A Year in Provence (18 page)

Madame told us what we owed. Fifty francs each for the food, and four francs for the coffee. The wine was included in the price. No wonder the place was full every day.

Was it really true she was going to retire?

She stopped polishing the bar. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I had to choose whether to work in the fields or in the kitchen. Even in those days I hated the land. It’s hard, dirty work.” She looked down at her hands, which were well kept and surprisingly young-looking. “So I chose the kitchen, and when I married we moved here. I’ve been cooking for thirty-eight years. It’s enough.”

We said how sorry we were, and she shrugged.

“One becomes tired.” She was going to live in Orange, she said, in an apartment with a balcony, and sit in the sun.

It was two o’clock, and the room was empty except for an old man with white stubble on his leather cheeks, dipping a sugar lump into his Calvados. We thanked Madame for a fine lunch.

“
C’est normal
,” she said.

The heat outside was like a blow on the skull and the road back to the house was a long mirage, liquid and rippling in the glare, the leaves on the vines drooping, the farm dogs silent, the countryside stunned and deserted. It was an afternoon for the pool and the hammock and an undemanding book, a rare afternoon without builders or guests, and it seemed to pass in slow motion.

By the evening, our skins prickling from the sun, we were sufficiently recovered from lunch to prepare for the sporting event of the week. We had accepted a challenge from some friends who, like us, had become addicted to one of the most pleasant games ever invented, and we were going to try to uphold the honor of Ménerbes on the
boules
court.

Long before, during a holiday, we had bought our first set of
boules
after watching the old men in Roussillon spend an enjoyably argumentative afternoon on the village court below the post office. We had taken our
boules
back to England, but it is not a game that suits the damp, and they gathered cobwebs in a barn. They had been almost the first things we unpacked when we came to live in Provence. Smooth and tactile, they fitted into
the palm of the hand, heavy, dense, gleaming spheres of steel that made a satisfying
chock
when tapped together.

We studied the techniques of the professionals who played every day next to the church at Bonnieux—men who could drop a
boule
on your toe from twenty feet away—and came home to practice what we had seen. The true aces, we noticed, bent their knees in a crouch and held the
boule
with the fingers curled around and the palm facing downward, so that when the
boule
was thrown, friction from the fingers provided backspin. And there were the lesser elements of style—the grunts and encouragements that helped every throw on its way, and the shrugs and muttered oaths when it landed short or long. We soon became experts in everything except accuracy.

There were two basic types of delivery: the low, rolling throw that skittered along the ground, or the high-trajectory drop shot, aimed to knock the opponent’s
boule
off the court. The precision of some of the players we watched was remarkable, and for all our crouching and grunting it would take years of applied effort before we would be welcomed to a serious court like the one in Bonnieux.

Boules
is an essentially simple game, which a beginner can enjoy from the first throw. A small wooden ball, the
cochonnet
, is tossed up the court. Each player has three
boules
, identified by different patterns etched into the steel, and at the end of the round the closest to the
cochonnet
is the winner. There are different systems of scoring, and all kinds of local bylaws and variations. These, if carefully planned, can be of great advantage to the home team.

We were playing on our own court that evening, and the game was therefore subject to Lubéron Rules:

1. Anyone playing without a drink is disqualified.
   

2. Incentive cheating is permitted.
   

3. Disputes concerning the distance from the
   cochonnet
   are mandatory. Nobody’s word is final.
   

4. Play stops when darkness falls unless there is no clear winner, in which case blind man’s
   boules
   are played until there is a torchlight decision or the
   cochonnet
   is lost.
   

We had gone to some trouble to construct a court with deceptive slopes and shallow hollows to baffle visitors, and had roughened the playing surface so that our luck would have a sporting chance against superior skill. We were quietly confident, and I had the added advantage of being in charge of the pastis; any signs of consistent accuracy from the visiting team would be countered by bigger drinks, and I knew from personal experience what big drinks did to one’s aim.

Our opponents included a girl of sixteen who had never played before, but the other three had at least six weeks of practice between them, and were not to be treated lightly. As we inspected the playing surface, they made disparaging comments about its lack of regularity, complained about the angle of the setting sun, and made a formal request for dogs to be banned from the court. The old stone roller was trundled up and down to humor them. Moistened fingers were held in the air to gauge the strength of the breeze, and play commenced.

There is a distinct, if slow, rhythm to the game. A throw is made, and play stops while the next to throw strolls up for a closer look and tries to decide whether to bomb or whether to attempt a low, creeping delivery that will sidle round the other
boules
to kiss the
cochonnet.
A contemplative sip of pastis is taken, the knees are flexed, the
boule
loops through the air, thuds to earth, and rolls with a soft crunching sound to its resting place. There are no hurried movements and almost no sporting injuries. (One exception being Bennett, who had scored a broken roof tile and self-inflicted concussion of the toe during his first and last game.)

Intrigue and gamesmanship make up for the lack of athletic drama, and the players that evening behaved abominably.
Boules
were moved by stealth, with accidental nudges of the foot. Players poised to throw were distracted by comments on their stance, offers of more pastis, accusations of stepping over the throwing line, warnings of dogs crossing the court, sightings of imaginary grass snakes, and conflicting bad advice from every side. There were no clear winners at halftime, when we stopped to watch the sunset.

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.

“T
HERE 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 comprenezi
” 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. “
Měme 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.