The Magic of À Tould

Hello, my name is James. The story which I am about to narrate to you is not some pathetic fantasy. What I am about to narrate is 100% genuine. I had written and put up this story before but got some very bad responses for because of my bad grammar and spelling mistakes. All of the conversations did take place in French so it was difficult for me to translate every word correctly. I have recreated some of the dialogues since it has been such a long time so please bear with me.

As I said my name is James, I am fifty-seven years old now. I work as a police officer. I am just a detective in the 12th precinct and nothing more right now at this point. I have been married for twenty-four years now and have a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl who is in college and a eighteen-year-old boy in high school. I live in the beautiful and mind-blowing city of Paris in France now. You probably do not need any description about it.

I grew up in a small town called À Touldé in the far southern extremes of France. The little town had very few people and even fewer chances of anything-cool happening. It could barely be called a town; it was more like a small village. Most were farmers and cattle herders.

My father Henry was a farmer just like most men in the village, he was not a native of the village. My father came from the city of Marseille along with his parents when he was three years old. My mother was also from the big city. Evelyn Is mothers name, she was an orphan and did not have any brothers or sisters. She told me that she ran away from the orphanage when she was thirteen years old. She jumped on one train and then came to the village looking for place to live. My father was 18 years old when he met her. My grandparents took my mother into the house showing kindness. My grandparents died a little while after that, there was a massive flood there in the village and many of the people died there.

“Nobody from the government come and help us.,” my father always screamed.

My father was barely eighteen years old when his parents died, he had been working at the farm all his life so he knew how to make a living. My mother was 18 years old when my grandparents died. My mother and father got to know each other very well; they worked in the fields and even around the house. My grandmother thought my mother how to cook and how to do other things. My mother had to sleep in the kitchen on a small bed because there were only two other rooms one my grandparents used and the other was used by my father. She spent about two months with my grandparents before they passed away.

My father took charge of the house and started to rebuild it. My mother cooked and cleaned and they were soon in love. My grandparents treated my mother like a daughter but my father and mother quickly fell in love after my grandparents died. It was not incestuous because they were not related through the blood and it was not like they had grown up together as brother and sister. They had only known each other for two months or so. My mother got pregnant about two or three months after the flood. She was still thirteen at that time and my father was almost eighteen. It was 1952 when I was born. It was very difficult for my mother to give birth as there was no one to teach her the pregnant things and my father did not know much about it himself. There were only a few elder women from the village did help with the labor but they could not do much else. There were only seven elderly women left in the entire village after the flood. They did their best in helping my mother but were themselves busy rebuilding their lost homes, raising their own children, or working on the fields.

Nobody looked at it like it was incest and neither would they have been bothered if it was incest. Incest was nothing disgusting in the village we knew it existed very much. I myself know of five such cases in which siblings were having the sex together. There were not many other people here of their age so they did it with each other. There was also a man named Jean Basques who had gotten one of his daughters pregnant. It was probably the first case that I could remember. I was 18 years old or so when I heard from Franck the blacksmith that jean was having the intimate relation with his daughter Carolyn. The blacksmith told me that he had seen jean and his daughter having sex behind their house near the barn where they tied the horses and pigs. Franck the blacksmith said he went to get back some money which jean owed him. He laughed as he told me that the farm animals were looking at them while they had sex on the ground crawling around in the mud and the filth. Jean was very old maybe fifty-five or maybe even more but his daughter was only two or three years older than me. Jean had lost his wife a long time ago and was with one boy and two girls.

Carolyn was the eldest child of the Basques family her brother were my age and her other sister was about ten years old. I played around with her brother a lot when we were younger but then we just grew apart. Carolyn was very beautiful for her age; she was very slim and was short. I had always liked her but now I felt bad that she did these things. I was in no way disgusted by it but was a little disappointed. After three months, the bump in her belly became very clear and we all knew how the father was. No one distanced themselves from her at all. She was only one of several pregnancies like this.

There was no church in the village so there was no one to object to this kind of behavior.

Over the next two years, I heard and saw through my own eyes many other incest relations in the village. I was very much interested in sex and was fascinated a lot by it. Franck the blacksmith was like a gossipmonger who knew all the things that happened in village. I stayed close to him and found out about a lot of things. He told me about the bezique family where the widow bezique would have sex with her two sons. Her sons worked on the farm all day long and were very strong and well built and this was probably why she was attracted to her sons.

There was also this story of David the mason and his mother. David’s mother I cannot remember her name had lost her husband to the war and David had lost his wife during the miscarriage of their first baby. Franck told me that David had forced his mother into sex the first few times but after a while, his mother got to like it and gave the consent to him. Franck said it had been over twenty years ago since it had happened, he said it was the first case that he could remember. David got his mother pregnant and she had given him three children.

“They acted like they were a married couple around the village. He would kiss her in front of every one and touch her here and there in front of every one like it was nothing forbidden.” Franck said staring at the wall remembering his own past.

“I was a little older than you are right now James.” Franck said beating on a hot piece of metal.

I worked for Franck at the shop. He would pay me a little but what I learnt was more than enough to come to work evening. I could not do much of the heavy work and Franck knew this but still kept me around because he liked to talk and I liked to listen to his old stories.

There was no middle school or high school in village. With exactly seven children my age in the village what do you expect. Although there was a primary school, it was a pathetic example for an educational institute. There was just one teacher who taught us all the give subjects himself. It was a very scrawny old man who was asked to teach us by the elders of the village because he was from the big city. They thought he was smart because he spoke English very well. Mr. Morgan was his name, he was an old English man from London. Although Mr. Morgan’s teaching was very stupid and silly, he told wonderful stories about the big city and all the wonderful things in them. We did not do much studying in his class, all we did do was sit around and draw or talk. We never minded as long as we did not make noise. We carried a small notebook and one pencil but all we did was draw. We did not have any textbooks or any study material. He would sleep in class stretching his legs on the desk as we drew on the chalkboard with chalk that he barely ever toughed. One of the things that he did do was teach us to read and write English. It took us almost a year to learn just the basics of the English language.

Since there was, no television and no other means of entertaining ourselves I and my friends went swimming in the lake when we were not working in the fields or doing house chores.

I had three other close friends Anthony and Jacob. They were both my age and we lived almost right next to each other near the Cabbage fields. Anthony was a very brave person, he was always getting into trouble here and there all the time, and his father was a very nice man how never hit him or hurt him when he got into trouble.

Jacob was very big and strong but also very shy. He was not a coward but was very smart. He would always think of things a hundred times before he did them. He was the smart one of us all, he had on numerous occasions got us out of trouble with his intelligence. Even though he was shy, he was very good with words and was a good negotiator.

We all had plans to leave to some big city when we were old enough. We had saved a little money but nowhere was it enough. We did not know it at the time but we thought it was easy living in the city.

It was the middle of April 1966 when my father became very ill. He was working on the barn door on afternoon when suddenly he fainted. We thought that he fainted because of the extreme heat we were having. The neighbors and my mother picked him up and brought him home from the barn.

“I’m just feeling tired because of the heat. I will be ok,” my father said.

“Are you sure?” my mother asked as she sat next to him on the bed.

“Yes. I am sure it is the heat that has me tired. What else could be wrong?” my father said bragging about his physical condition.

My father was a very hard working man who spent nearly the entire day out in the field working. He was probably the strongest man in the entire village. So it is clear why he was so confident about his physical state.

For a while, my father was ok but then during the end of April he became very sick, he was struggling to move and was coughing very terribly.

My mother became more concerned and took him to the nearby town to see a doctor. She left me in charge of the whole farm and the animals in the barn, we had two cows, three pigs, over a dozen chicken. It would take them at least three or four days to go there and come back. If the tests took long, they said it might take them a week.

I was not worried as I thought it was nothing just like my father did. I was very happy that I was alone and had the entire farm to myself but my mother asked Jacobs’ and Anthony’s mothers if they would let them stay and help me with the house. It was a very small village with less than a hundred people so we had to help each other during difficult times. It had always been that way, it was like an unwritten or unspoken law in the village that if someone needed help every one would offer as much help as they could.

“It has been like this since the flood came and killed half of our village.” My mother always said.

Every one in the village had lost at least one or two members from their houses during the flood. They said that the government did not help rescue people or even help them rebuild the village and all the houses.

The villagers waited for weeks but no one even bothered to show up. It was then that they decided that they would no longer wait for help. They helped each other rebuild houses, and everything.

“Most of us were just children then James. We were barely out of our teenage years when we had to bury our own parents after the flood. Most died during the rain itself, before it started to flood from the river.” I remember Franck telling me as he shed tears.