Trussoni - The fortress: a love story

B efore the club in Paris, and before the Frenchman, I was a woman in a fortress.

Or, more precisely, I lived with my husband and two children in La Commanderie, a medieval fortification at the center of the French village of Aubais, pronounced obey, as in love, honor and... Aubais. Built by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century, the fortress stood high on a hilltop and could withstand attack from every angle. There were arrow slits in the walls and a perch from which to spy the enemy coming. The foundation was sunk deep into the rock of the village, rock that millions of years before had formed the Mediterranean seabed. Occasionally, when I examined the rock, I would find imprints of fossilized shells, ancient swirls of disintegrated calcium that created the bedrock of the entire region. The fortress rose from this long-gone sea like a stone Leviathan, strong and unsinkable. It was a defensive place, a place of barriers, one meant to resist catapults and battering rams. A place in which we could shut everything out, even the truth.

An ancient granite wall surrounded the fortress. Outside the wall the sun scorched the streets to a sizzle. Inside, a deep shadow fell over a courtyard, where my family ate lunch at a weathered wooden table. I picture us now, as we were then: My two children, Alex and Nico, our pug Fly Me to the Moon (Fly for short), and our three cats: Napoleon, Josephine, and ChouChou. I see me, a thirty-six-year-old woman in an oversize sundress and sunglasses, walking barefoot over hot flagstones, slipping between slats of sun and shade as I make my way past the cats, to my husband, Nikolai. Tall and dark and handsome, he wears a black top hat perched on his head. He bought the top hat in a junk store and wore it as a joke, but the joke became a habit and the habit an eccentricity, and so the hat stayed, giving him the air of a dark magician, one who couldwith a flick of his wristcoax a dove from the depths of nothingness.

Under our feet, deep below the hot flagstones, was a treasure-filled tunnel, or so we liked to imagine. According to legend, the Knights Templar had constructed a system of tunnels between La Commanderie and the fortified city of Aigues-Mortes, where St. Louis launched the Crusades. These passages allowed the Knights to move in stealth to defend the king, to hide valuables, and to transport goods for their voyages to the Holy Land, but anyone looking at a map would have serious doubts that such a tunnel actually existed. The swampy port of Aigues-Mortes is more than ten miles from Aubais, the terrain rocky. Even so, I liked to believe that there was some truth to the story and that deep below the fortress, carved into the compacted limestone, was a hidden space, a tunnel guarding Templar treasure.

La Commanderie was eight hundred years old and had many owners after the Knights Templar. One built an olive press on the property. Another created an Italianate courtyard with flagstones and a window-lined salon to border it. One used the garden as an arena for bullfightsor les courses camarguaises, as they say in the Languedocand I liked to imagine the matador and the bull moving around each other in the courtyard, attacking and hiding, one beast pursuing the other. When the Nazis requisitioned the property in the forties, they used it as the center of their operations in the region, a legacy that older villagers remembered. The fortress had seen olive oil and bullshit and swastikas. And then we arrived.

We hadnt been in the market for a dark, drafty, thirteenth-century fortress, but we walked through the door, took one look, and knew that La Commanderie had been waiting for us. The realities of buying and living in a historic compound in a tiny village in a foreign country didnt strike us as daunting. The fact that we were thousands of miles away from family and friends didnt dissuade us. The problems with the house itselfthe oil-sucking monstrosity of a heater, the leaky roof, the mold-infested bathroom, the broken sewage pipeseemed manageable. It was precisely the scale of the fortressso outsize, so unrealisticthat made it ours.

The day we moved in, we pushed open the gate together. Over ten feet tall, the blue ironwork speckled with rust, it was so heavy that it took the two of us with our combined weight to move it. It swung open, creaking on old hinges, and suddenly we were not a couple on the verge of divorce. We were the owners of La Commanderie, a structure more powerful than us, a place so solid that it would