The First Caravan

A Love in Three Caravans, 2/4

At the end of my month wwoofing in the garden, Marie and Bernard unexpectedly offered me a job as a chef in the restaurant. I accepted, throwing the rest of my plans to the wind. I didn’t have a tent or a van or anything to live in, so they negotiated with a friend who keeps a caravan on site to kindly allow me to stay in it. This person had tragically paid a thousand euros for it, which I would describe as highway robbery were it not for the fact that this caravan can never be moved let alone make the acquaintance of a highway without rapid disassembly into its thousand pieces.

After living in the pantry attic of the restaurant, I was thrilled to be given the use of the caravan (I had a door and walls! There were no bags of lentils and sugar nearby!) but it took some work to make it habitable. No one had slept in it for a year or so. It had been used as a makeshift office, but not by anyone who cared to clean it. I evicted a large community of spiders, flies, and beetles, vacuuming, brushing, wiping, and scrubbing every inch of the inside. A vent in the roof was condemned and leaked, so Erwan, the general handyman for the site, balanced some sheets of corrugated metal on the top. The windows were almost all broken or cracked, including one whose inside filled with water and lime-green algae when it rained, looking horribly like it might one day burst inwards, all over the spot where my bed was meant to go.

Marie and I were using greenhouse liner to patch the windows up when suddenly the brothers were there and confusingly curious about the caravan. Olivier was especially eager to find out what I was doing. I was taking a job as a cook? I was going to live in this caravan? Did I need help? The platform for the mattress looked uneven and uncomfortable; would I like a board to place beneath it? He had one at home; should he go now and get it? I was sweaty and covered in cobwebs and cleaning products and it never crossed my mind that he was interested in me. But he held a strip of greenhouse liner to the window so that I could put the tape on straight, and suddenly his arms were around me. “UH OH!” screamed all the pores of my skin in unison. I was so busy trying not to show that I was flustered that I didn't even wonder if he also felt a thrill.

He left. Then he came back. He had some tape he thought would hold up better on my windows. He could drive me to the post office to retrieve my misdelivered parcel, which contained a mosquito net for my new caravan. “No, thank you, I’m sure they’ll try again tomorrow!” I said, politely, the appropriate response to a man you don’t know asking if you’ll get into a car with him. Was I sure? I was going to be devoured by mosquitoes! The post office would be open for another half an hour and it was truly no trouble at all. I considered that everyone here knew him, that this was his community—this reasoning had exposed me to predators in the past, but I didn’t want to live like a victim. He seemed so undemanding and authentic. On the drive, he chatted engagingly about a book he had read recently on North Korea and the time he went to Venezuela, asking interesting questions about my book and personal history. He kept glancingly touching my arm, and I was on the verge of telling him to stop when I realized that I didn't feel invaded, but included, happy, and alive. On the way back, he came up with an incoherent reason why he needed to stop at his house before dropping me off. I could have walked back to the garden, but I was curious to see inside. His home, beautifully remodeled by the brothers during lockdown, had hundreds of books and vinyl records and old leather armchairs (wonderful) and comic book prints on the walls and hideous old taxidermy (ugh). The garden, which he planted and tended alone, was charming and leafy and the perfect amount of overgrown and ramshackle. A squinting cat prowled by, preoccupied with wisdom too irrelevant to share.

A day or two later he showed up at the restaurant again and asked if he could buy me a glass of wine. “No, thank you!” I said reflexively, and he smiled, not taking it personally. I shook myself—why had I said no?—“Actually… yes!” I was rounding the big central table to sit across from him when I finally let my guard down, allowing myself to look him shyly in the eyes with the sweetness and flirtation I was feeling. He met my gaze curiously, calmly, visibly wondering what it meant, which was too much—I closed my expression and looked away. Annoyed by my cowardice, I swallowed and met his eyes again, deliberately this time. A little light came alive in his face, and he sat up in his seat as I sat down in mine. This excruciating process took perhaps three seconds. Then, there it was—the vibe—and now we were face to face, conscious participants in a sparkly energy we were going to explore together.

I asked if he knew of any local swimming spots that I could get to quickly on a bike. He didn’t, but announced that he was on holiday that summer starting the following week, and would visit one of his favorite rivers on Monday. He brought this up a few times before I bit and said that if there happened to be spare room in the car (thinking he was going with a group of friends) then I was also off that day, and would love to come along. We did not exchange numbers or know each other’s full names, so I thought he might forget. I still thought he was mainly being friendly. I knew that he found me fascinating and attractive (duh), but who doesn’t feel that way about new friends? He was so funny and respectful and generous, but I still felt intimidated by his confidence, his rootedness in the home of his ancestors, so remote from my experience and way of being in the world. I later heard that he spent that weekend at a wedding telling all his friends that he had met me. He also insists that he would have been happy just to make a friend, and I believe him because I would have, too.

He didn’t forget, and when he arrived I discovered that we were alone. Was this a date? I spent the whole day wondering until the end. He took me to a hilltop village that hosts a graffiti festival, where Renaissance engravings creep out of walls alongside murals in bright colors. He took me for a shady picnic on a river, the Gartempe, and then to a town on another river, Angles-sur-l’Anglin, where we swam, splashing each other and laughing. The Anglin was deep and unhurried, its baptismal coolness overshadowed by creamy limestone cliffs dappled with wild gardens of herbs and topped by the ruins of a twelfth-century castle, radiating late-June sun against an iris sky. If I could bottle the primordial scent of that river and wear it as perfume, I would. He kept finding more things to show me, extending the adventure as we sped past luminous fields of corn, sunflowers, and wheat, telling stupid stories and listening to Stupeflip. By the end of the day, we were in Chinon, the miniature city where Rabelais was born, and where more of Touraine’s tuffeau cliffs create a long, half-natural, half-human-sculpted gallery that overlooks the old Renaissance city and its river, the Vienne. We hiked up to the Saint Radegonde Chapel, a troglodytic church whose facade emerges from caves buried deep within the cliff. We sat on the bench under the tree before it and watched the watercolors of the sunset bleeding into one another, then stood and walked together to the view. Very slowly, so carefully, he put his arms around me on the rampart and kissed me. From that moment, we were together. A week later, we were in love.

That first caravan became a little paradise and love nest—cloud-soft, peaceful, and cool. I adored it. It had a little yellow plastic bathroom whose plumbing didn’t work, but which made me feel like I was in a Barbie playhouse when applying sunscreen in its mirror. Marie lent me floral bed linens and jewel-toned throw pillows that, in combination with the mosquito net and the greenery from the wood outside the window, made it feel like the fairy bower I imagined living in when I was ten. In between the lunch and dinner services, in the heavy heat of early afternoon, I would nap there, dreaming deeply, and Olivier would come to wake me up with blissful, drugging kisses before driving us both to the river to swim. Yet in the end, I can’t have slept there more than ten or fifteen nights as almost instantly I inadvertently moved in with him. At the end of each long summer evening, at twilight, I hung up my apron and put on my headphones for the walk to his house. Bobby Womack sang “Somebody Special” to me as I strolled past horses cooling gratefully in cicada-scattered fields of long grass, whose flower-headed spikelets stroked the sky to tell the stars that it was time to show themselves at last.