Encore Provence (9 page)

The watch committee is part of the family that you have to be prepared to adopt if you choose to live in a tiny, curious community, and that is one of the drawbacks of village life. We once tried it, many years ago, and the memories of our first few days are still fresh in my mind. We had barely moved in when the spinster sisters who were our neighbors appeared on the doorstep demanding a tour of inspection. They looked everywhere and wanted to know the price of everything. How fortunate we were, they said, to have a telephone, one of the few in the village. The next morning their brother arrived, made the calls he’d been saving up for the past three months, and left fifty centimes on the table by the phone.

We put up with this and all that followed because we were foreigners desperately anxious not to cause offense. We had chosen to live with these people, after all. They hadn’t chosen us.

Village life taught us early on that what you gain in
companionship and convenience you lose in privacy The face at the window and the knock on the door can come at any time, and there’s no escape. You can hide, but you can’t run.
They know you’re in there
. They know because your shutters are open, and nobody leaves a house without closing the shutters. (You can, of course, always fool them by closing the shutters and staying at home, but then you’d be spending your life in the dark.) Your movements are monitored, your mail examined, your habits discussed and analyzed.

I’m sure this isn’t confined to France. Go to live in the Hebrides or Vermont or a hamlet outside Munich; you will find the same fascination with newcomers, and you’ll be considered newcomers for a good five or ten years. It’s obvious that many people enjoy this, but I’ve discovered that I don’t. I like to come and go without having to explain, every fifty yards, what I’m doing. I like a little privacy in my private life. That is why for me, a village—even St.-Bonnet-le-Froid, my ideal village—is best enjoyed at a distance. It will always be a great place to visit. But I wouldn’t want to live there.

Driving along the back roads of the Vaucluse, you cannot help noticing the high proportion of cars that are well past the first flush of youth. With their mottled, rusty complexions, engines in the final stages of bronchitis, and exhaust pipes adangle, they seem to last almost as long as their owners, kind and good souls who are obviously prepared to put up with their cars’ mechanical idiosyncrasies. When we first came to live here, I assumed that this loyalty to old iron sprang from the frugal nature of the inhabitants and their reluctance to part with any piece of machinery, no matter how ramshackle, while it could still be kicked or coaxed into life. Then we bought a car, and I understood.

Frugality has nothing to do with the Provençal motorist’s attachment to his limping ’71 Citroën or the exhausted Peugeot with 400,000 kilometers on it. Shortage of funds is not the problem here. The reason for all those disreputable old bangers on the roads, I’m convinced, is that the process of buying a new car is often so infuriating, so frustrating, and so time-consuming that if you have any sense you never wish to repeat it. As we discovered, it is not enough—not
nearly
enough—to have a valid driver’s license and a check. The buyer is also required to prove that he or she officially exists, and don’t think you can do this simply by waving your passport under the nose of authority. Other documents are demanded (usually one at a time, so that you have to keep coming back) to prove that your driver’s license, your checkbook, and your passport are not just artful counterfeits. For some reason, phone and electricity bills are considered to be exempt from the forger’s attentions, and these, together with a handful of old envelopes addressed to you, will eventually do the trick. But it can be a long and weary journey, demanding much stamina and patience. Or so it was when we were obliged to go through it seven or eight years ago.

Things will have changed, I told myself, when the time came to replace our car. This is the New Europe, blazing along in a white-hot streak of multinational cooperation and efficiency, with factories spewing out hundreds of thousands of cars each year. These cars had to be sold. Big business was on my side. And even if it wasn’t, even if things hadn’t changed, I was no longer an innocent in these matters. I knew what to expect, and when I arrived at the showroom I was fully prepared, confident that the comprehensive dossier I had put together—which included
all the normal documentation as well as a form stating my blood type, some old airline tickets, and a greeting card from my accountant wishing me a prosperous new year—would be more than enough to establish my credentials. I was ready for anything, except what actually happened.

I had decided to support local industry and go to a dealer in Apt. The premises were not much bigger than an office, but they showed all the reassuring signs of efficiency. A computer hummed and hiccuped on the desk, the brochures were neatly arranged on racks, the aroma of freshly waxed coachwork was in the air, the place was spotless. Somehow, two cars had been squeezed into the small space, and they, too, were so highly polished that one hesitated to touch them. Here, I said to myself, was a dealer who meant business. The New Europe, even down in Provence.

But where
was
the dealer? After a few minutes I was beginning to feel lonely when a woman appeared from behind the rack of brochures and asked me what I wanted.

“I’d like to buy a car,” I said.

“Ah.
Attends
.” She disappeared. Another few minutes went by. I started to read my third brochure, mesmerized by upholstery options and remote-control glove compartments, and barely glanced at a burly man in a checked shirt and flat cap who came in from the forecourt to join me by the rack.

“It is you who looks for a car,” he said.

Indeed it was, I told him. I’d decided on the model, picked a color, chosen the upholstery. All that remained was to establish a price and a delivery date.

“
Ah bon.
” He tugged at his cap. “You need a salesman.”

“I’m sorry. I thought that was you.”

“
Beh non
. I take care of the forecourt. My son is the salesman.”

“Then perhaps I could talk to your son.”

“
Beh non.
” He shook his head. “He is
en vacances
.”

The gentleman in the cap could do nothing. But his son the salesman, so I was assured, would be back in a week or so, fit and rested. Meanwhile, as a special dispensation—brochures being the price they were these days, they didn’t have many of them—I was allowed to keep the brochure so that I could study it at home.

It was either an admirable exercise in low-pressure salesmanship or a maddening inconvenience, depending on your patience and your point of view. Or, in my case, another reminder of why I like to live in Provence. Curiosities are everywhere, and the world’s most reluctant car salesman is only one of them. Before leaving Apt, we should pay our respects to another—the town’s railway station.

It is set back from the main road that leads to Avignon, a cream-colored building constructed during those giddy, prosperous days of the nineteenth century before trains had any real competition from cars and planes. The architectural style is railroad bourgeois—two substantial stories crowned by the triumphant, unblinking flourish of a circular
oeil-de-boeuf
window, its blank stare directed across the road toward the Hotel Victor Hugo directly opposite. (Rooms for the weary traveler at 175 francs a night, W.C. included.) To one side of the station building is a small, well-kept park, and the area in front is usually crowded with cars and vans coming and going. There is an air of bustle appropriate to the starting point for exotic voyages to every corner of Provence and beyond.

In fact, I wanted two seats on the TGV high-speed train from Avignon to Paris. Was it possible, I asked the gentleman at the reservations desk, to purchase tickets from him that would take us all the way?

“Of course,” he said, pecking away at his computer to bring up the schedule of departures. “From here,” he added proudly, “I can arrange tickets to anywhere in France—and also to London on the Eurostar, although that does involve changing trains at Lille. What time would be convenient for you to travel?”

I picked a time, and asked him when the train left from Apt to connect with the TGV from Avignon. He looked up from his computer with a frown, as though I had asked a question of extraordinary stupidity. “You can’t go from
here
,” he said.

“No?”

He stood up. “
Venez, monsieur.
” I followed him to the back of the building, where he threw open a doorway that gave on to the deserted station platform and waved a hand at what had once been the track. I looked in vain for the shining double rails of the
chemin de fer
, for the signals, for the puff of steam on the horizon. Alas, there was no way for even the most determined train to penetrate the waist-high weeds that stretched in a straight line off into the distance. Apt’s days as a vital rail link were clearly long gone. However, I was told that with sufficient notice a taxi to Avignon station could easily be arranged.

But think what you will about a train station without any trains, at least it is open all day to conduct its limited business. This sets it apart from those Provençal establishments—and there are many of them—which open and close according to a timetable that is guaranteed to bewilder and mystify the unwary. Butchers,
épiceries
, hardware
stores, newsstands, antique dealers, clothes boutiques, and small stores of nearly every description seem to follow only one consistent rule: Whether they open at eight in the morning or not until ten, they lock their doors at lunchtime. The shutters come down at noon for at least two hours, often three. In small villages, this can stretch to four hours, particularly when the heat of summer calls for an extended siesta.

And just when you begin to feel that a certain chaotic pattern is emerging, the rules will change. You go to buy cheese at a shop that has always opened on the dot of three, only to find the window bare except for a notice advising you of a
fermeture exceptionelle
. Your first thought is that there has been a death in the family, but as the exceptional closing period enters its third week, you realize that a matter of almost equal gravity—the annual vacation—has come up. This is confirmed by Madame when she returns to work. Why didn’t she put her holiday plans on the notice? Ah, because news of a prolonged absence might encourage burglars. Cheese theft, apparently, is a grim possibility in these dangerous times.

The rituals of rural commerce are made even more complicated every August, when the French by the millions leave their offices and factories for the joys of the open road and the peace of the countryside. Since Provence is a popular summer destination, most local enterprises keep working, hoping to profit from the high season. You will never have a problem finding food, drink, postcards, pottery, souvenirs made from olive wood, or suntan oil. But should you need anything a little out of the ordinary, something that originates in those deserted offices and factories up there in the far north, you would be well advised to anticipate a long wait.

Friends from Paris, down to spend August in their village house, discovered that their old electric kettle had expired. Being by nature faithful customers, they went back to the shop where they had bought it to buy a replacement. And there in the window, somewhat dusty but definitely new, was exactly what they wanted. They were already taking out their checkbook as they went into the shop.

The proprietor was apologetic, but firm. His stock of kettles was exhausted and, as the factory outside Paris was closed for the month, it would be mid-September before he received any more.
Désolé
.

But Monsieur, said our friends, you have a kettle—an up-to-date version of our old kettle, the very kettle we desire—in your window. What luck! Well take that one.

The proprietor would have none of it. That kettle must remain in the window, he said, for reasons of publicity. How else would people know that I stock that particular
marque
?

Reasoned argument failed to budge him. The gift of the old kettle as substitute window dressing was declined. The offer of payment by cash, usually a powerful inducement, was refused. The kettle stayed in the shop window, where, for all I know, it is still gathering dust, a small token of the trials of August.

It is in many ways the most difficult month of the year, and not only because the population is swollen by tourists. Crowds can easily be avoided, but the weather can’t, and the weather of August is, as the farmers say,
excessif
, a reaction to the heat that has built up during the long, dry days of July. For week after week, the sun never seems to set, soaking into the hills and the stone houses, melting tarmac, splitting earth, grilling the grass brown, thudding
down to make the hair on your head hot to the touch. And then one day, traditionally around the middle of August, the air thickens and becomes heavy, almost syrupy. There is an abrupt silence in the bushes as the
cigales
stop chirping, and you feel that the countryside is holding its breath, waiting for the storm.