Arc-en-Ciel

 

 

            We returned to America last Friday, landing at Newark just before 5:30 and arriving home shortly after darkness had fallen.  To the extent I had thought about it at all, I suppose my intention would have been to pursue a blog topic other than our French idyll.  I did have a few possibilities in hand, but the tenor of our final two days in Salernes, and particularly an allegorical experience on the Thursday following my last posting, has made me change my mind.

             By the very end the wonderful house party had been reduced to Joan, me, and our host Andrew.  The general sense of an impending ending was heightened by the unusual weather on Thursday.  The day was heavy with clouds, and there were occasional faint sprinkles.  The gloom was exacerbated by a  disconcerting experience of the day before—the day, in fact, when I published the previous post.  In order to board an airplane we were required to present evidence of negative results on a very recent Covid test.  Many French pharmacies offer the tests—free for French citizens with a carte vitale (national health insurance card) and twenty-five euros for visitors without one—and we had scheduled ours for Wednesday afternoon.  But there had been a goof-up in the scheduled time (made by me), and when we got to the town square about 4:30 I was told that we had missed our appointment, probably for everything and probably forever.  Nowhere is the bureaucratic spirit more vibrant than in France.  And as a general rule of thumb the less actual power possessed by the bureaucrat, the more rigorously is that power imposed.  But I threw myself upon the mercy of the pharmacological court, who at length allowed that, absolutely exceptionnellement, if we returned in an hour, at a time reserved exclusivement for vaccinations, we could get a Covid test.  This involved another imposition on our host, who had to drive us back and forth again, a short distance but still a drag.  When we showed up, nobody was being vaccinated, though one other woman did get a Covid test, as did we too.  That was the entire commerce of the “clinic hour”.  But since it was so late in the day, it would be impossible for us to get certified results until the next day, the very eve of our departure.   That would be cutting things a bit fine.  We were certain that we were Covid-free, but….

            By the time we got back to the pharmacy on Thursday afternoon, a light rain had begun.  The moment I entered the building the sprinkle transformed to monsoon.   Our host later told us that not in thirty years had he seen such a local cloudburst.  It took me only five minutes to negotiate the printing of our certificates.  I had assumed the findings would be negative, and they were.  But by now I was a prisoner in the Pharmacie du Cour, which was toward the sloping bottom of the town square.  Water at least four inches high was cascading down the street.  In places it was already flooding the sidewalk.  The storm drains, if there were any, were clearly overwhelmed.  I had no hope of exiting without being drenched.  The meteorological enormity was of such a scale as to temper the attitude even of the resident bureaucrat.  He pressed me to stay until the inundation subsided.  His assistant found an envelope that might offer some protection to our precious certificates.  I did eventually make it to my host’s car, the roaring flood halfway up its tires.  I felt a bit like a latter-day Jean Valjean in the Bagne at Toulon.   

  

         Andrew then gingerly drove to the higher ground of the road back to his house.  Driving even a short distance in that downpour was a significant feat, but he effected a safe return.  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the deluge ceased entirely.  We had our necessary travel document, but the blackened sky and my soaked shoes, which would present a challenge in packing my suitcase, indeed the general effect of the sudden gloom of the violent storm altogether,  were hardly auspicious omens for our last hours of holiday.  But then a little miracle cheered us up.  A few rays from the sinking sun pierced the cloud cover, and in the dark, distant view looking down from the verandah, the changing beauty of which we had been admiring all week, there appeared the most extraordinary rainbow I can remember seeing in my long lifetime.  For a few moments I was sure that I could discern all seven of its colors.  I had not too long before been instructed in their sequence by my seven-year-old granddaughter Hazel, who has them memorized: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

            Now the rainbow, as treated in the myth of Noah’s flood, is among the most prominent of biblical “signs”.  I was a little older than Hazel when I realized with a start that the bow part of rainbow alluded to the curved shape of the ancient archer’s weapon, an archer being a warrior armed with a flexible wooden arcus (arc in French).  I thought it pretty cool that the Flood story featured both a k-ark and a c-arc.  A happy philological accident.  The story of Noah’s flood, and its reflex of the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, have a long and rich history in the development of Christian iconography.  In our literature the range runs at least from Dante’s Divine Comedy to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.*

            Friday turned out to be a very long travel day.  It started at 8:30 in the morning, local time, when the car for the airport picked us up.  Only fifteen hours later did we touch down in Newark.  What we had signed up for as a direct flight from Nice to Newark had been altered by the carrier, La Compagnie.  Their pilot first flew to Paris to take on more passengers.  We didn’t have to change planes; but the flight to Orly and the ground time spent there did considerably prolong the trip.  It also added a bit of excitement and mystery.  Before the additional passengers were allowed to board, a squad of very serious policemen, at least five or six, came in and conducted a thorough and aggressive search.  Its object was not clear, but it appeared to be a what rather than a who.  They pretty well ransacked the overhead storage lockers and the interstices of the bed-like Business Class seats.  I cannot really sleep on airplanes, but I can drowse anywhere.  When I do so my mind often fills itself with visual images, as though in a slide show or an art history lecture.  One image in particular kept recurring: a bright rainbow illuminating a French hillside and the dark sky above it.

 

 

*While I was drafting this little essay the sad news of the death of an old friend and colleague, Albert Raboteau, reached me.  Al was a distinguished professor of religious studies and the one-time Dean of the Graduate School here.  Among his other important scholarly work is his remarkable book A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History, which in part deals with the early African-American interpretation of the relevant biblical texts mentioned here.  Requiescat in pacem.