The Great Dune of Pilat (or Pyla)
The revival of the Richard Brautigan Appreciation Society was going nowhere. It seemed some distance from the subject was required. To cheer myself up I went to Bordeaux to visit a friend. Livia was a fan of Jamaica, not California. Her house lies by the railway line between the city centre and the sea coast, along the bay of Arcachon. It is misleading to call it a house; it is more a random series of outbuildings dotted about a patch of land that the high speed trains run through every 30 minutes. Her Mother has painstakingly reconstructed and reconfigured these buildings; a tumbledown garage becoming a pottery studio for example. Some she rented out, others she used as an office or a bedroom for guests.
The garden here is always marvellous – her Mother was once a florist – lilies and dahlias abound, magnolia red geraniums compete with cerise roses and white and pink begonias. There are pots of fuschia and boughainvillea alongside large lavender and rosemary plants. Half of the garden is given over to growing food – raspberries, tomatoes, haricot verts, celery, rhubarb, aubergines, lettuce. Livia did not eat meat or fish, though she was happy to bring back oysters for me from her place of work at the port, to be cracked open fresh, doused with lemon juice and swallowed. Quickly, because I was unsure of the taste, but when in Rome has always proved a good policy for me.
In her spare time, Livia was usually protesting about some injustice with her son by her side. He too knew all the slogans about the owner state and global corporations robbing the citizens and was growing up to be a fine militant teenager. On her first visit to England, in her fight against nuclear power, she had been arrested at Sellafield. I envied her indefatigable certainty.
She said I should find a nice French woman and have two kids. Not me, she added, Mais non! Any more kids, forget it! There was a blonde with nut brown skin at the post office. How about her? she suggested. Let me introduce you! The blonde was carrying a freshly purchased single thin baguette, which we construed to be surely a symbol of loneliness. She looked baffled by the request. The date went poorly. She didn’t speak English. My French consisted of a random series of words which rarely combined into an effective sentence. Gendarmarie; ma cherie ami; j’ecoute; qu’est que ce; pourquoi; un emboueillage; combien de temps; d’accord; a droit; a gauche.
She was, it turned out, divorced and cynical. She was from Rouen and was staying at a campsite at the foot of the Dune du Pilat. We ate at a cafe by the beach. The wine was consumed ravenously. The magret de canard was magnifique. The mosquitoes were also very hungry. We walked up the dune, the largest in Europe, a huge spine of the finest sand over 100 metres high, a local wonder. On a clear day, Livia told me, you can see the Pyrenees from here. An ice cream man trudged by, pulling a trolley with huge wheels. He had nice eyes. All he had left was double chocolate magnum – and I have a slight allergy to chocolate. This lack of choice seemed to satisfy Madame. Reggae music played and we watched the sunset with about a thousand other people, the heat of the day slowly dissipating, the ocean now becalmed
I returned with a long face which was beginning to swell, my upper lip too. We sat under the almond tree, drinking a local rosé. Livia laughed and said, So you did not get any opportunity to practice ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir’? She rolled another cigarette and shrugged. Ah, that is life. Is beautiful, no? Anyway, everyone is turning lesbian these days. You know it is the big fashion in France? She poured me another large glass of wine. She then said, I agree with Descartes when he say, ‘If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.’ N’est pas?
The next day we dug in the grey mud of the bay for mussels.
