A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  "Right, so I have only one option. Go and buy some explosives."

  From the way my half-full glass splashed its load across the table, I think the waiter must have understood English.

  The following weekend, Alexa couldn't come with me because her dad had been dumped by his spoon stylist guy and was threatening to do something drastic to himself with a knife.

  I went out to the maison anyway. I needed to be there, to get a real feel for the place again before taking any decisions.

  I arrived pretty late, after Saturday lunchtime. Rural France was looking its usual charming self. A gentle sweep of valley, empty except for the bare trees, the dotted houses and Monsieur Augème's red tractor, which was pulling a seeding machine up the ploughed slope towards the tree line.

  I parked the car outside the barn and started walking up towards him. There was still dew on the long grass in the orchard, and my Parisian trainers were soon soaked. As I got to the top edge of the orchard, Monsieur Augème began rolling back down towards me.

  It was a large tractor for such a small farm, I thought. And quite new for such an old farmer. It had a cab big enough for two and back wheels as tall as the old man himself. It was trundling, steady as a rock, along the deep furrows, not diverting one centimetre left or right as it flicked out its seeds.

  He'd got about 20 yards down the hill when he looked up and saw me emerging from the orchard. I wasn't exactly in camouflage gear - I was wearing a bright orange sweatshirt and a white woollen hat to keep the damp chill out of my sensitive urban ears.

  As soon as he caught sight of me, he steered a course away to my left, towards the gate that led down to his own farmhouse. At the gateway, he stopped, climbed out of his cab and grabbed up three or four white plastic sacks which he stuffed any old how into the cab. He then jumped nimbly up into the driver's seat and chugged back to his own barn at top speed.

  I didn't think this was because he'd forgotten to put on a clean vest that morning.

  I looked across a low wire fence at the furrows he'd been planting. The earth had been turned over again to protect the seeds from the hungry crows, but I could see a few whitish spots in the mud where dried grains of maize had fallen outside the furrow.

  Over to my right, in the other field, the sheep were standing in two huddles, perhaps wondering whether to be frightened of the figure in orange. Next to the electric fence keeping the sheep out of the ploughed field, I saw that there were a couple of large white bags like the ones that Monsieur Augème had been so keen to hide.

  I wandered up towards the discarded bags. The sheep decided I might be a hunter and scattered away across the pasture.

  Lying crumpled in the mud there were two seed bags bearing the name of the crop ("maïs"), a serial number and the logo of one of the world's best-known agrochemical firms, which was famous outside the farming community for trying to persuade people that we would all be a lot better off if we just gave in and accepted that the future of agriculture lay in genetically modified crops.

  So, not content with receiving EU subsidies, Augème was also getting paid to test GM

  crops? No wonder he could afford a new tractor.

  I turned away from the skittish sheep, and saw that the old farmer was standing on his back tractor wheel, watching me from the safety of his farmyard.

  Next morning, I was awoken by what sounded like a firing squad. I already had a headache after getting through two bottles of wine the previous evening during my long, thoughtful dinner.

  It was the hunters again, but much closer this time. Orange-jacketed figures were stalking about in front of the barn, in the orchard, even just outside the kitchen door, across what I'd hoped to turn into my fennel patch.

  One of them, a red-faced fatso with a moustache the size of an adult rat, was standing, camouflaged legs apart, shotgun over one shoulder, like something on the cover of a Rambo fanzine. He was staring straight at my bedroom window.

  Having neither bulletproof vest nor rocket launcher to hand, I thought it best not to oppose the assault. Instead I ducked down and called in reinforcements.

  'What?" Monsieur Lassay said blearily. Like me, ne'd been woken out of a deep sleep. "Hunters? They probably think the house is empty today."

  "No, no. One man looks my window bedroom," I argued, switching over to emergency, grammar-free French.

  "I will call Monsieur Augème, he will tell them to go," Lassay said with the calmness of someone who's not surrounded by armed thugs.

  I risked a peep outside the window. Rambo was still staring in at me, though he'd now moved two paces nearer, and had drawn a knife that would have been called a sword in most parts of the world. He didn't look as if he was going to be scared off by a little old farmer.

  "1 am not sure for that. Can you arrive quickly here, please?"

  "I will come tout de suite." Lassay sounded pissed off, I was glad to hear.

  I hung up, thinking as I did so that the hissing I could hear was probably one of Élodie's tyres breathing its last sigh of life down the blade of a hunting knife.

  I was, quite frankly, shit-scared by now. I crept round the house on all fours, bolting all the doors, although a determined hunter could have broken in just by tapping any window politely with the butt of his rifle.

  Then I went and sat in the fireplace, which was deep and dark enough to hide me, even before I pulled an armchair across to block the view from the window.

  Fortunately, I'd made a fire the previous evening, and the residual warmth from the dead-looking embers calmed my goosebumps down a bit. I was only wearing a t-shirt and underpants.

  Crouching in my hiding place, I could hear the triumphant laughing voices that Bosnian Muslims must have heard before the paramilitaries burst in and dragged their menfolk away.

  There was a shot and a smashing window, another shot and what I took to be the splatter of lead pellets against the house.

  At last there was a knock on the front door. Lassay.

  I crept out of the fireplace, sprinted into the hall and threw the door open.

  I was met by a rat-sized moustache and an alcoholic's red nose. Rambo.

  It had never occurred to me that they'd knock at the front door. Rambo the psychologist.

  My already shrivelled balls shrunk further up into my underpants as the hunter and I examined each other at close range. He'd slung his rifle behind his back, and sheathed his knife, but he still looked scary enough for me, especially with his gaggle of chums hanging about in the background.

  "Bonjour," he said.

  Not wishing to be impolite to such a well-armed group of gentlemen, I replied in kind.

  "Ça va?" he asked.

  'Oui, et vous?" It was just like greeting one of my co-workers in the lift. Apart from the weapons, of course.

  "You intend to buy this house?" He called me tu, the word for friends, family, children, animals and people belonging to races you don't respect.

  "I don't know. Is it good idea for me?"

  He laughed with a great puff of alcohol fumes. If I'd popped a lighted match in his mouth he'd have gone into orbit.

  "You know if you buy the house, we have legal access, we can hunt here when we want?" He was speaking slowly, with his patois twang under control so that I got the full implications of every word.

  "Even in my bedroom?"

  He laughed again, and glanced pointedly down at my bare legs. "You are Martin's little friend?" This was a slur on my manhood which there was no point reacting to.

  "Jean-Marie Martin? He is my boss. Why?"

  "If you buy the house, you will prolong all the same agreements as him?"

  "Agreements? What?"

  "With old Augème, for example."

  "Ah. The maize?"

  "For example." He nodded slowly, as if congratulating me for understanding some complex point. "There have been protesters who tried to stop this. They have pulled up plants and tried to cause us all sorts of merde. They are city people. We are just fa
rmers trying to make a living. And the gendarmes know that it is best to support us." He grinned a warning. So all this was because I'd caught the old bastard planting GM crops?

  "You say me the agreements are with Monsieur Martin. Why with Monsieur Martin?"

  "It is his house, non?" From the look on Rambo's face, I was supposed to know this already. He was right. I really should have known. But on my promesse de vente, the seller was named as someone local.

  "It is his house? Merde."

  The hunter smiled and relaxed. He turned to wink at one of his co-Rambos. Saying "merde", admitting publicly that you are in it, seemed to soften even the hardest French heart.

  "If it is his house," I said, "no, I do not buy it."

  It struck me that I ought to ask the guys to burn the place down so as to release me from my contract, but I didn't have time. Satisfied with the success of their scare tactics, the hunters were already wandering off.

  Rarnbo turned back and smiled. "Bon dimanche," he wished me.

  The old executioners probably used to say "bonne guillotine" before they cut people's heads off.

  "No, it is not Monsieur Martin's house," Lassay insisted half an hour later. I didn't believe him. "He made a donation of it to this seller, who is a cousin, and who does not want to keep it."

  "So Jean-Marie receive zero euro if I buy?" Lassay hesitated a split second too long before saying no.

  I sat back, fully dressed now, in the armchair that had hidden me from the hunters. There was a wood fire crackling where I'd crouched, and it filled the small sitting room with a thin haze of sweet-smelling smoke.

  I looked Lassay in the eye and shook my head. It was unbelievable. Not so much that I could have been taken in. After all, Jean-Marie had fooled the whole Ministry of Agriculture. And he was a French politician, so he was used to playing in a world-class league of double-dealers. At that very moment, practically the whole of France was being taken in by their President's show of pacifism with regard to the looming Iraq war, even though informed voices were saying that he was motivated by the oil contracts that France had signed with Saddam.

  I didn't feel ashamed at being taken for a sucker. And I didn't blame the French public for swallowing the line that the President was throwing them. There was no shame in being fooled by a master shyster - it happens to all of us.

  No, what I found unbelievable was that Jean-Marie would do it to me. Why not just put the house on the open market? At such a low price, someone was bound to buy it eventually, weren't they?

  Weren't they?

  "Monsieur Lassay - I have a question very important."

  He shifted slighty in his armchair, and I thought I detected a real physical effort to look honest. A widening of the eyes, a tilting of the head.

  "This house has a problem?" I asked. "Secret problem and no one buy it normally?"

  "Secret problem?" He tried a Parisian shrug, but he was too provincial to carry it off. A Parisian's shrug would have dismissed the idea as pathetic stupidity. His simply tried to deflect it.

  "You are lawyer," I said. "I ask you legal question now. I find other lawyer if you do not answer. For a first thing, it is not normal you are one lawyer for two people in this transaction, no?"

  He didn't shrug this time.

  "Alors, Monsieur Lassay. Has Jean-Marie a secret problem with this house?"

  His shoulders slumped.

  "OK," he said. "But I am not confident that it is a legal reason to withdraw from the contract."

  "What reason?"

  "In France we take a different view of some things."

  "What things?"

  "For many people, it is an opportunity for employment, an attraction for new businesses."

  "What is?"

  "The new nuclear power station."

  FÉVRIER

  Make amour, not war

  There is one thing about love that you can't fail to learn if you live in France. An essential thing. A thing that makes us English-speakers sound laughably ignorant in the arts of seduction.

  It is this: lingerie isn't pronounced the way we think it is at all.

  It's not "lon-je-ree" or "lon-je-ray". It's "lan-jree".

  The French don't understand our pronunciation of lingerie at all. You try telling a French woman that you want to buy her some "lon-je-ree" and she'll be at a loss. At best, she'll think you want to buy her something from the boulangerie. What would you like for Saint Valentine's Day, cherie? A loaf of bread?

  Alexa wasn't a lingerie type of gal. She was more a nudity kind of gal, which suited me fine.

  So as we entered February, the month of love, I wondered what I should get her as a Valentine's treat.

  A romantic weekend in Venice, maybe?

  Late one night, as we were snuggling up on my bed, listening to the sound of Élodie still not being there to make strange noises through the bedroom wall, I asked her if she'd ever been to Venice.

  "Would you like to go?" I gave her the lightest of kisses on the temple to try and conjure up some Italian romanticism.

  "I don't want to think of travel in this climate."

  My kiss obviously hadn't been Venetian enough. It should have been wetter, maybe, more canal-like.

  "Too cold, you mean?"

  "No." She de-snuggled herself and sat up. "In this political climate, of course."

  It was true that the world was marching steadily towards war. Or that certain English-speaking parts of the world were trying to convince the UN to give everyone a ride in that direction.

  "It will be too dangerous to travel," she said. "A war in Iraq will make the Muslims believe we hate them and cause terrorism everywhere."

  "Right. Shame Chirac can't nip down to Baghdad and persuade Saddam to turn into a nicer kind of guy," I mused.

  Alexa wriggled completely clear of my arm and turned to stare at me as I lay back on the pillow.

  "Was that supposed to be ironic?" she demanded.

  "No."

  She took that as an ironic yes.

  "I do not understand you British!" she huffed. "Supporting the Americans when all they are doing is protecting their own interests."

  I'd heard this old chestnut so often in the previous weeks that I couldn't stop myself.

  "What, and Chirac isn't protecting French interests? The oil contracts between Elf and Saddam? The fact that Saddam owes France billions of dollars and that the Americans want to cancel the debt if his regime falls? And France is quick enough to send troops into African countries to protect its interests, isn't it? This sudden outbreak of pacifism sounds to me like wanting to have your croissant and eat it."

  "Croissants? What has this got to do with croissants?"

  I tried to explain my witticism, but she cut me off.

  "In any case, you are just anti-French at heart."

  "What?"

  "Yes, like all the Anglo-Saxons."

  "Why do French people call all us English-speakers Anglo-Saxons? The Anglo-Saxons were a tribe of hairy blonds with horns on their helmets who invaded the British Isles in the Dark Ages. Do I have a helmet with horns on?"

  "In spirit, yes. You are all Vikings. Invaders."

  "Yeah? Unlike the French, who started off all this hatred between Muslims and the West by massacring I don't know how many Algerians in a colonial war. And who screwed up so badly trying to hang on to their colony in Vietnam that they provoked 20 years of napalm, civilian casualties and some of the worst movies in Hollywood history. Some of the best, too, mind you. Apocalypse Now, Fourth of..."

  But Alexa wasn't ready to end our political differences with a joke. She got up off the bed, pulled her jeans on, slipped into her trainers, and walked out of the bedroom. I heard her grab her jacket from the hook, and then the door slammed.

  There was a muffled protest through the ceiling from the snooty woman upstairs.

  "Too much noise, is there?" I jumped up and stomped into the hall. "One tiny slam of a door and you're complaining?"

  I took
a broom out of the hall cupboard and walked around the apartment, banging on the ceiling as if I was hopscotching upside-down in platform shoes.

  "There, is that quiet enough for you?" I growled at the ceiling as I thumped. "Did that wake you up?" Bump, bump, bump. "You don't mind making noise, but you don't like getting it, do you?" Thud, stomp, bang. "You want to have your croissant and eat it, too, don't you?" Boom, bam, BOOM.

  Petty, I know, but ecstatically soothing when your girlfriend has just walked out on you.

  I stayed away from the kiddies' bedroom, of course. Even Anglo-Saxon invaders have hearts.

  * * *

  Lingerie isn't the only interesting bit of French lovespeak.

  The English word "rupture" is brutal but simple - it's a hernia, a painful splitting of the stomach wall that can be put right with a few surgical stitches. In French, though, it means, amongst other things, the splitting-up of a couple. And there's no simple operation to cure that.

  And quite frankly, I didn't have the mental energy to attempt the kind of micro-surgery that would have been necessary to get Alexa back. I called a few times and left conciliatory messages. I think I might even have admitted that the Brits and the Americans were behaving a bit like Vikings. But all the time I was thinking, hell, what kind of relationship forces you to leave political messages like that? And then finally I got the goodbye text: "Do not call me," she texted. "You cannot persuede me."

  Persuede? A new word meaning to wrap someone up in soft leather? No, I was never going to do that to her. It'd be too frivolously erotic. She was just too serious for me. She put political principles above the chance of a little human affection. I'd never met anyone like that before. When I was at college, the only reason anyone joined political movements was to get laid.

  I thought back to the first time Alexa and I had ruptured ourselves (in the French sense). She'd said that two people from different cultures could never stay together. It seemed she was right, after all. Especially with the French and the British at that moment in history.