Encore Provence (19 page)

At this point you might run into a snag. In an effort to be considerate, you say to him that you’d prefer just to see the location of three or four promising houses before taking a tour of any interiors. You have a car and a map. If he would tell you where to find the properties, you wouldn’t have to take up his valuable time or bother the owners unnecessarily.

Mais non
. That, unfortunately, will not be possible, and here is where you learn lesson number one. All kinds of excuses may be given for declining your thoughtful suggestion,
but you’ve already heard the reason. There is a shortage of attractive properties in the Luberon. However, there is no shortage of real estate agents; in fact, there’s a glut of them, and it’s a situation that leads to intense competition. When a single property is given to three or four agents, as is often the case, the agent who introduces the property to the eventual purchaser is well placed to claim the commission (which is healthy: five percent or more of the purchase price). First come, first paid is the rule. That is why the escorted visit is crucial. It enables the agent to mark the territory.

Lesson number two: Such is the level of suspicion and secrecy that the most obvious and innocent question can provoke miracles of evasion. Let’s say you have seen a house advertised in
Côté Sud
, the glossy magazine of the South, and you like the look of it. You call the agent whose name is at the bottom of the advertisement.

And so it goes on. The agent will go into rhapsodies about the Roman roof tiles, the courtyard, the two-hundred-year-old plane trees, and the wine cellar. He will tell you about the microclimate, sheltered from the mistral but perfectly placed to benefit from the summer breezes. He will tell you every last detail about the house except where it is. And finally, if that still doesn’t convince you that a rendezvous at his office is your first step to paradise, he might, in desperation, agree to send you a dossier with more photographs and a written description of this jewel among houses.

Lesson number three: A coded vocabulary is used in these descriptions which, after a few educational expeditions, you will learn to translate.

To start with, the price is often not specified, but indicated as being in one of three main categories:

To the base price, of course, must be added the costs of adapting the house to your personal requirements, and these costs will depend on the general state of repair and decoration. Here once again there are three main categories:

There are other code words which you’ll pick up as you go along, but these should be enough to see you through
your first afternoon.
Courage!
(And don’t forget your checkbook.)

If there is a single Provençal tradition that every visitor should experience at least once, it is the siesta, taken externally.

Oddly enough, we have often found it very difficult to convince our guests that this is a healthy, sane, and refreshing way to spend a hot afternoon. They have arrived in Provence with their work ethics intact and their Anglo-Saxon distrust of self-indulgence poised to resist undisciplined, slightly decadent Mediterranean habits. Fear of inactivity comes bubbling to the surface. We haven’t traveled all this way, they say, to do
nothing
.

I try to point out the mental and digestive benefits of doing nothing, but my advice falls on suspicious ears. The lunatic idea of an after-lunch game of tennis, however, is welcomed. Don’t ask me why. I can only assume that the physical labor and potentially fatal strains on the heart involved in running after a ball in hundred-degree weather have some kind of perverse attraction. When reasoned argument fails to persuade the players of the risks they’re taking, I’m obliged to call Monsieur Contini, our local Florence Nightingale. I ask him to come and park his ambulance next to the tennis court, and to leave the engine running. That will almost always bring the game to an end, and we are proud of the fact that we haven’t lost any players yet. But there is still the problem of finding a civilized distraction for them that won’t induce feelings of guilt and long faces around the dinner table.

The solution, we’ve discovered, is to give them a literary
excuse, an opportunity to add to their knowledge and enrich their minds by reading a book.

The choice of the book is all-important. Thrillers, adventure stories, and bodice-rippers won’t do; they don’t have enough weight, either mentally or physically. An improving tome is what’s needed here, something that you’ve been meaning to read—something that you feel you
ought
to read—if only you could find the time. There are hundreds of suitable titles and authors, and we have a small selection of them, which is known as the Hammock Library. It includes Trollopes, Brontës, Austens, Hardys, Balzacs, Tolstoys, and Dostoevskys. But the book that has never failed—ever—in its appointed task is the three-volume boxed set of Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.

Tuck a volume under your arm and make your way through the trees to the shaded corner of the garden that overlooks the valley. Roll gently into the hammock, adjust the pillow, and let Gibbon come to rest on your stomach. Take in the sounds: The
cigales
are hard at it in the bushes, their tireless, scratchy, strangely soothing chirrup rising and falling in the warm afternoon air. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks—a half-hearted, heat-muffled bark that tails off into a falsetto yawn. Underneath the hammock, there is a hurried rustle in the dried grass as a lizard seizes a bug.

Supporting your elbows on the sides of the hammock, you lift Gibbon into the reading position. How heavy he is. Beyond the pages of the open book you see your toes, the rigging of the hammock, the motionless leaves of the scrub oak, and the long, blue panorama of the Luberon. A buzzard quarters the sky in lazy, graceful curves, its wings barely moving. Gibbon feels as though he’s gained weight.
He declines and falls back to his resting place on your stomach and, as many have done before you in similar circumstances, you decide to allow yourself a brief doze, no longer than five minutes, before getting to grips with the Roman Empire.

Two hours later you wake up. The light on the mountain is beginning to change, a rim of sky above the crest turning from blue to violet. Gibbon is sprawled, pages akimbo, beneath the hammock where he fell. You dust him off, placing a bookmark at page 135 for the sake of appearances, before taking him back through the trees to the pool. A quick plunge is followed by the most wonderful sense of well-being, and you realize that a siesta isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Old age is unlikely to be a keenly anticipated period in anybody’s life, and no amount of euphemistic camouflage by the senior-citizen lobby can make it any more attractive than a long-awaited bill that finally arrives. Even so, it seems to me that growing old in Provence is not without its share of consolations. Some are mental, others are physical; one you can actually take to the bank.

Let us say you have retired, and that your main asset is your house. It suits you, and you have every intention of living in it until you make your final public appearance in the obituary columns. But the expenses of old age—and
there’s always something: the Ferrari for your grandson, the services of a live-in chef, the ruinous price of vintage wines—will inevitably increase every year, and there comes a moment when a windfall might be very welcome. This may be the appropriate time to consider selling your house under that particular French arrangement which is called
en viager
.

It’s a gamble. You sell the house at a price below the full market value, but with yourself included as a fixture, having the right to continue in residence for the rest of your life. For you, it is like having your cake and living in it; for the buyer, it is a chance to acquire property at a discount—always providing that you, the ancient proprietor, have the good grace not to hang around for too long and make a lingering inconvenience of yourself. Some people find this system morbid. The French, always very practical in matters of money, see it as a chance for both buyer and seller to profit from natural causes.

But the gamble can sometimes backfire, as it did not long ago in the town of Aries, itself a monument to old age. Founded before Christ and noted for its pretty women, Aries was until 1997 the home of Madame Jeanne Calment. Her story is a testament to the bracing air of Provence and a warning to all property speculators.

She was born in 1875, and had met Van Gogh when she was a girl. At the age of 90, she decided to sell her apartment
en viager
to a local lawyer, a mere sprig in his forties, who had every reason to think he was making an impeccably sound investment.

But Calment lived on. And on. And on. She treated her skin with olive oil, ate almost a kilo of chocolate a week, rode a bicycle until she was 100, and gave up smoking
when she was 117. According to official records, she was the oldest person in the world when she eventually died at the age of 122. As for the unfortunate lawyer, he had died the previous year, aged 77.

Calment, obviously, was an exception, one of those blips that spoil the symmetry of actuarial statistics. But while her accumulation of years was quite extraordinary, it would not surprise me if her record was eventually broken by one of the lively octogenarians I see every week—the antiques dealers who predate some of their stock, the elderly ladies who elbow you aside in the
épicerie
with the vigor of young girls, those gnarled but stately figures muttering words of encouragement to the tomatoes in their vegetable gardens. What is it about Provence that sustains them? What is their secret?

For several years, we lived near a family whose oldest member, known as Pépe, was a daily fascination to me. A small, lean man, invariably dressed in jacket and trousers of washed-out blue and a flat cap that never left his head, he would take his promenade along the road before coming up our drive to inspect the vines. He liked it best when there were people working in the long, green alleys—weeding, trimming overlong shoots, distributing the ration of sulfate—because then he could lean on his stick and supervise.

He was generous with his advice, which, as he often reminded his captive audience, was the result of more than eighty years’ experience. If anyone had the impertinence and temerity to disagree with him on matters of wine or weather, he would reach back into his memory and produce some dusty scrap of evidence from the past to prove that he was right. “Of course,” he once said, “you wouldn’t remember the summer of 1947. Hailstones in
August, big as quails’ eggs. The vines never recovered.” That kind of remark was usually enough to put a stop to any loose talk about conditions being perfect for a vintage year. Optimism and nature don’t mix, he used to say. After an hour or so, having satisfied himself that the vineyard was being properly attended to, he would walk back down our drive, along the road, and into his daughter-in-law’s kitchen, no doubt to supervise the preparation of the midday meal.