Vineta

I've been running in the Estérel since I was fifteen.

Always the same paths. San Peyre on the left, the red track under the pines, the smell of resin sticking to the throat when the sun beats down. The body knows every turn. The feet know where the roots break through the ground. I could run with my eyes closed here too.

That day I went further.

I don't know why. The legs decided. I was on holiday at my parents' place, in Mandelieu. The vaporizer had done its work. The head was soft. The flow was there before the first step. And instead of turning at San Peyre like always, I kept going straight.

The track sank deeper. The ridges rose around me without me noticing. The red rock became more present, more bare. The pines thinned. And at some point I understood I was in a hollow. A bowl. As if the mountain had collapsed on itself a very long time ago and left a round hole in the middle.

A caldera. I learned that later. Two hundred and fifty million years. A volcano that emptied its lava and whose roof caved in. And at the bottom of the hole, me, soaked in sweat, stoned, running on brick dust.

Then the concrete.

Grey. In the middle of the red. Two squat domes rising from the maquis. Rusted metal crosses. Walls covered in tags up to shoulder height, as if the vandals didn't know how to climb. A sealed door with a Templar cross. And total silence. The kind of silence that has weight.

I stopped.

It wasn't surprise that stopped me. It was the calm. An immediate, absolute calm, as if the place demanded it. As if by entering the caldera I had crossed a threshold I couldn't see.

I walked around for an hour. The basin shaped like a nautilus, the broken tiles at the bottom. The open-air amphitheater, the concrete bleachers facing nothing. A V-shaped sculpture aimed at the sky. And everywhere this feeling that someone had built something immense here, for reasons no one understood anymore.

Notre Dame du Labeur. Our Lady of Toil. I researched it when I got home. A Parisian banker in the sixties. Mystic. Freemason. He built an Orthodox chapel for his wife at the bottom of an extinct volcano. His daughter blew glass there. Artists came. Then no one.

Thirty years of abandonment. The doors bricked shut. The maquis reclaiming. Tags over prayers.

And here I am, soaked in sweat, the vaporizer in my pocket, looking at the rusted crosses against the blue sky. And I don't feel anything sad. No melancholy. No nostalgia for a place I never knew alive.

Wellbeing. Pure calm.

Someone built here because he felt what I feel. The hollow of the caldera absorbing all the noise in the world. The red rock with two hundred and fifty million years of patience. And this silence that isn't absence but concentrated presence.

He put concrete in the volcano. Domes in the forest. A Templar cross on a door that no one will open again. He tried to fix something that can't be fixed.

I put words on a screen.

It's the same gesture. The same bottle in the sea. You build in the middle of nowhere because you don't know what else to do with what you carry. And you know the maquis will reclaim it. That the tags will come. That the doors will end up sealed.

But you build anyway.

Because the caldera asks for nothing. Not from the banker sixty years ago. Not from me today. It waits. And when you arrive with your body emptied and your head in ashes, it does the only thing it knows how to do. It absorbs.

Stay.