The village was run at the time by a député-maire, a mayor who was also the local parliamentary representative in Paris. He was a slight man in his fifties. He had been born in the village and was married to one of Luc’s mother’s cousins. He was a good socialist in a socialist community, but he had grown slack and accustomed to power. Up for reelection, he had snubbed the local pétanque team, most of them communists, Spanish refugees and civil-war veterans. They invited him to a vin d’honneur two nights before the election. He went to a dinner party given by Gigi instead. They reacted quickly, rounded up the vote and decided to go for the other side.
The other side was represented by a man called Subleyras, a stocky man, with arms that looked as though he knew what a plowshare was, and hands that dangled and almost grazed the ground. His father had been mayor in the fifties. Before that he had run a hardware store in the Rue St. Florian, and used to store Picasso’s canvases for safekeeping in the room at the back of the shop. This often came up in the son’s speeches.
Subleyras was the perfect populist. Unlike the mayor, he knew the value of sitting on the terrace of the café late at night and catching people in conversation. His conversation was crude and macho. He talked about “propreté,” which he appeared to be using in the sense of keeping the streets clean, but which had darker resonances for the very few Arabs in the village. He promised work in traditional village occupations.
After the devastating first round, which Subleyras won by a large majority, the old mayor had a week to rally support before the second vote. At meetings in the Salle de Spectacle, promises were made regarding international pétanque tournaments, a covered swimming pool, the conversion of the big empty house with the sixteenth-century façade opposite Luc’s office into a museum for local crafts—espadrille-making, corks, fabrics. The regionalist agenda of the 1960s rebels had been effectively hijacked by the nineties right. The second day of voting came around. Mitterrand sent a telegram of support, but Subleyras won by sixty-two votes.
Within two days the outgoing mayor had raised a formal complaint. One of the new mayor’s henchmen had been seen distributing tracts in the marketplace on the day before the election—elections are held on Sundays in France. No publicity is allowed during the twenty-four-hour period before an election. A request for a revote had been formally lodged with the Ministry of the Interior.
The new mayor got on with the job, as the newly elected, with mock humility, like to say. He threw out the champagne socialists and canceled an exhibition of Picasso’s graphics at the museum because it was too expensive a project and would be better done by a museum up in Paris. Instead he proposed an exhibition of all the museum’s holdings by local artists. Many artists withdrew their work from the permanent collection because they didn’t want their “eels in plastic tunnel” displayed anywhere near Madame Leblanc’s meditation in pastels on the cherry orchards in bloom. War was declared. The village had always lived peacefully till then, but that year was the most turbulent in its history. Divisions ran through families and trades unions, siblings stopped speaking, people threw their neighbors’ horses out of their fields. The new mayor rollicked through the streets at the Saturday market, arm in arm with his deputies, hugging people, kissing small animals and ordering everybody drinks. He got so much into the spirit of things he began to overspend.
One night, while dining at Le Jardin Fleuri, he discovered Johnny Hallyday’s manager was sitting at the adjacent table. Johnny Hallyday must be nearly sixty now. He wears a leather jacket and rides a Harley-Davidson. He sings. He tours. He has about seventy electricians and nine hairdressers and several exwives, and they all come, too. He plays in big places like Montpellier and Toulouse—it helps if they have a large population of old-age pensioners. The mayor brought the manager over to his table, got talking and decided it would be a good idea if Johnny brought his act to the village the following September, instead of the Slovenian baroque ensemble from Ljubljana. It was an act of bravado. No word had yet arrived from the Ministry of the Interior on the question of the reelection. They were due to report back by June. If there was a need for a new election and Subleyras won it, vindicating his earlier victory, he’d still be in power by the time Johnny came to town, and would make a huge financial success of the concert. Failing that, he could always raise the money from local industrialists, or sell off a Matisse. Likewise if there was no reelection. But if there was one, and he lost, the returning mayor would find himself footing the bill for the concert that was estimated at something completely crazy like seven million francs. The local industrialists wouldn’t support him, and since he was a supporter of the museum and its “elitist” policies, he couldn’t possibly think of selling a Matisse. It was very confusing the way the right-wing candidate was always accusing the socialist of elitism, and the socialist accused the right-winger of pandering to the masses.
From the moment the pact between manager and mayor was sealed, the village was plastered with posters. Johnny was the word on everybody’s lips. The teenagers were furious, and held a demonstration, supported by their teachers, who hadn’t been on a good demonstration since 1974. They wanted Jarvis Cocker and I was with them on that one, but nothing would move the mayor.
One Friday evening in May, a year after the election, a message arrived from the Ministry of the Interior. The minister considered the election had indeed been unfairly influenced against the outgoing incumbent by the distribution of tracts in the marketplace on the morning of the day before the ballot. No one really believed this, but those who stood to gain from the judgment read the reprieve as a kind of moral arrangement of the political tea leaves. It was as good as if it had been true. The two sides took up their positions. This time there was to be only one vote. Everything would be decided in a day.
Luc would occasionally sit and chat with Subleyras on the terrace of the right-wing café. “He’s my patient,” he’d say, “I like talking to him. He bought a painting off me once. It doesn’t mean I’m going to vote for him.”
“You shouldn’t talk to him like that if you’re not. Everyone else thinks you’re on his side.”
“And you care about that? It’s got nothing to do with you. You haven’t even got a vote. I don’t know why you’re getting so involved.”
“I am involved. He hates foreigners!”
“Is that what Stefan says?”
“Yes. But he’s right.”
“You listen to Stefan too much.”
“Because he cares what happens outside the village.”
“And this is a village election.”
“Just don’t be surprised if he shuts down the museum”—contemporary art was decadent, he said, which made Luc laugh—“and puts your pictures up in the tourist information office.”
“Good idea,” Luc said. “I’d be happy if there was nothing to do here. No museum. No Festival Méditerranéen, no Fête de la Sardane, none of that tourist stuff. Nothing for visitors at all.”
“You could always go on day trips to Toulon for entertainment.” Toulon was the center of right-wing extremism along the coast, and had anti-Arab rallies like other towns have fêtes and bridge tournaments.
“This is local politics. It’s not about left and right, it’s about the village.”
“Local politics is global politics.”
“Ah, yes, the global village,” he said. “I wouldn’t know about that. You’ll have to talk to Stefan about that.”
“Anyway,” he said later when the point had had time to settle, “you know I won’t really vote for him. I don’t know why you’re getting so upset.”
“You won’t?”
I was dropping him off outside his office, and he leaned down at the car window, “Of course not. I’ll vote for my mother’s cousin’s husband.”
* * *
Forty-eight hours before the election, Subleyras was to give his final public address. It had been an extraordinary week. Everyone had taken sides. Unbelievable alliances of convenience had
been struck. Promises untenable and implausible had been made. The tennis club could look forward, in theory, to twelve new courts, to be constructed on the site of the old railway station, next door to the cherry cooperative. The question of the Perspex roof for the swimming pool had been floated yet again. The director of the Museum of Modern Art had gone on sick leave. The mayor had targeted her as one of the ringleaders of the caviar-socialist set. In France, caviar, not champagne, indicates a love of luxury incompatible with socialist principles, since champagne, though still expensive, is something everyone should drink. She was hiding out in the restaurant run by her lover on the edge of the port, where there used to hang works donated by Picasso and Matisse in lieu of bar bills; they were eventually stolen, I’ve heard, so now there are only works by lesser painters, but it’s still atmospheric and the fresh fish is good. Every now and then she slipped back to the village with a slightly deeper tan and dived into the dress shop, which the new mayor would never dare enter, since Gigi was a communist. The new mayor’s problem was that, like most men in the village, he lusted painfully after both the director of the museum and Gigi, cultivated women both with beautiful skin, who for the last ten years had been running a sexual syndicate, sharing Luc and a couple of other painters among them when they were between wealthy Parisian lovers.
The deposed mayor had held his meeting the previous evening. He had addressed a crowd of maybe 600 people, without passion, dryly. The new mayor, defending his position, now took the stage by vaulting onto it, using his hand and wrist as a pivot. He’d hired a television crew from Toulouse, and they’d rigged up a huge Times Square–size screen behind him, so that as he walked up and down the stage with his microphone, looking remarkably school of Hallyday in gait, girth and general wolfishness, he was shown in closeup on the screen behind him. Not only could we watch his lips, we could see the spittle gather in the corners of his mouth. He strode up and down, and swung his hands about, and paused and swung again. I kept thinking he might break into a run, do a knife jump and start singing one of Barry Manilow’s faster numbers. He talked, very smoothly, about how he wanted to run the town for the people, only for the people, and that meant, first of all, the people of the village, which meant people who had the births of four grandparents registered in the files at the mairie. He began to talk about the budget. He mentioned the plans and promises of his opponent. He crouched close to the edge of the stage. There was a rumor he had bribed someone to chuck their knickers at him—the woman who ran the nursery school and was desperate to keep her job. I realized, appalled, that I was almost beginning to fancy him myself. I always went for slight men who looked like disgraced angels; he was big and sweaty, with a deep voice and a long stride, and I began to recognize in him a different kind of beauty, one that had beefy thighs and large hands and broad shoulders. He was so glad to be in his body, and had a kind of clumsy grace that made the rest of us feel small and Sunday-school neat. His face was creased and cracked with broken promises, like a cowboy’s saddle. I realized the power of the demagogue could lie in sexiness, and not so much in straight sexiness but in that ability to make people go for you against all their instincts. I could see how a meeting like this could really sway people; it was already starting.
Luc hadn’t come to the meeting. He hated emotional circuses of any kind. Stefan was leaning against the wall at the end of a row. He was wearing a clean black T-shirt and jeans. He caught my eye, shook his head and pulled a face. I drifted off a bit, lulled by the rhetoric and the heat, and thinking how I liked the way Stefan always wore faded clean clothes, with that hint of having just showered and changed out of something extremely sweaty. I was still watching him when I saw him tense and then move forward, the way he did on the back line of the tennis court as I pushed a serve over toward him and he went in for the kill. The mayor had offered the microphone over for questions. Stefan twitched, though I knew he wouldn’t speak. Someone else moved forward off the back wall and almost ran down the aisle, sprang up onto the stage, seized the microphone and started speaking. At first the crowd thought he must be speaking in support of Subleyras. He was clean-cut, young, handsome and well-dressed. Then his words began to surface like bubbles, popping in the listener’s minds: “disgrace,” “fascist,” “expenditure,” “Hallyday!” “budget,” “mendacious,” “meretricious,” “racist,” “Le Pen,” “scandale.” There was a snarl from the row behind me and the heavies got to their feet and pounded toward the stage. Meanwhile the mayor had forgotten he was on screen and was shown quivering with fury and loathing. The cameraman had frozen the shot, so the backdrop was of a hideous man in late middle age, with crazed eyes and hair bristling in his nostrils. The young man—who, it turned out, was in his first year at the University of Paris in Nanterre, and whose mother had been kicked out of her job by the present mayor—was perfect. Before they could lynch him, he sprang off the stage, making the mayor’s earlier leap, in retrospect, look gross and fake, and disappeared out the back door. After that Subleyras never had a chance. I glanced over at Stefan, who was looking stunned. As we left he said, “I was jealous. I have never been jealous before, it’s against my political convictions to be jealous, but I was jealous of that young man for saying what I can no longer say.”
The old mayor won the election comfortably, and Subleyras stomped off over the hills and was scarcely seen again, as though, in some folktale, a pinprick had entirely undone him, let the spirit out of him, so he was just a jumble of bones and flesh and sagging chins, and fine clothes that now flopped about his limbs but did not hide him. It is an extraordinary thing to do, to set oneself up for power, to invite the judgment of the crowd. Until the moment the outcome is announced you are high up, in the realm of the possible, of hope, even of desire; however unlikely you are to succeed, your very candidacy separates you from the rest. Afterward, after failure, you slump back into the crowd, if you are lucky; but more often your aspiration has marked you in ways people cannot see, and you are never so able to feel like one of them as before you aspired to represent them. There is more disgrace, somehow, attached to the hubris of the man of power than to that of the lover, whom failure can even ennoble. I suppose it’s because anyone can imagine losing in love, but very few people, far fewer than we imagine, are really interested in power.
In his role as the new mayor’s nemesis, Johnny Hallyday probably came closer to political involvement than he’d ever been in his life, although his role was completely inadvertent. In the end the whole thing was decided by an act of God, who washed out the concert with rain, making an obscure Belgian singer into an obscure instrument of grace. Acts of God only seem to cover the weather. Imagine if your only instrument for expression of free will was the weather, if your only vindictive weapon was drizzle, or fog. No venomous letters, no cuckolding, no backstabbing. It makes one less attracted to the idea of being God when there are so many more instruments of malice around for mere mortals to choose from.
CHERRY PIE PROJECT
Shortly before the cherries ripened, a month before the May reelection, I was approached by a deputation from the Foyer de Jeunesse, who are involved with creating employment for the young and had a plan. They needed me to supply a recipe for authentic American cherry pie, which they would sell at the Saturday morning market. We’ll have a meeting at Luc’s in two weeks’ time, said Marianne, the project’s leading lady. Luc said, “Don’t be ridiculous, it’ll never work. Stick to writing. At least you won’t run up any bills.”
The day of the meeting I was making curtains and realized I had forgotten to do anything about the recipe. At lunchtime, just before the two o’clock kitchen meeting, I let myself into Luc’s office while he was out at the pizzeria, searched for “cherry pie” on the Internet, and was able, within seconds, to download a short-crust-pastry recipe from a source in Tennessee. I had a problem with the printer, which recognized I was English and kept trying to form a queue. When Luc printed out a prescription and insurance form for his first patient a
fter lunch, the computer started producing a neat set of instructions that began, “Pick ’em ripe and juicy.”
Luc was right, the cherry pie project did not seem set to be a winner. Even if you have sixty cherry trees that ripen on the hillside every April, it’s a long way from that to a cherry pie. You need to spray them for blight—organic spray made from nettles, so you need some nettle beds, too—you need ladders and a workforce to pick them; de-stoning volunteers; huge pans to simmer them in; sugar; ovens; pastry bowls; large quantities of flour and butter; baking dishes; freezers; licenses to cook and to sell; and something to do for an income the other eleven months of the year.
Even so, I told Marianne she should go and see someone called Bruno, who was on the town council. He was popular with everyone. He had a nice face and was funny and inquisitive. His wife, though Catalan, had a touch of the hunt country about her and drove around in a Range Rover with her ashblond hair in a ponytail. Bruno would give Marianne advice about the laws covering preparation of food for commercial use. “The fat bastard who drives a city jeep?” she said.
Marianne, who seemed to have been torched into feminism by a neglectful husband, had run away down here from Paris with three children, bought a horse and a patch of land with sixty cherry trees on it and lived in a constant state of incipient outrage against the state, the mayor, men, marriage and, apparently, her own children. “No one on the town council’s going to get involved with a harebrained scheme like this right now,” she said. “Not with the election coming up.”
* * *
By the time the election was over Marianne seemed to have decided to let the project slide. At the first meeting of the new town council, they were about to take a vote on whether they could make Subleyras come across for the canceled Johnny Hallyday concert. Bruno was doodling on his minutes when the door opened and one of the secretaries came in and quietly handed him a piece of paper. The vote was a resounding yes, though everybody knew it was probably unenforceable. Bruno opened his note. It was from Marianne. He knew who she was because the previous week she had come to consult him about the restrictions applying to the commercial preparation of food in a private kitchen, or in someone’s dairy. The note gave the name of one of the town’s luxury hotels: “Chambre neuf, huit heures.” He tried to recall her face. It was seven-thirty. The mayor was asking whether anyone had any other business. Half an hour later he walked into chambre neuf to find Marianne lounging on the bed with a bottle of champagne on ice, Laurent Perrier rosé, beside her and, at the desk on his way out, a Visa slip waiting to be signed. When Stefan heard about this he said, “It’s a shame she’s not pretty; I could almost go for her myself.”
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