Encore Provence (4 page)

It must have been two or three months before our relationship progressed from low finance and began to take on some kind of social dimension. I went into the post office one morning, and there I found Marius engaged in a negotiation involving a scrap of paper, which he kept pushing toward Madame behind the counter. She kept shaking her head and pushing it back. There were many shrugs, and eventually an exchange of those audible pouts—air being expelled through downturned, disdainful lips—that the French like to use when indicating disapproval or disagreement.
And then, silence. The negotiation had clearly foundered.

Madame used my arrival as an excuse to put an end to the proceedings, leaning around Marius to wish me good morning. When he turned and saw me, his expression changed from a scowl to a smile, and he clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll wait for you outside,” he said.

The problem, as he explained it to me, was that Madame, whom he accused of having no imagination and a sour and unhelpful disposition, had refused to cash a check for five hundred francs—a valid financial instrument, he said, and held it up for inspection.

It flapped sadly in the wind as he passed it to me. I suppose the check might once have been legitimate, but now it was rumpled and grubby, the words and figures faded and almost indecipherable. It would have been an act of supreme optimism to part with any money in return for such a tattered and unconvincing relic. And besides, I told Marius, I didn’t have five hundred francs on me.

“
Tant pis
,” he said. “In that case, you can buy me a drink.”

I find it hard to resist this kind of amiable effrontery, perhaps because I have very little of it myself, and so, two minutes later, Marius and I were sitting at a table in the back of the café. All our previous meetings had been in the car, when my eyes had been on the road; this was the first time I’d had a chance to take a close look at him.

His face was a study in the brutal effect that too much weather can have on the skin: a complexion like flayed meat, ruts where other faces would have wrinkles, wrinkles where other faces would be smooth. But the eyes were bright, and he had a full head of hair, cut
en brosse
, spiky and grizzled. I put his age at around sixty. He took a
big box of kitchen matches from the pocket of his army surplus jacket and lit a cigarette. I saw that the first joint of his left index finger was missing, probably a slip of the pneumatic secateurs while he’d been pruning vines.

The first swallow of red wine went down, marked by a small shudder of appreciation, and he started to question me. I spoke French like a German, he said. He was surprised when I told him I was English, it being well known that the Englishman abroad prefers to stay within the familiar bounds of his own language, merely raising the volume of his speech to overcome any misunderstanding with the natives. Marius put his hands to his ears and grinned, his face collapsing into a web of creases.

But what was an Englishman doing here in the winter? What kind of work did I do? It was a question I had often been asked, and the answer invariably prompted one of two reactions. Either pity, since writing is a notoriously precarious occupation, or interest, sometimes even tinged with the respect that the French still have for anyone who labors in the arts. Marius was in the second category.

“
Ah
,” he said, “
un homme de lettres
. But clearly not poor.” He tapped his empty glass.

More refreshment arrived, and the questions continued. When I explained what it was that I liked to write about, Marius leaned forward, half-closing his eyes against the smoke from his cigarette, the picture of a man with confidential information to impart. “I was born here.” He waved an arm in the general direction of his birthplace, somewhere outside the café. “There are stories I could tell you. But another time, not now.”

He had a prior engagement. Apparently there was a funeral in the village that day, and he never missed funerals. He liked the measured pace of the funeral service, the
solemnity, the music, the sight of the female mourners in their best clothes and high heels. And if the ceremony was to celebrate the burial of an old enemy, he liked it even more. The final victory, he called it, a testament to his own superior powers of survival. He reached over to seize my wrist and look at my watch. Time to go. Stories would have to wait.

I was disappointed. To hear a good Provençal storyteller is to hear a performance given by a master of the art of verbal embroidery, a prince of the pregnant pause, the shocked expression, and the belly laugh. Drama is extracted from the most mundane occasions—a trip to the garage, the gutting of a chicken, the discovery of a wasps’ nest under the roof. Coming from the right person, these small moments can take on a dramatic significance more suited to the Comédie Française than a village bar, and I always find them fascinating.

The next time I saw Marius, he was crouched over his Mobylette at the side of the road, peering into the fuel tank, his head cocked in a listening position as though he were waiting for it to whisper in his ear. Dry as a rock in July, he said to me as he folded himself into the car. But I could take him to the garage to get a
bidon
of fuel,
non?
And then I could buy him a drink, as it had been an exasperating morning. There was, as usual with Marius, the confident assumption that I had no pressing plans of my own which might interfere with my duties as his emergency chauffeur.

We settled in the café, and I asked him if he had enjoyed his last funeral.

“
Pas mal
,” he said. “It was old Fernand.” He tapped the side of his nose. “You know? They say he was one of the five husbands. You must have heard the story.”

When I shook my head, he turned to call for a carafe of wine. And then he began. He glanced at me from time to time for emphasis, or to see if I had understood, but for the most part his eyes stared off into the distance, examining his memory.

For some reason, he said, butchers and women often have this affinity, a closeness that goes beyond the simple transaction of buying and selling meat. Who knows why? It might be the sight of all that flesh, the pinkness of it, the slap it makes on the block, the promise of a choice cut. Whatever the reason, it is not unusual for a certain intimacy to develop between butcher and client. And when the butcher is young and good-looking there is often the added pleasure of a little flirtation over the lamb chops. This is normally as far as it goes, a harmless moment or two, something to bring a sparkle to a woman’s eye as she goes about her daily business.

Normally, but not always. And not in the case of the butcher whom we shall call Arnaud. At the time the story takes place, many years ago, he was newly arrived in the village, having taken over when the old butcher, a glum, unsmiling man who was stingy with his meat, had retired. The local ladies were never quick with their opinions, but they gradually began to approve of Arnaud as news of what he was doing was broadcast from mouth to ear on the
téléphone arabe
. He transformed the little butcher’s shop—repainting, replacing ancient fittings, installing modern lighting—and by the time he had finished it was a joy to go in there, to be greeted by gleaming steel and glass, the clean scent of fresh sawdust on the floor, and the smile of the young proprietor.

He, too, was a considerable change for the better, with his shining black hair and brown eyes. But what set him
apart from most other men of his time were his teeth. In those days, rural dentists were few and far between, and their techniques ran more to extraction than repair. Consequently, it was rare to see an adult without a gap or two, and those teeth that had survived were often in a sad way—crooked, dingy, stained with wine and tobacco. The teeth of Arnaud, however, were startling in their perfection: they were white, they were even, they were all there. Women meeting him for the first time would come away dazzled, asking themselves why it was that such a
beau garçon
didn’t appear to be married.

Arnaud was not unaware of the effect he had on his female clients. (Indeed, it came out later during the investigation that he had been obliged to leave his previous place of work in another village after some complications with the wife of the mayor.) But he was a businessman, and if smiling at his customers led to more business, he would smile.
C’est normal
.

It must be said also that he was a good butcher. His meat was properly hung and aged, his blood sausage and
andouillettes
plump and amply filled, his pâtés dense and rich. His cuts were generous, often a few grams more than had been asked for; never less. He even gave away marrow bones. Gave them away! And always, as he handed over the packages of neatly wrapped pink waxed paper printed with his name and the illustration of a jovial cow, there would be the sunburst of his smile.

All through that first winter and that first spring, his popularity grew. The men of the village found themselves eating more meat than they had eaten in the time of the old butcher, and better meat, too. When they mentioned this, their wives would nod. Yes, they would say, the new one is a great improvement. The village is lucky to have
him. And some of the wives, as they looked across the table at their husbands and made an involuntary comparison, would catch themselves thinking about young Arnaud in a way that had very little to do with his professional skills. Those shoulders! And those teeth!

The trouble started at the end of June, with the beginning of the true heat. The village was built on a hill, and the stone buildings that faced full south seemed to suck up the sun and store it overnight. In private houses, shutters could be closed against the glare and the steadily rising temperature, but commercial establishments were not so fortunate. Their display windows invited the heat, and magnified it. And so Arnaud was obliged to modify his working methods to suit the climate. He cleared the window of anything perishable, replacing the usual arrangements of sausages and prepared cuts with a notice informing his clientele that his meat was being kept in the cool storage area at the back of the shop.

Naturally, the butcher himself needed some relief from the heat, and by early July Arnaud had adopted a more practical uniform than the canvas trousers and cotton sweater he usually wore. He still kept his
tablier
, the long white (although frequently bloodstained) apron that covered most of his chest and extended down to his shins. But beneath that he wore only a pair of old black cycling shorts, snug around the hips and buttocks, and rubber-soled clogs.

Business, already healthy, became even more brisk. Items hanging on the hooks behind the counter were suddenly much in demand, since to reach them Arnaud had to turn and stretch, exposing a muscular back and legs to the waiting customer. Expeditions to the cool area where the rest of the meat was kept were also very popular,
involving, as they did, close proximity to an attractive and almost naked young man.

There were changes, too, in the appearance of Arnaud’s customers. Everyday clothes and cursory grooming were replaced by summer dresses and makeup, even scent. The local hairdresser was kept unusually busy, and visitors to the village could be forgiven for thinking that the women they saw in the narrow streets were dressed for a fête. As for the husbands—well, those who noticed put it down to the weather. In any case, their wives were treating them well, with the extra attention that a touch of guilt often provokes, and feeding them like prizefighters in training. The husbands had no complaints.

July continued like an oven, one rainless, blistering day after another. Dogs and cats tolerated each other, sharing pools of shade, too stunned to squabble. In the fields, melons were coming to ripeness, the juiciest for years, and the grapes on the vines were warm to the touch. The village sprawled on its hilltop, stifling in a cocoon of hot, still air.

These were difficult days for the butcher, despite his flourishing business. He was finding that making friends in a small, closed community is a slow and cautious process. A newcomer—even a newcomer from a mere thirty kilometers away—is treated with guarded politeness in the street but excluded from the homes of his neighbors. He is on probation, often for several years. He is a foreigner; in Arnaud’s case, a lonely foreigner.

To add to his problems, the demands of his business left him very little time to make the journey to Avignon, where the lights were brighter and social opportunities more promising. His working day started shortly after sunrise, when he would come down from his cramped apartment
above the shop to swab the floor, sprinkle it with fresh sawdust, evict dead flies from the window, arrange his cuts, put an edge on his knives, and snatch a cup of coffee before his older customers, always the earliest, began to arrive just before eight. The hours between noon and two, while the rest of the world was taking its ease, were often spent picking up supplies. Wholesalers refused to deliver to the village; the streets were too narrow to accommodate their trucks. The afternoons were slow, early evenings the busiest. He was rarely able to close before seven, and then there was the gray torrent of paperwork: the day’s receipts, suppliers’ invoices, government forms requiring confirmation that the
code sanitaire
was being strictly observed, mutterings from the Crédit Agricole about his bank loan. It was a heavy burden for a man on his own. What he needed, Arnaud often told himself, was a wife.

He had one in early August, unfortunately not his own.

She was younger than most of his customers, and a good fifteen years younger than her husband. Her marriage, if not exactly arranged, had been vigorously promoted by the two sets of parents, whose vineyards occupied adjoining slopes below the village. What could be more satisfactory than a union of blood and earth, families and land? As each family made its discreet calculations, the savings on tractors, on fertilizer, on vine stock, and on labor became delightfully apparent. A date was set for the wedding, and the two principals were encouraged to become fond of each other.