She never spoke of gathering clouds. Mother didn’t, either, but then she wasn’t one to speak about the weather.
I didn’t understand why until I saw it for myself. Of course, in her childhood home, Mrs. Littington sometimes wouldn’t see rain, or even clouds, for months at a time.
Every evening, the sun set wider and brighter behind trees that ringed the sea from her front yard, around a shoreline that arced like a boomerang back to the mountains she could see when she looked directly in front of her. For weeks, through August and September, and sometimes October, the sun—colored like the earth of the nearby hillsides—filled the waves with a power that burned foam away, leaving the most intense shade of azur—too much for the bluest of eyes, accustomed as they are to the flat colors, interrupted only by splashes of white, of the northern oceans.
She was right. I had to see that to understand why the part of the world where she grew up—even the gray city, Toulon, that she knew, where ships drifted away and disappeared beyond waves: ships heavy with their freight of secrets—is called the Cote d’Azur. The sea, the sky, at night or during the day, do not turn into shades of black or gray. Under the moon, nothing does.
And so even in Toulon, gray and gritty even before the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on it, the passage of days, of lives, happens through intensifying shades of blue and rose turning to orange, and back.
She remembered the day she left. It was close to evening. Blue hues deepened, as if the sea had engulfed the sun but couldn’t put it out. Instead, the sun refracted the depths of the sea through the stars and under bristles of cedar trees.
There was not darkness, no blankets of clouds: only more color, more intense and consuming hues, than even her eyes, which were accustomed to months of sun followed by months of rain, could take. Or take with her, she said.
Still, she never complained about this block, even though she wouldn’t’ve stayed any longer than she had to. Summer heat-- not light-- blinded people here: It led the eye to cracks in faded bricks. So did the clouds: layers of reflections of the shingles and windows of the houses here.
On this block, the clear blue sky—on those rare occasions when we really had one—suspends time, freezes motions—even those of the face—like a moments recollected from dreams. On the other hand, time, at least in every story I’ve heard or read, marches and gathers like the bodies of water that become storm clouds.
That’s how it is; that’s how it was—except in Adam’s stories. Or in Mrs. Littington’s, though she hardly ever told them. I don’t remember when I heard them: I don’t think she would’ve told my mother—or maybe she did, once or twice. But mother wasn’t interested in hearing about any other time or place but the one she was in. She’d’ve never understood what Mrs. Littington might’ve had to say about this place; she had no interest in Mrs. Littington’s Cote d’Azur or prewar Europe, for she’d never been, and never would be, any place but here.
And, through all those years we’ve spoken over the phone, mother never asked where I was: only that I had some place to say and something to eat. The sun from the Mediterranean, the wind down the Rhone—nothing like those things would’ve mattered to her.
