A Year In Provence

by Peter Mayle

  The way home was littered with spent shotgun cartridges fired by the men whom Massot dismissed as chasseurs du sentier, or footpath hunters-miserable namby-pambies who didn't want to get their boots dirty in the forest, and who hoped that birds would somehow fly into their buckshot. Among the scattered shell cases were crushed cigarette packets and empty sardine cans and bottles, souvenirs left by the same nature lovers who complained that the beauty of the Lubéron was being ruined by tourists. Their concern for conservation didn't extend to removing their own rubbish. A messy breed, the Provençal hunter.

  I arrived at the house to find a small conference taking place around the electricity meter which was hidden behind some trees in the back garden. The man from Electricité de France had opened the meter to read it, and had discovered that a colony of ants had made a nest. The figures were obscured. It was impossible to establish our consumption of electricity. The ants must be removed. My wife and the man from the EOF had been joined by Menicucci, whom we now suspected of living in the boiler room, and who liked nothing better than to advise us on any domestic problem that might arise.

  "Oh là là." A pause while Menicucci bent down for a closer look at the meter. "Ils sont nombreux, les fourmis." For once, he had made an understatement. The ants were so numerous that they appeared as one solid black block, completely filling the metal box that housed the meter.

  "I'm not touching them," said the EDF man. "They get into your clothes and bite you. The last time I tried to brush away an ants' nest I had them with me all afternoon."

  He stood looking at the squirming mass, tapping his screwdriver against his teeth. He turned to Menicucci. "Do you have a blowtorch?"

  "I'm a plumber. Of course I have a blowtorch."

  "Bon. Then we can burn them off."

  Menicucci was aghast. He took a step backwards and crossed himself. He smote his forehead. He raised his index finger to the position that indicated either extreme disagreement, or the start of a lecture, or both.

  "I cannot believe what I have just heard. A blowtorch? Do you realize how much current passes through here?"

  The EDF man looked offended. "Of course I know. I'm an electrician."

  Menicucci affected to be surprised. "Ah bon? Then you will know what happens when you burn a live cable."

  "I would be very prudent with the flame."

  "Prudent! Prudent! Mon Dieu, we could all perish with the ants."

  The EDF man sheathed his screwdriver and crossed his arms. "Very well. I will not occupy myself with the ants. You remove them."

  Menicucci thought for a moment and then, like a magician setting up a particularly astonishing trick, he turned to my wife. "If Madame could possibly bring me some fresh lemons-two or three will be enough-and a knife?"

  Madame the magician's assistant came back with the knife and lemons, and Menicucci cut each into four quarters. "This is an astuce that I was taught by a very old man," he said, and muttered something impolite about the stupidity of using a blowtorch-"putain de chalumeau"-while the EDF man sulked under a tree.

  When the lemons were all quartered, Menicucci advanced on the nest and started to squeeze lemon juice back and forth over the ants, pausing between squeezes to observe the effect that the downpour of citric acid was having.

  The ants surrendered, evacuating the meter box in panic-stricken clumps, climbing over one another in their haste to escape. Menicucci enjoyed his moment of triumph. "Voilà, jeune homme," he said to the EDF man, "ants cannot support the juice of fresh lemons. That is something you have learned today. If you leave slices of lemon in your meters you will never have another infestation."

  The EDF man took it with a marked lack of graciousness, complaining that he was not a lemon supplier and that the juice had made the meter sticky. "Better sticky than burned to a cinder," was Menicucci's parting shot as he returned to his boiler. "Beh oui. Better sticky than burned."

  THE DAYS were warm enough for swimming, the nights cool enough for fires, Indian summer weather. It finally ended in the excessive style that was typical of the Provençal climate. We went to bed in one season and woke up in another.

  The rain had come in the night, and continued for most of the following day; not the fat, warm drops of summer, but gray sheets that fell in a vertical torrent, sluicing through the vineyards, flattening shrubs, turning flower beds into mud and mud into brown rivers. It stopped in the late afternoon, and we went to look at the drive-or, rather, where the drive had been the previous day.

  It had already suffered in the big storm of August, but the ruts made then were scratches compared to what we now saw: a succession of craters led down to the road, where most of the drive had been deposited in sodden piles. The rest of it was in the melon field opposite the house. Some of the gravel and stones had traveled more than a hundred yards. A recently detonated mine field could hardly have looked worse, and nobody except a man who hated his car would have attempted to drive to the house from the road. We needed a bulldozer just to tidy up the mess, and several tons of gravel to replace what the rain had washed away.

  I called Monsieur Menicucci. Over the months, he had established himself as a human version of the Yellow Pages, and, since he had a regard verging on the proprietorial for our house, his recommendations had been made, so he told us, as though it were his own money at stake. He listened as I told him of the lost drive, making interjections-quelle catastrophe was mentioned more than once-to show that he appreciated the extent of the problem.

  I finished talking, and I could hear Menicucci making a verbal list of our requirements: "Un bulldozer, bien sûr, un camion, une montagne de gravier, un compacteur…" There were a few moments of humming, probably a snatch of Mozart to assist the mental processes, and then he made up his mind. "Bon. There is a young man, the son of a neighbor, who is an artist with the bulldozer, and his prices are correct. He's called Sanchez. I will ask him to come tomorrow."

  I reminded Menicucci that the drive was not possible for an ordinary car.

  "He's used to that," said Menicucci. "He will come on his moto with special tires. He can pass anywhere."

  I watched him negotiate the drive the next morning, doing slalom turns to avoid the craters and standing up on his foot-rests as he drove over the mounds of earth. He cut the engine and looked back at the drive, a study in color-coordinated moto chic. His hair was black, his leather jacket was black, his bike was black. He wore aviator sunglasses with impenetrable reflective lenses. I wondered if he knew our insurance agent, the formidably hip Monsieur Fructus. They would have made a good pair.

  Within half an hour, he had made a tour of the mine field on foot, estimated a price, telephoned to order the gravel, and given us a firm date, two days away, for his return with the bulldozer. We had our doubts that he was real and, when Menicucci called that evening in his capacity as supervisor of catastrophes, I said that Monsieur Sanchez had surprised us with his efficiency.

  "It runs in the family," Menicucci said. "His father is a melon millionaire. The son will be a bulldozer millionaire. They are very serious, despite being Spanish." He explained that Sanchez père had come to France as a young man to find work, and had developed a method of producing earlier and more succulent melons than anyone else in Provence. He was now, said Menicucci, so rich that he worked for only two months a year and lived during the winter in Alicante.

  Sanchez fils arrived as promised, and spent the day rearranging the landscape with his bulldozer. He had a delicacy of touch that was fascinating to watch, redistributing tons of earth as accurately as if he were using a trowel. When the drive was level, he smoothed the surface with a giant comb, and invited us to see what he had done. It looked too immaculate to walk on, and he had given it a slight camber so that any future downpours would run off into the vines.

  "C'est bon?"

  As good as the autoroute to Paris, we said.

  "Bieng. Je revieng demaing." He climbed into the control tower of his bulldozer and drove off at a statel
y fifteen miles an hour. Tomorrow the gravel would be laid.

  The first vehicle to disturb the combed perfection of the drive's surface crawled up to the house the next morning and stopped with a shudder of relief in the parking area. It was a truck that looked to be even more venerable than Faustin's grape wagon, sagging so low on its suspension that the rusty exhaust pipe nearly touched the ground. A man and a woman, both round and weatherbeaten, were standing by the truck and looking with interest at the house, obviously itinerant field workers hoping for one last job before heading further south for the winter.

  They seemed a nice old couple, and I felt sorry for them.

  "I'm afraid the grapes have all been picked," I said.

  The man grinned and nodded. "That's good. You were lucky to get them in before the rain." He pointed up to the forest behind the house. "Plenty of mushrooms there, I should think."

  Yes, I said, plenty.

  They showed no sign of going. I said they were welcome to leave their truck outside the house and pick some mushrooms.

  "No, no," said the man. "We're working today. My son is on his way with the gravel."

  The melon millionaire opened the back doors of the truck and took out a long-handled mason's shovel and a wide-toothed wooden rake. "I'll leave the rest for him to unload," he said. "I don't want to squash my feet."

  I looked inside. Packed tight up against the back of the seats and stretching the length of the truck was a miniature steamroller, the compacteur.

  While we waited for his son, Monsieur Sanchez talked about life and the pursuit of happiness. Even after all these years, he said, he still enjoyed the occasional day of manual labor. His work with the melons was finished by July, and he got bored with nothing to do. It was very agreeable to be rich, but one needed something else, and, as he liked working with his hands, why not help his son?

  I had never employed a millionaire before. I don't have much time for them as a rule, but this one put in a good long day. Load after load of gravel was delivered and tipped onto the drive by the son. The father shoveled and spread, and Madame Sanchez followed behind with the wooden rake, pushing and smoothing. Then the compacteur was unloaded; it was like a massive baby carriage with handlebars, and it was wheeled ceremoniously up and down the drive with Sanchez the son at the controls, shouting instructions at his parents-another shoveful here, more raking there, mind your feet, don't tread on the vines.

  It was a true family effort, and by the end of the afternoon we had a pristine ribbon of crushed, putty-colored gravel worthy of being entered for the Concours d'Elégance sponsored by Bulldozer Magazine. The compacteur was inserted into the back of the truck; the parents into the front. Young Sanchez said that the price would be less than his estimate, but he would work it out exactly and his father would come around to deliver the bill.

  The next morning when I got up, there was an unfamiliar van parked outside the house. I looked for a driver, but there was nobody in the vines or in the outbuildings. It was probably an idle hunter who couldn't be bothered to walk up from the road.

  We were finishing breakfast when there was a tap on the window and we saw the round brown face of Monsieur Sanchez. He wouldn't come into the house, because he said his boots were too dirty. He had been in the forest since six o'clock, and he had a present for us. From behind his back he produced his old checked cap, bulging with wild mushrooms. He gave us his favorite recipe-oil, butter, garlic, and chopped parsley-and told us a dreadful story about three men who had died after an ill-chosen mushroom supper. A neighbor had found them still at the table with wide, staring eyes-Monsieur Sanchez gave us a demonstration, rolling his eyes back in his head-completely paralyzed by malignant fungus. But we were not to worry, he said. He would stake his life on the mushrooms in his cap. Bon appétit!

  My wife and I ate them that evening, studying each other between mouthfuls for signs of paralysis and eye rolling. They tasted so much better than ordinary mushrooms that we decided to invest in a guidebook and to share a pair of anti-snake boots.

  THERE COMES a time in the restoration of an old house when the desire to see it finished threatens all those noble aesthetic intentions to see it finished properly. The temptation to settle for the shortcut nags away as the delays add up and the excuses multiply: the carpenter has severed a fingertip, the mason's truck has been stolen, the painter has la grippe, fittings ordered in May and promised for June don't arrive until September, and all the time the concrete mixer and the rubble and the shovels and pickaxes become more and more like permanent fixtures. During the hot months of summer, tranquilized by the sun, it had been possible to look with a patient eye at the uncompleted jobs throughout the house. Now that we were spending more time indoors with them, patience had been replaced by irritation.

  With Christian the architect, we went through the rooms to establish who had to do what, and how long it would take.

  "Normalement," said Christian, a man of great charm and implacable optimism, "there is only six or seven days of work. A little masonry, some plastering, two days of painting, et puis voilà. Terminé."

  We were encouraged. As we said to Christian, there had been dark moments recently when we imagined waking up on Christmas morning still surrounded by the debris of a building site.

  He threw up everything in horror-hands, eyebrows, and shoulders. What a thought. It was inconceivable that these mere finishing touches should be delayed any longer. He would telephone the various members of the équipe immediately to organize a week of intensive activity. Progress would be made. No, more than progress; a conclusion.

  One by one, they came at odd times to the house: Didier and his dog at seven in the morning. The electrician at lunchtime, Ramon the plasterer for an evening drink. They came, not to work, but to look at the work that had to be done. They were all astonished that it had taken so long, as though people other than themselves had been responsible. Each of them told us, confidentially, that the problem was always that one had to wait for the other fellow to finish before one could start. But, when we mentioned Christmas, they roared with laughter. Christmas was months away; they could almost build a complete house by Christmas. There was, however, a common reluctance to name a day.

  When can you come? we asked.

  Soon, soon, they said.

  We would have to be content with that. We went out to the front of the house, where the concrete mixer stood guard over the steps to the front door, and imagined a cypress tree standing in its place.

  Soon, soon.

  November

  THE FRENCH PEASANT is an inventive man, and he hates waste. He is reluctant to discard anything, because he knows that one day the bald tractor tire, the chipped scythe, the broken hoe, and the transmission salvaged from the 1949 Renault van will serve him well and save him from disturbing the contents of that deep, dark pocket where he keeps his money.

  The contraption that I found at the edge of the vineyard was a rusty monument to his ingenuity. A 100-liter oil drum had been sliced in half lengthwise and mounted on a framework of narrow-gauge iron piping. An old wheel, more oval than round, had been bolted onto the front. Two handles of unequal length protruded from the back. It was, so Faustin told me, a brouette de vigneron-a wheelbarrow, custom built at minimal expense for the pruning season.

  All the vines had now been stripped of their leaves by the autumn winds, and the tangled shoots looked like coiled clumps of brown barbed wire. Sometime before the sap started to rise next spring they would have to be cut back to the main stem. The clippings, or sarments, were of no agricultural use, too fibrous to rot into the ground during the winter, and too numerous to leave piled in the corridors between the vines where the tractors would pass. They would have to be gathered up and burned; hence the brouette de vigneron.

  It was the simplest kind of mobile incinerator. A fire was lit in the bottom of the oil drum, the sarments were clipped and thrown on the fire, and the barrow was pushed along to the next vine. When the drum was full, th
e pale grey ash was scattered on the ground and the process began again. It was, in its primitive way, a model of efficiency.

  Walking back to the house just before dusk, I saw a slim plume of blue smoke rising from the corner of the field where Faustin was pruning and burning. He straightened up and rubbed his back, and his hand felt cold and stiff when I shook it. He pointed along the rows of clipped vines, twisted claws black against the sandy soil.

  "Nice and clean, eh? I like to see them nice and clean." I asked him to leave some sarments for me to gather up to use on the barbecue next summer, and I remembered seeing them once in a shop which called itself a food boutique in New York-Genuine Vine Clippings, they were labeled, and they were guaranteed to impart That Authentic Barbecue Flavor. They had been trimmed to a standard length and neatly trussed with straw twine, and they cost two dollars for a small bunch. Faustin couldn't believe it.

  "People buy them?"

  He looked at the vines again, estimating how many hundreds of dollars he had burned in the course of the day, and shook his head. Another cruel blow. He shrugged.

  "C'est curieux."

  OUR FRIEND, who lived deep in Côtes du Rhône country north of Vaison-la-Romaine, was to be honored by the winegrowers of his village and admitted to the Confrérie Saint-Vincent, the local equivalent of the Chevaliers du Tastevin. The investiture was to take place in the village hall, followed by dinner, followed by dancing. The wines would be strong and plentiful and the winegrowers and their wives would be out in force. Ties were to be worn. It was that kind of occasion.

  Years before, we had been to another Chevaliers' dinner, in Burgundy. Two hundred people in full evening dress, rigid with decorum at the start of the meal, had turned into a friendly mob singing Burgundian drinking songs by the time the main course was served. We had blurred but happy memories of watching the sozzled Chevaliers after dinner, trying to find and then to unlock their cars, with the amiable assistance of the Clos Vougeot police force. It had been our first experience of an evening formally dedicated to mass intoxication, and we had enjoyed it enormously. Any friend of the grape was a friend of ours.