I'm lying on my bed reading.  I get up and go to the window to find out whether it is raining, has been raining for a while, or has just started to rain.  It is the last, which requires action.  I open the door of the cell and walk along the corridor, aware that my shoes have become part of the mental life of people who are trying to concentrate.  Everyone, sitting at their desks or lying on their beds,  will hear the sound of the long bolt sliding back as I open the door to the hen-yard.  It feels like a major event in the quiet afternoon. I step out into the rain which is light, falling with a light sound, and look up through the slanting drops at the washing line. My laundry is not there. I turn back inside, shut the door as quietly as possible, the bolt slides and slams again, and the door of a cell opens.  Claudia's homely shape looms against the light. 'Are you looking for your linen?' she asks. 'Martine has taken it in already.'

Martine is based in the office by the front door. She gives the tours and explains the iconography of the frescoes in the cloister- the life of  Saint Francis in costumes that make me think of scenes from the American revolution. To get  Martine's attention and gain admittance, the visitors ring an electric bell which makes us jump on the days when it rings only once or twice. On busy days we get used to it and to the sound of voices in the cloister, children calling to each other, parents calling to children and the placid undertone of Martine murmuring her commentary.

It is summer, the village is full of visitors, and on the second of August the moon peeps over the little Matterhorn that sits so perfectly in the frame of my window. In an hour or two it is gone again, but a week from now the beam will take all night to move across the room, turning my cell to a silvery sunglassed day.

At dinner I drank too much wine and one of the women who smile at me, cook for me, laugh at my jokes, read my book when they cant sleep and are kinder to me than any woman has been since I was twelve, murmurs huskily of me:  'Il commence a etre desagreable.'

I have pointed to her packet of packet of cigarettes, where there is a number for a helpline for smokers who want to quit.  'Call that number Alexandre,' I said.  'Its not too late.

'I'm so often uncertain how to behave, though nobody here tries to make me feel uncomfortable, I enjoy the feeling of superiority when I watch the French go through the gestural lexicon of the smoker which everywhere else in the world has already become something for nostalgia. People who vote green, walk the mountain passes, cycle to work and, for all I know, drink wheat grass smoothies for breakfast, see no contradiction in puffing through forty cigarettes a day, all the while doing unconscious imitations of Bogart, Bacall and Belmondo. I go upstairs feeling angry with myself.  The air in the cell is thick and hot, too heavy to sleep in, so I think about monks.

Living like that is blasphemy to us, though if anyone has got the time to cultivate spiritual refinement its us isn't it, with our long old ages ahead of us. I stand naked in the cell, letting the coolness of the floor seep into my feet and the feeling of superiority returns – to men who died at forty without ever surrendering their bodies to the imaginative use of others.

We know there is no such thing as self denial – those appetites just go elsewhere. Love of food that borders on perversion would ameliorate the labours of the kitchen and the monastery garden. Lying in a cell dreaming of torturing heretics would be a way to kill the crushing boredom of a life withdrawn from the world, or watching the moonlight on circular medallions where the Virgin Mary  floats like a Botticelli Venus. If the frescoes in every cell were innocuous to the people incarcerated there, why have they been whitewashed over?

Between the medallions are rectangular shapes likes TVs frozen on one eternal image.  But not like TVs because the incarcerated monk did not so much watch them as feel himself watched by them, accompanied, consoled in the long hours and estimated by the unfailing critical eye of the image. For whatever reason they were whited out, I'm glad not to have to look at them, watching me lying on my bed with my headphones on, listening to Nick Cave.

And there is no God up in the sky
And there is no Devil beneath the sea

Who can do the job that you did baby
Of bringing me to my knees.


*****

After lunch people drift upstairs, there is a clatter of latches controlled from outside by a piece of string passed through a hole in the door – a boyish invention that served for hundreds of years.  You cannot lock the doors with these things so a separate key lock has been installed. I never use my lock, even when the cloister is full of visitors and it makes me feel closer to the spirit of the place to frown on those who do, like understanding that it is wrong to want to kill the mice or to be afraid of the bats.

You hear everything:  Nina's sandals slap slapping as she goes back to work on her Russian translation, Ping Kwan clearing his throat with a little growl as he works – when you see him he is always laughing and he talks in the corridor at the top of his voice, totally uninhibited by hush.
Jean-Jacques walks lightly and quickly, snapping his fingers on his way to his office as he thinks about the phone calls and after them the letters and invitations to people who help the place to tick along.  Stephanie walks beside him in bare feet, consulting about the housekeeping in a smoker's whisper so as not to disturb the writers.  Then they burst out laughing, talking about last night at the Pizzeria.

In mid afternoon, when everything is quiet, the wind comes up and rattles the doors in their loose-fitting catches.  A sharp gust slams my cell window, waking me from my sleep, then, one after the other,  the big windows at each end of the corridor close with a crash.   Sometimes a pane of glass cracks when a window slams, and Jean Jacques makes a note that a repair will be needed.


*****

The road below my window has so many bends, the drivers are constantly honking their horns to alert cars coming the other way. Dozing in my cell, I think for a moment I am back in my apartment overlooking a London intersection. Then I remember that this is the Valley of the Bandola, just where it meets the Roya, the last pristine valley in France and, apart from the car horns, one of the quietest.

The granite slab of the  cill is hot from the sun, almost too hot to rest my forearms on it and lean out. Stephanie is at the next window doing the same thing.  She is taking a break from her labours and smoking a quick cigarette of course. I lean back for fear of breaking her reverie. Soon I will go  to the Bain de Semite for a swim. It's a long walk down and back in the heat, but worth it for the cold river and watching the lazy vacationing French at their waterside games.

Among cities, London was my first love. You could say she spread herself – most welcome after twenty years in a town as folded and steep as Victorian skirts. I could walk for hours and never get tired. I thought: am I superhuman now? It was just the end of all that either going-up or coming-down of Wellington, with the wind pushing me back or forward onto my face. Until I left I didn’t even know Wellington was windy. I had never lived outside the wind.

Now it’s Paris, but first Marrakesh, the black and brown-skinned Paris of the South, in pink walls and mouths. Paris in Africa, the desert Paris. I got to know the French through the ice-cream smiling children of their lust.

Big dilapidated cafes with newspapers printed on Soviet-era presses. Long rakish street converging on rond-points, etoiles. Everything is designed: Paris by Haussman, Marrakesh by Lyautey. And the people; you can’t imagine the French colonising anyone ugly. It’s all line and light and nothing to displease the photographer’s eye; Romans and Jews, Berbers, Arabs and massive Congolese mixed and spilled their blood here. Suffering, slavery, prostitution and every sort of uprooting finally turned out the best looking people on earth. In 1912 the French breezed in and threw a frame of boulevards around the lot.

2006: osmosis, the edge has drifted to the centre; Paris is the Marrakesh of the North. Beautiful faces scowl by pale walls. ‘It’s so cold. How can we stay?.’ But they stay for work and make winter warm, insofar as that is possible.

A formerly highly-sexed blonde lady keeps a tagine restaurant in a quiet back street with the husband she brought home thirty years ago. The walls of the dining room are pink and too clean. The old boy serves mint tea to the guys from the gallery and thinks about escaping back to where he was so pleased to escape from. Religion is getting to him at last, tempting him to believe it is still there.


*****

In November, the trees in the monastery garden look a little shameful, obliged to stand  above the golden clothes they have thrown off as if in a fit of impatience with the effortful beauty of summer.  Did they want to run into winter's simplicities with free and naked limbs? Do they regret it, now they are getting cold?

Martine has a small group of visitors today. She shepherds them around the stations of Saint Francis, calling them to attention before each fresco with a soft and slightly condescending 'Alors...'

It is a different Martine we meet in the kitchen at lunchtime where she makes her rapid and wherever possible scurrilous contributions to the talk of village affairs, making the office girls laugh, then rushes to rinse her bowl in the sink. When she scalds her fingers at the tap she yelps, and that yelp along with 'Alors' is her most characteristic sound. After all this time she still forgets how hot the water comes out. Martine lives in the village and comes up each day for work. We who live in the monastery and use its showers, do not forget about the hotness of the hot water.
Rainy day. Clouds enlace the peaks of the upper valley. The big window at the end of the corridor frames a Chinese landscape painted on silk. Maurice, in his lovely Breton clothes, says of the valley:  'Il se donne. Les moines ont choisi bien.'

The summer foliage has fallen from the mountain outside cell number twelve. My private Matterhorn is a slab of bare and brutal rock. That cloud passing below my window has no visible means of support.

I mean, if it was a puff of smoke I would know there was a fire; if it was a geothermal emission I would know there was a vent. Or it might have come from a factory, but there a no factories here, just this small cloud moving along the road as though it has every right to be there when it has no clear origin, no papers of identification.

Where did it come from?  Why didn't it stay with the other clouds, in the sky or clinging to the mountains?  What is it doing BELOW my window?  The strong light shows every raindrop and when it rains heavily, long streams of light fall past my face.

Geoff Cush est un romancier néo-zélandais, auteur notamment de Graine de France (Son of France, traduit par Pierre Forlan, Ed. Actes Sud, 2004)