“You look charming when you dance,” I told her.
“Thank you. I love to dance. Is that for me?”
“What? Oh, yes. Here you are.” I opened the citronade and poured it for her.
The band began a slower melody to which the older people could dance a passo, and women of a certain age were begged out into the dancing circle by friends and family. After the obligatory refusals and shruggings away, they allowed themselves to be prevailed upon and they danced soberly—pairs of middle-aged women and some quite old; widows and spinsters who cut vegetables in the farm kitchens of their luckier married sisters; several stiff old men with their ten– or eleven-year-old granddaughters—their eyes slyly searching out acquaintances in the crowd to make sure they were being watched, as they should be. Anyone familiar with the rhythms of rural Basque fetes would know that this dance marked the end of the evening for the older women and the younger children, as it was nearly ten o’clock. After all, there would be a fкte again next year, God permitting, and one needn’t spend out all his allotment of joy at one time. The responsible middle-aged men, heads of etche households, would have one last txikiteo around the buvettes with friends, then they, too, would begin to slip away to their carts and carriages to make the slow ride to their outlying farms, to look in on the animals before sleep. This would leave only the young and the very old men to revel until midnight; the Young because they were full of energy and joy, and youth is a brief visitor to one’s life, while old age remains with you until death, like a visiting in-law; and the Old because they had served their many years of toil and merited their few years of relaxation in the knowledge that each hour wounds, and the last kills.
I offered Katya my arm and we strolled through the thinning crowd towards the bridge and the lower end of the village. She was pleased to hear that I had seen her father engaged in close talk with local elders, presumably gathering folktales for his studies.
“And the men accepted him, even though he’s an outsider?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “He’s an avid listener—a rare find in a land noted for its indefatigable storytellers. Then too, he is buying Izarra for the table, and that cannot fail to endear him to the Basque heart. They love their Izarra almost as much as they loathe parting with a sou.”
“And Paul? Did you see Paul?”
“Ah-m-m… yes.”
“Is he enjoying himself?”
“Ah-m-m… yes. In fact, there he is. Over there.”
“Where? I don’t see– Oh yes, there he is! What a pretty girl… the one he’s dancing with. Wait a minute, wasn’t she in the motorcar that…?”
“Yes, she was.”
“And those two brawny young men watching Paul so intently, aren’t they the ones who drove us off the road?”
“They are.”
Her expression grew troubled. “I do hope there isn’t going to be any trouble. Paul can be a trifle… provocative.”
“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed. But I thought you were looking forward to a little bagarre basque.”
“But not with my brother as one of the principals. Wait. Listen.” We stopped before the door of a cafй/bar within which a group of old men were singing in the plaintive high warble of Basque song with its haunting harmonies. “What a sad melody,” she said, after listening for a time.
“All Basque songs are tugged towards the minor key.”
“Do you know the song?”
“Yes. It’s a traditional ballad: ‘Maritxu Nora Zoaz.’ I should warn you that it’s considered a little off-color.”
“Oh? How do the words go?”
I had to consider for a moment, for I had no experience in translating Basque. When I spoke Basque, I thought in Basque; and I found it difficult to find French equivalents for—not the words, as they were simple enough—but for the meanings and implications of the words. “Well, literally the song asks: Marie, where are you going? And she answers: To the fountain, Bartholomeo. Where white wine flows. Where we can drink as much as we want.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“It doesn’t sound very off-color to me.”
“Perhaps not. But any Basque would know that the fountain isn’t a fountain, and the wine isn’t really wine, and the act of drinking is… well, not the act of drinking.”
“You’re a devious people, you Basque,” she said with a comic frown.
“We’d rather view ourselves as laudably subtle.” We had reached the edge of the village and were approaching the bridge leading to the meadow in which carts and carriages were awaiting the merrymakers, a regular trickle of whom were leaving the fкte. “Shall we cross the stream and walk in the meadow?” I asked.
She laughed. “So long as the bridge is a bridge, and the meadow is a meadow, and a walk is a walk.”
The late-rising gibbous moon lay chubby and cheese-colored on the mountain horizon, softly illuminating the meadow as at early dawn, but with silver rather than gold. Perhaps inspired by the young couples in the square, I had slipped my arm around her waist, doing thoughtlessly what I would not have dared to do with premeditation. I shortened my stride, so that we walked in rhythm, and I was warmly aware of the sensation of our casual contact. We walked slowly around the ring of horses standing sleepily in their traces—thick-bodied workhorses, for these peasants could not afford the luxury of an animal useful only for transportation and show. Katya hummed a swatch of “Maritxu Nora Zoaz,” then stopped in midphrase and fell pensive.
For the first time that evening, save for an icy moment when the Drowned Virgin brushed past us, I permitted my thoughts to touch on the dark events back in Paris that had driven the Trevilles to Salies, and which were now driving them yet farther. I still could not accept the thought of Monsieur Treville as a madman capable of killing. That gentle old pedant who was even then drinking with Basque peasants and absorbing their rambling folktales? How could it be?
I felt the warmth of Katya’s waist in my palm, and I recalled that, in return for Paul’s permission to speak with her later that night in a last effort to persuade her to stay with me and let her father and brother flee alone, I had promised never to attempt to see her again.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why so distant?”
“Oh,” I shrugged, “it’s nothing. You are enjoying yourself, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes. I haven’t had such fun since… well, I don’t believe I’ve ever had such fun. You are very lucky to be Basque, you know. You must be proud of it.”
I smiled. “No, not proud. I never thought of it as an advantage. In fact, quite the opposite. I used to be ashamed of my accent, and of the fun others made of it. Then too, there’s a darker side to the Basque character. They can be narrow, jealous, superstitious, tight-fisted. And when they feel themselves wronged, they never forgive. Never.”
“But they have such a love of life!”
“That they have. And of land. And of coin.”
“Oh, stop it. You are very lucky to be… something. Most of us are cut from the same bolt of cloth. We’re modern educated French… all alike… all informed by the same books… all limited by the same fears and prejudices. We’re interchangeable… identical, even in our shared belief that we are particular and unique. But you—even if you’re not proud of it—you come from something. You are something. You participate in traditions and characteristics that are a thousand years old.”
“A thousand? Oh, much more than a thousand!”
She looked at me quizzically. “You’re quite sure you’re not proud?”
I laughed. “Trapped, by God! Yes, I suppose there’s something in what you say, but I– Oh-oh. What have we here?”
“What is it?”
We were passing the motorcar where it was stationed under a tree. On the padded and buttoned leather seat were four bright brass objects: the headlamps, which had been wrenched from their sockets and broken off, then carefully deposited there in a row.