The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story

It was cold now, and we walked with our heads bowed to avoid the wind. Our lunch by the roadside was a brief and chilly affair: an apple and a squashed nectarine, Quaker oatmeal bars I’d brought from home, and two thick slabs of Laguiole cheese from the Aubrac – rough, Rouergat highlands to the east. The cheese tasted like the rind of a fresh Camembert, a young, new taste, but with a supple texture; we ate it atop pilfered slices of baguette from breakfast. Shortly after lunch we came upon the great prehistoric hunks of granite. The dolmen sat next to the macadam encircled by a little gravel drive, giving the impression of a caged beast in a zoo. Annie prowled around it.

‘It’s a wonder to behold.’

‘Don’t make fun of the dolmen.’

‘Perhaps it was made by quite short people.’

At 5 foot 9, she was a good foot taller than the capstone. I had to admit it did look like a very large, mottled mushroom. Hannah Green, however, had been enamoured. She reported its Occitan name, La Peira-Levada, the Raised Stone, and said that a ring of menhirs had once stood nearby. She also wrote that the Celts believed dolmens to be meeting places where the living conferred with the dead, and that they became sites of pilgrimage. The fact that I can’t confirm this is what makes dolmens so wonderful – no one knows much about them, least of all their original or, in the Celts’ case, even secondary significance. Dolmens aren’t ruins; unlike weathered Romanesque carvings, it is their stories, not their shapes, that have eroded away.

And that’s fine. We need to forget in order to invent. Dolmens, too, offer a handshake to the human imagination.

‘Looks like a beached whale,’ remarked Annie. ‘By the by, dare I ask about this quarry of yours?’

I had been anticipating this moment. ‘Well, you see, there is no quarry per se, at least not any more.’ Up went the eyebrow. ‘It was filled in ages ago. But the exact site doesn’t really matter. We’re in Lunel; we know there was a quarry somewhere nearby. This is the place the abbey stone called home. Ancestors of those stone-hatches you just identified for me probably knew it as neighbours.’

Annie snorted good-naturedly as fast clouds patterned the fields with moving shadows. The little village of Lunel was entirely built of rousset – it looked like Conques’ little sister. Kind-eyed cattle the colour of dark caramel, Aubrac cattle, populated the adjacent fields. Here we turned around; the next day we would follow the same route in my car, taking twenty minutes to do what today had taken hours. We retraced our steps for about half a mile before heading off on a new track – the GR 62, a southern tributary of the Chemin de St Jacques – back toward Conques. A wrought-iron cross stood at the turning; pilgrims had come this way. There was also a signpost that put the distance to the abbey at 11 kilometres. I was aghast and immediately began to calculate.

‘Do you realize we’ve already hiked 15 kilometres? Dear God, that will make 26 altogether.’

‘Ooh, that sounds impressive.’

‘Impressive? It’s insane. That’s over 16 miles! No wonder my feet hurt.’ It now dawned on me, belatedly, why I hadn’t come up with Annie’s triangular itinerary on my own. It’s always been dangerous to let her plan hikes and parties: I lacked her fabled stamina in both realms. A farmer working sheep with a rambunctious Border collie – the lambs had tails like pipe cleaners – warned us it was a long way to Conques. ‘Downhill, though,’ he added cheerfully. Blossoms that Annie had just identified as evening-blue cornflowers were startled at our approach and flew off together, revealing themselves (we caught our breath) as butterflies. Wild thyme scented our footfalls.

It was a Rouergat paradise, but even so, once I’d worked out how far we’d walked I began to whine: my arches ached, my hips’ ball-and-socket joints felt like those of an old German Shepherd. Annie, however, marched on relentlessly. For a while the route held to the top of a high ridge, the south face of which fell away dramatically, culminating in the valley below in a perpendicular fan of woolly-wooded, peaked fissures. Patches of oxblood earth showed between gaps in the forest. Finally we began to descend. This is how the stone had come, too, atop wagons hitched to twenty-six pairs of oxen. We were following its tracks. It had been a tradition with medieval pilgrims walking to Compostela to carry stones as a penance (a variation on walking barefoot, or in chains). Sometimes monks put this practice to use, encouraging pilgrims to transport not just any old rocks, but to carry cut stones from quarries to ecclesiastical construction sites. I fingered the piece of schist in my pocket and trudged on.

Some time later Annie broke the silence by asking if I’d rather run a marathon or take heroin.

‘Right now?’

‘Yes, you have to do one or the other right now.’

‘Take heroin.’

‘Thought you’d say that.’

As we neared Conques we came upon a sign pointing toward a detour to a Point de Vue, overlooking the great concha of the Dourdou (Hannah Green translates concha as ‘valley’; others argue that it is the shell-shaped enclave on which Conques is built that lends the village its name). ‘Shall we?’ asked Annie in ready tones.

A look from me sufficed. ‘Ah, well, you get out there and find it’s only an opinion anyway.’

‘How dare you have the strength to be funny,’ I growled. Ancient apple and plum trees, woven with mistletoe, guided us back to the village: we’d been gone for seven hours. That night Annie treated me to a dinner of sea bass with chanterelles – the lacy mushrooms the French call girolles; along with groseilles (red currants), they’re a staple of summer markets – which we downed with a bottle of Gaillac, rounded off with Cognac, at the three-star Hôtel Ste Foy. It had become increasingly difficult for me to speak French in her profoundly English company, and I’m afraid our waiter suffered the consequences. Lucy and Kingsley had lunched in the same place; ‘a heavy meal, of much meat’. Later that night we went to a concert of ‘Chasticovitch’, Mozart, and Schubert, held in the abbey.

The clarity of sound in the big, white, clean space of the church was pure and true. Wayward lines of melody explored the nave, climbed its pillars, ribboned down the arches, while harmony felt its way along the dark side aisles with my eyes, or perhaps ears, in tow. Music and stone were old partners here, still searching together for common ground, joined tonight by the cries of house martins swooping in through the open door and whirling around the nave. Later I asked Annie if she’d picked them out amidst the Schubert.

‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘They balanced it out. A fairly pleasant disharmony, didn’t you think?’

4 Kingsley And Queensley (#ulink_1ee6e140-6c8f-5d13-9559-848fb6920e59)

My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going 30 mph on a smooth road to a 12th century cathedral.

Henry Adams, 1902

On 22 July 1920 Lucy and Kingsley Porter found their friend Bull Durham waiting for them at the Spanish border. They had commissioned Bull to drive their new Fiat over from Italy, and together the three made their way into France along with Anfossi, the Porter’s chauffeur, and Lucy’s maid Natalina. The Porters had just spent two months in Spain photographing churches, eating too much, dressing in what they considered rags, and enjoying the good, earned weariness that comes from spending active days in fresh air. ‘We sleep in one stretch,’ Lucy wrote, ‘like a baby.’ As she did every night of their trip, she meticulously noted in her journal how much they paid for their hotel room and midday and evening meals, always taking care to add whether or not the wine was included, and how much extra they spent on Natalina, who ate alone.

Compostela had pleased them. Lucy was satisfied to find St James on the altar instead of Jesus: ‘It seems right Christ should take second place here.’ She thought the sculpture fine: ‘The South passageway interests me the most. The devils are exquisite … the nude figure (soul) held by the leg, head forward, is perhaps the loveliest of everything. I feel here how polytheistic the Catholic religion is! … It is a much more rational explanation of the existing universe than monotheism.’

By the time they reached France they were worn out. ‘The Spanish trip has left us in a condition of physical and mental exhaustion,’ wrote Kingsley to Bernard Berenson and his wife in Italy. Still they purposefully ploughed ahead, making their first stop in France at the Romanesque abbey of St Michel de Cuxa, just outside the town of Prades. From here it would take them nearly a month to reach Conques.

Travelling slowly, only laxly following their route, experiencing no punctures nor lengthy respites for camera repair, it would take me two days. (Lucy, I believe, secretly enjoyed the punctures; it provided an opportunity for exercise – she fretted about the effects of overeating – and to walk ahead alone with Kingsley in the ‘glorious air’ of the French countryside.) By contrast I endured only one hindrance en route to the Rouergue from a side-trip to the Pyrenees, at a roundabout coiled between gnarled vineyards just outside Castelnaudary. The police were stopping all northbound cars in a breathalyser sting. I hadn’t tried the local sparkling white, called Blanquette de Limoux, which had been much praised at lunch, but was nervous none the less. The gendarme had to demonstrate how to breathe into the tube, which I then tried to do as he presented it to me. ‘Non, alors!’ he snapped. ‘You take it!’

This I did, blew, and was pronounced sober. Distracted by my ineptitude, he hadn’t taken in my accent, leaving my identity as a foreigner to become apparent upon the presentation of my Massachusetts licence.

‘Voila une Américaine!’ He called his partner to the car and my heart sank. I wondered which French law I had openly flouted. The partner took my licence and addressed me gravely. ‘Have you, madame, yet tasted the cassoulet of the region?’ I shook my head. ‘Ah, well then. You must try it!’ As drivers fumed in an ever-growing line of cars behind me, the policemen first debated, then concurred upon, the best place to experience the wonderfully adaptable white bean stew of southern France, and gave me directions. We parted with a question about Boston baked beans: they are rumoured to be sweet – can this really be so? (Yes.) The gendarmes shook their heads in disbelief.

My nerves, it occurred to me, were a residue of the day’s drive. I had spent hours following the River Aude northward on a crumbling, thirties-era highway through a desolate park in the Pyrénées-Orientales. No cars trailed behind me, nor could I see any ahead. Clinging ferns and mosses and the dense over-storey above brewed the air into a shade and scent much like that of green tea. The bedrock muscled its way into my lane and would have forced me into oncoming traffic, had there been any. Farmhouses were rare, and empty; old resort hotels, advertising geothermal baths, had been long abandoned. I willed the foothills to fall to their knees but they complied only by eroding into individual, towering formations, left behind from another epoch. The geological drama reached a crescendo at the ‘Gorges de Georges’, a cubist collage of giant rocks like the bombed remains of cathedral towers, from which a natural crevice had been expanded to make room for the road.

Here was a very different relationship between humankind and rock – the brutal disagreement between the immovable object of immemorial age and human impatience to proceed in a straight line – and it was a fierce one. The narrow passageway was something nightmarish that Escher might have dreamt up had he been a sculptor: knife-sharp, angular thrusts of rock lunging at the car from every conceivable direction, and so dark I had to put on the lights. After I emerged, the land abruptly relaxed and grew agricultural, hills rolled, and a pretty haze formed from the exhalations of asparagus.

Many hundreds of hours earlier, it seemed, I’d begun the day in Prades, with a visit to the abbey of St Michel de Cuxa. Lucy’s journal hardly recommended it: ‘Once a famous Benedictine monastery, now served by a handful of Cistercian monks. Little left of its past grandeur.’ She added, ‘They talk with interest of … restoring church and cloisters (but out of what?). An old abbot (almost blind) and several dirty monks came and talked with us while we photographed the portal of the abbey.’

What Lucy didn’t say is that the monks had only taken charge a year earlier, in 1919; before that the abbey had been empty since the French Revolution, when the previous order was kicked out and the place sacked to a state of desolation. Today it is again run by Benedictines; in fact, a time traveller from the twelfth century would be more likely to recognize St Michael de Cuxa now, thanks to nearly a century of renovations, than would either of the Porters. Nonetheless, an older continuity than Christianity – the sun in this luxuriant enclave beneath the snow-capped Pic de Canigou, the orchards here, the lilacs, wildflowers and rosemary, the scent of cypress, the quietude broken by cuckoos’ cries, above all an inkling of Mediterranean ease while yet in sight of the great, cold mountains – created a kind of sacred serenity beyond the abbey walls that Lucy and Kingsley had surely experienced. Despite the discontinuity in architectural time, I felt very close to them in this secret place.

In 1920 there had been no crypt to visit; it was only resurrected in 1937. At its heart I found a domed room called the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crib (Christ’s crib, of which the abbey had reputedly owned a shard), supported by a single massive central pillar. At its peak the ceiling just permitted me to stand my full height (5 foot 5). The floor was earthen. Imagine a stone fountain spouting forth a circular jet of stones; imagine a perfect half-sphere of a cave with one magnificent stalactite growing in the centre from ceiling to floor; imagine if Buckminster Fuller had been born in the twelfth century and built his geodesic dome of mushroom-coloured stones mortared with lime.