A Year in Provence (25 page)

With Christian the architect, we went through the rooms to establish who had to do what, and how long it would take.

“
Normalement
,” said Christian, a man of great charm and implacable optimism, “there is only six or seven days of work. A little masonry, some plastering, two days of painting,
et puis voilà. Terminé.
”

We were encouraged. As we said to Christian, there had been dark moments recently when we imagined waking up on Christmas morning still surrounded by the debris of a building site.

He threw up everything in horror—hands, eyebrows, and shoulders. What a thought. It was inconceivable that these mere finishing touches should be delayed any longer. He would telephone the various members of the
équipe
immediately to organize a week of intensive activity. Progress would be made. No, more than progress; a conclusion.

One by one, they came at odd times to the house: Didier and his dog at seven in the morning. The electrician at lunchtime, Ramon the plasterer for an evening drink. They came, not to work, but to look at the work that had to be done. They were all
astonished that it had taken so long, as though people other than themselves had been responsible. Each of them told us, confidentially, that the problem was always that one had to wait for the other fellow to finish before one could start. But, when we mentioned Christmas, they roared with laughter. Christmas was
months
away; they could almost build a complete house by Christmas. There was, however, a common reluctance to name a day.

When can you come? we asked.

Soon, soon, they said.

We would have to be content with that. We went out to the front of the house, where the concrete mixer stood guard over the steps to the front door, and imagined a cypress tree standing in its place.

Soon, soon.

T
HE
F
RENCH PEASANT
is an inventive man, and he hates waste. He is reluctant to discard anything, because he knows that one day the bald tractor tire, the chipped scythe, the broken hoe, and the transmission salvaged from the 1949 Renault van will serve him well and save him from disturbing the contents of that deep, dark pocket where he keeps his money.

The contraption that I found at the edge of the vineyard was a rusty monument to his ingenuity. A 100-liter oil drum had been sliced in half lengthwise and mounted on a framework of narrow-gauge iron piping. An old wheel, more oval than round, had been bolted onto the front. Two handles of unequal length protruded from the back. It was, so Faustin told me, a
brouette àe vigneron
—a wheelbarrow, custom built at minimal expense for the pruning season.

All the vines had now been stripped of their leaves by the autumn winds, and the tangled shoots looked like coiled clumps of brown barbed wire. Sometime before the sap started to rise next spring they would have to be cut back to the main stem. The clippings, or
sarments
, were of no agricultural use, too fibrous to rot into the ground during the winter, and too numerous to leave piled in the corridors between the vines where the tractors would pass. They would have to be gathered up and burned; hence the
brouette de vigneron.

It was the simplest kind of mobile incinerator. A fire was lit in the bottom of the oil drum, the
sarments
were clipped and thrown on the fire, and the barrow was pushed along to the next vine. When the drum was full, the pale grey ash was scattered on the ground and the process began again. It was, in its primitive way, a model of efficiency.

Walking back to the house just before dusk, I saw a slim plume of blue smoke rising from the corner of the field where Faustin was pruning and burning. He straightened up and rubbed his back, and his hand felt cold and stiff when I shook it. He pointed along the rows of clipped vines, twisted claws black against the sandy soil.

“Nice and clean, eh? I like to see them nice and clean.” I asked him to leave some
sarments
for me to gather up to use on the barbecue next summer, and I remembered seeing them once in a shop which called itself a food boutique in New York—Genuine Vine Clippings, they were labeled, and they were guaranteed to impart That Authentic Barbecue Flavor. They had been trimmed to a standard length and neatly trussed with straw twine, and they cost two dollars for a small bunch. Faustin couldn’t believe it.

“People buy them?”

He looked at the vines again, estimating how many hundreds of dollars he had burned in the course of the day, and shook his head. Another cruel blow. He shrugged.

“
C’est curieux.
”

·  ·  ·

O
UR FRIEND
, who lived deep in Côtes du Rhône country north of Vaison-la-Romaine, was to be honored by the winegrowers of his village and admitted to the Confrérie Saint-Vincent, the local equivalent of the Chevaliers du Tastevin. The investiture was to take place in the village hall, followed by dinner, followed by dancing. The wines would be strong and plentiful and the winegrowers and their wives would be out in force. Ties were to be worn. It was that kind of occasion.

Years before, we had been to another Chevaliers’ dinner, in Burgundy. Two hundred people in full evening dress, rigid with decorum at the start of the meal, had turned into a friendly mob singing Burgundian drinking songs by the time the main course was served. We had blurred but happy memories of watching the sozzled Chevaliers after dinner, trying to find and then to unlock their cars, with the amiable assistance of the Clos Vougeot police force. It had been our first experience of an evening formally dedicated to mass intoxication, and we had enjoyed it enormously. Any friend of the grape was a friend of ours.

The village hall was officially called the
Salle des Fětes.
It was a fairly recent construction, designed with a complete disregard for its medieval surroundings by the anonymous and overworked French architect whose mission in life is to give every village its own eyesore. This was a classic of the contemporary blockhouse school—a box of raw brick and aluminum-trimmed glass set in a garden of tarmac, devoid of charm but rich in neon light fittings.

We were greeted at the door by two substantial, rosy-faced men in white shirts, black trousers, and wide scarlet sashes. We told them we were guests of the new Confrère.

“
Bieng, bieng. Allez-y.
” Meaty hands patted us on the back and into the big room.

At one end was a raised platform, furnished with a long table
and a microphone. Smaller tables, set for dinner, were placed down either side of the room and across the far end, leaving a large space in the middle which was packed with winegrowers and their friends.

The level of conversation was deafening; men and women who are used to talking to each other across a vineyard find it difficult to adjust their volume, and the room echoed and boomed with voices that had been developed to compete with the Mistral. But, if the voices had come straight in from the fields, the clothes were definitely from the Sunday-best
armoire
: dark suits and shirts whose collars looked uncomfortably tight around weatherbeaten necks for the men; vividly colored and elaborate dresses for the women. One couple, more couture conscious than the rest, had outfits of startling splendor. The woman shimmered in a dress of gray bugle beads, and small matching gray feathers were sewn to the back of her stockings so that her legs appeared to flutter when she walked. Her husband wore a white jacket trimmed with black piping, a frilled shirt with more black piping, and black evening trousers. Either his nerve or his resources had run out at that point, because his shoes were sensible, thick-soled and brown. Nevertheless, we felt sure that they were the couple to watch when the dancing started.

We found our friend and his family. He was glancing around the room, looking puzzled and almost ill-at-ease, and we thought that the solemnity of the occasion had brought on an attack of Confrère’s nerves. The problem, however, was altogether more serious.

“I can’t see a bar anywhere,” he said. “Can you?”

There were barrels of wine against one of the walls. There were bottles of wine on the tables. We were in a village that would float on a sea of Côtes du Rhône if all the
caves
were emptied, but there was no bar. And, now that we studied our fellow revelers, we made another worrying discovery. Nobody was holding a glass.

We were prevented from making an indiscreet grab at a bottle on the nearest table by a fanfare on the loudspeaker system, and the Confrères filed in and took up their position behind the table on the dais—a dozen or more figures in cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, some holding parchment scrolls, one with an imposingly fat book. Any moment now, we thought, the
vin d’honneur
would be served to signal the start of the ceremony.

The mayor embraced the microphone and delivered the opening speech. The senior Confrère gave a speech. His assistant, the keeper of the fat book, gave a speech. One by one the three new Confrères were summoned to the dais and eulogized at length for their love of wine and good fellowship. One by one, they replied with speeches accepting the honors bestowed upon them. I detected a certain huskiness in the voice of our friend which others may have mistaken for emotion. I knew it to be thirst.

As a finale, we were asked to join in the singing of a song written in the Provençal language by Frédéric Mistral.

“
Coupo santo e versanto
,” we sang in praise of the sainted and overflowing goblet, “
A-de-reng beguen en troupo lou vin pur de nostre plant
”—let us all drink together the pure wine of our growth, and about time too. The investiture had taken just over an hour, and not a drop had passed anyone’s lips.

There was a noticeable eagerness to be seated, and at last the sainted goblets were filled, emptied, and refilled. An air of relief spread throughout the tables, and we were able to relax and consider the menu.

Quail in aspic came first; the heads, which we were told cost two francs each, were detachable and could be used again at a future banquet. Then there was sea bass. These were mere preliminaries, the chef’s limbering-up exercises before attacking the sirloin of Charolais beef
en croûte.
But, before that, there was a small and deadly item described as a
Trou Provençal
—a sorbet made with the minimum of water and the maximum of
marc.
Its purpose, so we were told, was to clear the palate; in fact it was sufficiently powerful to anesthetize not only the palate,
but the sinus passages and the front portion of the skull as well. But the chef knew what he was doing. After the initial jolt of frozen alcohol wore off, I could feel a hollowness in the stomach—the
trou
—and I could face the rest of the long meal with some hope of being able to finish it.

The beef made its entrance to the strains of a second fanfare, and was paraded around the tables by the waiters and waitresses before being served. The white wine gave way to the pride of the local winegrowers, a formidably heavy red, and the courses kept coming until, after the serving of soufflés and champagne, it was time to rise up and dance.

The band was of the old school, clearly not interested in performing for people who simply like to hop up and down; they wanted to see
dancing.
There were waltzes and quicksteps and several numbers that might have been gavottes, but for me the highlight of the evening was the tango interlude. I don’t think it is given to many of us to witness fifty or sixty couples in the advanced stages of inebriation attempting the swoops and turns and heel-stamping flourishes of the true tango artist, and it was a sight I shall never forget. Elbows were cocked, heads flicked from side to side, desperate and off-balance charges were made with twinkling feet from one end of the room to the other, potential collision and disaster were everywhere. One diminutive man danced blind, his head sunk into the
décolletage
of his taller partner. The couple in bugle beads and frilled shirt, molded together at the groin with their backs arching outward, lunged and dipped through the crowd with a dexterity unknown outside the tango palaces of Buenos Aires.

Miraculously, nobody was injured. When we left, sometime after one o’clock, the music was still playing and the dancers, stuffed with food and awash with wine, were still dancing. Not for the first time, we marveled at the Provençal constitution.

We arrived back at the house the following day to find that its appearance had changed; there was an unfamiliar tidiness in front of the steps that led up to the door. The cement mixer,
which had for months been an integral part of the façade of the house, was no longer there.

It was an ominous sign. As much as we disliked having its hulk parked outside, it was at least a guarantee that Didier and his masons would return. Now they had crept in and taken it—
our
cement mixer—probably to use on a six-month job somewhere the other side of Carpentras. Our hopes of having a finished house by Christmas suddenly seemed like a bad attack of misplaced optimism.