But nothing matched up to his tales of the Arabs. In retrospect, I see that in some ways, his attitudes were shockingly rascist: “Never trust an Arab” was a regular piece of wisdom which I took to be the gospel truth. Many times I heard his sorry tale of the day he was sitting on a train outside Cairo, returning to camp after a few days’ leave in England only to have the reading glasses snatched off his face as the train was pulling out of the central station, leaving him unable to see, let alone recognize the escaping culprit. His only certainty was that the blasted thief had been an Arab!
France was long the imperialist power in northern Africa. The horrors of Algeria are known to us all. Today, France’s second labor force is African, predominantly Arab. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right who preaches France for the French, is their enemy; or rather, they are his. He is more extreme in his rabble-rousing than the late Enoch Powell, and less intelligent in his rhetoric. In spite of the stories bequeathed to me by my father, I have never felt the slightest empathy with Le Pen, nor any other xenophobic demagogue, but what I had never reckoned on was the possibility that one of the local Arab workforce would become one of my closest friends and our greatest ally in the dark days that lay ahead for us and Appassionata.
I HAD SETTLED IN FOR the summer, with no plans to travel anywhere. I had my scripts to complete, the hill to maintain, the arrival of guests to prepare for. I could not be more content. Then the telephone rings. It is Michel.
“We have won an award,” he announces.
My first book, which we filmed as a miniseries in Australia the previous autumn, has been screened at a film festival in the States and has picked up an award. I am speechless. I had not known the series was being presented.
“The Australians want you to publicize it for them.”
“Where?”
“Australia.”
“When?”
“Leave on Friday.”
The line goes silent while I take this in. Actors are used to this. We live with our passports in our pockets. These calls come at any moment, usually when they are least expected. But this time, I am not prepared. It coincides with another film I shot which is opening across Australia any minute now. I know I should go, but I am in a quandary.
I am thinking about No Name, I am worrying about my schedule which is of no one’s making but my own. And the trip, it turns out, is only for one week. I won’t even suffer jet-lag because I’ll be there and back before it hits me. “Fine,” I say eventually.
I begin to set matters in motion. All I need is to close up the house and ask René if he would be kind enough to pop by twice a day to feed No Name. Or as a last resort, I could telephone Amar, who I know will do it for a price. René agrees without a second’s hesitation to house my beloved dog, chez lui, for a week. No Name will be in loving hands; I have nothing to be concerned about.
It is Thursday. I am leaving at the crack of dawn Friday, flying to Sydney via Paris. Alone in my gecko-infested workspace, I settle down to a day’s writing when I hear the whirr of machines start up like an orchestra tuning. They are right beyond the window. Puzzled, I go to take a look, and to my horror, I see three men, their heads and faces masked by plastic helmets, cutting back the strip of land that borders the road to the left of us and lies alongside our olive groves. The jungle of vegetation there has been the only deterrent to entry from that quarter. Recalling the unsavory sensation I felt when I learned that we had been burgled, I throw my pen back onto my desk and go running to stop them.
They have been sent by the mairie, one of them informs me. The land has to be cut back. The neighbors along the lane have complained. It is a fire risk, très sérieux. I look back along the winding lane to where the man indicates. I cannot even see the house he is pointing at. “What neighbors?” I squawk. Their concern exasperates me. “But we are at more risk than those neighbors should a fire break out,” I protest, to no avail.
“Have you been here during a fire?” he asks.
I have to admit that I have not, which seems to be the concluding point.
The workman, who is covered from head to foot with bits of vegetation and sheets of aluminum protective clothing and looks rather like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz, shrugs, dons his helmet and is about to walk away.
“Couldn’t it wait just one week?” I plead. I am thinking that when I return we could buy some fencing and secure this section of land.
He reiterates that he has been sent by the local council and it has nothing more to do with him. He takes up his machine and begins to cut. Stones, strips of split bramble, roots, all go flying into the air. I move out of range of traveling herbage and shooting flint. I know there is nothing I can say or do to stop this now. I return to the house and telephone Michel.
“I can’t leave,” I tell him.
“Don’t be foolish. The publicity tour has been arranged. You can’t not leave.” He is right and I know it. “We will have to take our chances. No Name will be there.” At this stage I don’t bother to explain that I have agreed with René that No Name should stay with him. I drop it. We must continue as planned and hope for the best.
Tormented by the steady drone of the brush cutters baring our home and farm to all and sundry, I give up on my script and set off for the village to buy a week’s supply of dog food. As I round the bend, I am forced to halt because the road is blocked by two large trucks parked one in front of the other. There are also several workmen standing in a huddle, pointing and shouting upward to one of their crew who is strapped onto a crane extension and is slicing chunks off the tops of the complaining neighbor’s exceedingly spiry pine trees. At first I assume this to be part of their disquiet over possible impending fires until I notice that there are cables swinging freely in the road. Some of the telephone wires seem to have broken loose, or maybe a tree has fallen. Cars are banking up behind me, honking insanely. So few cars ever pass this way that I am bemused by this line and cannot think where it has come from. There must be a road closed somewhere else, other cables down. Musing, I sit patiently, listening to the discordance of chainsaw, whirring brush cutters, French and Arab voices disputing the length of time all this is taking, and asking myself what ever happened to the tranquility of this barely known corner of the coast arrière.
Suddenly, I hear two men in front of me begin to shout loudly, “Non, Monsieur, s’il vous plaît, non!” I crane my head out of the window and see a car approaching from the opposite direction. It is attempting to pass the parked trucks. This is a perilous insanity, for our narrow little lane drops sheer to a busy road a lethal hundred meters beneath the cliffside. Everybody takes up the call, Danger! Arms are waving, men are rushing to and fro, yelling, jumping, all engaged in the frenzied business of refusing to allow this driver’s impatience to risk lives. I, along with several other motorists, temporarily abandon our cars to wander along the lane and take a closer look, for what else is there to do? Beyond the trucks and the driver hell-bent on getting through no matter the consequences, are several stationary vehicles, their drivers stone-faced, waiting to move on.
Behind this caravan of rising blood pressure and ranting workers, I spy the approach of the postman on his motorbike, weighed down as always with his satchels of letters hanging like floppy leather ears on either side of his post office–yellow scooter. He draws close, weaves his way in and out of the traffic, circling the screaming, hysterical human beings and slips along the lane by the inner side of the trucks. Engaged in their fury, no one notices him, and he pays the show in progress not a blind bit of attention but presses his foot on his accelerator intending to whizz by the trucks on the inner side of the lane. Unfortunately, he has underestimated the portliness of his own figure or misjudged the width of the passage, no wider than the narrowest of mountain defiles, because he finds himself sandwiched, man and bike, between truck and cliff. I alone hear his cries, for his voice is lost among the general furor.
As I hurry to seek out the driver of the offen
ding truck, I throw a final glance at Monsieur le facteur, whose arms are now stretched wide and waving high above his head, eyes turned skyward and mouth gaping open in frozen horror. His blue postman’s cap has fallen to the ground behind him.
It is only then that I grasp what is about to happen. High above us all, the chainsaw worker in the crane has remained diligently at work. A fairly substantial upper trunk of pine tree is about to give and, any minute now, will come barreling to the ground. Our postman will definitely be its target.
“Attention!” I yell. “Attention!” My actress’s voice booms to full capacity. I am shouting, pointing and running. There is a general cry of “Mon Dieu” as half a dozen men scuttle like a twelve-legged beast to save the postman. The obvious move is to shift the truck, but this cannot be done because the driver has disappeared down the lane for a pipi, so the crowd is obliged to push and drag postman and scooter. Several others are yelling to the mec up on the crane, who eventually gets the message and halts work, leaving a very wobbly-looking pine tree. The driver returns, whistling while closing up his pants, just as the group to the side of his truck is yanking the postman by the shoulders and literally dragging the poor fellow backward off his bike. Everyone, including the postman, is yelling hysterically. He seems barely able to stand, even with the assistance of the rockface behind him, and is rubbing his face with a large spotted handkerchief in an attempt to calm himself.
By now, cars are streaming freely to and fro, while those on foot—the workers—are shaking hands and congratulating themselves and one another. A crisis has been averted.
It is then that I happen upon one of the Arabs who had been lending a hand and who is now making his way toward the house across the lane, our neighbor Jean-Claude’s abode. He sees me, nods and returns to his task of trimming the hedges. I watch him for a moment. I have often heeded him there and, more importantly, have frequently remarked on the gardens and well-pruned orange groves. I walk over to him and introduce myself. He smiles shyly, revealing a toothless mouth save for one tobacco-stained front tooth and a golden nugget farther to the back on the upper left side. He also sports a small blue tattoo in the center of his forehead, reminiscent of the red spot worn by Hindu women. His eyes are warm, if yellowed by age. He knows who I am, he says. He has seen us frequently entering and exiting our property. I ask him if he would be interested in doing a spot of work for us. I explain my dilemma, and we both stand and regard the men relentlessly cutting back the triangular strip of land.
He accepts without hesitation and introduces himself. “Je suis Harbckuouashua,” he says.
Sorry? He repeats his name, and I still cannot grasp it, which tickles him. “Call me Quashia.”
He agrees to begin the following morning. I explain what needs to be done. He lists what he requires, and I set off for the builders’ merchants in search of meters of meshed wire fencing, cement and iron pickets, as well as the almost forgotten dog food.
The following morning, he arrives late. I fear he is not coming. I will miss my plane and am about to give up on him when I catch sight of his silhouette sauntering along the lane. Trust me, he reassures. And so I do.
When I return from Australia a week later, zapped by an overload of radio, newspaper and television interviews—added to turning my body clock on its head twice in the space of a week—I find the fence in place and completed.
Quashia is there waiting for our return from the airport, keen to display his work. In my absence, Michel and he have become the best of buddies: we have acquired the able-bodied man we spoke of at the start of summer. His skills include masonry, tiling, trimming, tree pruning, as well as any other odd job I can come up with.
Proudly he is claiming Michel and me as “ma famille française.” From here on, he addresses Michel as mon cher frère. This greeting is followed by four kisses, two on each cheek, much hugging, followed by back-slapping of a force that leaves Michel limp. At first I have to confess to a certain mistrust of such hearty bonhomie, but I am soon forced to reconsider my unvoiced reservations.
On the other hand, I am not always regarded as a chère soeur, but on occasion, as a potential second wife. When Michel is away or out of sight, even on nothing more than a quick trip to pick up some fresh salad, I have to watch my step. “Sleep with me once, just for the hell of it!” pleads Quashia, and I flee indoors. Glancing back, I catch the tobacco-toothed grin lighting up his sun-cracked face.
HIGH SUMMER IS APPROACHING fast, which means the influx of guests. The first this year will be my parents, who are visiting us for the first time. After their concerns about the purchase of this farm, I fear they will be testing, rigorous, difficult to please, so their imminent arrival makes me edgy. Added to which, Michel has been called to Paris and will not be back until tomorrow. This leaves me running around alone like a headless chicken. I have never claimed to be a good housekeeper and in fact am pretty hopeless, but here I am now dragging sticks of furniture, such as we have—garden chairs as clotheshorses or dressing tables and the like—from room to room, corner to corner, in a pathetic attempt to create ambience and a home which might realistically be judged as up to snuff.
An hour before I am planning to set off for the airport, believing all is about as together as it is going to get, I flop over the balustraded terrace, breath a deep sigh of relief, peruse the shorn grounds all around me and smile proudly down upon our swimming pool. Michel has spent hours vacuuming and treating it, and now it is crystal-clear. That will impress them, I am thinking, rather too overconfidently. Oh no, they can’t call this place a pig in a poke, I am muttering to myself smugly, and then, to my horror, I notice movement. The sanitation cover on the terrace alongside the pool is heaving. An emission of dark brown waste is creeping out from beneath it. Another twenty minutes and the excrement will be slopping like green-jellied aliens into the pool. No, I cry, but the only soul heeding me is No Name, who runs for cover. I scoot inside. My heart is pounding fast. I have to combat this impending disaster before I leave for the airport, or when we return… the image does not bear thinking about.
I rip through the pages of our villa address book, searching for the number of Monsieur Di Fazio. Of course, it is eleven in the morning, and he will have left home for work hours ago. Crazed with panic, I ring anyway. I must meet that plane. I have to stop the seepage. There must be an underground leak in the pipes; by this stage, I am yammering to myself. Desperate, my brain is spaghetti. What in heaven’s name is the French word for leak? I simply cannot recall it.
Madame Di Fazio answers, “Je vous écoute?”
I am still trying to get my head around how to explain the excrement oozing across the terrace beneath me. Truite! Yes, that’s the word I’m searching for! Truite!
“’Ello?”
“TRUITE!” I yell into the phone.
“’Ello?”
“Hello. Madame Di Fazio, c’est Madame—”
“Bonjour Madame. Yes, I recognized your accent.” She laughs kindly. “Are you all right?”
I have no time for such chitter-chatter this morning. My parents’ plane must be sweeping over Lyon by now.
“Madame, I have a serious problem. It’s very urgent.” I am speaking in French, of course.
“Oui, Madame—?”
“Please contact your husband and ask him to come over here right away, please. It is gravement urgent. There is a huge truite which has… somehow… come up through the plumbing and is now moving along the downstairs terrace. It must have escaped through the… er”—I cannot think of how to explain the problem. I have no idea what the translation is, or even the English words for what I am trying to put across are. “Une truite… in the thing… yes, and it’s making for the swimming pool, la piscine.”
Madame Di Fazio is giggling. “Une truite, Madame—?”
“Yes, a truite, heading for the swimming pool.” I am a demented being, shouting and waving my free hand in the air, worse than those lunatics who are convinced that if you speak
forcefully enough in English, anyone, no matter what their mother tongue or how nonexistent their grasp of our language, will understand you. “IT’S MOVING TOWARDS THE SWIMMING POOL AND IS ABOUT TO SLIDE INTO THE WATER ANY SECOND NOW AND MY PARENTS WILL BE HERE WITHIN THE HOUR!”
“I’ll call my husband.” She laughs and puts down the phone.
I cannot drag myself away from the upper balcony. I am standing dead-still, staring at the excrement seeping like poison across the terrace beneath me. No Name approaches it gingerly.
“Get away from there!” I yell from way above her. If she treads in it… I scream at her again. “No Name, get away from there!” Her tail disappears beneath her, she glances up at me curiously, regards what from her point of view must be a red and furious face and then slinks away, completely baffled.
Within ten very drawn-out minutes, Mr. Di Fazio’s cranky old motor croaks up the drive. He climbs from his van, covered head to toe in soot, as ever, white teeth grinning like piano keys. “Where’s this monster fish, then?” he chortles.
“What fish?” I cry, believing this to be yet another of his witty cracks alluding to my television career, or rather the career he continues to insist is mine. Right now I cannot contemplate programs with fish in the title; I am in no mood for it. “Look! Look there!” I lead him to the drainage, and he laughs long and loud. His fat stomach heaving with merriment.
“Why are you laughing, Mr. Di Fazio? This is serious! My parents are on their way. My mother already thinks I have no common sense. Please, do something. HELP!” And help he does. Out of his van, he unwinds meters of thick coiled piping. The underground canal is suctioned and emptied in no time, along with two others situated at various points descending the drive, which according to our plumber could also cause us distress. Then off he goes, explaining happily that he and Michel can discuss a cash price during the weekend. “For the removal of the fish.”
Olive Farm Page 18
