Marc

The bells are ringing.

I don’t mind, generally. My romantic side might have taken a beating over the last few years – after half a decade of skimming our pool, if I never see another autumn leaf skittering in a gentle breeze again, it’ll be fine with me – but the sound of church bells has never lost its charm. They normally ring at seven, morning and evening, and then give an abbreviated little ding every hour on the hour during the day. It’s a gentle sound rich with associations, a regular reminder, even if my fingers are tapping and my head is enmeshed in the white noise hum of the digital world, of the extraordinary real world that persists just outside my window.

Now and then, however, it rings a different rhythm. It goes on and on, as if the bellringer (which, like most church bells these days, has been modernized and rigged to a timer) has short-circuited. It beats like a pulse for several minutes until it becomes almost maddening, and then it falls silent.  In the old days it served the practical purpose of the village tomtom, getting news out to the outlying farms, but that function too has been thoroughly modernized in our village: the cantonnier keeps us up to date by driving around putting little slips of paper in mailboxes. The bell ringing out the news lingers on only as a tradition now, a relic, and we are free to indulge ourselves in the metaphorical implications of the ringing and the silence that follows. Either way, the little slip of paper that will show up in the mailbox will only confirm what today’s manic clanging has just told us, that someone in the village has died.

With the guns of the hunters popping in the distance, I could imagine that some tragedy has occurred. Could be – if you set a dozen tipsy armed men loose in a forest with a brief to kill anything big and hairy, then you must expect things to go wrong now and then. But around here, where the young move away to find jobs and the old come to retire, we’re usually pretty safe in assuming that we’ve lost one of the oldies.

Even in such a small village, most of these old-timers are strangers to me. They live quietly on their farms, and now and then I’ll see them at the bakery or a village fete. I might have heard a name, might have seen a face, but more often than not I’m unable to connect the two. And among those I do know, half of them I can’t communicate with on any meaningful level. I’ve mastered the quirky patois-laced French of Madame up the road, so I get more or less full benefit of her stories about life here half a century ago. Stories of children walking to school through the woods, of her late husband crafting skis out of felled chestnut trees one winter. Stories of the funeral processions that used to pass, on foot, along the rutted forest path down in the valley behind her farm. But with many of the others, I’m reduced to smiling and nodding and hoping they haven’t just informed me of a loved one’s tragic demise in a freak helicopter accident. We pass in the baker with a simple bonjour madame, bonjour monsieur. With those I know better we trade a few words, they in their very regional French, me in my halting, accented, schoolbook version of the language, and move on, happy to have understood what we could of each other.

I was reminded of how much I’m missing in these polite, content-free exchanges this past Thursday we went made our way to the village, as we do every year, for the Armistice Day celebrations. It was touching, as usual, with the Mayor’s traditional reading out of the names of the thirty-odd men who gave their lives in the First World War (and the two who died in the second) – names we all know, families of friends and neighbors we see every day. The familiarity of those names, and the recitation – “mort pour la France” – after each of them always makes the war feel close.

But this time Jean-Pierre added something. He announced that we were also here to honor one of our fellow villagers for his service in the Resistance. And with that, he called up Marc.

I’ve talked to Marc a few times, mostly about the weather. It turns out he was a baker’s son, and spent his evenings during the Occupation sneaking sacs of flour along footpaths to make bread for the Maquis hiding in the hills. I’d love to talk to him more, now that I know a bit of his past. Sadly, he falls into the category of people I can’t understand, but in his case it’s not so much the accent as the voice. Perhaps he smoked too many Gauloises to keep warm during those cold winter nights up in the hills.  He might have had major surgery on his larynx, or ruined his voice when singing for a rock band in the seventies for all I know. But when he speaks, his words sound like builder’s rubble grinding out of his mouth. He’s always friendly when we cross paths at the bakery, though, and until I get better at deciphering the scraping noises he produces in place of speech, that will have to be enough. Knowing a bit about his past, though, knowing the incredible stories this man must have to tell, makes me want to try a little harder next time.

And it makes me wonder what other stories hide behind the friendly smiles and bakery counter chitchat about weather or the strikes. There is so much history here in the churches and castles and old stone villages that it’s easy to forget the hidden history that still shuffles through farmers markets or sits wreathed in smoke at the cafes. Their stories won’t all be as extraordinary as Marc’s – he had the benefit and misfortune to live through more extraordinary times – but it’s good to be reminded now and then of what the old people here are carrying around inside them, the stories that give all this beautiful architecture and idyllic landscape meaning. Those people, and their stories, are slowly vanishing.

I don’t think the bells are ringing for Marc today. Most likely it’s someone I don’t know, one of the many old farmers holed up in the countryside, someone whose face I glanced over during a village Loto night, maybe one of those guys I get stuck behind on windy roads going half the speed limit. A familiar family name, someone’s grandfather, but not someone for whom I’ll personally mourn.

After hearing Marc’s story, though, I can’t hear those bells anymore without a little pause to wonder what has been lost.