After two months passing the time in the south of France, the final days leading up to my departure saw some unexpected behaviors. A definite uptick in alcohol consumption. Restless nights. Impatient outbursts over trivialities. And now, having left France (I’m writing this from a hotel near Zurich), I start to understand why.
The time spent in France was not only about getting away. There is nothing really for me to get away from – no job, no pressing responsibilities, only a routine. Months living in one place – for me, a short-term lease on a lake near Salzburg – had generated a routine of working daily to finish a novel, exercising in a local gym, meeting people, and exploring my new surroundings … along with the mundane: the grocery shopping, the cooking, doctors and dentists, haircuts.
Loading up the car and driving off to France for two months should leave that all behind. You would think.
There was an immediate break in the routine, of course – the thrill we all get when we lock up the house and turn the car toward the airport or some distant destination. That first day will likely not include seeing the inside of a supermarket or getting a load of laundry done. For a fleeting moment you sizzle with the excitement you felt as a child backing out of the driveway; you recall seeing the delight in your parents – the ones who were getting away from it all – in their wider smiles and faster and brighter chatter and their increased patience with you. It’s powerful stuff that you now know (as your parents did then) won’t last for long. Sometimes maybe – sadly – not even to the end of the driveway.
But my time in France would not be so tragically short-lived. I had organized my visit into two one-month stays. At the time I made the bookings, I mainly had practical considerations in mind: I didn’t want to be moving around constantly; a different hotel every week; the logistics of getting from A to B; schlepping the luggage; just getting acclimated only to have to move again. I wanted something like the comforts and conveniences of “home” being away from home. And I wanted some small luxuries – one really: to have a swimming pool.
What I had at the back of my mind when I booked everything in November was rehabilitation. I had just been hit with a sudden and unexpected divorce. The first couple of months had been hard. I anticipated more emotional upheaval ahead – efforts to come to terms with the change, with a new and very different life that had been foisted on me all at once. By summer, I was thinking, I’ll have probably achieved some acceptance (I had) and be ready to recover from the whole ordeal.
The cabana idea proved to be a good one – uncharacteristically prescient of me, it has to be said. I settled into the first one just outside Narbonne and then, in a strangely disconnected way, observed myself like an anthropologist in the field: How will this specimen faced with such conditions react?
I went to the supermarket. I loaded my cabana kitchen with a few local delicacies – baguettes and croissants, of course; more cheese than I could ever possibly eat; fresh French summer fruit, regional wines – but mainly with the same sort of thing I would eat at home. After some time spent exploring Narbonne and a half-day in nearby Carcassonne, I lacked the enthusiasm for any more tourism. Instead, I took a daily dip in the pool, lounged in the sun, read; I joined a local gym for a month and signed up for French lessons. I settled into a routine. Perhaps this is what it feels like for people who have holiday homes or boats or cabins to get away to every summer. Except this was not in a familiar place, and the routine wasn’t the summer routine; it was all new. It seemed nomadic in a way – a hybrid mash-up of vacation with ordinary life: a stay-cation, I guess, but for longer.
It turned out to be more than I bargained for. The speed with which I concluded that conventional tourism bored me was startling. I had the right intentions with the gym and the French lessons, but these are things that need time: instead of just keeping the fitness level ticking over at the new gym and slipping back into a decent conversational level of French, each just felt like a leap into icy water – brief, invigorating, but unrewardingly superficial.
I had forced it, basically. I had responded to some kind of compulsion to do something, anything. I had been too enthusiastic in my wish to take home on the road, a kind of invisible caravan containing my habits, my basic routine pitched in this new place like a worn tent at a campsite. I needed to let go. I needed to consider what my inner voice, I guess, was telling me, a voice I had learned over many years to choke into desperate silence. The battle this turned out to be proved fierce. The conflict between what I felt compelled to do – establishing a road-show routine versus the obligation to explore where I was – the south of France, for Christ’s sake – became physical. I found myself knotting up inside, waking in a sweat two or three times a night. Mind and body were at odds. Something had to give.
Something gave. Me. I accepted what that inner voice was telling me. It wasn’t in the form of a sudden revelation. It was more like scattered bursts of self-chastising instruction – a drill buddha: do whatever you want in the moment; don’t feel an obligation to do anything; let each day tell you what to do. Let go.
I wrapped up the French lessons and returned the key fob to the gym. These had been worthwhile things to do; it was just the wrong time, the wrong circumstances. I forgave myself for my lack of interest in local attractions. Instead, I swam. I wanted to explore the beaches, so I did, driving up and down the coast between Narbonne and the Spanish border, dipping into the sea, leaving when I had (quickly) had enough. I spent the day by the pool, reading, or lounging beneath the olive tree. I stopped drinking. I made friends with the neighborhood cat.
Or, rather, he made friends with me. A little orange tabby with a sharp face – not a pretty face – and an abrupt, scratchy voice turned up and began to stick around. I started calling him Der Rote: The Red One. As he spent more time with me, inching closer and closer, until he slept beside me on the sofa most afternoons while I watched the cycling on TV, he got what he had probably been angling for: I broke down and bought cat food. Since I left the bathroom window and the sliding glass door open day and night, the little dude would enter through one and go out the other, ending up buried in the duvet at the foot of the bed when I woke in the morning.
This changed the whole calculus of my stay. It became my home. But not in the stale sense of home with all its downsides – the mundane daily tasks and ordinary concerns – but in the sudden joy of feeling a sense of belonging, even while knowing the moment was spectacularly short-lived; a sense that I had filled an empty niche only for this brief time, a glitch in the spinning and evolving cycle of the universe that needed addressing in order to recalibrate the balance of things. I suddenly felt everything was right in the world … not the whole world, of course, but my own little corner of it.
When the first month ended, I mourned my departure. The hardest thing was saying goodbye to my little friend. But I tried to carry the good feeling with me to the next place – another pool-side cabana; this time near Avignon in the south of France. The pool was bigger, even more inviting than the first one. The cabana was a comfortable small apartment. I was remote, surrounded by vineyard, far from the really big tourist attractions. I had learned a few lessons in the first place. Here, everything was even better suited to put it to practice.
And there was a cat.
Wilder, more wary than the Red One, this little – very little – gray had the look of permanently sleeping rough, with burrs tangled in his fur and one runny squinting pirate eye. His meows were indignant, louder and more insistent than the Red One’s; he had an attitude, but like that of the kid who starts the fight and leaves others to fight it. Half-mangy and only about half-grown, I called him Tiny Tot.
Clear now on the cat-human dynamic, I wasted no time buying cat food. This brought Tiny Tot to the door the moment I opened it in the morning and again every evening at the dinner hour. He made occasional brief visits during the day. It took time for him to warm up to me. In the end, though, he did. He joined me on the sofa and curled up in a towel. Not as near to me as the Red One, but I could see that Tiny Tot had to overcome something big to do it; a wariness derived from his size, maybe, mistrust born of experience – you could see it in his eyes. It had been an effort for him, something new tried, much like what I had done myself a month earlier.
All at once I liked where I was very much. There was no one thing I could put my finger on to explain it. There was much I could probably find to complain about, being as remote as I was and hearing a rooster every morning that never knew when to stop, or the careless landscaping of my surroundings, mosquitos, the days where I spoke to no one … but the place was being good to me; I was being good in it.
In Zurich now in a chain hotel, I understand that I will miss what I had over this past summer, and I believe I mostly understand what that is. I had the fantastic good fortune to experience something that falls between the frantic getaway of an all-too-short vacation and the bliss of real natural life. It was like stepping through a portal into a possible world that expands before you as you meander further into it. But instead of this new landscape revealing itself, you discover you are revealing yourself to yourself, in minute and unpredictable ways.
I had few expectations when I left for France two months ago and no real plans. When asked what I would do there, I had answered that I hoped to work on my French. But I knew this to be a ruse, something said that passed as an acceptable answer. Maybe this partly explains my experience. Having no expectations meant none were unfulfilled (or fulfilled). Having no expectations, no plans, making no demands on myself, I accepted time for what it was; I stopped trying to shape it into a foreseen reality but allowed the reality of it to make itself known to me. Still, this feels like only part of the explanation – a ruse played on myself like the one played on those who asked me about France. I don’t know if it’s possible to let everything go – and maybe if it is, this is what Nirvana is like … I don’t know; I’m no mystic – but to let go of a little seems to amount to a lot. It has left a painfully sharp but sublime impression on me, a haunting memory that offers satisfying comfort – the possibility of well-being.