One lundi I'm sitting on a curb in the autoroute service area, waiting for Paul to arrive. The problem is, I have no idea what he looks like. There were a few photos of him and his home, Noa Noa, on the BénéBio website: one of him standing in front of the house, another posing triumphantly at the summit of a mountain. The image quality was poor though; when I tried to enlarge them, his features blurred into pixels. I check the time on my phone. It's been over an hour since I got off the bus from Paris, half an hour past the time that Paul and I agreed he would pick me up. I scroll back through our messages. He'd always taken one or two days to get back to me, and when he did so it was in fractured English, with an almost giddy use of punctuation. We are excited to you welcome my home, Noa Noa!! I'd told him it was fine if we communicated in French, and mentally shelved any concern about his late responses; anyone who runs a sustainable farm should not have to be glued to their emails. The heat rising from the asphalt prickles my thighs. I stretch my legs out into the road, drawing them back every now and then as a car speeds past from the drive-through. The drivers and passengers stare straight ahead, clutching their burgers in silence. Maybe it's just the smell of the food, wrapped in papers damp with grease, but every time a car goes past my stomach lurches. I drag my scuffed, one-wheeled suitcase to McDonald's, the service area's beating heart. The shift in light in the shaded interior feels vaguely spiritual, as if I'm approaching something sacred. I'm briefly plunged back into the moment of entering the archives in Paris each morning, the swift transition from white sun to cool, muted shade, as the unsmiling attendant buzzed me in. Back outside with a lukewarm Diet Coke, I watch the cars move in and out of the berths, their slow dance at the drive-through. It's almost elegant, rhythmic, each member belonging to some choreography larger than itself. I think of courtly dances, their participants finely dressed and affectedly anonymous with jeweled and feathered masks, threatening a descent into debauchery at any moment. Flirtations whispered between topiaries, incests muffled by the maze's high hedges. I remember A.B. telling me about his first intensive research project after graduating. He was assisting an Irish historian who specialized in Insular manuscripts, under whose supervision he'd spend upward of eight hours a day hunched over miniature pages with a magnifying glass in hand. When he finally emerged from the archives each evening, he found the manuscript seared across his vision; everything was snared in the interlacing knotwork of its pages. I look back at the cars, wondering if something similar is happening to me. No courtly dances, no masks, no topiaries. Just cars, I tell myself. With my attention on the autoroute in the distance, I fail to hear the heavy, metal panting of the rusting station wagon before it pulls up next to me. The car and its driver hit me all at once: I find myself caught in the teeth of a wide, full jaw filling the open window and bouncing the sun's light back to me. It's a mouth too large for the man's face, pushing out the flesh of his deeply tanned cheeks. My eyes are still in his teeth when he addresses me. "Frances? Frances Hawthorne?" Despite the width of his mouth, he is unsmiling. His voice is deep, and he pronounces my name in a thick accent that turns the last syllable into something like "torn." "Yes . . . Paul?" He looks me up and down, brushing dark curls aside as he wipes his brow. He nods and steps out of the car. I realize I'm still sitting on the pavement as he stands over me, and I fall out of his teeth and into his shadow. Lifting my suitcase into the trunk provokes a laugh from Paul, who addresses me in French. "How long are you planning on staying?" I shrug and smile. We both know exactly how long I have signed up for: a week of light agricultural labor, in exchange for bed and board. After that, I will travel on to work elsewhere. "I hate having to come to places like this," he says, glowering at the McDonald's. "Mmm," I say, echoing his tone as I get into the car. "Me, too." A cool breeze filters through the open window. I try to relax into my seat and sneak a glimpse at Paul: he appears louche and at ease, his skin dark and thick with hairs, well worn by sun and activity. I think of the texture of some hardy and durable piece of equipment, a burlap knapsack, perhaps. The car is not exactly dirty, but it is cluttered with use: there is a layer of soil on the floor and surfaces, banana skins and apple cores on the dashboard. One of the cores is not yet brown, maybe just put down by Paul before meeting me. As if able to follow my train of thought, he reaches out and grabs it, putting it in his mouth, core, stalk, pips, and all. He looks over at me as tiny flecks of saliva and apple spray into the air. "There is too much waste in the world," he says. "I eat everything." We begin to speak, keeping the conversation light, the talk small. Paul speaks with an urgency that seems faintly aggressive; it takes me a couple of minutes of swimming upstream against his diction before I relax into its current. I've always found listening easier than speaking. When A.B. and I were with his colleagues in Paris, he would talk to them and I would listen, comprehending here and there. He was often told he had a "firm grasp" on the language, and always took this as a compliment. It made me think about the phrasing. Why "firm"? Why did understanding have to come with so much grasping and force? I tell Paul I'm relieved he turned up, happy I wasn't waiting at the wrong service area. It comes out a little more effusively than I'd intended, but he doesn't seem to notice. He half apologizes for his lateness before doubling back on himself with an excuse: he had errands to do on the way, something about a jazz festival. "And you've come from Paris?" he asks. "Yes." "On your holidays?" "No." I pause, wondering how much to say. "I was working. In the archives. As a research assistant." "Oh. So you're an academic?" he says knowingly. "No--I've only just finished my degree. But my supervisor has this research project, and he asked me to--" "In what subject?" he cuts across me. "Medieval history." "Ah." He smiles as if some realization has dawned. "What?" "I studied anthropology. It's my job to try to figure people out." I laugh, feeling scrutinized and unsure how to respond. I shift in my seat. The seat belt is too tight and begins to rub the skin on my shoulder. I notice Paul is not wearing his. "So," he goes on. "You're English, a medieval historian, you were a research assistant in Paris, and then--you decided to come and work on an organic farm." I shrug. It occurs to me how much his description sounds like an obituary. "And what was it, out of all the hundreds of farms on BénéBio, that made you choose mine?" "I . . ." "Is it because of the handsome host in the photos?" He grins, eyes glinting in the sun. I blink. He is still waiting for a reply. Why did I choose him? It was A.B. who'd sent me a link to the website; I think he'd refused to see me again by that point. I remember making several trips to our temporary office, but he'd had the locks changed. He'd sent me the link to BénéBio's website in a short, terse email, saying that a friend of his who was recovering from a breakdown had done the program last summer and had found herding goats in the Cévennes a "restorative experience." As for Noa Noa, I remember clicking on it at random and scrolling through the photos Paul had uploaded: the winding, lush garden; the tall, off-white house with cornflower-blue shutters and climbing vines; the open veranda with its long wooden table for making preserves and drying herbs; vistas of the surrounding Pyrenean valleys; and finally a view of a mountain from a window, taken at dawn in an almost white light. Its peak appeared to float above a valley of lilac mist. Once I'd seen the photos, I'd closed the other tabs of "maybe" locations one by one, until Noa Noa was the only one left. "It was the mountain," I tell him. "Though I've forgotten its name. Mount . . ." "Tagire." He finishes my sentence with a nod. "Mount Tagire." Paul tells me it is about an hour and a half's drive to his village, Lazeaux. He has been living there for a few years, although he grew up, he says, in the suburbs outside Paris. "Not the rough ones," he adds. "The sleepy white ones where nothing happens and people vent their racism online." He moved a lot in his twenties and thirties, traveling around islands in the South Pacific, working temporary jobs in France in between to save up money. Before moving to the Pyrénées, he was a mature student in Montpellier. He tells me he fell backward into anthropology, spending time with island tribes during his travels before going on to study them formally. Paul the anthropologist. I imagine his gangly frame in a pale linen suit, hunched over field notes in a hut, wiping tropical sweat from his brow. "I am a photographer, too," he says. "I will show you my images when we get to my home." "I saw some pictures of the mountain on the website. It looks beautiful." Paul snorts faintly and waves his hand. "They were just quick shots," he says dismissively. "My real practice is travel photography. I've been all over--Tahiti, Bora Bora, Tupai . . ." "And do you still travel a lot?" Paul looks out of the window. "It was time to settle down," he says, tilting his side-view mirror. "I am forty-four; I'd been traveling too long." He smiles boyishly. We filter off to narrower roads, leaving the traffic behind us. The route takes us higher into the hills, where the air becomes thinner, the birdsong louder, and the green haze beyond the windows blindingly vibrant. The road thins down to a single lane. Each time we pull over to let an oncoming car pass, Paul grins at the people in it, his smile unfaltering. As we go deeper into the mountains and meet fewer cars, I have the feeling that we are peeling away the outer layers of things I know and can put a name to; the familiarity of the parking lot feels distant. We pass a turnoff leading to a nearby cathedral, Saint Pascal. Famous--among medievalists, anyway--for its hybridity of architectural eras, a fusion of Romanesque and Gothic styles. Maybe that was one of the reasons I chose Noa Noa; when I looked up the whereabouts of Paul's home, I'd noticed its proximity to Saint Pascal and hoped I'd be able to visit. I crane my neck to follow the road, but the turn is obscured by trees. "Have you been?" I ask, nodding at the turn. "To Saint Pascal? Briefly, when I first moved here. But it was crawling with tourists. Plus I'm not religious. Though I would call myself spiritual," he adds. I look over, expecting to see a sarcastic expression on his face. Instead he looks gravely serious. "I meditate," he goes on. "I believe there are ways to encourage the body to heal itself, ways the West has largely forgotten--" I sneeze, interrupting him. He looks faintly annoyed. "Sorry." I sniff. "Go on." He turns back to face the road. "I learned a lot from my travels. I had a lot of troubles as a young man. When I was growing up, I felt very different from everyone around me. I never felt like I belonged anywhere or fitted in . . ." He trails off. I realize I am nodding, though I'm not sure exactly what he means. "But the first time I visited Tahiti," he says, "everything changed for me. It was like I was cut loose from everything, all this Western conditioning." He takes a deep breath in. "So, I went back as often as I could. And then, when they felt I was ready, I was initiated." "They?" "The Areoi. Descendants of a once great and secret tribe. Their race was said to have been founded when the sun god mated with Vairaumati, the most beautiful of all mortal women. They don't usually initiate outsiders, of course, but they made an exception for me; they could see the respect I had for their ways. That's how I got my name." "What--Paul?" "No! Noa Noa. It's one of the many faces of the god Oro. It's the name for his mad face. Mad, and . . . a little gullible." "Good combination." "Yes," he says, laughing. "I was out trekking with two native men. There was an inland gorge I wanted to visit, and we arrived after a few days' walking only to find the pass was half collapsed. I insisted we try, but they said I was noa to want to take the path and noa to believe I would be able to. So they camped there and waited for me, and when I came back later the next day, they said it was a miracle I had made it, but that I was completely noa noa. That's how I got the name." "I see." "So, when I finally decided to settle down and found this place in Lazeaux, there was only one name I could give it." I adjust the seat belt from where it's cutting into my shoulder. "But still," Paul says, "I wouldn't say I am religious." Soon we pull up outside a tall metal gate. There is a distant sound of a lawn being mowed. Behind the gate, a driveway runs down past a shabby, almond-colored house, ending in a garden that curves out of sight. The driveway is littered with soccer balls and lone flip-flops that appear to have strayed from the brightly colored mountain of shoes by the back door. Our arrival prompts two yellow dogs to bound up to us, barking through the gate. I squint at the modern house and feel confused--it looks nothing like what I can remember of Noa Noa. Excerpted from Paul: A Novel by Daisy Lafarge All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
