Have Mother, Will Travel by Claire Fontaine

Author:Claire Fontaine [Fontaine, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2012-06-30T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Avignon

Pentimento

Def: A visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer, or layers, of paint on a canvas. From Italian, literally “repentant.”

If happiness were a landscape, it would have corridors of Italian cypress, lanes of potted lemons, purple tunnels of wisteria, hillsides lush with roses. It would look like the seemingly endless gardens of the Fort Saint André Abbey, which tumble into one another as lyrically and naturally as if they’d been there since time began, rather than having been lovingly cultivated over several centuries. Who would have guessed that all this was behind the towering walls of the giant fort we could see from our bluff across the river?

We wander through one little paradise after another: hidden bowers with bees and flowers; a sun-bleached crest with the crumbling remains of a chapel; a grove of ancient, twisting olive trees. Outside, the fort is a solid, cold, masculine enclosure of stone that soars into the blue. Inside, however, like Avignon, it’s a lush, feminine embrace.

I was almost speechless the first time we came (yes, it’s that amazing). It was like finding someplace I never knew I’d been dreaming of all my life: the hilltop silence, the metallic scent of chalky stone, the soft shush of wind through tall, pale reeds, long views through arch after arch of stone, the cool of an ancient grotto. I could set up a desk, chair, and bed and live here for the rest of my life. Everything about this place delights my physical senses.

My heart and soul, however, came alive in Plovdiv, the verdant, historic hilltop town in Bulgaria. Till now, I wasn’t sure why. As Mia and I sit for lunch against a low stone wall and a cascade of ivy tendrils and the wind blows the little green corkscrews across my cheek, I suddenly understand.

I close my eyes and I’m three and sitting inside a pergola dripping with grapevines at my tante (great-aunt) Fox’s backyard. In the sweet, heavy heat of August, I squeeze the hard little baby grapes and then tickle the curls of the young vines against my cheek. My mother and tante’s voices float out the kitchen window, speaking Yiddish, rising and falling as they move to and from the windows while they make dinner. Fifty years later I can still feel the happiness of that time, viscerally. I can still hear my mother’s laughter and the buzz of glossy, black-bottomed bees, still see the giant heads of pink peonies lolling on the wet grass, having fallen of their own weight, drunk with morning rain.

No wonder I responded to Plovdiv as I did. It lies on the same latitude, exactly, as Cleveland Heights, where I was born and spent much of my childhood. It has the same plants and flowers, the same trees, insects, climates and constellations, the same fragrance, light, and colors. One, I hadn’t been surrounded by in decades.

The landscape of our childhood imprints itself into our very being at the same time and in the same way—primal, umbilical—as our relationship with our mother; they’re inextricably bound.

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