Ilaria holds up her hand. We are in front of a long stone wall, from a privileged age. It is twice the height of our heads and covered in ivy and stretches out as far as we can see on both sides. It blocks out the world, but there is a green gate set into the wall.
“This must be the place,” Ilaria says and after the briefest hesitation pushes on a broken plastic button.
There is no sound of a bell. We wait in silence. Ilaria rings again. Finally, as we have almost given up hope, we hear footsteps crunching on a gravel path and there is a blundering, crashing noise as if the person on the other side of the wall has a log tied to his leg and is dragging it through bushes.
The metal gate opens a crack. A face appears, the eyes are wary like an animal in hiding. The top of the face is hidden by a black hood. The bottom of the face is covered with patchy tufts of beard, like the first growth of wire grass in a dry Spring.
“Apache sent us,” Ilaria says.
The eyes in the face swivel to appraise Ilaria. They take in her dark hair and equally dark eyes, and her radiant and oh-so-innocent smile. The face softens, and the gate opens a crack more.
“Entrez. Vite!” He says pulling us in.
We are suddenly in a secret garden and the city and a troubled electronic world no longer exists. There is a small forest of pine trees and Mediterranean oak. A path, almost hidden by grass winds away through the trees. Above the trees we can just see the roof of a very large house.
The person flips back his hood for a second. He is thin, in his early twenties. His face is young and drawn. He is wearing high leather boots that give him a military air, but the laces are undone.
The man-boy pulls the gate shut. “No one saw you come in did they?”
He darts another look at Ilaria. You get the feeling that if he did get hold of her, he wouldn’t quite know what to do.
“My name is Ulysses,” he says. He doesn’t explain why he has chosen the Roman name for an ancient Greek hero but you could imagine that he was perhaps christened Jean-Luc or Pierre, but then had dreamed of bigger things.
“Bienvenue à Schlub!” He says again.
“Schlub?” Leo asks.
“Oui, oui, Schlub.” Later we learn that such names are part of a cult of anonymity.
Ulysses leans towards us. His hood falls down and shadows his face.
“Have you heard of the disease of the twisted penis?”
We recoil, our backs against the wall.
“Otherwise known as the maladie de Lapeyronie? Well this is the manoir Lapeyronie! It used to belong to one of Montpellier’s most famous and richest families – the doctor who described the twisted penis disease.”
Ilaria beams at him. “I hope they had a good kitchen.”
‘Attention! This place is new and I got big ideas for it.”
He talks with bravado but there is a sadness and defensiveness to him.
“In France there are 2,8 million empty houses, and yet we have many homeless people and people living in bad conditions.”
“I want to build a project which provides solutions to our housing crises and housing policies dominated by market laws and housing speculation. It is abhorrent that these types of places remain unused for decades, only to be later bought by large investors, while elsewhere people go without shelter. I want to promote communal ways of living that provide solutions to our unsustainable and alienated and individualistic lives in this capitalist system where only the rich are well looked after.”
“So you’re the boss here?” Ilaria asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Ulysses replies. “Noone is allowed to be certain about leadership, only the Bourgeoisie are sure.”
I read later that the word squat was first used in England in the 17th century to talk about the occupation of land by the Diggers. It was first used in France after the second world war, when the struggle for housing and the squatters movement began because so much had been destroyed. In 1942, young Catholics created a movement called the Popular Movement for Families. They squatted unoccupied buildings to house working class families. In the 1960s and 1970s, students and left-wing young workers started to create squats to house immigrants and to create utopic communities.
Suddenly, from deep in the undergrowth, comes that sound again, like someone is dragging a body through the branches.
Ulysses turns towards the sound. On the back of his hoodie there is printed, in white, a ragged A surrounded by an O. It is the international Anarchist symbol; the A stands for anarkhia, in Greek, without ruler, and the O stands for order. The O is included as a reference to Proudhon’s definition of anarchism ‘as man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy’.
He flings back over his shoulder.
“It might be a squat but we got rules here. It takes a lot to open a squat and keep it going, so we’ve got to be organised.”
Later I would see just how seriously squat opening is taken in France. It requires serious skills and knowledge. A manual called the ‘The Squat from A to Z’ tells how to choose the ideal house, how to barricade yourself in, how to deal with your first contact with the police and the bailiffs and how to get water and electricity.
The noise in the undergrowth gets louder and louder.
Unworried, Ulysses sets off down the path and beckons for us to follow.