Picnic in Provence (7 page)

Friends trickled in throughout the morning and were immediately put to work. There were more carrots to be grated for salad; tables and chairs to set up on the patch of grass between the house and the barns. I was in the kitchen chopping liver. To keep everyone going until the main event, the
méchoui
always begins with brochettes of grilled lamb’s liver, marinated briefly with a slick of olive oil, spicy red harissa pepper, salt, and a good earthy dose of cumin. When Affif butchered the lamb himself, he would save
la voilette,
the delicate, lace-like membrane of fat that surrounds the internal organs, to wrap the hunks of liver and give it a bit of sizzle on the grill. Unfortunately, the supermarket butcher had chosen to throw this part away.

Gwendal’s colleagues arrived from Paris. After five years of working on the bleeding edge of the digital-cinema industry, they were like an army unit, full of banter and private jokes. Alex brought reinforcements: two cases of Bordeaux. My eleven-month-old son
loved
the liver, proving, more than any passport, the French blood coursing through his veins.

During those lazy hours when the lamb browned slowly and it was too hot to sit outside, I found myself perched on some fading couch cushions in the barn with our friend Marie. She’s a teacher in a small town in the Pyrenees. She speaks classical Greek, and she’d refused to fill out administrative forms asking for the professions of her students’ parents: “What difference should that make!” she said indignantly. She’s the kind of warm, intelligent, thoughtful person who makes a new friend feel like an old friend in a hurry. She also speaks fluent English.

“I read your book,” she said. I braced myself, waiting for another literary sledgehammer. “I really enjoyed it. It was very thoughtful and well written.”

I was sure I didn’t know her well enough to throw my arms around her neck and sob with gratitude. Because the book was not published in French, and because talking about work in France is bad form in general, aside from the family drama, there had been little reaction on this side of the Atlantic. I was living parallel lives, one in which the book was an event to be celebrated, one in which it was barely acknowledged. I managed to clamp down my reaction to an acceptable European level. “
Merci,
Marie.
Ça me touche beaucoup
. That really means a lot to me.”

THERE IS NOTHING
fundamentally graceful about a woman with a greasy oven mitt lugging forty pounds of lamb across a field. It’s more about tradition, tribal ritual. I was honored with the first piece of lamb crackling, burning-hot, slick and shiny like the leather on a fine first edition. I had to resist the urge to pick my entire meal off the spit with my bare hands. I sunk my teeth into the crispy fat.
Take your diamonds, boys, just give me the skin.

As the afternoon heat gave way to an early-evening breeze, Gwendal and I took Alexandre to the yellow cherry tree in the garden. I’m sure my father-in-law once ate cherries off this tree; he was tall enough to reach deep into the branches without a ladder. (We keep the photo we took that day on the mantel: Alexandre raised above Gwendal’s head, his chubby fingers grabbing at the leaves.)

After the day’s feast, it seemed impossible that anyone would want dinner, yet somehow the spicy
merguez
on the grill lured everyone back to the tables. Marie had brought a case of melons with her across the Pyrenees. Alexandre didn’t seem to mind when the juice dripped past his elbows.

I can’t say this
méchoui
went as late as the one I remembered, with wine and the lilting melodies of
chansons réalistes
stretching late into the night. The kids, the rare Brittany heat wave, and the good Bordeaux wore us out. We were moving in a few days. I went to bed thinking about the people and places we would miss, all the boxes left to pack. We slept like little lambs, and woke up—if you can believe it—hungry.

T
he French have a habit of polite understatement. Something good gets a slight nod of the head. Something marvelous might elicit a firm
bien
. But anything truly spectacular, knock-it-out-of-the-park nirvanaesque gets a resounding
pas mal
—not bad. We’ve been here only a few weeks, but already I can tell you: summer in Provence is
pas mal
. The heat is positively shimmering. It makes everything undulate, like the landscape in a fever dream. If you can bear to roll down the windows in the car (I could write a sonnet titled “Ode to Air-Conditioning”), the perfume of the fresh-cut lavender fields rushes in, making everything else you’ve ever inhaled a distant memory.

The drive from Paris took just over twelve hours. Since we left at rush hour, it took us nearly three hours just to clear
le périphérique
—the giant ring road that encircles the city like a manacle. The movers had forgotten to pack the contents of the coat closet, so in addition to my jewelry and the family silver, the backseat was stuffed to the gills with every scarf, hat, mitten, umbrella, spare button, and bottle of shoe polish we’d accumulated over the past ten years. To the passing cars, we must have looked like a band of gypsies off to join the circus. We pulled into Céreste, wheels crunching through the heavy silence, at four in the morning. We laid Alexandre in his crib and fell asleep on a bare mattress.

The first sign of our neighbors was a small wicker basket on the kitchen stoop. I disappeared upstairs with a carton of books and when I came down there it was, like a valentine from a secret admirer. The basket was carefully arranged, overflowing with small batons of zucchini, their delicate yellow flowers still attached. There were also green peppers, longer and slimmer than the ones I knew. Balanced on top were two squat, roly-poly eggplants and
le pièce de résistance,
a bright yellow heirloom tomato so large it barely fit in my hand.

It didn’t take long for Jean, our next-door neighbor and vegetable benefactor, to appear. When he heard a string of French curses (Gwendal almost lost control of a box of dishes), he sauntered out; the metal gate at the entrance to his house shut with a clank behind him. Like a cow’s bell or a teenager’s ringtone, the sound was something we would learn to associate with his comings and goings.

Seventy-eight years old, Jean has close-cropped white hair, round glasses, and a belly that precedes him.
“Alors, les jeunes.”
He was still dressed in his gardening clothes, a white undershirt and loose gray sweatpants. Come to think of it, those may have been the only pair of sweatpants I’d seen since I arrived in France.

He leaned against the stone wall of the courtyard and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. At 9:00 a.m., he’d already done a full day’s work, leaving the house at six, back before the late-morning heat set in.

I kissed him on both cheeks.
“Merci beaucoup,”
I said, turning the basket to admire the vegetables from all angles.

He pointed to the zucchini. “You will make soup for the baby.” Over the past few months, I’d noticed that the French, particularly those of a certain generation, are positively dictatorial about babies and green vegetables. This has less to do with torture or nutrition than with introducing kids to the diverse flavors of the French table as early as possible. Almost as soon as they start on solid food, French children are expected to eat a miniature version of their parents’ meals. Zucchini and leeks are favorite places to start.

“You add a bit of olive oil, a bit of cream.” He looked over at Alexandre, still working on his morning bottle.
“Miam, miam,”
he said, patting his stomach. (That’s French for “yum, yum.”)

“Regarde ça,”
he said, picking up the yellow tomato and bouncing it a bit in his hand to emphasize its heft. “From my garden.”

“J’adore cuisiner.”
I love to cook.

“Ah” he said. “You will come any time you like.

“You are American?” he said, narrowing his eyes. Though he’d met me several times and no doubt had had this piece of information since we’d bought the house the year before, the tone was suspicious, a vague rumor that required confirmation or denial. Could a woman born in the land of McDonald’s really have a proper appreciation for French cuisine?

“Oui,”
I said, smiling hopefully.

“Before the war, my grandmother was the
chef de cuisine
at the American consulate in Nice.”

“Ah,
oui?
” I said, nodding and blinking rapidly. I hope I sounded suitably impressed. Sometimes the most tenuous connection is all it takes. Between Grandma and the tomato the size of a small pineapple, perhaps I had found my first culinary mentor.

The clang of Jean’s gate had brought Denis and Marguerite out onto their front steps. We heard the rattle of the heavy beaded curtain covering the front door. The subtle movement of the beads is meant to keep the flies out. We had our own hideous, if necessary, example over the kitchen door.

“Ho, Playboy.” Denis calls our eleven-month-old son Playboy, pronounced with a broad Marseille accent: “Play-bo-yah.” He’s a big man: big voice, big belly, big heart. He identifies himself as “L’Arménien,” though his family came over from Armenia more than a century ago. It’s very possible that if my great-grandchildren were to live in the village, they’d still be known as “Les New Yorkais.”

Though I had been speaking French every day for the better part of ten years, I strained to understand the speed, lilt, and expressions of France’s deep south. The Provençal accent has an extra
g
at the ends of words:
vin
becomes
ving,
pain
becomes
paing
. But Marseille natives, with their love of one-upmanship, add a whole extra syllable, an
eh, oh,
or
ah
that sounds like the one-two jab of an amateur boxer. As Denis bent forward to kiss my cheek, his large cross and nazar, a glass amulet in the shape of an eye, dangled on a gold chain into space. Marguerite appeared on the stoop with a watering can, her red hair cut Anna Wintour–style over her full cheeks. Although they are a generation older than us, they are newlyweds, recently married at the village town hall, complete with white dress and pink Cadillac.

I heard the creak of a heavy wooden door as Claire and Arnaud joined us in the middle of the narrow street. Their house was literally stuck to ours; their daughter’s room was once a part of our house, and we passed under her window to enter our small inner courtyard. Their little girl, Clémentine, scampered out from behind Claire’s knees. Two and a half years old and intensely verbal, she showed me a pigeon feather she had found, carefully smoothing its edges between her small fingers. I felt the fuzzy spring of Arnaud’s beard as we exchanged three rapid kisses. Depending on the region, one can spend quite a bit of time on perfunctory morning kisses in France. Two in Paris, and it seems to be the same here in Céreste, but just over the river in Apt it’s three, and if you happen to meet someone from northwestern France, it could be four. Plus, I’ve never found a consistent answer to the question of which cheek to offer first. I just close my eyes, lean forward, and hope for the best. If you get it right, it feels like a dance; if you get it wrong, you can end up in a head butt like a pair of contentious goats. I’m sure there are times when kissing people you barely know has a lot of advantages, especially for teenagers. Imagine—you’re seven-eighths of the way into someone’s personal space from birth.

I haven’t worked in a proper office in a while, but I imagine this is what it’s like, the proverbial gathering around the water cooler. But instead of discussing reality television or basketball, the men were talking about firewood. Arnaud chops his own. With his beard, plaid shirt, short ponytail and calm, steady gaze, it is easy to imagine him taking a meditative pleasure in wielding an ax at dawn on some misty spring morning. I looked up, squinting to protect my eyes from the searing light coming through the branches of the apricot tree.
Firewood?
How can anyone talk about firewood when it’s ninety degrees in the shade? I felt the moving boxes lurking behind me, waiting to be unpacked. It was unclear when or how we could excuse ourselves. It was Tuesday, and only two of our group were retired, yet no one seemed to have anywhere urgent to be.

Paris seemed impossibly far away—too far for a comparison. Still, I guess we won’t be lonely here. It was ten in the morning, I’d barely left my doorstep, and I’d already kissed eight—no, actually, nine—people.

TURNED OUT OUR
neighbors weren’t our only neighbors.

I was on my way to the cellar for a broom and heard a rustle. I opened the door a smidgen, heard distinct flapping, and immediately shut it again. “Gwendal, I think there’s a bird stuck in there.”

“It’s not a bird,” said Gwendal, stamping on the last of the cardboard boxes, “it’s a bat.”

“A what?”

“A bat. It probably moved in because there was no one living in the house.”

“Well, can you tell him to move
out,
” I said, backing away from the door.
There’s a new sheriff in town, and she doesn’t like vampire movies.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They eat the mosquitoes.”

Buying an apartment in Paris had taught us all about squatters, and the bat wasn’t our only encounter with the local wildlife. There were also scorpions—probably not the kind that could kill you, but even so. They hide in damp corners and behind laundry hampers, lounge in shower drains. No bigger than a matchbook, they seem completely unaware of their own puniness. When confronted with a shoe, they raise their pincers and flail around like Godzilla. You have to admire their pluck. Spiders are considered positively friendly. When the carpenter came by to measure the bookshelves, he patted the plaster walls and nodded up to a spiderweb across the kitchen ceiling.
“Ça veux dire que la maison est saine.”
It means the house is healthy. Flies are considered an acceptable nuisance; instead of screen doors, most homes sport beaded fly curtains. When we bought the house, I wondered about this decorative touch. The last time I’d seen one of those was in the ladies’ room of our local Chinese restaurant. In 1978.

At least I recognized the pigeons. I used to count the ones lined up on the roof of the A&P on the corner of Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from my dad’s apartment. These pigeons had decided, like the bats, that a house that hadn’t been lived in for twelve years was more theirs than ours.

The locals told us to buy an anti-pigeon sonar—which accomplished nothing at all. Then one day on my way to the café I saw a guy walking around the place des Marronniers with a long leather glove and a sleek, glassy-eyed falcon perched near his elbow. At first I thought the bird might be stuffed, which was weird enough, but then I saw its eyes dart back and forth, its feathers ruffle with impatience. I looked around for the cameras, sure they were filming a costume drama of some kind—Robin Hood was about to prance out from behind the iron gate of the château in tights. Not wanting to miss a village movie-star sighting, I asked the man what was going on.

“Ça fait peur aux pigeons,”
he said. The falcon is supposed to scare the pigeons.

Scare them?
Pigeons, if I remember correctly, have very small brains. This brings up existential questions: Do pigeons experience trauma? Can they even remember being scared, from one day to the next?

Sometimes translating from one language to another leaves a mental lag that allows concrete consequences to fall through the cracks. Just after our arrival, I started finding enormous wasplike creatures in the dining room, two or three each evening. They were yellow and black and made a sound like a remote-control helicopter. I brought a dead one in a plastic bag over to Arnaud.
Frelon,
I was told, very dangerous; a few stings can kill a small child. But somehow the word
frelon
just didn’t sound that serious. If I’d known then what I know now, that there was a hornets’ nest at the base of my chimney, I would have gone after them with something sturdier than a paperback copy of
Me Talk Pretty One Day
.

And then there’s the scratching. It’s no wonder people used to think their houses were haunted. It began during one of Gwendal’s trips back to Paris for work. Thinking maybe the bat had migrated from the cellar to the upstairs hall, I gathered my courage, rolled last week’s
New Yorker
into a makeshift baton, and went to face the enemy. There was no one there. At least, no one I could see. I sat up most of the night listening to the claws of the invisible intruder racing to and fro above my head.

“It’s probably a
loir,
” said Angela. Over the year we were preparing the move to Céreste, Rod and Angela, our English B&B hosts, had become dear friends, not to mention a valuable source of local information. My hands were still shaky from a sleepless night when she gave me a much-needed espresso the next morning.

“What’s a
loir?
” I said, imagining a huge slinky rodent with eight feet and four eyes.

“I think it’s a dormouse.”

“It didn’t sound like a dormouse. It sounded like a yeti.”

And then there’s Guy. Stealthy as a fox, silent as a dead mosquito, and hunted by his clients with the zeal of the wild boar. Guy is our plumber. He walks around town in a royal-blue jumpsuit, which should make him easier to spot than a general in the Napoleonic wars, but just when you see him and think you can catch him without breaking into an undignified run, he manages to dip around a corner, or through a gate, and disappear. The extraordinary calcium levels in the local water require the timely replacement of our hot-water heater. It has been a few weeks now,
timely
being a relative term here in Provence. Guy has an excellent reputation, but like the hares that scamper across the roads at night, you can never tell when there’s going to be a sighting. I don’t run around the house naked anymore because one day, on a non-aforementioned date—weeks, perhaps months, after my urgent call—I’ll find him staring, patiently, through the window of the kitchen door at eight a.m., waiting for the key to the cellar.