Rat knows the names of only a few of them. There’s the Narbonnaise from the north, there’s the Vent d’Espagne from the south, the Marin, a clammy east wind from the sea that encloses you in a gray-white fog for weeks on end. And then there’s the infamous Tramontane, a harsh howling broom from the northwest that sweeps the clouds from the sky and turns their courtyard into a dust-bowl cyclone, their apartment into a sandpit. When the Tramontane’s blowing, you eat, breathe, pee dust, you go to bed with dust up your nose, and awaken with your head screaming. Other people hate it, but Rat doesn’t mind.

The Tramontane is Rat’s wind. When Rat first started school and didn’t have any friends, Vanessa used to ask her whom she’d played with that day. And Rat would reply, “I played with the wind.”

“Which wind?” asked Vanessa, laughing.

“Ours.” Ours was the Tramontane.

Looking out the back window, as you rise onto the plateau of Château-Roussillon, you catch a last glimpse of the sea and the gray lagoon of Saint-Cyprien, chopped and churning with white-caps. Out Rat’s window, there are fields of artichoke, their long coarse serrated leaves olive-gray. Underneath, the fruits are purplish bruise–colored.

Approaching Perpignan, artichoke fields and vineyards give way to malls. The shops have grills over their windows.

Mist clings in the hollows of land, dark gray clouds engulf the Albères.

Vanessa takes the low road through Perpignan, alongside the river Têt. There’s a tiny shantytown of cardboard boxes and fruit-crate shelters down by the river. A trio of homeless men are huddled by a campfire, and another one fishing, and just below the waste-treatment plant, a blue heron stands lonely in the middle of the river.

As they head up into the hills, the land gets drier. Nurseries, greenhouses, market gardens give way to limestone crags. Garrigues. The only vegetation in these hills is stunted live oaks and yellow broom. Bandit-land. Wild West.

It was Vanessa’s old boyfriend Max who started Vanessa on the brocantes. Max had a Volkswagen van that he’d take door-to-door, asking people if they had anything to get rid of—burnt-out pots, stacks of LPs, sofas with the springs gone. On Wednesdays, he and Rat would go to the town dump to see what they could salvage. People throw away wonderful things: one time Rat found an old-fashioned manual typewriter in mint condition, once you got the e unstuck. On weekends, they’d work the yard sales. Then they’d resell what they’d found at the bigger markets.

Rat loved Max. He was Swiss, but he hated Switzerland. He was the most generous person Rat ever met. Once he gave her a little gold heart that was a locket, and another time, he brought her back from Switzerland an old horn penknife with a folding fork and spoon.