All our outings led us toward stones. Castles, of course, but the castles of the Loire, even though none were missing from our agenda, interested us less: too beautiful, too clean, too opulent, too bourgeois — decors for princesses with peas under their mattresses and secret love affairs. And then, the mild weather in Anjou conspires to deal gently with limestone and tufa. For a soft climate, soft stone. Father possessed the kind of austerity that felt more at home with granite. So on the long Easter and Pentecost weekends, he would take us on a guided tour of Brittany. There, the whole substratum resounded with this secret message, rising from the depths: granite is a rock as hard as men are sometimes hard — from having had too many crosses to bear. It is a crystalline rock, magmatic, formed in the entrails of the earth. The pressures on it are so great that the volume of an airy immensity is reduced to the dimensions of a diamond. And what the Armorican substratum has borne is no less than a Himalayan chain.
We were in the primary era, and everything still remained to be done. A powerful folding movement thrust tall islands up out of the depths of the waters. The Armorican Massif was then more than fifteen thousand feet high, a dinosaur before the dinosaurs, tropical before the tropics, because the prevailing climate of these first lands was hot and humid. When people boast of the charms of the past, they always forget this Polynesian phase of Brittany. But if you are a painter in Pont-Aven, this could save you the money spent on a fruitless journey to the Tuamotou Archipelago. The entire island was covered by a dense forest, necessarily virgin because no one ever came across either druids, birds, or mammals, not even those tall, clumsy creatures with long necks that weren’t giraffes. What caused our Hercynian Mountains to be leveled? The wind, which blows on our coasts; the rain, which our skies lavish on us; and time, with a modicum of infinite patience. On a smaller scale, we can understand it better. Take a few million pilgrims, hang a cockleshell around their necks, send them by any route to Galicia, and ask them, as they enter the triumphal porch of the cathedral, to place a hand on its central column. Come back five centuries later, and the pilgrims’ sweat has left a deep impression of five fingers in the granite. A breath of air, provided it doesn’t lose heart, is enough to raze mountains. Today, their highest point rises to no more than twelve hundred feet. With a bit more time, with a few more squalls, the Armorican Massif will resemble the plains of Beauce — minus their fertility.
Brittany was his chosen land. He crossed the length and breadth of it six days out of seven, working for a Quimper wholesaler located on the bank of the Odet River in the rue du Vert-Moulin. It wasn’t hard to remember the address: rue du Vermoulu — “Worm-eaten,” he would joke when business was going badly. His area covered the five departments of Brittany, but not the little bit south of the Loire where the estuary, in the days before the bridges spanned it, formed a natural frontier. To organize his itineraries in the best possible way, he had stuck the local Mich-elin maps of the region on a plywood bulletin board and, by juxtaposing them, reconstituted a greater Brittany, which covered one whole wall of the office. It was pierced by hundreds of map pins with different-colored heads, each color representing one of his clients. He only had to glance at it to know what was what. He had worked out a complicated code, which he alone had mastered, in which the colors referred to the turnover achieved, to the frequency of his visits, to new possibilities for sales, and to other criteria that escaped us. We knew, for instance, that the green heads saw him less often than the red heads, and that the blue heads, either because he expected more from them or simply because it was worth making a detour to call on a friend, enjoyed his special attention. As for the black heads, they were invited to make a bit of effort if they didn’t want to disappear from this Breton constellation. And since he had a range of some ten colors at his disposal, he also indicated the pleasant hotels, the good restaurants, and even a few sights, the destinations of our next family outings.
On Sunday evenings he closeted himself in his office, brought his accounts and order books up to date, and wrote the cards stamped with his name that he mailed to his clients to advise them of his next visit. Then, stationing himself in front of his wall chart, which, over the parts showing the sea, he had embellished with photographs of the most beautiful sites in the region, and as if he were planning his strategy on the eve of a battle, he worked out his future routes, joining the colored pins with cotton thread that traced, according to the Euclidean principle of the shortest distance, an ideal geometrical route, a zigzagging aerial view that represented, like a diagram or a temperature chart, his schedule over the next month. Week after week, in broken lines, the threads indicated Ariadne’s paths, which furtively thwarted our father the minotaur. The threads too were of different colors and, when weighted at both ends with copper buttons to keep them tight, managed to avoid encroaching on one another. And, while methodically exploring an area, they would sometimes meet at a place where he enjoyed staying the night, thus doing his best to reconcile the clients to be called on with his favorite hotels, sure as he was of chancing upon two or three fellow travelers there and playing a game of cards with them after dinner.
He hesitated for a long time before deciding on the most judicious solution, kept changing his mind — instead of that point in the north, why not try that other one more to the west? — and every time a new variation, an unknown itinerary, depended on these options. When a particular one seemed to lead to an impasse, he untied the thread circulating between the colored heads and started again from zero; that’s to say from Quimper, where he arrived every Monday morning, having left Random at six, with nothing inside him by way of breakfast but the smoke from his first Gitane cigarette.
Two hundred kilometers to drive at a stretch was no picnic. Whereas nowadays they do their best to bypass them, in those days the gravelly, narrow, winding roads passed through every little village. The small towns, confined within the perimeter of their ancient ramparts, with their crowded markets and their cramped streets, all constituted obstacles to the progress of the traveler. For that was how salesmen liked to describe themselves. The word didn’t evoke any dream of evasion, any image of a far-off country, of golden sands bordered with coconut palms: a traveler was simply someone who earned his living on the road.
The moment you left a main road and penetrated into the labyrinth of the Breton countryside, you had to reckon with the droves of cows blocking the whole width of the road with their disenchanted gait; corpulent, sensual creatures with their udders bouncing about between their hind legs and almost touching the ground, ruminating the same immeasurable ennui between their jaws, as if having to carry that strange geography of brown continents and ivory oceans on their bulging flanks had convinced them they had traveled around the world. The cowherd, male or female, followed on a bicycle, a stationmaster’s little red flag tucked under his or her arm with which, should the occasion arise, to direct the traffic, feigning with suitable dignity to hear nothing when the sound of a horn betrayed a driver’s impatience, continuing at an unvarying speed, almost losing his balance because he had to ride so slowly, taking in bumps and potholes with the same heavy pressure on the pedals, only dismounting at the bottom of the steepest slopes, and always at the same place, getting back on his bike at another landmark — that tree, for instance, which indicated the spot where the slope became gentler. Such is the routine, along the road ritually followed morning and evening, of this twice-daily transhumance. Could the pasture be brought closer to the farm by an exchange with a neighbor? The cowherds sometimes think about it, but immediately reject the idea of asking a favor — how humiliating — and anyway that would upset the established pendular movement in the wake of the indolent beasts, that is, upset the motion of the planets, the beautiful alternation of days and nights, the cycle of the seasons in accordance with which life, however wretched, has so far been organized, and will still be organized tomorrow. Any change, even if it were conducive to greater comfort, would certainly bring with it some hidden disadvantage, and also, if the working of the clock were disrupted, something like death.