Alberto had bypassed Orléans, where the traffic heading toward that city was as heavy as it had been around Paris. People had flooded into Paris after the announcement, maybe because so much of French life had always been centered there. Whatever happened now, a lot of people obviously wanted to be in Paris when it did.
To have so many coming into Paris had made it easier for us to leave. The traffic had been heavy on the roads leading to the city, but almost nonexistent on the lanes going out. Alberto had filled the tank of his Fiat right after our arrival and hadn't driven the car since, so we had enough gas. The concierge at the hotel had let us check out without paying, maybe because by then the exchange rates were fluctuating from one hour to the next and there was no way of knowing how much any currency would be worth in time. We even had a bag of canned food and bottled water. Making my way back to the hotel, I had been caught in a crowd of looters, and somebody had thrust a canvas bag of food at me. The owners of the shops and stores didn't seem to mind the looting. By then, some of them were standing by the doors of their establishments shouting "Prenez-en" and "Prenez-les tous," telling people to help themselves to everything inside.
We left the main highway, then had to detour around a small town. The cobblestone streets leading into the town were blocked by vans. The traffic was thinning rapidly. Soon ours was the only car I could see on the road.
We followed the Loire along a two-lane highway nearly as straight as the line on a graph. On the other side of the river, I spotted the distinctive dome and stacks of a nuclear power plant.
"I hope they've shut that thing down," I said.
Alberto was silent as he drove over a bridge and past the plant, then turned right. He hadn't said anything since leaving Paris. After dropping off my bag of food in our room, I had found him in the hotel bar, sitting with a middle-aged Canadian couple and a young woman in a University of Minnesota sweatshirt. The middle-aged man was saying, "We were on our second honeymoon." The young woman said, "This was my first trip to Europe." Alberto sighed, then said, "We were going to look at some of the châteaux along the Loire before starting back to Italy." It struck me then that everyone was using the past tense, as if their earlier lives were over.
I had let Alberto decide what to do. He seemed to think that the place to be was outside the major cities. Whatever happened now was likely to affect the cities first, so it was better to get out of Paris and then consider what to do next. His thinking had seemed reasonable to me when we were sitting in our room, with the TV tuned in to CNN International for the latest news--or non-news--and the sounds of cars, honking horns, and tolling bells outside growing louder by the minute. Now I wasn't so sure. Alberto had decided to head toward the Loire Valley because that was where we had originally planned to go. I was beginning to think that he simply didn't know what to do, that he preferred to pretend that there was some purpose to his actions rather than sit around in our room or the hotel bar speculating about what might happen and freaking himself out. Probably all the people crowding into Paris and other cities didn't know what to do, either. Maybe they just wanted to be in a crowd while they waited instead of getting terrified all alone somewhere.
Alberto turned on to another road. A high stone wall at our left surrounded forested land. I gazed absently at the map on my lap, on which the roads were not very clearly marked, then thrust it into the glove compartment. "Where are we now?" I asked.
"Near Chambord," he replied, speaking at last. "You remember, Lois--we were going to stop there first. It is considered one of the most spectacular of the châteaux, perhaps the grandest. It was the project of François the First--"
"I know all of that," I muttered, wondering why he was mentioning it now.
"--who was a great admirer of Renaissance art, particularly Italian art. Leonardo da Vinci has been credited with drawing up some of the plans for Chambord." Alberto sounded like a tour guide. Hearing him speak in such a flat, matter-of-fact manner made me even more apprehensive. I realized then that he was probably just trying to distract himself from any fears he might be harboring with this pretense of normality. By then, I was wishing that we had stayed in Paris.
)
