Amour Provence (28 page)

When he returned, he stood next to her for a moment. Then he leaned down and took her hand. As Berti felt his touch it was obvious that his youthful ineptness had disappeared. She considered asking him to leave right then and there. Instead, she felt a kind of languor come over her as he gazed down at her in silence. Then he lifted her hand and she felt his warm breath on the inside of her wrist. The tips of her fingers naturally curled to touch the sandpapery cheek that somehow felt just as pleasurable to her as his kiss. But she managed to take hold of herself and gently extricate her hand.

“This can't happen.” Berti stood up. “We'd never have any peace. Everyone would know about us in two minutes. Just you appearing like this tonight—”

But Didier cut her off. “I couldn't care less what people think. We're not children anymore, Berti! Or is it my reputation that's bothering you? You're afraid you'll be seen associating with a pervert?”

She shook her head, not knowing what to say. But it was true that she didn't want her life poisoned by vicious, small-town gossip. Harassment of an elderly woman, a
neighbor, was what Didier had been accused of. And the victim was Sabine Dombasle, whom he'd known all his life.

Didier's hands dropped to his sides and he walked back to the window, where the streetlamp emitted its citrine glow. She could smell the aroma of the strong red wine and felt somehow intoxicated by it, knowing all the while that this was impossible. The electric radiator hummed and she felt her face grow red. She wanted to turn it off, but she didn't dare draw closer to Didier.

“I'd like to tell you what happened, Berti,” Didier finally said. “It's important to me that you know. Will you listen?” She fixed her gaze on the glowing window. He must have taken her stillness for an affirmation because he went on talking in a low voice. “Remember when we used to take the school bus together in the morning? We were still just kids with another whole year or two of lycée ahead of us. It was then, that spring, that Sabine Dombasle started something up with me. It was my first experience with sex and it was exciting. I won't tell you it wasn't. Sabine took the lead and I was more than ready for all of it. But when her husband was shot to death in that hunting accident, it all came to an end. I never saw her again except when I'd spot her from afar. Our relationship was over just like that, as if it had never happened.”

Didier slowly passed his hand over his forehead with a sigh. Then he continued. “One night a couple of years ago, I'd had too much to drink at the
fête du village
and something reminded me of Sabine—the Sabine of
then
. So I went to her house as I had as a boy. That night she'd seemed
strangely like her old self, even acting as if she'd been expecting me.

“Of course, I didn't touch her. She's an old woman. There was no denying that fact even in my drunken state. But I was shaken, standing there in her presence again, hearing her voice and remembering how she'd once been. When I left Sabine that evening, her son, Manu, must have seen me go and eventually forced some sort of false confession out of her. I have no idea what she told him. It's not important. Afterward, Christine divorced me. I come back to the village only to work the vines and see my daughters. If not for those things, I would never have shown my face in Serret again.”

Berti kept her eyes on Didier. They faced each other in silence for quite a while. Finally, she heard him say, “I still don't understand what drove me to Sabine's that night. Perhaps I was hoping to pull the world down on top of my head.” And then he moved away from the window. “I better go,” he told her. The streetlight flashed like boiling glass as he drew close to her. Didier cupped her face in his large, rough hand. Then he took his coat and left.

In March, an unseasonable hot spell caused blossoms to suddenly sprout forth on the fruit trees. Berti was aware that warm weather in early spring didn't come without risk. A frost could easily ruin an early-budding orchard. Winegrowers also became concerned when the sun's rays became too strong too early, and fragile, canary-colored leaves pushed out of the brown papery bark of the vines. Still, Berti felt grateful for the blue skies, a sign that spring was on its way, bringing with it change.

It was eight o'clock when she went down the stone staircase to the street, thinking that she'd have time to stop at the village café before going to work at the
mairie
. The air was cool first thing in the morning and she'd wound a heavy scarf around her neck. The café owner, Michel, automatically made her what she always had: a noisette, strong espresso with a dash of milk. But that morning instead of his usual friendly greeting he scowled and said, “It's not even the season yet and I'm already sick of the tourists. When they're not here I make no money, but when they are, the place is bursting at the seams and I can't stand it! I've decided that at the end of the summer I'm going to sell this place and move up to the mountains, where the real people live, to a village where one can expect regulars all year round!”

“We'll all be very sad if you do that,” said Berti, stirring a lump of sugar into her coffee. “Maybe you'll change your mind.”

He shook his head. “I've had it up to here with the traffic, the boutiques, the fancy restaurants—all just to attract more tourists!” Berti kept her mouth shut. Part of her job at the
mairie
was to promote tourism. All the villages that made their money from wine were eager to attract visitors. But perhaps Michel was right; there were just too many of them.

It was still early and Berti decided that instead of driving to work she would walk, taking the long way around the village. As she descended through the stone portal, the closely pruned vineyards looked like ordered patchwork. The first thing she passed on the road was Sabine Dombasle's house.
Berti had spotted Sabine at the weekly market just before Christmas, dressed in an old black coat. She'd been turning over orange rutabagas at a vegetable stand. Perhaps she had been planning a Christmas dinner for Manu. Berti imagined them huddled over a table together, eating silently. She wondered if Sabine ever felt guilty about betraying Didier, the person with whom she'd obviously once been so enthralled.

When she reached a dip in the road, she saw one of Didier's vineyards spread across the hillside. Here the exposure to the sun was different from the other vineyards. No burgeoning buds were showing on the vines, so if another frost came, his grapes wouldn't suffer any harm. She found herself emitting a sigh. She hadn't seen Didier since that rainy night a month or so before and the thought of him made her uncomfortable and a little sad. She tried to concentrate on the beauty around her and the warm sunshine that felt like a soft hand caressing her hair, but that made her remember Didier's touch and she picked up her pace.

Her favorite part of the walk was through a sandy gully where brambles and small overhanging bushes made an archway overhead. Even without leaves the branches were so thick that they turned the air around her blue. A swampy odor ascended from the dank sand. She'd played there as a child, hiding in the undergrowth during games of
cache-cache
and then breathlessly clambering up the steep chalky sides of the slope where tree roots were the only purchase. A great fear had always overwhelmed her as she fled to a hiding place. Even though she was playing with friends, the image of her father bearing down upon her, his teeth
clenched in anger, always arose before her. Sometimes, in her panic to get away, she tore her flesh on thorns, causing beads of blood to form upon her arms and wrists as she bounded into the sheltering woods beyond. She never felt the pain of the scratches until later because the terror of the moment had been so intense. But then came the thrill of getting away scot-free.

At Easter time, Berti was given a week's vacation. She had made no particular plans, having instead spent all her free time the month before filling out forms in order to gain entry into a program at the University of Montpellier. One of her old school friends, a vintner named Rémi Faraud, told her that he and a dozen other winemakers had plans to open a shop that would sell their wines right there in the village. They all thought Berti would be perfect to run the place since she knew the region so well and would be able to speak English to the tourists. At Montpellier she signed up for several courses that had to do with the cultivation of wine. She had begun to think she might rent a tiny apartment there in the autumn, or simply move out of her tower in Serret for good. After all, Montpellier was a big town, where she'd make a lot of connections in the business. If the local vintners actually got their wine store up and running, she could always move back to the vicinity.

Berti decided to spend part of her Easter holiday at the sulfur springs in Mondraque, a village up beyond Mont Ventoux, where she could relax alone at the spa there. She threw her things into the backseat of her Clio and took the road to Saint-Maxence, passing by its Roman bridge and on up into the region of the Drôme, where the Toulourenc
flowed in a deep crevasse below the steep mountain roadside. All along the way the river glittered like a silver ribbon under a sapphire sky. Wild fruit trees were in full bloom on the slopes, and Berti's heart lifted at the sight of the tiny purple and white blossoms on the gnarled plum and apple trees. The imposing Mont Ventoux loomed on the other side of the gorge. There was still snow on the summit, which, from her angle, appeared elongated, like a white cat stretched upon a pillow. She remembered going up there as a girl with friends one Saturday, hoping to spot wild chamois on the high slopes. But they'd all been shocked not only by the excruciating gusts, a mistral so strong that they could hardly keep their footing, but also by the intemperate chill, even though it had been the month of May. At a particularly precipitous point where she had not taken account of how perilously the gravel rolled beneath her feet, she'd lost purchase and begun to slide down the rocky cliff, beneath which there was nothing to halt her fall. Just as she'd opened her mouth to scream, a strong hand had grabbed her arm and pulled her back. For a moment, she couldn't move or speak, she'd been in such a state of panic.

“Ça va?”
a voice behind her had softly whispered. And she'd realized it was her friend Didier who had reached out just in time.

Berti found herself speeding and slowed the car. The road upward curved in tight switchbacks, making the wheels careen as if they were on ball bearings. She passed through familiar mountain hamlets with signs advertising homemade sausage and millefleur honey. Farther on she came by a fenced-in trout farm that had been there since she was a child.
Its huge stone basins, larger than swimming pools, were filled with glittering gray-pink hatchlings that swam in synchrony like birds. Finally, she descended to the village of Savoillans, whose plowed fields and single lane of houses bordered the Toulourenc. The sober village church stood just past a stone bridge that arched over the river, and on a whim Berti drove across it and pulled up next to the bell tower. Across the way, a solitary horse with a round, muscular chest looked up at her from a field where newly sprouted grass gleamed a verdant chartreuse. She remembered that there was a fountain on the main
place
, fed from a mountain spring. Feeling suddenly thirsty, she rounded the corner and drank deeply from the iron spout.

Afterward, she returned to where the horse was grazing and followed the path to an adjacent field. Feeling the ground warm beneath her feet, she lay down upon it and gazed up into the branches of a linden tree. On the other side of the field stood a line of poplars barely budded, their shoots shimmering like lemon drops in the morning light. Berti put her hands beneath her head and stared up at the cloudless sky. Nothing's going to drive me away from here for long, she thought as she lay in the warm patch of grass. She felt her body relax and conform to the shape of the earth, and in her repose she realized how stressed she had been between money concerns, getting used to her work at the
mairie
, and dealing with the red tape that entrance into the university entailed. On the cushioned ground she breathed in the scent of wild honeysuckle and a feeling of peace settled within her. Behind her, the horse made a contented snuffling noise.

When she turned her mind to what the afternoon at the spa in Mondraque would offer, the pleasurable sensation dissipated. The fountains there spurted sulfurous waters that were considered revivifying to bathe in and to drink. Her nostrils flared at the thought of the water's aroma of rotten eggs and the hot briny taste. Inside the spa was a good-sized swimming pool, but Berti didn't enjoy jumping in because no sun entered through the tinted windows and the water was cold. She decided that she would avoid the pool and perhaps sunbathe on the little terrace with a view over the town and then have a massage. But she remembered the salt rub a fleshy Eastern European masseuse had given her the previous visit that had caused red welts like little cuts to appear on her skin.

Berti gazed at the cerulean sky against which the branches of the linden moved to and fro. Finally, she decided she'd better go. She walked slowly back to her car, contemplating the way light and shade shifted on the speckled ground. Leaving the village, she bumped back over the steep bridge that traversed the river. After only a few kilometers, she came to a crossroads where she pulled over and stopped her car. A sign pointing to the left indicated Mondraque and its spa. To the right, three other signs listed the high mountain villages of Banon, Simiane-la-Rotonde, and Sault. Berti remembered what a lovely drive it was up there, especially in summer when the lavender fields were in full bloom. She'd done it often as a girl and had even once taken her sons there for a picnic and a leisurely promenade through the ordered lines of purple and gray lavender.