Sundays in France are the worst. You see, on Sunday everything shuts down completely: offices, restaurants, stores, people, everything; everything that is, except us. I was up early again, bleary eyed and a shade this-side of grumpy, working like usual at all the things that need to be done in an average day so I ended up spending most of the morning in our office in the hotel. As you can imagine, after a few hours it got to be a little dull. We’d been to downtown Blagnac the other night, for La Fete du Rues which was good but not as good as La Fete du Musique had been, and it was a nice charming little French town so I figured I’d head down there, takes some pictures and enjoy a coffee on the street. I had forgotten that today was Sunday, today it was a post-apocalyptic dead-zone, a town devoid of activity or life, a subtle reminder of the quietude of Sundays in France.

None the less, I had my camera and a sense of malaise to shake off so I whistled at the silence and kept on moving. The first interesting thing I came to was a cemetery, and I ask you, where else should one go to shake off a sense of malaise? What better place to consider the face of life and kick your own ass back into gear. Well, that didn’t really happen, mostly I walked around looking for people that had died the year I was born, or people that had died recently, or people that had lived short squalid meaningless lives; and to be fair their tombstones didn’t say anything about squalid, but I liked to infer it.

Leaving the cemetery I continued towards the centre ville since I figured that’s where the action would be. During La Fete du Rues it had been a hoping place with tables and chairs and people packing every square inch of plazas and streets, there were people on stilts with fanciful costumes and billowy pants followed by someone pushing a bubble-making machine, very odd that, but very neat. Today however, there was none of that; it was quiet, like a graveyard. I saw a few other people but they were scurrying with their heads bent in the sort way that says if-I-don’t-see-you-you-don’t-see-me-and-then-I’m-not-doing-anything-wrong, I did my best not to let them see me seeing them and everyone went away happy; although my sense of malaise was still following me.

I rounded a corner and came to a huge brick wall. It was immense, easily 10 feet tall if it was an inch with crumbling red-bricks everywhere their jacket of plaster having weathered away long ago. I followed the wall for a while for the simple reason that I had no reason not to. It led around a corner and down past an old folks home with one lost slipper outside on the walkway. Like the folks inside it was worn and used up, the sole was worn away and there was a hole in the fuzzy pink upper of the forlorn slipper. As if to maintain the old-and-worn theme the wall itself was decrepit here and leaning out into the street. I continued on by quickly, lest it be catching and before too long the wall took another corner, switched to pure concrete, or maybe just new plaster, and then meeting up with someone’s house it abruptly ended. I felt unsatisfied; it should have some sort of formidable buttress or ended at a gothic turret or something, anything other than an average 3 bedroom European home with an attached two-car garage and a Renault in the driveway.

Figuring to teach it a lesson I kicked it with my sandaled foot and only served to injure my big toe. With a throbbing toe I worked my way back down the wall, past the corner where it had turned to concrete and then back past the old-folks home. Something glinted in the sun and caught my eye so I whirled around and spotted it: a big, black, iron gate set into the wall. It was odd, I had to look again because I was certain it hadn’t been there the last time I walked by. The gate was pure black, like the soul of the devil, and was set with large iron spikes on the top, also like the soul of the devil. Mounted waist high was a black iron raven and I can only assume it was to serve as the door handle. Strange though, to this day I would swear that that gate wasn’t there the first time I passed it.

It really did seem too good to be true, the gate had lifted my spirits and now I wanted nothing more than to know what was inside the wall. Walls are bad for that, we can’t go in and so we want to know what’s inside and, more importantly, why it isn’t for us. After all inside it could be a paradise with soft green earth, fragrant trees, streams that flow sweet as wine and just the right amount of breeze to mix it all together. We never consider the possibility that it could be a garbage dump, or a nuclear waste site or the place where the Brotherhood of Plumbers #103 meets to plan it’s annual bowling convention. Nah, it’s always something wonderful that is being kept away behind an impenetrable brick wall with a big black gate that won’t open no matter how hard to push or pull on it. .

Not to be deterred I followed the wall back out and then along the main street for a few hundred meters before it curved away behind someone’s house.

My previous malaise was gone, and I was full of curiosity now, whatever was inside the wall wasn’t nearly so important to me as knowing what was inside the wall so I carried on…