Beth Kephart

Down the street, meanwhile, in a neighborhood of Santa Tecla called Las Colinas, mansions were tumbling from the sky, plunging from their mountain berths in a storm of dust and drama. Whatever was in their path fell prey — the clustered houses that sat on the mountain’s lower face, the children spinning tops in the narrow streets, the idle conversations between neighbors. Before there was time to look up and run, a swath of suburbia was swallowed whole, entombed in a mudslide that stopped six blocks short of Nora’s front door. Those who were saved were saved because of luck — because of an errand that had taken them away from home, because of a traffic jam that had delayed their return, because of a plate of hot tortillas they were delivering to a neighbor. Because of a baptism that had ended on time, not minutes later, when the cathedral would be lying in a smolder.

Central America is a noisy land — opinionated, self-serving, notoriously dissatisfied with its own design. At least six times, between 1545 and 1798, earthquakes shook El Salvador’s capitals to the ground, like so many dogs shaking their coats to remove the wet. Volcanoes blew, turning hillsides into rivers of red lava. Lakes disappeared and new mountains warped up in their place. Revolutions coincided with eruptions of every geophysical confabulation. In the mid-1960s, the earth knocked against itself in the middle of the night, and my husband, 8 years old at the time, yanked his youngest brother from the crib and ran them both to safety on roiling ground. In 1986, a few months after I had returned from my first visit to El Salvador, a massive earthquake toppled the country’s capital, leaving countless dead and countless more without homes. It precipitated the rise of the “cardboard for walls and bottle caps for nails” communities that still thrive, all these years later, on the highway’s median strips.

It is impossible to stop the land from speaking, impossible to ordain it with a conscience, impossible to teach it: This is a family, this is a child, this is a people’s history. It is impossible to understand the stories my husband tells me now about La Gloria, the expanse of land that was a coffee farm before developers turned it into Las Colinas, the latest death trap. “Now that was a farm, Beth,” Bill, my husband, tells me while I lie in bed, a fever brimming. “That was one gorgeous place, thick with trees. We’d take our horses up there, and we’d go exploring in the catacomb of natural caves that had wormed in through the earth over time. We always suspected that the caves had been carved by water, by long dried-up underground springs. We’d take our horses deep inside, but we never reached the tunnels’ ends.”

Now those caves are gone, rumbled to nothing, and so are the houses that sat upon them, and so are the people who called those houses home. Buried 10 feet deep under the quake-induced mudslide are little girls and little boys, multiple generations of single families, newlyweds and widows, lovers and gardeners and maids, none of them properly eulogized, none of them ready to die. All across El Salvador the morning of Jan. 13, the land tucked up and slammed down, engulfing tourists at a waterfall, swiping coffee pickers off slopes, snuffing out secondary roads, snapping the beautiful things into pieces. Every historic, heartening structure gone in one instant: the chapel in the orphanage, the shelter for the elderly infirm, storefronts and offices, the church in which my in-laws were married, where my husband was confirmed. “You walk by the church now,” Nora reports when we can get through on the phone, “and you see its altar, its Sacred Heart statue; you see these from the street because, my God, there are no walls.”

After the 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck, after hundreds were already suspected dead, Nora went out searching for everyone she loves. She walked up and down the streets, knocking on doors. “Are you OK? Do you need help?” she asked. She found her sisters and her brother: alive. She found her best friends and my husband’s best friends and their families: all, miraculously, alive. She found her gardener, ancient Tiburcio, who was — by fluke — in the town of Santa Tecla and not out among the coffee trees, and she found Nicha, the maid whom she has known for 60 years. Nora herself was found and embraced, blessed and questioned: “What now? Are you all right? What did you lose?”

And through the chaos of it all, through the powerful tremors that ensued, through paths that he must have made for himself by chopping down grasses and tree limbs with a machete because the roads were newly smothered, inverted, came Tito, the “campesino” who keeps watch over Nora’s coffee farm; he came with news. All the homes on Nora’s farm were down, he reported — the huts in which the coffee workers live year-round, the three-room structure in which they make tortillas for the farm, the old brick house that Nora spent last year lovingly restoring so that she could live most of her remaining days in the shade, among the trees. Elsewhere, 40 coffee pickers were lost in one landslide. Entire slopes of coffee trees had been ripped from their roots; farm roads would be impassable for months. But there was, Tito said, a miracle to report on, too: He had found Nicha’s grandson alive, found him in the only room of all those farm shacks that had been left standing after the quake, found him sitting there, spared, deep in shock.

Here, in Pennsylvania, where the earth seems more peaceful with itself, we play the roulette wheel of what ifs silently, with ourselves. What if the baptism had run a quarter-hour longer? What if Nora’s city home were six blocks west? What if Nora hadn’t already finished her coffee-bean harvest and had been out — as she had been out the week before — on the steeply angled hills when the earth roared? And what if Nicha’s grandson had chosen the wrong room to sit in? And what if Tiburcio hadn’t come to the city on a whim? And what if Nora didn’t care, the way Nora surely cares, about the 14 campesino families that lost their houses on her farm?

“I am taking out a loan,” Nora tells Bill when he gets through to her by phone a few days after the quake. “I am taking out a loan because the first thing that must get done is building all my workers their new homes.” Already she has had corrugated metal siding taken to the homeless shelter and banged up, haphazardly, to the wooden joists so that the infirm old won’t have to sleep out in the streets. Already she has talked to the nuns at the orphanage, asking what needs to be done — and how fast. Already she has begun to organize delivery of food to the campesinos in the hills who were trapped by the abrupt collapse of all the roads. Already she is looking beyond all she has lost — crystal, china, a home she loved, the memorabilia that tied her to the past — to ask, What can I do here? What must get done?

“That land,” one friend writes to me a few days later, when my fever is in full bloom, “isn’t fit to live on; it’s always crashing.” And of course that’s true: El Salvador is an unstable place; the land has a mean mind of its own. For as long as there are people there, there will be earthquakes and volcanoes. For as long as there is a building up, there will be a brutal wrecking down.

And yet, for as long as there are people in El Salvador, there will be those like my husband’s mother, Nora, living on the skirt of danger, but not succumbing to it. All this week I have been ill, fighting fever and back spasms, fighting the bullet pain of migraines, fighting nausea that has left me dehydrated on the floor. All this week, there’s been disorder in my blood. When I close my eyes, I see the mudslide coming. I sit in silence and hear the earth roar. I hold my hands out empty and imagine them digging buried people free. In my fevered dreams, it is this way. When I’m awake, it’s this way, too. I cannot liberate myself, we must not liberate ourselves, from that earthquake far away. From a land that speaks and from a people that speaks back. From a Nora and a Tito who dare to reach out and hold on.

“It’s so much better when you read to me,” he grumbles and whispers, then sighs to prove his point. “All I have to do then is be in your arms and wait for the story to come.”

Over the next several days I make it my business to understand the ergonomics of reading: the hands that hold; the fingers that turn; the spine that curves or straightens; the legs that must forget that they are construed of flesh and blood. At the neighborhood library, under the cover of a book, I watch the way a woman with flowing hair paces as she reads, up and down, up and down, rifling a breeze through the stacks. I watch the way old men gather at the chest-high reference shelves and lay out their books and papers and maps, like so many priests at their pulpits. A boy with a leg-long cast hobbles in, pinching a portable raft with his fist. He finds a swath of natural light and settles, the air from his chair fast escaping, his crutches now tossed to one side.

“There are plenty of ways to read,” I report back to my son.

“Sure,” he says. “Sure. But which one’s comfortable?”

I remember a book in our basement, an extraordinary collection of Andri Kertisz photos. The unwitting inventor of the candid photograph, the Hungarian-born, self-taught Kertisz focused his lens on what was true. An old woman in a hospital bed in France, upright with the help of pillows, a black blanket on her shoulders, a book held like a prayer in both her hands. A man halted before an outdoor cart of used books on New York City’s Fourth Avenue, his face adorned with thick eyeglasses, his right hand holding a magnifying glass, his left palm cradling “Comradeship,” his nose breathless inches from the page. There are the readers in Washington Square backed up against trees, strewn over grass. There’s the S-shaped woman in Paris, 1928, the white page in highest contrast against the black folds of her skirt.

“There are so many ways to read,” I assure Jeremy. “So many, I can’t count them.”

“Sure,” he rolls his eyes, then snuggles back into my open arms and waits for me to read to him.

So I ask my friends, who, come to think of it, I’ve hardly noticed reading. I can’t imagine how Susan sits or Barbara does, or where in the house Joanne puts herself inside a book. So I send them and others little messages, urgent pleas, and while I wait for their replies, I read “The Enormous Egg” out loud and tell Jeremy I’m working on it. Still.

“Oh Beth,” my friend Susan, the book critic and writing teacher, messages back. “What a question you ask: how do I read? Well, I hardly ever sit when I read. I usually crawl under the covers in bed next to my reading lamp and hold the book above my head and prop my arms up with pillows. I can read like this for hours. And also, I really liked reading when I was pregnant, kicked back in a worn-out Lazy Boy with a book propped up on my swelling stomach, and I also love to read in a really hot bath, but I’m always dropping the books into the bath water and they swell up like little accordions. I had to stop doing that with library books.”

Jayne Anne, my comrade in secrets, divulges a part of herself I now see clearly, and which I explain to Jeremy, who regards me doubtfully. “How I sit when I read?” she writes. “Preferably in bed, Dahn Center (Korean meditation), heated rice pillow on my stomach (that knotted flux of emotions), pillows behind, covers pulled up against the 30-below wind chill factor outside the draft windows — in the dark, just my light on, everyone else asleep. How I read more often? In the car, waiting at the train for my commuting teenager, just hoping that he’s on the train, that my cell phone won’t ring with a change of plans, that he has his gloves, his hat, even his coat …”

You see? I say, in so many words, to Jeremy. There’s reading as a privilege, and reading as something we steal, and then there are adjustments we make, on behalf of a story, sighs we don’t sigh, because it’s worth it. Reading is the occupation of the mind, the conundrum of the body, the thing that gets us from here to there. You make your body work with a book, with light, because, in the end, I say, it’s so exciting.

“I’d rather play soccer,” Jeremy says. “Now that’s comfortable.”

“But reading’s so fun,” I say.

“It hurts my arms.”

“Well then we just haven’t found the right position yet.”

“I read prone,” writes Alex, my journalist friend. “On our worn, mouse-infested couch. My head propped on a pillow, my legs covered by a blanket, often relying on whatever sunlight makes it through our windows. The other place I love to read is on planes and the El. It’s the only time I read sitting up (not that I have a choice.) On the El going downtown, I know enough to sit on the north side of the train; otherwise the sunlight hitting the moving train will make me nauseous.”

“Don’t you love that?” I say to Jeremy, “the idea of reading on a train? I think you could do that, don’t you? That sounds pretty easy. Whenever we’re on a train, let’s take a book, and you can read.”

“It’s more fun looking through the windows, Mom,” Jeremy opines. “Or listening to you tell a story.”

“Try to understand,” I tell him, growing frustrated by my own poor persuasive powers. “Listen.”

And then I read him the message my friend Kate sent, about how she sits (but only when her house is clean) in a low-slung Victorian rocking chair (green velvet upholstered, bought specifically for rocking babies and reading) in her bedroom, natural light from the north, a view of the bay that she’s not looking at. I read him what Barbara says about folding one leg up under the other on a wide wicker kitchen chair, one hand fiddling with her hair, the other fiddling with the cover on the book — all of this going on until the day grows too dim and she takes her book to bed and lies in the light. I tell him how Ken and Inga share a couch and a lamp when they read, and how Joanne, in bed, slides against a pillow backrest until she’s violating every chiropractic rule, and how Amy won’t read a single word these days unless she’s got her poodle on her lap.

“You can be an outlaw when you read,” I say. “You can do it any way you want.”

“Show me how.”

So we troop around the house together, looking for the best way to read. “Here’s my personal, time-tested favorite position,” I tell him, throwing myself horizontal over the puffy loveseat couch that crowds my writing office. I fit my neck upon one armrest, fling my feet over the other. “See how my knees come up to make a perfect support for the book? See how my head is upright so that I won’t fall asleep? See how the window draws in the sun? See how there’s quiet in here?”

“You’re taller than me, Mom,” Jeremy says when he tries it. “That couch just does not work for me.”

So then I demonstrate my lunch-time position. I pull a chair to the kitchen table, plant my feet on the floor, balance a spoon in my right hand, a book in the other. “My feet dangle,” Jeremy says, after he’s tried this out. “I’m not too comfortable here.”

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Okay.” And round and round our six rooms we go, trying out this couch, this chair, this rug, this stool, trying out the pace, the stand, the recline. Finally, we’re back up in Jeremy’s room, where there are soccer sheets and soccer quilts, a soccer rug and soccer trophies. There is also (courtesy of my mother) a soccer bean bag chair, and Jeremy, disappointed, flops down in this, and sighs.

“Stay right where you are,” I say, after a few moments. “Don’t go anywhere.” I trip over to his shelves and retrieve a book. A little paperback, light as a feather. It’s “Soccer Shock,” by Donna Jo Napoli, something that must appeal to him, something I fit into his hands while his legs lengthen out and his body sinks and sinks into beans.

He rolls his eyes.

He turns one page.

And then he turns another.

“How’s that?” I say. “How’s that? Okay?”

But he doesn’t say a word because I’ve lost him to the story.

Standing there, observing Phillips, I was struck by contradictions, as readers of her work have always been. Here was the originator of characters who marched straight out of the dark side and spoke: “Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks …” Here was the author of tender reminiscence: “My mother’s ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water.” Here was the teacher — at Brandeis, at Harvard, at Boston University, elsewhere — with the reputation for being obsessed with the minuscule, the line edit, the word and its hyphen, the punctuation mark.

“Have you been to the Castle?” She came toward me.

I shook my head no.

“Well, tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll go. Your family. My family. Here’s my number. Call by 10.”

We spent the next day jostled by the summer crowds of Prague, in the darkened corridors of St. Vituvius Cathedral, beside the violet drapes of burnished confessionals. We spent it beneath the pinched-up height of vaulted roofs, before the ardent depictions in colored glass. Outside there was summer heat and triangulated gardens, a clan of singers in velvet green and ochre frocks. Phillips was there with her husband and two sons. My little boy and husband were with me. We made our way out of one knot and penetrated another.

We finally crossed the Charles Bridge. It was hot; morning was done. We bought postcards, jewelry, architectural miniatures. Then, saying little to one another, we parted in Mala Strana. I turned to watch her go. I saw how it was. Jayne Anne in the center. Her two sons on either side, her husband nearby. Jayne Anne Phillips: a mother and a wife.

“Black Tickets,” the 1979 short-story collection that catapulted Phillips to fame at 26, is best remembered for its explicit fractions of lascivious lives, for the teenage whores and drifters who erupt from stories like “Stripper,” “Lechery,” “Country” and “Gemcrack” and deliver their inimitable street poetics. And yet it’s the book’s familial stories that seem most haunting and mysterious, even prophetic.

It’s the daughters narrating these stories who stand out, the young, between-places women who come home and don’t belong. They talk to their mothers about sex and orgasms. They offer their naked mothers a towel after a bath. Between these mothers and their daughters there is telepathy and disagreement. Perpetually a sickness lingers, a fear, rumbling near the surface, of loss.

In the story called “Home,” a daughter remembers a cycle of care. Phillips was in her early 20s when she wrote these lines:

My mother doesn’t forget her mother.

Never one bedsore, she says. I turned her every fifteen minutes. I kept her skin soft and kept her clean, even to the end.

I imagine my mother at twenty-three; her black hair, her dark eyes, her olive skin and that red lipstick. She is growing lines of tension in her mother. Her teeth press into her lower lip as she lifts the woman in the bed. The woman weighs no more than a child. She has a smell … .

I did all I could, she sighs. And I was glad to do it. I’m glad I don’t have to feel guilty.

No one has to feel guilty, I tell her.

And why not? says my mother. There’s nothing wrong with guilt. If you are guilty, you should feel guilty.

My mother has often told me that I will be sorry when she is gone.

Reading “Home,” one senses that the complicated affection of an adrift daughter for her sensible mother is Phillips’ truest subject, the thing she has turned over and over in her mind, seeking its heat, sifting through its ashes. Several stories later in “Black Tickets” — following fragments of near pornography, lines gorgeously twisted — “Souvenir” returns the reader to the emotional space that Phillips carved out with “Home.” Here the daughter is named Kate and the mother, a school administrator, has a brain tumor. Kate has come to the hospital to abide the news with her mother, to wait for an operation that may or may not bring a cure.

Her mother pulled the afghan closer. “I’ve been thinking of your father,” she said. “It’s not that I’d have wanted him to suffer. But if he had to die, sometimes I wish he’d done it more gently. That heart attack, so finished; never a warning. I wish I’d had some time to nurse him. In a way, it’s a chance to settle things.”

“Did things need settling?”

“They always do, don’t they?” She sat looking out the window, then said softly, “I wonder where I’m headed.”

“You’re not headed anywhere,” Kate said. “I want you right here to see me settle down into normal American womanhood.”

Her mother smiled reassuringly. “Where are my grandchildren?” she said. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

“You stick around,” said Kate, “and I promise to start working on it.”

In the wake of enormous commercial and critical success for “Black Tickets” (“a crooked beauty,” Raymond Carver said; the signs of “early genius,” opined Tillie Olsen), Phillips did not yield to the common diseases of early fame — arrogance, paralysis.

Within five years, she had produced her first novel, “Machine Dreams.” Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, chosen as one of the best 10 books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Phillips’ first novel begins with a chapter titled “Reminisce to a Daughter” and goes on to explore an ordinary family against the backdrop of war. Once again, a mother and a daughter are central to the story. Their bond is both fractured and necessary; loss is threatening, adulthood is closing in.

In 1994, following a long period during which Phillips gave birth to two children and suffered the death of both her parents from cancer-related illnesses, she published “Shelter,” a novel steeped in darkness and twisted lure. The book begins, “Concede the heat of noon in summer camps,” and then asks even more of its readers, above all a willingness to travel to the heart of unabashed evil and then grope back out toward the light.

While many critics hailed “Shelter” as a major step forward, others shied away from the book’s dense, lyrical rendering of the loss of innocence. Sales — at 22,000, strong for a book of literary fiction — did not meet its publisher’s expectations.

For a writer who had early on won critical raves and commercial success as well as two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the task of producing another full-length work could have been wrought with new pressures and doubt. But Phillips, who has always maintained that she writes for her own “psychic survival,” persisted — quietly, resolutely, bowing to nothing but her own imagination. Anyone who tried to interview her during those years hit a wall. She insisted on the big, white line between the books she wrote and the life that she was working hard to live.

In Prague, I knew Phillips first as the hub of her family — the mother of two sons and the wife of an amiable physician whose eyes I once saw wet with tears as his wife read an essay about her work. Sometimes, in that place of seashell-colored buildings and accordion music and weddings that seemed spontaneous and hopeful, our families would explore together: boutiques and towers, the checkered countryside. She was guarded, perpetually cautious, never carefree. She was, it always seemed to me, more comfortable alone.

And yet. When it was just Phillips and me, just the two of us over hot chocolate and coffee, she was also generous and vulnerable, refreshingly direct. She would tell stories about Sam Lawrence. He was the editor whom she discovered while attending a workshop at a writing conference, a man she later called, in an inscription in her novel “Shelter,” “the angel of my writing life, in every word.” He was her editor until he died six years ago, another grueling, heart-rending death for the author. Phillips remembered:

“Mr. Lawrence,” I asked him, “do you publish short stories?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said. I gave him an edition of “Sweethearts” [published by Truck Press in 1976] and he phoned me and asked me to bring my stories to Boston. And that’s how it began.

Phillips would talk, too, about her interest in stories and monologues that evoke an entire world. She would ask about me, about my ambitions. And the more I got to know her, the more she talked about a book she was just then working on, a book that seemed laden, forbidden, seductive, a book that it was finally time to write.

It didn’t have a name back then. It was a pastiche of images drawn from life. “I’ve been writing about the lining in a baby’s drawer,” she’d say, and then she’d go on to name the specifics — a white bureau, paper adorned by pastel teddy bears small as polka dots — each word meticulously chosen, each word, it occurred to me, a tax on memory and imagination. “I’ve been writing about a daughter and a mother. I’ve been writing about cancer. I’ve been writing about birth.” It seemed that it was important not to press, to simply listen and wait for whatever might be coming next.

And so I waited and I listened and I understood that Phillips wasn’t a daughter anymore. Life had turned her on its pivot and taken her to the opposite side of the breach. She was the mother now — she was the one who had to take care, who had to soothe, who had to hone her own lonely instincts and finally trust them. Her subject now was motherhood. The daughter lived in memory.

When I saw Phillips again it was 1996, the Bread Loaf Conference in Middlebury, Vt. The book that had been fragments in Prague had matured into chapters, an overarching vision.

“MotherKind,” as the book would soon be known, would capture nearly a year in the life of a young woman named Kate, whose first pregnancy and bewildering months as a parent coincide with the exquisite pain of caring for her dying mother. Two stepsons would be featured in the book, as well as a first son, a doctor husband and a town near Boston. Kate would be a writer born and raised in West Virginia. The mother, Katherine, would be a former schoolteacher who never would quite stop sharing her every confidence with her daughter. The book would carry the past into the present. It would look back at what had been lost, at things dissolved. It would be told in an airtight third person, from Kate’s perspective.

From the back of a drafty auditorium, I listened as Phillips read an early chapter. In the scene that day, the baby was home from the hospital. Katherine, the mother, had come to live out her final months in Kate’s unruly house. Kate was nursing; she was drifting through her life:

He was her blood. When she held him he was inside her; always, he was near her, like an atmosphere, in his sleep, in his being. She would not be alone again for many years, even if she wanted to, even if she tried. In her deepest thoughts, she would approach him, move around and through him, make room for him. In nursing there would be a still, spiral peace, an energy in which she felt herself, her needs and wants, slough away like useless debris. It seemed less important to talk or think; like a nesting animal, she took on camouflage, layers of protective awareness that were almost spatial in dimension. The awareness had dark edges, shadows that rose and fell. Kate imagined terrible things.

“MotherKind” is the sort of involving, brokenhearted book that easily could have devolved into the sentimental in another writer’s hand. It relates a circumstance and not a plot. It divulges how it feels to need a mother, to lose a mother, to become a mother.

This is a book about forfeiting the strongest link one has to one’s self, about turning around and spinning a web toward the baby in one’s arms. It’s about the circle of healing that does not close, about what will never be replaced. There is poetry on the fringes; there is real life in between; there is the planted perspective of the protagonist Kate, who never wavers from what faces her, nor from her own reactions to many uncontrollable fates.

“MotherKind” is a book for families, but it is a book for writers, too, shot through with Phillips’ own lessons about words and the indelible weights they carry. Early in the book she writes:

Words are so often maligned by their meanings; Kate conceives of words as implements of pure energy, washed, infused, shadowed or illumined by all they carry in endless combination with one another. She writes words and works with them, for pay and for succor; she believes words open in the intangible spheres of their construction, yet stay apart from the world of use, innocent of motive, of healing or harm.

“MotherKind,” Phillips says today, “is about paradoxes and patterns. It is meant to invite the reader into a layering of experience that is nearly limitless, yet wholly ordinary and familiar. I want this book to reach the large number of readers who are actually grappling with these issues in their day-to-day lives, and then to look beyond those lives, into what surrounds all of us.”

She speaks to me from her home in Boston, her boys in the background, her mind busy with a syllabus she is preparing on a course called Primal Pictures, a course that, she says, “focuses on primal loss and its role in the development of the artist’s consciousness.” She speaks to me, wary, as she has always been, of taking what she has wrought into the world, of trusting the rest of us with the secrets she shares.

“MotherKind” is a book about loss by a writer famous for her protected loneliness. It is a stunning meditation on family by a woman who pioneered a shocking rootlessness. It is a lesson in writing by an author who is known to spend days patiently beading together words, knotting them into place, securing the clasp.

Whatever happens next with the book is beyond Phillips’ control. She understands this better than most writers do, understands the separation between a person and a book, the demand that each be evaluated on its own mysterious, ineluctable terms.

Bill, I say to my husband, who’s at the wheel. For God’s sake, Bill, we’re going to fall. And then, because God has intervened, we are miraculously spared.

Earth, in this southwest knuckle of France, is a phantasma of layers. It is our planet left essentially alone or, more true, it is our planet respected. Ruined stone castles crumble down hills. Iron crosses sprout out of unlikely limestone pilings, like rusty bouquets to religion. I come from a place where land has been disregarded, pulped, and here, in this region of unblemished possibility, I suffer from a sadness that is also partly prayer.

On the day we leave for La Grotte Rose, the valleys are obscured by fog. It all burns off before noon, and by then we are already too far gone along a narrow necklace of road to turn back. Closing my eyes, I leave the navigation to Bill and the entertainment to our son, Jeremy, who is doing a fair impersonation of Ricky Martin in the back of the rented Renault.

At one hairpin curve some 860 meters up, Bill swerves and curses a camper barrelling down wide on the opposite side of the single-lane road. I put one hand over my shut eyes and sip at the air through clenched lips. When the earth decides to level out again, I open my eyes to find a dull gunmetal-algae landscape, with evergreens that are stumpy and ill-shaped. We pass through a town big enough to have a name, small enough to be contained in a single photo. The roofs of its five houses scrape against the ground. A battalion of white geese honk their unilateral opinion.

The caves, when we reach them, are a relief. We are offered former visitors’ discarded sweaters to wear, for it is cold — 10 degrees — inside the earth. We are given the history, which sounds like folklore, about a shepherd named Sahuquet who, one crisp autumn day in 1880, saw a fox enter a fissure in the rocks. Being the good shepherd he must have been, Sahuquet set off in pursuit, fitting himself between the stones. It wasn’t until his eyes adjusted to the light that he saw the ghosts knocking their heads against the smooth domed ceiling, the colored magic wands thrusting up from the nether world. At the very instant he let out a scream, others — invisible, haunted — let out screams back at him. This was hell of course, and Sahuquet ran from it, pawing his way back into the sun. Vowing never to return, he never did.

But he told his friends what he had seen and heard, and soon enough, Edouard-Alfred Martel, a fancy lawyer hungry for adventure, had brought the nascent craft of speleology to the caves. It is him we must thank for the lighted stairs we’re about to descend.

In the sun, we fiddle with our adopted sweaters until the tour guide, his story over, finally steps aside to let us through. Inside the caves, the air seems more wet than cool, and we pull our arms in toward our chests, like birds settling their wings. There must be two dozen of us on this tour, and when I turn around there is already no sign of sun behind us, no evidence of the gray-green tundra, or of the nasty gap at the edge of the Jonte cliff, through which we are now walking. Claustrophobia has no business here. Over the next damp hour, we will walk for two kilometers and go 120 meters down into the crepuscular belly of the earth.

It’s a church we’re looking at, and then a tortoise, a minaret, Father Christmas, a hall turned pink. It’s the needles of stalactites hanging overhead and a burnished community of stout, determined stalagmites, some shaped like small-capped mushrooms, others like the free-form sand castles I used to pull through my fingers beside the tide pools of the Jersey shore.

The guide speaks in French. We pay acute attention, recalling what we already know. Look around, we imagine the guidesaying to us, and remember the chemistry of caves. How rainwater is not neutral, but acid, and yes, remember how curious rainwater is. How it creeps, trickles and gropes between fissures and rock layers — breaking the earth’s surface into clints and grikes and sinkholes, opening tunnels into which streams may disappear.

And how it keeps on running underground, dissolving rocks, chiseling out networks and passages, tunnels and caves, caverns and unreachable domes. How it sets the stage for the crenelated stalactites overhead, and for the stalagmites, which are both wrinkled and eerily smooth. And sometimes the stalactite and the stalagmite become one, as if columns were commissioned to serve the domes. Rainwater alone, dissolving the calcite of limestone, yields a single color: white. Where there is ferrous oxide, we are given red and yellow, pink. Where manganese oxide makes its presence known, there are shadows of charcoal and grey.

Down we go, farther down; I take Jeremy’s hand into my own, wanting the comfort he always yields. Eeww la la, he whispers. Eeww la la, in his very best French, with the innocent awe of childhood. I fumble around with my camera, certain all the while that I won’t succeed. The colors will be wrong and how do you photograph a glisten anyway, how do you train your lens to measure the distance between yourself and a sky of stone?

We go down, and we go farther down, past a church pulpit, a flock of sheep, a forest of candles, something the guide calls the chaos of subsidence, into corridors, chambers and halls. It takes a full century to produce five centimeters of petrification. And yet, look at this petrified waterfall — 100 meters long and 20 meters high. Look at the elephant ears hanging above us. Look where we have come to, far down now, and deep as we’ll ever go.

Jeremy, I whisper, still holding his hand, which has warmed slightly in mine. Imagine cavemen living in this wild place. Imagine thinking that the dome overhead was the first important sky and the sky that we know, the cup of heaven. That the sound of the water ceaselessly dripping was the sound of the wind going by.

Eeww la la, he says. They must have thought they lived in magic.

I bet.

They must have whispered.

Sure.

They must have been scared when they turned the lights out.

I take a deep breath. I fill my lungs with the fumes of the earth. I feel drops of mysterious mischievous rain burst on my head, wriggle toward my right ear lobe. If I stood here long enough, I think, I’d be draped in a cloak of colored calcite. I’d be sealed inside the earth, in the dark, in a place 500,000 years old. A place that knows nothing of life on the other side, a place where nothing ever changes, not really, save the size and shape of all that glistens, and the echoes of astonished little boys.