Some summers, winter strikes again. There, at the end of the alleyway. It is like most things: unattended. The wind, and all the sacred things that come with it.
What I remember about wintertime France was not the cold, nor the rain. It was that impending loneliness scratching at the façades, no matter how hard I tried to escape; that loneliness dripping from the windows, no matter how hard I tried to gather my bones and carry myself towards the ochre sunset.
Winter used to be the season of comfort. I say “used to be” because, I reckon, I always enjoyed crushing the dry leaves beneath my feet, mixing and stirring them into a colourful broken puzzle until a sudden blow of air would take them away from me.
I used to be a poet in wintertime France.
A sunken poet in the muddy woods of some provincial road, trying to escape from myself and everything else.
In the humid Atlantic south of France, between the Basque coast and the high valleys of the Pyrenees, lay the small Béarnese city where I lived.
Many afternoons, I would return to my little studio there. The fragile purple contrasts of the Pyrenees mountain range, marking the French border, showed me the double, sickly colours of the horizon. Beyond the snow was the country where I was born; here, the yellowish reflection of the sunset seemed to have been torn from the mountains and placed inside my eyes.
The railway station melted into winter and gathered the tears of ice-covered branches hanging from the Empire-style roofs. Two French tricolours fluttered above them, superimposed against the sunset.
They were worn.
As worn as the country.
Pau was provincial, sleepy and, to me at least, almost painfully boring. It was not, in fact, a rich city. Today, almost a quarter of its population lives below the poverty line, a striking figure in a region that can otherwise appear prosperous beneath the mountains.
And yet this was Béarn, a region whose landscape had once been transformed by the enormous wealth of the Lacq gas field.
The contradiction stayed with me.
A small city beneath the Pyrenees, apparently comfortable and unremarkable, carrying a history of industrial wealth and yet, at the railway station, people were sleeping because they had nowhere else to go.
I remember finding this difficult to understand.
Perhaps nowhere is not the absence of wealth.
Perhaps nowhere is what happens when wealth, housing and belonging stop belonging to the same place.