I received an invitation from the cellist to spend the weekend in the mountains with his family in Saint-Gervais near Chamonix. It seemed like a very misguided idea to everyone I told but I was confident that he had a good head and even in the case that it should turn catastrophic I would one day make a good story from it.
I caught the train just by a nose and I finished the end of Salomé by Oscar Wilde on the way. I was maximum apprehensive, hard-pressed to follow the words that I read, and my head was turning uncharitably the whole way. I could only guess that the cellist was having as many doubts as I was about how the weekend would end up going.
Saint-Gervais is in a beautiful valley where everywhere looked as it were or it would be well to be painted, We had pains to communicate at first but once we'd arrived at the house I was completely put off my nerves. Bric-à-brac galore, a wonderful log house from the early 1900's with a feast of stories everywhere you looked!
We sightread a bit of music, (they've got a soviet piano which has never in thirty and something years been tuned and because of it's iron-strength construction it has quite incredibly not gone very far off! But it's not a wonder that this maker never caught on because it gives you soap for response).
We visited a charming middle-age village across the valley for some grocery shopping and stopped at a baroque era church. He and his mother took the length of the car ride to decide on what to prepare for dinner. If the French are not eating, they are either talking about what they are going to eat or what they have just come from eating.
The day after we went to Megeve to meet some other musicians and to hear some jazz music. I was very at ease with his friends, and I realized something really neat about speaking in a foreign language. It is easier to find that sensation you get from people you just meet and you find that you could really get to know and who are truly interested in getting to know you. In a basic set of terms, maybe a foreign language makes easier the judging of actions and not of words.
I suffered my way through conversations about trash metal, philosophy, nuclear energy, religious cults, and the latest Coen brothers' films. I spoke the whole weekend in French which means that I spoke very little, or if not was a monster abuser of the language.
Another day we went to another village higher in the mountains and across from Mont Blanc where we stopped at another church. It was a modern church with a Chagall and the most moving stain glass works I have ever seen. Apparently, it would be the weekend of the church.
I arrived back in Annecy and I couldn't find a single place open to buy fruit on a Sunday. I met up with a friend from the institute and I was bent easily to have a scoop of sorbet from the Glacerie des Alpes. The weather was turning awful and the topic of conversation turned from sibling rivalry to how we imagine two people in love as we walked to the opposite face of the lake where I live. The cellist told me about a wedding of a friend he went to recently where they read from Nietzsche and finished by saying "One person does not belong to another." What a beautiful ambience to walk home in the rain with.
