Encore Provence (2 page)

It wouldn’t be so alarming if the equipment, both human and mechanical, were up to the demands placed on it. But you can’t help feeling, as yet another baby Renault screams past with its tires barely touching the road, that small cars were never designed to break the sound barrier. Nor are you filled with confidence if you should catch a glimpse of what’s going on behind the wheel. It is well known that the Frenchman cannot put two sentences together without his hands joining in. Fingers
must wag in emphasis. Arms must be thrown up in dismay. The orchestra of speech must be conducted. This performance may be entertaining when you watch a couple of men arguing in a bar, but it’s heart-stopping when you see it in action at ninety miles an hour.

And so it’s always a relief to get onto the back roads where you can travel at the speed of a tractor, with time to take in some of the graphic additions to the scenery. Ever since my first visit to Provence I have loved the faded advertisements painted on the sides of barns and solitary stone
cabanons
—invitations to try aperitifs that have long since vanished, or chocolate, or fertilizer—the paint chipped and peeling, the blues and the ochres and the creams bleached by the sun of seventy or eighty summers.

For years, these primitive billboards have been outnumbered by less picturesque messages, and these seem to be increasing. Towns and villages now often have two names, one with the old Provençal spelling. So Ménerbes now doubles as Menerbo, Avignon as Avignoun, Aix as Aixen-Prouvenço. And this may only be the start. If the Provençal road-sign lobby continues to be active, we might one day see
Frequent Radar Controls
or
Low-Flying Aircraft
or even
The Home of the Big Mac
adapted to the language of Frédéric Mistral’s poetry.

Signs are everywhere—informative, persuasive, educational, proprietorial, nailed on trees, perched on poles by the side of a field, attached to railings, pasted onto concrete; signs for wine
caves
, for honey, for lavender essence and olive oil, for restaurants and real estate agents. Most are inviting. But there are a few which warn of savage dogs, and one—my favorite—is particularly discouraging. I saw it in the hills of Haute Provence, tied to the trunk of a tree by the side of a path leading into a stretch of seemingly
uninhabited wilderness. It read as follows:
Tout contrevenant sera abattu, les survivants poursuivis
. Which, roughly translated, means:
Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be prosecuted
. I like to believe that the author had a sense of humor.

There is one other warning I can’t imagine seeing anywhere else in the world but France. You can find it in the Place des Lices, in St.-Tropez, where the market is held every week, an enamel sign screwed to the railings. It informs the passer-by in large type and stern language that he is absolutely forbidden to stop and relieve himself in the vicinity—a message one cannot imagine being necessary in East Hampton, for instance, a town noted for its well-toned and highly disciplined bladders.

The message is necessary in France because of the Frenchman’s fondness for impromptu urination. Whenever nature calls, he is quick to answer, and it doesn’t matter where he finds himself at the time. In towns and cities there are a thousand discreet corners; out here in the country, hundreds of empty square miles and millions of bushes ensure privacy for
le pipi rustique
. But judging by what I’ve seen of the Frenchman’s choice of venue, privacy is the last thing that he wants. Sometimes on a rock, silhouetted against the sky like a stag at bay, sometimes so close to the side of the road that you have to swerve to avoid cutting him off in midstream, he is there, doing what a man has to do. And he has not the slightest embarrassment about doing it. If you should catch his eye as you pass, he will acknowledge you with a courteous nod. But it is more likely that he will be gazing upward, counting the clouds as he takes his ease.

Luckily, such forbidding notices are not at all typical of the greeting one can expect in most public places. The
politeness of strangers in France is noticeable—not necessarily friendly but invariably well-mannered, and a morning of running errands is marked at every stop by small but pleasant acknowledgments that you exist, something that doesn’t always happen in other countries. In England, for example, many shopkeepers make a point of behaving as if you’re not there, possibly because you haven’t been formally introduced. In America, the land of rampant informality, you can frequently find the other extreme, and the customer has to respond to well-meaning inquiries about his overall health and how he’s doing followed, if they’re not quickly nipped in the bud, by a stream of comments and questions about ancestry, clothing, oddities of pronunciation, and general appearance. The French, it seems to me, strike a happy balance between intimacy and reserve.

Some of this must be helped by the language, which lends itself to graceful expression even when dealing with fairly basic subjects. No, Monsieur, you haven’t made a beast of yourself at the table; you’re simply suffering from a
crise de foie
. And could that be flatulence we hear coming from the gentleman in the corner? Certainly not. It is the plangent sound of the
piano des pauvres
, the poor man’s piano. As for that stomach we see threatening to burst the buttons on your shirt, well, that’s nothing but a
bonne brioche
. And there is that famously elegant subtitle from a classic Western.

No wonder French was the language of diplomacy for all those years.

It is still the language of gastronomy, and in a country that often gives the impression—at least on the roads—of being late for lunch or dinner, you would expect to see more physical evidence of the national passion for good food. More solid flesh, more Michelin men rolling from one meal to the next. But it isn’t so; not, at least, in Provence. Of course they exist, these mammoths of the table, but they are few. The vast majority of men and women I see every day are definitely, irritatingly slimmer than they have any right to be. I’ve heard people from other countries explain this as the result of some benign cocktail of the genes, or an overactive metabolism brought on by too much coffee and French politics, but the true answer must lie in what they eat and drink and how they eat and drink it.

The French don’t snack. They will tear off the end of a fresh baguette (which, if it’s warm, is practically impossible to resist) and eat it as they leave the
boulangerie
. And that’s usually all you will see being consumed on the street. Compare that with the public eating and drinking that goes on in America: pizza, hot dogs, nachos, tacos, heroes, potato chips, sandwiches, huge containers of coffee, half-gallon buckets of Coke (Diet, of course), and heaven knows what else being demolished on the hoof, often on the way to the aerobics class.

Restraint between meals is rewarded as soon as a Frenchman sits down at the table, and this is where other nationalities become deeply puzzled. How is it possible for a body to pack in two serious meals a day without turning into a human balloon or keeling over with arteries that are rigid with cholesterol? French portions are fairly modest, certainly, but they never stop coming, and they will often include dishes that would horrify doctors in the States:
creamy rillettes of pork, pâtés laced with Armagnac, mushrooms wrapped in buttery pastry, potatoes cooked in duck fat—and these are merely to set you up for the main course. Which, naturally, has to be followed by cheese; but not too much, because dessert is still to come.

And who could contemplate a meal without a glass or two of wine for the stomach’s sake? Some years ago, seekers after the gastronomic truth discovered what the French have known for centuries, and pronounced that a little red wine was good for you. Some of them went further. Looking for a tidy explanation of what came to be called the French Paradox, they noticed that the French drink ten times more wine than Americans.
Voilà!
Paradox explained. It must be wine that keeps the French trim and healthy.

I’d like to think it were as simple as that, but I have a feeling that there are other, less dramatic influences at work on and in the French stomach. I believe, without a shred of scientific proof, that the raw ingredients here contain fewer additives, preservatives, colorants, and chemical novelties than in the States. I also believe that food eaten at a table is better for you than food eaten hunched over a desk, standing at a counter, or driving in a car. And I believe that, wherever you do it, hurried eating has ruined more digestive systems than foie gras. Not long ago, there was a fad in certain New York restaurants for the guaranteed thirty-minute lunch, enabling the busy and important executive to entertain two different victims in the space of an hour. If that isn’t a recipe for tension and indigestion, I’ll swallow my cell phone.

It’s true that time in Provence is not worshipped in quite the same way as it is in more hectic parts of the world, and it took me a week or two to bow to the
inevitable and put my watch away in a drawer. But while there is no great importance given to time in the sense of punctuality, there is an enormous relish of the moment. Eating, obviously. Conversation on a street corner. A game of
boules
. The choosing of a bunch of flowers. Sitting in a café. Small pleasures receive their due, and there is an absence of rush—sometimes infuriating, often delightful, and in the end contagious. I realized this when I went into town on an errand that need only have taken fifteen minutes, and came back two and a half hours later. I had done absolutely nothing of any importance, and I had enjoyed every minute of it.

Perhaps the slower pace of life is partly responsible for another aspect of the local character, and that is cheerfulness. The French are not famous for being jolly; rather the reverse. Many foreigners tend to judge the mood of the entire nation on the basis of their first humiliating exposure to the Parisian waiter, not knowing that he is as morose and distant toward his countrymen—and probably toward his wife and cat as well—as he is to the tourist. But go south, and the difference is striking. There is an atmosphere of good humor, despite considerable social difficulties, high unemployment, and the financial guillotine of French income tax.

One response to these problems has been to leave them behind, and the newspapers of the moment are filled with stories about young French business people moving from Paris to take advantage of
le boom
in England. But if that kind of ambition exists in Provence, it isn’t very apparent. Everyone agrees that times could be better; everyone hopes they will be. Meanwhile, they fall back on the philosophy of the shrug.

It’s not a bad philosophy for the visitor to adopt as well, because life in Provence is never short of curiosities, and the national genius for complication is never too far away. There may be some mad logic at work somewhere, but there are many times when it is difficult to understand. Take, for example, the matter of the village garbage dump. It is discreetly placed, frequently cleared, designed to accept debris of any type and size short of a discarded truck, an admirable facility in every way. An official notice is prominently displayed above the garbage containers; translated it reads:
Large items should be deposited two days after the last Wednesday of each month
.

I stood and looked at it one morning for some time, thinking at first that I had misread it, or that my French was letting me down yet again. But no. That’s what it said.
Two days after the last Wednesday of each month
. Why didn’t it say the last Friday of each month? Was there some plan afoot—doubtless another piece of nonsense from the bureaucrats in Brussels—to change the name of Friday to something more dynamic and politically exciting? Euro-day, perhaps. While I was wondering if this was a treat in store for the year 2000, a small van arrived. The driver got out and studied the notice. He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked again at the notice, shook his head and shrugged.

Not long afterward, the notice was removed. I was told that everyone had continued to toss away their old refrigerators, bicycles, and TV sets whenever they felt like it, instructions or no instructions. The French love of signs is only equaled by their delight in ignoring them.

Put this together with another national characteristic, that of keeping your money as much as possible out of the
clutches of authority, and you begin to understand the parking problem. Every town in Provence now has areas set aside where you can park your car off the street. These areas, clearly indicated by many signs and thus easy to find, are more often than not ignored. The streets, on the other hand, are clogged with examples of imaginative and illegal parking. Cars with two wheels cocked on the sidewalk or stuffed into alleys with a bare six inches to spare on each side are commonplace. Miracles of stunt driving are performed as traffic backs up, tempers become frayed, horns squawk, and disputes erupt. And why? Because the official parking area has the audacity and the naked greed to charge five francs an hour.

But—so I am assured by my friend Martine, who regularly parks where no others dare to park—it’s not just the money. It’s the principle.
Le parking payant
is an affront to the French ethos and must be resisted, even if that involves circling the town for half an hour in search of a place. Time, after all, is free. Moral and financial considerations aside, there is also the immense satisfaction to be gained by finding a truly exceptional spot. I once saw a man reverse his small Peugeot into the premises of a boutique that had been gutted prior to renovation. While he was walking away, he looked back at the snug fit of his car in what would one day be a shop window and nodded at it, a moment of bonding between man and machine. It was as if together they had achieved a significant victory.

For me, moments that make up the texture of daily life define the character of Provence as much as the history or the landscape. And if I had to choose a single example of what I missed most in America, it would be a country market; nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual collection
of stalls that are set up each week in every town from Apt to Vaison-la-Romaine.