“Hey,” Leon shouted from the car. When she looked over, he was pantomiming a camera. He brought the imaginary camera to his face and made a clicking noise. “I’ll call it still life with poppies.”
She smiled and waved, then dropped the petals and wiped her palm on her jeans.
“You don’t see flowers like this in the north,” he said when she returned to the passenger seat. He started the car and pulled into the road. “Lavender,” he added. “That’s another thing that grows like wild over here.”
“Question.” She touched the red streak on her palm. “What do you think Fredrick is trying to say with his pictures?”
“That the world is too much for him.” They turned onto a dirt road. White dust rose around the car. “Children say it all the time in different ways. The privilege is lost with age.”
“If you were going to draw a self-portrait, what would it look like?”
He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “A bunch of lines maybe. Like a ball of string. Or maybe a big flat shadow.”
“Do you remember the Henri Cross painting at the d’Orsay? The one that looks like it’s made of a million little dots?”
He nodded.
“When I saw it, I felt like if I blew hard enough on the canvas, all those specks of paint would scatter.” She tried to rub the red from her skin, but it barely lightened. “I would make something like that.”
III
They parked in front of a squat cobblestone house and got out of the car. Leon walked to the front door and knocked. An elderly woman answered. She was small, her skin freckled and creased. She wore a white linen dress with large pockets on the front and a black scarf wrapped around her head, revealing only a curve of silver along the hairline. Her eyes were small and dark.
The woman invited them inside, her French marked by an unfamiliar inflection. The house was small and low-lit. Juliana smelled rosemary and bread. The woman showed them to a rectangular wooden table, where she served herbal tea in clay mugs. The cups were shallow and Juliana finished her tea quickly.
“Leon,” the woman said. “Are you still wearing the skeleton mask?”
“I haven’t given it up yet.”
“Keep going through the fall,” she said, “And you will see something remarkable.”
“The weather is very hot now,” he replied. “The tourists stand around like dazed cattle. Few people give me money.”
“Bear it,” the woman said. Then she set aside her cup and smiled at Leon, showing crooked and stained teeth. He glanced at Juliana and nodded.
She produced three large stones from her pockets. They were inky and smooth, as though they had spent years in a riverbed. The woman made a triangular shape with the stones and covered them with her hands. Juliana nudged Leon underneath the table, but he just sat there with his arms crossed, staring at the woman and her bean-shaped stones.
The woman reached for Juliana’s hand. She pressed her thumb against the red mark on her palm.
“From the poppies,” Juliana explained.
The woman held onto her hand and began speaking in a dialect Juliana could not translate. She lowered her head and rounded her shoulders. Juliana felt heat entering her body; she imagined the woman peeling back her skin and studying the geography beneath. She did not pull away, too surprised for a struggle. When she asked Leon what was happening, he shook his head and brought a finger to his mouth. She was disturbed by her inability to comprehend the woman’s language — I can’t understand you, she wanted to shout — but the feeling of being shut out, of being unable to interpret, was also somehow familiar. The woman squeezed her hand harder, pressing the slender bones in her fingers together. She pursed her lips and hummed. It frightened Juliana to be dominated in this way, but a part of her wanted the woman to keep her pinned to the table, to dictate her next movement, and she felt a shiver of disappointment when her hand was finally released.
Juliana rested her elbows on the table and stared into her mug. She interlaced her fingers; her hands were hot and moist. The door was cracked open and warm air flowed into the house, the sunlight making a pattern on one end of the table that reminded her of Cole’s equations, the bands of signs and symbols. After giving herself a moment to settle, she stood to leave and Leon placed a hand on her knee.
“Not yet,” he said.
She returned to her chair. They sat in silence a little longer, then the woman reached into her pocket and gave Leon an old-fashioned iron key. He took it and thanked her. “Nothing is waiting,” the woman said to Juliana in her accented French. She did not make any other gestures toward her before they left the house.
Juliana and Leon walked half a mile down the road and entered a garden. A low, rocky hill stood behind the foliage. They followed a gravel path, passing thickets of lavender and oleander before reaching a bench at the bottom of the hill. To the left, purple geraniums concealed their view of the road; on the other side, rows of Italian cypresses and sage-colored olive trees.
“Want to sit?” He pointed at the bench.
“All right.” The wood was cool against her legs. Leon did not join her, instead standing in the shadow of a tree. “What language were you speaking back there?” she asked.
“A dialect from the Camargue region,” he replied. “Where she’s from.”
She had read a little about Camargue, the marshes and pink flamingos and ranches that bred white horses. “Is that why we really came all the way out here?” She picked at the moss growing on the bench. “To see that woman?” She thought of how soothing the warm sand of a beach would feel right now, of leaning back and planting her elbows in the ground and looking out at an endless span of blue.
“That was one reason,” he replied. “But there’s something else.”
She looked at him. “Well?”
He smiled. “Shall we go to the cave?”
She followed him to the hill, ducking underneath low-hanging branches. An arch had been carved into the rock, the entrance covered by a steel gate. Vines dangled in front of the bars like tentacles.
“The town installed this last year.” He unlocked the gate with the key the woman had given him. “To protect the inside of the cave.”
He stepped inside, leaving the gate open. Sunlight brightened the pale walls. The cave was much longer than it appeared from the outside. The light began to disappear as they went deeper and soon they were in total darkness.
“We’re getting close now.” A tiny beam appeared in his hand — a flashlight the size of a pen.
“How long have you known the woman we visited?”
“For years. My family vacationed in this part of France when I was a boy.”
“Exactly what does she do?”
“She lives near the sea and goes to the garden. She collects those stones you saw and tells people about themselves. My mother used to visit her every summer, always on the first day of June, before she died. Her drowning was predicted one year before it happened.” Leon stopped and faced the wall, then moved the light around. She was watching the beam slide across the stone when she saw a dark shape: a sketch of an animal, a horse or a cow.
“There.” He pressed his hand against the wall. “This is what we’ve been looking for.”
Soon the light revealed a black outline — yes, it was a horse — and three mountain peaks, the rock underneath shaded faint yellow and blue. The drawings were small, no larger than her fist. She stepped closer to the wall. “How old are these?”
“Thousands of years,” he replied. “They were discovered by a group of geologists last spring. Scientists have come all the way to Marseille to study them. Another group is scheduled to return this summer. But my friend has a key. I don’t know how she got it. She lets me use it whenever I like.” He passed her the flashlight. “Here,” he said. “See for yourself.”