The Slow Breath of Stone by Pamela Petro

Author:Pamela Petro [Petro, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-744580-6
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2005-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

I smiled. Lucy liked to fuss over Anfossi; she even worried that jolting over bad roads tired his arms. Only once in her journal did she mention reprimanding him (or rather, making Kingsely do so), and this only for driving too fast for her to take in the scenery.

Upon the angels Lucy bestowed high praise (recall that she had only found Isaiah a ‘high water mark’), although as far as I could make out their horns were straight. As daylight failed I held her photograph up to the church for one last look. Christ’s hand, palm up, prominently extends into Lucy’s portrait next to the angel’s horn. In the picture he has a thumb; on the tympanum he did not. I may have been thinking about the assemblage of points in time, but I must not have been feeling it; in my heart, I knew, it had been 1920. Thanks to Christ’s missing thumb, eighty-two years rushed into what remained of the evening, a slim five hours, filling them with the century just passed and sweeping Lucy and Madame far away from me, leaving me on my own in the company of kind strangers.

‘Est-ce qu’on embrace?’ asked the old man after he had finished filling my car with petrol – ‘May I hug you?’ Broken blood vessels made messy purple filigree of his nose and cheeks. We had exchanged stories about the airports of Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City; enough said, I warranted, to merit a hug.

‘Oui,’ I replied, carelessly as it turned out, whereupon he drew me towards him not by the arms but the sides of my ribcage, so that my breasts popped up like two honeydew melons which he then squashed dramatically against his chest. After the danger of suffocation passed, I had to give him credit. I was clearly in the presence of a master of the outrageous but unthreatening gesture, a man who had mined every nuance out of the word ‘avuncular’. I told him he was agarçon méchant – a bad boy – and headed down the N20.

The A20, the modern auto-route, and its alter-ego, the older, slower N20, run side by side, north to south, slicing France’s mid-section in two from Paris to Toulouse. On road maps these red and yellow lines halve Quercy as well. It’s a division I had been unable to dislodge from my mind the entire time I was in France. To the east of the twinned highways lie Quercy’s dry, limestone causses, which give onto the rougier of the central Rouergue, climaxing in the Aubrac highlands. More or less neatly to the west is Quercy Blanc – White Quercy – which takes its name from a layer of bright white chalk that overlays the limestone. Flowing perpendicular to the highways are four principal rivers, which corrugate the easterly landscape, especially, into ribbons of gorges and fertile valleys: the Dordogne, the most northerly, followed in southerly order by the Lot, the Aveyron, and the Tarn.

After weeks of

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