Napoleon's Roads (2 page)

~

The road outside Capestang, or over the river at Trèbes above the ranked barges. There is a sudden turn there, as the highway that has been straight for five or six kilometres, suddenly narrows, enters the village, and you cross the bridge – and calm, a moment's slowness after the speed, the majestic trees bending over the water, forming a great bower, the thin, winding streets, the café, the
tabac
, the
boulangerie
, before highway again, out through the acres of vines.

~

The plane and the poplar are fast-growing trees, but even Napoleon, planting them along his roads, can't have thought they would be tall enough to shade his troops the next year, or for several years to come. What was it then? Investment? Empire? Belief in the future? Each year, when they did go on manoeuvres – those who lived, those who survived – the trees were a little taller, a little fuller of foliage. I imagine them singing as they marched, though perhaps it was harsher than that, only the occasional soldier, singing under his breath.

~

Thursday, 5.15 p.m., huge moon above Campagnan, round and full and riding low over the scattered lights. Impossible to return the next night but there at the same time Saturday, with camera. No moon. Have clearly miscalculated the rising times. Decide to pull off the road and wait anyway, to see. And within two minutes a police car appears – I can just make out the ‘
Gendarmerie
' sign in the half-dark – and moves carefully up beside me. One of them – there are three men in the car – winds the window slowly down as I do the same. Does he think I have a shotgun? Matches?

‘
Un problème
?'

‘
Non, pas de problème
…
J'attend un photo'
, holding up the camera, ‘–
de la lune
…'

‘
D'accord
', he says, calmly – not the slightest reaction – and they drive off.

God knows what they say. Maybe nothing. The moon, after all, is a remarkable thing. Even
gendarmes
watch it. Or might have – I think as I drive away – an hour ago, as they paced the D32, huge and dangerous through the bars of the trees.

THE CELLAR

He sometimes thought it was to avoid her but it wasn't. If it was to avoid anything then it was to avoid everything, but he wouldn't have said that.

The cellar had always been there, the idea of it. An openness under the house. A cool, dark space, with the damp earthen smell of a cave. Some sort of presence, or unconsciousness, and if you listened closely enough – as he had discovered the first time, clambering in through the hole under the veranda – the faint sound of trickling water. It had been precarious, that first time, climbing down, not knowing where to put his feet, only the thin blade of torchlight bouncing about: down the face of a granite boulder into the sea of broken bricks and rubble that turned out, as best he could understand it, to be the remains of the house that had been there before, collapsed into its foundations to save the cost of carting it away, so that there was no knowing, until you removed it, how deep was the hole really.

It was this that had intrigued him and played on his mind, a sort of deferred planless plan to one day find out how deep it was and make a cellar, to store wine or use as a darkroom, or just as a place to put away the kinds of things that one puts away in the dark underneath, old bassinettes and wooden-barred cots and tricycles and trainer-bikes and steamer trunks full of old uniforms, not that, as it had turned out, there had been children, or uniforms.

So that when in '96 they were having a new set of shelves built in the kitchen he'd had the carpenter cut a hole in the floor of the boot-closet under the stairs and put in a trapdoor and a wooden ladder though he, the carpenter, had been uneasy about the unstable rubble at the base and had dragged in an old piece of eight-by-four to firm it. Then in '04, with a light now installed, he – the subject of this story, not the carpenter – had rented at first a small mini-skip and then a larger one and then a larger still and had spent half a year of Sundays getting rid of the rubble, the floor getting gradually lower and lower and the unstable base of the ladder more and more of a problem until he replaced it with a longer one so he could adjust the angle as the floor descended until at last, just as he'd hoped, he found solid rock. In some places it made him think of the back of a large cetacean part-surfaced from earth-ocean, around the edge of which, from the front of the house running directly down and back into the last remaining pool of rubble, there now ran and had probably always run a trickle that in periods of heavy rain he could almost call a stream. It gave him a delicious feeling, getting up in the middle of the night and staring out at the upper branches of the huge Sydney Blue Gum,
Eucalyptus saligna
, in the moonlight from the third floor window, thinking that far beneath – a dozen feet below street-level – a small spring trickled, bathing and feeding the roots.

But how to preserve it, the stream, while at the same time turning the sub-floor space into a cellar truly? Reluctantly (but it was not without precedent; it had happened with the Tank Stream), he decided to bury it alive, and channelled the water into a PVC pipe. There was still, where the ground seemed to fall suddenly away, a part of the sub-floor covered with rubble. The stream disappeared into it as into a pool. He realised that if he poured sand over it the sand might clog the water's exit point, wherever that was. If he was to concrete the floor it might, in this part, be as simple a matter as a plastic sheet and some sand levelled over it. It took some time – he did it in stages – but within two months he had laid a concrete floor, created a large cellar almost half the floor-size of the level above it, and was now thinking of fixtures. Perhaps a wall, dividing the space into two, with a door, on one side the wine cellar and on the other, furthest from the ladder, the darkroom, with a light outside to indicate when he shouldn't be disturbed. Not that he really expected his wife would ever come down. Once set up with a bench and chair, an enlarger, developing trays; once water had been connected (but how to drain it?), he could disappear into it for hours.

The water was a problem. Not the drainage from the sink, but the stream, or what had been the stream. Mounting behind his back during the winter. Since other things had distracted him, and the work had been suspended. A period of months when he did not go down. There was, after all, nothing stored there yet, nothing as yet that he needed to go down there to fetch.

It was a dream that alerted him. Hard to explain, or would have been, had there been anyone he needed to explain it to. A murmuring, like an actual human voice trapped. He was out of the city when he heard it, in a motel in a dry country town, at three or four in the morning, on the edge of the desert. As he drove to the next town the following day, three hundred kilometres of almost-straight road, he thought of it continually. It seemed like a sign but there was no telling of what.

Back in the city, however, it was days before he remembered and went down. And there it was, covering the concrete slab. Four or five inches of it. A dark pool which, when the trapdoor was opened, before the light was turned on, turned suddenly into a mirror in which he could see himself, in silhouette, with the light from upstairs behind him. He had no idea where it had come from. Perhaps, all along, the walls had been seeping when it rained heavily, but in the past, before the concrete, it had gathered to form the stream and so no-one had ever noticed. But now something had to be done. Maybe the stream had murmured for a reason. He brought down a crowbar, went to the part of the floor above the rubble-pool, and broke a hole in the concrete. When he went down again the next day the water had gone. He could now put in a drain, perhaps, so that the problem would not recur, but when he shone a torch into the hole, down past the concrete and the drooping, sand-covered plastic, he found that the rubble had receded. Perhaps the stream had done it. There was a gap, now, as deep as his forearm. A lair. He half-expected to find some creature in it.

The concrete was thick but would not hold indefinitely. If he filled the space with sand or rubble there was no guarantee that it wouldn't recede again and that that part of the floor wouldn't collapse. He broke more of the concrete away and began to remove the rubble. When the pile beside the hole grew large enough and as yet there was no sign that the rubble was coming to an end, he hired another skip. It seemed clear now that all along the water had been disappearing into a fissure in a large sandstone boulder – another drifter in the sea of the earth that was now all around him. But no, it was going around and under it, disappearing further down. It was almost summer again. Upstairs, when he looked out at the smooth, flesh-pale branches of the great Sydney Blue Gum late at night, he fancied he could see in one of its highest forks the shape of a possum staring out over the wide basin of the suburb in the moonlight.

From time to time as he worked he could hear his wife upstairs, moving about.

It was a room, or could have been. The size almost of the small laundry two floors above. And he found that the idea of it would not leave him alone. Having cleared it out, having found its dimensions, it seemed a question, almost a demand that had to be answered. He went down and sat there, on a three-legged stool he had brought from the garage. In the depths of the earth, had he been able to slow down his hearing – to slow it down, or perhaps it was to speed it up; he couldn't tell; from a second, say, to a thousand years – it seemed to him that he would be hearing the songs of the great boulders as they swam so darkly and slowly. A deep, deep moaning. The rumble of an elephant, he had read, although inaudible to human ears, could be heard far, far off by other elephants. Whales made sounds that travelled hundreds of kilometres through the ocean.

There seemed no choice but to make it larger, as if, having imagined it, there was nothing he could do but bring it about. The work was hard, dragging buckets of earth and stone up to the cellar level, to then fill the bins that could be dragged up and out to the skip. Sorting them first, conserving the full and the half-bricks, since if he were to make a wall it seemed logical to make it with what was already there. It took weeks, interrupted as it was by trips away. Now and then he would make, to her, some comment by way of explanation. Usually to do with finding the track of the water. He was surprised that she didn't ask questions. Before long the cavity was almost the size of the master bedroom. But further back; only part of it actually below the cellar; another part – at least half, by his calculation – under the western foundation, maybe five metres below the fence, in the direction of the Sydney Blue Gum.

He had started to think, rather dispiritedly, about another concrete floor, trying to work out how he might avoid a repetition of the water problem, when he noticed that a neighbour two doors down on the other side of the street was having his veranda-boards replaced. The ends of most of the old ones had rotted, but these could be easily sawn off. Good, sound Tallowwood,
Eucalyptus microcorys
. With a careful placement of beams beneath them they could be the makings of a wooden floor. He moved them in, beams and veranda-boards both, on a Sunday while she was out at the end-of-financial-year sales. By the time she returned there was hardly a thing left to be done, and little trace at all that anything had been. A floor. Hasty, yes, but a floor nonetheless. A plateau. An even surface to think upon. To sit on, on the three-legged stool, and plan walls, a trapdoor above, some more permanent access than the old wooden ladder he had used so far.

Work distracted him again. Travelling. Motels in country towns. Tightness. Squareness on the ground. The gravelly solidity of the earth beneath. Now and then he would be given a room on a first floor, but that was only a sleight of hand, barely relief at all. In truth there was no escape. Not that way. Nor in the car, out on the plains. Everything horizontal. Everything visual. Even the sky seemed stubborn. Now and then he would stop, when he found one, at a grove of tall trees, turn off the car, walk out, stand still, try to hear water. Through the flies and the noise that most people seemed to mistake for silence.

It was a month before he could go back down to sit in the semi-darkness and listen. Here and there roots hung out from the walls. At first he had thought to cut them but then, feeling their toughness and their moisture in his hands, thinking of the huge Sydney Blue Gum that had probably been there since before the house had been thought of, had decided to leave them be. The walls that he would build from the bricks he had emptied from the space could be made around them, with gaps and crevices wherever the roots seemed to need them. It was slow work. Months went by. He installed the second trapdoor, rigged it so that a light would go on when it was lifted, fixed an iron bar to the frame onto which to hook the new, aluminium ladder so that it could be left permanently in place.

She didn't seem much interested. He said that he was building walls. There was no secret anymore. She hated ladders. If he was happy enough with whatever he was doing then she was happy enough to leave him to it. Besides, her knee was bad; she might fall if she tried to go down. And how, then, would he get her out, with the bulk of her?

One night he woke and realised that rain had come. He lay there listening to it, heavy and long, the muffled roar on the iron roof, the torrent in the gutters and downpipes. An hour, two, and the first runnels would be reaching the sub-floor, the stream would be waking. He tried to envision it, thinking the whole system through, saw water seeping up through the floorboards, inching up the feet of the ladder, felt an anxiety mounting. It made no difference to know that at this hour there was nothing he could do, or that left just a day or two any problem would most likely sort itself out. It was the knowing of it, how it came. He got up, felt his way out of the bedroom, listening before he closed the door, to see if the pattern of her breathing had changed, but could hear nothing but rain.

The cellar was dry. The walls also. When he lifted the second trapdoor, fully expecting a flood below, he found that the floorboards, too, were dry. He climbed down, sat for a while on the stool, wondering whether he could hear the rain down here. Nothing. He thought, illogically, that he might hear better, be better able to concentrate, in the dark. He climbed up, closed the trapdoor, felt his way back to the stool. As he sat there he became conscious of a tiny chink of light coming up from between the floorboards, like the light of a farmhouse seen at night from the air, ten thousand feet up, or the light from the end of a tunnel.

This third room was harder and, since he had no reason for it other than this self-evident but inexplicable call, more secretive, not that there was anyone to keep the secret from. There was soil now, no rubble, and barrier stone – earth dolphins – and with the skip gone he had to dispose of it by other means. He would bring it up, in buckets, to the cellar proper, then when she was out, distribute it around the garden. The scallops of stone – for it did come away, under the chisel, in curved, creamy scallops – he piled along the side of the room above, the second one, where as yet he had still to complete the wall. This third room would not need to be large, nor was there any rush to finish. He dug down at first, and then, when there was room to stand, outward, towards where, above, he imagined the fence would be. The space was two metres deep and almost a metre-and-a-half square when he made his discovery and began slowly – it was more, now, a matter of washing than of digging – to remove the soil from around it, to reveal its smooth, white nakedness. Just as far as the needs of the room went, the aesthetics, not wanting to damage or, any more than he might already have done so, interfere.

It went on. As she explained to the police, and as she would repeatedly to others in the years that followed, she had grown used to his absences, sometimes for whole days, from the mornings until late at night, but after two days on the occasion in question had realised that something must have happened, that he must have had a heart attack, or stroke, and, if he wasn't dead already, must be lying there, unable to cry out. In truth it did not greatly trouble her. She felt she hardly knew him these days. But she knew that she would be held accountable. She could see that he wasn't at the foot of the ladder, and when she stood at the top of it and called his name there was no response.