Читать книгу Provence for All Seasons - Gordon JD Bitney - Страница 10

Chapter 4

the welcome blossoms of spring

Is it so small a thing

To have enjoyed the sun,

To have lived light in the spring . . .

AGRICULTURE REMAINS THE ECONOMIC BASE; it forms the way of life in Provence. The seasons—printemps, été, automne and hiver—are the real measures of each year, not the weeks and months created for a calendar. For farmers, life revolves around the seasons, and each one brings a different set of tasks and new rewards.

With the approach of spring, the sun rose noticeably earlier each morning and lasted longer into the evenings. The warmer weather brought renewed activity and colour to the fields. Grass began to grow again beneath the trees in the orchards. Blossoms appeared first on the almond, followed by the apricot and then the cherry. The rows of grapevines in the vineyards lost their black gnarled look as the leaves unfurled. Birds returned. Spring affected the villagers as well—smiles came more naturally, along with more sonorous bonjours. Everyone moved with a relaxed new vigour. There was a new quality to the air. Shop doors were propped open, allowing the smell of baked goods and coffee to filter out onto the streets.

One day asparagus arrived at the Thursday market. We had already seen the long rows of plastic in the fields covering the new spears to keep them white and tender. Bundles were piled high on the tables according to size, from thick and stubby to long, thin tendrils, their white tips sometimes tinged pale purple. They were still muddy from the fields, like the earth-stained hands of the ruddy-faced farmers who had cut and brought them to the market. We stopped at a stall to talk to a woman who was still wearing her rubber boots, and bought a kilo for the week, knowing that the best asparagus would not be available for long.

“It grows so fast we have to cut it quickly,” she said, “before it shoots up and goes to seed.” She held a thick spear upright in her fist as if to demonstrate its quality. “It is at its best very young.”

• • •

Our gardener, François, who had been recommended to us by friends, began to look after the tasks that we couldn’t do ourselves. During our winter absence, he had cleaned up the garden and pruned the olive trees. He was not a tall man, and although he was muscular, he did not look particularly athletic. When I shook his hand the first time we met, I learned he was also very fine-boned. By any standard, he should not have been as strong as he was. All the same,

I watched him take on tasks that I would have avoided. Once, when a tree trunk that was over a foot in diameter had to be removed, he skilfully used a hatchet, the only tool available.

He was an exceptionally self-effacing, almost shy, person who always wore a smile that was as genuine as his willingness to see a job to completion. His other skill was correcting my French. In other words, he often worked on both me and the garden at the same time.

One day while we were unloading the stones for the garden path off his truck, another truck drove up with the stone bench I had bought at the used materials yard. A man got out to confirm that they were at the right house, while the other man parked the truck. Then the two deposited the bench along with its two pedestals in the middle of the driveway.

“Can you move it to the other side of the house?” I asked.

“That’s not our job,” one of them said, got back in the truck and waved as they drove away.

François and I looked at the bench lying in the driveway. I attempted to lift one end and quickly realized it was too heavy for me to move.

“Pas de problème”—no problem, François said. He climbed onto the back of his truck, where he extricated a two-wheeled handcart from among his gardening tools and then handed it down to me. Next, he hopped down and proceeded to work the bench onto the cart; together we towed it across the gravel patio to the other side of the house. We set the pedestals into the ground and then, in one joint effort, heaved the bench into place.

My wife had been watching from where she was gardening and walked over with her pruning shears in her gloved hand. “Wow! Does it ever look good in front of that stone wall. All we need now is a clump of lavender at each end. When it blooms this summer, it’ll be awesome!”

We all stood back admiring our success when Tabitha walked over, rubbed her chin against the bench and then hopped on to it, as if laying claim to this new object.

Light rain settled in that afternoon, so we stayed indoors to do some household tasks and relax. My wife was reading M.F.K. Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin’s treatise The Physiology of Taste, and I was working on my French with a Georges Simenon mystery.

Tabitha had hopped onto the sofa, curled up on my lap and gone to sleep.

“This is interesting,” Hélène said. “He says that a dinner should move from the most substantial courses to the lightest, while the wines should move from the lightest to the headier and more aromatic.”

“That makes sense,” I said, and went on reading.

“Wow, is he keen on cheese! Listen to this: ‘A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.’ What a brutal comparison!”

“Ugh,” was all I said, trying to focus on the mystery again. However, the bizarre nature of the comparison stuck in my mind. “Would you like some tea?”

“That would be nice,” she replied, without lifting her head from her book.

As I got up, I moved Tabitha from my lap onto the sofa. By the time I had put the kettle on, Tabitha was curled up on the warm spot where I had just been sitting. I picked her up and put her on my lap. When the kettle came to a boil,

I moved her again, and once again she settled onto my warm spot on the sofa. This time as I returned Tabitha emitted a grumble and hopped onto the floor. I picked her up and put her back on my lap.

“Aren’t you going to pour the tea?”

“Tabitha won’t let me. Maybe you can.”

She poured two cups of tea and put one next to me.

Instead of returning to her book, she reached for the morning Trib and began scanning the pages. Then she laughed. “Here’s an ad in the Personals section. A woman wants to meet a mature man. She gives quite a flattering description of herself and then states that the man she is looking for must be ‘pas de pantoufle’! He can’t be an old man wearing slippers!”

“I don’t quite get it.”

“It’s a French expression for a man who just shuffles around the house and doesn’t do anything. She wants someone young, not an old fart.”

That evening I was setting the table for dinner when Tabitha came in and sat by her empty food bowl. She looked at me while I set the table, then she meowed. I ignored her; she meowed again and didn’t take her eyes off me. I continued with what I was doing. Finally she walked over, wound herself between my legs, meowed and returned to her food dish.

“In a minute, Tabitha,” I said.

“She wants to be fed.”

“I’m getting a bottle of wine from the cellar. Then I’ll feed her.”

I walked away, but Tabitha dashed after me, batted at my leg, bit my ankle and then ran off.

“Ouch!” I said. “Why did she do that?”

“You didn’t feed her.”

I opened a can of cat food, spooned some into a bowl and put it on the floor. We were at the table having dinner when Tabitha walked back into the kitchen. She ignored her food bowl and sat on the floor beside me. Then she reached up with one paw and patted at my wrist.

“She’s poaching. Don’t spoil her.”

I gave her a bit of meat from my plate and she ate it. Then she walked over to Hélène, reached up and patted her on the wrist. Hélène muttered something and then picked a bit of meat off her plate and held it out. Tabitha nipped at it to pull it out of her fingers and let it drop to the floor, where she ate it and asked for more.

“Merde,” Hélène said.

At that moment Myrtille announced her presence with an owlish Siamese meow, followed by vigorously rubbing herself against my leg. Next she went to check out the food bowl and ate what Tabitha was now ignoring. Tabitha watched Myrtille and then reached up and patted Hélène’s hand once more. A détente between the two cats had been reached last summer, but there were still territorial rivalries that surfaced in short skirmishes. Tabitha had staked out the sofa as her space. All the same, Myrtille would walk by, rubbing her tail along the cushion that Tabitha was sleeping on, as if testing the exact boundary. Then she would walk away to curl up on the seat of one of the wicker chairs that was pushed under the kitchen table.

A few days later we were washing up the dishes after dinner when Myrtille reappeared in the olive tree and hopped onto the balcony to stand at the open French doors to the kitchen. She didn’t come in. Odd, I thought, as I got on with what I was doing. Then she turned and walked back over to the edge of the balcony where she meowed and sat looking down the tree.

Hélène stepped onto the balcony to the railing to see what this was about. “She’s not alone.”

I came out. At the base of the olive tree were two young cats, not kittens any longer, but not yet grown to their full size. One after the other, not having acquired the full agility and assurance of adult cats, they clawed their way clumsily up the tree and onto the balcony.

“She’s brought her kittens for us.”

Hélène put a bowl of cat food on the floor. They walked over and ate, pushing and shoving at each other. Myrtille, who last year had what could be called a competitive appetite, just sat nearby and watched. The two young ones stayed long enough for us to pick them up, pet them and then put them down next to Myrtille, who watched every movement. Finally, she led them back down the olive tree. That was the only time she showed us her kittens; she did not bring them around again. She seemed to treat our house as her time away from them—a mother tired of the demands of her offspring.

• • •

Every Frenchman seemed to own un vélo and ventured out regularly, either alone or in groups, spinning in swarms along the roads. Cars inevitably lined up behind, waiting impatiently yet politely for any straight stretch of road to pass. My vélo, an all-purpose bike with fatter tires to accommodate rougher roads, had become a companion of sorts. If I stopped riding for more than a day or two, I missed the exercise and was anxious to get back to it once again.

One morning, as I rode into the village, I saw the owner of the bookstore, the librairie, putting out a stand of road maps, so I stopped and went in. L’Institut Géographique National of France (IGN) published a blue series of 1:250,000 scale maps for every region of the country. When I unfolded the map covering our village, I was surprised at the detail. I could make out even the smallest lanes and trails as well as a black rectangle that indicated our villa. This was a treasure of information for back-road cycling, so I bought maps for all the surrounding areas.

The IGN maps led me and my bike in the ensuing months down lanes and shortcuts to places along meandering routes I never dared to take the car—even to tiny hamlets at the end of remote trails that only the residents drove and few people knew existed.

The new activity of biking that I had taken up on returning this spring was both physically rewarding and mentally stimulating. Riding gave me time to think about the culture of Provence. It was still an exotic place for me, where formal rituals and cultural differences often crept up unexpectedly. At first they seemed subtle and minimal: another language, one that was manageable with effort; the strict formality of greeting someone; rigid restaurant hours with no place open to eat between breakfast and lunch, and between lunch and dinner, unless a McDonald’s had made an unwanted inroad into a village. It was as if the very view of the world in Provence was different from that in Canada. Workers going out on strike at any opportunity and staying out until the country reached the brink of economic meltdown and social chaos was considered normal. The more I learned, the more small things eluded me.

Walking my bike into the garage late one morning, I found Hélène stretching after one of her runs.

“So where did you ride today?” she asked.

“To the east. First to Les Pilles along the D94 and then south on the D185 to Châteauneuf-de-Bordette behind Montagne Garde Grosse. I came out of the hills near Mirabel-aux-Baronnies and then took the D538 back.” I said this rather matter-of-factly, although my pride must have been showing.

“That’s great. You’re getting to know those roads.”

“Col de la Croix Rouge is back there, and it’s a bugger to climb—almost a mountain pass. The road runs over a steep ridge between two valleys. There’s a church with a big red cross at the top in the middle of nowhere. It’s stunning in there—rugged and lonely as hell. I don’t know how people a hundred years ago eked out a living on those barren hillsides; yet there are stone farmhouses up there with no running water or plumbing. They have electricity and TV dishes, but those may be the only concessions to modern life. I actually rode by an old woman who was leading her donkey with a load of firewood on its back.”

“You’re losing weight,” Hélène said.

“Yes, I guess I am. That was my ‘office weight’, from sitting at a desk all day.” I certainly felt trimmer. Then I glanced at her physique, lean from running every other day. She saw my admiration and smiled.