A Year In Provence Read online

To the west of the house, the sun was centered in the V made by two mountain peaks in a spectacular display of natural symmetry. Within five minutes it was over, and we played on in the crépuscule, the French word that makes twilight sound like a skin complaint. Measuring distances from the cochonnet became more difficult and more contentious, and we were about to agree on a dishonorable draw when the young girl whose first game it was put three boules in a nine-inch group. Foul play and alcohol had been defeated by youth and fruit juice.

  We ate out in the courtyard, the flagstones sun-warm under our bare feet, the candlelight flickering on red wine and brown faces. Our friends had rented their house to an English family for August, and they were going to spend the month in Paris on the proceeds. According to them, all the Parisians would be down in Provence, together with untold thousands of English, Germans, Swiss, and Belgians. Roads would be jammed; markets and restaurants impossibly full. Quiet villages would become noisy, and everyone without exception would be in a filthy humor. We had been warned.

  We had indeed. We had heard it all before. But July had been far less terrible than predicted, and we were sure that August could be dealt with very easily. We would unplug the phone, lie down by the pool, and listen, whether we liked it or not, to the concerto for jackhammer and blowtorch, conducted by Maestro Menicucci.

  August

  "THERE IS a strong rumor," said Menicucci, "that Brigitte Bardot has bought a house in Roussillon." He put his spanner down on the wall and moved closer so that there was no chance of jeune overhearing any more of Miss Bardot's personal plans.

  "She intends to leave Saint-Tropez." Menicucci's finger was poised to tap me on the chest. "And I don't blame her. Do you know"-tap, tap, tap went the finger-"that at any given moment during any day in the month of August there are five thousand people making pipi in the sea?"

  He shook his head at the unsanitary horror of it all. "Who would be a fish?"

  We stood in the sun sympathizing with the plight of any marine life unfortunate enough to be resident in Saint-Tropez while jeune toiled up the steps carrying a cast-iron radiator, a garland of copper piping slung around his shoulders, his Yale University T-shirt dark with sweat. Menicucci had made a significant sartorial concession to the heat, and had discarded his usual heavy corduroy trousers in favor of a pair of brown shorts that matched his canvas boots.

  It was the opening day of les grands travaux, and the area in front of the house resembled a scrapyard. Piled around an oily workbench of great antiquity were some of the elements of our central heating system-boxes of brass joints, valves, soldering guns, gas canisters, hacksaws, radiators, drilling bits, washers and spanners, and cans of what looked like black treacle. This was only the first delivery; the water tank, the fuel tank, the boiler, and the burner were still to come.

  Menicucci took me on a guided tour of the components, emphasizing their quality. "C'est pas de la merde, ça." He then pointed out which walls he was going to burrow through, and full realization of the weeks of dust and chaos ahead sunk in. I almost wished I could spend August in Saint-Tropez with the half-million incontinent holidaymakers already there.

  They and millions more had come down from the north in the course of a single massively constipated weekend. Twenty-mile traffic jams had been reported on the autoroute at Beaune, and anyone getting through the tunnel at Lyon in less than an hour was considered lucky. Cars and tempers became overheated. The breakdown trucks had their best weekend of the year. Fatigue and impatience were followed by accidents and death. It was a traditionally awful start to the month, and the ordeal would be repeated four weeks later in the opposite direction during the exodus weekend.

  Most of the invaders passed us by on their way to the coast, but there were thousands who made their way into the Lubéron, changing the character of markets and villages and giving the local inhabitants something new to philosophize about over their pastis. Café regulars found their usual places taken by foreigners, and stood by the bar grizzling over the inconveniences of the holiday season-the bakery running out of bread, the car parked outside one's front door, the strange late hours that visitors kept. It was admitted, with much nodding and sighing, that tourists brought money into the region. Nevertheless, it was generally agreed that they were a funny bunch, these natives of August.

  It was impossible to miss them. They had clean shoes and indoor skins, bright new shopping baskets and spotless cars. They drifted through the streets of Lacoste and Ménerbes and Bonnieux in a sightseer's trance, looking at the people of the village as if they too were quaint rustic monuments. The beauties of nature were loudly praised every evening on the ramparts of Ménerbes, and I particularly liked the comments of an elderly English couple as they stood looking out over the valley.

  "What a marvelous sunset," she said.

  "Yes," replied her husband. "Most impressive for such a small village."

  Even Faustin was in fine holiday humor. His work on the vines was finished for the time being, and there was nothing he could do but wait for the grapes to ripen and try out his repertoire of English jokes on us. "What is it," he asked me one morning, "that changes from the color of a dead rat to the color of a dead lobster in three hours?" His shoulders started to shake as he tried to suppress his laughter at the unbearably funny answer. "Les Anglais en vacances," he said, "vous comprenez?" In case I hadn't fully grasped the richness of the joke, he then explained very carefully that the English complexion was known to be so fair that the slightest exposure would turn it bright red. "Même sous un rayon de lune" he said, shuddering with mirth, "even a moonbeam makes them pink."

  Faustin in waggish mood early in the morning was transformed into Faustin the somber by the evening. He had heard news from the Côte d'Azur, which he told to us with a terrible relish. There had been a forest fire near Grasse, and the Canadair planes had been called out. These operated like pelicans, flying out to sea and scooping up a cargo of water to drop on the flames inland. According to Faustin, one of the planes had scooped up a swimmer and dropped him into the fire, where he had been carbonisé.

  Curiously, there was no mention of the tragedy in Le Provençal, and we asked a friend if he had heard anything about it. He looked at us and shook his head. "It's the old August story," he said. "Every time there's a fire someone starts a rumor like that. Last year they said a water-skier had been picked up. Next year it could be a doorman at the Negresco in Nice. Faustin was pulling your leg."

  It was difficult to know what to believe. Odd things were possible in August, and so we were not at all surprised when some friends who were staying in a nearby hotel told us that they had seen an eagle at midnight in their bedroom. Well, perhaps not the eagle itself, but the unmistakable and huge shadow of an eagle. They called the man on night duty at the desk, and he came up to their room to investigate.

  Did the eagle seem to come from the wardrobe in the corner of the room? Yes, said our friends. Ah bon, said the man, the mystery is solved. He is not an eagle. He is a bat. He has been seen leaving that wardrobe before. He is harmless. Harmless he may be, said our friends, but we would prefer not to sleep with a bat, and we would like another room. Non, said the man. The hotel is full. The three of them stood in the bedroom and discussed bat-catching techniques. The man from the hotel had an idea. Stay there, he said. I shall return with the solution. He reappeared a few minutes later, gave them a large aerosol can of fly killer, and wished them good night.

  THE PARTY was being held in a house outside Gordes, and we had been asked to join a few friends of the hostess for dinner before the other guests arrived. It was an evening that we anticipated with mixed feelings-pleased to be invited, but far from confident about our ability to stay afloat in a torrent of dinner party French. As far as we knew, we were going to be the only English speakers there, and we hoped we wouldn't be separated from each other by too many breakneck Provençal conversations. We had been asked to arrive at what for us was the highly sophisticated hour of nine o'clock, and we
drove up the hill toward Gordes with stomachs rumbling at being kept waiting so late. The parking area behind the house was full. Cars lined the road outside for fifty yards, and every other car seemed to have a Parisian 75 number plate. Our fellow guests were not going to be a few friends from the village. We began to feel we should have worn less casual clothes.

  We walked inside and found ourselves in magazine country, decorated by House and Garden and dressed by Vogue. Candlelit tables were arranged on the lawn and the terrace. Fifty or sixty people, cool and languid and wearing white, held glasses of champagne in jeweled fingers. The sound of Vivaldi came through the open doorway of a floodlit barn. My wife wanted to go home and change. I was conscious of my dusty shoes. We had blundered into a soirée.

  Our hostess saw us before we could escape. She at least was reassuringly dressed in her usual outfit of shirt and trousers.

  "You found somewhere to park?" She didn't wait for an answer. "It's a little difficult in the road because of that ditch."

  We said it didn't seem at all like Provence, and she shrugged. "It's August." She gave us a drink and left us to mingle with the beautiful people.

  We could have been in Paris. There were no brown, weathered faces. The women were fashionably pallid, the men carefully barbered and sleek. Nobody was drinking pastis. Conversation was, by Provençal standards, whisper-quiet. Our perceptions had definitely changed. At one time, this would have seemed normal. Now it seemed subdued and smart and vaguely uncomfortable. There was no doubt about it; we had turned into bumpkins.

  We gravitated toward the least chic couple we could see, who were standing detached from the crowd with their dog. All three were friendly, and we sat down together at one of the tables on the terrace. The husband, a small man with a sharp, Norman face, told us that he had bought a house in the village twenty years before for 3,000 francs, and had been coming down every summer since then, changing houses every five or six years. He had just heard that his original house was back on the market, overrestored and decorated to death and priced at a million francs. "It's madness," he said, "but people like le tout Paris"-he nodded toward the other guests-"they want to be with their friends in August. When one buys, they all buy. And they pay Parisian prices."

  They had begun to take their places at the tables, carrying bottles of wine and plates of food from the buffet. The women's high heels sank into the gravel of the terrace, and there were some refined squeals of appreciation at the deliciously primitive setting-un vrai dîner sauvage-even though it was only marginally more primitive than a garden in Beverly Hills or Kensington.

  The Mistral started, suddenly and most inconveniently, while there was still plenty of uneaten shrimp salad on the tables. Lettuce leaves and scraps of bread became airborne, plucked from plates and blown among the snowy bosoms and silk trousers, scoring the occasional direct hit on a shirt front. Tablecloths snapped and billowed like sails, tipping over candles and wineglasses. Carefully arranged coiffures and composures were ruffled. This was a little too sauvage. There was a hasty retreat, and dinner was resumed under shelter.

  More people arrived. The sound of Vivaldi from the barn was replaced by a few seconds of electronic hissing, followed by the shrieks of a man undergoing heart surgery without anesthetic: Little Richard was inviting us to get down and boogie.

  We were curious to see what effect the music would have on such an elegant gathering. I could imagine them nodding their heads in time to a civilized tune, or dancing in that intimate crouch the French adopt whenever they hear Charles Aznavour, but this-this was a great sweating squawk from the jungle.

  AWOPBOPALOOWOPAWOPBAMBOOM! We climbed the steps to the barn to see what they would make of it.

  Colored strobe lighting was flashing and blinking, synchronized with the drumbeat and bouncing off the mirrors propped against the walls. A young man, shoulders hunched and eyes half-closed against the smoke of his cigarette, stood behind the twin turntables, his fingers coaxing ever more bass and volume from the knobs on the console.

  GOOD GOLLY MISS MOLLY! screamed Little Richard. The young man went into a spasm of delight, and squeezed out an extra decibel. YOU SURE LOVE TO BALL! The barn vibrated, and le tout Paris vibrated with it, arms and legs and buttocks and breasts jiggling and shaking and grinding and flailing around, teeth bared, eyes rolling, fists pumping the air, jewelery out of control, buttons bursting under the strain, elegant façades gone to hell as everyone writhed and jerked and twitched and got down.

  Most of them didn't bother with partners. They danced with their own reflections, keeping one eye, even in the midst of ecstasy, fixed on the mirrors. The air was filled with the smell of warm and scented flesh, and the barn turned into one huge throb, seething and frenzied and difficult to cross without being spiked by elbows or lashed by a whirling necklace.

  Were these the same people who had been behaving so decorously earlier in the evening, looking as though their idea of a wild time might be a second glass of champagne? They were bouncing away like amphetamine-stuffed teenagers, and they seemed set for the night. We dodged and sidestepped through the squirming mass and left them to it. We had to be up early in the morning. We had a goat race to go to.

  We had first seen the poster a week before, taped to the window of a tabac. There was to be a Grande Course de Chèvres through the streets of Bonnieux, starting from the Café César. The ten runners and their drivers were listed by name. There were numerous prizes, bets could be placed, and, said the poster, animation would be assured by a grand orchestra. It was clearly going to be a sporting event of some magnitude, Bonnieux's answer to the Cheltenham Gold Cup or the Kentucky Derby. We arrived well before the race to be sure of a good position.

  By nine o'clock it was already too hot to wear a watch, and the terrace in front of the Café César was spilling over with customers having their breakfast of tartines and cold beer. Against the wall of the steps leading down to the rue Voltaire, a large woman had established herself at a table, shaded by a parasol that advertised Véritable Jus de Fruit. She beamed at us, riffling a book of tickets and rattling a cash box. She was the official bookmaker, although there was a man taking off-track bets in the back of the café, and she invited us to try our luck. "Look before you bet," she said. "The runners are down there."

  We knew they weren't far away; we could smell them and their droppings, aromatic as they cooked in the sun. We looked over the wall, and the contestants looked back at us with their mad, pale eyes, masticating slowly on some prerace treat, their chins fringed with wispy beards. They would have looked like dignified mandarins had it not been for the blue and white jockey caps that each of them was wearing, and their racing waistcoats, numbered to correspond with the list of runners. We were able to identify Bichou and Tisane and all the rest of them by name, but it was not enough to bet on. We needed inside information, or at least some help in assessing the speed and staying power of the runners. We asked the old man who was leaning on the wall next to us, confident in the knowledge that he, like every Frenchman, would be an expert.

  "It's a matter of their crottins," he said. "The goats who make the most droppings before the race are likely to do well. An empty goat is faster than a full goat. C'est logique." We studied form for a few minutes, and No. 6, Totoche, obliged with a generous effort. "Voilà," said our tipster, "now you must examine the drivers. Look for a strong one."

  Most of the drivers were refreshing themselves in the café. Like the goats, they were numbered and wore jockey caps, and we were able to pick out the driver of No. 6, a brawny, likely looking man who seemed to be pacing himself sensibly with the beer. He and the recently emptied Totoche had the makings of a winning team. We went to place our bet.

  "Non." Madame the bookmaker explained that we had to get first, second, and third in order to collect, which ruined our calculations. How could we know what the dropping rate had been while we were away looking at the drivers? A certainty had dwindled into a long shot, but we went for No. 6 to win,
the only female driver in the race to come second, and a goat called Nénette, whose trim fetlocks indicated a certain fleetness of hoof, to come in third. Business done, we joined the sporting gentry in the little place outside the café.

  The grand orchestra promised by the poster-a van from Apt with a sound system in the back-was broadcasting Sonny and Cher singing "I've Got You, Babe." A thin, high-chic Parisienne we recognized from the night before started to tap one dainty white-shod foot, and an unshaven man with a glass of pastis and a heavy paunch asked her to dance, swiveling his substantial hips as an inducement. The Parisienne gave him a look that could have turned butter rancid, and became suddenly interested in the contents of her Vuitton bag. Aretha Franklin took over from Sonny and Cher, and children played hopscotch among the goat droppings. The place was packed. We wedged ourselves between a German with a video camera and the man with the paunch to watch as the finishing line was prepared.

  A rope was strung across the place, about eight feet above the ground. Large balloons, numbered from one to ten, were filled with water and tied at regular intervals along the length of the rope. Our neighbor with the paunch explained the rules: Each of the drivers was to be issued a sharp stick, which had two functions. The first was to provide a measure of encouragement for any goats reluctant to run; the second was to burst their balloons at the end of the race to qualify as finishers. Evidemment, he said, the drivers would get soaked, which would be droll.

  The drivers had now emerged from the café, and were swaggering through the crowd to collect their goats. Our favorite driver, No. 6, had his pocket knife out, and was putting a fine point on each end of his stick, which I took to be a good sign. One of the other drivers immediately lodged a complaint with the organizers, but the dispute was cut short by the arrival of a car which had somehow managed to creep down through one of the narrow streets. A young woman got out. She was holding a map. She looked extremely puzzled. She asked the way to the auto-route.