Lourdes

 Lourdes Day 1

 

It doesn’t seem plausible, but it’s true: I’ve never seen a mountain from the ground. I’ve flown over the Alps and the Picos de Europa. I’ve been in the general vicinity of Snowdonia. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Peak District, walking up what are obliged to call large hills. Mountains are different. You read about them “emerging from the haze” and you don’t quite grasp what that means for the scale. Only things at enormous distances are distorted by haze: only things at enormous scale are visible beyond that distortion. That sense of perspective hits the hindbrain first. They’re the biggest things I’ve ever seen. It’s as simple as that. 

I get off the train in Lourdes, nestled between the mountains at the base of the Pyrenees, which are green and covered in trees and occasional strange bald patches, denuded of growth, showing grey rock beneath. A funicular railway crawls up the side of one. Look beyond, through a gap in these foothills, and you see snowy peaks rising even higher, brilliant and white in the sunlight. It’s thrilling. I think I love mountains.

Lourdes, then. Here’s how it goes: in stories of faith, the tacky votive object is a common symbol. A chipped Blessed Mary dangles from the rearview mirror. Plastic rosaries are fingered by rough hands. A novelty candle burns down to the nub. It is a lesson that meaning is granted by people, not derived from objects. Look: the peasant’s humble faith is expressed just as purely by his plastic crucifix as it is by the Vatican’s many riches. Observe the humble, personal God, and the humble, personal faith. Belief is a crucifix drawn in the air. It doesn’t matter if anyone sees it but you. 

Lourdes is absolutely full of tat. It heaves with it. It is a place for not just tourists but faith tourists. It’s Disneyland for Catholics. Low rent, tacky, full of overpriced bars and shops selling not just similar but absolutely identical items. Souvenirs of Lourdes next door to Lourdes Souvenirs. Café Jeanne D’Arc sells Guinness. There’s Americans everywhere, but then that’s been my experience wherever I go. There’s a common saying about rats, but I like rats. I’d love to be ten feet from a rat. Something about the condescension of the American tourist, telling the glazed-over waitress that, are these called frites, is that right? Oh they’re just delightful. The clucking and the photographs and falseness. It’s not fair of me. They’ve done nothing wrong. I’m in Lourdes. Something about the place breeds cynicism. You have to look up at the mountains for a tonic. 

I pass a shop which has a t-shirt bearing the face of the new Pope. He was elected today. Hours ago, in fact. It’s not that I object to the commercialism, and I have no real issue with them ripping off pilgrims (see above: faith is what you make of it). It just makes everything feel low rent and I haven’t quite decided if it’s entertaining or squalid yet. Real writers love this kind of stuff, of course. These strange little cultural microclimates. Why go to a family-run restaurant in a Gascony valley when you could stack yourself into a moulded plastic chair, eat an overpriced crepe, and watch the nuns go by? Or, as I drink a coffee, a deputation of African priests carrying a blue carrier bag full of cans. 

A rickety little tour-train full of tourists passes as they look out of the window at hotels, souvenir shops, shabby little bars. One takes a photograph. I think I’m in it. I wonder if, when they return to Idaho, they’ll go through the photos and see me slumped against the wall, staring back at them, shirt hanging open, sunglasses on, walking stick propped up and face slack. And they’ll think: fuck me, there’s English people everywhere. Can’t move for them. 

I try to lean into it. I’m having a nice time.

My ankles still hurts.

Lourdes Day 2

I am spiritually vulnerable. That’s the word. I would love to believe in something. The world is a horrifying, unjust place, and I sometimes linger on violent retributive fantasies. I have departed on my early-mid-life crisis. I have quit my job and spend my days sharing dormitories with elderly French hikers. Every day I eat another baguette. I am listless and rootless and what little faith I had in the sickly liberal order to maintain even the pretense of humanity is gone. I am a plum target. I am desperate for something to dig my fingers into. Come and get me!

This isn’t enough, obviously. You can’t believe just because you really like the idea of believing. That’s cheating. Belief isn’t there to be instrumentalised towards some general sense of personal wellbeing. Belief just is. I might still buy a crucifix though. Just a little one. Just to feel the shape of it. 

I worry, as I limp around with my stick, that people will think I have come to be healed. The thought feels vaguely embarrassing. I start to wonder whether on some level I injured myself deliberately once I knew I was coming to Lourdes. Everyone I told that I was going to Lourdes to do some mountain climbing and see the Pyrenees saw through it for the bullshit it was. My heart’s compass pointed towards Bernadette of Lourdes. 

Today I do nothing. It feels dishonest to write a travelogue in which I don't just not travel but I scarcely even leave the apartment. The instinct is to chisel out some experience or observation from the long hours but the truth is that boredom begets boredom and recovering from an injury that affects your mobility is tedious. The apartment is a little way from town as well so I am chained to the couple of bars and restaurants which huddle around the station to capture the tired and the lazy. Perhaps the best place to find God is in the endless boredom of a still holiday apartment and an episode of French Columbo. Or in an adequate tagine. 

I don’t bother to try and take apart the sofa bed again. I sleep across bare sofa cushions and I wake up with a stiff neck. 

Lourdes Day 3

The day is thickly fogged. The mountain tops are obscured. Dark green forested banks frame the town and rise out of sight. There could be anything up there. You just wouldn’t know. I walk to the launderette, which is unmanned. I press a button and blue-speckled detergent powder is dispensed into the bottom half of a plastic bottle. I sit on an orange plastic chair in a vest watching my clothes go around. God has abandoned me. God is in the detergent and God is hiding in the walls. 

I walk to the shop to pick up ingredients for dinner. I somehow fail to notice that half of the pepper is rotten until I go to take it out of the bag at the other end and push my finger through slithering vegetal mush. I forget to buy milk so I put a knob of butter in my coffee. I’ve learned to use the coffee machine in the apartment, but there were only two little bags of coffee available, so it has returned once more to being a purposeless grey plastic lump in the corner of the room. 

This is what they call: recuperation. This is what they call: not putting too much stress on my bad ankle. I have come to the place of healing and I am healing by remaining stationary. I watch more French Columbo. I open all the cupboards again just in case more coffee has appeared without me noticing. The fog lifts and is replaced by a hailstorm. The day thrashes at my window, trying to get inside. I wonder if I should let it in. 

The hailstorm passes. I look out of the window at the roof below me, littered with damp cigarette ends. Every so often a chime sounds from the train station over the road. I open the window fully. It drips collected water onto the faux-wood floor. The window is wide and tall, and doesn’t have that awful little cable which is meant to stop you from jumping out of the window and killing yourself. Why would I kill myself? I can fly!

Tomorrow I’m going to take the waters. That’s what I tell myself. Today I am saving my strength. Even the walk to the shop and the launderette was too much, too reckless. Too testing of my fragile Achilles’ integrity. I am playing with fire. God is in the hailstorms and the fog. I have to stay inside. 

I don’t have enough salt for dinner so I use a ton of capers, cornichons and brine. It works, in a roundabout way. I also didn’t buy a whole bottle of olive oil (I refuse to leave it behind or cart it around with me) so dinner was mostly cooked in butter. I don’t know what I’ve invented but it’s surprisingly good. I give some to the Blessed Mary but she can’t get her thin lips around it and it falls with a wet thud onto the sofa-bed. Dark patches appear on my palms and feet. Coffee oozes from open wounds. The window is open again. The evening has cleared and I can see the mountains in the distance. 

The French for “just one more thing” is juste encore une chose.

Lourdes Day 4

French fire alarms are high pitched and a little peevish. I know this because the one in this building went off on three occasions last night between the hours of 3 and 4am. It was raining outside and nobody else seemed to be doing anything. After the third time I looked out my window and judged that I could dangle from the window ledge and drop onto the roof below without breaking my ankle, and from there repeat the trick to reach the ground. Satisfied by this, I put my earplugs in and decided that I’d do my best to wake up if I felt the flames licking at my feet. 

I don’t die. 

I leave the apartment. I take a lift to the top of the Châteaufort and trundle around the museum with my stick, taking my time. A slug has infiltrated the self-cleaning public toilet. It hides near the ceiling from the scourging jets of disinfectant. We eye each other warily; one atheist to another. I drink coffee outside of an Argentinian café and sit by the river with a Leffe, watching swifts skim across the surface, taking insects on the wing. The waiter asks where I’m from. Nottingham, I tell him. “Robin ‘ood!” he responds triumphantly, and mimes firing an arrow. This is at least the fourth time this has happened. The water is the soft pastel colour of a Chalkhill Blue butterfly. 

Lourdes is not a city which is hospitable to wheelchairs. It is steep and lumpy and medieval. This is unfortunate because it is full of them. There is a constant stream of people heading towards the grotto. I see a large group pass, all wearing yellow lanyards identifying them as on a trip sponsored by a cancer trust. We aren’t often exposed to the dying. We keep them hidden away as much as possible. Sometimes we meet them and we feel a guilty resentment towards them for forcing us to reckon with mortality, to make awkward, exhausted conversation. In Lourdes they are everywhere. Lourdes is a town of the dying. 

The Catholic Church has confirmed 70 miraculous healings in total associated with Our Lady of Lourdes. The majority of these are associated with the baths - they have been submerged in the waters entirely. At the base of the basilica there are several lines of taps, attached to stone basins under the rockface. There are queues, mostly caused by the fact that people are filling not the delicate glass vials on sale in the souvenir shops, but colossal plastic multi-litre carboys. When it’s my turn, I drink a little water from cupped hands, splash some on my face, and rub some on my injured ankle. The water is cold. 

The grotto looks as it might ever have done. Moss climbs the walls. Water bleeds from the cliff face, leaking naturally from other tiny springs. It is mostly silent, but for the shuffling of feet, and then mass commences in Italian, amplified from speakers drilled into the cliff. The rock is polished smooth at hand-height from decades of touch. The woman in front of me runs her fingers along the length of it. Candles gutter in the breeze. A plastic screen has been installed in front of the spring itself, and some iron railings maintain a gap into which flowers are thrown, likely bought from a stall I passed on the way in. I hear a man quietly sobbing.  Through the speakers the voice of the priest booms out one of the few phrases I recognise: “Ave Maria”. On the steep slopes above the grotto, goats graze.

I leave feeling something. I’m not sure what. I wonder whether I should go back through everything I’ve written and subtract all the irony. The cancer trust who passed me were Americans. I heard them talking. 

I walk very slowly back to my apartment.

Lourdes Day 5

The mountains look closer this morning.