by Peter Mayle
One response to these problems has been to leave them behind, and the newspapers of the moment are filled with stories about young French business people moving away from Paris to take advantage of le boom in England. But if that kind of ambition exists in Provence, it isn't very apparent. Everyone agrees that times could be better; everyone hopes they will be. Meanwhile, they fall back on the philosophy of the shrug.
It's not a bad philosophy for the visitor to adopt as well, because life in Provence is never short of curiosities, and the national genius for complication is never too far away. There may be some mad logic at work somewhere, but there are many times when it is often difficult to understand. Take, for example, the matter of the village garbage dump. It is discreetly placed, frequently cleared, designed to accept debris of any type and size short of a discarded truck, an admirable facility in every way. An official notice is prominently displayed above the garbage containers. Translated, it reads: Large items should be deposited two days after the last Wednesday of each month.
I stood and looked at it one morning for some time, thinking at first that I had misread it, or that my French was letting me down yet again. But no. That's what it said. Two days after the last Wednesday of each month. Why didn't it say the last Friday of each month? Was there some plan afoot – doubtless another piece of nonsense from the bureaucrats in Brussels – to change the name of Friday to something more dynamic and politically exciting? Euroday, perhaps. While I was wondering if this was a treat in store for the year 2000, a small van arrived. The driver got out and studied the notice. He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked again at the notice, shook his head and shrugged.
Not long afterwards, the notice was removed. I was told that everyone had continued to toss away their old refrigerators and bicycles and TV sets whenever they felt like it, instructions or no instructions. The French love of signs is only equalled by their delight in ignoring them.
Put this together with another national characteristic, that of keeping your money out of the clutches of authority as much as possible, and you begin to understand the parking problem. Every town in Provence now has areas set aside where you can park your car off the street. These areas, clearly indicated by many signs and thus easy to find, are more often than not ignored. The streets, on the other hand, are clogged with examples of imaginative and illegal parking. Cars with two wheels cocked on the pavement or stuffed into alleys with a bare six inches to spare on each side are commonplace. Miracles of stunt driving are performed as traffic backs up, tempers become frayed, horns squawk and disputes erupt. And why? Because the official parking area has the audacity and the naked greed to charge five francs an hour.
But – so I am assured by my friend Martine, who regularly parks where no others dare to park – it's not just the money. It's the principle. Le parking payant is an affront to the French ethos and must be resisted, even if that involves circling the town for half an hour in search of a place. Time, after all, is free. Moral and financial considerations aside, there is also the immense satisfaction to be gained by finding a truly exceptional spot. I once saw a man reverse his small Peugeot into the premises of a boutique that had been gutted prior to renovation. While he was walking away, he looked back at the snug fit of his car in what would one day be a shop window and nodded at it, a moment of bonding between man and machine. It was as if together they had achieved a significant victory.
For me, moments – the sounds and sights and smells that make up the texture of daily life – define the character of Provence as much as the history or the landscape. And if I had to choose a single example of what I missed most while in America, it would be a country market; nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual collection of stalls that are set up each week in every town from Apt to Vaison-la-Romaine.
They have an instant visual charm, these markets, with their bursts of vividly coloured flowers and vegetables and their handwritten signs, the stalls shaded by ancient plane trees or tucked up against even older stone walls. They might have been artistically arranged for a postcard photographer, or for the high season, to be dismantled and forgotten at the end of summer. But you will find them in January as in August, because their bread and butter comes from local inhabitants. The tourist is just a dollop of jam. Welcome, but not essential.
Stall-holders and customers know each other, and so shopping tends to be slow and social. Old Jean-Claude's brand-new smile is much admired while he selects some cheese, and there is some debate as to the precisely appropriate texture, given his recently fitted dentures. A Brie would be too sticky. A Mimolette, too hard. Perhaps some Beaufort would be best, until the new teeth have had a chance to settle in. Madame Dalmasso is plunged into a state of profound suspicion by the tomatoes. It is too early in the year for these to be local tomatoes. Where have they come from? Why hasn't their place of birth been written on the sign? After some investigation – a squeeze, a sniff, the lips pursed – she decides to throw caution to the winds and try half a kilo. A bearded man wanders back to his stall, a glass of rosé in one hand and an infant's feeding bottle in the other. The bottle is for a baby sanglier that he has adopted, a tiny wild boar, its black snout twitching at the scent of milk. The flower lady gives my wife her change, then ducks under her stall to reappear with two new-laid eggs which she gift-wraps in a twist of newspaper. On the other side of the square, the tables outside the café are filling up. Above the hiss and clatter of the espresso machine, a voice from Radio Monte Carlo, in raptures of enthusiasm, describes this week's competition. Where do they find these people who never have to stop for breath? Four old men sit in a row on a low stone wall, waiting for the market to end and the square to be cleared so that they can play boules. A dog sits up on the wall next to them. All he needs is a flat cap and he'd look just like the men, patient and wrinkled.
As the stall-holders begin to pack up, there is an almost tangible feeling of anticipation. Lunch is in the air, and today it is warm enough to eat outside.
There are two undeserved results of our time on the other side of the Atlantic. The first is that we are thought of as experts in all things American, and are regularly consulted about events taking place in Washington and Hollywood (now almost the same place), as if we knew the politicians and film stars personally. The second is that we are in some way considered responsible for the spread of American tribal customs, and so we often find ourselves pinned to the wall by the accusing finger of Monsieur Farigoule.
A retired schoolteacher and self-appointed guardian of French culture and the purity of the French language, Farigoule can work himself into a lather over everything from le fast-food to les casquettes de baseball, which have begun to appear on previously bare French heads. But on this particular autumn day, he had something infinitely more grave on his mind, and when he leaped from his bar stool to corner me he was clearly very concerned.
‘C'est un scandale’ was his opening remark, followed by a stream of disparaging comments about the pernicious influence of transatlantic imports on the fabric of French rural life. Farigoule is a very small man, almost a miniature, and when agitated tends to bounce up and down on his toes for emphasis, a little ball of outrage. If he were a dog, he'd be a terrier. I asked what had upset him, and found my head going up and down in time with his bouncing.
‘Alowine,’ he said. ‘Is this what we need? The country that gave birth to Voltaire and Racine and Molière, the country that gave Louisiana to the Americans. And what do they give us in return? Alowine.’
I had no idea what he was talking about, but from his tone of voice and his tightly clamped, downturned mouth it was a major catastrophe, a disaster to rank with a reappearance of phylloxera among the vines or the arrival of Euro Disney outside Paris.
‘I don't think I've seen it,’ I said.
‘How could you not? They are everywhere – les potirons mutilés – in Apt, in Cavaillon, everywhere.’
Mutilated pumpkins could only mean one thing. Like Mickey Mouse and
tomato ketchup, Hallowe'en had arrived in France, another nail in the cultural coffin.
After making my excuses, I went into Apt to see for myself. Farigoule had exaggerated, as he usually does, but it was true that Hallowe'en decorations were displayed in one or two shop windows, the first time I had ever seen them in Provence. I wondered if the population had been officially informed of this addition to the festive calendar, and if they knew what they were supposed to do about it. A random sample interviewed in the streets of Apt revealed only puzzlement. Pumpkins meant soup.
Whose idea had it been to bring Hallowe'en to Provence? And would a health warning be issued to any bands of children allowed out at night to go around the farms on trick-or-treat expeditions? The dogs would get them for sure. Fortunately, the occasion passed without any reports of bloodshed in the local papers. Alowine, this year at least, seemed to be one of those parties where nobody showed up.
France, in any case, already has more than enough traditions of its own, which we were rediscovering month by month. There is May, which starts with a public holiday and continues with several more to prepare us for August, when the entire country is en vacances. There is a permanent festival of bureaucracy, marked by a snowstorm of paper. Each saint has a saint's day, each village its annual fête. And each week, by popular demand, there is the feast of the common man, otherwise known as Sunday lunch.
Sunday is a day apart, a day that feels different even if one hasn't spent the week in an office. The sounds change. Birdsong and the drone of tractors during the week; the baying of hounds and the pop of distant gunfire on Sunday morning, when the Provençal hunter likes to exercise his right to defend the countryside from invasion by hostile rabbits and thrushes.
This year, he faces a more serious challenge than ever, from mutant sangliers. Nobody seems to know quite how it happened, but the wild boar population has multiplied with dramatic speed. One current theory is that sangliers – which normally produce a single small litter each year – have been mating with their more prolific cousin, the domestic pig, and their offspring are threatening to overrun the vineyards and orchards. You can see their calling cards everywhere: ruts gouged out of the earth in the search for food, vegetable gardens trampled, dry-stone walls knocked awry.
The area around our house was sealed off one Sunday as part of an organized sanglier drive. At intervals down the long dirt road, hunters had parked their vans, snout first, in the bushes. Figures in camouflage green, armed, immobile and sinister, waited while their dogs circled and backtracked, collar bells clinking, their barking hoarse with excitement. I felt as though I had walked into a manhunt, or a war.
The first casualty appeared as I was nearing the house. A hunter was coming towards me with the sun directly behind him, and all I could make out in the distance was his silhouette. A rifle barrel slanted above one shoulder, and in his arms he was cradling something large, something with legs that flopped loosely on either side of his body as he walked.
He stopped when he reached me. The black and tan hound he was holding rolled a lugubrious eye at our dogs, and the hunter, no less mournful, wished me good morning. I asked after the hound's health. Had he been attacked and savaged in the bushes by an oversized piglet, a cornered sanglier protecting his patch?
‘Ah, le pauvre,’ the hunter said. ‘He has passed all summer in the kennel, and that makes the paws soft. He's run too far this morning. His feet hurt.’
By eleven-thirty, the road was empty again. The army had withdrawn, to regroup and change uniforms and weapons. Combat fatigues and guns were replaced by clean shirts and knives and forks in preparation for an assault on the table.
Sunday lunch, at any time of year, is my favourite meal. The morning is undisturbed by work, the afternoon siesta free of guilt. I feel that restaurants have a more than usually good-humoured air about them, almost an undercurrent of festivity. And I'm sure that chefs try harder, knowing their clients have come to enjoy the cooking rather than discuss business. There's no doubt about it. Food tastes better on Sunday.
There are a dozen good restaurants within a twenty-minute drive of the house; spoiled for choice, we can pick a place that suits the weather. The Mas Tourteron, with its vast shady courtyard and a selection of straw hats to keep customers' heads cool, is as close as one gets to eating in heaven on a ninety-degree day. In the winter, there is the Auberge de l'Aiguebrun – an open fire, a high, light, white-curtained room, and the view of a private valley.
What sets these two apart from most other local restaurants, and indeed from most other restaurants in France, is that in both cases the chefs are women. The traditional division of labour has always placed the man in front of the oven and Madame behind the till. Now times are beginning to change, although no female chef has yet come close in terms of national recognition to Alain Ducasse, who has enough Michelin stars to decorate a tree. Women in France are better represented in medicine, in politics and in the law than they are in restaurant kitchens. I find this odd, and I wonder if chauvinism has had something to do with it.
There is only one man to consult over a tricky social question like this if you want a provocative answer: my friend Régis, who excels – in fact, I believe he's been asked to represent France – in both gastronomy and chauvinism, and who is happy to share his opinions with the world. It didn't surprise me that he held strong views on the matter of female chefs, and when I asked him why there weren't more of them, the answer came out like a bullet. ‘What you have to understand,’ he said, ‘is that in France some things are considered too important to be left to women.’
Female doctors, lawyers and cabinet ministers Régis found curious but acceptable. Female chefs (and female sommeliers) made him suspicious and uneasy. It was somehow against the proper order of things. Professional cooking was man's work.
He ate his words one winter Sunday, during lunch at the Auberge de l'Aiguebrun. After a cautious start with a gratin of Swiss chard, he continued without any apparent difficulty to deal with a lamb stew, a small mountain of various cheeses and a dark, dense slab of triple-strength chocolate in a puddle of crème anglaise. All cooked by a woman.
We stood outside the restaurant, and I waited for him to admit that he might have been wrong. Not a chance. He merely adjusted his chauvinism to suit the moment.
‘Only in France,’ he said, ‘can you find cooking like that in the middle of nowhere.’ He waved an arm at the mountains, and at the sun pouring into the funnel of the valley. ‘It's good to be back, isn't it?’
Yes, it's good to be back.
2
The Unsolved Murder of the Handsome Butcher
It was very nearly death at first sight when I met Marius. I saw his tall figure in the distance, hands in pockets, strolling along in the middle of the road that leads to the village. He heard the car engine and turned to look back, so he knew I was coming. But after one or two alarming experiences on that particular stretch of road, I had learnt to distrust the unpredictable movements of pedestrians, bicyclists, tractor drivers, dogs and confused chickens, and so I slowed down. Luckily for both of us, my foot was resting on the brake when he leaped in front of the car, arms stretched wide as though he wanted to embrace it. I stopped with about eighteen inches to spare.
He nodded at me before walking round to the passenger door and getting into the car. ‘Bieng,’ he said in that familiar Southern dialect. ‘You're going to the village. My Mobylette is being repaired.’
He asked to be dropped off in front of the café. But when we got there he showed no sign of leaving the car, seemingly fascinated by the assortment of small change that I kept in a tray by the gearstick to feed parking meters.
‘You wouldn't have ten francs, would you? For a phone call?’
I pointed to the tray. He sifted carefully through the coins, took a ten-franc piece, beamed at me, and disappeared into the café without as much as a token glance at the pay-phone he had to pass on his way in.
Over the next few weeks, a
pattern emerged. Marius would appear on the horizon, patrolling the road or wandering through the village, his open arms demanding transport. His motorized bicycle would still be undergoing repairs, and he'd need to make another phone call. After a while, we abandoned the tiresome formalities. I would simply leave two ten-franc pieces in the tray by the gearstick; Marius would put them in his pocket. It was an efficient and civilized arrangement that suited us both, as neither of us liked to discuss money.
It must have been two or three months before our relationship progressed from low finance and began to take on some kind of social dimension. I went into the post office one morning, and there I found Marius engaged in a negotiation involving a scrap of paper, which he kept pushing towards Madame behind the counter. She kept shaking her head and pushing it back. There were many shrugs, and eventually an exchange of those audible pouts – air being expelled through downturned, disdainful lips – that the French like to use when indicating disapproval or disagreement. And then, silence. The negotiation had clearly foundered.
Madame used my arrival as an excuse to put an end to the proceedings, leaning round Marius to wish me good morning. When he turned and saw me, his expression changed from a scowl to a smile, and he clapped me on the shoulder. ‘I'll wait for you outside,’ he said.
The problem, as he explained it to me, was that Madame, whom he accused of having no imagination and a sour and unhelpful disposition, had refused to cash a cheque for 500 francs. A valid financial instrument, he said, and held it up for inspection.
It flapped sadly in the wind as he passed it to me. I suppose it might once have been a legitimate cheque, but now it was rumpled and grubby, the words and figures faded and almost indecipherable. It would have been an act of supreme optimism to part with any money in return for such a tattered and unconvincing relic. And besides, I told Marius, I didn't have 500 francs on me.
