Titi

The blazing mid-summer afternoon sun hits the massive stone walls of what was once the richest house in the village but dies with a whimper, killed by rooms of soot that soak up light and reflect nothing. It could be winter inside, in the dark, with the old wood stove throbbing out heat. It could be Europe a century ago.

And in this room sits a ghost of a man: shaky on his feet, missing his glasses that cut into him when he hit the cold stone floor a few weeks ago, back from his dialysis that just about keeps him alive, and still, for some reason, known as Titi, a name he probably got as a baby.

He is one of the last four residents of a village that had 112 people when he was born in 1944. The rest have left, and those who didn’t leave have died. There are no births in this village.

Titi’s house, once the richest in the village, is now its poorest. All that remains of its past glory are its stones: massive slabs cut at sharp angles that sets it apart from the other buildings in the village. But stone is the only thing left of the house, so it is only a shell, hollowed out inside. Stone is the only thing that could have survived. Stone and the hollowed out remains of Titi.

There is only one usable room left, the dining room, in which the last remaining possessions have been accumulated. Soot covers the rest of the empty space. Titi has a single table with a couple of chairs on one side and a thin bench on the other. An old fridge, an old TV, an old wood stove towards the middle of the room, its metal chimney snaking its way towards the ceiling. A massive old sink. A large bottle of cheap wine in the fridge, a chipped plate of leftover tomato and onion salad on the next shelf. Old baguettes lie strewn across rooms, cut haphazardly with old, thin knives. A couple of packages of La Baleine salt, with a big white baleen whale on deep blue. Wood spilling out onto the floor from an adjoining room. A handful of flies lying dead on a little saucer filled with yellow granules of something that attracts and then poisons them, or what was once something. One of them is half-alive and can’t get out, but it keeps trying, endlessly, in circles.

Titi sits where he always does, on the chair next to the fridge, so he can see out through the open doorway, past his 30-year-old tractor he calls Marguis, after its last owner, across to his crumbling barn filled with nothing, over the one road through Courdemanges that no one is on.

The little radio is plugged in above the fridge, and Supertramp crackles on Nostalgie.

Whispers trail Titi through the mostly abandoned villages here, stories of varying authenticity told over glasses of bad wine or rough coffee with a handful of cubes of sugar. Titi’s grandparents were so rich they paid for the house in gold. His mother looked like a witch and was only missing a broom. His mother lost her mind. His father was good for nothing. Titi knew how to party. Titi got cheated…

But whatever the intricacies, the gist of the stories is true: one of the richest families in the village has seen its fortunes nosedive, reduced to the misery of a handful of now old siblings. And among those siblings, the most startling: Titi, an almost hermit-like figure at first glance, left with the remains of a house without even a toilet, his home hanging by the end of a lone electric wire, his body drained of its blood three times a week through one massive needle, replaced with new blood through another, leaving his veins bulging and bruised. His hospital sessions are, he says with a mix of humor and experience (he worked in an abattoir), like the massacre of a pig. And then, over endless hours in the half light of his room, Titi will work on his scabs till his arms bleed again.

His family in the village can be traced back to Titi’s great grandfather, so rich in land he was apparently the village banker, who, in the words of the old monsieur, “knew how to get money back. He’d give a finger and take a hand.” And, always attached to such stories, the other end: “But Titi never knew how…”

Titi speaks with a slow, forceful drawl, his hand shaky as he reaches across the table with a handkerchief, clearing the plastic tablecloth of breadcrumbs. “Saloperie!”

He was one of five children, but a brother got sick as a baby and died, and then there were four, and they all lived on the first floor, with the parents below. You can still see where they slept, single beds for husband and wife at opposite ends of the room, behind a makeshift clothesline Titi must have strung up years ago, weighed down with his signature clothes: blue and white checkered shirts and blue-gray pants.

“My best friend was Jean-Pierre, at the end of the village, and we were always up to stupid things. We had to help out the priest and fill in wine at the church, but we drank it instead and replaced it with water. My mother was furious, of course.”

His mother was tough and hard, riding horses and working in the fields, apparently knitting while on horseback with the stirrups around her neck. “Mother was always cooking but lost her mind and then I had to take care of her and do the cooking. My father was quiet and sat in his chair, while mother made stupidities. She was 92 when she died.”

But there are other stories about his parents too, where people talk of his mother as the real manager of the farm and household, and the family slowly coming apart as her mind unravelled, as so many other minds had here.

And the story of his father, that Titi didn’t mention: that he went to Africa on obligatory military service, and stayed there for seven years. And he got bitten by a tsetse fly, and had a crisis long after he returned. The family spent a lot of money on his treatment, but it was too late anyway. For in those days, as the old monsieur reminds me, “Doctors weren’t good — they treated animals better. Besides, they made their money from cows, not men.”

And then, with his mother’s mind turning to mush and the father useless in his armchair, that final chapter, with Titi suddenly at the head of the family and the farm. But Titi didn’t want a family and he didn’t want the farm. In fact, he never seemed to want anything at all, at least nothing that others did. And so he lost the family fortune, and lost the farm, and in the end the only things he had left were the stone shells of his empty barn and house.

To the villagers Titi is someone spécial, a word used politely not in admiration but for someone a bit peculiar, or wildly eccentric, a term that was heard often in these parts, these inner edges of France that attracted the odd, the desperate and those wanting to forget and be forgotten in return — Edwin, le Anglais, who got his Moroccan girlfriend to plaster the back of his house and told everyone she was his maid from Dubai; Jean-Michel, who blew half his head off with a gun and lived, forever after with the rest; and the old monsieur’s wife, who lost her humor years ago while playing cards. But the word also points to their utter incomprehension of any character outside the norm, in a poor land where only generations of hard work bear fruit, a land so hard its stonemasons became rich and its farmers remained poor.

As the old monsieur points out one afternoon, while his teacup trembled in his Parkinson’s-ridden hands: “You need generations to build up money, and then the last one loses it.”

How exactly did Titi’s family make their money? Monsieur says it was through manpower and animals, and if Titi knows he isn’t telling. But a couple of hundred years ago, during or sometime after the French Revolution, peasants across the country were claiming the land they had worked on, land ruled over by the feudal landlords, the seigneurs. And Titi’s family had the money to buy up a lot of property that was seized from the seigneur who ruled over a patch of land that included this village, its handful of neighboring settlements, fields and forests.

Titi would wake up at five and get through the day with the help of a couple of packs of Gitanes. He had to work with the bêtes (the beasts, or farm animals), and he hated them with murderous intent, a character trait irreconcilable with his place and time. “I didn’t like them and they didn’t like me,” he says. His father wanted him to become a farmer, but he just wanted to get rid of animals. So in winter he went to the next town and worked at the abattoir. He would help out with each stage of the process, trying to force the pigs in against their will, getting them into a cage, hanging them and then slitting their throats. When all the blood had been drained they would be put into boiling water and then a machine would remove their hair. They were then cleaned, hung again and cut up.

The tough part was getting them into the gangway. A young man from Giat was killed by a pig once, and Titi had faced an animal so crazed he had refused to risk his life.

Titi was 14 and this was the only thing he wanted to do with animals, but his father pulled him out and got him back onto the farm. Sometimes, though, he’d get to work for the butcher on Sundays, a bit of entertainment for him. In winters he went to the farms to kill the pigs on site, getting through 70 in one season.

He used a knife that he bought from monsieur Dumontaux, with its brand and guarantee still etched into the metal today: Veritable Brossard. And now, decades later, it lies between his old baguette and his new checkbook (fresh from the post in its envelope) and a letter from the social security agency with bad news. A centimeter or so of blade is missing from the bottom, worn down over a lifetime’s worth of pig’s throats and sharpening, and endless hours sitting with nothing more than a sausage and baguette for company.

Titi’s trouble with his health began innocently enough, in a classic pattern of negligence and incompetence that would repeat itself throughout the rest of his life, and he had both his own choleric nature and the ineptitude of the French rural health system to blame. The French social service was killing him and keeping him alive at the same time.

It was 1962 and Titi had appendicite. He was treated but something went wrong, and he says his stomach turned hard and he couldn’t walk. He was taken to the hospital in Montluçon where, he says, they destroyed his intestine. They patched it up with a plaque but it always opened (everyone seems to have one, including old Jeanette, who got one to hold her insides together after having too many children. Decades later, when they flushed bad mushrooms out of her stomach, they said the plaque was disintegrating). He went to a specialist in Clermont-Ferrand twice, but he was told it was too complicated to operate again and he was better off if he could bear the pain instead. They put him on tablets for three days but it didn’t heal, and by then it was too late anyway because it should have been operated on immediately. But the doctor he had first gone to hadn’t diagnosed his problem as appendicitis. Titi was 18 and up for military service but got a certificate from the hospital and gave it to the office in Gueret and never served. He’d had five operations by then.

Titi broke his wrist in 1986 while tending to a cow giving birth. He was trying to get the calf out but got kicked instead. His wrist was in plaster for two months, but it didn’t heal properly, and he’s never been able to bend it like normal ever after.

And meanwhile, while he had the cast on, he was given a vaccination for Hepatitis B. But he reacted badly to it and his skin erupted. It was their mistake, he says, but they said it was his, somehow. He went to his doctor but it was too late for that, so he was taken to the hospital at Évaux-les-Bains, where they cut a vein instead. He lost consciousness and was taken into the emergency room, where they managed to patch him up. Later, the specialist in Clermont would tell him there was nothing to do except block the nerve to make it stiff till the pain went away. But Titi didn’t do it, and it was partly blocked anyway. They never followed it up with a second shot, and Titi asked the doctor if there was treatment for mistreatment.

And so the years passed, with Titi stumbling from one crisis to the next, progressively getting worse, but perhaps not poorer because he didn’t have much to lose by then anyway.

One of his doctors was Madame Cheine, who blamed him for a lot of things till he got so upset he told her that if she took him for an idiot then he took her for one too. Later, he burned himself when he dropped a red hot pan straight off his old wood stove on to his leg, and she blamed him again.

When Melanie the nurse told him to come back the next day he said he wouldn’t return for an idiot. And then he was sent to a dermatologist by mistake and he got even angrier, and he was too tense during his dialysis and he collapsed and they had to put him into the emergency room.

At his age, Titi says, you don’t educate donkeys. And then, interrupting our stream of conversation, “To hell with these medicines. It would be nice to have something good to eat!”

And the vision of Titi, on the last day of November and the first day the rain started freezing: shrinking from the doorway, his nose and left cheek a bloody, congealed mess, so gruesome it hurt to look at. He had fallen, again, face-down on his stone floor. And he was angry, not at having fallen, but for all the attention: Janine clucking over him, telling him he should wear the necklace alarm like she did, while he pooh-poohed at the idea, taking out a ball of a handkerchief he had probably never washed and wiping his runny nose, roughly, while bits of dried blood flaked off and disappeared into the filth of the floor. He hated the attention, and knew Janine would tell everyone. Once, a long while ago, he had been in an ambulance and even the nurse inside had told him of news that concerned him that she had got from Janine.

As the last cock in the village crows, Titi tells me why the rooster was the symbol of France: “It is the only creature that sings while standing in the merde.”

And meanwhile, the insides of the country have been eaten away, leaving a hollow in the very heart of France. This is la Creuse, one of the poorest, least populated départements of the country, the France that the French never speak about.

It is the France that France forgot. And in this center, splatters of dead villages (it is rumored that it is easier for the central government to get people to leave rather than to invest in infrastructure here), and in the middle of this splatter: the loneliest village in France, with the last of its original residents.

Titi was a semi-detached spectator as his family’s fortunes nosedived till he was left with nothing. To outsiders his was a miserable life, but he himself was never miserable. In some strange way he was always content, somehow at peace alone each evening with his sausage and knife and TV (with a Western movie showing at the best of times), and there was always something about him that attracted people to him, even if all they were looking for was a bit of talk and bad wine. But perhaps they also envied him: his independence, the way he could somehow live his own way, separate from the world around. Jean didn’t come for the talk and sometimes bullied Titi when he didn’t get the wine, switching off his electricity and stealing his wood. Others were better company: the baker with the bad thumb, or the big farmer with the hunting dogs in the back of his white van, or the farmer who looked like rock carved a long time ago who sold Titi potatoes.

Titi had more company when he was a young man. There were 60 people in the village in those days, enough to support a café, which only had a license for apéritif. It was owned by a family from Clermont, but the wine came from a dealer in Charonsat. The café, located conveniently behind Titi’s house, was full of men on Sundays. Like Titi, who blew up his money in such places, taking tattered francs out from between the pages of an old book no one ever read, until there were none left.

Later, Titi’s son-in-law, who was méchant, burnt the book and Titi’s old photos and then he was left with only memories. As the insurance agent Jean-Michel tells me: “Even the pigeons fly upside down over Creuse so they don’t have to look at its misery.”