Back to France Part Two

Dark Fears
I easily get scared, especially in the dark. I never watch horror movies and sometimes even have a hard time with regular thrillers. I also never read thriller-books, they give me nightmares. I know these are my rules, they do me good and I should stick with them. But on occasions, I get lured into doing something foolish, like this summer, on our memorable trip to France.

This summer a few friends & colleagues, independent of each other, recommended to me to read a book. THE book of the season, Dan Brown’s bestselling Da Vinci Code. And I agree, I would also strongly recommend it to everybody. It’s brilliant! So much conspiracy theory and such revolutionary interpretation of Christianity is just breathtaking and admirable and a very engaging read.

But as I said, I easily get scared. It could be in my genes, but I think some part of it I owe to my big sis and our girl cousins and my big sis friends. Looking back, it really is laughable how I used to believe their stories of vampires and especially the one about ‘cachticka pani,’ a mythical witch who killed pretty girls to bath in their blood with the ultimate purpose of achieving eternal youth. As a child, I saw vampires and this cachticka pani behind every corner and in the night I swear the room was full of them. Anyway, this summer the albino beat them all.

The albino is the evil element in Brown’s book. He goes about murdering people and he does it in ways which really put you off. It was in the Pyrenees that the albino really gave me sleepless nights. We stayed in this pretty hotel in the middle of nowhere with a gorgeous view over the mountains. But in the evening, the whole scenery turned black, so black like it only does in mountains; it was so dark everywhere it made you wonder if there ever would be light again. And on top of that it was full moon and I swear there were wolves. Or maybe they were owls or dogs or some other creatures but they sounded like wolves. And there was I reading about an albino murderer.

I sometimes wonder if there are many people, adults, with similar irrational fears. I would like to believe that they go away as you get older, but in my case there seems to be no way of getting rid of them. I sometimes hope I would be more concerned about real dangers like air pollution and nuclear waste, but until now, it’s always just been darkness that succeeds in haunting me.

Anyway, it was very special to read this book then and there. We even visited La Couvertoirade (I hope I spell it correctly), which had been a village of the Knights Templar in the middle ages and which was just fascinating to see in the context of the Brown book. All in, I strongly recommend it to everybody, the book, and if possible in combination with a trip to France. And if you have the luxury of choice, pick Paris because much of the plot happens in and around the Louvre. Do you think Mona Lisa is ugly?