Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  We barely have time to lug ourselves and our baggage onto the wrong car before the doors slide shut. The conductor expels us at the next stop where we must leap, along with our baggage, onto the platform below and run like crazy to the right car and scramble aboard before the doors hiss closed again.

  One near death experience averted, we await the next. It turns out to be driving. We pick up our rental car at the Avignon station. Larry, who is by far the more confident driver and has a much better sense of direction takes the wheel and maneuvers out of the parking lot and onto the roadway. Within a kilometer, the traffic in front of us slows to a crawl and we find ourselves facing a road sign that reads, “Vous N’avez Pas La Priorité.” Literally, you do not have the priority. This is not meant to be an existential French statement about the meaning of life; all it means is “yield.” We will see this sign whenever we are approaching a rond-point. Rotaries, rather than red lights, are the way the French control traffic. Only their rotaries aren’t puny little “here we go round the mulberry bush” American traffic circles. A French rotary is la maman of all rotaries with exits at regular intervals, like rays from a giant sunburst.

  Larry inches along in line. When it’s his turn to enter, he leans forward, trains his eyes to the left toward the oncoming traffic circling the rotary, and waits for an opening. As soon as Larry sees one car exit, he guns into the newly created space, which is about the size of a car length, and I let out my breath. We go around the rotary, reading the exit signs for various towns, hoping for one that reads “Direction L’Isle sur la Sorgue.” We drive around again and again while I consult the map until I have determined that none of the towns named on the exit signs are going to take us to L’Isle; not “Arles,” not “Nîmes,” not “Centre Ville,” and not “La Barthellasse.” The only other option, besides driving around in circles chasing other people’s tail pipes until we run out of gas, is to exit at a wild card of a sign that we’ve been rejecting because we’ve been taking it too literally: “Toutes Directions.” All Directions. They really mean all other directions. Larry turns on his blinker, and off we go in all directions. We drive through the town of Le Pontet on the outskirts of Avignon. We have chosen wisely, if desperately. After a few more minutes, a few more rotaries, and a few more Toutes Directions, we see the exit option for L’Isle sur la Sorgue.

  We’re headed in the right direction.

  We turn on the car radio. Neither of us understands a word.

  We pass a storefront sign that reads in big, red letters, “Pain.”

  “Imagine how baffled you’d be if you didn’t know it meant bread,” I remark, regaining my confidence after a series of Franco-flops.

  A precedent has been set that we don’t yet realize. For the next month, we will be temporarily bipolar, our moods swinging between the yin of failure and the yang of success.

  We are jet-lagged, we are tense, and in just a few minutes, grâce à Dieu, we will arrive at Impasse des Jardins, our home. We imagine a little charmer of a cottage, surrounded by flowers, on a dead-end street.

  We imagine wrong. It is hate at first sight. Other than the obvious fact that the house is located in Provence, there is nothing Provençal about this yellowing plaster rectangle that looks like a crumbling hunk of parmesan cheese, located in a development of identical, shabby rectangles.

  Upon further inspection, we hate it more. Where are the plane trees, the sunflowers, the cunning eaves, the dark Provençal beams and the terra-cotta tile floors we had come to love when we were tourists in Provence? The well-named impasse turns out to be a dead-end alley so narrow that Larry can barely drive down it without knocking the side mirrors off our rental car.

  The jardin is a total misnomer. No grass or flowers could possibly grow on this small plot of parched earth in the middle of what can only be called, at least by American standards, a subdivision. There is no shower—not even a metered one. The two-burner stove and tiny oven are encrusted with food. The owner’s products fill the ice-bound freezer. Is Larry, who loves to cook as well as eat, supposed to make boeuf bourguignon in this dump of a kitchen?

  We realize too late how critical real estate is to our Provençal experiment.We had imagined a nicely renovated house with some age to it, at least a century or two. I feel sick with disappointment and dread. What have we done? What can we do about it? Meanwhile, Mme Gottinkiene stands by, waiting, hands on her hips, tapping her toe.

  I am at a loss for words, except for “Impossible!” which I pronounce loudly in my best French accent. Lots of words in the French language are the same, as long as you send them through your nose.

  Mme Gottinkiene, who speaks English better than we speak French, reminds us that we will forfeit our hefty deposit if we do not take the house. Then she goes on to accuse us of being typical spoiled-rotten Americans.

  That does it for me. I don’t like being accused of being typical. I don’t know where I find the words to confront her, or why I choose to address her in French. I may have been trying to prove to her how wrong she was about us. Typical Americans don’t speak French, even bad French. My tone is at once aggressive and heartfelt. I explain to an astounded Realtor that Larry and I have been dreaming of living in Provence for years, that we love the French people, their language, and their style of living, that we have come here for a month, that we are going to study French four hours a day, three days a week with Monique Desroziers, and that we will not under any circumstances live in this nightmare of a house. She can keep our deposit. We will look elsewhere. To this day, Larry calls it my “I Have a Dream” speech.

  By the time I get done, the expression on her face has changed from total disdain to loving-kindness. Is it the touching eloquence of my broken but earnest French? Or is it the mention of Monique Desroziers, who, as luck would have it, is Catherine’s friend?

  We repair to a nearby café to talk things over. L’Isle sur la Sorgue, she explains, for all its Venetian charm, its lovely cafes, antique shops, and waterwheels, is a blue-collar town with very few rental properties. People stay put. The reality of an ugly, circa 1950 French ranch house never occurred to me. My tendency to confuse fantasy with reality will continue to be both a blessing and a curse.

  If we are willing to live outside of L’Isle sur la Sorgue, she will find us a suitable house. Furthermore, she will see to it that we don’t have to forfeit our deposit on the house we have rejected; nor will she take her commission. By the time we have consumed enough café to send the three of us to the bathroom numerous times, we have learned that Catherine used to be a Catholic, but now she is a Buddhist.

  “There are no bad experiences,” Catherine says. “Difficulties are good,” she adds, nearly convincing us that renting a rotten house in the wrong town was an excellent choice on our part. She then gives us an example from her own life.

  She used to be married to a German man with whom she’d had a daughter in Germany. He took up with another woman, got her pregnant, and left Catherine. According to some legalism we don’t understand, in order for Catherine to return to France, she had to leave her daughter with her ex-husband in Germany for an entire year.

  “This was the hardest thing I ever did,” she says. Still, after a year, her daughter chose to be with her, and now Catherine lives with her daughter and Yves, the man who helped her to make the transition from Germany to France. They had started out as friends, and now they are a couple. Catherine will be our first French friend. She makes short work of finding us a perfect house six kilometers from L’Isle sur la Sorgue in Saumane de Vaucluse, a small village perched on the top of a hill, un village perché, with an adorably tiny population of 820, including Catherine, Yves, and her daughter. Now 822, counting us. The house even comes with two bikes, which we are free to use during our stay.

  In the First Place

  Home Sweet Medieval Home

  It is September 2003 when we first see our house on rue de L’Eglise
and immediately put our fantasy of riding bikes down the treacherous hill to Le Café Bellevue on hold. It won’t be our first fantasy to hit the dust. So what if we will have to drive six kilometers each morning down the winding, serpentine hillside road that leads to L’Isle sur la Sorgue below.

  The house is just right—a medieval, attached townhouse with cunning shutters and a heavy, planked wooden front door, located directly on a narrow street meant for carriages, not cars. The house is so old that the plumbing’s on the outside. My heart leaps when Catherine takes a large, toothy key out of her purse, the kind that might have hung from the belt of a Shakespearean chambermaid, and opens the door.

  The inside of the house is just as appealing. We enter onto a small landing from which two steps lead down to what Catherine calls the “salon.” To us, salon summons up a gathering of bright and witty, high-bosomed women, one of them Mme de Sévigné, lying about, holding forth on an encyclopedia of subjects. But those Renaissance days are over. These days, French salons are merely living rooms, and this one is comfortably furnished with an attractive mix of contemporary and antique chairs, a sofa and a glass coffee table. The kitchen is very small but modern and well equipped. There are no closets in the two bedrooms—only armoires. We have a wall of sliding-door closets at home, but here we love armoires; they’re old, inconvenient, and hardly hold anything. And the floors are terra-cotta. On the very distressed, antique dining room table stands a bottle of champagne, along with a note from the owners, which reads in sweetly broken English, “Have a nice days.” Buddhism is beginning to look good.

  Unlike our town, where a street named Bonnie Brook Lane doesn’t necessarily have a brook, rue de L’Eglise has a church, the tiny, chaste twelfth-century Romanesque church of St. Trophime, built against the town’s ramparts, with a view of the colorful patchwork of the Sorgue Valley below, silver with olive trees, and purple with grapes ready to be harvested. The church is just a few steps from our door.

  At the very top of the village is a twelfth-century château where the Marquis de Sade, the literary pornographer and advocate of the no-pain, no-gain school of sexual intercourse, spent his childhood inventing sadism. He probably started small, by pulling the wings off flies. He would spend his adult years, when he wasn’t in jail or an insane asylum, loving it up in a castle in nearby Lacoste.

  The only commercial enterprise in town is a bistro, Lou Clapas. At first, we figure the bistro was named after someone named Lou Clapas. Then, as we become more familiar with the area, we notice a number of restaurants named Lou Something or Other, causing us to deduce that all of these Lous comprised a chain of restaurants, like Howard Johnson, owned by a guy named Lou. Days after we’d gotten comfortable with that explanation, we find that Lou, in the ancient Provençal language called langue d’Oc, means “the,” and clapas means “stone.”

  We notice, too, as we drive around, that the signs designating town names appear first in contemporary French with the ancient Provençal name printed just below. There is a concerted effort, at least in the Vaucluse, the region in which we will rent for four consecutive years, to preserve the Provençal language. Vaucluse means “closed valley” or Vau-Cluso, and closed it is, surrounded by various mountain ranges, including the highest peak in the Luberon range, Le Mont Ventoux, windy mountain. A storm in the Vaucluse, we will soon find out, is a tympanic thrill as the thunder, trapped in the valley, bounces repeatedly off the valley walls, unable to escape.

  The region is also bounded by two of France’s greatest rivers, the Durance and the Sorgue. The Sorgue is fed by runoff from Le Mont Ventoux, which, after traveling through a network of underground caves, bursts forth into a huge cavern in what will become one of our favorite towns, Fontaine de Vaucluse, once called La Fònt de Vauclusa.

  Buddhism is still looking good, until we attempt to get my computer and Larry’s cell phone to work. No matter what house we rent in the future, no matter how much adaptive technology we bring with us, no matter how strongly our landlords assure us that we will have no problems getting online, we can’t. It’s il ne marche pas over and over again, ensuring that we will spend too much of our first three days in any house dwelling in a digital dystopia. Plugging into another country’s electrical current is such a challenge that it makes us wish we were home, but neither of us dares say so out loud.

  We have neighbors across our narrow street, the Rogets. They introduce themselves. René and Danielle are a retired couple. In French, the condition of being retired is à la retraite, which translates literally as “in retreat,” as if one were a soldier in a defeated army. Is that better or worse, I wonder, than American retirement, which suggests it’s time to go to bed.

  He was a banker; she the director of a girls’ school. They invite us into their home for an introductory drink. I had thought the French were unfriendly and rarely invited foreigners into their homes, but that is not the case in Provence, as we will continue to learn.

  The dominant feature in the living room is a full-color, life-sized, acrylic sculpture of Louis Armstrong. René explains in slow, easy French, enhanced by gestures, that he was eleven years old, living in Paris, when the Americans liberated the city. They gave him du chocolat and introduced him to le jazz.

  He loves Americans. During the month, they will invite us for cocktails and take us to an American movie, Man of La Mancha. The subtitles are in French. We are at first surprised, but then delighted, to learn that there are no movie theatres in Saumane, nor, for that matter, in L’Isle sur la Sorgue. Nothing is coming to a multiplex near you. It’s coming to a grange in the nearby town of St. Didier.

  The grange is a modern building, located on a side street where tourists never go. There we are, helping our neighbors set up the folding chairs and putting them away at the end of the show. We chat with them and munch on cookies. Danielle and René introduce us to their friends.

  “You have only been studying for two weeks and you speak so well?” they say, and we smile sweetly, forgetting to mention our three years of high school French. One of them will invite us, along with René and Danielle, to her house the next day for an aperitif. Meeting one’s neighbors is an important component of belonging. Tourists don’t have neighbors.

  We meet more neighbors during our stay in Saumane by attending La Fête de la Musique, a potluck event to which Larry contributes a dish. The music is recorded. Yves, Catherine’s partner, is the emcee, playing records over a loud speaker. He introduces us to some of the villagers. Larry is determined to knock their Provençal socks off by making mac and cheese. He has thoughtfully modified this dish for French palates by using gruyère instead of cheddar. He explains in his best French to the housewives who are serving up their coq au vin, tartes aux tomates, or quiches lorraines, that his dish is called “mac and cheese” and that it is uniquely American. He repeats its name slowly, carefully, like a teacher—“mac and cheese.” They smile, taste it, and tell him how much they enjoy it. In the fullness of time, we will find out that mac and cheese, made with gruyère, is an authentically French dish, a regular offering on pretty nearly every bistro menu in Provence.

  Totally Immersed

  Our lives in Saumane are organized around our French lessons. The need to understand and be understood is critical to any pretense at Frenchiness. One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take my junior year abroad in France. As a result, I am now trying to learn a foreign language at the same time that I am forgetting words in my native tongue. Still, we must work with what neurons are left. It’s probably a losing game, but we figure it’s how we play the game that counts.

  We have been lucky with Catherine, and we are lucky with Monique, who we quickly learn to call “Mo.” She, even more than the house and the sweet town of Saumane, makes this experience better than anything we might have dreamed. This may be the first time that one of my fantasies turns out as well as I’ve imagined. I suppose that is bound to happen every once in a while.<
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  She is a superb French teacher, animated, humorous, intelligent, artistically talented, disciplined, and inventive. Sometimes we study grammar per se, attempting to drill verb declensions into our heads. More often, we learn grammar, vocabulary, and French culture by singing songs, listening to tapes, watching films, cooking meals, and taking field trips.

  In class, we are totally immersed, as promised. English never crosses our lips. When we don’t understand the meaning of a French word, Mo explains it by using other French words. When we can’t find le mot juste to say precisely what we think or feel, we settle for some circumlocution that we hope gets to the heart of the matter. The air fairly buzzes with the strain of trying. I enjoy the effort, although failure always lurks. I often launch myself into the conversation with only the vaguest idea of what I’m going to say or how I’m going to say it, a sense of dread that sailors in medieval times must have experienced when they approached the place on the map that read, “Beyond here there be dragons.” Because there are so many words I do not know, I am obliged to beat around the verbal bush. The unknown noun for interview, entretien, becomes “a meeting where you ask people questions and they answer.” I am by nature longwinded. At home it’s because I think out loud and like to hear myself talk. Here it’s because I’m stalling, searching for words.

  I love words, all words, written or spoken. One of my earliest childhood memories is my delight in learning “cat,” the first word I could spell and read. I must have been in first grade. I ran all the way home that day, spelling and saying “C-A-T cat, C-A-T cat” over and over again to myself, as if I held the word in a saucer and the letters might spill out and be lost. “C-A-T cat!” I cried as I burst through the kitchen door in search of my mother, eager to present her with my prize.