Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  We stopped along the rivers at small hotels which were empty during the week but thronged on Sunday with people from the towns and cities. We seemed strange to them, and they puzzled over us. Why had we left home? Did we have family? Why were we here? We found that we were the first United States citizens these small townspeople had met; to a Frenchman in 1930 it was difficult to think of life apart from France, and they could not understand our eagerness to find out about their lives, or about France. A few who knew us long enough to grasp our purpose furthered our search by showing themselves, their ideas and beliefs—these few were, in most cases, radicals.

  As we drew near to Paris we passed villas of concrete decorated with rustic boughs and branches of molded concrete, with names like “Mon Rêve,” or “Sans Souci.” On weekends Parisians crowded every road leading out to the many river and forest resorts, to beautiful villages or old châteaux, to ponds and roadside taverns with gardens, bowers, and a dance place with music or a pavilion for the Sunday band concert. Everyone turned out, and vehicles were as varied as people’s fortunes; in automobiles, motorcycles, or bicycles, some with a third wheel and sidecar into which a family crowded with baskets of lunch, everyone went off for a day in the country. In the United States we had felt crowded if there was another family nearby when we picnicked, but here there was a joyful air of a carefree day in the country, with sports and games. Boules was the pastime of the older men, and a court for boules was swept and rolled and kept in perfect condition in back of every bar, restaurant, and tavern in the country. Lovers strolled in woods not very similar to our western forests, but enchanting, intimate forests of deciduous trees. Corot painted their shimmering light—the play of sun through moving leaves.

  On the rivers there were always beautiful pulling boats, which we called St. Lawrence skiffs. They were built of thin cedar planks over steamed and bent oak ribs and had a seat around their hourglass sterns. They pulled easily with long light sweeps. We would row upstream, pull into the wake of a passing barge, and with our skiff’s bow held against the stern of the barge, sit and talk with the bargeman and his family until we reached a lock, where we would turn back to row or drift down the current to our hotel.

  We reached Paris, and we did not know how to find a stable for Pom-Pon. George asked a pedestrian, a solid-looking citizen, “How would you suggest I go about finding a stable for the horse?”

  “Oh,” he replied, “I’d go to the Café de la Paix and say to the busboy, ‘Boy, stable my horse.’”

  And we did. The stable was a riding school on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne where we rented for Pom-Pon a stall larger than our hotel room. The straw was changed in his stall every day.

  We were budgeting ourselves to 25 francs a day. If we exceeded 25 francs we spent less the following days until we had regained our budget. In the afternoons we went for a drive with Pom-Pon in the Bois de Boulogne, where we saw a few horse-drawn carriages; there were many horseback riders on the bridle paths, and the Bois was beautiful.

  In the Louvre we wandered through galleries hung solidly with pictures; we found the French Primitives, and we loved the Pietà of Avignon so much that we came every day to see it. There was also a portrait of a lady with a banner in her fingers: de quoilque non vede. yo my recorde. The paintings carried deep sincerity, as though they expressed their times to me in a later time. I copied the lady with the motto of her patient remembering in egg tempera on a polished gesso panel. The arts of Paris were a splendid education, before our eyes each day there was as much to be absorbed as we could carry away. Each day there was more to see all around us, in the streets and cafes as well as on the walls of museums and galleries. We discovered the still lifes of Chardin and the landscapes of Claude de Lorraine, whose paintings opened up out of the seventeenth-century discovery of the New World and of science; and here we were, two children of that new world come to find the meaning, the new light cast on time before us by the opening of the human spirit into art. There was not at this time the opportunity to see such wealth of art in the United States as we found in Paris.

  We stayed perhaps two weeks before we took Pom-Pon, rested and gay and ready to travel, on the road south. We found on our way down the Rhône valley the Romanesque art of early Christian-Roman Gaul. This art has a force, a simplicity and sincerity and strength of conviction that made for me a deep root in art; it nurtured me.

  We reached Marseilles and began to look for a place to stop. George’s parents were soon going home from France to San Francisco, and we had agreed to live near Cannes to welcome my little sister-in-law on her vacations from school. We looked for a house outside Le Beausset, in Var, which is a mountainous district with hills down to the Mediterranean. The climate is hot in summer with winds from Africa, and in winter it is cold and rainy. There were empty houses in the vineyards, and we wanted to rent one of these houses. I wanted to paint, George wanted to write, and we planned to live for a while in this place and publish the books. We stopped at the only hotel in Le Beausset and found that the hotel owner and the town butcher were eager to help us; the women ran the businesses and the two men had time to help us find a house. In the community, a grape-growing district with a cooperative, the Vinicole, to press the grapes, it was a problem to rent an empty house on land that was in production. No one had thought of such a thing. The butcher and the hotel owner took us from one land-owner to another in the butcher’s little car, which he drove like a madman; the land-owner would purse his lips, expel air explosively in puzzlement and disbelief and refuse to rent his house. At last the butcher thought of a land-owner who had visited New York, and in Ollioules, in a house surrounded by the terraces that grow flowers for the perfumes of France, we found our landlord. He understood us; I think he was amused by us. We rented his empty farmhouse in the vineyards of Le Beausset. He recommended Mme Sicard, who looked after his house for him, to care for us. Our house, built of plaster and stone, glowing with golden color, had a small courtyard to the south, and the sloping valley floor was planted with grapes. We became a center of interest for the whole village of Le Beausset.

  Mme Sicard came every day to care for us; she cleaned the house, polished the red tile floors until they shone and washed our clothes. She brought us a little gift, a candle-snuffer. She asked for an “osaydar,” and we didn’t understand what it was that she wanted; but one day in a hardware store in Toulon I saw an O’Cedar mop. “Osaydar!” I exclaimed, and I went into the shop and bought it for Mme Sicard. She may have wanted one for years—for her it was a helping hand which made the task of keeping red tile floors much easier.

  We had a toilet put in this centuries-old farmhouse before we knew that the water supply was seasonal. Villagers came to see this marvel on their way to work, to hunt or to gather herbs in the mountains, or a peasant shouted, “Ça va?” across the grapes as he passed.

  On the surrounding hilltops stood remains of medieval fortified towns. We drove with Pom-Pon as close as we could, then we walked to explore the ruins, which were usually empty. Sometimes we came across poverty-stricken peasants who lived without paying rent in and among the rubble of these ruins. From these old towns we could see over the surrounding countryside, and we tried to imagine the life when peasants descended each day to work in the fields and returned each night up the long steep climb to spend the night behind the walls. Life must have seemed very hazardous. Far in the distance we saw the Mediterranean, where on hot days at the end of summer we went with Pom-Pon to bathe in the sea. We found that Pom-Pon loved to swim, and we unsaddled him and rode him bareback. It is a great sensation to ride a swimming horse and feel his stertorous breathing and the tremendous surges as he strikes out strongly with all four legs. We found a small village called Cassis, where we drank the local wine; it was a delicate wine that could not travel, and we savored it. We were out of doors most days; occasionally we saddled Pom-Pon and made an excursion back into the mountains, which were different underfoot th
an they had seemed from our house in the valley. Each flower was fragrant, each shrub and almost every growing thing aromatic. Small birds I did not recognize twittered and rustled in the bushes. Pom-Pon scrambled up the steep paths, which always led to huts which were owned by someone who used them only a few days out of the year, when the hunter carried a bird cage with him from home to hang in the trees near his hut; the bird was always of the same kind as that which he was hunting, and served as a decoy.

  We puzzled at their customs as they puzzled at ours. Discussion must have taken place in every house in the village concerning the strange young Americans who had come to live in their valley. They welcomed us, and wherever we were invited we made a visit. We drank the little sweet drink offered us after the proper conversational formalities, and we stayed until what seemed to us the completion of the visit, during which more drinks were offered. When these visits were repaid we found that the correct way to pay a call is to leave as soon as the first drink is finished. We had behaved rather like Drag-Your-Tail-Feathers, the Indian Chief, who used to stay all day when he visited my father in Big Fork, Montana. But we watched the life around us and learned the ways of the village. In the vineyards, open shelters or a small house covered with a trellis of grapes made a leafy, shady retreat where workers and horses rested through the heat of the day. Tools and supplies were kept in the unoccupied houses, and we began to understand the need the peasants had for the houses that stood empty. Peasants arrived at the fields from Le Beausset every morning, hoe on shoulder. The white stallion who drew the water-cart for the village brought water to the vineyards for the spray-tanks, filled with a copper solution, with which the peasants sprayed the grapes, turning the vineyards a ghostly gray. The little white stallion and Pom-Pon the slender tall Anglo-Arab, were friends who whinnied across the fields to each other. Once in a while the stallion escaped as he was being unharnessed in the village; he galloped, tail and mane and harness flying, down the hill, past the Vinicole, and straight up the road to our place. Over the fence or through Pom-Pon’s stable window they nuzzled, caressed, and nibbled each other’s necks in delight.

  As spring drew near, the peasants prepared for the blessing of the animals and for the annual race, to be held on a track plowed around the circular grove of trees left intact on the valley floor a short way from the Vinicole. This grove may have always been sacred—it still had a Virgin in her own little shrine at the entrance, where some goddess may have stood earlier. Pom-Pon was specially invited to the race, as our neighbors were eager to see him run. Heavy draft horses, mules, and Pom-Pon’s love, the white stallion, were beribboned, and hooves were varnished while flowers were braided into manes. We polished and braided Pom-Pon too, and George rode him in procession with all the animals of the village to be blessed. Children and women led or carried the small animals as the procession went past the church, the priest flicking a few drops of water to bless the animals for the year to come. We went along to the grove in the procession to determine this year’s champion in the race. Pom-Pon won the race, and George was given the prize, a halter big enough for the largest Percheron. All the riders from the race went through the village riding on a wagon, to receive the drinks that were brought out for the horsemen. After the festivities, George and I and our blessed Pom-Pon, now the champion of the village, trudged home.

  Our friends the hotel-keeper and the town butcher had duties to their wives and to their businesses, but they were not occupied full-time. The butcher went to market to bring back meat; after he carried it in to hang on the big hook inside the entrance, he was free. The butcher’s wife was storekeeper and kept the house in back of the store. The hotel-owner, too, was free after brief duties in the hotel each day. The two of them escaped in the butcher’s little car to pursue other interests, and once in a while we were invited too. It is likely that they only meant to invite George, but I didn’t think of that, and I always went along on these expeditions. The hotel-keeper questioned us about our politics, and we replied that we hadn’t any, or to speak more accurately, that our political concerns didn’t yet go beyond a very narrow circle of hunting for the nooks and crannies of our society in which we might live as artist and poet. Our hotel-keeper friend took us to Toulon to see the Tom Mooney room that had just been completed in the Labor Temple; in 1916, at a Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco, ten people had been killed and forty injured by an explosion of a bomb, and Tom Mooney had been framed and convicted. George and I had heard his name, but we had not realized the meaning of the case. The election of Governor Olson in 1939 was to result in a full pardon, but this came only after a world-wide campaign of workers to free Tom Mooney, a cause célèbre; it was people like our new friends here in Le Beausset who created sufficient awareness among peoples of the world to exonerate Tom Mooney.

  Depression and poverty were heavy in France in 1931. In this valley of grapes and wine not one cow supplied milk for the children; after weaning, children drank water with a little wine poured into it. Town water supplies all over France were labeled “potable” or “non-potable,” and the only safe water to drink was boiled water or bottled water. “Tisanes,” or herb teas, were drunk, for which the herbs were usually gathered by old women who roamed the hills and roadsides. We observed them as we passed in our cart; these women carried the age-old knowledge of the medicinal and edible qualities of herbs and mushrooms, and they lived their lives in the same place and pattern as had their mothers before them. Their way of life dated back as far as anyone knew, and probably forever before that.

  Mme Sicard prescribed and brewed tea for our stomach-aches and back-aches and to relieve muscular pain. “Cupping” was also a common remedy; George caught a cold, and a man came with little glass cups, which he heated and applied to George’s back in the area where the congestion seemed to be. Long after George had recovered, he bore the round marks of the cups, which, with their vacuum, had made blood collect in bruise marks. Mme Sicard taught us to save orange peels and fragrant blossoms of flowers to put in bottles of Eau de Vie that were left as gifts when callers came to visit. In time these infusions made the liqueurs so loved in this part of France. By wintertime we were settled in our farmhouse; rains came, and the winds blew cold from the Alpes-Maritimes, just behind us to the sea. In daytime when the sun shone and we were out-of-doors it was warm and fine, but the house was so cold that our bones ached. We bought carpet-slippers with thick soles, and pattens which stood outside the door, to step into when we went outdoors. We bought the only heating stove we could find in Toulon; it was so small that someone had to stand beside it to feed it, at first with little slivers of wood and then with coal, and our floors were never warm. We learned to live out-of-doors. I was painting, learning to use oil paints and watercolors. I sketched our plane trees in our courtyard and our house with its courtyard and its structures around the well, work-places that had been built during years and years of use; the colors and structure of our house were beautiful.

  The weekly movie in Le Beausset was usually a film of Chaplin—“Charlot” to the French. They loved him, and we did too; we saw his films again and again that winter.

  My accent when I speak French reflects the language I learned caring for Pom-Pon and living near Marseilles. I picked up the Marseillaise accent, which is notoriously ludicrous in France, and my beginnings in Montana, the far north, added the clipped harsh consonants of most northerners to my speech. More than once someone has said, “You speak French very well, Madame, but where did you get the Chinese accent?”

  During that winter we published An “Objectivist” Anthology, William Carlos Williams’ Novelette, and Pound’s ABC of Reading; these paperback books were intended to be sold at low cost in the United States. We wanted to make poetry and other types of literature, that could not find a publisher, available at least to poets and to their own circle, for we had to search to find the writing of our own times. We made frequent trips to Toulon to the printer. The books were prin
ted in English, but they were typeset by non-English-speaking French printers. We read proof after proof, each time finding more mistakes. In Toulon, after we finished our business at the printer’s shop, we ordered a cup of champagne, six oysters on the half-shell, and half a loaf of French bread at a quayside cafe; usually we ordered another cup of champagne and six more oysters. We then found our Pom-Pon and climbed into the cart while we could still walk, and Pom-Pon took us safely home to Le Beausset.