Toujours Provence (23 page)

The beam caught them as they came into the clearing: a couple, middle-aged and unremarkable, the woman carrying a small sack, the man with flashlight and truffle pick. Red-handed.

The three men, making great display of their artillery, approached the couple. They had no defense, and with gun barrels under their noses quickly admitted that they had been there before to steal truffles.

How many truffles? asked the old peasant. Two kilos? Five kilos? More?

Silence from the poachers, and silence from the three men as they thought about what they should do. Justice must be
done; more important than justice, money must be repaid. One of the men whispered in the old peasant’s ear, and he nodded. Yes, that is what we will do. He announced the verdict of the impromptu court.

Where was the poacher’s bank? Nyons?
Ah bon
. If you start walking now you will be there when it opens. You will take out 30,000 francs, which you will bring back here. We shall keep your car, your dog, and your wife until you return.

The poacher set off on the four-hour walk to Nyons. His dog was put in the boot of the car, his wife in the back seat. The three men squeezed in too. It was a cold night. They dozed through it in between tots of
marc
.

Dawn came, then morning, then noon …

Alain stopped his story. “You’re a writer,” he said. “How do you think it ended?”

I made a couple of guesses, both wrong, and Alain laughed.

“It was very simple, not at all
dramatique
,” he said. “Except perhaps for the wife. The poacher went to his bank in Nyons and took out all the money he possessed, and then—
pouf!—
he disappeared.”

“He never came back?”

“Nobody ever saw him again.”

“Not his wife?”

“Certainly not his wife. He was not fond of his wife.”

“And the peasant?”

“He died an angry man.”

Alain said he had to go. I paid him for the truffles, and wished him luck with his new dog. When I got home, I cut one of the truffles in half to make sure it was the genuine, deep black all the way through. He seemed like a good fellow, Alain, but you never know.

Going native.

I don’t know whether it was meant as a joke, an insult, or a compliment, but that was what the man from London said. He had dropped in unexpectedly on his way to the coast, and stayed for lunch. We hadn’t seen him for five years, and he was obviously curious to see what effects life in Provence was having on us, examining us thoughtfully for signs of moral and physical deterioration.

We weren’t conscious of having changed, but he was sure of it, although there was nothing he could put his finger on. For lack of any single change as plain as delirium tremens, rusty English, or premature senility, he put us in the vague, convenient, and all-embracing pigeonhole marked “going native.”

As he drove away in his clean car, telephone antenna fluttering gaily in the breeze, I looked at our small and dusty Citroën, which was innocent of any communications facility. That was certainly a native car. And, in comparison with our visitor’s Côte d’Azur outfit, I was wearing native dress—old
shirt, shorts, no shoes. Then I remembered how often he had looked at his watch during lunch, because he was meeting friends in Nice at 6:30. Not later in the day, not sometime that evening, but at 6:30. Precisely. We had long ago abandoned timekeeping of such a high standard due to lack of local support, and now lived according to the rules of the approximate rendezvous. Another native habit.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that we must have changed. I wouldn’t have called it going native, but there are dozens of differences between our old life and our new life, and we have had to adjust to them. It hasn’t been difficult. Most of the changes have taken place gradually, pleasantly, almost imperceptibly. All of them, I think, are changes for the better.

We no longer watch television. It wasn’t a self-righteous decision to give us time for more intellectual pursuits; it simply happened. In the summer, watching television can’t begin to compare with watching the evening sky. In the winter, it can’t compete with dinner. The television set has now been relegated to a cupboard to make space for more books.

We eat better than we used to, and probably more cheaply. It is impossible to live in France for any length of time and stay immune to the national enthusiasm for food, and who would want to? Why not make a daily pleasure out of a daily necessity? We have slipped into the gastronomic rhythm of Provence, taking advantage of the special offers provided by nature all through the year: asparagus, tiny
haricots verts
barely thicker than matchsticks, fat
fèves
, cherries, aubergines,
courgettes
, peppers, peaches and apricots and melons and grapes,
blettes
, wild mushrooms, olives, truffles—every season brings its own treat. With the expensive exception of the truffle, nothing costs more than a few francs a kilo.

Meat is a different matter, and butchers’ prices can make the visitor wince. Provence is not cattle country, and so the Englishman in search of his roast beef on Sunday had better take his checkbook and be prepared for disappointment, because the beef is neither cheap nor tender. But lamb, above all from the area around Sisteron where the sheep season themselves with herbs, has a taste that would be a crime to disguise with mint sauce. And every part of the pig is good.

Even so, we now eat less meat. An occasional
appellation contrôlée
chicken from Bresse, the wild rabbits that Henriette brings in the winter, a cassoulet when the temperature drops and the
mistral
howls around the house—meat from time to time is wonderful. Meat every day is a habit of the past. There is so much else: fish from the Mediterranean, fresh pasta, limitless recipes for all those vegetables, dozens of breads, hundreds of cheeses.

It may be the change in our diet and the way it is cooked, always in olive oil, but we have both lost weight. Only a little, but enough to cause some surprise to friends who expect us to have developed the ballooning
embonpoint
—the stomach on stilts—that sometimes grows on people with good appetites who have the luck to eat in France.

Through no deliberate intention of our own, we also take more exercise. Not the grim contortions promoted by gaunt women in leotards, but the exercise that comes naturally from living in a climate that allows you to spend eight or nine months of the year outdoors. Discipline has nothing to do with it, apart from the small disciplines of country life—bringing logs in for the fire, keeping the weeds down and the ditches clear, planting, pruning, bending, and lifting. And, every day in every kind of weather, walking.

We have had people to stay who refuse to believe that
walking can be hard exercise. It’s not dramatic effort, not immediately punishing, not fast, not violent. Everybody walks, they say. You can’t call that exercise. Eventually, if they insist, we take them out for a stroll with the dogs.

For the first 10 minutes the going is flat, along the footpath at the bottom of the mountain, easy and undemanding. Pleasant to get a little fresh air and a view of Mont Ventoux in the distance. But exercise? They’re not even short of breath.

Then we turn and go up the track leading to the cedar forest that grows along the spine of the Lubéron. The surface changes from sandy soil cushioned with pine needles to rocks and patches of scree, and we begin to climb. After five minutes, there are no more condescending remarks about walking being an old man’s exercise. After 10 minutes, there are no remarks at all, only the sound of increasingly heavy breathing, punctuated by coughing. The track twists around boulders and under branches so low you have to bend double. There is no encouraging glimpse of the top; the view is limited to a hundred yards or so of narrow, stony, steeply inclined track before it disappears around the next outcrop of rock. If there is any breath to spare, there might be a curse as an ankle turns on the shifting scree. Legs and lungs are burning.

The dogs pad on ahead, with the rest of us strung out behind them at irregular intervals, the least fit stumbling along with their backs bent and their hands on their thighs. Pride usually prevents them from stopping, and they wheeze away stubbornly, heads down, feeling sick. They will never again dismiss walking as nonexercise.

The reward for this effort is to find yourself in a silent, extraordinary landscape, sometimes eerie, always beautiful. The cedars are magnificent, and magical when they are
draped with great swags of snow. Beyond them, on the south face of the mountain, the land drops away sharply, grey and jagged, softened by the thyme and box that seem to be able to grow in the most unpromising wrinkle of rock.

On a clear day, when the
mistral
has blown and the air shines, the views toward the sea are long and sharply focused, almost as if they have been magnified, and there is a sense of being hundreds of miles away from the rest of the world. I once met a peasant up there, on the road the forest service made through the cedars. He was on an old bicycle, a gun slung across his back, a dog loping beside him. We were both startled to see another human being. It is normally less busy, and the only sound is the wind nagging at the trees.

The days pass slowly but the weeks rush by. We now measure the year in ways that have little to do with diaries and specific dates. There is the almond blossom in February, and a few weeks of prespring panic in the garden as we try to do the work we’ve been talking about doing all winter. Spring is a mixture of cherry blossom and a thousand weeds and the first guests of the year, hoping for subtropical weather and often getting nothing but rain and wind. Summer might start in April. It might start in May. We know it’s arrived when Bernard calls to help us uncover and clean the pool.

Poppies in June, drought in July, storms in August. The vines begin to turn rusty, the hunters come out of their summer hibernation, the grapes have been picked, and the water in the pool nips more and more fiercely until it becomes too cold for anything more than a masochistic plunge in the middle of the day. It must be the end of October.

Winter is filled with good resolutions, and some of them are actually achieved. A dead tree is cut down, a wall is built,
the old steel garden chairs are repainted, and whenever there is time to spare we take up the dictionary and resume our struggle with the French language.

Our French has improved, and the thought of spending an evening in totally French company is not as daunting as it used to be. But, to use the words that were so often used in my school reports, there is considerable room for improvement. Must try harder. And so we inch our way through books by Pagnol and Giono and de Maupassant, buy
Le Provençal
regularly, listen to the machine-gun delivery of radio newsreaders, and attempt to unravel the mysteries of what we are constantly being told is a supremely logical language.

I think that is a myth, invented by the French to bewilder foreigners. Where is the logic, for instance, in the genders given to proper names and nouns? Why is the Rhone masculine and the Durance feminine? They are both rivers, and if they must have a sex, why can’t it be the same one? When I asked a Frenchman to explain this to me, he delivered a dissertation on sources, streams, and floods which, according to him, answered the question conclusively and, of course, logically. Then he went on to the masculine ocean, the feminine sea, the masculine lake, and the feminine puddle. Even the water must get confused.

His speech did nothing to change my theory, which is that genders are there for no other reason than to make life difficult. They have been allocated in a whimsical and arbitrary fashion, sometimes with a cavalier disregard for the anatomical niceties. The French for vagina is
vagin. Le vagin
. Masculine. How can the puzzled student hope to apply logic to a language in which the vagina is masculine?

There is also the androgynous
lui
waiting to ambush us at the threshold of many a sentence. Normally,
lui
is him. In
some constructions,
lui
is her. Often, we are left in the dark as to
lui’s
gender until it is made known to use some time after he or she has been introduced, as in:
“Demandez-lui,”
(ask him)
“peut-être qu’elle peut vous aidez”
(perhaps she can help you). A short-lived mystery, possibly, but one that can puzzle the novice, particularly when
lui’s
first name is also a mixture of masculine and feminine, such as Jean-Marie or Marie-Pierre.

And that is not the worst of it. Strange and unnatural events take place every day within the formalities of French syntax. A recent newspaper article, reporting on the marriage of the rock singer Johnny Hallyday, paused in its description of the brides frock to give Johnny a pat on the back.
“Il est,”
said the article,
“une grande vedette.”
In the space of a single short sentence, the star had undergone a sex change, and on his wedding day too.