Blue Mars(91)
No doubt it was better that way. Although as Michel sat in cafés eating his meals, feeling as alone as if he were in a solo rover in the far outback of the southern highlands, it was a bit disappointing to be entirely ignored— just one vieux among all the rest, another one of those whose unnaturally long life was creating more logistical problems than le fleuve blanc, if the truth were told. . . .
It was better this way. He could stop in little villages around Vallabrix, like Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, or Saint-Victor-des-Quies, or Saint-Hippolyte-de-Montaigu, and chat with the shopkeepers, who looked identical to the ones who had been running the shops when he had left, and were probably their descendants, or even possibly the same people; they spoke in an older more stable French, careless of him, absorbed in their own conversations, their own lives. He was nothing to them, and so he could see them clearly. It was the same out in the narrow streets, where many people looked like gypsies— North African blood no doubt, spreading into the populace as it had after the Saracen invasion a thousand years before. Africans pouring in every thousand years or so; this too was Provence. The young women were beautiful: gracefully flowing through the streets in gangs, their black tresses still glossy and bright in the dust of the mistral. These had been his villages. Dusty plastic signs, everything tattered and run-down. . . .
Back and forth he oscillated, between familiarity and alienation, memory and forgetfulness. But ever more lonely. In one café he ordered cassis, and at the first sip he remembered sitting in that very same café, at that very same table. Across from Eve. Proust had been perfectly correct to identify taste as the principal agent of involuntary memory, for one’s long-term memories settled or at least were organized in the amygdala, just over the area in the brain concerned with taste and smell— and so smells were intensely intertwined with memories, and also with the emotional network of the limbic system, twisting through both areas; thus the neurological sequence, smell triggering memory triggering nostalgia. Nostalgia, the intense ache for one’s past, desire for one’s past— not because it had been so wonderful but simply because it had been, and now was gone. He recalled Eve’s face, talking in this crowded room across from him. But not what she had said, or why they were there. Of course not. Simply an isolated moment, a cactus needle, an image seen as if by lightning bolt, then gone; and no knowing the rest of it, no matter how hard he tried to recollect. And they were all like that, his memories; that was what memories were when they got old enough, flashes in the dark, incoherent, almost meaningless, and yet sometimes filled with a vague ache.
He stumbled out of the café from his past to his car, and drove home, through Vallabrix, under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to the ruined mas, all without thinking; and he walked out to it again helplessly, as if the house might have sprung back into being. But it was still the same dusty ruin by the olive grove. And he sat on the wall, feeling blank.
That Michel Duval was gone. This one would go too. He would live into yet further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here the first time. Flashes, images— a man sitting on a broken wall, no feeling involved. Nothing more than that. So this Michel too would go.
The olive trees waved their arms, gray green, green gray. Good-bye, good-bye. They were no help this time, they gave him no euphoric connection with lost time; that moment too was past.
In a flickering gray green he drove back to Arles. The clerk in the hotel’s lobby was telling someone that the mistral would never stop. “Yes it will,” Michel said as he passed.
He went up to his room and called Maya again. Please, he said. Please come soon. It was making him angry that he was reduced to such begging. Soon, she kept saying. A few more days and they would have an agreement hammered out, a bona fide written agreement between the UN and an independent Martian government. History in the making. After that she would see about coming.
Michel did not care about history in the making. He walked around Arles, waiting for her. He went back to his room to wait. He went out to walk again.
• • •
The Romans had used Arles for a port as much as they had Marseilles— in fact Caesar had razed Marseilles for backing Pompey, and had given Arles his favor as the local capital. Three strategic Roman roads had been constructed to meet at the town, all used for hundreds of years after the Romans had gone, and so for those centuries it had been lively, prosperous, important. But the Rhone had silted its lagoons, and the Camargue had become a pestilential swamp, and the roads had fallen into disuse. The town dwindled. The Camargue’s windswept salt grasses and their famous herds of wild white horses were eventually joined by oil refineries, nuclear power plants, chemical works.