My French Village

Criselda Yabes

Les Ardennes is hidden in the northeast region of France. The French don't give it much of a
thought, unlike the Riviera in the south, the countryside of Normandy in the north, or the waves of the
Atlantic against Brittany. If by any chance they've come across it, they'd say it's at the end of the world
or describe it as "the finger stuck in the ass" of Belgium with which it shares the frontier.
For three consecutive summers, I stayed in a small village referred to as part of the region's la
valleé. Even that has an ominous ring to it; that being in a valley depicts the imagined claustrophobia of
a people, its small-mindedness, its fear of strangers, and that l, being an Asian, from a country many had
probably never heard of, was an oddity.
My village, Haybes, faces a wall of a thick green forest that people find oppressive as if it keeps
them imprisoned. I should have been surprised but wasn't when I discovered that a Filipina has been
living here among 2,000 souls, married to a retired French man, and making herself as inconspicuous as
possible.
Anna Liza rang me up one day when she’d heard of me while at an errand at the pharmacy
situated by the river and across the steel bridge as one enters the village. That was normal: the
pharmacist is my ex-husband who had had the urge to return to his place of childhood, this damn valley,
as he would sometimes say out of frustration.
There's not much to be done in Haybes; it doesn't even have a decent café. The restaurants
would be far from seeing their names in the Michelin guide. The pizzeria run by an Italian has ranked
lower than its counterparts in the next town about ten kilometers away. The bakery has had its ups and
down with the clientele that finds the baguette a tad below its taste.
What this village has—the entire valley for that matter—is the one thing
I could not escape from nature. And so I invited Anna Liza, my fellow Pinay, for a stroll in the
woods just behind my house. It was where I'd go for walks in the late afternoons, and it became like a
park for me, choosing any of the trails that wove through other villages, a silent meander among pines
and oaks and other trees not seen in my own country.
Having been here for more than 20 years, raising a daughter, tending to a household in what
resembled a subdivision, the forest was a strange apparition for Anna Liza. She was afraid of snakes. She
feared getting raped (although there had been no such incidents in our part of the woods). I showed her
there was nothing dark to it, making her listen to the soothing run of the stream, pointing out to her the
infrequent marks of caves from which stone slates known as the ardoise were gathered in the old days.
The ardoise had been the valley's industry, along with other massive manufacturing and
metallurgical factories that had made this region wealthy, enticing migrants from Italy and Spain
through the first half of the 20th century. But it had been more of a relic until the village historian made
a rather impressive movie about what took place in Haybes during the First World War.
That was one of the rare occasions when residents came out of their dwellings for a public
gathering. At the very least, they were proud of what the community had done one hundred years ago,
trying to defend the village from the German soldiers. There had been a massacre. The church survived
razing by the enemy, the only structure in which Anna Liza was hoping to find solace as she would have
done back home, but it has been locked to keep away vandals and is opened only for weddings and
baptisms.
She arrived in Haybes in the early 1990s when prosperity was already waning, the rich
protecting themselves in their enclave while the growing unemployed, the immigrants, the poor Arabs
put up in social housing were pushed to the backside of the village. Anna Liza seized me with panic when
we ran into Muslim teenagers playing by the creek.
 In my house made of the ardoise, thin purple slates fitted to the walls; I would wait for the sun
to shine. The valley’s worst reputation is for its rain, consistently wetting the forest and filling up the
river.
The mist covers the village like a phantom that comes to visit from time to time. At the sight hint
of the bright rays, I’d be off on my bicycle, trundling down the hill until I reached the level ground of the
track along the River Meuse.
That was where I chanced upon Anna Liza a few days after our forest hike; she was walking to
the pharmacy to buy some creams on a doctor's prescription. Her legs had swollen from a rash after
we'd sat on a bench in the arboretum. I felt guilty and made up for it by inviting her for a bike ride along
the Meuse as autumn was fast approaching. She came for the sake of exercise when the weather called
for it.
But the river for her was useless, " Walang silbi," she said because the sight of the water made
her pine for the seas back home thousands of miles away. I came to Les Ardennes for this river looping
around villages, sending out the ducks, geese, swans to the banks, displaying the hues of the verdant
greens. I love this river. It made me daydream, it made me go forward, and it gave me a certain amount
of strength.
The biking track from one end to another stretches to about 90 kilometers, starting from the city
of Charleville-Mezieres—home of the rebel poet Arthur Rimbaud of the late 1800s—to the frontier town
of Givet that Belgians flock to for the restaurants by the quai, the shops and supermarkets and the odd
McDonald's by the fields. Givet is the nearest thing to civilization from our village.
We would go there for the movies, and for the patisserie that sells the Paris Brest, I'd boast to
everyone as the best tasting one in the whole of France—and I am, of course, exaggerating. Luckily for
us, a new salon de thé opened close by this summer, in the town where my ex-husband grew up, his
family home already sold when his parents retired to the Riviera. It is right across the river, and I could
bike to it if I wanted to.
It's our saving grace in our corner of the valley if you ask me. The pastries are good enough to
boost us out of our afternoon gloom. We take home baguettes for our meals for the days ahead and the
croissants saved for our Sunday breakfast treat. That's how little it would take to make me happy being
in Les Ardennes.
I am tempted to call my village simple. My days followed the weather, mostly to be able to
schedule hanging out the laundry by the terrace of the garden, the clothesline tied to a rowan tree that
Anna Liza made me swear never to cut because she said it was lucky. When it gets gray, other woman
friends come by for tea, and we do an exchange of homemade fruit jams, particularly the summer
blackberries picked from the shrubs along the river.
One Sunday morning, after buying fruits and vegetables from the friendly Turk who unloads his
produce at the plaza rain or shine, I saw a striking, gray-haired woman getting off her bike by the river. I
watched her remove her socks and then her shoes. She balanced herself on a rock by the banks, found
her place to sit, and dipped her feet in the river. That was one of the small things that made me happy
about Les Ardennes, and I thought that I might do the same if or when I return to my French village.