Jean Luc

By Barry Smith

Ariege, France, 2009

I have never found that hill easy to climb. No matter how I focused my imagination in the pretence that I was a grand tour leader - and soon to be crowned King of the Mountains - some insistent devilish voice inside my head would prevail. At best I would reach for the lowest gear and twiddle the pedals up to the col, gasping for breath as if at extreme altitude. At worst my forward momentum would be so reduced by fatigue that the biophysics of cycling no longer applied. Desperate not to stall, a sequence of swerves preceded the inevitable and I would keel over amidst frantic efforts to remove my feet from the toe clips. 

On this particular day I was climbing in familiar fashion, hunched over the handlebars in ignominious suffering, rasping breath and pounding pulse. My pride survived only because I was alone. Then I became aware of a vehicle grinding up the hill behind me, sounding like it was about to suffer an automotive version of my own breakdown. The engine was only intermittently working in unison with its various parts, the drive train was whining and whirring in imperfect synchronicity and, with every pothole negotiated, the rattling body of the vehicle joined the cacophony. 

I pulled my bike well to the side of the road, and the long-suffering Lada rattled by, its driver crouched low behind the wheel and only just visible behind a star-cracked windscreen. Then it stopped. Smoke and steam drifted from parts of the engine which emitted an unsettled wheezing sound. There was a sharp smell of burning metal and hot oil. A total collapse, I surmised, but the pickup just rolled backwards, steered adeptly by the invisible driver until it teetered against the roadside bank. Evidently the non-existence of a hand brake was a mere detail in a list of malfunctionings. 

A hand reached out through a missing side window and opened the door on its single hinge. The driver jumped out and searched for a rock to put behind a back wheel. Then he stuck his hand out to grip mine vigorously. He seemed to do these things all in one movement. 

     “Eddy Merckx, you know Eddy Merckx? I do. But I’m Jean Luc”.

I didn’t know what to say. He was talking about the best road racer ever, who even in his worst moments bore no resemblance to me hunched over my handlebars. 

     “You from Belgium then?” 

     “That’s right. Everybody knows him there. You want a lift?” 

I looked at the col just a few hundred metres away. I glanced at the Lada which looked, sounded and smelled ready for last rites rather than an extra load. And I looked more closely at the driver. Tall and lightly clad in shorts, he was somewhat stooped, lean and wiry almost to the point of emaciation, but not at all frail for somebody I guessed to be about 40 years old. With a long fine-featured face prematurely grey and weathered, and with long silver hair tied back in a knot, his dark eyebrows hovered over deep-set pearl grey eyes that could capture and mesmerise at first glance. I wondered where - if his death-knell pickup made it - he was heading to. From the col a narrow metalled road leads to a farm where an old lady lived alone. And a dirt road makes its way steeply down before dividing, one branch dead-ending at a couple of empty houses set in abandoned fields. The other branch becomes deeply rutted as it enters dense woodland, and so meanders to a small house in melancholic disrepair surrounded by once majestic barns now in exaggerated states of collapse. 

    “That’s where I live, yes”. 

I thought about the smell of wood smoke that surrounded him, stale wood smoke like opening the door of a long-closed bothy. 

     “You sure you don’t want a lift?” 

I remember now the rusting carcasses of two Ladas under the tumbling roofs of one of the barns. And I wanted desperately to ask him how he could possibly live in the straitened conditions of the ruinous hamlet. But then I looked at his equally ruinous pickup, and so declined his generous offer. Already my curiosity was demanding that I discover more about this man of the woods. 

     “No thank you. Eddy wouldn’t take a ride, would he?” 

He smiled and studied me with those eyes: melancholy rather than sinister, but penetrating straight through to one’s soul so there was no place to hide. He shook my hand, kicked the rock from behind the back wheel, and jumped into the driver’s seat - all in one movement again - and grabbed the steering wheel just as the vehicle took-off backwards. Starting a vehicle in reverse, it is not always easy to control things, and I gripped my handlebars tightly trying to will Jean Luc into making the right moves. 

Standing helplessly at the side of the road, my feet moved between imaginary brake, clutch and accelerator pedals. The Lada lurched backwards, risking descent into a steep open field on one side, making rumbling noises that substituted for the sound of a starter motor. As the engine tried to respond and wheels skidded on gravel, the smell of burning tyre and clutch added extra menace to the proceedings. As speed increased, in reverse, all seemed lost until a belch of black smoke from the rear end initiated some mechanical noises. It seemed that the engine could no longer resist starting up. 

With no little dexterity and some use of the road banking again, the vehicle was wrestled to a halt abruptly and briefly as a whinnying sound from the clutch heralded reluctant forward momentum. Jean Luc smiled and fluttered a wave as he struggled with wayward steering, before settling down to grinding up the road in first gear until reaching the col where the noise of his progress stopped suddenly. I guessed he was freewheeling steeply down the other side placing his trust in faulty brakes and who knows what else. I followed on, peddling up to La Croix determined now to bear my burden of pain more resignedly having witnessed the struggles of Jean Luc. Then I turned and sped back down the mountain. 

I am shouldered with an unfettered curiosity stoked by a heated imagination, and Jean Luc’s eyes had got into my head and led me on. But it was mid-winter before I ventured down the deeply rutted forest track to his broken cottage, my snowshoes click-clacking as I ploughed through deep creaky snow. When I stopped just short of the front door, I felt the silence, intense and cold. Even my dogs, clothed in a crystalline robe of snow they seemed reluctant to shake off, had abandoned their normal inclination to explore hither and thither. Sitting closely side by side, they were unsettled, all senses primed and focused on the poorly hinged front door upon which I now rattled. A dog barked within, but it did not scratch at the door nor did its nose push under the gap beneath. I used a clenched fist to knock harder. The dog whined, but except for me shuffling in my boots, this was the only sound. 

Approaching the cottage I had looked in the snow for signs of Jean Luc. If he had been out and about in the last several days there would have been footprints, but there was nothing to disturb the delicate deep tracks of a few wild animals. I felt his presence, there was the dog and, now that I looked around more closely, the faintest heat shimmer escaped from the broken chimney. But no person stirred within. In the dead silence of snow I said nothing, feeling a kindred sympathy for the unsuccessful efforts of a traveller standing before a “moonlit door” in a Walter de la Mare poem, striving to raise the listeners within. But never the least sound made Jean Luc. 

The cold was seeping into me so that I fumbled with my rucksack to retrieve a packet of coffee and some biscuits. These I hung from the defunct door handle and moved away, stopping only briefly lest a hand at the window pushed back the scrap of curtain. But there was no hand, there were no eyes. 

Moving quickly through the snow, I felt a strong desire to get away, to be on the move, and to shake off an incipient melancholia that had been getting to me like the cold. My dogs broke away from each other, celebrating our escape from the ruinous hut by thrashing about the deep snow in a grand melee. 

Come spring I started to hear the rackety Lada grinding up to La Croix. He spoke some English, but always a conversation became tangled at the very moment we were perhaps close to understanding each other. It seemed that he had travelled from Belgium more than ten years ago and - so he said and re-enacted in lurid detail - beautiful women were on his trail. When they caught up with him, there were scenes of delirious abandonment. 

But any hope that I might discover something uplifting in his reclusive life in the woods was short lived. In his sad broken cottage there was absolutely nothing even remotely romantic in how Jean Luc was now cohabiting with nature. His living room was filthy and spartan in the extreme. It seemed devoid of even bare essentials for subsistence, so old food cans were used for cooking and drinking. The smell was rancid and acrid from old cooking and wood smoke. The fireplace was little more than a rocky platform above which a rickety pipe led up to a corroded hood into and around which the smoke would curl to find its way through the broken chimney pot. The rafters were black and weighed-down by curtains of dust-ladened spider webs. Any heat this fire might produce Jean Luc could appreciate from a wicker chair worn beyond safe use; but it was probably redundant anyway, for he seemed temperamentally unsuited for sitting down. 

The only evidence of any need for comfort I could only find was in the scattering of plastic flagons for cheap red wine that were lying about, and in the cigarettes he rolled that reminded me of the Victory Brand in Orwell’s 1984. I remembered his washing place - the steep, slippery, brambly, muddy steps leading abruptly down to the woody stream where he had placed a piece of mirror and some soap amidst the undergrowth. There were some old plastic bottles to collect drinking water, and I reflected that this man was at least consistent in the realisation of his living arrangements. In our fragmentary conversations it seemed he found little pride in his situation but knew of no way out of it. Asked how he chose to be in the Ariege - his adopted departement and perhaps provider of some economic support - and he shrugged and became fretful. 

     “And, what about the Ariegeoise then, your neighbours, and the rest?”  

     “Robbers, all robbers. See what they’ve done here ... .” 

Well, I could not see. All I saw was decay, and all I sensed were dreams that had started to fade the day he arrived at this place, an etranger, a person dislocated from wherever he had come from. The vehicle that had brought him here, an old Citroen, lay broken and abandoned in the bushes. 

I visited Jean Luc irregularly over the next few years. There was a ritual - he made tea in a tin can pushed into the embers of his cooking fire, then we sat on the ground outside chatting in the time it took for the metal cup to cool. When I left I gave him a pack of coffee and some biscuits that were received gratefully. Rarely, he visited me, always bringing a small chapati tasting strongly of wood smoke. 

We lost touch, and his cottage seemed more abandoned than ever. Somebody had been scraping about in the garden which was overgrown. Fruit trees were in need of picking. A slightly improved replacement Lada blocked the track. I was told that he had inherited money, and that he was running a tiny clothing and craft boutique in town. Word was that his shop was too often closed. Stock remained on the shelf and he was frightening customers with his piercing eyes and erratic sales patter. 

For him to run a boutique of all things seemed most unlikely; but all else was consistent, so I was impatient to call on him. On my approach I could just make out that he was locking up, so I increased my leisurely pace in pursuit only to lose him in a warren of old town back streets. I do not go to town much, my mental map of streets is scrambled, and so subsequent attempts to find him were frustratingly circuitous. 

I started to suspect I had merely dreamed of this boutique. But, telling this tale to my nearest neighbour, she recognised the haunted grey eyes, the long tied-back hair, his bony thinness and the smell of wood smoke. She gave him a lift sometimes when he jumped out into the road waving his arms. He may have been looking smarter, wearing rather than selling stuff from his shop, but he could not hide the haunted look of a vulnerable and damaged soul. 

A few weeks later she told me Jean Luc had admitted himself into the psychiatric department of the local hospital where she works. A courageous thing to do, she reckoned; but he did not stay long. It is easy to disappear in the woods in the Ariege. Weeks too quickly become months, nobody knowing enough or caring enough to search for an eccentric for whom the epithet “missing” seemed appropriate at the best of times. 

Neither Jean Luc nor his Lada were seen or heard on the road, the door of his cottage was unlocked but if he was in residence things looked more chaotic than ever. Again there were marks of what looked like random shallow digging in the garden as if somebody had been looking for a crop of vegetables that surely was not there. 

Then there was a piece in the local newspaper detailing a man matching Jean Luc’s description being found dead in a house that had been occupied by squatters. I believe foul play was not suspected, and the cause of death was not evident save for the body being extremely emaciated. That is all I know about Jean Luc Marrat. Even during our only occasional encounters, I could see how easy it was to dismiss him as an eccentric loner, a bit crazy but probably not much to worry about. 

My interest came out of curiosity, but set in the context of rural decline and abandonment in the Ariege he is not alone. Leave a field untended for a year and acacia seedlings arrive en masse. Before long the stone barns that stored hay and sheltered animals are hidden in the new woodland. There are thousands of farm buildings abandoned, with even their ownership in doubt due to the complex inheritance laws of France. Some of these granges have been discovered and occupied by people earnestly seeking a new way of living. Whole villages buried in the woods, people coming and going, living and dying, and nobody ever knows.

Drifters and marginals is how disenchanted locals see them; lazy, drug-addled ne’er-do-wells who only emerge from the forest to ponce about on market day, and whose sense of social responsibility is limited to rolling up at the right time and place to claim state assistance. Some of these neo-hippies actually seem self-assured in their own way, realising the dream of living a new life. 

But Jean Luc was not like this. He was vulnerable; but like homeless beggars on the street it would be easy to walk on by because here is something beyond our immediate understanding. We are a little uncomfortable, a little fearful perhaps, and so our capacity for sympathy is reduced. And so we are reduced too. It was only my curiosity and my life-long interest in people who choose to live alone in remote places that prevented me from walking on by. 

What I found was a person who was kind, gentle, and generous in quiet ways. He was responsive to small kindnesses. His post box was a mouldering leather satchel hanging on a tree stump where, so the post lady told me, he left her “a sort of love letter”. When I sent him a Christmas card - perhaps his only card that year - he was clearly touched and remembered my little kindness months after the event. If he was downcast it was because, for whatever reasons rational and otherwise, the dream he once nurtured of making a new way of life had long deserted him. He was lost in a world of his own, his spirit broken, forgotten. 

But look about and it is just so easy in our everyday lives to detect him in various guises – “just a marginal”. And it is the memory of his pale searching eyes that serves to remind me, lest I forget, of the tragedy of so much of the human condition, of which he was surely a part.

Barry Smith is a recovering academic, a woodturner and forestry worker, who has kayaked around Cape Horn and made solo first ascents in the Himalayas.  His current preoccupation is with exploring landscapes of abandonment.  His books include The Island in Imagination and Experience - "the defining work of island literature that's long been needed ... rooted in authentic adventures, yet infused with a brave spirit of physical curiosity and scholarly enquiry" JIM PERRIN, published by Saraband, 2017; and Where Sea and Mountain Meet: A Traveller's Tales, published through Independent Publishing Network, 2024.

Both books are available through barryjnsmith@gmail.com