A House in the Sunflowers (16 page)

In Monflanquin posters went up for a performance of Molière’s
L’Avare
, The Miser, which was to be held
in the square at the summit of the town, using the church wall as a back drop. The company
Les Baladins D’Agenais
tour the whole south-west region during the summer and our town was to get one performance. Had
les Bertrand
seen them before? Were they any good? Raymond shrugged. He had no idea, but if we were going they would like to come.

Billed to start at nine o’clock, half an hour later a small army of technicians was still making sound and lighting checks. The audience of about a hundred and fifty, many seated on wooden benches, were getting restless and I wondered what we had let ourselves in for. Suddenly it was dark, the lights came up, music began and streaming out from the house of the Black Prince came a wonderfully costumed troupe of actors. Running, leaping, cartwheeling, walking on their hands, they were so skilled in the style of the Commedia del Arte that they took our breath away. The set was a high wooden scaffolding with a staircase on each side and downstage a simple wooden step ladder, the steps facing the audience.

Much of the first scene which takes place between the daughter and her lover was played while swinging high on the scaffolding, without for one moment impairing the speaking. The girl often hung upside down and just as it seemed that her delicious breasts must tumble out of her low cut dress she would swing upright again as the audience sighed. Crouched
motionless at the top of the tall stepladder, his back to the audience, sat the miser. When he first turned to reveal the grotesque white face, black lines on either side of the mouth, the crowd gasped. With infinite slowness, back braced against the steps, he began to descend the ladder like a malevolent spider, extending his thin black legs and flexing his bony fingers. In the scene where he discovers that his money has been stolen he scuttled into the audience, an anguished and desperate figure. The children shrieked and cried ‘
Non! Non!
’ when he demanded if one of them had stolen his treasure, but no one laughed. It was a masterly performance and the crowd applauded and cheered.

‘
C’etait quelque chose,
’ said Grandma as we walked down to the car. Since then we have tried not to miss any of their performances, which included a pageant on the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine played in the now dry moat of the great Château of Bonaquil. The setting was spectacular, they used the battlements and towers, and the great horses which they rode in and out added most powerfully to both sound and smell.

As August ended another scent was beginning to fill the air. Ripening plums were once again weighing down the branches and this year we would inaugurate another new machine. Raymond had talked about it the previous year. Designed and manufactured locally,
la nouvelle machine pour les prunes
apparently shook
and collected the fruit at speed. ‘It’s a marvellous invention, marvellous,’ Raymond had declared. ‘It will do the work in half the time.’ Grandpa had said nothing, just pursed his mouth and wrinkled up his thin nose as though there was a bad smell somewhere.

We cleared the ground of the few plums that had fallen in the night and awaited the arrival of
la machine.
A triumphant, yet clearly nervous, Raymond appeared, his tongue wagging wildly as he tried to manoeuvre into position what looked like a giant grasshopper with red legs and folded green wings trailing behind the tractor. He backed it eventually to touch the first tree in the row and at the pull of a lever a claw grasped the slender trunk. ‘
Attention!
’ he yelled as suddenly the great wings unfurled to encircle the tree with an upside down umbrella five metres across. At the touch of a third lever the tree shook and shuddered as if in ecstasy, the leaves in a frenzy as the lavender-coloured plums pelted into the green canopy and then tumbled through the central holes into the bright red containers beneath. Once empty the umbrella swiftly refolded and
la machine
moved to the next tree while we, the humble retinue, bent to retrieve the few plums that had fallen off the edge. It was a pretty spectacular performance.

All went well and Raymond was beginning to relax a little until we came to the end of the row. A small branch, hanging very low with fruit, obstructed the
unfurling. Before it could be lifted clear it was ripped off by the force of the umbrella. Throwing his arms in the air and cursing loudly Raymond jumped from the tractor, picking up the torn branch as tenderly as though it were a human limb.
‘Ah, il y a des défauts,
’ he said sadly, looking at his new toy.

Claudette comforted him, ‘
Oh il y a toujours des défauts
.’

‘
C’est vrai. C’est vrai.
’ Reassured he climbed back and began again.

It was certainly all much quicker. There were far fewer of us and yet by midday we had harvested almost two tonnes of plums and were finished. The small plastic crates into which we had emptied our baskets in previous years had been replaced by great wooden
paloxes
each holding two hundred kilos which had to be loaded with the fork lift – another tricky manoeuvre – instead of being nonchalantly swung onto the trailer by M. Demoli’s strong brown arms. M. Demoli was, sadly, absent. We had hardly glimpsed him all summer. His wife, not unreasonably, had grown weary of living in a hovel and had accepted the offer of a neat, new, council bungalow on the edge of Monflanquin. He had refused to go. Even worse, the scrap dealer for whom he had worked on an extremely freelance basis, in the winter, had suddenly moved to another district. Unable to cope with two desertions, M. Demoli, it was said, had taken to his bed and no one could get him out of
it. Raymond, with typical kindness, had tried but even he had given up. Fernande, his wife, unperturbable as ever, worked with us and admired the new machine but the days of pelting her with plums were now
quelles d’autrefois.

After lunch a delighted Raymond drove out of the courtyard to take his loaded trailer to the
Coopérative
where the plums would be dried. Before getting the machine he would have worked all afternoon climbing up and down the iron ladder to shake by hand and was often so tired at night that he would fall asleep over his supper. The weather was glorious and all the talk of the bumper harvest. Neighbours came to admire
la nouvelle machine
and everyone, except Grandpa, was delighted.

However, several days later Raymond returned from the
Coopérative
in a state of shock. There were too many plums! He was not the only farmer to have planted more trees in the last seven years, trees that were fruiting fully for the first time, nor was he the only one to have bought a machine. The
Coopérative
, though working flat out both night and day, simply did not have enough ovens to dry all the plums and they had decided to limit each
producteur
to two crates a day. It seemed there might be a plum mountain. What could be done? Each day some ripe plums would fall whether the trees were shaken or not, but that night there was a strong wind which blew in from the west
and by next morning a gentle but persistent rain was drenching a thick carpet of plums. They would rot if they were left but the machine could not be used.

With raised voices and anguished gestures telephone calls were made. Distant cousins arrived to help and very old, rarely seen neighbours put on galoshes and ancient oilskins and crept out to join them. While
la machine
stood idly by with folded wings we picked up the plums in the way they had always been picked. Grandma had often talked about the problems of harvesting plums in the rain. This was our first such experience and, as we scraped the mud off our leaden boots for the tenth time we knew what she meant. The rain, now heavy enough to penetrate the trees, dripped relentlessly down our bent necks.

Once the two crates were full Raymond drove them glumly away while Claudette unearthed a few dozen of the smaller plastic crates which, by midday, we had filled. We loaded them and took them down to the farm.

The ancient
étuve
was already alight, smoke rising, a triumphant Grandpa replenishing the wood. As soon as he had heard the news he had lit it, knowing that the drying of the remainder of the plums would be up to him. Grandma laid out the flat wooden trays on two long planks supported on oil drums and we tipped the wet sticky plums in, pressing them down gently into the corners. Once they were filled Mike
helped Grandpa to load the
wagonet
and push it into the heat. As the first load began to dry Grandma was already filling the next lot of trays. Their
système
needed once more, they were content. From every farm spirals of smoke arose from
étuves
that had long been abandoned but were now reborn.

At last the backlog was cleared. The
Coopérative
once more accepted as many crates as the farmers could deliver and there was talk of adding another oven before next year. The crisis was over. The weather returned to normal and the new machine once more unfurled its great green umbrella beneath the trees. The little iron ladder was reserved for those too fragile for its rough embrace. Mike stayed to help whenever Raymond needed a driver for the fork lift but I went back to work in my garden. For me the charm of harvesting plums had been the peace of the orchards, the quiet chatter under the trees and the sweet smell of warm fruit.

La machine
necessitated much yelling of ‘
STOP
’ as it was positioned and the fumes from the old tractor which pulled it lingered under the low trees. Yet another harvest had become
quelque chose d’autrefois
. Raymond felt it. Proud though he was of his machine he regretted the passing of another tradition.

‘But what else can I do?’ he said. ‘My parents-
in-law
are old and my children?’ he shrugged. Philippe was studying economics at college in Bordeaux and
Véronique was learning office skills. Neither was interested in a career as a farmer. ‘
Eh alors
,’ he said,
‘il faut acheter les machines
.’

But in the warm, wet woods, under the ageless layers of leaf mould another harvest waited that needed no machines. Two spells of heavy rain followed by long, hot days had begun a relentless underground movement, soon to reveal itself. Grandpa had already taken to disappearing between the trees in the early morning mist. When we commented he smiled, tapped the side of his nose, raised his eyebrows and said ‘In a few days.’

It was the beginning of the season of the
Boletus edulis or le cèpe de Bordeaux
and its imminent arrival was the signal for a frenzy of searching in the steaming woods. On our early morning trips to market there were cars parked along the edges of the wooded lanes and signs
CHAMPIGNONS INTERDIT
began to appear nailed to the trees. ‘
C’est la guerre
,’ said Raymond. ‘If you get up at seven your neighbour will get up at six.’ It sounded to me very much like the three little pigs.

One morning, well before eight, Claudette in her flowered hat, apron and Wellingtons and carrying a long stick, arrived on our porch. Flushed with excitement she opened her carrier bag to show us a dozen or so brownish-orange tops with thick white stalks which broadened at the base. Some six inches across, others no bigger than her thumb, she took each one out as
tenderly as though it were alive, laying them on the well cover before sitting down to drink coffee. She admitted that it was the fascination of finding, even more than the eating of these white fleshed edible toadstools that obsessed her. ‘
C’est la passion
,’ she laughed.

Normally too busy to take even an afternoon off, once the
cèpes
had begun she neglected the farm and spent hours in the woods. ‘
Elle est toujours comme ça
,’ said Raymond in apparent indulgence, except that his passion is eating them. We were invited to try them, a whole dish full, freshly picked and cooked crisp. ‘
Sentez, sentez
,’ said Raymond, in a kind of ecstasy. ‘When they are cooking they perfume the whole house.’ I really felt quite guilty. They were perfectly edible but, try as I might, their appeal was lost on me. ‘
Oh, c’est une question d’habitude
,’ he said kindly.

The excitement of finding them was something I could understand. Into a soft, humid world of dappled light and shadows, the very concentration of looking, adjusting one’s eyes to each patch of patterned ground, turning the leaves gently with a stick and circling round and round, anxious not to miss an inch, was mesmeric.

The wood was full of fungi, underfoot and hanging like thick, leathery lips from the trunks of the trees, but, by now, we knew what we were looking for. Each worked in their own small section but at the first cry we would converge for the
cèpes
were always in a
cluster, some clearly visible above ground, others just the faintest concavity beneath the thick carpet of leaves. We pulled them gently and then tried to remember the exact location, for tomorrow there would be more – if we managed to get there first.

With no arduous preparation of the ground, no expensive fertilisers or seed, no watering or weeding, I could understand the fascination of such a harvest for the farmer. It was a gift from the gods and that year was especially bountiful. Grandpa returned one morning with several kilos and refused to tell anyone where he had found them.

The biggest joke in the neighbourhood was old M. Boulloner, a retired Parisien, not the most popular person in our village. Each day he would bump slowly up the track to the woods in his red car. On one occasion he couldn’t find the way out of the wood and had to be rescued. Each evening he would return with a bulging carrier bag which, wisely, he would take down to the farm for Raymond to check. With cries of ‘
Mauvais, mauvais
,’ Raymond would reject one after the other until poor M. Boulloner was lucky to be left with one miserable mushroom for his evening omelette. Sadly, his smart city cap on his head and his sleek little dachshund at his heels, he would plod out to the car.