In the public garden, where we walked between showers, the trees had poems in Occitan — the spruce, the Spanish fir, the Sequoia (such a long way from home). And when it became dark, we ate dinner in the same place we ate on our first night here: duck in walnut sauce, sarladaise potatoes, walnut cake, with a pichet of brisk Bergerac wine. Wish you were here.
yesterday, we spent most the day at Lascaux IX, the recreated world of the ancient cave above Montignac-Lascaux, and it was wonderful. But somehow the most remarkable thing to me was knowing that the original cave was just 100 meters back in the woods. It’s not possible to visit that one. I understand why. But still.
Today we went to Font-de-Gaume. I’d booked tickets ages ago and so we walked up along a limestone escarpment to meet our guide. The sides of the path were green with hart’s tongue ferns, a small vivid campanula, remaining leaves from spring’s bee orchids, a few figs, succulents and tiny wildings growing in bowls in the limestone. John’s photo shows the entrance to the cave which we entered with 8 others. We were told to keep our clothing close to our bodies and not to touch the cave walls. We walked into darkness.
When our guide shone his light on the first grouping of bison, I wept. The hairy rhino, the incised deer, one licking the antler of another, its tongue beautifully rendered with superb skill, and the horses, oh the horses.
i have already begun to think my way into an essay though in some ways it’s more like accessing the beings who’ve been in my imagination since I first read about them 50 years ago. Horses rendered in manganese oxide, red and yellow ochre, their anatomies as perfect as anything before or since
Our guide told us how the (re)discoveries of the caves in the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries often met with disbelief. No, it’s not possible that these are old. Someone is playing a joke. But then, he said, “when we believed, they came to us ” They still come to us, the muzzles of the horses alive in the dim beam of the guide’s light, their scent ripe with the wild grasses of the Vezere valley, the reindeer in their small affectionate moment, 15,000 thousand years ago, or longer. Walking back, the oak leaves rustled under our feet
the real cave is 100 meters away, hidden, but somehow I was taken there to stand in tears below the horses, sturdy and animated, the aurochs, ibixes, Bison, the 5 stags in an imaginary river, their beautiful heads above water
a morning of lows (rental car host gone to ground, not responding to messages, and no other cars available), of hope ( we found Clara, who will take us to the places we can’t reach by bus), and of the sense of abundance as we wandered through the Wednesday market in Sarlat: every kind of duck preserve, from confit to terrine to sausage; wild strawberries; huge rounds of local cheeses; nougats; mushrooms fresh and dried (morels, cepes, chanterelles, trumpets); wines; nuts; and overhead, a blue sky out of a book of hours. Church bells. Dogs.
on our way to get walnut cake to have with coffee, pigeons whirring in the mild air
arrived to this room in a 14th c. building and now, after dinner, our street in lamplight.
how it began, 1979…
and it continues, 45 years later:
As I walked across to buy tickets for a concert tomorrow at Saint Julien de Pauvre, I had the feeling I was being watched…
I loved everything about the Picasso museum — the stone stairs worn in the centres, the white shutters, the paintings and drawings and ceramics, the relationships–Matisse, Cezanne, Jackson Pollock–the beautiful women, and maybe most of all, the Aubade, a morning song, darkness and light, its preparatory drawings so stunning, and how I am still thinking about it after lunch at Cafe Breizh where we also ate in 2009, buckwheat galettes with cabbage, sausage, Comte, mustard creme, a glass of cider, and sorbet, also buckwheat, and the familiar walk back along Rue Rambuteau.
Found our little flat in the Marais, we’re charmed, went out for provisions, returned to a leaking roof. Pots on the floor catching drips, and a blithe host assuring us we can use the extra towels to mop up. Wish you were here.
...Theresa Kishkan 