Amour Provence (16 page)

He took the steps two at a time up the cavernous staircase that traversed the rampart wall and led to the maze of medieval streets upon which no cars could pass. Some of the other vintners, those with cellars in the village, already had their cases of wine stacked and ready. Tasting glasses emblazoned with the town crest of a tower with crossed keys were lined up next to bottles containing whites, reds, and summery-pink rosés. Christine would take charge of selling Didier's wine. She was on vacation from her job as an administrator at the local lycée, the same school that his daughters attended. They had promised to help their mother that day, leaving Didier free to do what he liked. He didn't need to promote or sell his wine at small fairs like this. Distributers handled most of his production for him, so the only vintage he would be offering that day was his simplest Côtes du Rhône.

At the top of the stairway, the town weaver already had her handmade woolens and multicolored jackets hung neatly from wooden racks. The white-haired old lady had lived in the village for most of her life, though she was originally from a neighboring town. Like many Provençal who
have had deep roots in one place for generations, Didier considered her a stranger. But he greeted her politely. After all, they'd known each other since he was a small boy.

At the village fountain, small chairs and tables from the tea shop were arranged near the moss-covered stone heads that spouted water into the circular basin. Thérèse, the lanky brunette who owned the place, already had an assortment of cakes arranged on golden doilies. She was ten years younger than Didier and he gave her an appreciative grin. Like many southern women, she was dark-complexioned with almond eyes that gleamed like varnished oak. He could easily imagine Thérèse without her clothes because she resembled his wife.

“Here, Didi, have a piece of
quatre-quarts
.” She held out a platter to him. “On the house!” Didier thanked her and put the entire half-cut slice of pound cake into his mouth. He would have enjoyed sitting down with Thérèse, but it didn't do to be seen too often with any of the village women. It could be dangerous if a husband got wind of something, whether or not it happened to be true. “Look but don't touch” had become his motto. He didn't want any trouble.

He continued down the cobbled streets, striding along over the sharp stones in his heavy work boots. Each cobble beneath his feet had been hand-chipped into its cubed shape hundreds of years before and fit exactly into its particular spot in the narrow alley. The perfection of the stonework always amazed him. The whole town was made in this way, each stone cut in accordance with the one next to it and placed just so, like a complicated puzzle. And then there were the very special, round
galets
, egg-shaped river stones
that paved the esplanade in front of the village church, the place where he and Christine had been married. Noble stones like those were barely obtainable anymore since it took hundreds of years of flowing water to create the smooth, river-polished ovoids that now graced only the most ancient cloisters or the entrances to wealthy people's châteaux. Didier had seen Serret's church entrance photographed in tourist guidebooks. Seven hundred years ago those stones had been hauled out of the river one by one and brought up to the top of the village in wooden-wheeled donkey carts to be laid by hand.

As he descended the main street, he nodded to the various merchants. In the shady niche of her doorway sat his friend Jeannot's mother, Marie Rose Pierrefeu. As she always did, Marie Rose had made several trays of
oreillettes
for the fête, delicate, fried sugar cookies that would stay crisp and fresh for only a matter of hours. Didier bought a sachet of them and his booming voice could be heard praising Marie Rose's confections up and down the narrow alley.

When he got to the café the double doors were open to the bright morning light. Didier didn't intend to continue any farther, definitely not down through the lower gate that led to the opposite end of town. For him that remained an uninviting neighborhood, and even though his vines covered several of the sloped hectares located just below the village there, he avoided the road. His old schoolmate Manu Dombasle lived down on the plain. There was no particular rancor between them, but Manu wasn't a vintner the way Didier was. After his father's death, he'd sold the most valuable property and now he simply delivered his production of
grapes to the cooperative, not even bothering to vinify it himself. The co-op wine was mediocre pinard as far as Didier was concerned and he didn't respect growers who didn't care enough to create their own vintages. Manu, who was unmarried, was naturally taciturn like so many
paysans
, but the truth was that he was an unkempt, lazy man who generally appeared as if he'd slouched out of a barnyard. Beneath the medieval tower at the end of the rampart, still in residence in the long rambling farmhouse, Manu's mother, Sabine, passed her days behind closed doors. She was old now, a widow who lived quietly, seeing practically no one. When he passed through his fields at night, Didier sometimes glimpsed the flicker of a lamp through her shuttered window and remembered all too clearly what she'd been like when she was young and desirable, and what she'd meant to him. But Sabine was more than twenty years older than Didier and ever since their affair had ended, he'd gone out of his way to avoid her. A month previously, he'd glimpsed her from a distance clothed in one of those shapeless dresses that snapped up the front with wide sleeves to cover old-crone arms. He'd felt a strange despair, as if seeing his own grave opened up before him, but was quick to harden himself. Sabine was nothing to him other than a fleeting reminder of the grim reaper's hourglass, the inevitability of the
croque-morts
who would come to take you away when the spirit departed, leaving nothing behind but a shrunken cadaver with stiff feet.

Standing at the zinc counter of the café, Didier downed his espresso in one gulp as the bartender Michel set up chairs and tables outside on the graveled terrace. Today visitors
would fill the tables, consuming wine, sodas, and the ubiquitous glasses of yellow pastis served with a jug of water alongside to temper the strong alcohol. Already people lined the bar as others pulled up chairs to the Formica-topped tables. The song floating from the jukebox was Jacques Brel's
“Ne me quitte pas.”
Then a couple stumbled together into the bar.

Didier had seen the two around since the winter. They lived in a trailer camp at the edge of the river in a dilapidated van hoisted onto cement blocks. The man made what living they earned by selling sugared peanuts at outdoor markets. Didier supposed he'd be setting up somewhere in the village that day with his hot pans of caramelized
cacahuètes
that he scooped into paper cones. But now he was with his woman. That was the only way to describe her. She probably wasn't his wife or girlfriend, nothing as respectable as that. She was the scarecrow he lived with, her hair dried out and frizzled like old corn husks, her arms mottled, though she couldn't be much older than thirty. Even her face had that brown animal look of something kicked about and smeared with a strange dusky color like cheap makeup, but it was simply her sunburned flesh. The couple ordered two pastis and downed them full force without adding the usual quotient of water. Nine o'clock in the morning with the whole day still ahead. Only craggy-faced alcoholics who passed their days in bars drank their pastis like that. When the woman ordered a second, the peanut seller tapped her on the shoulder. Without even looking at him, she reared back and let loose a stream of invective. “
Petit con! Emmerdeur!
Don't you tell me what to do!” When he tried to put his arm around her, she let off another vile sally.

All the patrons turned to look. One didn't generally hear that kind of language first thing in the morning, and certainly not from a woman. Didier's wife, Christine, never uttered anything stronger than
“mon Dieu!”
Like the rest, Didier was surprised by the foul, grinding speech of the wretched woman. As her man eased her backward past the bar, Didier got a whiff of her breath. She must have been up all night drinking. He noticed her dirty fingernails, her dust-covered sandals, but still he gave a sideways glance to the hard nipples that poked against her light shirt, the flat belly beneath. He imagined the tawny hair that would cover her sex and the way her slender legs would meet at the top. Didier ran his hand over his face. As he counted out the centimes to pay for his coffee, her curses echoed off the stone walls of the alley. Inside the café, Michel closed the doors as his clients silently waited to see what might happen next. Didier stood motionless there at the bar, falling into a trance as he listened and found himself taken back to a time when that sort of language, whispered rather than shouted, would pull him along as if he were attached to an unbreakable cord and the only thing he could think about was his own satisfaction. That day, the woman's shouts were palpable, laden with a perverse erotic promise, culminating for Didier in a soul-wrenching longing he hadn't felt in years. And he thought of Sabine, once so vibrant and alive, the married woman he'd made love to in secret when he was just an adolescent boy, the dream that had once been the center of his universe, now impossible to ever revisit or revive.

His coins clattered on the metal counter and he forced himself out into the street, moving rapidly in the opposite
direction from the couple. He took a breath to calm himself, but his exhale ended in a drawn-out groan. He looked around to make sure no one had heard and mounted one of the narrow, less-traveled alleyways. His big feet moved unevenly over the steps of graduated cobbles and he felt as though his heart was being cut and abraded by the same sharp stones that he traversed.

He stopped in a shaded curve of a stairwell where he knew he would be alone. Cacti in full, golden bloom cascaded over the wall above him and he realized that it had been years since he'd had someone to love who loved him back. He suddenly laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of his thoughts and, looking down at the perfectly cut stones at his feet, knew that unlike them he would never fit into place in the perfect way they did. He didn't fit anywhere. And Didier suddenly found himself with the anguished thought that he'd never known even a remote intimacy with his wife, Christine. Didier would have enjoyed making love with her at dawn that morning when those lavender clouds hung over the horizon, but she'd been up before him, as she always was. At night, when it was pitch-black except for a brilliant, laughing star or two, she would turn away from him. And on the rare occasions when she did let him touch her, Didier sensed that it was just because she felt the weight of her own miserliness. The fact was, she wasn't attracted to him, maybe never had been. That's how it felt to him, her unyielding reaction to his appalling needs. He supposed she didn't ask for a divorce because she was a Catholic, or perhaps the appearance of happiness and normalcy was enough for her. In the shadow of the staircase,
he let his wrist graze against himself, feeling his sex heavy and soft. His face suddenly clogged with emotion, and he wiped away what he could with a handkerchief, trying to get himself under control.

The sky was already shimmering white, the sun a burning opal at midmorning. Didier stumbled up to the top of the village, where the river-stone esplanade fanned outward from the church in a half-moon separated by lines of blue pebbles like some fantastic astrological map meant to interpret the heavens. Just beyond, a balustrade presented a vista over the entire valley, a view even better than the one from Didier's house because it was so much higher. And below hung the eternal clouds over the Rhône, a single file of pure white cavorting lambs. He knew that view so well, but that day it did not seem a part of him and he felt set adrift like one of the clouds.

Didier wished he could find some place where he could be by himself, but he knew that the church with its crenellated bell tower would be locked. There was no retreat. The white sun scalded his forehead. He tried to breathe normally but his chest felt like it might explode. Looking down, he saw the stands set up on the Place des Platanes, some with colored parasols or gaily striped awnings slanted over them. Christine and the girls would be down there somewhere selling his wine, charming the locals and the summer tourists. He pressed his fingers against his eyes until green and gold lights flashed against the darkness. Then he forced himself to move, descending rapidly through the casbah of winding streets and passageways that led beneath stone archways or by hidden gardens glimpsed through wrought-iron gates.
He wandered up and down through the village for an hour or so, not speaking to anyone, just making his way silently through the maze of narrow alleys where only an occasional lost visitor might penetrate. Finally, there was nothing to do but return home. He found his elder daughter, Mimi, and his wife in the kitchen.

“Amélie said she'd take care of the stand this afternoon if
Maman
and I would make a cake for dinner tonight,” fourteen-year-old Mimi informed him with a giggle. Christine appeared as gay as her daughter as she measured out sugar into a bowl. Didier wrapped his fingers lightly around her arm, but she shook him off as if confused by his touch. At lunch, Didier ate in silence, his head hanging above his plate.

He thought about taking his tractor for a promenade through his vines during the afternoon, but the heat was unbearable, the sun seeming to radiate right through the flesh into bone itself. So he kept up his ramblings in the shady areas of town, and finally, as the shadows lengthened, forced himself to visit his fellow
vignerons
, who were absorbed in selling their vintages. Usually he tasted with precision, rolling the wine over his tongue, breathing it in, and then using the spittoon that was always provided for serious oenophiles. But that day he didn't spit out a drop. Instead he drank the wines down and roared out his approval whether they pleased him or not. By the time he reached the fourth vintner, Antoine Moravec, his palate was so jaded that everything tasted just fine. Like the wine that had flowed down his gullet, his discernment was gone. Aware that his voice was getting louder and louder, he simply didn't care.
His cries echoed in the stone rooms where the wine barrels lay on wooden pallets, and his body emanated an almighty heat even though the temperature of the
caves
, long ago chiseled by hand into the rocky mountainside, remained cool even on the worst summer days.