A Year in Provence (7 page)

We tried both. To begin with, we made a conscious effort to become more philosophical in our attitude to time, to treat days and weeks of delays in the Provençal fashion—that is, to enjoy the sunshine and to stop thinking like city people. This month, next month, what’s the difference? Have a pastis and relax. It worked well enough for a week or two, and then we noticed that the building materials at the back of the house were turning green with the first growth of spring weeds. We decided to change our tactics and get some firm dates out of our small and elusive team of workmen. It was an educational experience.

We learned that time in Provence is a very elastic commodity, even when it is described in clear and specific terms.
Un petit quart d’heure
means sometime today.
Demain
means sometime this week. And, the most elastic time segment of all,
une quinzaine
can mean three weeks, two months, or next year, but never, ever does it mean fifteen days. We learned also to interpret the hand language that accompanies any discussion of deadlines. When a Provençal looks you in the eye and tells you that he will be hammering on your door ready to start work next Tuesday for certain, the behavior of his hands is all-important. If they are still, or patting you reassuringly on the arm, you can expect him on Tuesday. If one hand is held out at waist height, palm downwards, and begins to rock from side to side, adjust the timetable to Wednesday or Thursday. If the rocking develops into an agitated waggle, he’s really talking about next week or God knows when, depending on circumstances beyond his control. These unspoken disclaimers, which seem to be instinctive and therefore more revealing than speech, are occasionally reinforced by the magic word
normalement
, a supremely versatile escape clause worthy of an insurance policy.
Normalement
—providing it doesn’t rain, providing the truck hasn’t broken down, providing the
brother-in-law hasn’t borrowed the tool box—is the Provençal builder’s equivalent of the fine print in a contract, and we came to regard it with infinite suspicion.

But, despite their genial contempt for punctuality and their absolute refusal to use the telephone to say when they were coming or when they weren’t, we could never stay irritated with them for long. They were always disarmingly cheerful, they worked long and hard when they were with us, and their work was excellent. In the end, they were worth waiting for. And so, little by little, we reverted to being philosophical, and came to terms with the Provençal clock. From now on, we told ourselves, we would assume that nothing would be done when we expected it to be done; the fact that it happened at all would be enough.

F
AUSTIN
was behaving curiously. For two or three days he had been clanking up and down on his tractor, towing a contraption of metal intestines which spewed fertilizer to either side as he passed between the rows of vines. He kept stopping to get off the tractor and walk over to a field, now empty and overgrown, which had been planted with melons. He studied the field from one end, remounted his tractor, sprayed some more vines, and returned to study the other end. He paced, he pondered, he scratched his head. When he went home for lunch, I walked down to see what it was he found so fascinating, but to me it looked like any other fallow melon field—a few weeds, some tatters of plastic left over from the strips that had protected last year’s crop, half an acre of nothing. I wondered if Faustin suspected it of harboring buried treasure, because we had already dug up two gold Napoleon coins nearer the house, and he had told us that there were probably more to be found. But peasants don’t hide their gold in the middle of cultivated land when it can be squirreled away more securely under the flagstones or down a well. It was odd.

He came visiting that evening with Henriette, looking unusually
spruce and businesslike in his white shoes and orange shirt, and bearing jars of homemade rabbit pâté. Half way through his first pastis, he leaned forward confidentially. Did we know that the wine produced from our vineyards—Côtes du Lubéron—was about to be given
Appellation Contrôlée
status? He leaned back, nodding slowly, and said
“Eh oui”
several times while we absorbed the news. Clearly, said Faustin, the wine would become more expensive and vineyard owners would make more money. And, clearly, the more vines one has the more money one makes.

There was no arguing with that, so Faustin moved on to a second drink—he drank in an efficient, unobtrusive way, and always reached the bottom of his glass before I expected—and put forward his proposition. It seemed to him that our melon field could be more profitably employed. He inhaled some pastis while Henriette produced a document from her bag. It was a
droit d’implantation
, giving us the right to plant vines, a privilege accorded to us by the government itself. While we looked at the paper, Faustin demolished the nonsensical idea of continuing to grow melons, dismissing them with a wave of his glass as being too demanding in terms of time and water, and always vulnerable to attack by the wild boar who come down from the mountains in the summer. Only last year, Faustin’s brother Jacky had lost a third of his melon crop. Eaten by the boars! The profit disappearing into a pig’s belly! Faustin shook his head at the painful memory, and had to be revived by a third large pastis.

By chance, he said, he had made some calculations. Our field would accommodate 1,300 new vines in place of the tiresome melons. My wife and I looked at each other. We were equally fond of wine and Faustin, and he obviously had his heart set on progress and expansion. We agreed that the extra vines sounded like a good idea, but thought no more about it after he had left. Faustin is a ruminant among men, not given to hasty action, and in any case, nothing happens quickly in Provence. Perhaps next spring he would get around to it.

At seven o’clock the following morning, a tractor was plowing
up the melon field, and two days later the planting team arrived—five men, two women, and four dogs, under the direction of the
chef des vignes
Monsieur Beauchier, a man with forty years’ experience of planting vines in the Lubéron. He personally pushed the small plow behind the tractor, making sure that lines were straight and correctly spaced, trudging up and down in his canvas boots, his leathery face rapt in concentration. The lines were staked at each end by bamboo rods and marked by lengths of twine. The field was now stripped and ready to be turned into a vineyard.

The new vines, about the size of my thumb and tipped with red wax, were unloaded from the vans while Monsieur Beauchier inspected his planting equipment. I had assumed that the planting would be done mechanically, but all I could see were a few hollow steel rods and a large triangle made of wood. The planting team gathered around and were assigned their duties, then jostled untidily into formation.

Beauchier led the way with the wooden triangle, which he used like a three-sided wheel, the points making equidistant marks in the earth. Two men followed him with steel rods, plunging them into the marks to make holes for the vines, which were planted and firmed in by the rear guard. The two women, Faustin’s wife and daughter, dispensed vines, advice, and fashion comments on the assortment of hats worn by the men, particularly Faustin’s new and slightly rakish yachting cap. The dogs enjoyed themselves by getting in everyone’s way, dodging kicks and tangling themselves in the twine.

As the day wore on, the planters became more widely spaced, with Beauchier often two hundred yards in front of the stragglers at the back, but distance was no barrier to conversation. It appears to be part of the ritual that lengthy discussions are always conducted between the two people farthest away from each other, while the intervening members of the team curse the dogs and argue about the straightness of the lines. And so the raucous
procession moved up and down the field until mid-afternoon, when Henriette produced two large baskets and work stopped for the Provençal version of a coffee break.

The team sat on a grassy bank above the vines, looking like a scene from Cartier-Bresson’s scrapbook, and attacked the contents of the baskets. There were four liters of wine and an enormous pile of the sugared slices of fried bread called
tranches dorées
, dark gold in color and crisp and delicious to taste. Grandfather André arrived to inspect what had been done, and we saw him poking the earth critically with his stick and then nodding his head. He came over for a glass of wine and sat in the sun, a benign old lizard, scratching a dog’s stomach with the end of his muddy stick and asking Henriette what was for dinner. He wanted to eat early so that he could watch
Santa Barbara
, his favorite television soap opera.

The wine had all gone. The men stretched and brushed the crumbs from their mouths and went back to work. By late evening it was finished, and the ragged old melon field was now impeccable, the tiny dots of new vines just visible against the setting sun. The team gathered in our courtyard to unkink their backs and make inroads on the pastis, and I took Faustin to one side to ask him about payment. We’d had the tractor for three days, and dozens of hours of labor. What did we owe them? Faustin was so anxious to explain that he put down his glass. We would pay for the vines, he said, but the rest was taken care of by the system which operated in the valley, with everyone contributing their time free when major replanting had to be done. It all evened out in the end, he said, and it avoided paperwork and tedious dealings with
les fiscs
about taxes. He smiled and tapped the side of his nose with a finger and then, as though it was a small matter hardly worth mentioning, he asked if we would like 250 asparagus plants put in while we still had the use of the tractor and the men. It was done the next day. So much for our theory that nothing happens fast in Provence.

·  ·  ·

T
HE
L
UBÉRON
sounded different in spring. Birds who had been ducking all winter came out of hiding now that the hunters were gone, and their song replaced gunfire. The only jarring noise I could hear as I walked along the path toward the Massot residence was a furious hammering, and I wondered if he had decided to put up a For Sale notice in preparation for the beginning of the tourist season.

I found him on the track beyond his house, contemplating a five-foot stake that he had planted at the edge of a clearing. A rusty piece of tin had been nailed to the top of the stake, with a single angry word daubed in white paint:
PRIVÉ
! Three more stakes and notices were lying on the track, together with a pile of boulders. Massot was obviously intending to barricade the clearing. He grunted good morning and picked up another stake, hammering it into the ground as if it had just insulted his mother.

I asked him what he was doing.

“Keeping out the Germans,” he said, and started to roll boulders into a rough cordon between the stakes.

The piece of land that he was sealing off was some distance from his house, and on the forest side of the track. It couldn’t possibly belong to him, and I said I thought it was part of the national park.

“That’s right,” he said, “but I’m French. So it’s more mine than the Germans’.” He moved another boulder. “Every summer they come here and put up their tents and make
merde
all over the forest.”

He straightened up and lit a cigarette, tossing the empty packet into the bushes. I asked him if he had thought that maybe one of the Germans might buy his house.

“Germans with tents don’t buy anything except bread,” he said with a sniff of disdain. “You should see their cars—stuffed with German sausage, German beer, tins of sauerkraut. They bring it all with them. Mean? They’re real
pisse-vinaigres.
”

Massot, in his new role as protector of the countryside and authority on the economics of tourism, went on to explain the problem of the peasant in Provence. He admitted that tourists—even German tourists—brought money to the area, and that people who bought houses provided work for local builders. But look what they had done to property prices! It was a scandal. No farmer could afford to pay them. We tactfully avoided any discussion of Massot’s own attempts at property speculation, and he sighed at the injustice of it all. Then he cheered up, and told me a house-buying story that had ended to his complete satisfaction.

There was a peasant who for years had coveted his neighbor’s house; not for the house itself, which was almost a ruin, but for the land that was attached to it. He offered to buy the property, but his neighbor, taking advantage of the sharp rise in house prices, accepted a higher offer from a Parisian.

During the winter, the Parisian spent millions of francs renovating the house and installing a swimming pool. Finally, the work is finished, and the Parisian and his chic friends come down for the long First of May weekend. They are charmed by the house and amused by the quaint old peasant who lives next door, particularly by his habit of going to bed at eight o’clock.

The Parisian household is awakened at four in the morning by Charlemagne, the peasant’s large and noisy cockerel, who crows nonstop for two hours. The Parisian complains to the peasant. The peasant shrugs. It is the country. Cocks must crow. That is normal.

The next morning, and the morning after that, Charlemagne is up and crowing at four o’clock. Tempers are getting frayed, and the guests return to Paris early, to catch up on their sleep. The Parisian complains again to the peasant, and again the peasant shrugs. They part on hostile terms.

In August, the Parisian returns with a houseful of guests. Charlemagne wakes them punctually every morning at four. Attempts at afternoon naps are foiled by the peasant, who is doing
some work on his house with a jackhammer and a loud concrete mixer. The Parisian insists that the peasant silence his cockerel. The peasant refuses. After several heated exchanges, the Parisian takes the peasant to court, seeking an injunction to restrain Charlemagne. The verdict is in favor of the peasant, and the cockerel continues his early morning serenades.