Our House is Certainly Not in Paris (25 page)

It is extraordinary too to discover such events and places are on the very doorstep of Cuzance.

And another day.

Going back in history, I do not remember if I told you about the Cuzance treasure (some coins are on display in Musée Binche in Brive) but most of it is in another museum in Paris. That is why on the Cuzance escutcheon appears a gold doubloon!

Truly, there seems to be no end to the fame of our
petite
village, even though it is buried in the depths of rural France
.

In my Inbox on yet another occasion, to balance the pathos.

After sad stories concerning Cuzance, I must tell you about one that made people in Cuzance hilarious last year. Across the lane southward from your house, a young couple had a maison built a few years ago. The young woman tried to have activities so she claimed to give watercolour lessons (in fact she should have been paying for the lessons) and then she was offered a job looking after school kids before and after school hours. After one year she disappeared and I asked what had happened to her... Well, people told me, she had separated from her husband and was living with somebody else in the village where the Bonne Famille restaurant is; but she had separated from her husband on such good terms, that before leaving, she had taken the trouble to find a replacement to keep her husband happy and had introduced her to him. Last year, she was back in Cuzance looking after the kids... but I don't think she is back in her home yet! Funny? Sad? Contemporary anyway!

During the long, cold winter months in Lyon, there is more time for Jean-Claude to write and share his stories of Cuzance. He has embraced my desire to soak up his stories from afar and this, his last, sums up all that is extraordinary, alarming and heart-warming in our
petite
village.

Let me tell you a very sad story that is unfolding in Cuzance these days. Do you remember the Pech, that is, the hill that is crowned by the stadium (and now the Maison de la Truffe)? When you go up the hill, on the right, there is a low-slung one-storey bungalow; twenty years ago it was quite solitary on the hill except for the old house on the left of the road. The inhabitants were a jolly fat woman who we mainly saw in her Volkswagen Polo and her live-in, who went about riding a bicycle (he was later killed on it on his way back from Souillac – he was not overprotected as are Tour de France cyclists!).

My contacts with this woman then deteriorated because I was attacked by her dog every time I went past her house. (Rest easy, when I say deteriorated, I mean that I ignored her as far as possible)... However, her next dog – a Pekinese – did not, and had a strange bias against me whenever I walked past her house or past Madame Dal's house where the dog took refuge all day since she was mostly absent.

Well time went by; she had another live-in (an ex circus, odd-job man)... and they built three council houses just below her house. In one of them lives my friend Michel Bournat, so that I saw quite a lot of her place, in fact. Her place deteriorated and I heard rumours about her being a danger on the road since she drove carelessly and at excessive speeds. Then, one day, there were two dustbins overturned on the road between her house and my friend's, and plenty of litter on the road. I enquired about it from my friend and he told me it was the woman who had become quite mad at him for no reason at all. (You know the dapper little man he is and how clean his wife is.) Sometime later, I was surprised to see that Michel's gate was locked and he told me that the woman had taken a fancy to pouring garbage into his garden! Later, I was apprised that she attacked the children of another house further up the hill.

Then one day I saw that her roof was quite ruined... and this was the start of a story that made me quite proud of the Cuzance citizens, because when we arrived in the next spring, I remarked to Michel that the woman's roof had been repaired. He explained that her roof had been ruined by a storm, as a consequence of the lady being swindled by Irish gypsies, who told her they would clean and renovate her roof but replaced her tiles with worthless used-up ones. So, that when a storm struck, the roof blew down. And, this is where I fall in love with the villagers: they worked on her roof for free so that she should have something over her head.

Time elapsed until one day, Michel stopped by our place, quite agitated and full of nervous tics. Apparently, the woman had attempted to kill him and his wife with a knife.

Another neighbour saw the scene, photographed it, called the Maire who in turn called the gendarmes, who had the woman sent to a psychiatric hospital in the vicinity. The next day she was back, mouthing horrors and threats against the whole world... and especially against Michel and his wife!

And so the problem goes on since the woman refuses to take her medicine, she suffers from violent bouts of aggression... and the gendarme are called... and the rigmarole goes on.

I even heard she hurt a gendarme once, but nothing can be done to (or against?) her. If you go by her house, you will notice it because of the weeds and abandoned look (all her shutters are closed and she goes out only at night); sometimes (rarely) her children come and tidy up the garden... and the situation deteriorates slowly until... drama strikes?

Sad is it not? A portrait of our civilization!

And that indeed sums it perfectly. There is simply nothing else I can possibly add to Jean-Claude's history lessons and stories.

Is it the paving that is crazy or the people laying it? This is a question that is full of imponderables
.
Stuart comments that it could certainly drive people crazy – and very quickly too... As a prelude to laying it the following day, after an
apéritif,
we start playing around with the pieces, laying them out in various configurations round
la piscine.
The permutations are endless. Not only are the sizes any number of variables, so too the thickness of the stone varies. It's definitely going to be an alarm clock morning to get the paving underway. Once again, the task ahead is a daunting one.

My job is to unpack the paving, then sort the pieces and start laying them out. It is soon rapidly apparent that the appellation ‘crazy paving' is not a misnomer. Meanwhile Stuart has to come to terms with his industrial cement mixer and the different proportions of sand and cement to mix. Unlike
artisans
we have heard of, he will not abandon a batch of fresh cement if the church bells strikes twelve, signalling
déjeuner
.

No, we will work on regardless, especially as Sunday is absolutely a day of rest – our very own village
vide grenier
day. We are hoping Cuzance defies the odds of the weather forecast and the predicted storm does not strike at lunchtime. If the storm does hit, the annual lunch will have to be abandoned for the third year in a row. The only satisfied customers were the pigs as they were the happy recipients of all the food.

After just a short time, it is quite evident that I am simply never going to grasp the intricacies of how to lay crazy paving. The novice assumes that the very random nature of it, means that it will just literally all fall into place in a pleasing pattern. This is not the case at all. Far from it. Its placement requires logistics and mathematical precision.

These are not skills I have. They are not skills I am going to acquire. So, now this task is down to Stuart as well.

What I am left with? It would seem that labouring is my forte. This is an odd division of labour, for I am not the physically strong one in our team of two. It means that one of my main jobs now is to unpack the crates of crazy paving – all six of them. Not only does Stuart have to now mix the concrete and then apply it, he also has to first put all the paving into place. I labour. I lay out all the paving in ever-widening rows so we can see at a glance which piece may possibly fit into which place. I fetch and carry and move and appraise. I move them again.

Laying the concrete between the pavers does not proceed smoothly either. The concrete goes ‘off' far too quickly. Apparently this is the correct term when the mix is far too dry. Similarly, there is an unexpected art form to filling the spaces between the pavers and using the tool to smooth it off. This task too was meant to be one of my designated jobs. I just can't get the hang of it at all. There are many times in our other life in Cuzance when it is not all one of beer and skittles. Or should that be,
pastis
and
boules
? There remains a yawning chasm to pave round
la piscine
that seems far beyond our reach in the time frame we have. Yet again, the phrase rings prominently in my mind, ‘When will the
vacances
become a true holiday?' It's time for a drastic reassessment.

While it's all well and good to bond so firmly with Pied de la Croix through our sheer hard work, it rapidly gets to the point with the paving that it simply consumes our lives. I have cause again to question the reasoning behind buying our
petite maison,
rather than having a French
vacances
each year in a quintessential French farmhouse.

What has happened to the anticipated outings, the exploratory drives, the leisurely lunches? Time seems to have rapidly evaporated.

When we renovate, we are not used to not reaching our targets. Once we set a
renovation
goal, we work resolutely towards it. Not this time it would seem. We moderate our plans; they were just too ambitious. The paving project may now have to be completed next year. As for the bathroom plans? They too will have to be postponed for the year after. Surely then the annual French
vacances
will begin in earnest?

Another barrow full.

Fete en
Cuzance is in full swing. As we work away on Saturday afternoon, there is a
boules
tournament outside the
Maires'
office. Do we have time to go and watch?
Non
.

Preparations for the
vide grenier
have been going on for days. From our little porch, we can see the red tape in Marinette's walnut orchard marking out places for the stalls to be set up on Sunday. The first village dance went until 4 am on Friday night. A set of keys was found as they were tidying up. It was thought they are ours. I am profoundly grateful there was not a knock at the door at that time to find out if they were indeed ours, keys clutched in the
Maire's
hand. I am not sure though why it is that they think the keys may have belonged to us...

The outside disco, held in a marquee on Saturday night, does not start until darkness falls at 10 pm. Another huge day spent with the compacter, ends with
dîner
al fresco, accompanied by the discordant, surreal sound of the annual Cuzance disco beating loudly across the fields with an overtone of wafting pig aroma. Our gaze settles on the huge holes that
lapin
have started digging in the grass in front of our
petite maison
. Rabbits look altogether different bounding happily through the fields. Ah, life in the country.

We watch groups of young people drift in excited clusters past our
petite maison
.

We wonder where on earth they are the rest of the time and what they all do. Until tonight and the evening a group of
lycée
students came to sell us raffle tickets, we had always thought the population of Cuzance consisted of mainly much older inhabitants.

It's quite a mystery. Wherever the young members of our village may be the rest of the year, it is wonderful to see all ages and generations come together to celebrate life in their village.

There is nothing quite as exciting as opening your shutters to see your own village
vide grenier
unfolding right outside your
petite maison.
Cars are parked tightly, end to end, either side of our stone pillars and clear-out-the-attic stalls stretch out from the nearby curve in the road, leading down to the Hotel Arnal and beyond. As I eat my
petite déjeuner
, I watch Stuart from the window as he sets off on his second reconnoitre. He was up so early in anticipation that it was still dark and on his first foray, the stallholders were still setting up in the dim breaking light.

It is quite an experience to set off from our
très jollie
steps, basket as always slung over my arm – ever hopeful of filling it to the brim with treasure – and
voila
, we are immersed in our own Cuzance
vide grenier
. This year we were so determined not to miss it, that we have booked our return flights after the
grand
event. Our hopes are not disappointed at what we hope will be the first of many times at our own village annual market. My first – and what proves to be my best – purchase is a sweet, black
chapeau.
The woman tells me it was her grandmother's gardening hat. Who she was and where she gardened, I will never know. My elation knows no bounds when I wear it immediately and am told I look like Audrey Hepburn – my style icon. It makes an enormous change to feel stylish rather than in my usual dishevelled daily state.