We find a seat, get beer and food from a stall. We feel a little treacherous, though our treachery is all against Italy. It is not this prosperous French village we are deceiving: we are sure that France will win. They have to win, for much the same reason that we had to leave Italy — because reality requires it. Anything else would be fantastical, improvident. The French have Zidane, rationality, form. These are the things on which expectations can be based and decisions reached. What do the Italians have? I remember the traffic policeman who stood at the mouth of the tunnel with his elaborate braided uniform, his long leather boots, his snowy gloves, his manner that was both theatrical and sincere. He courteously waved us out of his land like an actor at the final curtain. The Italians have splendor. What would a decision be like that had splendor as its basis? To what strange, beautiful expectations would it give rise?
The French do not win the World Cup final. The Italians win. Zidane assaults one of the Italian players, butting him with his white, domed, rational forehead. We return to the rocky ledge, where all night the hard, uneven ground probes our slumber and sends our bodies roaming around the tent, searching for flat places, for relief.
The fields of the Charente are yellow, with chalky white partings like hair. Grain silos stand in their flat distances: they are gray, concrete, shaped like giant hourglasses. Their swollen forms are dominating, implacable. They stand upright between the horizontal planes of field and sky, alone, as though they had devoured everything that was once there.
We come off the motorway at St. Jean d’Angély and skim through the silent, yellow-white landscape. The road is completely straight: it stretches on for as far as the eye can see, pale gray and empty. The children gaze through the open windows. They are very quiet. Now and again a straight line of trees passes, at right angles to the road, and their eyes flicker, mathematically registering the perspective. We have booked a room in a hoteclass="underline" we arranged it by phone. Tiziana’s tent has been folded into its bag. It is our last night before England, a night for reflection, order, readiness. The world is once more flat and straight, symmetrical. It is bare and clean, blank, like paper. It seems to invite something, some final utterance. What can we say, to the blank yellow-white fields? What should we inscribe along the straight lines of trees?
We follow our directions: at a junction where four narrow white roads depart in four different directions across the flat fields, and where a few stone houses stand at the crossroads displaying pots of red geraniums but no people, we turn left. The road goes straight, into the yellow distances. Now and again there is a right angle, and then a straight section, and then another right angle. We are driving around the perimeters of fields. Sometimes we pass a small white house, sitting behind its fence. After a while we come to a dip, a kind of ripple in the earth. The lines of trees go down and come up again. The expanse of yellow grain describes it with its level, brushlike fibers, this perfect concavity. It falls and rises; it rolls like the sea. How strange and mysterious the world is, describing itself with such rigorous perfection: it is as though description is its ambition, its only purpose. The road enters the dip, descends and comes up again. In front of us there is a screen of dark green trees. The light is chalky, faintly unreal. It gives a kind of flatness to everything, like paint; it describes them, the green trees and the white road, the undulating yellow field. We pass through a pair of stone gates and along a driveway of pale, fine dirt. At the end there is a house. It is a grand house, long and low, light gray, with two rows of shuttered windows. The white, bleaching light is full on its face. The glass in the windows is dark. It is like something someone is remembering. To the left there is a long stone building with high-up windows, like a barn. The terrain is so flat that nothing is visible beyond the screen of trees.
We get out of the car and knock at the door. After a while a girl opens it. She is twenty or so, fine-skinned and tousle-haired, cheerful. She has an air of casual sophistication, of groomed self-absorption, like someone who has returned for the holidays from her small, elite university. She shows us inside: her aunt is not here, she has gone shopping in St. Jean. She will be back in an hour. In the meantime she will show us to our rooms. She consults a vast ledger with yellowed pages that stands on a wooden bureau in the hall. She chews her clean fingernaiclass="underline" she is not entirely certain where her aunt intended to put us. She will go and ask Hélène. We will do her the kindness of waiting in the salon for a moment.
We pass through a doorway into a large, low-ceilinged room. It is dark: the shutters are closed against the afternoon sun. Seams of white light show around their edges. The room is full of furniture. There are antique dressers and cabinets, desks and ornamental tables, a grand piano, bookshelves with glass-fronted doors. On every surface there are great numbers of things: dancing china figurines, items made of bronze and silver and glass, bowls and boxes and lampstands, glass paperweights with tiny flowers imprisoned in their depths, goblets of colored crystal, tapestries and sprays of silk roses, sea chests full of old lace, clocks and bells and a music box beneath a glass dome, faded photographs, tea sets, books with threadbare spines, hats and tiny pairs of pearl-buttoned gloves, and in a corner a mannequin, an antique dressmaker’s headless dummy with a rope of beads around her amputated neck. These things are not here by chance: there is no disorder, no element of chaos in this curious spectacle. Everything has been arranged, that much is clear. There is no dust on the dome of the music box; the velvet-upholstered chaise and chintz-covered armchairs are in their proper places in the gloom. There is no one sitting in them, but they have an atmosphere of animation. An invisible presence animates them. It is like a room in a doll’s house: at any moment, it seems, a large hand could descend, pluck something from its place, and rearrange it, in order to further the game.
The girl returns. She has a woman with her, a smooth, rounded, thickset woman in her thirties, with sallow skin and fair hair in two thick plaits. She emanates a stormy kind of vitality. Her powerful eyes are long and dark and heavy-lidded; her mouth is large and plastic. She is like one of Picasso’s colossal, Hellenic women who run by the blue water with uplifted arms. She looks at us, unsmiling. She speaks in a low voice to the girl. Then she vanishes again through the doorway.
We are led upstairs, up a creaking staircase and into a room with windows to the front and dark red wallpaper and a four-poster bed with white curtains. There is another room adjoining it; it is all perfectly pleasant. We thank the girl and she goes away. I sit on the bed. There is a book on the table beside it. I pick it up: it is a small paperback book, very old and faded. The spine crackles when I open it. It is in English. It is a handbook of advice issued by the War Office for soldiers departing for the Western Front. There is a man’s name, written inside the front cover in ink, and a date, 1917. I read a section on the care and maintenance of your rifle and uniform in the trenches. I read about what to do if you encounter your enemy in the road. How will you know he is your enemy? I read instructions for bravery. How will you know how to be brave? To be brave, it is necessary to place a restraint on your self-love. Love has left few traces in this world. Instead: courage, honor, duty. Without love there would be no tragedy. That would be easier, would it not? One might deny the existence of love, for this reason. I look at the man’s name again, at his handwriting. It is very sad, this book. Why has it been left beside my bed? There is something a little barbed, a little ironic, in its placement. It wishes, almost, to laugh at the quaintness of male valor. It wishes to conjure up the rigidity, the conservatism, the compliance of the male soul.