Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  The bistro is small, and the tables are close together. M. Meduan, we soon learn, is no ordinary propriétaire. He is a devout believer in the inseparability of good food and good company. He moves boisterously from table to table, introducing the diners to one another, including us, les Américains. Soon we are talking from table to table. Again, as so often happens, we are complimented on our French. We are praised more for trying than for succeeding. They are delighted that we love Provence so much and that we have visited twice in the past two years, a month at a time.

  Meanwhile, M. Meduan makes periodic visits from the kitchen to reassure himself that all his guests are getting along nicely and to tell an occasional joke. One, which I don’t quite understand, is clearly an off-color joke followed by much laughter and more spontaneous joke telling. It becomes clear that someone at each table is offering a joke and that it will soon be our turn.

  By now Larry and I have consumed an entire bottle of red and are speaking French fluently. Or maybe we’re not. I am so full of bonhomie that I surprise myself by launching into a joke without having any idea of whether the pun, that is the punch line of the joke in English, is a vrai or faux ami. The joke involves a guy who sits down at bar and orders a drink. While he’s sipping his apéritif, he keeps hearing little voices whispering sweet nothings in his ear. They love his necktie, the way he wears his hair, his suit. They tell him he’s very good looking, très beau. But the man can’t locate the source of these flattering words. There is no one else at the bar. Confused, he asks the bartender to identify the speakers. “Oh,” says the bartender, “those are the complimentary peanuts.” “Ce sont les cacahuètes complimentaires.”

  My punch line is met with total silence. Granted, it’s not much of a joke in any language, but still. As I had feared, “Ce sont les cacahuètes complimentaires” doesn’t marche in French. Complimentaire is a faux ami. It does not mean “flattering,” as the joke requires. M. Meduan, once my bilingual pain in the neck, now my linguistic savior, immediately intervenes and explains to my fellow diners why my joke is both incomprehensible and unfunny. Nevertheless, the diners applaud me enthusiastically, surely more for my courage than for my wit, but I am too drunk to care. I have just told an entire joke, albeit a dud, with something resembling fluency. Besides, I remembered how to say “peanut.”

  We have a history of traveling disasters, many of them linked to restaurants. Eating out had a different meaning when we camped through Europe in the 1960s and cooked our meals outdoors, but every so often we’d treat ourselves to an indoor meal.

  One night, while driving through the tiny French town of Talloires near the Swiss border, Larry spotted a small restaurant that looked like a chalet. A little on the corny side, we agreed, but what do you expect when you’re that close to a country that hides money, yodels, and plays the spoons? We’d give it a try.

  Just in case they had a dress code, we got our backpacks out of the trunk of the VW bug, where, for special occasions, Larry kept a pair of khakis, and I had a rolled up skirt. We found some roadside shrubs to hide behind and changed.

  We took a seat at one of the small tables on the patio. Even though it was seven in the evening, nobody else was there. We sat down and waited. I was beginning to wonder if this was going to be like our misadventure in Athens where we tried to check into a hospital, thinking it was a hotel. Maybe this chalet was a private home? Most of the time when we were camping and we wanted to sleep cheap and indoors, we had no trouble spotting hotels. In France, we looked for the word pension over the door of a building; in Italy, pensione. When we crossed over the border into Greece, we forgot that Greek was Greek to us. No wonder the man we first thought was the concierge was dressed in whites and wore a stethoscope.

  Eventually a waiter in formal attire arrived, greeted us, and waited at attention until we each ordered a glass of wine. When he returned with the wine and the bill, the total of which exceeded our entire dinner budget, we considered making a run for it.

  Shortly thereafter, a handsome, middle-aged gentleman dressed in a dinner jacket walked toward us and introduced himself. After some cordial conversation in English, he told us that he and his wife had just flown in from South Africa for the sole purpose of dining at this restaurant. The gentleman asked us in the nicest possible way if we had any idea where we were. We didn’t. He allowed as how he thought so.

  We were at Père Bise, he explained, a three-star restaurant and inn, one of the finest in Europe. He bought us another round of drinks, tipped the waiter, and wished us a bon voyage. Later that night, we shared a ham sandwich in our sleeping bags.

  We Don’t Like Tours; We Listen In on Yours

  We lead double lives in Provence. One role is French—the part that lives in a house, attends classes, and gives parties. We even break the law. Ulli leads us to an abandoned ochre mine, where swimming is not permitted, but we swim nevertheless. The other role is tourist. On the days that we don’t have class, we tend to go touring.

  Larry and I have an ambivalent relationship to tourism, given that we don’t want to be what we so obviously are—tourists. You can’t go to Paris without visiting Notre Dame. It’s required. Then, if you like, you may retire to a café and a glass of wine. And you can’t go to Provence without visiting the Papal Palace in Avignon.

  We are constantly weighing the advantages of succumbing to guided or even self-guided tours in a town or city we don’t know, versus the instinct to wander aimlessly through a town or city in the hope that we will somehow take in its essence without a more focused, studied effort.

  We are wary of tours, partly because we so often find them disappointing. We don’t care how tall buildings are or how many tons of stone from wherever went into their construction. We cringe at the prospect of being herded from one place to another, although, to be fair, we are not above hovering at the fringes of the tour group trying to hear what the guide is saying, particularly if she’s saying it in English.

  For us, guidebooks are mainly for casing the joint. We follow them at least to the door of the recommended church or palace, but most often we don’t enter. From years of travel, we’ve concluded that we can’t trust the guidebooks’ star-struck recommendations. We let our guard down and pay over 10 euros each to enter the three-star Papal Palace in Avignon. In contrast to its exterior towers, arches, and crenellations—which you can enjoy for nothing—the interior is bleak and bare—a giant snore.

  We tend to avoid the monuments and delight in the small stuff—a massive lion’s head doorknocker, intricate iron grillwork, a timeworn threshold. We prefer to walk around the medieval walls of Avignon, where retired men play boules, and old women sit on the benches and chat. People, not places, interest us most. We hang around the players, hoping they will invite us to join the game. That’s what we want, brief encounters of the human kind.

  Roussillon is one of the officially designated plus beau villages of Provence. The independent Association des Plus Beaux Villages de France does not look into a mirror to determine which are the fairest of them all; they rely on objective criteria. The village population should be no more than two thousand, and the village should have at least two classified sites of scientific, artistic, or historic interest. There are about 150 such villages in all of France, seven of them in the Vaucluse. Six are hill towns—Ansouis, Gordes, Rousillon, Seguret, Venasque, and Mènerbes. The seventh is flat and lovely Lourmarin.

  Rousillon is most famous for being perched on a precious lode of earth pigmented by shades of ochre that span the color palette from intense golden yellow to blood red.

  We visit first by car; it’s almost impossible to find a parking space. On another day, we tackle the climb by bike. We wander the streets, enjoying the colorful hues of stores and houses. We order a cup of coffee in the center of town, across from the church. We chat up the waiter. What we don’t do is the obvious: we don’t take the tour through the Sentiers des Ochres, the old
ochre mines. The tour brochure tells us that the Romans started to export ochre powder from the area over two thousand years ago and that until 1930, when synthetic colors took over the world-wide market, one thousand people were employed in the ochre mines.

  “The tour might be interesting,” says Larry, trying out the idea.

  “This whole town is ochre,” I respond. “Who needs to see more ochre?” So much for Roussillon.

  We also snub tourism in Gordes—not to be confused with Goult. Gordes is probably the most popular tourist town and the most precariously perched village in our part of Provence. It, too, is a designated a plus beaux village. It clings to a plateau overlooking the Luberon Valley. We try, but we cannot even visit Gordes as tourists, never mind wander without purpose through its narrow streets. We can only admire the stamina and intellectual curiosity of those visitors who persist. We hope that they found a parking place. We hope they could make their way past the anachronistic fleet of enamel-shiny tourist busses the size of railroad cars that park in the center of town on narrow streets intended for horse-drawn carts and obscure the view of the medieval houses, most of them now souvenir shops. We hope their visit to the fifteenth-century castle at the top of the town and the adjacent great hall with its “magnificently decorated Renaissance fireplace” was worth the climb. We tried to get there on our first and only visit to Gordes, but we gave up, overwhelmed by the mob of which we were a part.

  Still, we have found a way to love Gordes—from afar. When we drive by, we sometimes pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car to admire the town. It is dramatically located at a curve in the road, girdled at its base by steep, supporting terraces, as if to keep it from collapsing. The houses seem to lean against one another for support. They are piled in ever-smaller tiers like a wedding cake of golden limestone blocks. A castle sits on the smallest tier, its narrow spire exclaiming the top of the town. Viewed from the roadside, hundreds of feet below, the town sheds its touristic trappings and retreats into its historical origins. We must tilt our heads back to take in the whole magnificent scene. For us, Gordes is a plus beau, three-star drive-by photo op.

  By contrast, we find, much to our surprise, that we are happy to be tourists at the underrated Michelin one-star L’Abbaye de Notre Dame de Senanque. This twelfth-century structure is an architectural treasure set deep in an isolated rocky valley near Gordes. We approach her from on high, by way of a downward winding, narrow, one-lane road, so perilous that drivers heading down the canyon must pull into passing places in order not to collide with traffic climbing out of the canyon. Her singular location is part of her charm; she plays hard to get to, but she’s easy on the eyes. Because we’re here in July, our panoramic view includes acres of lavender fields in full, voluptuous bloom.

  We walk around the chaste exterior, admiring her austere lines. Unlike so many architectural beauties, barred by fences or velvet ropes, the abbey is approachable. We can get close enough to touch her, to stroll alongside her, letting our fingers play along her smooth, heather-gray stone. These blocks bear the signatures—the individual marks, actually—of the masons who cut them. The workers were paid by the block. One such mark is a B lying on its side; another is a snaillike design. Who was this man, I wonder, who made his mark with a B? Did the other mason perhaps have a sense of humor and a taste for escargots? I trace each one with my finger.

  We decide to take the guided tour in French. We could have opted for English, but then we wouldn’t be French, would we? We suffer the appropriate punishment for our presumption. We see much that is interesting, but we barely understand a word.

  Properly humbled, the next time we visit the abbey, we take the tour in English. Particularly fascinating are the Brobdignagian building tools used in its construction. They hang, in all their gigantic, primitive utility, looking dark and dangerous against the pale, vaulted walls they helped to build: the double saws that cut the limestone; the monster tongs used to move them. This is one of the moments, as they say, that history comes alive. For an instant, I can see through time. My twelfth-century avatar is there, watching two men, one at each end of the saw, alternately pull and push against the limestone. I feel their enormous effort as stone turns to dust at their feet. Time travel is the ultimate in touring. The farther back we can go, the more profoundly we belong.

  We are escorted to the Cistercian monks’ dormitory where they used to sleep, fully dressed, separated from the cold stone floor by straw. We visit the Charter Room, the only place in the abbey where the monks are allowed to speak, and the scriptorium, the only heated room, a necessary concession to austerity; frozen fingers cannot write. In order not to tempt the eye, the arcades of the cloisters are decorated by a simple leaf pattern. How ironic that we find the purity and simplicity of this virginal place so ravishing.

  We cannot get enough of her. We walk through the abbey, stopping at each exhibit to read the accompanying English translation. Actually, we try to read the French first and then supplement our understanding by reading the English. Our sojourns in Provence often feel as if we are watching an endless movie in French, with English subtitles.

  The next time we visit the abbey, we are ready to make ourselves at home. We bring our French lessons and a picnic dinner. Monique has recommended that we attend vespers. They are open to the public, but hardly anyone knows it. We wait on the hillside, where we have a fine view of the abbey and of the crowds of people eager to find out if the inside of this lovely monument to pure thoughts is equally beautiful on the inside.

  It is six in the evening, time for vespers, which take place in a vaulted, austere, beautifully proportioned Romanesque chapel. Light, the only luxury, pours into three deep-cut windows, illuminating the altar around which a few monks, dressed in white robes, are gathered. We are the only guests that day. We sit way in the back so that we can exit without calling attention to ourselves. We have never heard live Gregorian chants before. Sometimes the monks sing together; other times responsively. Sometimes they sit, sometimes they stand; often they bow. The chants rise and echo as they fill the vaulted dome. We are spiritually transported. But when it comes to the sermon, we’re out of there, body and soul.

  We visit Cavaillon, a city known for its delicious melons and for being the major produce market in our area. We pass Cavaillon often on our way to Avignon before we actually visit the place. It is impossible to drive by without noticing the sculpture of a melon the size of a house, which rests on its side on a pedestal on its own esplanade, marking the route into Cavaillon.

  Each time, we inevitably collaborate on making up a story about the fictional artist who made the melon. We give him a name, Pierre Le Melon. We give him a life. He is a poor but talented sculptor, someone who sees himself as a serious artist, maybe not quite in the ranks of Rodin but certainly a lot more worthy than a mere sculptor of melons.

  He almost doesn’t accept the commission from the dimwitted town fathers who insist upon a melon, but frankly, Pierre and his wife, Marianne, can’t afford not to accept the commission. Nor can Pierre bear to admit to his wife, who believes in his greatness, that he spends his days carving a nine-ton melon, with stem. Oh the shame of it! He doesn’t tell her, leaving her free to think he’s out sculpting something as lofty as the Pietà, or at the very least, the David. But ultimately, Pierre cannot avoid his wife’s inevitable question.

  “What did you sculpt today, my dear Pierre?”

  “Please,” replies Pierre, covering his shame in rueful mystery, “don’t ask.”

  Sometimes we change the story so that Pierre loves sculpting the melon, and his wife thinks it’s a work of genius. In another version of our story, the melon breaks loose from its pedestal and goes rolling through the town of Cavaillon, squashing everything in its path, including melons.

  Eventually we break down and take the recommended self-guided walking tour through the older part of the city, Vieux Cavaillon, which includes a n
umber of wonderfully ruined stone façades, among them a first-century arch, and an eighteenth-century synagogue.

  We get more Jewish whenever we’re somewhere besides home. In the fourteenth century, when Pope Clément V established himself in Avignon, the Jewish residents of four towns in the Vaucluse enjoyed his “protection”: Carpentras, Avignon, L’Isle sur la Sorgue, and Cavaillon. These people were known as “Les Juifs du Pape,” “the Pope’s Jews.” At first having the pope’s blessing was a good deal; Jews were free to live, worship, and work as they wished. Then ethnic tensions mounted. Jews were banished from the professions and confined to ghettoes. Men were forced to wear a yellow hat; women a yellow bit of cloth. Yellow. A very bad omen.

  There is a street in L’Isle sur la Sorgue called, matter-of-factly, Place de la Juiverie, the Jewish Quarter, a reminder of the ghetto and of a less tolerant time. Happily, we haven’t detected any anti-Semitism among the people we’ve met, but anti-Muslim sentiments are offered up freely to total strangers. In Cavaillon, we enter a shop. I have seen a sweater in the window that I can’t be French without. The usual conversation ensues. “Where are you from?” We tell. “You speak very well.” We thank. But the conversation changes radically when the shopkeeper notices two Muslim women in burkas passing by.

  “They are the ruin of France,” she says. “They’ve got to go.”