Even in The Hauts-de-Seine News there is space for items from the bay, but the only news there remained the regular announcement of that storytelling hour (more like a “fairy-tale hour”) in a community hall, even a detailed program, simply to fill up the column for the area. Theme for this week: the only surviving local legend, in which a long time ago an unregenerate noisemaker was stoned by the original inhabitants — to be precise, at that pointe or spit of land.
Whereas in Clamart, Meudon, Boulogne, Sevres, also in the much smaller Ville d’Avray, to judge by the newspaper, week after week there were all kinds of happenings, with concerts, exhibitions, building projects, births, weddings, deaths, if I wanted anything eventful here I had to turn to the sports section, where in a dozen pages I might find a few lines devoted to the local handball club, or just the score might be reported, with the team lineup, the majority of the names Portuguese, Italian, Arabic.
Not that there was no news in the bay worthy of publicity: there was simply no reporter available. At the beginning of my stay here I at least found notices of births and deaths — in the meantime, under Naissances, as well as Décès, the only notation is always Néant (nothing). When this past summer the traditional bay festival took place by one of the ponds, the News repeated word for word the article from the previous year, and that in turn, with hardly any variation, is familiar to me from my almost eleven years here.
Instead I kept up to date, day by day, during this entire year of 1999, with the Spanish provincial town of Benavente, where I have never been. A reader who has lived there all his life sends me, day in, day out, the section of La Opinión, which is published in Zamora, devoted in words and pictures to his town, the simple facts from there, the page with the local news (editorial opinion, according to my Spanish reader, a member of the guardia civil, is to be found, in plenty, on the front page). Thus I am informed about Benavente, far off in Castile, on the Portuguese border, much better than about my place of residence here. I know all about the constant well drillings there, made necessary by the water shortage; about the processions of pilgrims in May to the Cristo de la Vega, in the meadows; about the schedule at the Avenida, the only movie theater, with a thousand seats, from which on a summer evening I sometimes heard behind me, when I was out in my garden, a member of the audience nibbling his sunflower seeds; about the tax inspector who was beaten up by the proprietor of the Viena restaurant; about the town gardener, Eustaquio B., who is supposed to have exposed himself to a nun and for whom his brother provided an alibi the following day; and even about the departure times for the buses to Madrid, the same all year long, and nevertheless scrutinized by me in each clipping so intensely that eventually I at least felt the draft of the morning bus making its loop at the Estacion of Benavente.
What was transmitted of the history of the bay, even over the centuries, did not in itself yield enough for a book.
The author of the chronicle The Locality from Ancient Times to Today, which then appeared this year, had felt obliged, in order to give his account book length, to devote most of one main section to facts drawn from the history of all of France. What is known of this particular region could be recorded, at least from the point of view of a professional historian, on one page of the community bulletin (which does not exist here). Almost the only thing I recall from my reading is that during the French Revolution more soldiers were drafted from the forest bay than from elsewhere, since those eighteen- to forty-year-olds had neither a profession nor an official position “essential to the life of the country”; that in the mid-nineteenth century the township was the poorest in the entire departement; and that of the new arrivals in the local refugee asylum, from the beginning of this century on, each demanded the food of his country of origin, “which was not possible.”
The other main section in the chronicle of the bay was devoted to the building of its churches. Was this history, when none of the churches here even predated the older inhabitants? No matter: these building histories, or so I thought then, were something I wanted to go on reading for a long time. And they came from someone who, a chronicler, was also noticeably well disposed toward the actors and their most inconspicuous actions.
For almost a thousand years, until after the Second World War, the bay had lacked a church. For Sunday Mass the natives had gone up the hills through the woods to the plateau of Velizy. When the church there was destroyed by bombing in 1944, the inhabitants of the bay built themselves a chapel out of wood, with their own hands, dedicated to Joseph, the carpenter. The wooden tower, standing apart, went for years without bells. Attendance in the postwar years, far above the country average, required expansion of the barracklike structure, which thus acquired a transept, and then the decision was made to erect a proper church, a basilica, of stone and concrete; the chronicler cited the precise day and even the house where the decision was reached, complete with street and number.
The bay at that point was not yet an independent parish, only an apostolic zone, provisionally. The photograph of the cornerstone laying on the edge of a cleared stretch of forest even showed a sight particularly disconcerting here, the figure of a bishop, with his crooked staff, something hardly ever seen before in the bay (“1857: Confirmation — For the First Time in Thirty Years a Bishop”), and at any rate never again since; and that great crowd, according to the caption present for the celebration: has anything like it ever gathered here again, no matter where?
For this church an architect had to be called in, and it was the same one who had designed the low-income apartment houses right next door, and since I discovered that, I have viewed both structures somewhat differently. The cross, of iron, was made by a locksmith/stove fitter. The Sunday offerings — this I gathered by way of additional information from the parish newsletter, appearing more and more irregularly — were meager and steady in the bay, the same expression used by the chronicle for the donations of churchgoers through the centuries.
There is no connection with the fact that no Pope, neither the present one nor any other, will ever kiss the ground of the no-man’s-bay. And no conqueror or liberator will ever place his boot on one of the former royal border markers (the few remaining ones are, by the way, not mentioned in the chronicle; are as obvious as secret; the crown chiseled into them looks fake at first sight).
The wood crickets seemed to have finally fallen silent for the year, after unexpectedly announcing their presence time and again on the occasional warm, sunny day far into the fall, sometimes after an absence of weeks, the last time being in the middle of November, though only as a little fading chirp somewhere, to which no second voice responded.
Or was I merely imagining that? Even when I now walked the wintry paths, the summery cricket calls piped up, especially if I stood still now and then, and also in the dead of night, in my house, I heard them recently, impossible to tell whether outdoors or in my head; it woke me up, more easily and instantaneously than usual, and in the dark I allowed the sound to spin on.