Disappearing in Provence
Starting My Month at the Dora Maar House
Hello, it’s time for another installment of FLIGHT, about my year of travel around Europe, following in the footsteps of bold women writers and artists who redefined their lives on their own terms.
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Here is the full list of installments, from the beginning, updated as new ones appear. You can catch up here anytime.
This week I head to Provence to begin my month-long writing residency. It was a big change from the activity and excitement of Paris. It was awfully quiet in that big house on the hill, with lots of time to reflect. I hope you enjoy it.
Provence
“How can a woman keep from disappearing?”
—Allison Funk, “Into the Chambres of Dora Maar”
I would like to disappear. For a while. To be nobody, even to myself.
It’s not an easy thing to do.
To be nobody takes stamina. Because nobody must always be on the move. If you stop somewhere, you become someone. Being nowhere is necessary to being a nobody.
You also must be free of the need to make money. If you have an occupation, you automatically become something—or, if you are successful, somebody.
In order to be nobody, you also have to be utterly alone. Because if you have somebody, anybody in your life, you become somebody too.
For now, I’m as much a nobody as I’ll probably ever be. A blank slate, a white page, all of the old words erased.
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I’m on my third glass of wine. Its smooth acidity goes down easily—too easily. Sinatra is playing. There is a gentle breeze in the poplars overhead. A little blond boy is weaving his way around the tables, his feet crunching in the pebbles that cover the terrace.
I can’t help watching him and saying to the waitress when she passes, “Très mignon.”
“Oui,” she responds, and I’m inordinately proud of my ability to have even this tiniest of conversations in French.
I arrived this afternoon in Menerbes, a medieval hilltop town in Provence, after a three-hour high-speed train ride to Avignon, then a forty-five-minute taxi ride. It was supposed to have taken nearly an hour, but google maps clearly doesn’t know how fast the French drive.
Dusk has descended, blotting out the valley and the hills beyond. The waitress drops off a tiny, battery-powered lamp for my table. The few straggling couples on the terrace have gone inside, leaving me and a couple with the little boy, who runs up to his mother, the hostess, whenever he sees her. She is mostly inside now. Dinner service has begun. And I’m out here drinking more than I should, eating some fried appetizers and trying not to feel so utterly alone.
I’m nobody here.
