Sylvie brought the car to another windy turnout overlooking the sea. It was brown right to the horizon, the offshore wind causing them to be looking at the back sides of waves moving away from the strand, an odd effect. Michel tried to recall the old sun-beaten blue. There had been varieties of Mediterranean blue, the clear purity of the Adriatic, the Aegean with its Homeric touch of wine… now all brown. Brown sea, beachless sea cliffs, the pale hills rocky, desertlike, deserted. A wasteland. No, nothing was the same, nothing.
Eventually Sylvie noticed his silence. She drove him west to Aries, to a small hotel in the heart of the town. Michel had never lived in Aries, or had much to do there, but there were Praxis offices next to this hotel, and he had no other compelling idea concerning where to stay. They got out; the g felt heavy. Sylvie waited downstairs while he took his bag up; and there he was, standing uncertainly in a small hotel room, his bag thrown on the bed, his body tense with the desire to find his land, to return to his home. This wasn’t it.
He went downstairs and then next door, where Sylvie was tending to other business.
“I have a place I want to see,” he said to her.
“Anywhere you like.”
“It’s near Vallabrix. North of Uzes.” She said she knew where that was.
It was late afternoon by the time they reached the place: a clearing by the side of a narrow old road, next to an olive grove on a slope, with the mistral raking over it. Michel asked Sylvie to stay at the car, and got out in the wind and walked up the slope between the trees, alone with the past.
His old mas had been set at the north end of the grove, on the edge of a tableland overlooking a ravine. The olive trees were gnarled with age. The mas itself was nothing but a shell of masonry, almost buried under long tangled thorny blackberry vines growing against the outer walls.
Looking down into the ruin, Michel found he could just remember its interior. Or parts of it. There had been a kitchen and dining table near the door, and then, after passing under a massive roof beam, a living room with couches and a low coffee table, and a door back to the bedroom. He had lived there for two or three years, with a woman named Eve. He hadn’t thought of the place in over a century. He would have said it was all gone from his mind. But with the ruins before him, fragments of that time leaped to the eye, ruins of another kind: a blue lamp had stood in that corner now filled with broken plaster. A Van Gogh print had been tacked to that wall, where now there was only blocks of masonry, roof tiles, drifts of leaves. The massive roof beam was gone, its supports in the walls gone as well. Someone must have hauled it out; hard to believe anyone would make the effort, it had to have weighed hundreds of kilos. Strange what people would do. Then again, deforestation; there were few trees left big enough to provide a beam that large. The centuries people had lived on this land.
Eventually deforestation might cease to be a problem. During the drive Sylvie had spoken of the violent flood winter, rains, wind; this mistral had lasted a month. Some said it would never end. Looking into the ruined house, Michel was not sorry. He needed the wind to orient himself. It was strange how the memory worked, or didn’t. He stepped up onto the broken wall of the mas, tried to remember more of the place, of his life here with Eve. Deliberate recall, a hunt for the past… Instead scenes came to him of the life he had shared with Maya in Odessa, with Spencer down the hall. Probably the two lives had shared enough aspects to create the confusion. Eve had been hot-tempered like Maya, and as for the rest, la vie quotidienne was la vie quotidienne, in all times and all places, especially for a specific individual no doubt, settling into his habits as if into furniture, taken along from one place to the next. Perhaps.
The inside walls of this house had been clean beige plaster, tacked with prints. Now the patches of plaster left were rough and discolored, like the exterior walls of an old church. Eve had worked in the kitchen like a dancer in a routine, her back and legs long and powerful. Looking over her shoulder at him to laugh, her chestnut hair tossing with every turn. Yes, he remembered that repeated moment. An image without context. He had been in love. Although he had made her angry. Eventually she had left him for someone else, ah yes, a teacher in Uzes. What pain! He remembered it, but it meant nothing to him now, he felt not a pinch of it. A previous life. These ruins could not make him feel it. They scarcely brought back even the images. It was frightening — as if reincarnation were real, and had happened to him, so that he was experiencing minute flashbacks of a life separated from him by several subsequent deaths. How odd it would be if such reincarnation were real, speaking in languages one did not know, like Bridey Murphy; feeling the swirl of the past through the mind, feeling previous existences … well. It would feel just like this, in fact. But to reexperience nothing of those past feelings, to feel nothing except the sensation that one was not feeling…
He left the ruins, and walked back among the old olive trees.
It looked like the grove was still being worked by someone. The branches overhead were all cut to a certain level, and the ground underfoot was smooth and covered by short dry pale grass, growing between thousands of old gray olive pits. The trees were in ranks and files but looked natural anyway, as if they had simply grown at that distance from each other. The wind blew its lightly percussive shoosh in the leaves. Standing midgrove, where he could see little but olive trees and sky, he noticed again how the leaves’ two colors flashed back and forth in the wind, green then gray, gray then green…
He reached up to pull down a twig and inspect the leaves close up. He remembered; up close the two sides of an olive leaf weren’t all that different in color; a flat medium green, a pale khaki. But a hillside full of them, flailing in the wind, had those two distinct colors, in moonlight shifting to black and silver. If one were looking toward the sun at them it became more a matter of texture, flat or shiny.
He walked up to a tree, put his hands on its trunk. It felt like an olive tree’s bark: rough broken rectangles. A gray-green color, somewhat like the undersides of the leaves, but darker, and often covered by yet another green, the yellow green of lichen, yellow green or battleship gray. There were hardly any olive trees on Mars; no Mediterraneans yet. No, it felt like he was on Earth. About ten years old. Carrying that heavy child inside himself. Some of the rectangles of bark were peeling down. The fissures between the rectangles were shallow. The true color of the bark, clean of all lichen, appeared to be a pale woody beige. There was so little of it that it was hard to tell. Trees coated in lichen; Michel had not realized that before. The branches above his head were smoother, the fissures flesh-colored lines only, the lichen smoother as well, like green dust on the branches and twigs.
The roots were big and strong. The trunks spread outward as they approached the ground, spreading in fingerlike protrusions with holes and gaps between, like knobby fists thrust into the ground. No mistral would ever uproot these trees. Not even a Martian wind could knock one down.
The ground was covered with old olive pits, and shriveled black olives on the way to becoming pits. He picked up one with its black skin still smooth, ripped away the skin with his thumb and fingernails. The purple juice stained his skin, and when he licked it, the taste was not like cured olives at all. Sour. He bit into the flesh, which resembled plum flesh, and the taste of it, sour and bitter, unolivelike except for a hint of the oily aftertaste, bolted through his mind — like Maya’s deja vu — he had done this before! As a child they had tried it often, always hoping the taste would come round to the table taste, and so give them food in their play field, manna in their own little wilderness. But the olive flesh (paler the further one cut in toward the pit) stubbornly remained as unpalatable as ever — the taste as embedded in his mind as any person, bitter and sour. Now pleasant, because of the memory evoked. Perhaps he had been cured.