The Lantern (9 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
W
hen the wild cherries had dried on the trees, too small to pick, too hard for the birds, but chewy and delicious and left as treats for us children, we knew it must be close to the fourteenth of July. The date was marked every year in Apt with a party in the big south square and a fairground and fireworks at ten o’clock.
Apart from the village
fête
votive
, also an annual event, this was the highlight of the summer. School long-forgotten and too far in the future even to think about, we celebrated Bastille Day and freedom with a few traditions of our own.
Having spent the afternoon baking, Maman, in her best dress, hair gleaming, would climb daintily (helped by our proud father, suited in brown serge) into the front seat of the
charrette
, the little cart. The baskets would be handed up.
Then the rest of us piled into the
charrette
, and our neighbors in theirs. The horses had a last drink at the trough and were hitched, and off we went. It was quite a party. We could have walked, or even taken the bus down from the village, which stopped where our track joined the road, but it wouldn’t have been the traditional event without the family crammed into the old cart, eating sugar-dusted doughnuts Maman had made that afternoon and singing as we bowled down the hill, swapping jokes and invitations to race with the other carts, the blue of the sky deepening as the orange glow trickled like honey over the mountain ridge, the rippling hills growing taller and more mysterious over us as we descended.
I
n town, the streets were warm as day with all the crowds and fires and lamps. Legions of glasses and bottles stood to attention on tables in the square, restaurants were full, and a band was playing at full strength.
“Midnight, in the usual place,” said Papa sternly, and we were off to enjoy ourselves in all the unaccustomed light and noise.
Marthe, Arielle, and I linked arms and paraded around, stopping to see what the boys were up to at the fairground. For them, that meant the shooting gallery and the desirable prizes to be won by hitting the tin targets.
For Maman and Papa, and the other adults, the dancing was the great attraction. For hours, they showed off their steps, waltzing and fox-trotting, twirling and bending. I was awestruck to see them perform a passable tango, and wondered where on earth they had learned it.
The band was indefatigable, the accordionist mastering the complex rhythms and changes of direction with aplomb and liberal swigs of wine.
T
he fireworks had exploded, leaving smoky trails across the night and a drifting scent of burned excitement. Marthe, Arielle, and I were already at the stage of utmost tiredness, which must never be admitted for fear of not being allowed to stay up late for special events.
We were sitting on a low wall, watching the parade of dancers coming off the dirt floor, the men drinking in the bars, the lights strung up between the plane trees, the musicians beating and blowing and pulling, when Pierre emerged from the inner town.
He passed under the clock tower gateway, rubbing his face with his sleeve. There was an awkwardness to his walk and the slope of his shoulders. Up went his sleeve again. Expression set in anger or disgust, he was about to turn away when three of his friends came running up, shouting to get his attention. One put a hand up to his head and was shaken off.
I strained to see what was happening in the half-shadow of the archway. Now there seemed to be some kind of argument going on. Pierre’s mouth was moving quickly, hands were being raised. It was intriguing. Perhaps there would be a fight. It was about time my brother was on the receiving end of some pain, and it would have been quite satisfying to witness the event.
At the very moment, Marthe pulled at my arm and asked me to take her to the stalls where the doughnuts were frying. In the time it took to take in her request and stand up, Pierre and his friends had been swallowed up by the darkness.
A
t midnight, we assembled on the corner of the square, as arranged. We girls were the first, followed by Maman and the ladies of the party. The men fetched the horses and carts. Papa had taken out his fob watch and was about to comment, when Pierre and the boys came running up.
Pierre claimed that the crusty red mess on his face was the result of a nosebleed, and thanks to the silence from his friends, my parents had no reason not to believe him.
The next morning, Arielle told me, in whispers in the woods above the sheepfold, that her brother had told her what had really gone on. Pierre had been beaten up for stealing by the stallholder he worked for in the market.
The other boys had wanted to go and find the man and his gang, and give them a kicking in return, but Pierre had ordered them to leave it. It was as good an admission of guilt as any.
I don’t know how much of this, if any, our parents were told. Not much, I suspect, but I may have been wrong. Luckily, Pierre’s nose was not broken, or surely our father would have extracted the truth from the boys, and seen the man from the stall subjected to some rough justice.
Whatever theories I had, I decided to hold on to them in the event that they might prove a useful lever against my brother’s excesses.
F
or our return, the lanterns were lit on the cart and, tired, mouths sticky-parched with sugar, the stars so hard and clear above that you could make out the gleaming path of the Milky Way, we allowed ourselves to be jolted back up the hill.
Later, unable to sleep for the excitement, I got out of bed and went over to the open window. Below, in the courtyard, was an oil lamp burning on the ground beneath the olive, and around it, silently, majestically, Maman and Papa were dancing, alone. Her head was on his shoulder, her eyes were closed, and her lovely smile stretched right across her face. Papa was singing, at least I think I heard him, under his breath, so that only she knew what song it was.
I
t is only six kilometers down the hill to Apt, but, to me, the journey signified much more. Until then, sliding into the car, I hadn’t fully realized how little time I’d spent on my own away from the house. Our world of two had been so enjoyable, so comforting in a way I’d never really experienced before, that I had been perfectly content to drift in the flow.
The road down is bumpy as well as sinuous. It makes for an uncertain ride, even before the locals in their extravagantly dented vehicles swoop around the blind bends and out of hidden turnings at top speed in the middle of the road, oblivious to the possibility of encountering anyone else. In town, the Calavon River was high, running through the valley here in its casing of concrete. During the summer, it had been a sad dribble of water along the bottom of the basin, so unthreatening that lush outcrops of grasses and scrubs had grown up on the stones of the riverbed. Warning notices to exercise caution when using the car parks contained within the embankments still seemed unnecessarily alarmist. I took one of the many empty spaces and then walked over the bridge into the main part of the little town.
The last time I was there, it had been market day. It’s one of the most famous in the region; they say that there has been an unbroken line of markets every Saturday morning in Apt for eight hundred years. The narrow medieval streets were crammed with stalls and people, shouting, discussing where to buy the best vegetables, the most succulent game; Dom made for his favorite cheese stall and started bantering with the owner; smells rose of roasting chickens and chestnuts and freshly made pizza; three squares—north, south, and west—offered meat, fish, fruit, carved wood, spices, kitchenware, linens, racks of Indian-made clothes and leather goods from North Africa, bead jewelry, the scented olive oil soaps from Marseille, and all varieties of products made from lavender.
Now the narrow paved road through the center was almost empty. My footsteps echoed loudly, and the same goods had been moved behind shop windows. The warmth and scent of food were gone. A winter smell rode the light wind: the wood smoke of mountain villages. It was possible to look up without fear of obstructing the flow of the crowd. In the bookshop opposite the Hôtel de Ville, I found what I’d been looking for: books about the area, the way life used to be when it was a lost and remote area of France.
Then I bought a newspaper and read it as I sipped a cup of coffee in a café on the square, with only one other customer.
The missing girl’s body had been removed from the wooded ravine below Oppedette; a photograph of police tape that marked a forlorn muddy site. Other stories crowded the page; pictures documented the aftermath of a bad car smash, fatalities involved. More businesses were in trouble. The only good news was to be found in the small announcements of personal success, the civil marriages, and sports prizes.
As I drove back, there was a traffic jam, not unusual on the main road through town toward Manosque and Sisteron. Stationary behind a line of cars and vans, I looked around with interest rather than annoyance. That was the best of this life: there was no rush, no work stress, no beating against the clock; it wouldn’t have mattered to me if we were stuck here for hours.
Opposite was an Internet café I hadn’t noticed before. A couple of men in North African clothing were standing outside talking. Then another came out to join them and the wind caught the tails of their long, white shirts. Useful to know, I thought. It had never seemed odd until now that on our hillside we were all but cut off from the twenty-first century, living with no television, no fixed telephone line or broadband access. Then the car in front began to move and I pulled away.
O
ctober winds post crisp deliveries of dry leaves, torn petals, pine needles, and grit-rolled insects under sun-shrunken doors.
For generations, we women swept them up with the brush and pan, on our knees. Twice a day, when the mistral raged.
There are one hundred and eighty different winds that blow across Provence, all with their different and special names: the mistral, of course, from the northwest; the tramontane from the north; the south wind; and all the minute grades in between. They say there are more than six hundred different variations of the names of the winds.
Here in the Luberon, where around thirty of them are regular visitors, a softer wind from north-northwest is called a
biset
, a little kiss, but the might of a cold north wind is
l’air noir
, or
bise noire
, black air, black kiss. It is violent and chill, like a storm in the depths of a winter’s night without a moon.
A northeasterly is
l’orsure
, or
le vent de l’ours
, the wind of the bear—which, they say, is the wind of melancholy poets, artists, and dreamers. The north-northwesterlies are the
vents de farine
, the winds that grind the millers’ flour. The kindly
vent roux
, the russet winds, are east-southeasterly, close in spirit to the North African sirocco, bringing warm, dry breezes ridden by pollinating insects and rusty Arabian dust.
D
uring autumn and winter, when the worst winds howled, the summer lived on in the red and orange and green of the fruit and vegetables pressed into glass jars and sealed. As the temperature dropped, olive oil went cloudy in the bottle.
Once, when I was still too young to dispute the facts, Pierre warned me that the eerie white shapes held in the oil were imprisoned spirits.
“Like ghosts?” I asked.
“Bad ghosts.”
“Will they escape?”
“They might,” said Pierre.
“If they do, what will we do? Will they catch us if we run?”
“We will be pinned to the ground, unable to move, while they do terrible things.”
“Like what?”
While I stared in wide-eyed horror, he went over to the glass jar with a devilish look on his face, which made his chin look more pointed than ever. He made to drop the jar on the floor.
“Don’t! Don’t!” I begged him.
He gave one more unsettling laugh, but then slowly replaced the jar on the shelf. He would have gone through with his threat, I was sure, but for the rattle at the back door that announced our father’s return from the fields.
C
hange is not always visible, as the turn of the seasons is, or the natural process of aging. We are so many different people in one lifetime. But even now I think Marthe can sense my thoughts, would feel the rough textures of my indecision under her fingers, and taste my failings as easily as she could smell the changing seasons.
As for Pierre: what disturbance occurred inside his head, under his skin, so early in his life? I never understood him.
Why had he come back now? To laugh at me and mock my efforts? Why couldn’t it have been gentle Maman, or Marthe, or, best of all, Mémé Clémentine? A grandmother would have been in the natural order. I might have welcomed her return, given a choice of phantoms. Hers would have been a watchful presence by the hearth, by the entrance to the wine cave maybe, or in the quiet spot in the orchard or the kitchen garden.
I
still grow my own food. I eat vegetables mainly, and fast-growing chickpeas, that peasant standby. I keep as fit as possible, though my joints are not as flexible as they once were. When I wring out the washing, and try to pinch the pegs to hang it out, my fingers take longer than they should to grip. I’ve noticed that after a few hours in the vegetable patch, soil gets stuck in the deep grooves of my hands. Such a lot of scrubbing it takes to get out, and when that’s done, the things are red and bent like claws. It creeps up gradually, old age, all the more insulting when you were convinced it was a state that would never happen to you.
How much more I understand now, though! I still use the same utensils and pots that Maman used, and clean the copper with lemon juice, just as she did, the acid biting into the cuts in my fingers, just as it must have into hers, though she never complained. It’s important to keep up tradition.
“Go to town for work?” she’d cry. “But there’s always so much to be done here!” A countrywoman to the bone, she found the very notion of leaving the hamlet, let alone the village commune, for work unbelievable. It was enough to make it necessary for her to sit down (a rare event) with a restorative cup of lavender tisane. I don’t think I ever told her how much I would have loved to train as a nurse or a teacher.
Do I look like a mad old woman now? I suspect I do.
Maman’s little mirror is long gone. What would be the point of looking in a mirror, anyway? The only visitors are the birds and the wild animals, and the children who dare each other to play mean tricks and risk catching sight of the madwoman who lives here alone.
Better to be invisible.