A Year in Provence (11 page)

“
Eh oui
,” he said, “not big”—he held his hands up, about twelve inches apart—‘but if you’re bitten you need to get to a doctor within forty-five minutes, or else …” He pulled a dreadful face, head to one side, tongue lolling from the side of his mouth, “They say that when a viper bites a man, the man dies. But when a viper bites a woman”—he leaned forward and waggled his eyebrows—“the viper dies.” He snorted with amusement and offered me one of his fat yellow cigarettes. “Don’t ever go walking without a good pair of boots.”

The Lubéron viper, according to Professor Massot, will normally avoid humans, and will attack only if provoked. When this happens, Massot’s advice was to run in zigzags, and preferably uphill, because an enraged viper can sprint—in short, straight bursts on level ground—as fast as a running man. I looked nervously around me, and Massot laughed. “Of course, you can always try the peasant’s trick: Catch it behind the head and squeeze until its mouth is wide open. Spit hard into the mouth and
plok
!—he’s dead.” He spat in demonstration, hitting one of the dogs on the head. “But best of all,” said Massot, “is to take a woman with you. They can’t run as fast as men, and the viper will catch them first.” He went home to his breakfast leaving me to pick my way cautiously through the forest and practice my spitting.

E
ASTER WEEKEND
arrived, and our cherry trees—about thirty of them—blossomed in unison. From the road, the house looked as if it were floating on a pink-and-white sea, and motorists were stopping to take photographs or walking tentatively up the drive until barking from the dogs turned them back. One group, more adventurous than the rest, drove up to the house in a car with Swiss plates and parked on the roadside. I went to see what they wanted.

“We will picnic here,” the driver told me.

“I’m sorry, it’s a private house.”

“No, no,” he said, waving a map at me, “this is the Lubéron.”

“No, no,” I said, “that’s the Lubéron,” and pointed to the mountains.

“But I can’t take my car up
there.
”

Eventually he drove off, puffing with Swiss indignation and leaving deep wheel marks in the grass we were trying to turn into a lawn. The tourist season had begun.

Up in the village on Easter Sunday, the small parking area was full, and not one of the cars had local plates. The visitors
explored the narrow streets, looking curiously into people’s houses and posing for photographs in front of the church. The young man who spends all day sitting on a doorstep next to the
épicerie
was asking everyone who passed for ten francs to make a phone call and taking the proceeds into the café.

The Café du Progrès has made a consistent and successful effort to avoid being picturesque. It is an interior decorator’s nightmare, with tables and chairs that wobble and don’t match, gloomy paintwork, and a lavatory that splutters and gurgles often and noisily next to a shabby ice-cream cabinet. The proprietor is gruff, and his dogs are indescribably matted. There is, however, a long and spectacular view from the glassed-in terrace next to the lavatory, and it’s a good place to have a beer and watch the play of light on the hills and villages that stretch away toward the Basses-Alpes. A hand-lettered notice warns you not to throw cigarette ends out of the window, following complaints from the clientele of the open-air restaurant below, but if you observe this rule you will be left undisturbed. The regulars stay at the bar; the
terrasse
is for tourists, and on Easter Sunday it was crowded.

There were the Dutch, wholesome in their hiking boots and backpacks; the Germans, armed with Leicas and heavy costume jewelery; the Parisians, disdainful and smart, inspecting their glasses carefully for germs; an Englishman in sandals and an open-necked striped business shirt, working out his holiday finances on a pocket calculator while his wife wrote postcards to neighbors in Surrey. The dogs nosed among the tables looking for sugar lumps, causing the hygiene-conscious Parisians to shrink away. An Yves Montand song on the radio fought a losing battle with the sanitary sound effects, and empty pastis glasses were banged on the bar as the locals started to drift off toward home and lunch.

Outside the café, three cars had converged and were growling at one another. If one of them had reversed ten yards, they could all have passed, but a French driver considers it a moral defeat to give way, just as he feels a moral obligation to park
wherever he can cause maximum inconvenience and to overtake on a blind bend. They say that Italians are dangerous drivers, but for truly lethal insanity I would back a Frenchman hurtling down the N100, late and hungry, against all comers.

I drove back from the village and just missed the first accident of the season. An old white Peugeot had gone backwards into a wooden telegraph pole at the bottom of the drive with sufficient force to snap the pole in two. There was no other car to be seen, and the road was dry and dead straight. It was difficult to work out how the back of the car and the pole had contrived to meet with such force. A young man was standing in the middle of the road, scratching his head. He grinned as I pulled up.

I asked him if he was hurt. “I’m fine,” he said, “but I think the car is
foutu.
” I looked at the telegraph pole, which was bent over the car, kept from falling by the sagging phone line. That also was
foutu.

“We must hurry,” said the young man. “Nobody must know.” He put a finger to his lips. “Can you give me a lift home? It’s just up the road. I need the tractor.” He got into the car, and the cause of the accident became clear; he smelled as though he had been marinated in Ricard. He explained that the car had to be removed with speed and secrecy. If the post office found that he had attacked one of their poles they would make him pay for it. “Nobody must know,” he repeated, and hiccupped once or twice for emphasis.

I dropped him off and went home. Half an hour later, I went out to see if the stealthy removal of the car had been accomplished, but it was still there. So was a group of peasants, arguing noisily. Also two other cars and a tractor, which was blocking the road. As I watched, another car arrived and the driver sounded his horn to get the tractor to move. The man on the tractor pointed at the wreck and shrugged. The horn sounded again, this time in a continuous blare that bounced off the mountains and must have been audible in Ménerbes, two kilometers away.

The commotion lasted for another half hour before the Peugeot was finally extracted from the ditch and the secret motorcade disappeared in the direction of the local garage, leaving the telegraph pole creaking ominously in the breeze. The post office men came to replace it the following week, and attracted a small crowd. They asked one of the peasants what had happened. He shrugged innocently. “Who knows?” he said. “Woodworm?”

O
UR FRIEND
from Paris examined his empty glass with surprise, as if evaporation had taken place while he wasn’t looking. I poured some more wine and he settled back in his chair, face tilted up to the sun.

“We still have the heating on in Paris,” he said, and took a sip of the cool, sweet wine from Beaumes de Venise. “And it’s been raining for weeks. I can see why you like it here. Mind you, it wouldn’t suit me.”

It seemed to be suiting him well enough, basking in the warmth after a good lunch, but I didn’t argue with him.

“You’d hate it,” I said. “You’d probably get skin cancer from the sun and cirrhosis of the liver from too much plonk, and if you were ever feeling well enough you’d miss the theater. And anyway, what would you do all day?”

He squinted at me drowsily, and put his sunglasses on. “Exactly.”

It was part of what had become a familiar litany:

Don’t you miss your friends?

No. They come and see us here.

Don’t you miss English television?

No.

There must be
something
about England you miss?

Marmalade.

And then would come the real question, delivered half-humorously, half-seriously: what do you
do
all day? Our friend from Paris put it another way.

“Don’t you get bored?”

We didn’t. We never had time. We found the everyday curiosities of French rural life amusing and interesting. We were enjoying the gradual process of changing the house around so that it suited the way we lived. There was the garden to be designed and planted, a
boules
court to be built, a new language to be learned, villages and vineyards and markets to be discovered—the days went quickly enough without any other distractions, and there were always plenty of those. The previous week, as it happened, had been particularly rich in interruptions.

They started on Monday with a visit from Marcel the Parcel, our postman. He was irritated, barely pausing to shake hands before demanding to know where I had hidden the mailbox. He had his rounds to do, it was almost noon, how could I expect him to deliver letters if he had to play
cache-cache
with the mailbox? But we hadn’t hidden it. So far as I knew, it was down at the end of the drive, firmly planted on a steel post. “
Non
,” said the postman, “it has been moved.” There was nothing for it but to walk down the drive together and spend a fruitless five minutes searching the bushes to see if it had been knocked over. There was no sign that a mailbox had ever been there except a small post hole in the ground. “
Voilà
,” said the postman, “it is as I told you.” I found it hard to believe that anyone would steal a mailbox, but he knew better. “It is quite normal,” he said, “people around here are
mal fini.
” I asked him what that meant. “Mad.”

Back to the house we went, to restore his good humor with a drink and to discuss the installation of a new mailbox that he would be happy to sell me. We agreed that it should be built into the side of an old well, positioned at the regulation height of seventy centimeters above the ground so that he could drop letters in without having to leave his van. Obviously, the well had to be studied and measurements taken, and by then it was time for lunch. Post office business would be resumed at two o’clock.

A couple of days later, I was summoned from the house by a car horn, and found the dogs circling a new white Mercedes.
The driver wasn’t prepared to leave the safety of his car, but risked a half-open window. I looked in and saw a small brown couple beaming at me nervously. They complimented me on the ferocity of the dogs and requested permission to get out. They were both dressed for the city, the man in a sharply cut suit, his wife in hat and cloak and patent-leather boots.

How fortunate to find me at home, they said, and what a beautiful house. Had I lived here long? No? Then I would undoubtedly be needing some genuine Oriental carpets. This was indeed my lucky day, because they had just come from an important carpet exhibition in Avignon, and by chance a few choice items remained unsold. Before taking them up to Paris—where people of taste would fight to buy them—the couple had decided to take a drive in the country, and fate had led them to me. To mark the happy occasion, they were prepared to let me choose from their most exquisite treasures at what they described as
very interesting
prices.

While the natty little man had been telling me the good news, his wife had been unloading carpets from the car and arranging them artistically up and down the drive, commenting loudly on the charms of each one: “Ah, what a beauty!” and “See the colors in the sun” and “This one—oh, I shall be sad to see it go.” She trotted back to join us, patent boots twinkling, and she and her husband looked at me expectantly.

The carpet seller does not enjoy a good reputation in Provence, and to describe a man as a
marchand de tapis
is to imply that he is at best shifty and at worst someone who would steal the corset from your grandmother. I had also been told that traveling carpet sellers often acted as reconnaissance parties, spying out the land for their burglar associates. And there was always the possibility that the carpets would be fakes, or stolen.

But they didn’t look like fakes, and there was one small rug that I thought was very handsome. I made the mistake of saying so, and Madame looked at her husband in well-rehearsed surprise. “Extraordinary!” she said. “What an eye Monsieur has. This is
indisputably our favorite too. But why not have something a little bigger as well?” Alas, I said, I was penniless, but this was brushed aside as a minor and temporary inconvenience. I could always pay later, with a substantial discount for cash. I looked again at the rug. One of the dogs was lying on it, snoring gently. Madame crooned with delight. “You see, Monsieur? The
toutou
has chosen it for you.” I gave in. After three minutes of inexpert haggling on my part, the original price was reduced by 50 percent, and I went to fetch the checkbook. They watched closely while I made out the check, telling me to leave the payee’s name blank. With a promise to return next year, they drove slowly around our new rug and the sleeping dog, Madame smiling and waving regally from her nest of carpets. Their visit had taken up the entire morning.

The final interruption ended the week on a sour note. A truck had come to deliver gravel and, as I watched it backing toward the spot the driver had chosen to unload, the rear wheels suddenly sank into the ground. There was a crack, and the truck tilted backwards. A pungent and unmistakable smell filled the air. The driver got out to inspect the damage and said, with unconscious accuracy, the single most appropriate word for the occasion.

“
Merde
!” He had parked in the septic tank.

“So you see,” I said to our friend from Paris, “one way or another, there’s never a dull moment.”

He didn’t reply, and I reached over and took off his sunglasses. The sun in his eyes woke him up.

“What?”