The House of Alone-ness

For being alone is not only the worst we can experience; it is also the inevitable moment of some of our greatest experiences.  In the solitude of our selves we learn something that is otherwise unavailable to us – how to become who we are. – Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life

On the cusp of turning thirty, I cashed in my vacation days and took off for six weeks in Costa Rica, ostensibly to study Spanish.   Canada was in a the middle of a cod spat with Spain and I was out of luck getting a visa to visit my first choice, Salamanca.  I recognized this trip as a trial of sorts, the stirrings of a larger plan to move on.  In the end, the destination wasn’t all that important.

I enrolled in a language school in San José and boarded with a Tico mom and her kids.  I attended class in the morning and in the afternoons I studied, explored with my German friend Heidi, and looked for meaningful ways to pass the time, not particularly successfully.

My mother rang the house one afternoon to grieve the passing of my grandmother, and I shrank into my deepening loneliness, in the right and wrong place simultaneously.  Breaking a cardinal rule, I rang up the boyfriend I had deliberately split with pre-travel.  He came and I discarded my solitude for the ease of familiarity.  It was selfish of me to invite him there, knowing my motives.  But making a passage is rarely tidy business.

I didn’t stay the full six weeks.  I flew home, quit my job and moved into consulting work.   The following spring I sold my house, my truck, and stored my few precious bits in my parents’ basement.  I wrapped up my contract  and bought a one-way ticket to France.

I am told that I picked Arles for the same reasons the Romans had: it was halfway between Spain and Italy, leaving my strategic options open.  I arrived with no plan and hibernated in a small hotel for two days to get my travelling legs underneath me.  I left my bags and went in search of a rental agency.  In my nervously-poor French I explained that I was looking for a house or apartment rental for an indeterminate period of time.  When the agency woman showed me the photo of the stucco house with verdigris shutters and climbing roses two minutes from the centre of town, I knew I had found my place.  I nodded “yes, yes” like I understood what I was signing, made the downpayment and went off to meet my landlord.

I rented the lower half of the charming Provençal house.  The ceilings were high, the rooms spacious and my bedroom opened onto a courtyard garden. The walls were ochre and pink, it was simply furnished, and included a pull-out couch for guests.   I contributed a laptop and a backpack light on clothes but heavy on books.  No television, no telephone (or cellphone) and, of course, it was too early for internet or wireless.  I walked to the corner to use the pay phone when I needed or wanted to call my family and friends.

I was truly alone in my beautiful house.

Two days later I engaged a language tutor.  We met three times a week for lessons at my place and she took me home to meet her artist-husband and young daughter.  I became a regular at the street markets and read Le Monde at the same café every morning, where my handsome waiter served me perfect bowls of café au lait.  Without a car, I walked out into the countryside, through the fields that Van Gogh painted, and took the bus to the seaside at Ste. Marie-de-la-Mer and the salt marshes of La Camargue.  I drank wine everyday – usually in my bathtub with a book – and cultivated an interest in cooking.   I delighted in the highly-ritualized and rather intimate act of marketing, engaging with the vendors and practicing my French.

I called friends from the pay phone and coaxed them to join me.  I hoped they would, but no one did.

God bless the wildly persistent French men who were a constant source of amusement.  They sent flowers to my dinner table as I sat in the square, ran after me out of the movie theatre, stood staring not a foot from my face in the post office line, sprinted beside me as I ran through the cobblestone streets, commented on my legs, and begged me for dates as I minded my own business.   I don’t relate this to brag but to call out an important point I neglected to mention.  In January I had heeded Hamlet’s most excellent advice to Ophelia.   “Get thee to a nunnery,” he commanded, and so I did.  She threw herself in the river for dramatic effect,  but I more sensibly swore off romantic relationships of any kind for a year.  I called my plan “Serial Monogamy-B-Gone.”  It would take some tough love to break an entrenched habit.

I enrolled in Flamenco dance classes with a celebrated teacher.  She called me, derisively I think, “the girl with the boots” because I didn’t have the shoes or the flouncy skirts and I danced in the laced up granny boots I travelled with.  I loved those workshops but I was terrible.  Maybe I hadn’t suffered enough as a human being to really do Flamenco believably, my temporary alone-ness apparently insufficient to curb my sunny ways.  In class I met Corinne and we tooted around the surrounding villages in her Renault, sometimes with her photographer-boyfriend in tow, sometimes not. She gave me cooking lessons, and we ate in my garden and took in late-night concerts in the Roman amphitheatre.  When she returned to Nice I trained along the Côte D’Azur to meet her, toured the gardens and parfumeries of Grasse, and popped over to Italy for dinner.

As the weeks and months moved on, I called my friends and family less often and demurred on the overt suggestions of visits that started showing up in my post.

“Sorry, I’m not going to be around,” I wrote back, as I hopped the train to Switzerland to join Heidi and her family on Lago Maggiore. We headed south, for a multi-day hike between Florence and Sienna, following an obscure German map that gave directions like “after the clearing, turn left at the bent tree and proceed for thirty paces.”  At the end of our trip we bedded down  at the Hotel Almodomus with the Dominican nuns of Santuario Saint Caterina.  I stayed on for a few days after Heidi left, shooting and writing erotic poetry to a man I hoped would meet me in Paris in the fall.  I gave him a date, time and location and said I would wait one hour.  Vows of chastity or otherwise, some kinds of lonely remain close to the surface.

I returned to my little house and savoured the shorter days and the cooler nights that foretold a bittersweet ending.    Arlesiennes in traditional costume filled the streets for the final summer festivals and I awoke at night to music drifting in my patio doors.  I’d slip on my clothes and wander the streets silently, searching for its headwaters.  My time bowed to no one and I could no longer imagine the interruptions of visitors, except the most fleeting kind.

The Feria – the bullfights – in Les Arènes marked the final social event of the season.  Revellers poured into the town and the streets, bars and cafés overflowed.  From my usual morning perch, I watched a bull escape from its handlers and charge confusedly through the crowded square.  I spent that weekend alone, yet surrounded by people, my usual rhythm and patterns also confused by the crowds.  On Monday the streets were empty, littered with the celebration.  Café owners set about tidying up, putting away their outdoor tables and chairs, retracting their awnings, preparing for autumn.

I set about settling my bills, giving away my books, mailing home my trinkets and art pieces, and saying my few goodbyes.  I handed in my keys to the lady at the agency and said my farewells to my lovely house of alone-ness.

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I stood on that spot, on that day, at that time, for one hour as I said I would.  Still, he did not come.

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I floated to London, to Scotland and the Hebrides, over to Turkey and Greece but I never did make it to Spain.  Eventually, when the time felt right, I floated back to Vancouver and took up a winter house-sit on the ocean, alone.

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Four days after my year of solitude ended,  I met my Husband on the train between London and Paris.