Alex's Wake (34 page)

We return to the main road and are soon on the western edge of Perpignan near the city airport, where our room for the night is located. For most of our journey, I have endeavored to find charming local lodgings that reflect their particular surroundings, but tonight is an exception. Given what I imagine will be a rather grim encounter next morning, I have made reservations at a nondescript Comfort Inn, a chain motel only a few miles away from Rivesaltes. We find the room to be bland but perfectly acceptable and almost immediately drive into Perpignan for dinner and a little sightseeing.

Now the capital of the
departement
of Pyrénées Orientales, Perpignan was founded toward the beginning of the tenth century and soon came under the control of the counts of Barcelona. One of those counts, James the Conqueror, founded the kingdom of the island of Majorca in 1276 and established Perpignan as the capital city of the mainland territories of the kingdom. In the next century, the city lost nearly half its population to the Black Death, and during the following three hundred years it passed repeatedly from Spanish to French control and back again as the spoils of many wars between the two countries. Since 1659, the
citizens of Perpignan have lived under the French flag, although many street signs today appear in both French and Catalan. In 1963, the Catalan surrealist painter Salvador Dali declared that the city's railway station was the exact center of the universe and acknowledged that some of his best ideas had come to him as he sat in the station's waiting room. In Dali's honor, the city has erected a sign on one of the platforms that reads
Perpignan: Centre du Monde
.

On this warm late spring afternoon, we leave our car near the thirteenth-century castle of the kings of Majorca and stroll around the high castle ramparts and through the narrow winding streets of the medieval city until we come upon an Italian restaurant in the beautiful Place de la République. We eat heartily; I find myself talking and laughing in an unusually animated manner. Mindful of my appointment in the morning, I have decided this evening to adopt as my mantra Stephen Sondheim's “Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight!” As we return to our motel on the edge of town, however, my spirits sag and sleep comes late.

Monday dawns cloudy and windy. We eat a hurried breakfast in the Comfort Inn's generic dining area, near a table of pilots and flight attendants who are catching a plane at the Perpignan-Rivesaltes Airport. After loading the Meriva, we set off grimly in search of the nearby camp. A memorial museum dedicated to those who were interned at Rivesaltes is in the planning stages, and I have been in e-mail contact with Elodie Montes of the museum staff. In my last message, I confirmed that I would be seeing her at about 10:00 a.m. today. Anxious to be prompt—on top of my other anxieties—I have left what I assume will be plenty of time to find the site, which, given that it will be the location of a nationally supported museum, I further assume will be clearly marked. To my vast annoyance and frustration, we discover that my assumptions are utterly wrong.

Returning to the A9 autoroute, we become stuck in Perpignan's rush-hour traffic and then are slowed by an enormous bottleneck caused by a massive construction project involving six lanes of traffic and at least as many exit ramps going off in different directions. Thanks to Amy's considerable navigational skills, we manage to get off the A9 and onto route D614, which leads us into the center of the small town
of Rivesaltes. Spotting a sign reading
Musée-Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes
, we follow its arrow north on the D5, assuming that all will now be easy. But we then come to a traffic circle in which the D5 intersects with the D12, with no further indication of which road to follow. Over the next thirty or forty minutes, we try first one route and then the other, once following another road—the D18—which intersects with D12—but never again seeing another sign indicating that the
Musée-Mémorial
is any closer than Paris.

Frustrated beyond measure, I can barely take in the landscape, which varies between the verdant vineyards that produce the distinctive wines of the Pyrénées Orientales
departement
and arid plains that stretch to the rising uplands of the Pyrenees Mountains to the west. The scudding low clouds that obscure the higher peaks match my dark mood.

Finally we see a low building off to our right. We cannot make out what its small sign proclaims but decide that in this storm of uncertainty, we have reached a temporary port. The building proves to have nothing whatsoever to do with the camp—it's a vocational training center—but luckily the receptionist speaks English and kindly allows us to use her telephone. I reach Ms. Montes almost at once. She was expecting my call but is stuck at the museum's main office in Perpignan for the next several hours. She gives me detailed directions to the camp entrance and promises to meet me there tomorrow morning at 10:00. So Amy and I decide to push on to our destination for the next two nights, the nearby village of Prades.

But now that we know how to find the camp, my curiosity gets the better of me. We drive a few more kilometers up the D5 until we reach an almost indecipherable crossroads. To the right, a rough dirt road leads off into a tangle of unkempt undergrowth. To the left, standing forlornly by the side of the highway, are three small monuments. One pays tribute to the Spanish Republicans who were interned here after the Civil War. One is for the Gypsies. One is in memory of the Jews.

After a few moments spent gazing at the monuments, we wordlessly drive down the dirt road into a vast, empty, silent space. To our right are a half-dozen giant metal windmills, their blades revolving slowly through the humid air. We see scrubby trees that somehow take sustenance from
the dusty grey clay soil. The roadway is treacherous, pocked by deep ruts. A sense of sorrowful abandonment overhangs all.

We come to the ruins of what was once the camp's main gate, two immense vertical columns supporting the horizontal. There are coils of rusted, abandoned barbed wire twisted among the undergrowth. Driving through the gate, we come upon crumbling brick barracks, most of them open to the cloudy sky. I can drive no longer; we stop and step outside the car into as bleak and desolate a landscape as I could ever imagine. There is the sound of the ever-present wind in the scrubby trees and other than that a silence as profound as might be experienced at the bottom of the ocean.

I am seized by a sadness unlike any I have felt since we landed in Europe nearly three weeks ago. Suddenly I feel an irresistible urge to flee. Amy and I share a glance, we fling ourselves back into the car, and with all speed we make our way out of the camp, head south around the perimeter of Perpignan, and drive up into the foothills of the Pyrenees toward Prades. Neither of us speaks for miles.

Finally, I decide to treat my missed connection with Elodie Montes as a reprieve, an opportunity to return to the role of carefree tourist before tomorrow's resumption of my pursuit of Alex and Helmut. Indeed, there is much to relish on the journey to Prades, as the highway snakes upward through rock formations and a red-tinged soil reminiscent of the stunning scenery of the American Southwest. Occasional herds of sheep and goats appear in well-tended upland fields and the sky slowly clears as our altitude increases. By the time we reach our destination, my spirits have risen accordingly.

A small village just thirty-five miles from the Spanish border, Prades was founded in the ninth century. Its soaring St. Peter's Church dates from the eleventh century, with important renovations in the seventeenth century giving it one of the largest and most ornate altarpieces in all France. But its innate beauty aside, there are two reasons why the rest of the world knows about Prades: the monk and mystic Thomas Merton, author of the influential autobiography
The Seven Storey Mountain
, was born here in 1915, and the great cellist Pablo Casals lived here for many years during his self-imposed exile from Spain following the
defeat of the Republican forces in 1939. It is the Casals legacy that has inspired me to stay in Prades while visiting Rivesaltes. I am rarely so fulfilled as when I am on pilgrimage.

Our hotel is a lovely stone building that was built as a tannery two hundred years ago. After we check in, we stroll up a steep hill to the city's main square, which fronts the church of St. Peter. The square is neatly bounded by plane trees, the gnarled trees with the sometimes twisted trunks often painted by Van Gogh; Amy and I have actually taken to referring to them as Van Gogh trees. There are several cafés along the square. We choose one, order sandwiches and beer, and spend a peaceful hour relaxing, reviving, and reveling in the joyful fact of our good fortune to be in such a remote yet beautiful portion of the planet.

We then walk into the cool, dim interior of the church, where we admire the celebrated altarpiece. I reflect contentedly that I am in the same exalted surroundings where Maestro Casals played Bach when he put Prades on the map with his first international music festival in 1950. I imagine that I can hear the echoes of his profound performances reaching me across the decades, and my unsettling memories of this morning are temporarily banished. I am a happy pilgrim as we walk back down the hill to our hotel hand in hand.

But the next morning comes all too soon, and I head back alone to meet Ms. Montes. Amy has decided that after nearly three weeks on my schedule, she needs some time to herself, so she plans to spend the day reading and researching a project of her own by the side of the hotel's swimming pool. As I drive the thirty miles or so to my appointment, I juggle two conflicting fears. One is that Ms. Montes will stand me up, and the other is that she will appear but will have nothing of consequence to show me. To try to allay those fears and also to brighten up the cloudy day, I slip one of my favorite recordings into the Meriva's CD player: the Goldberg Variations by Bach, the second of the two commercial performances of the piece made by the great eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, released just weeks before his death, at age fifty, in 1982. In addition to being a superb pianist, Gould liked to drive, so the thought of his accompanying me on this journey down the mountain enhances my deep enjoyment of the music.

As I take the final curves on the road before arriving at the entrance to the camp, I bet myself that Ms. Montes won't show. Indeed, when I arrive at the lonely crossroads with the three memorials, I am alone in the vast emptiness. But it is only 9:50, and within five minutes, a little white Renault rounds the bend, pulls up beside me, and a trim young woman emerges holding a folder. It is Elodie Montes. Within minutes I discover, both to my satisfaction and my sorrow, that my other fear was groundless as well.

T
HE CAMP DE RIVESALTES
had its origins in 1935, when the French army, noting that the southwest corner of the country—near the Mediterranean and so close to Spain—was strategically important, requisitioned a little more than fifteen hundred acres of land to build a military base. Roughly two-and-a-half miles long by one mile wide, the base was completed three years later and named Camp Joffre after General Joseph Joffre, a Rivesaltes native who was the commander-in-chief of French forces during the First World War. When the Spanish Republican forces were defeated in early 1939, Camp Joffre was one of several sites, along with the camp at Agde, where refugees from Spain were housed. Within a year, the camp expanded to take in other “undesirables,” including refugees from Nazi Germany, Gypsies, and, especially after the
Statut des Juifs
of October 1940, Jews. In the last months of 1940, families of these undesirables were moved into the barracks originally intended for French colonial troops. Then, in early January 1941, the camp was euphemistically renamed a
centre d'hébergement
, an “accommodation center.” Men, women, and children were placed in segregated barracks arranged in a series of
îlots
, or blocks, designated A through K. The foulest chapter of the history of Camp de Rivesaltes had begun.

Within a very short time, utter misery seized those interned there, due to overcrowding, filth, disease, squalor, exposure to the elements, inadequate food and medicine, and—perhaps most debilitating of all—an utter lack of any meaningful way to pass endless hours behind barbed wire in the vast empty space. Men and women had separate barracks,
with an additional section of the camp set aside for mothers with children under six years of age. The barracks themselves, with concrete walls and floors and a single entrance, were each about a hundred fifty feet long and contained up to a hundred people. They slept on bunk beds, the top bunk reached by a rickety ladder, with the beds lined up against each long wall, a narrow aisle stretching between them. As was the case at Agde, the internees at Rivesaltes slept on thin mattresses filled with straw, which was rarely if ever changed. In the four corners of each barracks, there was a tiny room reserved for the very elderly, the very ill, mothers with nursing infants, and, in some cases, someone who claimed—either via election or through sheer intimidation—the title of barracks chief. The one or two windows in each barracks contained no glass; thus it was either stiflingly hot or bitterly cold, depending on the season. The camp's population continued to expand, until by May 1941, there were an estimated ninety-five hundred people representing sixteen nationalities.

Contemporary accounts of the living conditions at Rivesaltes were stark. One social worker wrote, after visiting one of the barracks, “It was dark, cold, and humid, and there was no heating. And seizing you by the throat upon entering, a bitter odor of human sweat which floats in this den which is never aired out.” Another left this report: “The living quarters are very badly maintained and, with only rare exceptions, are repugnantly filthy. It is impossible to get rid of the vermin that have taken hold there, since there does not exist a systematic disinfecting mechanism. In general, the internees possess only the garment and the underwear that they wear, and the hovels in which they live make it impossible for them to properly look after their clothing.”