I am completely baffled but extraordinarily grateful, and I cannot spend time now trying to get to grips with his sense of humor. I need to leave for the airport instantly. I am late.
I arrive frazzled, zipping like a demented lizard. Naturally, I am not on time. Their plane has landed, they have collected their luggage and are awaiting me outside, smiling and unruffled. “Hello, dear.”
Back at the villa, after they are installed in their clean but basic room, which is bettered by plentiful bunches of Marguerite daisies picked from the garden, I take them on a tour. They drink it all in silently. “Well, what do you think?” I ask at last.
“I’m glad you’ve got big windows,” says my mother. “I don’t like those small ones the French foreigners always have here.” My father’s response is “I think you might have bitten off more than you can chew.”
WHILE I HAVE BEEN occupied with the tending of my family, word has been spreading fast on the village bush telegraph. I am now known as the actress who can take on the world as Emma Peel but who calls in the plumber to remove a giant trout from her drainage system. In scatterbrained panic, I have muddled my nouns: fuite, or leak, and truite, trout.
It’s time to learn the language, I concede when I hear my linguistic confusion repeated back to me. Sheepishly, I take myself off to Nice, to the university, where I enroll in an intensive summer course.
During my lunch break which, being French, last at least two—if not three—hours, I wander the streets and coastal strip of Nice, keen to learn a little about the city at close quarters. It has flavors to it other than Cannes. For one thing, it is a university city, and even though it is summer and the students have disappeared to the countryside or mountains and the profs are on congé, which means the university is only catering to linguistic numbskulls like me, the city still gives off a very different energy. There are myriad bookshops, a healthy majority of young people, a wide choice of movie theaters, an abundance of excellent museums and restaurants and a working population which is not dominated by the idle rich. It teems with bustling life, with inhabitants going about their days trying to make a living, and sports a magnificent harbor where colossal white passenger liners lie in dock preparing departures to Corsica or Italy, even to the Nordic lands or some as far afield as Russia.
Set back from the harbor is the old town, where the street names are written in both French and Niçoise, which is the patois language once spoken here. Perhaps the crowning glory of the vielle ville is the flower market to be found a few steps from the famous opera house, where Rigoletto is to be performed this evening.
The language I am hearing everywhere around me is Italian. Every week, the most avid and passionate of French shoppers cross the border to buy produce and very reasonably priced Italian clothing (and booze) at the frontier market town of Ventimiglia. In turn, the Italians are drawn here on Mondays to spend their lire on antiques and fresh produce every other day of the week.
Along the street Rue St-François-Paule, written in patois as Carriera San-Francés-de-Paula, is a huilerie, an oil shop, belonging to the Moulin à Huile d’Olive of Nicolas Alziari, a famous name in the business of oil production. His groves are situated in the granite hills up behind this city, and the fruit is a mix of the same small Nice olive, the cailletier, as ours and another, the picholine olive, which is longer and thinner. Picholine olives are named after a Monsieur Picholine, who developed a method of curing green olives using the ash from the green oaks that grow everywhere in this region—we have plenty on our terrain. I would have enjoyed a short browse, but the shop is closed for lunch. Across the street, also gone for lunch, a competitor is situated. The huilerie of Caracoles, where it is written—although I have not come across this maison before—the products are regionaux, les articles provençaux.
Making a short detour along the rue de la terrasse, the carriera de la terrassa, I am drawn to a hand-painted sign reading cave, Pierre Bianchi & Cie, where the painted glass windows are proof of its heritage. It announces proudly three siècles d’existence. Three centuries of trading. Quite a feat, considering the history of this city. It means they were here before the French; Nice was ceded to France in 1860.
I step up to the glass to read its hours of business, thinking that I might return after my afternoon course, and am amused to read that it reopens at two and has no particular hour of closing and on Sundays is closed only si grosse fatigue. If enormously tired!
The colors and architecture of the tall shuttered buildings crammed alongside one another in streets so narrow a bicycle can barely pass through (certainly not our postman!) are Italian-influenced: vibrant red ocher, yellow ocher and mustard hues, all decorated with faded green or bleached turquoise shutters, or pale dusty lilac, a color so fragrant you can almost inhale it.
Until 1860, this ancient city was governed by the House of Savoy and was adjoined to the kingdom of Sardinia, Piedmont and Liguria. Shortly after this date, these other provinces became part of a new unified Italy. But even today, there is much about Nice that boasts of its Italian heritage, not least its fabulous Mardi Gras carnival, with its masked balls dating back to the thirteenth century and known by the Italian name of veglioni. This famous carnival still parties here nonstop during the three weeks leading up to Lent and proudly claims the use of a ton of papier-mâché for every float!
Behind partially shuttered windows, I glimpse local craftsmen beavering away in ateliers barely larger than postage stamps. A bald-headed cobbler repairing the soles of a pair of leather sandals puts them to one side and shuts up shop for lunch. Along a crooked dead-end alley leading off one of the many squares, I encounter a mechanic disgorging the engine of an ancient pram-size Fiat Cinquecento. He is seated in the driver’s seat with the door hanging open, facing out to the world at large. In his lap is a dish of what looks like pork in a rich, winy sauce. On the ground at his feet are a half-emptied flacon and a glass of rosé wine, fruit, cheese, a half-eaten baguette and two hungry curs salivating at a safe distance, waiting for scraps. Clotheslines of sheets, shirts and undies are festooned like bunting everywhere above me, reaching across the narrow lanes from one side to the other. I hear the hum of a carpenter or cabinetmaker planing great sheets of wood. He must be the only craftsman still at work, for the midday siren has sounded and the world of les ouvriers has downed tools.
I am also growing hungry and make for the Cours Saleya, or in patois, Lou Cors, to the marketplace. It is sensational. The central square is an amphitheater of ancient colored buildings, the most magnificent of which is now the home of the Préfecture des Alpes-Maritimes and was once the palace of the Dukes of Savoie. The flower market, operating alongside the fish and food stalls, is a glorious blaze of colors and perfumes, crowned with pot after pot of brilliant green, aromatic herbs. It is a feast for all my senses, and I cannot resist a dozen long-stemmed birds of paradise. Now I must hurry and move on to the food. One stall is selling, they tell me—and I take their word for it, since I haven’t the time to count—one hundred and fifty different varieties of spice. Each is neatly laid out on dishes dressed in brightly hued Provençal cotton with the name of the spice handwritten in black ink. Muscade, poivre concassé, poivre Sichuan, exotique, but they are being whisked away and stored in the rear of a van parked in the cobbled square. Another marketeer offers olives. His array is a fête! Among a mind-boggling choice are olives de la Puglia, from Italy. They are the largest I have ever set eyes on and resemble in size, as well as shape, small green lemons. I help myself to one and slip it into my mouth, sucking on it with the glee of a child savoring a piece of hard candy. It is sharp and peppery and delicious.
At various corners and angles in the alleys near the market, there are dozens of busy restaurants where knives and forks clatter, glasses chink, voices chatter, laughter peals and diners await their meals being served al fresco; the acoustics of the ritual of lunch are amplified by the tall buildings.
I press my nose against the windows of one or two entici
ng traiteurs, hungry to gorge on everything. I must decide, since everyone is packing up for lunch. I creep inside the second where the flagstone floors are cool and clean, where the pastry smells so warm and soft and yielding you might lie down on it, and where every plate on offer is of psychedelic shades. Mayonnaise has never looked so rich, so yellow and creamy. I want to dive into the large round dish and behave rudely with it.
The dishes of Nice are not necessarily the same as those of Cannes; here again, the Italian and the Provençal influences are in evidence. I buy myself a workingman’s portion of tourte de blea, which is a local specialty. Still piping from the oven, its pastry is as delicate as papier poudre, and I carry my thick slice in a paper bag like a trophy to be consumed with a bottle of mineral water on a bench overlooking the Med, now bobbing with oily, shrieking people.
The beaches along this Promenade des Anglais are filling up by the day. To the right, half a kilometer along the coast, the planes sweep low, disgorging yet another batch of holidaymakers. Summer is upon us with its whiffs of suntan lotion, children splashing and screaming with joy, the bells of ice-cream vans ting-a-linging and the ceaseless impatience of drivers leaning on their horns. Two youths, skinheads with radiant pink mohawks, come to a standstill alongside me. The one farther to the left takes an asthmatic drag on a joint, then passes it to his friend, who does the same. They gaze out at the languid sea flopping against the beach in small curls of foam. “S’foockin’ grea’ ’ere,” says one, in a thick, lazy Scottish accent. His pal grunts and they move on.
Within the hazy, heat-drenched distance, I am able to discern the contours of the Alps which are, whatever the season, the magnificent backdrop to this sweeping seafront. Few of these visitors ever see this coastline at its most breathtaking, which, for me, is on a sharp wintry day when the limpid sea is a brilliant turquoise, the coast is depopulated save for a lone inhabitant or two strolling, windblown, close on the heels of racing, excited dogs while behind them the mauve mountains rise up, crisp, clear and snowcapped.
Ambling along a return route previously unknown to me, toward the university, I spot a poissonnerie that has reopened and slip in to buy succulent clovisses and praires clams, perfect for spaghetti alle vongole, which I now decide to make this evening and serve on the terrace by candlelight.
As I consider whether my family will enjoy this dish, a memory flashes by of my father’s mother, who sat by her fireside in the east end of London, a cigarette smoking between her nicotine-stained fingers, a glass of stout beer on the tiled hearth, picking cockles and winkles with a pin from their shells. Here cockles are known as fausse praire. How many worlds make up a life!
In a winding labyrinthine lane somewhere toward the heart of the city, I pass by a butcher specializing in game and poultry and pause to take a closer look. Beyond the glass is a still-life menagerie. It is crowded with heads, curly-tailed haunches and an array of hosed, furry bodies dangling from meat hooks. There are rabbits and hares, unplucked pigeons, quails, chickens and ducks, plump geese alongside tiny birds no bigger than sparrows. And on an oval silver platter in the foreground, like John the Baptist as presented to Salome, the pièce de résistance, are the heads of two wild boars. Their fanged teeth jut from semiclosed mouths, smiling with misjudged confidence. Although their days of hunting are over, they remain tusked and bristly but, decapitated, have lost much of their menace. Studying them at close quarters, I have no desire to rekindle an intimacy with any of their cousins living on our land.
BACK AT HOME, DAYS slide by, and the gentle splash of bodies paddling to and fro in the pool is the music of the afternoons. My script moves on apace. No Name grows healthier by the day, springing from one terrace to another like a gazelle in flight. While my mother siestas or reads and my father—with No Name constantly padding or sleeping at his side—snores in the shade or bakes himself a lurid red in the sun and my mother nags him to get in out of the heat before he gets sunstroke, Michel and I wander endlessly and aimlessly, taking stock and sharing our visions. Perching on stones buried in the drying grass, plucking daisy heads, we chalk up lists of projects. Mine are of orchards, fruit trees, farming, vegetable beds to nurture, a compost to dig, terraces furnished with succulents in tall terra-cotta pots; the produce of the earth surrounded by space and tranquility and the freedom to write: self-expression.
Michel’s perspective on the future contains a communal esprit, and architecture. He has a more structural approach to the place: overview. There it is again, his favorite German word: überblick. I am passionately involved at close quarters, while he is pursuing the larger canvas. He reads the lines of the terraces, the symmetry of the olive groves which I haven’t even noticed, the shapes and curves of walls. He detects cracks, fissures, the balance or imbalance of windows, aberrations that have been added to the property over the years and have destroyed its overall elegance, its simplicity of form. He draws up plans for future watering systems and reflects upon a practical choice of plants for this mountainous region. Agave cacti, palms, yuccas, citrus fruits, eucalyptus, olives. He never would have handed over cash for a hundred roses to wilt in the hot sun, obliging us to pass half our days hiking hoses or buckets up and down the hill in a never-ending attempt to keep them watered, but we don’t talk about my hundred roses, nor about the trader who took my money for them and never returned.
And he talks of artists, filmmakers, writers in wooden huts buried at work in corners of our pine forest… here we disagree! But in our shared idyll, all debate is amiable, nothing acrimonious.
Back at the villa, I catch my mother watching us; clearly, she is concerned. My father, who always has a useful aphorism on the tip of his tongue, is baffled: “You’ve got a career back home, love. A bird in the hand…” He has risen from his postlunch slumbers and is playing with the dog, or rather, she yields to him like a puppy, on her back, legs in the air, while he strokes her stomach and examines her. I see him fiddling with her teats, a frown crossing his beetroot-flushed face.
“What’s wrong? Is No Name ill?”
I barely hear my mother’s concerns: “I’ve seen you do some daft things, Carol, but… if you want a swimming pool, why not work in Hollywood? Think champagne and you’ll drink it!”
I giggle. It’s true that for the sake of “art,” my untamed nature or the whims of la passion, I have dived headlong into some “daft things”: hung out in Rome doing little better than extra work at Cinecittà and learning Italian, lived a week inside a live volcano, dived the seven seas, had a crack at tracking snowy regions of Lapland with a sleigh and six dogs, got blazing drunk on some deeply suspect concotion with headhunters in a longhouse in Borneo, traveled unaccompanied up the Amazon… oh, the list is endless, and I don’t regret most of it (the longhouse was a bit precarious; one more glass, and my head might have ended up on a key ring), but the purchase of Appassionata does not equate. It is an exploration of another kind because it requires commitment and faith. It is a canvas, and we are two creating this journey. My parents’ final words on the subject are: “Well, I hope you know what you’re doing!”
I don’t. It would be arrogance to claim that I do. I know where I have come from, what I am attempting to leave behind, the habits and experiences I want to shed like a skin, but not where I am going or even what exactly I am seeking. I am taking it as it comes, making it up as I go along. Pushing the boundaries of identity, hopefully to enrich, deepen, cultivate the spirit. Better to give it a shot than stare at the rain through wrinkled rheumy eyes, sighing What if…
“This dog is pregnant,” my father pronounces. This stops all metaphysical philosophizing. Within seconds, all of us are on our haunches surrounding No Name, who looks from one to the next, uncertain and puzzled. She nuzzles close to Daddy.
“No, it’s not possible,” I say, staring at her swollen black nipples.
“We should call the vet.”
“No, she’s fine. There’s no way she could be pregnant.”
IF QUASHIA IS
TO CONTINUE his sterling work of fencing then we must, by law, call in a surveyor, a géomètre, to stake out the boundaries of the land. Once this has been done, he will notify our neighbors in writing—including scale maps as drawn up by the department of cadastration—of our decision. If no boundary neighbor (which is only one) contests our rights within a period of twenty-eight days, then the same expert forwards the necessary documents to be signed by the adjoining landowners, which will confirm that they have no claims against the ownership of our land.
All this to fence our property and keep the burglars out! Farmland and buildings—every square meter, every stone fence, every stable—are clearly defined in numbered plots and detailed sketches on the maps and plans filed with both the notaire and the local council registers. Still, it has to be done. French bureaucracy is French bureacracy, and it is tireless!
So the géomètre can actually find the boundaries of the property to stake, a traversable pathway needs to be hollowed out of the weeds and jungle. This means hacking land way beyond the acres cut back by Amar, which to our dismay are growing faster than we can earn the cash to keep them at bay. And due to the enormous fire hazards in the area, all landowners are responsible for the safety level of their herbage. I am beginning to get a sense of the never-ending battle that lies ahead if we are to keep the tangle of growth on the farm under control, and the prospect of it exhausts me.
Quashia arrives. He and Michel are going to attack the grounds together. With trimming machines on their shoulders, water bottles in plastic bags and face visors to protect their eyes, the pair hike up the stone track behind the house and disappear into the forest.
Olive Farm Page 19
