Toujours Provence (20 page)

Les Halles
takes up an area perhaps seventy yards square, and very few inches are wasted. Three main passageways separate the
étaux
, stalls of varying sizes, and at that time in the morning it was hard to imagine customers being able to reach them. Crates, mangled cardboard boxes, and wispy clumps of paper straw were stacked high in front of many of the counters, and the floor was garnished with casualties—lettuce leaves, squashed tomatoes, errant
haricots
—that had been unable to cling on during the last breakneck stage of delivery.

The stallholders, too busy writing up the day’s prices and arranging their produce to spare five minutes for a visit to the bar, bellowed for coffee, which was served to them by Isabelle’s waitress, an acrobatic girl over the crates and a steady hand with her tray. She even managed to keep her footing in the high-risk zone of the fishsellers, where the floor was slick with the ice that men with raw, nicked hands and rubber aprons were shovelling
onto
the steel display shelves.

It made a noise like gravel on glass, and there was another, more painful sound that cut through the hubbub as the butchers sawed at bones and severed tendons with decisive, dangerously fast chops of their cleavers. I hoped for their fingers’ sake that they hadn’t had wine for breakfast.

After half an hour it was safe to leave the bar. The piles of crates had been removed, the trolleys parked; the traffic was on legs now instead of wheels. An army of brooms had whisked away the scraps of fallen vegetables, prices had been marked on spiked plastic labels, tills unlocked, coffee drunk.
Les Halles
was open for business.

I have never seen so much fresh food and so much variety in such a confined space. I counted fifty stalls, many of them entirely devoted to a single speciality. There were two stalls
selling olives—just olives—in every conceivable style of preparation: olives
à la grecque
, olives in herb-flavored oil, olives mixed with scarlet shards of pimento, olives from Nyons, olives from Les Baux, olives that looked like small black plums or elongated green grapes. They were lined up in squat wooden tubs, gleaming as though each one had been individually polished. At the end of the line were the only nonolives to be seen, a barrel of anchovies from Collioure, packed in tighter than any sardines, sharp and salty when I leaned down to smell them. Madame behind the counter told me to try one, with a plump black olive. Did I know how to make
tapenade
, the olive and anchovy paste? A pot of that every day and I’d live to be a hundred.

Another stall, another specialist: anything with feathers. Pigeons, plucked and trussed, capons, breasts of duck and thighs of duckling, three different members of the chicken aristocracy, with the supreme chickens, the
poulets de Bresse
, wearing their red, white, and blue labels like medals.
Légalement contrôlée
, said the labels, by the
Comité Interprofessionnel de la Volaille de Bresse
. I could imagine the chosen chickens receiving their decorations from a dignified committee member, almost certainly with the traditional kiss on each side of the beak.

And then there were fish, laid out gill to gill on a row of stalls that extended along the length of one wall, 40 yards or more of glistening scales and still-bright eyes. Banks of crushed ice, smelling of the sea, separated the squid from the blood-darkened tuna, the
rascasses
from the
loups de mer
, the cod from the skate. Pyramids of clams, of the molluscs called
seiches
, of winkles, tiny grey shrimp, and monster
gambas
, fish for
friture
, fish for
soupe
, lobsters the color of dark steel, jolts of yellow coming from the dishes of fresh lemons
on the counter, deft hands with long thin knives cutting and gutting, the squelch of rubber boots on the wet stone floor.

It was coming up to seven o’clock, and the first housewives were starting to investigate, with prods and squeezes, what they would be cooking that night. The market opens at 5:30, and the first half-hour is officially reserved for the
commerçants
and restaurant owners, but I couldn’t see anyone being courageous enough to stand in the way of a determined Avignon matron who wanted to get her errands done before six. Shop early for the best, we had often been told, and wait until just before the market closes for the cheapest.

But who could wait that long, surrounded by temptation like this? In one short stretch, I had eaten mentally a dozen times. A bowl of brown free-range eggs turned into a
piperade
, with Bayonne ham from the stall next door and peppers from a few feet further on. That kept me going until I reached the smoked salmon and caviar. But there were the cheeses, the
saucissons
, the rabbit and hare and pork
pâtés
, the great pale scoops of
rillettes
, the
confits de canard
—it would be madness not to try them all.

I very nearly stopped my research to have a picnic in the car park. Everything I needed—including bread from one stall, wine from another—was within 20 yards, fresh and beautifully presented. What could have been a better way to start the day? I realized that my appetite had adjusted to the environment, leapfrogging several hours. My watch said 7:30. My stomach whispered lunch, and to hell with the time. I went to look for the liquid moral support of more coffee.

There are three bars in
Les Halles
—Jacky and Isabelle, Cyrille and Evelyne, and, the most dangerous of the three,
Chez Kiki
, where they start serving champagne long before most people get up. I saw two burly men toasting each other,
their
flûtes
of champagne held delicately between thick fingers, earth under their fingernails, earth on their heavy boots. Obviously they had sold their lettuces well that morning.

The passageways and stalls were now crowded with members of the public, shopping with the intent, slightly suspicious expressions of people who were determined to find the most tender, the juiciest, the best. A woman put on her reading glasses to inspect a row of cauliflowers that, to me, looked identical. She picked one up, hefted it in her hand, peered at its tight white head, sniffed it, put it down. Three times she did this before making her choice, and then she watched the stallholder over the top of her glasses to make sure he didn’t try to substitute it for a less perfect specimen in the back row. I remembered being told not to handle the vegetables in a London greengrocer’s. There would have been outrage here if the same miserable ruling were introduced. No fruits or vegetables are bought without going through trial by touch, and any stallholder who tried to discourage the habit would be pelted out of the market.

Avignon has had its
Halles
since 1910, although the site under the car park has been in operation only since 1973. That was as much information as the girl in the office could give me. When I asked about the amount of food sold in a day or a week, she just shrugged and told me
beaucoup
.

And
beaucoup
there certainly was, being stuffed and piled into every kind of receptacle from battered suitcases to handbags seemingly capable of infinite expansion. An elderly, bandy-legged man in shorts and a crash helmet wheeled his
mobylette
up to the entrance and came in to collect his morning’s shopping—a plastic
cageot
of melons and peaches, two enormous baskets straining to contain their contents, a cotton sack with a dozen
baguettes
. He distributed the weight carefully
around his machine. The crate of fruit was secured with elastic straps to the rack behind the saddle, the baskets hung on the handlebars, the bread sack slung across his back. As he wheeled his load—enough food for a week—away from the market, he shouted at one of the stallholders,
“A demain!”
I watched him as he joined the traffic in the Place Pie, the tiny engine of his bike spluttering with effort, his head bent forward over the handlebars and the
baguettes
sticking up like a quiver of fat golden arrows. It was 11:00, and the café opposite the market had tables on the pavement set for lunch.

It has taken us three years to accept the fact that we live in the same house, but in two different places.

What we think of as normal life starts in September. Apart from market days in the towns, there are no crowds. Traffic on the back roads is sparse during the day—a tractor, a few vans—and virtually nonexistent at night. There is always a table in every restaurant, except perhaps for Sunday lunch. Social life is intermittent and uncomplicated. The baker has bread, the plumber has time for a chat, the postman has time for a drink. After the first deafening weekend of the hunting season, the forest is quiet. Each field has a stooped, reflective figure working among the vines, very slowly up one line, very slowly down the next. The hours between noon and two are dead.

And then we come to July and August.

We used to treat them as just another two months of the year; hot months, certainly, but nothing that required much adjustment on our part except to make sure that the afternoon included a siesta.

We were wrong. Where we live in July and August is still the Lubéron, but it’s not the same Lubéron. It is the Lubéron
en vacances
, and our past efforts to live normally during abnormal times have been miserably unsuccessful. So unsuccessful that we once considered cancelling summer altogether and going somewhere grey and cool and peaceful, like the Hebrides.

But if we did, we would probably miss it, all of it, even the days and incidents that have reduced us to sweating, irritated, overtired zombies. So we have decided to come to terms with the Lubéron in the summer, to do our best to join the rest of the world on holiday and, like them, to send postcards telling distant friends about the wonderful times we are having. Here are a few.

Cherchez les nudistes!
It is open season for nature lovers, and there is likely to be a sharp increase in the number of applicants wishing to join the Saint-Tropez police force.

The mayor, Monsieur Spada, has flown in the face of years of tradition (Saint-Tropez made public nudity famous, after all) and has decreed that in the name of safety and hygiene there will be no more naked sunbathing on the public beaches.
“Le nudisme intégral est interdit,”
says Monsieur Spada, and he has empowered the police to seize and arrest any offenders. Well, perhaps not to seize them, but to track them down and fine them 75 francs, or as much as 1500 francs if they have been guilty of creating a public outrage. Exactly where a nudist might keep 1500 francs is a question that is puzzling local residents.

Meanwhile, a defiant group of nudists has set up headquarters
in some rocks behind
la plage de la Moutte
. A spokeswoman for the group has said that under no circumstances would bathing suits be worn. Wish you were here.

Faustin’s brother Jacky, a wiry little man of sixty or so, grows melons in the field opposite the house. It’s a large field, but he does all the work himself, and by hand. In the spring I have often seen him out there for six or seven hours, back bent like a hinge, his hoe chopping at the weeds that threaten to strangle his crop. He doesn’t spray—who would eat a melon tasting of chemicals?—and I think he must enjoy looking after his land in the traditional way.

Now that the melons are ripening, he comes to the field at 6:00 every morning to pick the ones that are ready. He takes them up to Ménerbes to be packed in shallow wooden crates. From Ménerbes they go to Cavaillon, and from Cavaillon to Avignon, to Paris, everywhere. It amuses Jacky to think of people in smart restaurants paying
une petite fortune
for a simple thing like a melon.

If I get up early enough I can catch him before he goes to Ménerbes. He always has a couple of melons that are too ripe to travel, and he sells them to me for a few francs.

As I walk back to the house, the sun clears the top of the mountain and it is suddenly hot on my face. The melons, heavy and satisfying in my hands, are still cool from the night air. We have them for breakfast, fresh and sweet, less than ten minutes after they have been picked.

There is a point at which a swimming pool ceases to be a luxury and becomes very close to a necessity, and that point is when the temperature hits 100 degrees. Whenever people ask us about renting a house for the summer, we always tell them this, and some of them listen.

Others don’t, and within two days of arriving they are on the phone telling us what we told them months before. It’s so
hot
, they say. Too hot for tennis, too hot for cycling, too hot for sightseeing, too hot, too hot. Oh, for a pool. You’re so lucky.

There is a hopeful pause. Is it my imagination, or can I actually hear the drops of perspiration falling like summer rain on the pages of the telephone directory?