the altitude, and whole forests were planted. There is not much you can’t do with chestnuts, from soup to black bread to roasted kernels, and they are stuffed with fatty acids and nutritional goodness. Locals, too poor for much else, gorged on them.
Thus the dismay when, in the 1960s, the canker Cryphonectria parasitica decimated their numbers as seriously as the ‘ink disease’ of the 1890s. Careful arboreal treatment and a fashion for chestnut purée saved the industry. We gather them in season, careful only to stick to those tumbled onto the paths. There is a childlike satisfaction in heeling open the hull, spiked like a medieval flail, and revealing the glossy fruits nestling inside like cubs. Now a different kind of natural threat is endangering shepherding itself: if one of the main reasons for the Cévennes mountains’ recent designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site was the Neolithic survival of traditional ‘agro-silvo-pastoralism’, then so also was their diversity of species, including the wolf. Like the vulture that feeds on the kills, Canis lupus is protected. Hunters are forbidden to shoot it. Officially.
The shepherds (like the goat herders) know all their animals by name. Even when the flock numbers five or six hundred. Their quirks, their characteristics, their personalities. The outgoing ones, the insular ones. The leaders, the followers. Through the long and lonely days outside, the continual presence that Mediterranean pastoralism demands, you learn respect and fondness. So when just one of these familiars is hideously torn apart and left (not necessarily eaten), your view of the world, of life, changes. The world becomes less kind, more threatening. The ewes miscarry in the ripples of fear, and paranoia sets in. That’s what the Cévenol shepherds say, and some give up.
The defenders of the wolves – from expert specialists to straightforward Greens – say we understand, we sympathise, but tant pis. The wolves were here long before us, long before language, long before the concept of agro-pastoralism (defined by mobility and transhumance), or the human race or even the furry-looking hominids with the beetling brow and long-limbed crouch. This is their rightful territory, their heritage. We can’t appropriate it completely, as we have appropriated so much of the planet.
Flocks of sheep, some of the defenders remind us, are destructive to wild flowers, to saplings, they leave a hillside ecologically stripped. Along the gennel behind our house there are so many wild violets in the spring that their scent fills the air. Years ago, an old lady from the nearby farm came to pick a bouquet. ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘these were all eaten by the sheep. They loved the violet taste. We had to get up first thing before the flock passed, if we wanted any for the house.’
Do children still pick violets? Or even know what they are?
Well, wolves at least have returned, spreading back up, not from Poland as was previously believed, but from the Abruzzi mountains in Italy. We must learn to live alongside them, their sympathisers say, now that they have decided to hang about here on their passage to the Pyrenees, an epic journey built on cunning and intelligence. Since the red deer was reintroduced, it is worth it: serious meals are readily available.
It’s too easy for later immigrants like ourselves to find the natives troublesome. Look at what happened in the United States. In Arizona, lying under the brilliant stars in an Apache reservation 40 years ago, I suddenly sensed this vast brashness of a nation as absurd, outrageously appropriating the tribal lands for what is, let’s face it, a gain so short-term that it can barely be called a way of life. More a way of death, perhaps, and on a planetary scale.
When we walk in the mountains, we sense the wolves these days, as we sensed them in north-eastern Romania, up in the Pagan Snow Cap Region where the shepherds have dogs fiercer and more dangerous to walkers than the wolves themselves. Even these dogs are helpless against a whole pack. We sensed the bears there, too. There are no bears now in the Cévennes.
Our friend Max lives with his family high up in the neighbouring commune, having spent years single-handedly restoring a mas burnt out during the war by Waffen-SS troops from Nîmes. Yurts now dot its fields, and the self-composting toilet stands proud, with an amazing view down the plunge of valley. The first evidence of wolves was a dead badger on the three-mile forester’s track up to the house: ‘Its stomach was ripped open but only the liver was taken, being the most nutritious.’ Then, returning home one day in his jeep, looking across the wooded gulf, he saw a large animal padding past the front of the mas. ‘Too big to be a dog. And the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. Even at that distance.’ I nodded: they say that looking into the eyes of a wolf changes you. A few weeks later, up on the nearby col, his own dog abruptly cowered, refusing to move a step further, and it now hates going up there. Soon after, on the very same windswept crest, a neighbouring shepherd’s fearless border collie began whining and trembling . . . and there was the wolf itself, slipping between sprays of wild broom. The park officials arrived the next day, armed not with guns but thermal imaging cameras.
‘Personally, I am happy,’ said Max. ‘My dream is to wake in the middle of the night and hear their howls. But I’m not a shepherd.’
Rumour has become fact. They have returned. They have arrived chez nous.
Perhaps that’s what the locals thought when they saw the Waffen-SS soldiers tumbling out of their armoured cars, fanning over the same hills, intent on rooting out what the officers reckoned was a thousands-strong army of Resistance fighters. There were no more than a few hundred, of course. One of the victims was young Fernand, only son of peasant farmers, not a member of the Maquis, who had been ordered to guide the troops to a remote hideout of the Resistance. When they arrived, there was no one: only a few beds of bracken, the embers cold in the hearth. They torched the house and shot Fernand through the back of the head halfway along the return path, out of spite. It took days before he was identified (laid out in the mairie) by his clothes, as his face had gone. We always pause by his memorial plaque, and Max keeps it alive with flowers.
There is no real comparison between the self-conscious savagery of those soldiers and the sleek beast they modelled themselves on, its violence powered by instinct, but the Nazi regime made it all too frequently. ‘I am the wolf and this is my den,’ Hitler commented to a servant in his mountain hideout, and as early as 1928, Goebbels described the Nazi delegates to the Reichstag as ‘like a wolf tearing into a flock of sheep, that is how we come!’
In our early years here, a hike in the remoter, higher parts was likely to take us close to the wolves, watching unseen; now the same might be said of a local walk. The chill you feel is in response to the purely feral, and to the canniness of a creature who has learnt to cope where we have only learnt to conquer. It adds grit to the comforting blandness of the term Parc national. The wolf doesn’t obey boundaries. Its limits are those of its own survival. That’s why it avoids us, stays concealed, ready to put distance between it and the threat – at least 60 miles in a single day if needs be. Ancestral knowledge of how dangerous we are, shared with so many in the animal kingdom, is what keeps it alive generation after generation; for instance, the nature of the operation to eradicate it from America a hundred years ago seems psychopathic in its needless cruelty. At some almost cellular level, these things are remembered. As for the danger to humans from the wolf itself, in normal circumstances there is none. Only the shepherd has reason to fear: not for his life, but for his way of life.
The demands of UNESCO-protected pastoralism versus natural wildness, or shepherds v. wolves, were enacted in the form of a mock trial up at Florac in the high Cévennes recently, with real barristers, witnesses and a judge hearing the evidence, the whole procedure streamed onto the Net and taken very seriously.
The wolf knows nothing of such shenanigans. Canis lupus came before, and it will continue long after all our human quarrels, all our greatest concerns, have abated into birdsong and wind.
19
A Catastrophe
It is Friday morning in the hills. A clear-skied late June. We have barely slept, but we have to shop, and fancy a river swim. On the track where our car is parked, we meet our occasional neighbour from Normandy. He has recently retired as environment inspector, no longer ticking off EU stipulations. He drove down yesterday to his second home, escaping the rain. ‘Vous allez bien?’ he asks, as if today is normal. We pull appropriately long faces and he nods vigorously. ‘Une catastrophe! It’s not the fault of the people, it’s all too complex to grasp and they’re manipulated. Referendums are a bad idea. God knows what would happen if we were to hold one in France.’
The clear, rocky river is exquisitely chill under the overarching leaves, and we are alone. I enter the water slowly, scattering minnows and a lazy trout. It’s like walking into a liquid freezer unit. After a few minutes, however, your body adjusts and you might as well be in a lukewarm bath. Perhaps this is what the post-Brexit era will feel like after the shock: we are good at adapting.
Lying on the bank, I sense my late father shaking his head in disbelief. The Derbyshire son of the village schoolteacher, he volunteered to fight the Nazis at the age of 16. The horrors he witnessed in Normandy, Belgium and Germany made him a committed Europhile. Fluent in French from his years as a serviceman, he escaped Britain’s post-war grimness by joining Pan Am and being sent abroad: thus my birthplace (Paris). I once asked him what the happiest moment of his life was. ‘The day Brussels was liberated. Music and dancing in every street.’ The river chuckles on and I try to be philosophical: the natural state of human existence, perhaps, is migration. Or war. Without the Union, Europe would return to its old habits. Perhaps that’s what the likes of Farage, Davis and Johnson want; belligerence, where the crasser sort of rhetoric finds a home and bombast rules. I think of Victor Hugo’s celebrated lines:
Depuis six mille ans la guerre
Plait aux peuples querelleurs,
Et Dieu perd son temps à faire
Les étoiles et les fleurs.
For six thousand years, war
Has pleased a quarrelsome people
And God wastes his time making
Stars and flowers.
All my life I’ve tried to put down roots, and failed.
We return to find friends’ emails and text messages: those in French are sympathetic, as after a bereavement; those in English are distraught. ‘My whole life has been mocked’, reads one. To questions about what difficulties this might mean for the Thorpes, resident in France for 25 years, I reply ‘none at all’, as we have dual nationality. Never has that decision, requiring four years of patience and paperwork, seemed more sensible.
