Boulanger

Chapter three

A fork in the road by Philip Hartigan

Stop writing will you, please ?

You will cause nothing but heartache and pain

with your writing. You should stick to painting pictures.

Paintings are not offensive even badly painted ones are preferable to the tripe that you are producing now. Do you really think that this misuse of the English Language has any merit other than the bad taste and the self indulgence that pervade your falsehoods.

A friend

That was an anonymous letter that I received this morning. Just when I thought that I was getting along and amusing myself and my entourage with the rhythms and rime changes. Along comes Salieri. Hate mail is always a great antidote to self-congratulation and complacency. So today I will get out the sketch pad and draw the mountains. I have a drawing box that simply becomes blacker and blacker. I have used home made charcoal for long time. Just straight from the fireplace. Willow is the best because it doesn’t break up as you use it. Smudges with so much delicious artfulness. A gracious smudge from a stick of willow is erotique and gives pleasure. Like watching cricket on a Sunday afternoon. Drunker and drunker on cold beer from a even colder barrel.

I have chosen first to draw and then to paint the Mount Ventoux from the top road that leads out of the village. Firstly and most importantly I must use the volume that the view gives me. It is the most stunning. A turn in the road down from Marseille at the café Cesar and the fertile plain of the Valley of the Sorceress A glacial plain gouged out of the earth’s unshaven blue chin Blue saturation harnessing the pushing fertile soil. At its head Red Ochre’s and Orange Colorado soils are dotted across the dramatic countryside. The mountain has a white bald summit that it looks as if it's always snowing. The Japanese tourists make comparisons with Yokohama and line up to take each others photos. I set myself upalong the old wall and begin my dance routine, pulling lines into shade and out of the relief of flat sided fields with trees in fine lengths poplar and plane. Plantations abound Mediterranean oaks and silver sided

olive. Waterworlds of bamboo from those early expeditions to China made by provencale adventurers. Popularly all good friends of Marco Polo. Squares of Mulberry that feed the silk worms of the 17th century no giant trees just a fascinating covering along the Roman valley of the Calavon. A thousand pencil marks later and the drawing is gleefully propped up against the wall. Thomas the baker parks his big truck next to it so close that when he opens the door he nudges it. His apologies are profuse and humorous. “At the last elections” he comments

“one of the candidates said that he would clean up the village of Arabs, dog shit and artists. The Japanese are here everyday they don’t buy anything at my shop, and I can’t park my truck because of the Artists. Obviously that politician wasn’t elected.” He breaks out into roaring laughter that forces everyone in the vacinity to laugh too. Or at least to laugh along with him.

“How’s it going? Still alive heh! When you are dead all the crap that you will have produced in your life will be doubled maybe even quadrupled in value.”

Even the Japanese tourists are laughing at that one. This is a Falstaff of a Frenchman a Gargantuan and a Pantagruel he is my baker and a sort of guru “It's about time you stopped all that and found a proper job.” “Lets have a coffee?” I enjoy his company he is a melancholy lone star lives for his work getting occasional visits from his son who was injured in the Last adventure of the Bush and Saadam families. The Kuwait crisis of 1991 its invasion and liberation are etched on the brain of this thirty year old man boy. He is serving in the coffee shop that is adjacent to the bakery. We sit down closely at the tables Thomas exclamatory gestures are directed to everyone that passes the door way and window of his shop. So sitting next to him is like being plugged into the whole world and its moral dilemmas. Although he is just a boulanger he his also a philosopher. He starts work at midnight and finishes at three in the afternoon. He watches a little T.V. reads all the newspapers voraciously and makes smart comments whenever he can. His cliéntéle ranges from jet set time share cabinet ministers from four or five different countries (More often he flirts with their wives and household servants) to peasant farmers who have sackcloth spread out on the kitchen floor and put their money in jars and dig holes in the garden to hide it . . Film stars rest in his coffee house. I once saw Charlton Heston lounging in there and John Malkovitz who the French think is the cats pyjamas practices accents and funny walks. The more humble ones have coffee and pastries read the paper making sure that the burn out is coped with and healed. Thomas has lots of sympathy with artists writers politicians and film stars, his life is a haunted house tragedy of a film. As polymaths go Thomas is I suppose what you would call a trier he will try to talk on the ethical nature of any subject. You should hear him talk about time - space and quantum theory with flour all over him gesticulating to the customers to try the new pumpkin bread, or the Maids of Honour who he assures are all virgins. “They have never been eaten.” “What kind of world is this to bring children into,” as his son serves without a smile.

Chirac is a old gangster but he’s giving the American Wasp aristocracy plenty to think about. John Wayne was a beautiful actor and his way of walking swaying with his shoulders. Can you treat Muslims like the Indians in Last massacre at Fort Appalachia, I can’t.

Bin Laden is Geronimo and the film only lasts one and a half hours.

The real crisis is the weakness of the United Nations. We should have a world government after this crisis.Everybody should be agreed. Terrorism can be wiped out, can AIDS, smallpox or pollution of the sea. Nothing can be done without worldgovernment and world policing of the big problems. The big criminal societies that have so much power why doesn’t Bush go for them.Why? Because he is now President thanks to the big industrial military complex. Boeing 747 and AT&T, Corn Flakes and Texas BigPotatoes. You know and they are just human beings and they believe in their God and they love their children, the trouble is they arepersuaded that they own the world and they are the best thing since Thomas ‘s gateaux. “Would you like one?” “I’ll take threebecause later today the wife of my agent is visiting me with her little girl we can enjoy them together. He’s disappeared you know,yes! completely vanished.” I tell him in that gossipy way, that I loathe about myself. That way of telling things that gets me morninghate mail.

He packs the largish cakes in a cardboard box with a delicate ribbon that is scrapped with a knife edge andmakes a frizzy form, a festive bow. “What can I say, vanished??? who saw him last??? What are the police doing ??? Poor woman. Shemust be crazy with worrying not knowing.” Life is ephemeral and fragile. Sometimes I think we are just dreaming this whole show. Iwork alone in the night I go through the same moves alone the same paces each night. I go here, I go there. One day I will die. It'sgood to know that one day the repetition of this life will end. Show me your picture.

I like it very much when its finished you can give it to me . You have represented the direct structure ofnature and the role of man and woman in the development of the landscape. There are Ying and Yang and God Almighty. But the colorwill be hard for you, yes?

Take a hint from a baker. “Don’t put two cherries on the same cake.” That infectious crazy laugh boltsout from his face and I realise he has put his finger on something, quite what the implications are, I don’t know. He knows his cakesand color for me has always been, like love, a hit and miss affair.

You don’t want know about these things but the heartache of the artist has a way of creeping into the mostdistanced and non associative pieces. What the baker said was true I think for the moment it was true. At least he didn’t say that artwas the yeast for life.

Yves has gone, maybe for good, that’s what intrigues me. Did the Russians take him out of the game? I don’tthink so, they are the new government of the European alternative. They take care of everyone who wants to work but who isn’tqualified. They play by rules that are long established. In fact I like them because they like me and are cute enough to learn to speakEnglish from the texts of Visions of Joanna. What’s more they pay cash. So he was up to something. his wife is coming to see me andmaybe she knows something about her manchild that I don’t know.

Lauris is a village near the River Durance, it has a chateau and it has a main street it's famous for asparagusand artichokes. Lauris is the name of Yves wife and she and her daughter have just got off the bus. She is heavily made up and thedaughter looks vacant, upset, maybe even traumatised. What children feel when things go wrong is unfathomable. The important thing is tohelp them to heal.

We sit down on the terrace and take in the landscape the forests are scrubby but what I like doing is findingtraces of past derelict habitations and trying to find them later on a ramble. I hope that I can pull off something when I show her aruined church and a cliff edge. “We can walk out there after lunch if you like.” Yves was trying very hard to go straight but inMarseille it's a difficult thing to do. She came to a point very quickly. He did all the good things he got training to create theinternet sites. He believed that artists working in our communities could give a positive influence for young people who needed a modelfor life, who needed reference points. “No trace is a bad thing, one day you are sharing your life with someone and the next day,wham! gone. It's two weeks, now, nearly three the police are nonplussed, I feel so stupid!”

I couldn’t think of what to say without incriminating myself. Have they checked his cell phone calls for theday that he dissappeared? He had three accounts and two stopped working the lunch time and the other one the day before hedisappeared. “He must have had four accounts Lauris, because he used a cell phone before he left to pick up the little one from herpano lesson.” “Who did he call?” she asked “I don’t know?” His business was his to take care of. For him alone. At that momentshe knew something that she wasn’t telling me. I was aware of something too, that I wasn’t telling her. We were either both verycourageous or both very afraid or both very sure about nothing. Yves was missing and the silences were growing longer.

After lunch we wandered for a stroll up to the ruined church, off to the right of the church was a cliff edge oflimestone. We walked up to look out over the valley. I held her hand as we clambered a bit and she responded firmly. I held her daughter

on the return walk to the village and she was pleased with my phoney father attempt at seduction so havingseduced mother and daughter. I had to make sure that I could hate myself totally by sleeping with Yves’s girl. She needed a friend, aprotector. Lauris is a big girl I spent the night alone jerking off , she was sleeping in another room, I had all kinds of repercussionsand false loyalty feelings. I got up about four in the morning and took a piss. I looked up into the dark blue sky inky blue and saw astar falling, not shooting, but falling.

It must have been something from the scrapyard that exists out there. I turned to get back into bed andthere she was in her black nightie. I interpreted the star as a go ahead and I went ahead she went ahead and without any contraceptionwe were rolling and tumbling mussling and slurrping. I had the self disgust of a defrocked priest and she was cool at breakfast. I saidthat we should do it again and get more practise. She called me a Belier a Ram Post coital zodiac talk. She said that she was a Gemini“Does that mean that I’ve got to fuck both of you???”

Philip Hartigan