Foreign Correspondence (25 page)

As we finished our coffee, the manageress made some phone calls. She returned with the news that St. Martin was in fact only five villages east of Lourmarin. “But it is nothing,” she reported. “It’s a town of truck drivers, vineyard workers and people who work in eggs.”

“Eggs? They have poultry farms?”

“No—Eggs—it’s the big town south of here.”

Aix. Aix-en-Provence. St. Martin was a village of laborers and commuters.

As Tony and I drove up the mountainside past the patchwork of vineyards, I imagined Janine’s father working his meticulous way through the vines, knowing from experience where to prune, where to let be. It was he I thought we would find in St. Martin, if we ever found St. Martin. I hoped he would be able to tell me news of his daughter, my bright young pen pal from so many years ago. Janine herself, I imagined, would be long gone from these little villages; pursuing a career in nearby Marseilles, Montpellier, Lyon or maybe even Paris.

Finally St. Martin announced itself with a modest sign and an avenue of speckled plane trees. In a minute or two it disannounced itself with a duplicate sign, slashed through by a black bar. Now I understood why, when I wrote to Janine, I didn’t need to give a street address—her name and the name of the village were all the direction my letters required.

We turned the car around and drove back through the village, more slowly. Many of the old sepia-stuccoed houses had gray, concrete block additions. Some had been torn down and replaced with boxy new structures. Apart from the handsome row of trees, St. Martin felt no obligation to be picturesque. We parked in the square. It was still lunchtime, and the town’s few
streets were silent. The faint snow had turned to a misty, Londonesque drizzle. A lone old man and his black and white dog ambled slowly down the street.

We left the car and wandered to the bar-tabac, into that familiar warm French fug of fresh-ground coffee and strong tobacco. The walls were decorated with the important business of village life: the standings of the Martinoise boule players and the latest news from the Société des Chasseurs. Inside, the sole customer stood hunched over a pinball machine called Star Flipp, emblazoned with an icon of Marilyn Monroe. Like the rest of France, the machine appeared to be
en grève
. The youth thumped it petulantly, but no bells rang.

We ordered a coffee and asked the barmaid if she knew the family of my pen pal.
“Oui,”
she said.
“Bien sûr.”

“You know
Janine?”
I asked.

“Mais oui, elle habit
 …” and she rattled off directions to a house on the town’s edge.

Even after my experiences in Israel, I almost fell off my bar stool in shock. After twenty-five years, Janine was still there, right where I left her. The barmaid said Janine had married a builder and managed his business from her house. “If you want to find her at home, now would be a good time,” she said. “Soon she will have to go to pick up her boys from school.”

We drained our bitter coffees and headed for the eastern edge of town. In a few minutes, following the barmaid’s directions, we had arrived at the foot of a steep hill dotted with newish, modest-scale villas. On the unfinished balcony of one of them a builder was at work. But by the time I got out of the car and climbed up to the house he had vanished. I walked on to the next villa and knocked on the door.

A young man answered.

“Excuse me,” I said in French, “I’m looking for Janine.”

“Oui,”
he said. He turned back into the house and raised his voice to call the name. A petite woman in a big sweater and
leggings appeared at the door. Her dark hair was cropped in a shapely bob that emphasized her soft brown eyes.

As I introduced myself, I opened my hand and showed her one of the letters she’d sent me, the elegant writing on the pretty pale blue stationery. She stared at me and then at the letters. Her hand fluttered to her brow.

“But it is twenty years—no—more,” she said in French.

Still, she remembered me well. I had been her only pen friend. She explained that I had knocked, by chance, on her mother’s door. Her house was nearby, but she was spending the day with her mother, who was ill. She seemed anxious to talk, so we made a rendezvous for the following day.

Janine’s parents’ house in the village had long since been demolished, its cramped, medieval rooms too small and irregular for modern taste. Her entire family lived now in new villas on the hillside, all built by Janine’s husband.

Janine’s villa was the last on the curve of terrace, before the pines and scrub oak reclaimed the mountainside. Patches of raw concrete, a cement mixer parked by the entrance and churned-up mud in the driveway gave the house that unfinished look so common to the homes of architects and builders too busy working on others’ projects to get the last touches done on their own. But tucked away on adjoining terraces were a big swimming pool, drained for winter, and a separate clubhouse-cum-games room complete with pizza oven and pinball machine.

Janine greeted me at the door and ushered me into a large room that overlooked the valley below. From this terraced hillside the valley stretched away in a long misty view of vineyards and orchards. From here, it was easy to understand why someone born in this place might never leave it.

A fire blazed in the hearth, its fuel the wood from those same vineyards. At first I mistook the wood for prunings, but
then I noticed that the pieces of vine stacked to dry by the hearth had roots attached.

“They are pulling up many vineyards these days,” Janine explained. “It is my father’s work now.” The Lubéron had never been one of France’s great wine regions. What it supplied was vin ordinaire, and these days other wine regions—including Australia’s—were filling that market more cheaply. The vintners no longer had a market for so many grapes, so Janine’s father was spending the last few years of his working life grubbing up the vineyards he had spent years nurturing into productivity. “Then he sells them for firewood,” Janine explained.

I realized that I had seen her father on the terrace by her mother’s house. A big, bereted man with a weathered face, he was maneuvering a tractor loaded high with vines. I had thought the scene picturesque. Now it seemed melancholy.

The table decoration spoke to another link with the land. Instead of a vase of flowers, a large dish of sprouting wheat grains occupied the center of the table. “Is it your son’s science project?” I asked. Janine laughed. “No. It is a tradition for the time of year. You start the grains at the beginning of December, and if they are high and green by Christmas it means you will have a rich harvest in the coming year.”

Since our brief meeting the day before, Janine had found a photo I had sent her of myself. She had placed it on the mantel. It was the picture I had sent in 1969—the one that I’d thought made me look angry and radical. What I really looked like was a kid who’d forgotten to brush her hair.

I’d hoped Janine would speak English as well as she wrote it as a sixteen-year-old. But she had forgotten everything. As she glanced at her own letters, she said she now couldn’t decipher the English sections she had written so flawlessly.

My French had improved a bit since I left school, because I had been forced to use it while reporting in North Africa and when visiting my sister in the nearby Alpes Maritimes. I also
had assistance from Tony, who didn’t share my tin ear for pronunciation. But Janine’s accent gave us both some trouble. It was heavily Provençal, with words like
bien
becoming “bang” and
main
becoming “meng.” The conversation proceeded in a choppy relay, with Janine often repeating herself, me kibbitzing with Tony on what she’d said, the two of us figuring out a response and Tony saying it in an accent she could comprehend.

Janine hadn’t had any reason to use English since she left school. The ruthless selectivity of the French educational system had directed her to a secretarial course. She was twenty when she met and married Juan, a Spanish immigrant whose family had come to the nearby town of Pertuis when he was nine.

“We came because we wanted to eat,” said Juan, who had wandered in with a large hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. He was a tall, handsome man with curly blond hair and a tanned face etched deeply by laughter lines. There had been no work in his parents’ home town of Valencia. “There was a lot of racism when we came, but now we are French,” he said with a convincingly Gallic shrug. These days, it was the more recently arrived Algerian and Moroccan immigrants who bore the stigma of foreignness.

This corner of provincial, rural, France had been all Juan and Janine had ever needed. At the age of forty, Janine had never visited Paris. I’d longed to see Paris, even though I’d had to travel halfway around the world to do it. For Janine, it was a day’s drive that she’d never bothered to take.

There was a wedding picture of Juan and Janine hanging on the wall. “Actually, it is a picture of one of our weddings,” Janine explained. France’s Napoleonic laws are even stricter in their separation of church and state than those of the United States. Religious wedding ceremonies aren’t legally recognized and have to be preceded by a civil marriage. In 1984, Tony and I had two French weddings, the first presided over by a mayor whose tricolor sash sat majestically across his impressive embonpoint.
The next day a rabbi married us again, under a chuppa rigged from Tony’s grandmother’s shawl and some pieces of wood bought at the last minute from the local
bricolage
.

Janine’s situation was even more complicated. Her family was Protestant, a remnant of the Vaudois—a medieval movement considered heretical by the Catholic Church. In the sixteenth century brutal religious wars between Catholics and Protestants decimated Lubéron towns, including St. Martin. Juan was Roman Catholic. So they had to be married at the mayor’s in St. Martin, then at the Protestant church in Lourmarin, then at the Catholic church in Pertuis. Since then, they had raised three boys—now seventeen, fourteen and nine—“all of them,” laughed Janine, “with no religion!”

Juan had taken his rifle out of its canvas covering, disassembled it and was cleaning the parts carefully on the dining-room table. When I asked what he had been hunting, he pulled from a sack a brace of small blood-speckled birds. Using one tiny corpse like a hand puppet, he made the bird’s beak open and close as he trilled an imitation of its call.

“Will you cook them?” I asked Janine, thinking they would provide poor fare for three hungry boys. Janine shuddered. “No, I have nothing to do with this … this … hobby … of his. I hate killing. Juan loves to hunt, but I make him give away what he kills.” In return, sometimes, people brought her samples of what they made from her husband’s trophies. She went to the kitchen and returned with some home-canned pâté, made by a neighbor after Juan had a good day in pursuit of grebes. It was, I had to acknowledge, averting my eyes from the corpses of their relatives, delicious.

From September through January, Juan scheduled his building projects to allow maximum time for
la chasse
through the piny woods of the Lubéron. When he was home, he cleaned guns, listened to an electronic bird-call imitator that helped him
identify quarry or tended his hunting dogs. He asked if I wanted to see his kennels.

We scrambled together up the steep slope behind the house. Behind a high wire fence, more than a dozen tails wagged. The dogs were kept four to a pen, and inside each pen was a doggy-sized villa, complete with stucco walls and traditional Provençal red roof tiles. Juan went from pen to pen, speaking to each dog and doling out dinner—a mixture of kibble, yesterday’s baguettes and tasty-looking leftover
daube
. As he introduced each dog he explained its strong points like a proud father. Some were retrievers, skilled at finding the tiny corpses of blasted songbirds. Others had the courage for running down the big-tusked, drooling
sanglier
, or wild boar.

When we returned to the house I asked Janine how she liked the dogs. “I have asthma, so I don’t like them too well,” she replied dryly. I had often wondered how couples cope when one has a passionate interest that the other finds dull or distasteful. But I had rarely seen such an extreme case as this one.

It was almost time for Janine to pick up her youngest son. Together, we drove back into the town square to wait for the school bus from nearby Pertuis.

Janine greeted the other mothers in the square. She had grown up with all of them, their lives lived together in the lockstep of a small village. Thirty years earlier, they’d taken the bus together as children. Now they waited for it together, as mothers. While they waited, they chatted, as they had the day before, and almost every other day of their lives. It was the kind of continuity that never existed in a restless new country like Australia, where people are always moving in and moving on. I thought of our street in Concord: none of the neighbors of my parents’ generation had been born there, and none of my generation had stayed.

When the school bus arrived Janine’s son emerged looking
tired from his long school day and almost staggering under a bookbag-rucksack packed heavily enough for a five-day wilderness trek.

Janine chatted with him about his homework on the short drive home. At the dining-room table she sat down with him, spread out his textbooks and went over that night’s requirements for every subject. As she returned to me in the sitting room, he went uncomplainingly to work on what looked set to be several hours of study.

As the light drained from the sky, we said our goodbyes. Tony and I climbed into the car and headed back down the hills toward Lourmarin.

All those years ago, I had written to Janine because I was hungry for the wide world, and yet my letters had found their way to this narrow sliver of provincial village life. In the years since we wrote to each other, as my world had expanded, hers had contracted. Janine and her husband, and the extended family surrounding them, lived a life that was as unchanged in its essence as the little village of St. Martin itself. Juan’s rifles may have been made of modern alloys, but men here had always hunted. His construction company may have used cranes and reinforced concrete, but the craft of building a house wasn’t that different from the one pursued here by sixteenth-century masons. And Janine’s world, caring for her children and her aged parents, living a life in a place where she knew not just every person but every stone, could be the same intimate world of a woman born in many centuries other than the present one.