Amour Provence (17 page)

At six o'clock, an orchestra set up in the square under the sycamore trees, whose branches had been grafted together so they formed a leafy net that cast a profound, cooling shadow. Didier pulled one of the folding chairs near the bandstand and sang along with the old songs being played. People occasionally slapped him on the back and laughed at his booming voice that was slightly off-key. That night he was inebriated to the point that he didn't mind what anyone thought, he simply remained in his own private world, imbibing the delicious evening air and trying to stay steady on his rickety seat. Sometimes he would get up and sway to the music, watching the people going to and fro. To Didier, all the women in the square looked wonderful, the voluptuous ones with their low-cut blouses that revealed round, fleshy breasts, and the pert girlish ones who wore short skirts to show off their slender legs. All were equally fine as far as he was concerned. He looked them up and down and muttered to himself
“Ah, les gonzesses!”—
What dames!—with an approving nod.

The aroma of grilling meats began to waft from charcoal braziers. On the street below, spicy
merguez
sausage and kebabs on sticks were being served along with cardboard containers of
frites
. Didier felt hungry as he always did when he smelled or saw something good. But he continued to sit alone in the square watching the women. Once in
a while two would dance together to the music of the orchestra and Didier could barely restrain himself from jumping up to join them, dreaming of pressing their pliant flesh beneath his fingers and holding them close. But drunk as he was, he knew he couldn't cross that line. If he'd been sober, he might have had his choice of dancing partners. Since he was fit and not bad-looking, he was attractive to a variety of the village women. But tonight they would shy from his touch, frightened by his red face and his rough farmer's hands. They might even laugh at him, and that would be unbearable.

Finally, the vendors began to close up for the night, pulling drapes of colored cloth over their stands. He looked up to see Antoine Moravec holding an open bottle of his unlabeled, personal stock. Moravec passed it to Didier, who took a swig.

“You make the best wine in the village,” Didier said. “Apart from mine, of course.”

Moravec laughed and said, “Didi, you're all alone tonight. Come on, let's get something to eat.”

“I'm not hungry,” said Didier, sitting up. Moravec's comment about his aloneness bothered him. He'd been careless getting drunk. Besides, he didn't particularly like the widower Moravec or his wines.

“Then have a drink at my house.”

“Another time,” said Didier firmly.

“All right, enjoy yourself,” said Moravec, leaving him with the half-filled bottle.

When the vintner wandered off, Didier moved to the edge of the square and sat on the wide stone wall that
formed the northwestern rampart of the town. At the end, the black windows of the tumbledown tower gaped. Just below, he could see his patch of vineyard where sunlight still slanted across the lush grape leaves. Above, in the shadow of the tower, stood Sabine's stone farmhouse. He remembered that once a luxuriant vine had grown up the side of the place, but now the wall was barren. Her front door was closed tight, as were the shutters on the street side. They would probably be closed on the other side as well, filtering out the light just the way she liked it, only one small, dim bulb left burning within to relieve the total darkness.

Didier remembered the shock of seeing the house blazing like a ship on a black sea the night her husband, Bruno, had been shot to death in a hunting accident. All these years later it was still whispered that he'd been murdered by a jealous husband, but no one really knew the truth. When Didier had entered with his mother the next day to pay their condolences, it had seemed like a different house from the one he knew, the shutters open wide and the brightly lit rooms quite the opposite of the dark interiors where he had spent hours in a miasma of blind, thoughtless sensation with Sabine.

As he peered over the rampart, no one loitered in the lanes below. The Dombasles never came to the fête. Manu didn't have any wine to sell since all his grapes went to the cooperative. Nor did Sabine participate. She had never cared about selling anything at a fair. She didn't knit or make pottery or crafts, but he remembered her cakes and the heavy aroma of spice that would occasionally greet him
as he entered her dim vestibule. And then there was the luscious smell of her skin. If she could have sold that, Didier would have been happy to buy. But everything between them had ended with shock and mourning.

He sat feeling a little more sober. As the evening sun turned the olive groves in the distance from teal to gold, Didier slipped off the wall still holding the bottle of wine and walked to the edge of the square. The leaves above him were absolutely still. He looked at his watch. Christine wouldn't be expecting him for another hour or so. He wended his way around the rampart and then out through the gate and into the winding street below, a place he hadn't walked in years. Cement planters mounted along the stone balustrade were empty of blossoms, the earth inside them cracked and dry. This part of the village seemed uncared for, as if abandoned by its inhabitants. He sauntered down the steep street, well aware that what he was doing was bordering on the insane. And then he was at Sabine's door.

When she opened the house to him, it was as if nothing had changed. The darkened shadowy anteroom, the exterior shutters fastened tight in the salon, and the windows open to let in the evening air were all so familiar. Sabine glided back into a dark corner as Didier shut the door behind him. Standing still, he let his eyes get used to the half light. A familiar smell hung in the air, cinnamon with a hint of vanilla. Sabine was still straight, unbent by age, her face hidden in shadow even as his eyes adjusted. He put the wine bottle on the table.

“Have a drink,” he told her. A tray of upturned glasses rested on the sideboard and she reached out, poured a half
glass, took a sip, then drank it straight down. Didier stood very still and then he opened up his hands and lifted them toward her. Great heaving gasps racked his chest as if he was expelling the last of the air from a life that had turned into emptiness itself. Sabine slipped backward toward the kitchen door, where she removed a lace cloth from a small round table. She pulled it over her head and the tatted edges hung down over her face. For a moment, she looked to Didier like a strangely enshrouded bride. And then she spoke.

“Didi, you come here after all this time looking for me! But I don't exist any longer—not the way you wish me to.”

Didier's hands fell to his sides. Sabine's voice had the same seductive sound, a little hollower perhaps, but with the exact cadence he'd once known by heart.

He stood there in the darkness trying to make out her face through the lacy disguise, knowing that if he touched her she would crumble like the scales of a dried-up fish whose flesh had been consumed long ago. But she had once been everything, her smooth arms and her breasts that he believed belonged to him alone, and that voice, that strong stream that washed over him, removing him from time and place, pulling him to her.

He could not speak. What might he express to her if he did?
Sabine, what you awoke in me is an unendurable torture that has ruined any semblance of happiness I might have had. I curse you for corrupting me, for abandoning me . . . for getting old!

After a moment, Didier forced himself backward toward the front door. Sabine hadn't moved. She stood in the tenebrous corner watching him from beneath the web of lacy cloth.
He grasped the doorknob. And as he did Sabine whispered, “You were my one true one! But I didn't dare hold on to you, Didi. You had a right to live life your own way.
”

The intensity of feeling that coursed through Didier kept him silent. After a moment, he turned to look at her. “Sabine” was the only word he could utter. He opened the door and peered into the empty street. Then, believing himself unseen, he slipped outside.

He had no intention of ever going back to Sabine's house. That Saturday of the fête, his inhabitual inebriation, and the roiling torment provoked by the street woman's curses had brought him to a level of baseness that shamed him. He tried to push the incident out of his mind. But afterward, his thoughts took on a depressing clarity that had previously been obscured. At night, Christine was always there to make his supper, his girls like twittering birds, either scampering up to their rooms or turning their backs on him as they went out the door to meet their friends. It was a semblance of life, but not real, and it had become abhorrent to him. He realized that he and Christine never went to people's houses together or entertained at home. She regularly went off in the evening to meetings at school, or out with Amélie and Mimi to concerts or the cinema, things that didn't interest Didier. And almost every night she visited her father in his big house in the neighboring town of Beaucastel. Christine's father, still a wealthy man, now suffered an impaired, arthritic dotage with servants hired to help with every aspect of his life. When Christine returned after her visits, there was no question of making love. She'd sigh or yawn, evidence of her exhaustion, and
Didier knew that if he simply caressed her arm or the nape of her neck, she would pull away.

For a long time, his evenings had ended with a small snifter of his own homemade
marc de Provence
that would send him straight into a deep slumber. But his nights alone had become increasingly burdensome to him. He no longer enjoyed the glassful of
marc
. It simply agitated and awakened him. Reading or listening to music wasn't entertaining and the television bored him. He thought of his youth and the final days at lycée when he and Berti Perra had grown close. But she was long gone with a new life in Scotland. There had been no chance for them, just a few happy moments that made his present existence seem so much worse. To ease his malaise, he began to take walks through his vineyards or up into the mountains after nightfall. But one night, stumbling along an unlit road, he felt the absurdity of his ramblings and the full weight of a profound alienation pressed upon him. His dreams of a lover who would accept him unconditionally were like fluttering wisps of ash over a hot fire. He would never find someone with whom he could feel free. And the emotion that had overcome him in Sabine's house began to recur with increasing intensity during his solitary walks.

Coming down from the mountainside one autumn night when a waning gibbous moon hung like a tilted silver coin, he smelled the sweet alcoholic perfume of grapes that had been left on the vines after harvest, grapes overlooked during the
vendange
or rejected because they had ripened too late. Didier found himself on the low road with a view upward to the village, the clutch of sycamore trees in the
square, the twinkling windows of the stone houses that mounted willy-nilly up the rocky hillside to the medieval church and the fortified garrison at the top. He forced his eyes to bypass Sabine's house. Even so, he detected an evanescent light behind the shutters and felt an urge to mount the narrow road. But he couldn't allow that to happen again. The fantasy of finding in Sabine the woman who had once been such a delight to him was madness. It was still before midnight, so he ducked into the café, where the owner was drying glasses with a linen towel and placing them on the shelf behind the bar. Michel waved him in and said, “
Entre, mon vieux!
I'll buy you a drink.” Didier had a quick cognac as Michel flipped the chairs upside down onto the tables and swept the floor, all the while complaining about the lack of clientele now that the summer was over.

After saying good night, Didier found himself outside again, fueled by the warmth of the now inhabitual alcohol. Knowing that he would have to walk it off before he could sleep, he took the road downward through a small copse of trees, then skirted the rocky embankment that brought him to the bridge spanning the Ouvèze River. It had rained for several nights and in the darkness the water ran black as oil rising up over the rocky banks and splashing against the cement stanchions beneath him. The moon was reflected in multiples in the unquiet water and appeared to jerk nervously like a fish on a line. Past the bridge lay the cement depot with its piles of sand, gravel, and hewn stone. A light glimmered dully from the encampment beyond where six or seven trailers housed a dozen souls. Some called that little clan of people Gypsies, but they weren't the Roma of
Didier's youth, who traveled in wooden caravans pulled by mules with an occasional stolen goat hitched at the back. Still, there was something unsavory about those temporary dwellings and he suspected that if an opportunity presented itself to rob a stranger, or make an easy break into an isolated house, it wouldn't be resisted. In fact, one of the inhabitants had been arrested just a month before for pickpocketing at the town market. The people who lived there seemed nothing more than worthless sludge, like the roiling muddy torrent that was plowing along beneath the bridge that night.

Didier looked at the sky, willing himself to think of nothing, not his family, not the little tribe living there in the wasteland down by the river, or anyone else. Instead, he began to whistle a tune through his teeth, a Spanish melody that was a staple in the Midi wherever there were gatherings of people who liked to dance the old-fashioned paso doble. The tune reminded him of the toreadors and running bulls and twirling black-haired women with clapping castanets that he'd seen at the ferias in Nîmes and Arles. And then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something coming toward the bridge. At first, he believed it to be a sand-colored dog trotting near the side of the river. He kept up his whistling and turned his face toward a sky that was filling with ashy clouds blotting out the moon. Another rainstorm on its way. When he looked over again, he saw that it wasn't an animal but a person coming toward him, a person walking in a kind of odd hop-skip. Didier made little drum sounds with his lips, remembering the rise in tempo that signaled dancing men to pull their partners close in a wild turn.
And then the person was on the bridge and Didier continued his tune. The wind batted against him in its own percussive way as he recognized the khaki jeans and sandals and flapping cotton blouse, the same things she always wore. It was the peanut roaster's woman, the one whom he'd seen drunk in the early morning at the
fête du village
. She'd no doubt been at it again, as a wobble punctuated her bouncing step. Her eyes, wide and glimmering, observed him, whether with fear or interest he couldn't tell. He kept on whistling and humming, and it sounded to his own ears like a welcome, something that could never be considered sinister or frightening on an autumn night when there was no one else about.