A Pig in Provence (6 page)

Mme. Duvivier smiled. “Yes, it’s very good, my dear. Very good indeed. And if my husband likes it, it is a great compliment. He is very particular, you know. That is why people come here, from Paris even, to eat his food.”

I left the cheeses with them, accepted the thirty-two francs fifty they gave me, and headed home, excited about telling Donald and Ethel the good news about our cheeses.

Soon I was selling our cheeses to the
auberge
and the local
épicerie,
and at the Saturday market in Barjols and on Wednesdays in the square of a small village where I was the only vendor and people came out of their houses just for my cheese.

On market day I got up at five to milk the goats and do my cheese work before packing my cheeses onto the racks stacked in the back of the
deux chevaux camionette,
our little bluish gray van, circa 1958. Once at the market I set up the table at my designated location on the square and displayed my cheeses, putting a label on each before covering them with white plastic mesh to protect them from dirt and insects.

As people bought my cheeses, I wrapped them in parchment paper, took the money, and put it in a small metal box. I quickly had a following of customers, and as word got around that we had fresh goat’s-milk cheese, people would even find their way to our house to buy them, sometimes a dozen cheeses at a time, making the bumpy journey over the dirt road and across the trickle of stream to get to us.

We stayed in the house by the forest with the goats, and soon a pig, through the spring and summer, and into early fall. But, especially when I became pregnant, it was clear that we couldn’t live there through the winter. Rain sometimes made the road
impassable, the fireplace didn’t provide enough heat, and with the shortening days, nightfall came quickly.

Our friends Denys and Georgette Fine offered to rent us a place on their property, a house of three small rooms, a kitchen and two bedrooms, that they called
la cellule,
the cell. Their property had once been a tile factory, and they had created the little house from the ruins of the vats where the clay had been stored, eventually living there with their two sons while restoring the main house next door. We decided to accept. We could continue to keep the goats and the pig where they were, going back and forth across the valley to tend them.

I loved my new kitchen. It was cozy, with a woodstove, a glossy red-tiled counter fitted with the usual two-burner cooktop, a round limestone sink with running water, and a built-in table with artistically sculpted white plaster benches on three sides. A large cupboard, partially screened in the rear to let in cold air, served first as our refrigerator and later as a cheese-curing cupboard. There was even a large, outdoor summer kitchen with an ivy-covered roof. A red-tiled walkway ran the length of the house and gave onto a broad yard bordered with bay laurel trees, rosemary, and the remnants of a stone wall.

As winter began to descend, and the baby’s due date approached, I started making thick vegetable soups and stews, simmering them on the back of the woodstove for hours at a time. Ethel, standing on top of a footstool, made her first pancakes using the cooktop. My kitchen was always fragrant with the wild thyme and rosemary I had gathered and hung from the rafters. At night, Donald read stories aloud to us as I cooked dinner and Ethel drew or played with her toy animals, our dog, Tune, curled at her feet. It was, at last, the beginning of home.

Encounters with M. Gos. Lucretia's piglets. A barvest lunch.
La mise à mort.
Provisions.

When we bought our pig from M. Gos, we didn’t know that we were about to become participants in one of the region’s longtime subsistence rituals. Donald had worked at the pig barns, as well as the sheep barns, at UC Davis and had always wanted to keep pigs. So buying a sow and raising feeder pigs seemed like a good idea, and would fit in with our cheese making since we could mix the high-protein whey with the bran the pigs would eat.

“I don’t know,” said M. Gos, pulling his blue cap down a little lower on his head as we walked toward a low-slung stone building. “Sows are delicate. Sensitive. You have to be gentle with them.” He lifted the metal latch of the barn’s heavy wooden door and pulled it open. Had there not been stout metal rails around the pens, we would have been stampeded. A half-dozen or more huge pigs came pounding toward us at full speed. They snorted and shoved, and blinked their pinkish eyes rimmed in stiff white
eyelashes, struggling to get at their master, who in turn scratched each one behind the ears.

“Ma chérie, oui, oui, je suis ici. Ah oui, tu es belle, toi aussi.”
He turned to us, smiling. “See how beautiful they are. Very affectionate.” Donald also loved pigs, finding them, just as M. Gos did, sensitive and interesting. He knowingly scratched their ears. Unfamiliar with pigs, I stood by quietly, a little frightened by the big, powerful beasts, while Ethel intently examined the snuffling, pink-snouted animals from the security of her position behind my back.

M. Gos next took us around to the far side of the barn, where we were greeted with squeals and squeaks as a jumble of piglets spilled over each other at the trough just inside their pen, scrambling to get to us. M. Gos reached over and picked one up by the scruff of its neck and handed it kicking and squealing to Donald, who readily took it in hand. He offered it to me, and I tried to take it in my arms as I would a kitten or puppy, but it twisted and squirmed.

“No, no,” they both cried at once, grabbing the scruff of its neck.

“You have to hold it like this,” said Donald, illustrating a maneuver that seemed a bit brutal to me but worked. I could barely hang on. The pig was a small, solid chunklet of energy, with every fiber of its little body bursting beneath its bristled skin. I held it as tightly as I could, wrapping my arms around it as it twisted, squirmed, and squealed. I was terrified it would spring out of my grasp, even though I held tightly to the scruff.

“Here, please take it,” I said to Donald with a weak but enthusiastic smile for M. Gos, who smiled and nodded, taking the piglet from Donald and returning it to its siblings.

We stood together, elbows on the railing. M. Gos pulled out a pouch of Gauloise tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers.
He offered them to us. I accepted and we both rolled a cigarette, licking it sealed. He pulled a hard candy out of his pocket and offered it to Ethel.

“Pigs really are intelligent,” he said. “I’ve had at least one pig all of my life. Except when I went to Paris. I was young then. It’s a beautiful city. But I came home.” He lit our cigarettes. “My son likes the grapes and the fruit trees, but he’s not very interested in pigs. His wife isn’t from here. Where are you from?” He turned to look at us.

“We’re from California,” I answered. Donald explained that he had grown up in San Francisco, but that we’d been living in Southern California, where we’d been going to a university.

“What did you study?”

“Agriculture first, then philosophy. Georgeanne studied history.”

“Hmmmm. Why did you come here?” M. Gos asked.

It wasn’t hard to have simple conversations about the weather, animals, or agriculture in French. But trying to explain why a philosophy Ph.D. candidate and a history Ph.D. student at the University of California at San Diego and their small daughter had thrown over their lives to buy a farmhouse and a little land in Provence so that they could make goat cheese was a different matter.

“I went to the university in Aix-en-Provence. We got married in Aix and always liked France. Since the war in Vietnam is making life so hard in the United States, well, we thought we would try to make a life here,” I said, holding Ethel’s hand tightly. That was as close to an explanation as I could give.

“Hmmmm.” M. Gos put out his cigarette, then slipped the butt in his pocket. “You have a nice spot for a pig over at your place, there with the goats. I’m retired now, and getting old.
It’s too much to keep all these sows. I’ve got a lot of customers, though. They depend on me for a pig to raise every year to
faire les provisions
—to make the hams,
pâté
s, everything. No one else around anymore sells little pigs. Only me. I don’t want to disappoint people.”

He turned back toward his house. “You’re thinking about raising a few pigs, then?” Donald had explained earlier about his background, and I could tell M. Gos knew that Donald understood pigs, even without talking about it.

“Bien.
We’ll see. Come and have a drink.” We followed him back to his house in the hamlet, more or less up and over from the barn. His wife opened the door and smiled, motioning to us to sit down. She was short and stocky, like so many local women of her age and generation, with soft gray hair pulled into a tidy bun at the base of her neck.

The pale green Formica table in the kitchen was set with a clear glass wine bottle full of water; a bottle of pastis; a bottle each of grenadine,
menthe,
and
orgeat
syrup; and five small glasses. The kitchen was filled with the scent of tomatoes and sausage, which I assumed was coming from the orange enamel casserole simmering on the stove. It would be noon shortly, and I knew that as soon as we left, the couple would sit down to what was probably an unctuous stew, preceded by some slices of homemade
jambon cru,
pâté
,
and fresh bread. We, on the other hand, would go home to noodles topped with sautéed onions, garlic, and carrots, all well seasoned with wild rosemary and olive oil. Our budget in those days allowed for little meat.

“Please, sit down,” M. Gos said, and we all took a seat. Ethel was served first. At three years old and just over six months in France, she could speak a few polite words of French and when asked what she wanted to drink replied “Grenadine,
s’il vous plaît.”

“Préférez-vous un tomat, perroquet, ou mauresque?”
asked M. Gos, turning to us now. Seeing the rather blank look on our faces, he laughed. “When you mix
pastis
with grenadine, it’s a
tomate. Pastis
and
menthe
make a
perroquet,
and
orgeat
and
pastis
are a
mauresque.
” I didn’t know what
orgeat
was.

“It’s almond-flavored syrup. The story goes that the Moors brought the almonds to Provence so that’s why we call it a
mauresque.”
His wife beamed at him, touching his large hand as he poured our choices. He poured for her, without asking, a little
orgeat
and water.
“Salut,”
he said, and we all drank. He took off his cap, revealing wisps of gray hair on a pink, balding head. “I’ll come over tomorrow and look at your
cochonnerie
to see if it will work for one of my young sows.”

We thanked M. and Mme. Gos for our drinks and stood up to go. It was almost noon, and politeness requires that you excuse yourself when it is mealtime. “Wait a minute,” M. Gos said. He opened a door off the kitchen and came back with a small glass canning jar of
pâté
.,/i> “Try this.” We said thank you again, shook hands, and went home, driving down the packed dirt road that led out of the hamlet onto the main road toward home.

Once there, we released the wire clasp holding the lid on the jar and looked inside at the ball of coarse
pâté
, all but the uppermost round covered with creamy white lard. Donald sliced the bread we had picked up on the way back and set it on the table along with the
pâté
. I put out some
cornichons,
and we sat down. I spread a slice with a little lard, then topped it with
pâté
, the way I had seen others do, and gave the slice to Ethel, who promptly ate it and asked for more. We didn’t finish the whole jar, but we could have.

After several more visits, more
pastis
sharing, and more conversation, M. Gos decided to sell us one of his young sows. That meant that we would have a brood sow, one that we would keep
for years. She would be a pet, so we would name her. Brood sows were kept for the purpose of providing babies, and a good sow would have two or three litters a year, each averaging twelve babies. These were sold at about six weeks old to farmers as feeder pigs—that is, pigs to be fed for a year and then slaughtered for meat. Brood sows didn’t go to slaughter until they were too old to breed, and that could be as many as five or six years.

“You can breed her again in a few months. Bring her to my boar. She’ll have babies four months later. That’s good, because they’ll be ready to sell in five to six weeks. I’ll tell my customers to go see you. By the way, if you want some firewood, just come by. I’ve got extra this year.”

M. Gos became our friend, coming by to see us and the pig we named Lucretia. He was especially fond of Ethel and always had a bit of candy or chewing gum in his pocket for her and often something for us as well. He was delighted to see that I was going to have another baby and always asked how I was feeling. Once, shortly after we had acquired Lucretia, he brought us several links of
boudin noir,
fresh blood sausage, that he had made and some fresh pig’s feet. I had learned to love
boudin,
after sampling it under duress at a dinner one night at the Fines’ house, our landlords and now our good friends. I was delighted to have the sausages again. That night I fried them slowly in butter, letting the edges darken and crisp. I served them with cooked apples and mashed potatoes, as I had been taught by Georgette.

I didn’t know what to do with the pig’s feet, so I went next door and asked Georgette. Nine years older than I was and a whirlwind of energy, she seemed to be perfectly in tune with the rhythms of rural life and to know everything about it. “Split each foot in half and poach them, tied up in cloth, for about five hours. Then let them cool, take off the cloth, and put olive oil all
over them. Make a mix of bread crumbs, salt, pepper, and herbs and pack this all over the feet. Then fry them. Ahhh.” She closed her eyes and smacked her lips.

Since I could not imagine myself slicing up the smooth, white, cloven, cartilaginous feet and then eating them, I gave them to her, explaining I didn’t think I would have time to cook them. (I still had intense memories of
Erbsensuppe mit Spitzbein,
which I had ordered once in Berlin. The bean soup was rich and creamy, but the whole foot sticking out of it had a smattering of hairs, and I didn’t know how—or if—to eat it.) I should have known when the normally generous Georgette did not bring back a sample of the fried pig’s feet that I had missed out on something tasty.

Later I came to understand that we had been the recipients of the traditional
don,
or gift of pieces of meat given to family and neighbors once a pig has been slaughtered. The annual winter slaughter of pigs was staggered over a month to six weeks, allowing small rural communities to have fresh meat when such a commodity was scarce. It was also a time to extend and renew friendships. In the strictest sense, the tradition called for giving certain pieces or preparations to neighbors and family who were not invited to the festive midday meal that celebrated the slaughter day. These gifts were distributed according to the village social hierarchy, of which every one was acutely aware. During our first years in Provence, the tradition was still carried on, even though the necessity was long past, and I think we were among the last to experience it.

Lucretia’s first litter was fourteen piglets, each the size of a large hand. When I went out to her pen and found it full of baby pigs, I was terrified. I watched her roll over and crush two of them as she struggled to get comfortable, and could see more caught
beneath her. There was nothing I could do, and I couldn’t reach Donald because he was off delivering chickens to Toulon, part of a job he had taken to supplement our income. I drove as fast as I could to M. Gos, Ethel with me, for help. He came immediately, bouncing down the dirt road to our barn right behind us in his little Renault.