This place is stair city. There are forty-two of them in all. Three steps lead to the front door; three more steps to a small WC; four steps down to the salon. And that’s just downstairs. To go upstairs, you Stairmaster your way up eleven more, counting the landing, and then, after a pivot to the left, another eleven stairs take you to the bedroom level, where you may lie down for a rest. This place is a workout, and I love it.
We introduce ourselves to each room. We follow the hallway a few steps down to the salon. On the wall hangs a TV screen much larger and more modern than ours at home. English-language DVDs and CDs are stacked on shelves below. The movies are in English; how tempting.
Larry chooses his favorite reading chair. I notice that the coffee table is the right size for Scrabble. On the back wall of the salon hangs a reproduction of the iconic self-portrait of local hero Vincent Van Gogh. Where Van Gogh’s head should be rests the head of a cat, with two fully intact ears. I’m beginning to appreciate their quirky sense of humor. Besides, we are occupying someone else’s life. Isn’t that the point?
The kitchen is a lot larger than our kitchen in Saumane but still smaller than our kitchen at home. Small kitchens are one of the marvels of French cuisine. Apparently, like sex, the other reputed French preoccupation, size doesn’t matter. And it’s very well equipped. At last here’s the Cuisinart Larry’s been missing! Clearly the American owners of this house like to cook. Larry is delighted.
No matter which house we’re renting, it is important that I identify what will be my favorite coffee cup. I have a favorite cup at home, too. I will read the kitchen shelves, carefully examining all the variations on the theme of cup—large mugs, small mugs, mugs with trigger handles, teacups. I will pick them up, test their weight, capacity, color, size, and degree of comfort in my hand. As much as I crave the novelty of somebody else’s house, of furnishings I’ve never seen, of chairs I’ve never sat in, and of mirrors in which I’ve never seen myself, I must have a favorite cup. Otherwise I float around like a Chagall lady, not quite grounded.
We search out the bathrooms, American in their style and efficiency. The house has that marvelous, slightly ruined French look on the outside, but it’s very up to date on the inside, no doubt due to the fact that it is owned by Americans. Everything works. The faucets dispense water in a downward direction. The sheets are soft, the water pressure hard, the towels thirsty. The downstairs powder room contains a rustic French basket full of English-language magazines dedicated to French décor.
When you open the drawer in the front hall table, you find all the conveniences of home: batteries, flashlights, scissors, candle stubs, lighters, rubber bands, take-out menus, Post-it notes, and twisties. There’s even an English-speaking washer and a dryer. There’s also a clothesline in the backyard near the fig tree, but sometimes I succumb to using the dryer. We like this house. She will serve us well, but she will seduce and spoil us with her promiscuous Franco-American ways.
The house has her secret places. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the bottom floor of the newer part of the house served as a communal bakery. People, like us, lived above the store. Determined to find evidence of the bakery, I’m in my best Nancy Drew mode, flashlight in hand. We push through a door under the stairway, grope around for the light switch, and find ourselves in a concrete dungeon-like space that contains nothing more than cleaning supplies. We are disappointed until we find a hole in the wall about the size of a pizza oven. Since there’s no one around to contradict us, we declare the laundry room the long-lost bakery. We are ridiculously excited; you’d think we’d discovered the Ark of the Covenant.
In a week or so, we will meet our next-door neighbor, a human sundial who loves to sit outside his house, moving his chair incrementally to follow the light. He remembers that his mother would give him some dough shaped into a loaf to take to the communal bakery on his way to school, with instructions to retrieve the baked loaf on his way home.
After the introductions, we begin to unpack. We fill the armoires, bureaus, and closets with our clothing, the bathroom with our toothbrushes, shampoos, prescription drugs, and other hygienic impedimenta, arranged on “his” or “her” side of the sink.
Then we make a list, locate the nearest supermarket, go shopping, and fill the refrigerator. That accomplished, we spend the requisite three days overcoming jet lag and the il ne marche pas parade of computer problems.
Nostalgia for a Life We Never Lived
After the isolation of Saumane, we have chosen to live in the midst of a village, and the center of Goult offers a lot of midst. Our house is situated, literally, on the square, Place de la Libération, which doubles as a parking lot. A large obelisk stands in the center of the square, a memorial to the soldiers from Goult who died in both world wars. “Aux enfants de Goult, morts pour La Patrie,” it reads, and lists the names of all who died, including the names of three Jews “morts en déportation.”
The twelfth-century medieval church of St. Sébastien stands directly across the square from our house. A larger-than-life-sized sculpture of Jesus on the cross stands diagonally across from the church, at the far corner of the parking lot, just to the right of our doorway.
Persian rug makers used to include a flaw in each of their carpets so that they would not offend God with perfection. I like to think that in medieval times, the bells in the church steeple summoned the workers from the vineyards and fields to their homes, or to the church for vespers, or sounded the dinner and bedtime hours. However, as we are about to learn, the bells of Goult’s church, a mere stone’s throw from our house, never stop. There is no hunchback at our Notre Dame. If there were, he might have been given the nights off. But no; these bells are set on automatic, 24-7. The chimes are heavenly and authentically informative, if insistent, during the day, when they are set to bong every hour, then two minutes after the hour, in case you need a nudge, and once again at the half hour. But all night long, they are the hammers of hell. First we try earplugs. Then we move on to gateway drugs.
All the commercial enterprises we could wish for are within a few steps of our front door—a boulangerie-pâtissererie, a grocery store, two thriving butcher shops, improbably located side by side, one restaurant, and, of course, Le Café de la Poste, which still serves a lemonade that is the real thing, citron pressé, so painfully sour that I might as well be drinking alum. Still, in an effort to be French, I order it twice before giving up and switching to Diet Coke. “Co-ca Dee-et,” is all you have to say, and one appears. The Académie Française, the protectors of the purity of the French language, must have been very désoles when they had to add Co-ca Dee-et to their list of loathed Franglais words like “le hot dog” and “le weekend” that are invading the language like kudzu.
Acceptance as a regular at the local café is the sine qua non of feeling French. In L’Isle sur la Sorgue, we were known at La Bellevue. In Goult, we might as well be invisible. Nobody will pay attention to me at Café de La Poste, except for the waiter who must. At least three times a week, after saying “Bonjour, Monsieur,” I buy two newspapers, the International Herald Tribune and the regional paper, La Provence, from the man behind the counter. In an effort to elicit a response, I explain to him in my best French that “One is for reading; the other is for understanding.” I think I’m charming. He doesn’t crack a smile. He deals a severe blow to my self-esteem as well as to my earnest pretentions.
We look forward to the three-day Fête de Votive de St. Eustache, the annual celebration honoring Goult’s patron saint. The event will take place in La Place de la Liberation. Remembering the folksy potluck music festival, the welcoming Feerie Nautique, the fascinating festival of dry stone, and the stirring fêtes des nego-chin, we are looking forward to what we are sure will be a celebration of all that is essentially Provençal. There is a boules competition, but otherwise, for three solid days, we will witness a totally sleazy American carnival, a desecration of all we hold
dear as French: good taste and a reverence for tradition. We will be asked to move our car. Huge vans will take over the village square cum parking lot. Workers will string up lights, set up a large dancing stage, a shooting gallery, a carousel, bumper cars, electronic beepers, canned music, and a hundred-foot by twenty-foot mural of a cabaret, featuring the torsos of naked women, their rosy nipples pointing right across the square at the statue of Jesus. What did we expect? Grape-stomping competitions? Olive pressing? Honey harvesting? Medieval Provençal dancers dressed in aprons and wooden clogs?
I suspect that people like me, who are drawn to fantasy, tend to be naive and maybe a bit literal. My grade-school child still imagines her picture book of “cultures from around the world.” My grown-up knows better, yet she hopes that Hans Brinker still skates on a frozen canal in the Netherlands, which people used to call Holland. I want to believe that if I go to Japan, I will see men in long pigtails with their arms tucked halfway up their droopy, dragon-decorated, silk sleeves. A native Congolese should be wearing a loincloth and paddling a dug-out canoe. He should not be wearing a Gap T-shirt and plastic flip-flops. He should not be selling trinkets to tourists. He should not take credit cards. And rosy nipples should not be eyeing Christ from across the square.
The Geriatric Tour de France
Larry and I share two habitual activities that we bring with us to Provence: we love to swim and ride bikes. I am most at peace when I am in motion. I suspect Larry is, too. Others sit cross-legged to meditate; we stroke, kick, and pedal. I get genuine pleasure from working my body. Larry calls me “Little Endorphin Annie.” In this respect, I am more like my aunt Lily, the serial monogamist who, born before women were meant to exercise or play sports, sought and found the physical workout she craved in sex and, when men were scarce, which was rarely, by rearranging large items of furniture in her living room.
Swimming in Provence is one way we make the Vaucluse our own. Early in our first stay in Saumane, we found a lovely outdoor pool in the Centre Sportif in the nearby town of Pernes les Fontaines, and we’ve been visiting it ever since. It’s too far to bike, so we drive. Taking the plunge for the first time turned out to be more than metaphoric. How much to pay, where to change, where to shower—all matters we take for granted at the YMCA—required us to compose various tortured questions. Between the two of us, we understood the answers. We paid the one euro fee and found our way to the vestiaire, where we changed our clothes, he with the hommes, me with the dames. Then it was on to the douche. Standing on a concrete floor in three-sided cubicle, we showered by pushing a chrome button under a metered shower. It was déjà vu all over again.
Under less than ideal conditions, we are the best of sports. We see inconvenience, disappointment, disgrace, and even fear as challenges to which we must rise and, having risen, occasions to celebrate. At least so far we do.
Once in the pool, goggled, capped, and nearly naked, sharing lanes, and swimming laps along with the other swimmers, our mouths in use only to breathe, not to mangle the French language, we are as fully French as we will ever be. When our regular pool closes in mid-September, we find an indoor public pool in Carpentras. It’s a rough place, full of hardscrabble, adolescent boys who bray and push and don’t stay within the lane markers. Away from our privileged, genteel village life, we get a stiff dose of urban Provençal reality. Larry gets an earache.
Finding an ear, nose, and throat doctor is as challenging as fixing a broken glass refrigerator shelf was on our first day in Saumane. We follow the usual drill: first the dictionary where we learn that the word for ear infection is otite, and then on to the yellow pages to find un oto-rhino-gorge médecin. We could have saved ourselves the trouble had we bothered to call Ellen. Later she tells us that the names and telephone numbers of the doctors who are on call on any particular day are listed in the local newspaper.
Larry leaves the doctor’s office with three prescriptions, which, when filled, cost less than eleven euros. The whole deal, the doctor and three medications, costs the equivalent of fifteen dollars. I’m trying to figure out what’s so bad about socialism. Larry also reports that when the doctor aspirated the gunk out of his ear, he said, “Oh là là.” It turns out the French really do say that.
Desperate for a swim, we search our map for blobs of blue that indicate what we hope are lakes, hop into the car, and hunt them down. Too often they are reservoirs posted with an unfriendly sign, “Baignade Interdite.” No swimming. We persist. Our determined pursuit takes us almost two hours south of home, to the Camargue region, famous for its bulls and wild horses. The wild horses are exciting. Even when standing still, they seem poised for action. The bulls are only dark smudges against the flat landscape, too far away to enjoy. The terrain is flat and swampy—gorgeously swampy—full of reeds, grasses, egrets, and pink flamingoes, the prima ballerinas of birds.
We head toward the sea and the town of Saintes-Maries de la Mer, which, were it not for an imposing medieval hulk of a church and the fact that this is where the gypsies hold their annual convention, would be little more than a miniature Atlantic City. There are lots of people milling about the strip of stalls on the boardwalk, ordering fast food, hoisting their children onto the carousel horses, and buying tickets to bullfights. Nobody is swimming.
There’s no place we can find to change into our swimsuits, so we perform the necessary towel-draped contortions in the car and walk toward the water. We see a fisherman casting his line from a nearby jetty. It’s our lucky cognate day when we ask him if there’s un courant dangereux. There isn’t. Half-nude, in this strange landscape, at the edge of Provence, facing a brand-new sea, I feel afraid. I extend a toe. Not too cold. We walk in. The French water closes around and holds us. We are in our element.
A two-hour-long drive, however, is a bit much for a swim, so we give up our quest for water and switch to biking. Our appreciation of the beauty of Provence exists in inverse relationship to the speed with which we travel through it, which is yet another reason why we like to ride our bikes whenever we’re able. We miss more when we’re driving. Biking slows us down. We pay attention.
There is nothing flimsy about the landscape of Provence. The sun is strong, the sky is a sharp blue, the ubiquitous stone walls are mottled green, white, and black with lichen. The furrows in the fallow fields are stern, and the turned, dry clods of earth are hard. Where there is vegetation on the nearby hills, it is silvery green, but for the most part, these hills are made of sedimentary limestone rock, exposed and raked into horizontal striations weathered smooth by eons of wind and water.
In Saumane, when we first started biking, we pedaled up and down rue de l’Eglise. We wobbled a bit, but then we gained confidence. If we were to go anywhere at all, we had to tackle what must be a one-mile, ninety-degree, precipitous plummet. We gathered up our nerve, fastened our helmets, and flew downhill, squeezing our hand brakes fiercely in a desperate attempt to stay in control. Now, in this our third season, we take the hill leading down from Goult with greater calm.
Once down the hill, we regroup and head out on flatter terrain. We revel in the sheer physical joy of the act, riding in the slipstream of our own childhoods. We are innocent of the ways of the world in which we find ourselves. Everything is a challenge, much the way learning to speak, read, cross the street, make friends, and jump double dutch were the challenges of our childhoods. And because that is the case, we feel inordinately delighted when we meet these challenges. Achievement, I’m convinced, is a crucial element of happiness. Being here, away from our real home and our real lives, we tap into that part of ourselves that is fresh, impressionable, and untried.
This second childhood of ours has other benefits. Sometimes, like children at play, we lose all sense of time. We are suffused with pure awareness, unsullied by self-consciousness. In our stressful adult lives, we’re always trying to beat the clock. By contrast, time stands still for children; it’s always now o’clock.
&nb
sp; During our two months in Saumane, we limited our bike trips to nearby towns, favoring the not so perché over the very perché. A favorite destination was the pretty, popular town of Fontaine de Vaucluse. With the hill behind us, we relax and pedal slowly on the flat road beneath a Roman aqueduct and under a bower made by the one-hundred-foot-high, broad-leafed foliage of plane trees. Some sources credit Napoléon with planting these relatives of the sycamore to protect his marching troops from the Provençal sun. If so, they could be two hundred years old. Planted at even intervals on both sides of many a roadway along the “route Napoléon,” plane trees are as emblematically Provençal as fields of lavender and sunflowers. They dapple the road with patterns of light and shade. Each time I pedal through these majestic archways, my heart melts. If it is true that one passes through a tunnel at the moment of death, I hope it’s this one. It would be a nice introduction to heaven, or wherever.
Unfortunately, these beautiful trees are doomed. They have been infected by an unremitting, killing fungus, thought to have been introduced to the region near the end of the Second World War by American wooden ammunitions boxes that were harboring this virulent blight. Infected trees are cut into pieces and burned on pyres in an effort to retard the demise of those that still stand. Happily, there is an effort underway to replace these doomed giants with an infection-resistant variety. Wait a hundred years or so and they’ll be back.
Playing House in Provence Page 10
