It was midnight and the road to the Lot was still long. I leaned back on the passenger seat and looked up at the pinpricks of white light in the inky firmament - the only thing that kept still as we dashed from one city limit to another.
As we hurtled past Azerables, H wondered what JM was doing. Probably taking his socks off and wondering where we were at the the same moment, or putting away the food his wife made, after rashly expecting we would be around for dinner. He had become so used to us stopping over on our way to the south; but it would be hours before we could rest, and dinner would later come in the form of convenience store sandwiches at a gasoline station (surprisingly) full of Filipinos, who turned out to be (not surprisingly) on their way to Lourdes.
With us was my brother in law, L, who owns the car but couldn't drive because he worked until ten in the evening. An hour's worth of doo-wop medleys kept me awake, challenging me to sing each and every song. At 3 am, H pointed to the deep blue sky outside that terminated in a dull glow of street lights watching over the rest of creation while it slept. It was so different from the orange-blue sky we'd been accustomed to in Paris, which is mainly condensed water vapor, pollution, sweat, lies, disappointment and regrets all rising up from an old and very tired city.
The next couple of hours were a blur. By luck, I was able to reach our bed and sleep for a few hours until lunchtime surreptitiously crept and we had to go say bonjour and salut to the rest of the family. After the repast, the brothers disappeared to get their father his birthday gift (I got the card to go with it, so my part was done) and I went to the clearing behind the woods next to the stream to read, and failing that, fell asleep on the grass.
It was the sound of my father in law's lawnmower that roused me back. I waved to him and went back into the house to wash the flowers from my hair and came downstairs to the clinking of champagne glasses. We sang happy birthday to him and had Swiss-style raclette from the wheel of cheese they got from Switzerland just the day before (which I realized was a far better technique than French raclette, and truer to the real sense of the word, which means "scraping"). Dinner was a blur, thanks to the copious amounts of alcohol I put away, with a wee gulp of digestif at the end to soothe my gluttonous belly.
I had yet to recover from dinner when the brothers and some kids from the village drove to the next town for its yearly fête. These little hamlets each have their own summer festival, perhaps a tradition passed down from medieval times, when troubadours hopped from town to town spreading melodious gossip and troupes of actors were the superstars of the day. In fact, I could imagine how the scene before me would have appeared in an earlier time, with simpler music and with people garbed in vintage guises. These modern trappings couldn't hide that they are essentially the same souls, concerned about life, love, money, family... we have not evolved much, you see. And the teenagers who did most of the showing off were no different from the teens who showed up at these festivals centuries ago, whose main goal for the night was to get someone in the sack.
A be-mulleted band played renditions of French and English tunes onstage while the rest of us drowned ourselves in beer, iced tea, sodas and Perrier. It was at 2 am, when the DJ got the party started, that we also drowned ourselves in soap suds care of the foam machine.
Meanwhile, in a river in Washington, the cremated remains of Kurt Cobain coagulated into a semblance of the human form just so it could turn over after sensing a rhythmic pounding in the ground reverberating from across the Atlantic where, in a small French village, his "Smells like teen spirit" was publicly being slaughtered by the nimble fingers of a local DJ named Felix.
It was almost morning when we got back home. The clear outline of the Milky way was close to disappearing. H's brothers croaked on the sofa at the pool house, and my legs were dead from my vain attempt to dance.
And then, just like that, it was Sunday.
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