8
O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate,—
What goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate;
For what offense the Queen of Heav’n began
To persecute so brave, so just a man;
Involv’d his anxious life in endless cares,
Expos’d to wants, and hurried into wars!
VIRGIL, The Aeneid, translated by John Dryden
For two hundred years, the Baxters have been reluctant travelers. My ancestors arrived in Australia from Germany, Sweden, and Scotland during the nineteenth century—in some cases not without a struggle—and decided they’d gone far enough. None ever went back. My mother and father left Australia only once in their lives. In their eighties, they visited France to inspect our daughter Louise, the family’s only grandchild. Having established to their satisfaction that such a rarity could exist, they returned home and never left again.
This tendency to put down roots and cling to them makes the experience of my grandfather, Archie Baxter, all the more puzzling. Not only did he spend three years in France between 1916 and 1919. He volunteered to do so.
Even more mysteriously, when he returned to Australia, he refused to rejoin his wife Stella, his daughter, and his son Jack, my father, nor return to his job as a grocery salesman. Instead, he rented a house in inner Sydney and started making and selling what our skimpy family records describe only as “condiments.”
Almost inevitably, this enterprise failed. If there is such a thing as a business gene, the Baxter DNA conspicuously lacks it. Resignedly, Archie went back to his wife and children, and a dead-end job in the grocery trade. But nostalgia for Europe infected him like a disease. The rest of his life, he was tormented, it seems, by a desire to return to France, and in particular to Paris.
He scattered French words and phrases through his conversation, not troubling to explain why or to translate. As a boy, my father memorized these. After Archie died, he continued to use them, though with little comprehension. I learned them too. “Dans la cité des ténèbres,” my father would mumble after three or four beers, “je cherche la verité.”—In the city of darkness, I search for the truth.
What city? What truth? He never said. The words had become a mantra.
Another phrase was even more puzzling.
After he sold his shop, my father built a cabin in the garden behind his home in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. Instead of the traditional names for such retreats, Mon Repos or Emoh Ruo (hint—spell it backwards), he chose a French phrase, or at least his own father’s version of it. Hearing it repeatedly, my dad came to see it as the condensation of his father’s hard-won wisdom, as well as his testament of despair. So significant did he find the words that he had a local carpenter cut out a phonetic approximation of them and hung it over the door of his retreat.
What Archie had seemed to mumble was “San Fairy Ann.”
“But he meant ‘Ca ne fait rien,’” said my French wife, Marie-Dominique, when I told her this story. “In English, you would say, ‘That doesn’t matter,’ or rather ‘It means nothing.’ ”
“Yes. I know that. But why would Archie have found those words so important?”
She shrugged. “Everyone feels that way from time to time. It is le malaise du temps.”
I doubted that anybody in Australia ever heard of le malaise du temps, the unease of our time, let alone suffered from it. If they did, they probably thought it was the flu. The French believe everything can be explained with reference to what obtains in France. So deeply ingrained is their love of the country, its culture and its language, usually lumped together as la patrimoine—heritage—that they don’t understand how alien this can appear to foreigners, particularly to those who come from less sophisticated societies.
Even after a lifetime’s exposure to French culture, I’d found relocating there a troubling and sometimes painful experience. How much harder for the American, British, Canadian, and Australian recruits, mostly uneducated, uncultured and naïve, who flooded into Paris between 1914 and 1918. Few people could have felt more lost, more in need of a friendly word, a loving hand. For them, Paris was literally “a city of darkness,” where truth was not easily found.