Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  It used to be the Jews; now they minor in Jews and major in Muslims. It’s always somebody.

  Near the end of the tour of Cavaillon, we are drawn by ethereal choral music to a small, twelfth-century cloister where a variety of flowers form a rectangle in the center, blooming bright against the luminous beige limestone of the arched passageways. We follow the music that emanates from the adjacent cathedral, where we pause to wait with an elegantly dressed crowd that has gathered in a state of happy expectation outside the cathedral door, waiting for something to happen. The doors swing open, and a bride and groom emerge, arm in arm, in all their veiled and tuxedoed glory, smiling and waving at their guests. The guests smile and applaud. We smile and applaud vigorously. We are no longer tourists. We’re members of the wedding.

  Next door to the church, we come upon a preschool playground. It must be recess. In one corner, a little Vidal Sassoon wannabe, equipped with a comb, is styling a little girl’s hair while she patiently awaits the results of his makeover. Near the swing sets, a gang of little boys and girls are chasing each other. Sometimes a boy will chase another boy and wrestle him to the ground. Sometimes a little boy will chase a little girl, wrestle her to the ground, lay on top of her, and kiss her on the lips. The little girls appear to be kissing back, ardently. Are the French born that way? Is it nature or nurture?

  We never fail to crack a joke when we drive or cycle past a road sign pointing in the direction of St. Pantaléon. “St. Pants,” we call it. St. Pants doesn’t even get a mention in our guidebook, a dumb fact that attracts our perverse attention. A village with nothing to recommend it? So much the better. We huff and puff our way through the countryside, heading toward our no-count village.

  After a couple of uphill kilometers, we come upon a sign indicating that a glass museum can be found further down a dirt pathway. Without needing to consult each other, we turn onto the pathway, get off our bikes, and start walking. Within seconds, we find ourselves surrounded by a weird forest of abstract shapes, some taller than we, made of colored shards of glass and twisted metal.

  We stop at various points along the pathway to examine one or another of these tormented forms. I do what I always do when surrounded by art I do not appreciate. I try to like it. I blame myself for being such a dolt. I’m in a museum after all. I conclude that there must be something wrong with me. Then, after feeling inadequate for as long as I can stand to—maybe a couple of seconds—I change my mind and speak with the authority of Phillipe de Montebello. “This is not art,” I pronounce. “Some psychopath off his meds must have found himself with lots of time and an excess of broken glass, axels, and hubcaps.” But what do I know? Don’t be surprised if some day you find his work on display in the Modern Museum of Art.

  At the end of this bizarre pathway, we see what must be the museum dug into the hillside. It looks more like an underground bunker. We sense the possibility of adventure, and it appears, personified, at the doorway. She is the guardian of the place. By the overjoyed welcome she gives us, we suspect she’s been waiting hours for anybody to show up.

  She escorts us into the lobby. She doesn’t even try to sell us a ticket to the exhibit. She is desperate to talk. So are we.

  Larry and I differ in our opinions of how well we speak. I don’t think our French is all that good. Larry does. Larry is a far more optimistic person than I am. He’d rather be happy. I’d rather be right.

  Still, we get along. Béatrice—we’re on a first-name basis—used to have an American boyfriend, but she’s forgotten most of her English. She fills in with French words when we falter. We fill in with English when she’s at a loss. Our mutual desire to talk bonds us almost instantly and keeps us conversing until closing time, prior to which nobody visits the museum. We exchange e-mail addresses and cheerful à bientôts, but we know, and she knows, we’ll never be in touch again. We score another delightful hit-and-run friendship. We are at our faux finest.

  We’re Party Animals

  The Provençaux love festivals. They celebrate lavender, grapes, guitars, boats, music, rivers, gardens, wine, the roots of the vines, folklore, cheese, dogs, rocks, and much, much more—and that’s not even counting local saints. At our real home, there’s an oyster festival every June and an Italian festival in the fall, but do we ever go? No. But here, because we are determined to live la vie Provençale, we do. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like somewhere else.

  Monique encourages Larry and me, along with Ulli and Bettina and our goddaughter, Zoe, who’s visiting from California, to attend La Féerie Nautique in L’Isle. The Féerie is really just a warm-up, a prelaunching launching celebration to congratulate all the workers who have designed and built fanciful floats that will parade down the Sorgue River the following month. The one that gets the most attention is a very large replica of the Mayflower. The young man who made it proudly explains to us that he has used wire fencing for an armature and then layered on lots of plaster and papier-mâché. He plans to string it with lights for the big event. His boat will be a splendid sight on the river.

  At least 150 townspeople are admiring the floats and enjoying the punch. Children are passing around plates of pale pizzalike triangles of pissaladière, loaded with onions, chunks of saucisson de sanglier, wild boar sausage, and anchois. Monique and Ange introduce us all to as many villagers as they know. We are welcomed as if we were foreign dignitaries. Yet again, we are astounded and warmed by the enthusiasm with which we strangers are greeted. In the following week’s issue of the regional newspaper, La Provence, our presence at the La Féerie is noted (with special mention going to “Zoe, la jolie californienne.”)

  A woman, one of the organizers of La Féerie, reads a message of welcome and praise from the mayor. The message consists primarily of a Homeric naming of all of the people in the trades—the electricians, masons, builders, cabinet makers, and many more—who have contributed their time and labor to building the floats. When we attend events at home, it is the sponsors of events who are honored in the program, listed in declining financial categories—platinum, gold, and silver. This festival in L’Isle sur la Sorgue seems closer to the heart. Here we sense a communal thrill. Perhaps the difference we note is the distinction between the intimacy of village life and the relative isolation of suburban living. Festivals in Vermont villages, I suspect, may be more like this one.

  At the end of the ceremony, everyone—workers and townspeople—line up, some standing, some sitting on bleachers, for a group picture, a scene that reminds me of an end-of-camp or elementary school photo session. The townspeople insist that we be included. “Non, non,” we protest. There is no way that we belong in this picture. We are outsiders, foreigners. But they prevail. “Dites ouistiti,” says the photographer. “Ouistiti,” Ange explains, is the French version of “Say cheese.” It means marmoset. It’s the “stiti” part of the word that stretches the corners of the mouth up into a smile. “Wee-stee-tee,” we say in unison.

  From a celebration of wet water, we party on to a celebration of dry rocks, held in our hometown, Saumane, where Le Festival des Pierres Seches, dry rocks, is an annual three-day event. It’s held on the expansive backyard of the de Sade castle. We tramp up the hill. A rock festival? Why not? Limestone is the DNA of Provence.

  We join many others as we file past an outdoor museum—hung with drawings and photographs featuring stone walls and bories, the primitive, beehive-shaped stone dwellings characteristic of Provence. About three thousand, dating from at least the Bronze Age, are scattered over the landscape. Some are large and rectangular and housed families as late as the nineteenth century. The smallest of the igloo-shaped bories sheltered shepherds or were used for storage. We’ve been fascinated by bories since we caught our first glimpse. I am drawn to the primitive. I want to know how it all started. I want to know what early people called home. I’m a sucker for caves, yurts, igloos, and teepees; to them I add bories.

  Whether
it’s out of a passion for their history or a desire to attract tourists, or both, the French have enacted laws that new houses, many of which are built of modern cinderblock, must be faced in stone. Even the windows must replicate the dimensions of former times. As a result, stone is at a premium. Danielle, our Saumane neighbor, serves on a committee that is dedicated to protecting the ancient stone walls. People steal the stones for their private use.

  Stonewalls in the Vaucluse are even more evident than the seventeenth-century dry stone walls in our native New England. Our earliest farmers cleared stones from the land in order to plow and plant. The resulting dry stone walls served as property lines. Some of them still exist near where we live, meandering in a semicollapsed state through the third growth woods and few open fields on which houses have not yet been built.

  Walls in the Vaucluse, we learn, served multiple purposes. The ones with little recessed sections doubled as installations for beehives; those with vertical rocks on top discouraged animals from climbing over them; stone walls with vertical rocks set on the bottom allowed for drainage. We were particularly captivated by the grim evidence of Le Mur de la Peste, the plague wall, built around 1721 in the vain hope that it would quarantine the region from the bubonic plague.

  At Le Festival des Pierres Sèches, it is stones all day and a rock concert in the evening, featuring Beatles music. The musicians are hippie French guys who look like refugees from the Haight—blue-jeaned, barefooted, and ponytailed.

  At first, we, along with the rest of the crowd, sit on fold-out chairs placed in a semicircle several yards from the temporary stage, but within minutes, many of us are up on our feet, dancing and singing. We start out dancing with one another, but pretty soon we’re cavorting with strangers—men, women, children—anyone who’ll have us.

  The French band is singing songs from the White Album in perfect English. It’s impossible to tell if they’ve memorized the lyrics or if they actually know what they’re saying. The audience sings along in English, too.

  What French lyrics do I know? “Frère Jacques,” for one, although up until much too recently, I used to fake-sing the third line, “Sonny Lemontina,” which sounds more like a mafia don than a lyric from a French children’s ditty. But now, after a couple of months of French language study, I know better. It’s “Sonnez les Matines,” ring the morning bells. I also know the first two lines of “La Marseillaise” and two lines of “Sur le pont d’Avignon.” Whenever we drive along the banks of the Rhône in Avignon, we serenade what’s left of it.

  When the Faux Beatles start to play “Ob-La Di, Ob la Da,” I find myself dancing and singing the chorus with great gusto. What sounds like English to my dancing partner, who’s singing the same lyric, sounds like French to me.

  We wouldn’t miss the nighttime Marche Flottante de L’Isle sur la Sorgue, the annual watery pageant of nego-chin down the Sorgue River. The parade starts on the outskirts of town and ends in the bassin. About forty of Alain’s hand-made boats, manned by Alain and his merry club of fisherman, dressed in traditional wide-brimmed black hats, white blouses, black vests and trousers, pole down the Sorgue. Adding to their number are several women, among them Alain’s elder daughter, costumed in Provençal skirts and blouses. The flotilla comes to a stop in front of Café Bellevue, their blazing torches reflected in the quivering skin of the night-black water. All is still. Then, at a signal, the fishermen cast their nets wide into the bassin and sing the nineteenth-century Occitan Provençal national anthem written by Frédéric Mistral, a cappella. Their voices are strong and proud.

  I have no idea what they are singing, but no matter. I am transported. Standing at the bassin, my hand on my fast-beating heart, my eyes fill with tears. I am a slut for patriotism. Anybody’s patriotism.

  What’s She Got That I Haven’t?

  When I’m out and about in the towns of the Vaucluse, I study the attractive women walking toward me. Usually they stare back brazenly. Neither of us blinks. We lock eyes until we must either stop and meet, face-to-face, or pass out of one another’s view forever. In those few seconds of contact, I conduct a body search. I probe for her secrets. I quickly slip in and out of her skin. When a man does what I’m doing, it’s called being on the make. When I womanize, I am trying to identify that certain je ne sais quoi that French women are supposed to have. Without that knowledge, how can I possibly pretend to be French?

  I am a true believer in the lie that change can come from the outside in, so I’ve set out to buy a dress. Monique has given me the name of her favorite store in Avignon. It’s late June, and the fields of les tournesols, sunflowers that literally turn to the sun, make the familiar forty-minute drive a treat. Van Gogh’s vision of Provence is so imprinted on my brain that it is as if the place didn’t exist before he painted it. I cannot help but see the irises, the cedars, the sunflowers, the blazing blue sky, and the limestone cliffs through the lens of his manic vision. Provence is resplendent with memories of color.

  I work my way through rack after rack of dresses, examining each one briefly and dismissing it. I don’t want anything too fancy. I wear jeans most of the time, so I’m looking for something practical. How often do I need a really fancy dress? Maybe once a year, and then I can always wear my black velvet pants and a silk shirt. Some part of me that does not wish me well is hell-bent on making what could be a genuine shopping spree into a joyless exercise in self-denial.

  Another woman begins to look through the dresses alongside me. The slide of hangers on the metal rack, like beads on an abacus, and an occasional exchange of excusez-moi are the only sounds that accompany this universal female ritual called shopping.

  I size her up through narrowing, gimlet eyes. What’s she got that I haven’t got? She’s a size ten on top and at least a twelve on the bottom. She has one of those high, bony chicken chests to which breasts must take second place. I’m a well-proportioned eight all over, and I still have the vestiges of a waist. Her waist is thick, and her upper arms sway like swags. Mine are a bit droopy—I’m thinking about sticking to long sleeves—but they don’t actually swing. Etched on both our faces are enough laugh lines to suggest that we’ve both been amused for at least six decades. Her hair is dirty blonde. It falls lank to her shoulders, emphasizing, it seems to me, her jowls. I have recently had my hair cut short for just that reason. I brush it upward, away from my face, to give me what my hairdresser calls “a lift.” In the face department, we’re a draw. When it comes to bodies, it’s no contest.

  I find a dress I like that I can afford. It’s blue cotton with a pretty floral pattern and has a flattering boat neck, three-quarter-length sleeves, and a full skirt. It’s belted at the waist—that could be a problem—but still, it’s worth a try, and the price is right. My French counterpart ducks behind me and snaps up a dress I have pushed aside. It’s a sleeveless red taffeta cocktail dress, with a neckline that plunges nearly all the way to the waistline, the same dress that I have just rejected as gorgeous but too revealing, too red, too expensive, too young for me, and besides, I don’t need or deserve it. None of this appears to bother Ms. France.

  I follow her into the dressing room. She struggles into the dress. Her poitrine rises like a Frank Perdue carcass from the red décolletage. She steps into her high heels.

  She pirouettes in front of the mirror. The peplum bobbles comically on her wide hips. She places one foot forward at an angle to the other, slides her hands lovingly up and down her own flanks, rakes her fingers through her hair, tosses back her head, wets her lips, and puts the make on her own reflection in the mirror. What’s she got that I haven’t got? I think I know. It is the certain knowledge that she is beautiful. So what if she’s wrong. She’s happy, isn’t she?

  Besides, the longer she preens there, exuding a musk of amour propre more French than Chanel No. 5, the more beautiful she becomes. I, who just moments ago saw every line and bulge, now find myself viewing her through a more generous l
ens, as if she were backlit and I were filming her through chiffon. I find her conviction that she is beautiful utterly convincing. I am seduced, and I’m not even a consumer. I don’t bother to try on the dress I’ve chosen. I don’t like it anymore. It’s too American.

  Discouraged, I head back home. As I drive, I find myself thinking about a push-up bra and panties set, both fashioned to look like an artichoke, that I paused to make fun of when I saw them in the window of a lingerie shop in the center of L’Isle. Each green nylon leaf overlapped the next as they circled ever closer to the nipple. The thong panties were a mere triangle of leaves.

  How comical! How verging on obscene! Even Victoria’s Secret wouldn’t go so far as to try to make an artichoke sexy, I thought at the time. But now, after my failure to buy the red dress, I’m not so sure. Maybe if I want to look like a French woman, I’ve got to feel like a French woman, right down to my underwear. Maybe I’ve got to go vegetal.

  I park the car near Catherine’s real estate office, where there’s almost always a space, pop my head in to say “Bonjour,” and walk along the canal to the center of town.

  “Les sous-vêtements d’artichaut?” the saleswoman says without cracking a smile. “Ils sont très populaires.” If artichoke underwear is très populaires with French women, I am determined that it is going to be très populaire with me.

  Once home, I put on the bra and panties only to find that the dark green leaves show through my clothes—as does the concentric structure, which looks bunchy under a T-shirt. Apparently, when you wear artichoke underwear you’re not supposed to be wearing clothes.

  I try the outfit on for Larry. I strike a fetching, slightly slouchy pose, hands on hips, my right foot a bit forward like the models do.

  “I’d rather eat them dipped in lemon butter” is his response.

  I have blown almost thirty euros on something I’ll never wear. I have also learned an important lesson about that certain je ne sais quoi. I don’t have it.