I listen to this radio program every day called La-bas si j'y suis with Daniel Mermet. a strange name for a program, one that everyone agrees has little in the way of literal significance. I had already been downloading French radio programs for some time when I heard of this one. A huge controversy had been ignited when the increasingly conservative Radio France tried to take Mermet off the air as it had other popular, leftwing programs. I signed a petitiion supporting the program and then felt obliged to give the program a listen = hooked. Each day at 15h00 (3pm) they begin the program with messages they have received on their answering machine. Very democratic for a national radio program heard in every corner of France. Poets, kooks, professors, truck drivers on cell phones. All of them really hard for me to understand, but full of ideas and passion. A couple of my French friends call the program "miserabilitist" which I suppose means obsessed with poverty and unhappiness. It's true, La bas covers any good labor strike it can find such as Guadeloupe. But with what happy brio. And then there is the easy laugh of Daniel Mermet himself, obviously hugely glad to be alive even if he's uncovering massacre sites in Central America, interviewing Noam Chomsky, ripping into French industrialists and political figures. One of my favorites was a series of shows on the Court of the Pre-condemned where they had mock trials of people like Bernard Henri-Levy, such a pompous intellectual that he is universally known by his initials, BHL. Or the equally hypocritical Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister under Sarkozy. Mermet's the judge, and various great critics from Le monde diplomatique and other places took the parts of avocats and the accused themselves.
Perhaps as an outgrowth of the campaign to save the program, all across France groups were formed known as Repaires de La-Bas si j'y suis. "Repaire" is a funny word that means a den for animals or a den of thieves or other questionable types. I had thought of trying to get my wonderful, world-weary neighbor and friend, Francis to help me start a repaire in Prayssac. So I was tickled pink to hear on the program one day that there was already a repaire in Cahors. I had a bunch of errands to run there, so off I went last Friday to check it out. Francis held back so I decided to record the whole thing so he could give it a test drive for next month's repaire.
I don't really ask look at maps much now that our Garmen GPS with an Australian woman's voice tells me where to go. Matilda knows best. Still I was a little dismayed as she directed me up a steep winding road that ended up high above Cahors. Did I mention that there was one of the most violently colored sunsets going on that I've ever seen?
I finally made it to the restaurant, Le Mont St Cyr, a couple minutes early.
Gradually people trickled in, first of all, LoLo, a Rabelasian guy with long hair, a voice as big as all Cahors, lots of turquoise rings. And a sort of French Padma, erudite, interesting, a real metis, mixed background person, having been raised in France from a Bretton mother and Kabyle (Algerian Berber) father. A few of the woman looked very Vermonty with hiking shoes but most were reassuringly French with really uncomfortable-lookikng high heels. The chitchat was a combination of news about organic farming and passionate discussion about wine. You could probably get a condemned French prisoner into a heated discussion of white wine even on his way to the gallows. So there were about 15 people including the restaurant owner and his wife, also political radicals at the table. Dreamers all! Across the table was a white haired music professor, Arab if I'm not mistaken, telling the story of how he built a 28 ft high tower beside his house because he found the house by itself boring. Little did he know how much work it was going to be. He sang a lot to make the work go faster. When he got up high enough to see how wonderful a view he would be having, he cried out, Allah Akbar! Later, the nosy little local notaire wandered past and accused him of building a mosque. First he is Christian, and towers like this, called pigeonniers, are the hallmark of local Quercy architecture.
After codfish, beef bourginon, salade, and crepes with creme fraiche and melted chocolate, we settled into stuffed chairs and couches and talked for a couple hours about the general strike in Guadeloupe. What a lot of pent up eloquence! Everyone who spoke (except for me) poured out a prose that was emminently publishable. Lucid, accurate, passionate, brief. I was feeling shy and thought the Algerian woman sitting next to me would never be able to break in and have her say, no matter how many tries she made. I was about to gallantly intercede when her time came and she delivered herself of a hydrogen bomb of a "temoinage", a testimony of her experiences during and just after the end of the Algerian War (1954 to 1962) She said the mothers and grandmothers were so deeply angry at the length and ferocity of the war that when two contingents of freedom fighters threatened to fight one another over dominance in the postwar order, some of these women ordered their children to lie down in the roads and dared the armies to roll over them. "Death was by this time nothing at all. Peace was everything. So that these women were willing to put themselves and their children literally on the line for peace."
With all this in my ears, I was grateful to let Matilda direct me home. But she must have been in a funny mood, perhaps rebelling, because the first couple of roads she ordered me to go down looked like 4WD only. Finally we came to one and when she said, "Take a right on the Road to the National 20" I figured I was ok. It started out a narrow paved lane, then the pavement gradually disintegrated, and, like a gag scene in some bad movie, it degenerated into a very steep, completely washed out loose dirt road with ruts deep enough to take out the transmission. A real class 4.
I was just getting over this betrayal when Matilda hit me with the second sucker punch, sending me home from Cahors on the 653 through Sauzet, up and over a twisty road full of possible deer. The oldest trick in the book. Well, the deer around here are the size of huge jackrabbits. And the only thing that ran in front of my car that night in fact was a large jackrabbit.
PS Has everyone figured out that if you click on the pictures, they expand to a more impressive size?
