He had adapted the back of the 203 so that the charts could be stored vertically and would slide effortlessly along rails ingeniously fixed top and bottom. In fact, that was what fascinated him — the possibility of using any sort of situation to put his powers of invention to the test.
Perhaps he had even accepted the job in order to have to solve the problem of storing the charts. And once he’d sorted that one out, there was nothing to do but go looking elsewhere, around Quimper way, where another problem arose: how to stow suitcases of different sizes, not in a van anymore (the 203, having had its day, was sold to a builder, who got a bargain when you consider that twenty years later it was still to be seen driving through the streets of Random) but in an elegant four-door sedan, a brand-new model that unlike its predecessor didn’t make you think of work.
Halfway through the “Trente Glorieuses,” now that things were looking up after the necessities had been provided for, we were able to make concessions to aesthetics. And they were big concessions. With its flowing and rather soft lines, all its angles systematically rounded, its ivory-colored molded plastic dashboard with its red and green lights, the Panhard Dyna was like a portable transistor radio. Everything, except the weather, made you feel like laying a beach towel down beside it — which in any case would have been useful for looking under its chassis when, after a few weeks and only very shortly after the breakingin period, it began to shed oil and nuts and bolts. But in any case it wasn’t in the nature of the Dyna to be silent; its designers probably thought that an engine that could be heard a long way off added a sporting touch, like the young men who disconnect the exhaust pipe of their mopeds, stick their heads down over the handlebars, and keep changing imaginary gears. But as the Dyna went on playing Tom Thumb, it became impossible to carry on a conversation in it, since its assorted noises made the engine’s powerful voice the only thing that could be heard. So rather than yell, we concentrated on the landscape. When we were on a journey, the driver would point out the sights without saying a word. We turned our heads to the right: a menhir, a calvary; to the left: a ruined castle, a horse. If his finger pointed upward: an airplane. The explanations came later, when we took a break. So it wasn’t an airplane, but a glider. A glider? That’s to say an airplane without an engine that is carried in rising currents of hot air. Without an engine? We glided with it in a vertiginous silence.
The suitcases piled into the back had very soon got the better of the suspension. We could have written a guide to the state of the Breton roads in which the milestones would have replaced the stars and the road signs. People who protested in the name of tradition against the paving of the cobbled roads, which were still numerous in the region, should simply have got on board the Dyna. Our teeth never stopped rattling all the way through the ancient towns.
To be honest, it wasn’t only his heavy suitcases that were responsible for the state of the shock absorbers. His hobby hadn’t helped. It was during this period that he started to collect unusual stones. During the week he spotted them at the side of the road, stopped, took the smallest ones, rolled the bulkier ones into the ditch or hid them behind a tree, and when he got home he marked them on his wall map with brass-headed studs — the only ones to be stuck in the open country. On some Sundays, the whole family set off to retrieve them.
Our postman Cheval had planned an ideal garden that he never had time to make, contenting himself with piling up his booty at the far end of the plot in anticipation of his great building project. Father had made a few pencil sketches featuring rockeries and a waterfall, which evolved every time he made a new discovery. Some of the sketches were more definitive. His rocky chaos, from which a spring would have gushed, was to have been six feet high. Concealed within its mass was a rudimentary but sophisticated device, very much like the heating pipes in the bedroom, which, by extending the gutters on the little garden house where our Aunt Marie lived (actually his aunt), would have fed his system with rainwater. Theoretically, in accordance with the principle of communicating vessels, the fountain would have risen to the eaves, but since he was afraid that the reality might prove somewhat rebellious, and even though rain is far from being a rare commodity in the Lower Loire, he had planned a parallel circuit running from the old well, disused since we had been connected to the water main. This circuit would have been used only occasionally, when inquisitive people were visiting, or to welcome friends.
There were two goldfish in a bowl, waiting for the basin at the foot of the rocky chaos that they had been promised. They had been the origin of the whole project. Out of compassion, on account of the exiguity of their abode. But the idea had already been in the air. Now that it was once again possible to make concessions to the superfluous, kitchen gardens and the “fear of going without” were retreating before the invasion of lawns adorned with cherubs, flowered cartwheels, or Snow White’s seven pocket-sized companions captured in their principal activity, which consisted of pushing a child’s wheelbarrow filled with succulent plants. Skillful gardeners trimmed their box trees into geometric shapes, and the most artistic among them made sculptures of elephants and hippopotamuses out of the solid masses of their plants. There was something of the secular creche about the whole thing, although it lacked a messiah to federate it.
Regrouping certainly was the order of the day. We didn’t know whether it was the lawn mowers or the authorities that had started it, but the go-ahead had been given to put an end to the suspicion of obscurantism and backwardness hanging over the region. Substitute order for chaos, light for shade, white snow for mud. The rural civilization passed the word around: We aren’t peasants any longer. You’ve got the message, said the savior from the ministry that was united in its determination to raze the area: You are small farmers.
We were able to turn this to our advantage. The powerful bulldozers unearthed stones galore. One Sunday, this led to gleaning our best harvest yet among the unwanted debris of finis terrae.” Early that afternoon we had toured the Carnac Alignments. This was not the first time that our very own Le Nôtre had sought inspiration from the landscape gardeners of the Neolithic period. When his route passed the site, if he had a little time he would stop, walk a few steps among the menhirs, and then, sitting down on a fallen stone, fish out his pack of Gitanes and pensively smoke a cigarette, after automatically tapping it on his thumbnail to push down the tobacco. He claimed he felt in harmony with the tall steles gangrened by time and the elements, turning up the collar of his jacket when the wind freshened, running a hand through his hair when a slight drizzle sent him back to his car. He would sit there for a moment, watching the seabirds hover, the sparrows flutter above the heather, and, between two puffs of smoke, his neck stretched up toward the sky, he would try to solve the incomprehensible enigma of this faceless statuary. As he had done some research, he was aware that no one knew much about the question, which put him on equal terms with the most eminent specialists of megalithic architecture. For an autodidact, whose every reflection was thwarted by the authority of the scholars, this was a godsend. In such cases he could let his mind wander with impunity. Among the theories on the meaning of the alignments, from the most serious to the most fanciful, he gave no credit to the idea of landing strips for Martian aircraft, though he was fascinated by the hypothesis of a cosmic calendar capable of fixing the date of the harvests and commemorating the birthday of the prince, a sort of gigantic almanac that lacked only the names of the saints carved on the stones and a few gardening tips on the art and manner of cutting and arranging such granite bouquets. Although a bit cumbersome and inconvenient to handle, this ephemeris for the birds — seeing that they could only consult the sky — at least had the advantage of opening up vast horizons to reverie, and satisfied a very real talent for mathematics, if we can judge by the ease with which he solved the difficult problems we brought home from school. This interpretation of Carnac presented the world with a coded allegory. Everything had been said, foreseen, enciphered: all you had to do was measure. As he always carried a tape measure with him to check the diameter of the glasses and flower pots, he had noted down the distance between several menhirs that, five thousand years before the master, were supposed to reproduce the ideal ratio set out in Pythagoras’s theorem: three, four, five. But the results had turned out to be too random for anyone to be able to predict the day and time of the next eclipse with any accuracy. On one occasion he had even planned to watch the sun rise above the moor at the Kermario Alignment outside Carnac on the June solstice. According to the tales of the odd early risers, pseudo-druids, or neo-followers of Ra, the first ray scrupulously followed one pathway until it planted itself right in the middle of a cromlech, which, like the door of the Holy Sepulcher, represented the world and was rebaptized the Telluric-Axial Point of the Universe. But since the same ray was expected in several places at the same time, because it also had to cross the Merchants’ Table in Locmariaquer, perforate the tumulus on the Island of Gavrinis, and also appear at the top of some other tall menhir, it was obvious that it couldn’t satisfy everyone. On the previous evening the sky had been overcast, and when in the middle of the night in his little hotel room near Auray he had heard rain, he wisely switched off his alarm clock and preferred to go back to sleep.