Hotel Pastis (7 page)

The village of Brassière-les-Deux-Eglises (winter population 702, summer population approximately 2,000) is balanced precariously on the crest of a foothill below the southern slope of Mont Ventoux. It has two churches, one café, a butcher, a baker, a
mairie
that is open for two hours on Tuesday afternoons, an
épicerie
, a two-pump Citroën garage, and a magnificent view of the Lubéron to the south. Apart from plans (which have been under discussion for four years) to install a public WC, there is no provision for the tourist trade. The regular summer visitors have their own highly restored houses in the village, but these stay shuttered and empty for ten months a year.

The Porsche limped up to the garage and stopped. Simon could hear the sound of a radio coming from the small workshop. He stepped over a large greasy Alsatian
sleeping in the sun and looked into the dark shambles of Garage Duclos. The proprietor’s oily canvas boots were visible, tapping together in time to the music from the radio. The rest of him was under a Citroën van. Simon knocked on the van’s door, and Duclos rolled into view on a low trolley.

He lay there, looking up, a wrench in one blackened hand, a rag in the other.
“Oui?”

“Monsieur, bonjour. J’ai un petit problème.”

“Comme tout le monde.”
Duclos sat up and wiped his hands.
“Alors, qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“Ma voiture …”

Duclos levered himself off his trolley and took out a packet of Bastos as they went out to the Porsche. Simon’s vocabulary, he realised, didn’t include exhaust pipes, so he crouched down and pointed. Duclos crouched beside him, dragging on his cigarette. The dog got up and joined them, pushing his way between them to sniff the back wheel of the Porsche thoughtfully before lifting his leg against it.

“Filou! Va t’en!”
Duclos cuffed the dog away and bent forward for a closer look at the hanging, bent pipe.
“Putain.”
He reached out and tapped the twisted metal and shook his head.
“Il faut le remplacer.”
Another reflective drag on his cigarette.
“Beh oui. C’est foutu.”

But, as he explained to Simon, a spare part for such a car—a German car, not at all common in these parts—would take time. A new exhaust assembly would have to be ordered from Avignon, maybe even from Paris. Two days, three days. And then there was the fitting. Could monsieur come back at the end of the week? By then,
normalement
, it would be done.

Simon’s first reaction was to make a phone call. All problems in life could be solved with a phone call. But
whom could he call, and what good would it do? It was late afternoon, and the village didn’t look the kind of place to have a resident taxi. He was stranded. Duclos looked at him and shrugged. Simon smiled at him and shrugged back. He was, after all, on holiday.

He took his bags from the Porsche and walked up to the tiny village square. Four sun-wizened old men were playing
boules
in front of the café—Le Sporting, it said in washed-out blue letters above the door—and Simon dumped his bags by a tin table and went into the bar.

It was empty except for the flies buzzing over the dented ice cream cabinet in one corner. Plastic-topped tables and an assortment of old chairs were arranged haphazardly around the room, and behind the long zinc bar a fly curtain made from what looked like dead caterpillars hung in a doorway, turning slowly in the warm, quiet air. Well, Simon thought, it’s not the Ritz. He strolled over to the wide plate-glass window at the end of the room and whistled softly at the view.

It was full south, overlooking a long, flat plain that ended at the foot of the Lubéron, perhaps five miles away. The evening sunlight, slanting in from the west, made shadows of deep black in the folds of the mountain, contrasting with the lighter haze, somewhere between purple and grey, of the rock face, and the green of pine and oak trees. Down on the plain, the orderly lines of vines were broken up by scattered farm buildings that might have been painted onto the landscape, flat and sharp and glowing. A toy tractor, bright yellow, moved silently along the black ribbon of road. Everything else was motionless.

“Monsieur?”

Simon looked round and saw a girl behind the bar. He ordered a pastis, and smiled at the memory of what
Murat had said; here she was, just as he’d described her—the ripe young Provençale with the dark eyes and olive skin. She reached up to fill his glass from one of the bottles fixed behind the bar, and Simon watched the flicker of muscles on her bare arms. Murat would have been over the bar with a rose between his teeth by now.

“Merci, mademoiselle.”
Simon topped up his glass with water and went outside. It was curious how much he enjoyed pastis in the heat of southern France, and how he never drank it anywhere else. He remembered ordering it once in the Connaught, and it didn’t taste the same at all. But here it was perfect—sweet and sharp and heady. He took a mouthful and thought about the unusual position he found himself in.

He had no car, no hotel reservation—and, from the look of the village, no hotel. No Liz, no Ernest. He was on his own, cut off from the human support system that normally took care of the daily details of his life. But, rather to his surprise, he found that he was enjoying the novelty of it all. Alone in a foreign wilderness, with nothing between him and starvation except a wallet stuffed to bursting with five hundred–franc notes. It was hardly a major catastrophe. In any case, it was impossible to feel depressed here, watching the old men laugh and argue over their
boules
.

The girl came out of the café and saw his empty glass. She came over to the table, walking in the loose, indolent way of people who live in the sun.

“Un autre?”

“Merci.”
She smiled at him, and he watched her walk away, hips rolling lazily under her short cotton skirt, her down-at-heel espadrilles slapping softly against her feet. Simon wondered what she’d look like in twenty years’ time, if the peach would turn into a prune.

When she came back, he asked her if there was anywhere nearby he could stay for the night.

She made the classic French grimace—eyebrows up, lips pushed forward and turned down.
“Beh non.”
There was the
gîte
of Madame Dufour, but that was closed now until Easter. Or there were hotels in Gordes. She waved a brown arm over towards the west, as though Gordes were on the very rim of civilisation, a thousand miles away.

The problem, said Simon, was that he had no way of getting to Gordes.

“Ah bon.”
The girl thought for a moment, biting her lower lip with small white teeth.
“Attends. Je vais chercher Maman.”

Simon heard the girl calling her mother, and then a loud, rapid exchange that he couldn’t follow.

Maman appeared, a vast billow of a woman in a floral dress and carpet slippers, the girl following behind. She beamed at Simon, gold teeth glinting beneath the faint shadow of a moustache.
“Ah, ce pauvre monsieur.”
She lowered herself until she had engulfed the chair next to Simon and leaned towards him, emanating garlic and goodwill. All was not lost, she said. Monsieur would not be obliged to pass the night under the tree in the village square. There was a room over the café,
pas grand’ chose
, but clean. Monsieur could stay there, and since there was no restaurant in the village, he could eat with them
en famille
. Three hundred francs, including the use of the family shower.
Voilà
. It was settled.

Simon took his bags and followed the girl up two flights of narrow stairs, trying unsuccessfully not to be mesmerised by the hips swaying a few inches from his face. Close your eyes and think of Mum’s moustache. They reached a tiny landing, and the girl opened a door
and led him into a room that was very little bigger, an attic with a low, steeply pitched ceiling, twilight-dark and as hot as an oven.
“Ça chauffe, eh?”
The girl opened the window, and then the shutters, letting in the view that Simon had admired earlier. He looked at the room—a single bed, a bare bulb hanging above it, worn linoleum on the floor. It reminded him of the junior dormitory when he had been at boarding school. Except for the view.

“Formidable,”
he said. He put down his bags and stretched.

“C’est pas un grand lit, mais vous êtes seul.”
The girl smiled.

“Malheureusement, oui.”
Simon found himself shrugging, the contagious tic of France.

The girl became businesslike. Dinner was in an hour, in the kitchen. The bathroom was on the floor below, through the blue door. If there was anything else monsieur needed, she and Maman would be downstairs.

Simon thought about the phone and decided not to bother until tomorrow. He unpacked and went to look for the blue door and a shower.

The plumbing arrangements of the French, a nation of great ingenuity and style, often come as a shock to foreigners who are used to concealed pipes, discreetly muted lavatory flushes, and firmly anchored taps, and Simon spent a few minutes working out how the flimsy but complicated arrangement of pipes and nozzles worked. He finally succeeded in showering by sections with a hand-held rubber contraption that alternated between scalding and freezing water, to the accompaniment of gurgling echoes from the pipes. A sign on the back of the bathroom door, stolen from a hotel on Lake Annecy, caught his eye as he was leaving the bathroom:

He went downstairs and followed the sound of conversation coming from the kitchen. A long table, covered in checked oilcloth, was set for four, with litre bottles of wine and water, a giant baguette, a basin-sized plastic bowl filled with salad, and, at one end, a television with the sound turned down. Maman and the girl were rubbing steaks with olive oil and cloves of garlic, and washing his hands at the sink was the man with the brick-red face Simon had last seen driving a tractor. Papa.

He turned from the sink, his hands still wet, and offered Simon his elbow to shake. “Bonetto.”

“Shaw. Simon Shaw.”

“Bieng. Un verre?”

He filled two thick glass tumblers with wine and motioned Simon to sit down at the table. Maman put a dish of sliced sausage and
cornichons
between them, and Simon’s first long and exhausting experience of Provençal hospitality began.

Sausage was followed by pizza, then by steak and roast peppers, salad, cheese, a homemade
tarte au citron
. Three litres of the young, fruity red wine, the wine from Bonetto’s own vines. And in between mouthfuls, a lecture in that accent—part French, part soup, with bellows of laughter from Maman and giggles from the girl at Simon’s desperate attempts to follow the rumbles and twangs of Bonetto’s increasingly rapid speech.

Some glimmers of comprehension came like flashes
in the fog: Bonetto was not only the owner of the café and several hectares of vines, but also the mayor of Brassière, a socialist, a hunter, a true
paysan du coin
. He had never been farther from the village than Marseille, a hundred kilometres away, and then he’d taken his gun, as it was well known that Marseille was inhabited entirely by criminals. In Brassière, he said proudly, there was no crime.

Simon nodded and smiled and said
“Ah bon”
whenever it seemed appropriate. Drink and concentration were making him drowsy, and when Bonetto produced a bottle of marc, yellowy-white and viscous, he tried to refuse. But it was no good: a guest in the Bonetto house was not allowed to go to bed thirsty. And so, while the women cleared away and washed the dishes, the level in the bottle went down, and Simon reached a state of comfortable numbness where it didn’t seem to matter whether they understood each other or not. He was finally allowed upstairs, with a parting slap on the back from Bonetto that almost knocked him over, and slept like a stone.

It was strange to be woken by the sun on his face, and for a few seconds Simon wasn’t sure where he was. He looked out of the window. The plain was white with morning mist under a spotless blue sky, and to his surprise he didn’t have a hangover.

He declined Maman’s offer of a sausage sandwich for breakfast and took his bowl of coffee outside. It was not yet hot, and the air—the purest air in France, so Bonetto had said, as though it were something that he personally had arranged—smelt fresh. In the village square, two women had put down their shopping baskets to leave both hands free for conversation, and a dog came out of an alley looking guilty, the remains of a baguette in its
mouth. Simon decided to explore before going down to the garage. There would be time enough to call the office later on.

He walked down the widest street leading off the square, past the
épicerie
on the corner and the narrow house that served as the
mairie
, and stopped in front of a gutted building. No windows, no shutters, no doors. A weather-stained notice, propped against the wall, said
L’Ancienne Gendarmerie
, and listed names and permit numbers and an announcement that the dossier could be inspected on request. Simon looked through the arched stone doorway and saw the Lubéron, framed like a picture in an opening on the far side of the building. He stepped over a pile of rubble into a high, long space littered with old beams, sacks of plaster, empty beer bottles, and piles of flagstones. Worms of electrical wiring twisted from the walls, and a cement mixer stood next to a waist-high drum of dusty water in one corner, at the end of a wide flight of stone steps. Openings had been made at regular intervals along the length of one wall, and the sun poured through to light the room with an intense halogen glow.

He walked over to look through one of the openings. Below him, the land fell away in steep terraces. He could see steps leading down to the deep rectangular hole of a raw swimming pool, still at the concrete and bare pipe stage, and beyond that the view. Simon thought he’d never seen a more spectacular setting for a swim, and felt a moment of envy for the owner. But what was it going to be? The place was enormous, far too big for a house. He took one last look at the mountains, now turning a faded purple as the sun rose higher, and left to check on the progress of the injured Porsche.