Lisette's List (2 page)

“Stop here!” André ordered. The bus came to a shuddering stop and André hopped out, plucked a fistful of lavender growing wild
along the roadside, climbed back in, and presented it to me. “To welcome you to Provence. I’m sorry it’s not in its full purple bloom yet. In July you’ll be astonished.”

A sweet gesture, sweet as the fragrance itself.

“How far is it to this Roussillon place?” I asked the driver as we started down the road again.

“Forty-five beautiful kilometers, madame.”

“Look. I think those are strawberry fields,” André said. “You love strawberries.”

“And melons,” Maurice added with a nasal twang. “The best melons in France are grown right here in the valleys of the Vaucluse. And asparagus, lettuce, carrots, cabbages, celery, artichokes—”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “I get the idea.”

He would not be
yes-yessed
. “Spinach, peas, beets. On higher ground, our famous fruit trees, vineyards, and olive groves.”

He pronounced every syllable, even the normally mute
e
at the ends of some words, which made the language into something energetic, decorated, and bouncy instead of smoothly gliding, as it is in Paris.

“Apricots. You love them too,” André said. “You are entering the Garden of Eden.”

“I see one snake and I’m taking the next train back to Paris.”

I had to admit that the fruit trees, laden with spring blossoms, exuded a heavenly fragrance. The grapevines were sprouting small chartreuse leaves, wild red poppies decorated the roadside, and the sun promised warmth, so welcome after a frigid winter in Paris.

But to live here for God knows how long—I had more than misgivings. For me to surrender the possibility of becoming an apprentice in the Galerie Laforgue, the chance of a lifetime for a woman of twenty with no formal education, had already caused resentment to surface in me. When André had made what seemed an impulsive decision to leave Paris and live in a remote village just because his grandfather had appealed to him to keep him company in his failing health, I’d been shocked. That he would so easily
abandon his position as an officer of the Guild of Encadreurs, the association of picture-frame craftsmen, a prestigious position for a man of twenty-three, was inconceivable to me.

I had gone crying to Sister Marie Pierre at the Daughters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the orphanage where I had been raised, complaining that he was shortsighted and selfish, but she had given me little sympathy. “Judge not, Lisette. See him in the best light, not the worst,” she’d said. And so here I was, bumping along in clouds of dust, despairing that I wasn’t in Paris, city of my birth, my happiness, my soul.

Following Sister Marie Pierre’s advice to try to see the situation in the best light, I ventured a possibility. “Tell me, monsieur. Does this town of yours have an art gallery?”

“A what?” he screeched.

“A place where original paintings are sold?”

He howled a laugh from his belly. “
Non
, madame. It is a
village.
”

His laughter cut deeply. My yearning for art was nothing casual or recent. Even when I was a little girl, this longing had been a palpable force every time I stole into the chapel of the Daughters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul to look at the painting of the Madonna and Child. How a human being, not a god, could re-create reality so accurately, how the deep blue of her cloak and the rich red of her dress could put me, a young orphan without a sou to my name, in touch with all that was fine and noble, how such beauty could stir something in me so deep that it must have been what Sister Marie Pierre called soul—such things drenched me with wonder.

André jiggled my arm and pointed out a cluster of red geraniums spilling over the window box of a stone farmhouse. “Don’t worry. You’re going to like it here,
ma petite.
”

Because of geraniums?

“
Certainement
, she will,” Maurice chimed in from behind the wheel. “Once she becomes accustomed to
les quatre vérités.
”

Four truths? “And what might they be, monsieur?”

“You see three of them right here.” He took his arm off the steering wheel to wave vaguely at the countryside, apparently able to drive and listen and talk and gesture all at once. Presumably that was a skill of living robustly. “The mountains, the water, the sun.”

True enough. The sunlight made the snow on the peak of a mountain to the north blindingly white. It shone on a river to the south in dancing specks of brilliance and turned the canals into iridescent silver-green ribbons.

“And what’s the fourth, monsieur?”

“It can’t be seen, and yet its mark is everywhere.”

“A riddle. You’re telling me a riddle.”

“No, madame. I’m telling you a truth. André, he knows.”

I turned to André, who tipped his head toward the window and said, “Think and look. Look and think.”

I studied the landscape for some mark.

“Does it have to do with those stone walls?” They were actually only remnants of walls, piles of flat stones forming barriers nearly a meter thick, some with wayside niches for figures of saints, I presumed, although I hadn’t seen any.

“No, madame. Those were built in the Middle Ages to keep out the plague.”

“Not a comforting thought, monsieur. Neither is that scraping noise. Is there something wrong with your brakes?”

“No, madame. You are hearing the sound of
cigales
. Insects that make their mating calls when the temperature gets warm.”

Definitely something I would have to get used to. Thickly planted cypress trees lined the north sides of the vegetable fields. Their pointed shadows stretched toward us like witches’ gray fingers.

Looking from side to side, I noticed another peculiarity. “Why don’t the houses on the right side have windows facing the road, while the ones on the left side do?”

“Now you’re thinking. Look. They all have windows on three sides, but not on the north.”

But why? Did the sun glare through north windows too strongly? No. It would shine from the south, giving light to only half of the house. The other half would be dark and gloomy.

When I asked André for a hint, he told me to look at the roofs. They were terra-cotta tiles, long, tubular, and overlapping. Flat stones had been placed at their northern edges.

“Wind!” I shouted.

The snorer in the back of the bus woke up with a snort.

“The mistral,” Maurice intoned in a deep voice. “Dry but cold. Oh, the mistral, it is fierce, madame. It comes three days at a time, in winter. Sometimes six. Sometimes nine.”

“Don’t delude her. It comes in the fall and spring too.”

“That’s almost all year!” I wailed.

Maurice explained that the highest mountain to the north was the southernmost mountain of the Alps. The mistral winds tore south out of Siberia, then leapt over the Alps to Mont Ventoux, which he called the Giant of Provence, and then arrived here.

“Windy Mountain is its actual name?”

“Yes. Now you’ll notice that the olive trees bend to the south.”

We passed several vegetable fields being tended. “Old farmers bend to the south too,” I remarked.

I could always stay inside for three days, couldn’t I? But what about nine? Despite my good intentions to be a compliant wife, reasons I would not like this place arranged themselves in a private list:

1. Cold wind for nine days straight.

2. Half of the house always in darkness.

3. It wasn’t Paris.

The two men in the back of the bus got off in the town of Coustellet. Soon after, the pavement ended, and an old woman at the roadside in front of a farmhouse waved both arms urgently.

“Ah, my first lady in distress!” Maurice brought the bus to a bumpy halt and scrambled down the steps to help her up. “Adieu, madame.”

“
Non, non
, Maurice. I’m not getting on,” she said. “Just take my duck and deliver it to Madame Pottier in les Imberts. She will be waiting by her olive tree.”

“What duck?”

“You have to catch him first,” she said.

The pen had a chicken-wire covering, so Maurice had to crouch down to waddle after the creature. He did his best to avoid muddy areas and splats of duck droppings, his thick arms stretching out to both sides, his stubby legs spread wide, his heels close together like a circus clown’s. Getting red in the face, waving his beret to shoo the duck into a corner, he crooned, “Come to Papa.”

André leapt off the bus to help him. With André barring any escape, Maurice flopped his body onto the duck, which caused a desperate quacking beneath his stomach until the angry duck squirmed its way out, right into André’s waiting hands.

The farmwife deftly tied the duck’s wings against its body and wrapped the twine around its two feet. André put the bewildered duck into the bus, whereupon it fell over. André righted it and said, “Enjoy the ride. Lovely scenery.”

Maurice tied the other end of the twine to a seat leg and bopped the poor duck on the head with his index finger. “You are going into the oven, so accept your fate like a man,” he told it.

The duck quacked.

“You’ve insulted him,” I said.

Maurice corrected himself. “Er, like a duck.”

Down the road, a matronly woman wearing an apron and a white kerchief hailed us.

“There’s your second lady in distress,” André said.

Maurice brought the bus to a halt and opened the door. “Adieu, madame. At your service.” He handed her the duck through the open door.

She took it in both hands. “This fellow’s going to be
pâté de canard
in a few days. I’ll save you some. Does your wife still want the feathers?”

“Yes. For a pillow. Adieu, madame.”

And the bus bounced back into action.

“Why do you greet someone with
adieu
instead of
bonjour
?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Think of ‘à Dieu,’ madame. It’s the Provençal way to wish a person to be with God when you meet him as well as when you leave him.”

A satisfactory answer, although I suspected that other Provençal ways were backward as well.

We stopped for a girl who was crossing the road while flicking a willow wand at half a dozen goats, then for an old man who was piling broken-off branches into his donkey cart—picturesque enough for a painting.

The road climbed steeply on switchbacks through terraces of orchards. Maurice identified the trees as pear trees. That sent me back to the painting of the Madonna in the chapel of the orphanage. A golden pear rested by itself on a railing in the foreground. Countless times I had asked Sister Marie Pierre why it was there, but she’d never answered me. All she said was to love the Virgin Mary and I wouldn’t miss the mother I barely remembered. Her response never satisfied me. As I grew older I recognized that Mary was wrapped in her own thoughts, unconscious of the child she was holding, an assessment that may have had more to do with my mother’s abandonment of me than with what the artist had intended to portray.

It was only a copy, but it was by an Italian named Giovanni Bellini, which made it all the more exotic. The chapel had only one painting. That was enough for me, then.

Maurice’s voice swearing an oath as he ground the gears brought me out of my reverie. Just below a hill town topped by a castle and a church, he set the brake.

“Roussillon?”

“Gordes,” he corrected. “I have to make a delivery here.”

I looked around inside the bus. “What do you have to deliver?”

“Pastis. From the glass to my throat. It is the first
apéritif
hour. Come. I will initiate you, madame.”

We picked our way up a long, uneven stone stairway to a café in the square. Maurice greeted the people he knew with more
adieus
and ordered a pastis for each of us. The tall slim glasses held only a couple of centimeters of clear liquid, a disappointment until Maurice poured water into his glass, which turned the pastis cloudy.

André prepared my drink along with his. “Ah,” he murmured. “One of the pleasures of the south. I’ve been waiting for this.”

“Santé.”
Maurice held up his glass and took a drink, then carefully wiped his trimmed mustache and the short whiskers of his white goatee, which, oddly, didn’t match his bushy black eyebrows.

“I like the aroma.” I took a sip, then another, then a gulp.

“It pleases you?” He raised his eyebrows. “The mix of anise and other herbs?”

“Very nice.”

“Beware, Lise,” André said. “It creeps up on you. Pour in more water if you feel …” He swiveled his hand in a circle.

“To suit yourself and the weather,” Maurice said. “A true Provençal drink.”

“And you are a true Provençal chevalier, monsieur. But please, tell me your surname.”

“Chevet, madame.” He put his hand out palm down about a meter above the floor.
“Un petit chevalier,”
he said, chuckling at his own joke.

As we descended the long stretch of stone steps to the bus, I felt pleasantly dizzy.

“Hold on to her, André. The steps can be treacherous.”

“I am. I will never let her go.”

“Your grandfather Pascal, he will be furious with me if I deliver her to Roussillon with a sprained ankle. When my friends learn
that I have brought a
Parisienne
to live in Roussillon—
oh là là
!—they will be so proud. But I wonder. Can a
Parisienne
ever become a
Roussillonnaise
?”

Would any
Parisienne
ever want to?

“Depends on how much we love her,” André said as we boarded the bus.

“Me, I love her already!” Maurice declared.

“You are too kind, monsieur. Is this town of yours nearby?” I asked.

“Just down and up. Look for a sickle stuck in a fence post.”

We had bounced along for a kilometer or so when I noticed a curious-looking group of stone huts in the shape of beehives. “I hope
that’
s not Roussillon.” I giggled. “Is it?”