Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Beyond the crime aspect, the amount he attempted to pilfer—and the fact that I shrugged it off—did send out shock waves, because it’s roughly twice the annual household median income in France, a number that feels surprisingly low considering it takes into account the higher salaries available in France’s big cities.

  Buying a country house gives me a chance to be reminded first-hand why the French call the rural parts of France La France Profonde. Although profound means deep in this sense, I always read it as profound, as in profoundly poor. No, rural France’s misery isn’t on the scale of, say, Appalachia. You don’t have widespread addiction to OxyContin or meth labs or higher-than-average infant mortality, but you can go to the E. Leclerc, France’s mega supermarket chain, similar to Walmart (but where employees are paid), and find yourself with a full shopping cart behind a mother with three screaming kids buying a tin of paté and two forty-ounces.

  A lot of political attention is paid to what the French call the désertion rurale of France, people fleeing the small towns. Industrial displacement, outsourcing of jobs, and a flight to the cities by young people have seriously affected places like lower Normandy, and considering agriculture is France’s third-largest export behind aviation and pharmaceuticals, many are now worried.

  The reforms implemented by agricultural minister Stéphane Le Foll—allocating 300 million euros to boost agriculture in struggling areas, allocating 75 million to create ten thousand new farmers, and doubling the budget on organic growing—have yet to bear much fruit (no pun intended), partly, I think, because Le Foll looks too much like Javier Bardem’s character in No Country for Old Men to be taken seriously.

  In 1998, the Perche became a Parc Naturel Régional, which gave it protected status in terms of urban sprawl. The development laws have become super stringent, work permits have to pass a jury in each hamlet, and a housing code similar to Nantucket’s has been implemented, meaning that, for instance, the shingles of each roof have to be a certain color. For this reason, the Perche, although relatively modest economically, has appealed to a certain Parisian looking to flee the city but weary of the touristy Gucci bling in towns on the Normandy coast, such as Deauville or Honfleur.

  According to Monsieur Letour, who owns the cows next door to us, this preservation has come with a price, though. The lack of industry has kept the cost of living down and along with it the price of his beef. However, the costs of raising the cows (the grain, the rent, the machinery) seem to rise each year.

  Letour may be suffering, but he still spares no expense for his wonderful cows, and I’ve grown to love having them next door to us. They roam in groups over the hills surrounding our house like Mardi Gras floats. Over coffee you’ll see white masses passing through the trees as they graze in the east at sunrise, then find them lounging in the setting sun on the opposite side of the house, staring at us blankly as we moo back at them over cocktails.

  The cows are so dependable, they’ve become my sundial in troop form. You can look out during the day and guess, simply by where they’re positioned, what time it is. They’ve also become, for me, the ultimate argument for vegetarianism. We’ve seen calves born in stables over the winter frolic in the spring grass like puppies, and groups of cows gallop like horses to greet my dog, Bogart, at the fence on Friday evening.

  Two years in, we discovered they’re of the Charolaise breed, meaning they’re not milk cows, but (as one of the paysans from the town told me as he brought a knife to his throat) beef cows, and I’ve done my best to keep from becoming attached on a personal level. Each has a number on its ear that looks like a tag from a dry cleaners. “#1706 you are so cute!!!” says Bibi. “Where is your friend #5609?” Otto asks. I don’t have the courage to tell him where #5609 might be.

  The only cow that maintains a constant presence year in and year out is the bull, whom Otto has christened Couilles Man (Ball Man), in honor of his enormous package, which swings in the breeze at sunset, and which I must admit is quite mesmerizing.

  I’ve learned that these grass-fed cows, although bred locally, aren’t necessarily eaten locally. When I asked Raymond, the man who cuts our grass, which butcher he usually went to (“The one in Berd’huis or the one in Bellême?”), he looked back at me as if I’d just asked him which Dean & DeLuca he preferred.

  “We split a pig at the beginning of the year with the Martins—then stock it in the freezer. That’s my butcher.”

  It’s not that the locals look down on me, they just have no time for my input. Once I left my car at the local garage to get repaired, and while I handed the mechanic my keys, I also offered up my theory of what could be wrong.

  “How about everyone just stay in their lane? It’ll be done next weekend when you arrive . . . from Paris.”

  Other times, they’ll give you a bullshit excuse and dare you to call them on it, simply because they know you’ll do nothing in the meantime anyway. Once I called the electric company to find out when they planned to take down a giant electric pole that’s been sitting in our garden since they changed the grid and put up taller poles down the road. The person on the other line responded, “Aux beaux jours” (when it’s nice out).

  A certain generation of Percheron will, on occasion, talk to you in the third person, which is unsettling for someone like me, who can’t even get his tus and vous entirely correct. I learned this from Raymond in one of our first dealings, when I hired him to cut our lawn over the weekends we weren’t there.

  “Il était content avec la tonte?” (Was he happy with the cut?), Raymond asked after the first job. “Il revient la semaine prochaine?” (Will he be coming back next weekend?)

  Not only did the conversation look curious the first three or four times, with me glancing over my shoulder each time, assuming Raymond was talking about someone else; but it also made me uncomfortable being spoken to like some squire. What made things worse was that I started responding in the third person, assuming it was protocol: “Yes, he’s very happy with the cut.” “Well, yes, he’s considering coming back in two weeks.”

  Raymond found my responses bizarre, especially when I’d point to myself and say John, as if he couldn’t understand otherwise. As our third-person conversations became more intimate, I soon began confiding to Raymond. “He is somewhat sad, John, because the magazine cut a lot of the good stuff from his piece. They cut it just like that,” and I’d make a snipping gesture, “without asking me . . . er . . . John.”

  “C’est dommage,” Raymond would reply, pulling out his chainsaw and drum of gasoline.

  “Oui, c’est dommage.” I’d shrug, heading back to the house to see how many people had liked my recent Facebook post.

  It took me three years to realize the locals don’t really care too much about my life in Paris, which hurts, because I always assumed they’d find it interesting. And considering all the questions I pose about their livelihoods, the least they could do is return the favor.

  I know I can be overly curious at times, and it’s true, I have a pathological need to keep a conversation flowing. But every time I’m chatting with a local, it seems I’m the one doing the heavy lifting. I’ve gone hours having the complexity of forest ownership explained to me, who cuts where and when to seed, how to change fan belts, or how to inherit the right to moonshine Calvados. The only thing, I’ve found, that my neighbors are interested in are my malheurs (unfortunate events). I’m not sure if it’s because they’re something they can relate to or if it’s just some homemade Parisian schadenfreude.

  * * *

  Last year, we were the victims of what’s called a “surcharge électrique” (electrical overload), which happens when too much current passes down a line, subsequently cooking everything electric in the house (in our case, the fridge, the oven, the stove, the works). Surcharges électriques have resulted in houses actually burning to the ground, which sounds completely crazy and unacceptable to Americans, but is met w
ith shrugs in the Perche.

  We discovered we’d been surcharged over the French October vacation of Toussaint, and our week of enjoying the falling leaves and headless-horseman costume-making transformed into one big insurance claim, collecting serial numbers, finding warranties, calling agents, and retrieving new Wi-Fi routers (which I think was the worst). But when we complained to our neighbors, expecting sympathy, all we got in return was jealousy. “Wow!!! Now you can work that insurance, mon bébé!”

  When the news circulated of our situation, everybody suddenly wanted to talk to me. “Could I put my TV on your insurance claim, John?” Mr. Dupont asked. “Or at least my broken iron?” In the Percheron’s eyes, insurance is held in the same respect as a lotto scratch. You pay each month with the hope that someday something will go haywire. No, our neighbors never go so far as to start a fire to collect on a ratty house, but if something—fingers crossed!—happens to the kitchen grid, it’s time to cash in, as in rural Powerball cash in.

  The only neighbors who sympathize with my malheurs are a group of other Parisians who’d moved to the Perche full time.

  Sergei and Solange had converted an old mill into a hotel and sound studio where they housed rock groups and recorded their albums, much in the same way the Rolling Stones cut Exile on Main Street in a dilapidated French château. When I first met the two, they’d just bought an abandoned elementary school, which is now a bar/restaurant and where I relive the days of drinking on school grounds.

  Another member of the transplants was Pascale, who worked on studio films and lived in the Perche between shoots. Her friend, Agathe, ran a select showroom out of her house, while selling the same fashionable wear in a cutting-edge boutique in the Marais.

  Also among this group were César and Anatole, who’d gone full Taliban organic, buying land, seeding the field with their own grains, making three varieties of bread and growing vegetables according to season, and then selling it all once a week on Friday at 5:00 p.m. out of a one-windowed shack in another nearby hamlet. The line of people eager to buy their wares was an improbable-looking group considering the surroundings: circus jugglers, dreadlocked white girls with bugaboos, and the always smiling Theo, who’d just bought a donkey he planned on riding into town. If you happened to pass at the right hour, you might think the line outside was of people entering a party at Vice magazine. I cringe to admit that I often find myself in this same line, marveling at how ironic it was that we’d all come to the French countryside in search of quality terroir, only to find ourselves buying from the sole local farmers who don’t use seeds from Monsanto, Roundup, or pesticides—Parisian hipsters.

  * * *

  I’ve found in the Perche that most people choose to drop by unannounced, which for a city person was considered tolerable in the 1980s, but nowadays, just isn’t done. If someone knocks at our door in Paris unannounced, I look at Anaïs franticly, asking, “Are we expecting someone?”

  In the Perche, I’ll know a car is approaching by the crunch of the gravel, and my blood will run cold, because I know I’m trapped. “They’ve seen the car,” my mind tells me, “they know you’re here.”

  Sometimes it’s the electrician, Monsieur Duval. Other times it’s the neighbor Georges with his kids, who want to play with our kids. Sometimes it’s Raymond or the cleaning lady, Esther. Everyone, by the way, has my phone number. Nobody, by the way, ever uses it to give me a heads-up. Sometimes they want to be paid for work done the previous month. Other times, they’re just bored. And the cruel part is, they never drop by just for five minutes.

  “No, I’m good,” Raymond will say, when I invite him in for a coffee. “I just want to show you where I put the peat moss.”

  “Now?” I’ll ask, still in pajamas, looking out into the rain.

  “Would you prefer I come back later?” he’ll ask, knowing full well the answer.

  So there I’ll be, in pajamas and boots, staring at a pile of peat moss in a light 8:00 a.m. drizzle on Saturday, acutely aware that all my friends in Paris are sleeping soundly.

  These casual drop-ins have become so systemic, Anaïs asked Santa for chic pajamas last Christmas, “So at least when we receive people, we’ll be respectable.

  “On the other hand,” she added, “we can’t really blame them. We’re usually in pajamas until two.” She had a point.

  As payback, I decided to drop by my neighbors’ house without calling, only to discover it wasn’t that much of an imposition for them. Raymond and his wife, Hermine, happily welcomed me in, sat me down, and offered up some homemade pommeau, an apéritif that tastes like liquored apple cider, a Calvados, but not as harsh. By the second pommeau we were strolling through Raymond’s potager talking about François who was chased by a wild boar last winter and the French TV celebrity who lives nearby and managed to piss off all the farmers by insisting on landing his helicopter in their fields, thus scattering all the seeds they’d planted.

  “Quel connard!” (What an asshole!) I yelled, a bit too loudly, a sign the pommeau was taking hold.

  They asked me if I knew this star, and I lied and said, “No, but I know someone who did and effectivement [in fact] he is a vrai connard.” We all laughed, and soon I felt guilty for having dreaded their presence, remembering, on my way back home, my car stuffed with lettuce and carrots and a giant pumpkin Raymond had given us, to have some pommeau on hand when (not should) they repay my visit.

  * * *

  What we all share, my Parisian brethren and I, is the love/hate relationship the locals have with us. Since we possess a certain buying power, they’re forced to tolerate us up to a point. But if it was up to them, they’d prefer to buy and sell only to each other and leave the city slickers out of things altogether.

  When they do attempt to sell to one another, it’s at horrible events called vide-greniers (flea markets), subsistence-based swap meets that are constantly organized from town to town. When I first attended a vide-grenier, I fantasized I’d stumble across an old silver set or a vintage work bench, only to be confronted by a postapocalypse scene of broken-lawn mower blades, car batteries, half-finished motor oil tins, piles of T-shirts, Cars—the Movie bathroom slippers, and plastic baby bathtubs full of Will Smith DVDs. What I thought would be a bucolic afternoon of “antiquing” transformed into being teleported back to 1929 right after the Crash or to somewhere in Bucharest in the 1970s.

  Parisians stand out in places like this, not because we share the same frown of disappointment, but because we’re wearing those giant Wellington boots, looking like forty-year-old Paddington the Bears.

  “You can tell Parisians in town, because they’re the only ones wearing those boots,” an old Percheron told me once.

  I asked him why the locals didn’t wear boots en ville (in town) like we do. “We wear boots at the farm or in the stables where they’re supposed to be worn, but when we go to town, we’re civilized.”

  I looked down at my muddy boots that I’d planned to track all over his store and nervously rubbed them onto the entryway mat.

  I used to enjoy village chitchat like that. But now I live in fear, especially of the hardware store owner, who always seems to have a horribly racist joke he’s sure I want to hear—probably because the last time he told me one, I smiled, not understanding what it meant.

  It was New Year’s Eve, and my friend Fred and I had just bought a set of cheap champagne glasses when, at the register, the owner began the joke’s setup. I should have known something was wrong, because I could see that Fred was wincing in wrinkled pain and staring at his shoes, wanting to leave. It was only later, back at the house when Fred translated the joke back to me, that I understood his pain.

  “John, do you still like the pine au noir?” the hardware man had asked, which to me sounded like Pinot Noir, but in this case literally meant pine (dick) au (of a) noir (black man). What made even the hardware store owner pause was how I responded on th
e spot . . . with a big smiled “I do indeed! Glug glug.”

  When Fred saw how mortified I was, he tried to ease my shame and anger with a toast. “Nothing rings in the New Year better,” he clinked my glass, “than being tricked into feeling you’re racist.”

  * * *

  In February of 2016, there were regional elections held throughout France. The Front National, the normally fringe far-right party headed by Marine Le Pen, had done surprisingly well, which sent media pundits and political prognosticators scrambling to explain why, how, and who was to blame.

  The center right bemoaned the socialist government’s handling of the French economy, whose stagnant growth and crushing taxes they said had stunted the middle class and pushed them to vote Front National in protest. Those on the left blamed the center right, whose cushy relationships with corporations and efforts to neoliberalize an already fragile French workforce had pushed the French worker to the protectionist warmth of Le Pen’s No to Europe message.

  Rural France had spoken, and our neighboring town, I found out later online, had narrowly voted Front National. This was a watershed moment. It was like that movie Dogtown by Lars von Trier, where Nicole Kidman’s character, a city girl on the run, tries to win acceptance within a small village only to realize the residents are uniformly horrible.

  The lone thing that made me happy about the election was that it confirmed a theory of mine I call the boulangerie index. The theory posits that the better the bread, the more racist/reactionary the boulanger is. The more amiable the boulanger, the more average the bread. Why my index only works for boulangeries, and not butchers or cheese guys, I don’t know. What I do know is that our village’s bread is really good, and it’s created a giant ethical conflict for me ever since the election.