Then the old man spoke, and Crawford swore softly to himself, for the language had the rhythmic precision of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, and none of the skating, back-of-the-nose elision of Picardy or Normandy.
For several seconds he tried to recall any Spanish phrases … and couldn’t. But perhaps the man also spoke French.
“Uh,” Crawford began, desperately mustering his words, “Parlez-vous français? Je parle français—un peu.”
The old man laughed and spoke again, and this time Crawford understood a few words; apparently the old man was insisting that he was speaking French.
“Oh, really? Well, bonjour, Monsieur. Listen, non j’ai une passeport, mais—”
The old man interrupted with a question that sounded like Essay kuh votary fahmay ay la?
Crawford blinked, then shook his head and shrugged. “Repetez, s’il vous plaît—et parlez lentement.” It was the French sentence he always used most—a plea to repeat and speak more slowly.
The old man complied, and Crawford realized that he was indeed speaking French, but was pronouncing all the usually unaccented final e’s. The question had been, Is your wife here?
“Non, non …” Good God, he thought, has he got me confused with someone else? Or did he see my wedding ring? No, that’s right, it went with the finger. ”Non, je suis seul, alone, you understand. Now envers mon passeport…”
The old man put a finger to his lips, then winked and began limping away, waving his stick in front of him between each step as if to hold Crawford’s attention.
But something else had already caught his attention—the old man, too, was missing his wedding-ring finger.
The old man led him out of the village east along the shore, skirting hills that were purple with a richness of heather Crawford hadn’t seen since leaving Scotland, finally to a tiny house made from the bow half of an overturned fishing boat. The sawn sides had been boarded across and fitted with a low door and a head-sized window, and a few yards away crude wooden steps led down among piled rocks to a tide pool that was overhung with tangles of nets and lines and scaffolds.
Crawford’s guide dragged open the little door for him, and Crawford sidled inside in something like a fencer’s crouch. Archaic-looking books and liquor bottles filled the dim triangular room, but there was a square indentation in the dirt floor, and Crawford sat down there.
The bow corner of the room was a little fireplace, and Crawford moved some pans aside so as not to have to sit on his feet … He paused before setting the pans down, for though they were of an ordinary silvery color, they were much lighter than any metal he’d ever handled.
The old man was grinning again when he followed Crawford in and perched on a stack of books, and in his outlandish French he remarked that Crawford was sitting where the old man’s wife had always sat; but before Crawford could apologize or ask if the wife was likely to appear soon and demand her seat, the old man was talking again.
He introduced himself as François des Loges, a poet, and assured Crawford that this was indeed France—a village called Carnac, on the south Brittany coast near Vannes. There was a government office in Auray, eight miles distant, and Crawford’s passport problem, whatever it was, could be rectified there.
Crawford was beginning to get used to the old man’s accent, and he could see why he had mistaken it for Spanish at first; not only did the man pronounce all the terminal e’s, he also gave words like “mille” an almost Spanish or Italian lilt, and he rolled his r’s. It was recognizably French, but seemed to be French as it had been spoken when the Romance languages were still more parallel than divergent.
Des Loges had pulled a straw plug out of a bottle as he was speaking, and now poured brandy into two blue crystal cups. Crawford sipped the liquor gratefully, and then, setting aside his doubts of the old man’s ability to give arbitrary and illegal orders to Customs officials, asked what he would be expected to do in return.
The brandy in des Loges’s cup caught a gleam of morning sunlight through the warped glass of the little window, and threw a spectrum of purple and gold across the weathered planks that were the wall. “Qui meurt, a ses loix de tout dire,” he began.
Crawford mentally translated this as A dying man is free to tell all. As des Loges went on, Crawford had to keep interrupting with requests that he talk more slowly, and even so he wasn’t sure he was understanding the old man’s speech.
Des Loges seemed to be saying that he had imprisoned his wife—though he waved toward the sea when he said it—and was now free, with help from the right sort of person, to get away forever. The in-laws might not be pleased—here, for some reason, he nodded toward the pans Crawford had moved—but they couldn’t touch him. He picked up one of the lightweight pans, made a face, and tossed it out the door onto the dirt outside. “Disrespectful, I know,” he added in his strange French, “but they’re not even good for cooking—they’re always getting pitted, and they discolor sauces and eggs terribly.”
He had had many women during his life, he told Crawford, but he wouldn’t tell anyone where these “yquelles” resided currently. None of them could get at him now, that was the important thing. He pointed at Crawford’s maimed hand and, with a grin, said he was sure Crawford understood.
Crawford was pretty sure he didn’t understand, though, especially when the old man concluded his speech by saying, “Les miches de Saint Estienne amons, et elles nous assuit,” which seemed to mean, “We love the loaves of St. Stephen, and they pursue us.”
But when des Loges stood up and asked Crawford if they were in agreement, Crawford nodded and assured him that they were. If he can get my passport stamped, he thought, then I will help him do whatever this procedure is that’ll protect him from his in-laws, or from loaves of bread, or whatever it is. And even if he can’t, even if he’s crazy, at least he’s a contact in a foreign land—and I’m ahead already by a roof and a glass of brandy.
The old man threw Crawford a pair of ancient shoes to put on, and from behind the door he lifted a cloth sack and indicated that Crawford could carry it—remarking, as they left the little house, that he had bought extra food and drink when he had heard that Crawford was coming.
Startled, Crawford asked him how he had heard that—but des Loges just winked, pointed at Crawford’s hand again and then pointed to the tide pool below them. Crawford stepped to the edge of the rocks and looked down, but the only thing he could see in the pool was a knee-high pyramidal stone with a square base.
Walking back away from the water, Crawford looked around for some sign of a paddock where horses or donkeys might be kept, but the little boat-house was the only structure on the heathery hillside. Was old des Loges planning to walk eight miles at his crippled-bug pace?
He was glad that the shoes were a good fit—and a moment later he wondered if des Loges had bought them when he had bought the food, having been told Crawford’s shoe size in advance too.
Then he saw that the old man had dragged out from behind the house a child’s wagon with a rope attached to its front, and that some kind of shoulder-harness was tied to the far end of the rope. As Crawford watched incredulously, des Loges climbed into the wagon, with his knees tucked up under his chin, and tossed the harness-end of the rope into the dust at Crawford’s feet.