Encore Provence

by Peter Mayle

  For humans, the level of noise in a mill means that all communication must be carried out in a bellow delivered no more than six inches from the ear, which was a slight obstacle to my education. Even so, Jean-Marie was able to penetrate the racket and guide me from the start of the process to the finish, from the sacks of olives waiting their turn in the washing machine at one end to the greeny-gold flow of oil pouring out at the other. There was a wonderful smell in the air, rich and slippery and promising, a warm smell I always associate with sunshine.

  We watched as the olives, stripped of twigs and leaves, washed and shining, went through to the next stage, the broyage, which crushes them into a dense, dark paste. ‘You're probably wondering about the pits,’ said Jean-Marie.

  Ah, the pits. It turns out that they are more useful and important than anyone might think. At one time, there was a feeling among certain avant-garde olive-men that the quality of their oil would be improved by extracting the pits and pressing only the flesh, an extra complication and expense. But they discovered that oil processed in this way didn't keep. There is a natural preservative contained in the pits, and without that the oil quickly turns rancid. It doesn't pay to tamper with nature, Jean-Marie said. God knows best.

  With our eardrums still vibrating from the noise of the machinery, we went through to the front office of the mill, where two growers were leaning against the counter. One of them, ruddy-faced and jolly, had retired, but had dropped in to see how the harvest was going.

  ‘Alors,’ he said to the other grower, ‘ça coule?’

  From what I had seen next door, the oil was flowing like a young torrent, but it was obviously not correct form to admit it. The other grower frowned and wagged his hand, a tentative admission that things could be worse. ‘Eh,’ he said. ‘Quelques gouttes.’ A few drops.

  The girl behind the counter was smiling, and when I asked her if the crop was good this year, she nodded, pointing to a tall glass flask. It was filled with a sample of early-season oil, undiluted aglandau. When I held it up to the sunlight the oil was so thick it looked almost solid. ‘That's Monsieur Pinatel's oil,’ she said. ‘We keep all the batches separate. I could tell you where each oil comes from – not the tree, but probably the field. Like wine.’

  It was time to move on. Jean-Marie – perhaps the only living Frenchman who works during lunch – had olive business to attend to, and we agreed to meet in the early afternoon for a conducted tour of the trees. I was to wait for him in the café at Dabisse, the Bar Moderne.

  Country bars tend to reflect the character of the country, and the bare, hard surfaces of the Bar Moderne had some of the austerity of a windy Haute Provence hilltop. Gusts of cold air came through the door with every customer, to be replaced by gusts of hot air as greetings were exchanged and conversations started up. Men who spend their working lives outdoors, where speech has to compete with distance and the clatter of tractors, seem to develop amplified voices. They boom at each other, and their laughter has the resonance of minor explosions.

  There was an interesting selection of headwear on display that day, modelled by representatives of three different generations. The oldest man in the room, huddled over a pastis in the corner, his hand curved protectively around his glass, was wearing something that might have belonged to a Russian tank commander in the Second World War – a canvas creation in olive drab with long flaps that hung down like a hound's ears either side of his raw, white-stubbled face. His younger companions had either flat caps or woollen bonnets; one had both, the cap jammed down over the bonnet. Only the boy behind the bar, with his baseball cap, had made any concessions to modern fashion.

  On the screen of the television set cantilevered out from the back wall, inhabitants of another planet were mouthing and capering in a series of music videos, unwatched by the clientele. A dog made the rounds of the tables, prospecting for sugar lumps. I drank a glass of chilly red wine and looked through the window at a suddenly darker sky. The sun had gone. A bank of heavy clouds the colour of pewter had moved in with the wind, and it was going to be bitter on the hills.

  I was delivered into the care of Monsieur Pinatel, who was standing at the entrance of an old stone barn, sniffing the air. After a leathery handshake, we got into his van, taking a narrow dirt track that led past a curiously decorative apple orchard: rows of trees, gaunt and leafless, each connected to the next by drooping swags of fine-mesh netting. From a distance, it looked as though someone had started to gift-wrap the entire orchard but had lost interest before adding the final ornamental touches. ‘It's to protect the fruit when there's a hailstorm,’ said Monsieur Pinatel. ‘Without the netting, they won't insure the crop.’ He grunted, and shook his head. ‘Insurance. Thank God we don't have to do the same for the olives.’

  I saw what he meant as we left the orchard behind us and entered an ocean of olive trees. Thousands of them stretched across the hillside, looking like primitive, leafy sculptures against the bare, stony ground. Most of them had been there for 200 years; the veterans were twice that age. The crop ran into many hundreds of thousands of olives, and each one had to be taken from the branches by hand.

  We stopped at the end of a long avenue of trees where the pickers were at work – men and women from the surrounding villages, doing what their great-great-grandparents had done before them. In those days, when travel was by mule or foot, the olive harvest used to be one of the few times in the year when inhabitants of isolated villages had a practical excuse to get together. This was a rare chance for young men to meet young women, and romantic attachments were often formed under the trees. A sackful of olives must have had the same allure as a bouquet of red roses. Love blossomed, and marriages were arranged. The first male child was often named Olivier.

  Customs may have changed, and so have the pickers' tools, but the technique of picking is much the same as it was 2,000 years ago. The bache, a giant plastic sheet, is placed on the ground around the base of the tree to catch the olives. These are taken from the branches with a tool that you can imagine being used to groom a very large shaggy animal – a short-handled comb, perhaps eight inches wide, with a row of blunt teeth. When the lower branches have been combed clean, the picker reaches the upper parts of the tree by climbing a triangular ladder, broad at the bottom, narrow at the top. Once up the ladder, half the picker's body disappears; all you can see are pairs of legs sprouting from the foliage, bizarre growths, most of them covered in denim. Above the sound of the wind, I could hear the steady, soft plop of olives falling on to the bache, and the occasional curse as a twig whipped back to sting a frozen cheek. It was slow, cold work.

  Driving home at the end of the day, my hands and feet thawing out in the warmth of the car, it was easy to understand what had made so many farmers give up the olive in favour of the grape. A vineyard will give you a quicker return on your investment; after three years or so, you're in business, and working conditions are more congenial. Apart from pruning, most of the hard labour is done when you can feel the sun on your shoulders, which is easier on the bones as well as the disposition. And, if the wine is good enough, grapes can make a handsome living for the men who grow them. Olives are different. I heard it again and again: nobody gets rich from growing olives.

  I realized that my own affection for olives was based on emotion rather than practicality. I was drawn to the history of the trees, their stubborn resistance to natural disasters, and their refusal to die. I would never tire of looking at the shimmer of their leaves in the sun and the muscles of their massive trunks, swollen and twisted with the effort of writhing up from the earth. These feelings, so I had always thought, were typical of an amateur attracted to the picturesque. It was a surprise and a great pleasure to find that they were shared by the hard-headed farmers out on those cold hills. You have to love the trees to do the work.

  12

  Friday Morning in Carpentras

  You will often see, on your travels around the Vaucluse, small fields planted with a few straggl
y rows of infant oak trees and guarded by severe black and yellow notices. Défense de pénétrer sous peine de sanctions correctionelles graves, they say, and draw the reader's attention to articles 388 and 444 in the French penal code. I have no idea what the punishments might be. A manacled trip to Devil's Island, possibly, or prodigious fines and confinement in a health spa. One shudders at the ghastly possibilities.

  Although I take these warnings seriously, it's clear that others don't; the notices are routinely stolen, defaced or used for target practice by hunters. But in theory you could be prosecuted for ignoring them and venturing into the field. It is – or will be, if God, the weather and the vagaries of soil and spores permit – a precious field, a field where wealth lies just a few centimetres beneath the surface. A truffle field.

  Not long ago, we had the good luck to spend some time in a house on the edge of the grandfather of all truffle fields; an entire estate, in fact, an area of more than 100 acres. It was by far the most impressive example I have ever seen of man's determination to cultivate the ferociously expensive and notoriously capricious black truffle – the ‘divine tubercule’ that makes gourmets quiver in anticipation even as they reach for their wallets.

  We became friendly with the owners, Mathilde and Bernard, who told us some of the history of the estate. It had been rough grazing land when Bernard's father saw its potential and bought it many years ago, but he was a man with a patient eye on the future. He was prepared to wait for his truffles. He must also have been an optimist, because black truffles have minds of their own and tend to grow where they want to rather than where they're supposed to. All one can do is help to create the right conditions, keep the fingers firmly crossed, and wait for five or ten or fifteen years.

  This was done. Twenty-five thousand truffle oaks were planted on well-drained, sloping ground, and several kilometres of irrigation pipes laid down. An impressive investment, everyone agreed, although the irrigation system was the cause of great amusement to the locals at the time. Who had ever heard of watering truffle oaks as if they were geraniums? Money thrown away. He'd be sorry.

  But Bernard's father had made a very thorough study of the care and feeding of truffle oaks, and knew that the trees needed refreshment during the heat of the summer. He wanted to leave as little as possible to chance and nature, and had laid down irrigation as an insurance against drought. In unusually dry years, when the August storms didn't arrive as they should, his trees still had water. In the winters that followed the droughts, when others were scratching the earth and finding nothing, he had truffles. The locals stopped laughing. And, paying him a kind of backhanded compliment, some of them started poaching.

  The problems of protecting a large, remote tract of land from stealthy invasion are considerable. They were made even more difficult in this case because truffle poachers usually work at night. Their dogs, trained to the scent, don't have to see; their noses take them where they need to go. Working in the dark, the poacher's traditional excuse if stopped and questioned – ‘I was just taking Fido for a walk’ – is less than convincing. Two in the morning is an odd hour for a stroll. But then, working in the dark, the poacher is very rarely caught. Sometimes heard, occasionally glimpsed, seldom nailed. What can one do?

  All kinds of discouragements were tried. Notices threatening prosecution and fines proved useless; a succession of night watchmen found it impossible to cover such an expanse of country; geese were recruited as a mobile alarm system, but found to be messy and ineffective. (Some of them didn't live long either, being easy to kill and rather good to eat.) Following the goose experiment, head-high wire fences were erected. The poachers promptly bought wire-cutters.

  Finally, a team of four guard dogs – big beasts, the size of German Shepherds and very fast across the ground – came to live and work on the property. Confined to their kennels during the day, they are let out at night and given the run of the land. They have been trained not to attack the poacher, but to concentrate their attentions on his dog, and the system works. Presented with the choice of retreat or death, the poacher's dog suddenly remembers an urgent appointment elsewhere, and off he goes. Without the dog's powers of detection to guide him, the poacher is finished. He can dig all night without finding anything more than handfuls of dirt. He might as well go home.

  A good truffle dog is money in the bank, as we saw one afternoon at the beginning of the season. She was a grey-haired, whiskery mongrel, low on the ground as many of the best truffle dogs are, and completely absorbed in her work. We followed her as she went slowly through the trees, head down, nose cocked, tail wagging. From time to time she would stop and scratch, surprisingly gently, at the earth, and she never failed. There was always a truffle just below the surface, to be eased out with a U-shaped pick while she nosed at her master's pocket for her reward, a tiny piece of Gruyère.

  The truffle season extends roughly from the first frost to the last, and during much of that time the kitchen of Mathilde and Bernard's farmhouse takes on a pleasantly perfumed air. The scent of truffles, ripe and powerful, greets you as you go through the door, and you may be fortunate enough to be offered one of the specialities of the house. This is the Rolls Royce of butters: alternate layers of butter and thinly sliced fresh truffles, spread on toast, sprinkled with grains of gros sel, coarse grey sea salt, and accompanied by a glass or two of red wine. If that doesn't set you up for lunch, nothing will.

  Towards the end of each week during the season, you might see in the corner of the kitchen a couple of capacious straw baskets, their contents covered with a damp linen cloth. These are the truffles that have been gathered over the last seven days, ready to be taken to the Friday morning market at Carpentras, and this week Bernard has entrusted me with an important job. I am to be the official truffle-bearer, he who carries the baskets.

  We set off at seven, driving almost blind through the fleece of low clouds that often settle on the hills in winter. As we dropped down on to the Carpentras road, the sun burned through, leaving wisps of cloud no more than pale smears across a sky that was as blue as in July. It was going to be one of those brilliantly clear winter days when the scenery looks as though it's been polished.

  The car smelled delicious, but slightly humid. I asked Bernard why it was necessary to keep the truffles damp, and he explained about the perils of evaporation. From the moment they are dug up and taken from the earth, truffles begin to dry out, losing moisture; even worse, losing weight, sometimes as much as 10 per cent. And since truffles are sold by weight, that 10 per cent is money. Gone up, as Bernard said, into thin air.

  By eight-thirty we were in Carpentras. So, it seemed, was every truffle enthusiast in the Vaucluse. There must have been 100 of them, a clot of humanity on one side of the otherwise empty Place Aristide Bruant. The market takes place every Friday morning from November through to March, with, as you might expect, its headquarters in a bar. Those who had arrived early, now fortified by coffee and a nip of something stronger against the chill of the morning, were beginning to leave the bar to make the rounds of the trestle tables set up outside. Bernard did the same. I followed him with the baskets, attempting nonchalance, as though I was used to carrying around tens of thousands of francs covered in damp linen.

  One of the many pleasant things about the Carpentras market is that it's not confined to professionals. Anyone with a truffle to sell can try his luck with the courtiers – the brokers who buy for their clients in Paris or the Périgord – and I watched as one old man came sidling up to the table where a courtier was preparing to do business.

  The old man looked from side to side before taking something wrapped in newspaper out of his pocket. He unwrapped the object, a fair-sized truffle, and presented it in cupped hands. Whether this was to conceal it from the prying eyes of the competition or to enhance the aroma I wasn't sure.

  ‘Allez, sentez,’ said the old man. ‘I found it at the bottom of the garden.’

  The courtier bent over the truffle to inhale,
then looked at the old man, his face a study in disbelief. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘While you were taking the dog for a walk.’

  At that point, their negotiations were interrupted by the arrival of a gendarme, who marched through the crowd until he found a clear space in front of the tables. With a ceremonial flourish, he raised his left arm so that he could study his watch. Satisfied that the moment had officially come, he put a whistle to his mouth and blew two short blasts. ‘Le marché est ouvert,’ he announced. Nine o'clock on the dot.

  It was easy enough to pick out the big sellers, the trufficulteurs, with their bulging bags or cloth-covered baskets, and the courtiers at their tables. But there was no way of telling if other, anonymous buyers were making the rounds that morning. Carpentras is a well-known market, and there is always the chance that someone has come down to buy for the three-star restaurants. Consequently, if you are approached by a man expressing interest in the contents of your basket, it is not only good manners but possibly good business to offer him a sniff.

  On Bernard's nod, I drew back the cloth and held up one of our baskets for a snappily dressed gentleman with a Parisian accent. His head almost disappeared inside the basket, and I could see his shoulders rise and fall as he took a series of deep breaths. He emerged smiling and nodding, then selected a truffle, which he began to scratch carefully with his thumbnail until the colour and the tiny white veins below the surface showed through. As a general rule, the darker the truffle, the more perfumed and desirable it is. And therefore more expensive, because the price is linked to the smell. In other words, you're paying through the nose.

  The gentleman nodded again as he replaced the truffle. He seemed highly impressed. I waited for the cash to come out. ‘Merci, messieurs,’ he said, and walked off. We never saw him again. Obviously, he was nothing more than a truffle groupie, a sniffer and a scratcher rather than a buyer. Apparently, every market has one.