Encore Provence (5 page)

The new husband, a placid man with modest ambitions, middle-aged from birth, found that marriage suited him. He was no longer dependent on his mother. He had someone to cook for him and mend his clothes and warm his
bed on long winter nights. One day he would inherit both vineyards. There would be children. Life was good, and he was content.

But his young bride, once the excitement of the wedding was over, felt a sense of anticlimax that gradually turned into resentment as the reality of everyday routine set in. She was an only child and had been indulged. Now she was a wife, with a wife’s responsibilities: a house to run, a budget to juggle, a husband who came home each night hungry, tired, caked in dust from the fields, happy to spend the evening with his boots off reading the newspaper. Happy to be dull. She looked into the future and saw a lifetime of work and tedium.

It was hardly surprising that she began to take increasing pleasure from her visits to the butcher, timing them for the afternoons when there was a greater chance that he would be alone. He was the bright spot in her day, always smiling and, she couldn’t help but notice, a fine figure of a man in his abbreviated summer uniform—sturdy, unlike her scrawny husband, with a fine glow to his skin and a clump of thick black hair curling over the top of his apron.

It happened suddenly one afternoon, without anything being said. One minute they were standing side by side as he was wrapping some rump steak, close enough to feel the heat from each other’s bodies; the next, they were upstairs in the little apartment, slippery with sweat, clothes on the floor.

Afterward, she let herself out of the shop, flushed and distracted, forgetting the meat on the counter.

Speculation is the hobby of a small village, and information seems to travel by osmosis, seeping into the consciousness
as surely as sunlight through gauze. Secrets never last, and the women are always the first to know. In the weeks that followed his afternoon with the young wife, Arnaud noticed an increasing friskiness among his customers, and their tendency to stand closer to him. Hands that had previously been businesslike, paying money and receiving packages, now lingered, fingers brushing against his fingers. The young wife began to come in regularly just after two o’clock, closing the door behind her and turning the sign so that it read
Fermé
. Others followed, picking their moments. Arnaud lost weight and prospered.

It is not certain who first alerted the husbands. Perhaps one of the oldest women of the village, whose joy in life it was to denounce every irregularity she saw; perhaps one of the wives who was disappointed never to have made the hurried journey up the stairs to the dark, beef-scented bedroom. But, inevitably, gossip and suspicion grew, eventually reaching the husbands. Accusations were made in the privacy of the matrimonial bed. Denials were disbelieved. Finally, one husband confided in another, and he in another. They discovered that they were members of the same miserable club.

Five of them gathered one evening in the café: three farmers, the postman, and a man whose work for the insurance company often involved nights away from home. They took a table at the back away from the bar, a pack of cards disguising the true purpose of their meeting. In low, bitter voices, they told each other much the same story. She’s changed. She’s no longer the woman I married. That little
salaud
has destroyed our marriages, with his greasy smile and the obscenity of his shorts. As they sat there, the cards forgotten in front of them, their outrage feeding on pastis, their voices grew violent and loud. Too
loud. The postman, the least fuddled head at the table, proposed another meeting, somewhere private, where they could talk about what was to be done.

By now it was nearing the end of September, and the hunting season had begun. And so they agreed to meet in the hills the following Sunday morning, five friends with their guns and dogs in search of the wild boar that caused such havoc rooting through the vineyards every autumn.

Within minutes of sunrise, Sunday was hot, more like July than September. By the time the five men reached the crest of the Luberon, their guns and bandoliers were weighing heavy on their shoulders, their lungs burning from the climb. They found shade beneath the branches of a giant cedar tree, eased their backs, passed a bottle around. The dogs explored the undergrowth by nose, following invisible zigzag paths as though they were being jerked along at the end of a cord, the bells on their collars chinking in the still air. There was no other sound, there were no other people. The men could talk undisturbed.

To punish the wives, or to punish the butcher?

A good beating, a few broken bones, his shop destroyed—that would teach him. Maybe, said one of the husbands. But he would recognize his attackers, and then the police would come. There would be questions, possibly jail. And who was to say it would stop him? Men recover from beatings. He would have the sympathy of the wives. It would start all over again. The bottle passed around in silence as the five men imagined living through long months, maybe more, in jail. If their wives were able to deceive them now, how much easier it would be when they were left alone. Finally, one of them said what they had all been thinking: It was necessary to find a permanent solution. One way or another, the butcher must go.
Only then would their lives and their wives return to the way they had been before this young goat had put them to shame.

The postman, always the most reasonable among them, was in favor of talking to him. Perhaps he could be persuaded to leave. Four heads shook in disagreement. Where was the punishment in that? Where was the revenge? Where was the justice? The village would laugh at them. They would spend the rest of their lives the target of whispers, the butt of jokes, five weaklings who stood by while their wives jumped in and out of another man’s bed. Five men with horns and no guts.

The bottle was empty. One of the men got to his feet and placed it on a rock before coming back to pick up his gun and slide a cartridge into the breech. This is what we do, he said. Taking aim, he blew the bottle to fragments. He looked down at the others and shrugged.
Voilà
.

It was agreed, in the end, that they should draw straws to decide who was to carry out the sentence. When this had been done, the men went back down the mountain to have Sunday lunch with their wives.

The executioner chose the time with care, waiting for the dark of the moon, leaving the house when night was at its thickest. To be sure of a kill, he had loaded his gun with two shells of
chevrotine
, even though one blast of the heavy buckshot was enough to stop an elephant, let alone a man at arms length. He must have wondered if the others were lying awake thinking of him as he went softly through the empty streets and up to the butcher’s shop. And he must have cursed the time it took the butcher to come downstairs in response to the persistent tapping on his door.

He used both barrels, jammed up tight against the
butcher’s chest, and didn’t wait to see him fall. By the time lights started to go on in the neighboring houses, he was in the fields below the village, stumbling through the vines on his way home.

Sometime before dawn, the first gendarme arrived, roused from his bed by a call from one of the few telephones in the village. Half a dozen people were already standing in the pool of light spilling from the butcher’s shop, horrified, fascinated, unable to keep their eyes away from the bloody carcass that lay just inside the door. Within an hour, a squad from Avignon was there to clear them away, remove the corpse, and set up an office in the
mairie
to begin the lengthy process of questioning the entire village.

It was a difficult time for the five husbands, a test of solidarity and friendship. They spent another Sunday morning in the forest, reminding each other that silence, total silence, was their only protection. Keep it behind the teeth, as one of them said, and nobody will ever know. The police will think it was an enemy from the butcher’s previous life in another place, settling an old score. They passed the comforting bottle around and swore to say nothing.

Days passed, and then weeks—weeks without a confession, weeks without even a clue. Nobody admitted to knowing anything. And besides, there was a certain reluctance to discuss village affairs with outsiders in uniform. All the police were able to establish was the approximate time of death and, of course, the fact that the murderer had used a hunting rifle. Every man who held a
permis de chasse
was questioned, every rifle was carefully inspected. But unlike bullets, buckshot leaves no identifiable traces. The fatal shots could have come from any one of dozens of
guns. The investigation eventually faltered, then stopped altogether, to become simply another dossier in the files. The village went back to work harvesting the grapes, which everyone agreed were exceptionally concentrated that year after a dry, warm autumn.

In time there was another butcher, an older, family man from the Ardèche who was happy to take over premises that were so well equipped, even down to the knives. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself welcomed with unusual friendliness by the men of the village.

“And that was the end of it,” said Marius. “It must be nearly forty years ago now.”

I asked him if the identity of the murderer had ever been established. There were, after all, at least five people who knew, and as he himself had said, keeping secrets in a village was like trying to hold water in your hand. But he just smiled and shook his head.

“I’ll tell you this, though,” he said, “everyone turned out the day they buried the butcher. They all had their reasons.” He finished his wine, and stretched back in his chair. “
Beh oui
. It was a popular funeral.”

The letter came from Gerald Simpson, a gentleman living in New York. He was puzzled by a piece he’d seen in the newspaper, which he had enclosed, and the article made sad reading. It condemned Provence as a region of clever peasants and bad food, and here was the source of Simpson’s puzzlement. I don’t remember it being like that at all, he wrote, when I was there on vacation. It’s not like that in your books. What’s happened? Can it have changed so much in the last few years?

I read the article a second time, and it did indeed make Provence sound unattractive and poorly served by its restaurants and food suppliers. I’ve been sent similar
pieces before, written by journalists in search of what they like to think is a different angle. They are anxious to find what they call “the reality” that lurks behind the postcards of sunny lavender fields and smiling faces. Give them a disenchanted visitor, a surly shopkeeper, or a bad meal, and they go home happy; they have their story. I rarely agree with what they write, but that’s fair enough. We all have our own ideas about Provence, and mine will inevitably differ from those of people who come for a week or two, particularly if they come during August, the most crowded, least typical month of the year.

The piece that I had been sent, “My Year in Provence Last August,” appeared on April 22, 1998, in one of the worlds most distinguished and influential newspapers, the
New York Times
. It was written by Ruth Reichl, whose name, I’m sure, causes a
frisson
of apprehension when it is dropped in the restaurant kitchens of Manhattan; more so during her tenure as restaurant reviewer for the
Times
, a position she no longer occupies but did that April. A shining beacon of gastronomic knowledge in a dim and ignorant world, a maker and breaker of culinary reputations—all in all, a woman who knows her onions, as one of those clever old peasants might say.

Not the least of Reichl’s accomplishments as a food writer and editor is her ability to get to the heart of things without wasting a moment. In the course of her visit during August, she was able to investigate, consider, sum up, and dismiss an entire region of France—what diligence!—and yet still manage to find time to have a disappointing vacation.

What a catalogue of disappointment it was, too, from the very first breakfast: awful baguettes, worse croissants, sour coffee. A trip to the market failed to unearth a single
ripe tomato. The peaches were hard as rocks. The green beans looked tired, and nothing makes a food critic’s heart sink more quickly than the sight of a tired green bean. And the heart continued to sink. None of the potatoes had been grown in France. None of the butchers had any lamb. It was gourmet hell, and visits to the supermarket, where Reichl said she was forced to shop on nonmarket days, did nothing to temper her dissatisfaction. There, too, the food was pretty dreary. The meat and vegetables were a disaster. The cheeses came from factories. The bread was wrapped in plastic. And, horror of horrors, the selection of rosé wines alone took up more space than all the cereals, cookies, and crackers in her local D’Agostino market back home. Imagine such a thing! More wine than cookies! There can be few more telling signs than that of a society in the grip of depravity.