A Year In Provence

November

THE FRENCH PEASANT is an inventive man, and he hates waste. He is reluctant to discard anything, because he knows that one day the bald tractor tire, the chipped scythe, the broken hoe, and the transmission salvaged from the 1949 Renault van will serve him well and save him from disturbing the contents of that deep, dark pocket where he keeps his money.

The contraption that I found at the edge of the vineyard was a rusty monument to his ingenuity. A 100-liter oil drum had been sliced in half lengthwise and mounted on a framework of narrow-gauge iron piping. An old wheel, more oval than round, had been bolted onto the front. Two handles of unequal length protruded from the back. It was, so Faustin told me, a brouette de vigneron-a wheelbarrow, custom built at minimal expense for the pruning season.

All the vines had now been stripped of their leaves by the autumn winds, and the tangled shoots looked like coiled clumps of brown barbed wire. Sometime before the sap started to rise next spring they would have to be cut back to the main stem. The clippings, or sarments, were of no agricultural use, too fibrous to rot into the ground during the winter, and too numerous to leave piled in the corridors between the vines where the tractors would pass. They would have to be gathered up and burned; hence the brouette de vigneron.

It was the simplest kind of mobile incinerator. A fire was lit in the bottom of the oil drum, the sarments were clipped and thrown on the fire, and the barrow was pushed along to the next vine. When the drum was full, the pale grey ash was scattered on the ground and the process began again. It was, in its primitive way, a model of efficiency.

Walking back to the house just before dusk, I saw a slim plume of blue smoke rising from the corner of the field where Faustin was pruning and burning. He straightened up and rubbed his back, and his hand felt cold and stiff when I shook it. He pointed along the rows of clipped vines, twisted claws black against the sandy soil.

"Nice and clean, eh? I like to see them nice and clean." I asked him to leave some sarments for me to gather up to use on the barbecue next summer, and I remembered seeing them once in a shop which called itself a food boutique in New York-Genuine Vine Clippings, they were labeled, and they were guaranteed to impart That Authentic Barbecue Flavor. They had been trimmed to a standard length and neatly trussed with straw twine, and they cost two dollars for a small bunch. Faustin couldn't believe it.

"People buy them?"

He looked at the vines again, estimating how many hundreds of dollars he had burned in the course of the day, and shook his head. Another cruel blow. He shrugged.

"C'est curieux."

OUR FRIEND, who lived deep in Côtes du Rhône country north of Vaison-la-Romaine, was to be honored by the winegrowers of his village and admitted to the Confrérie Saint-Vincent, the local equivalent of the Chevaliers du Tastevin. The investiture was to take place in the village hall, followed by dinner, followed by dancing. The wines would be strong and plentiful and the winegrowers and their wives would be out in force. Ties were to be worn. It was that kind of occasion.

Years before, we had been to another Chevaliers' dinner, in Burgundy. Two hundred people in full evening dress, rigid with decorum at the start of the meal, had turned into a friendly mob singing Burgundian drinking songs by the time the main course was served. We had blurred but happy memories of watching the sozzled Chevaliers after dinner, trying to find and then to unlock their cars, with the amiable assistance of the Clos Vougeot police force. It had been our first experience of an evening formally dedicated to mass intoxication, and we had enjoyed it enormously. Any friend of the grape was a friend of ours.

The village hall was officially called the Salle des Fêtes. It was a fairly recent construction, designed with a complete disregard for its medieval surroundings by the anonymous and overworked French architect whose mission in life is to give every village its own eyesore. This was a classic of the contemporary blockhouse school-a box of raw brick and aluminum-trimmed glass set in a garden of tarmac, devoid of charm but rich in neon light fittings.

We were greeted at the door by two substantial, rosy-faced men in white shirts, black trousers, and wide scarlet sashes. We told them we were guests of the new Confrère.

"Bieng, bieng. Allez-y." Meaty hands patted us on the back and into the big room.

At one end was a raised platform, furnished with a long table and a microphone. Smaller tables, set for dinner, were placed down either side of the room and across the far end, leaving a large space in the middle which was packed with winegrowers and their friends.

The level of conversation was deafening; men and women who are used to talking to each other across a vineyard find it difficult to adjust their volume, and the room echoed and boomed with voices that had been developed to compete with the Mistral. But, if the voices had come straight in from the fields, the clothes were definitely from the Sunday-best armoire: dark suits and shirts whose collars looked uncomfortably tight around weatherbeaten necks for the men; vividly colored and elaborate dresses for the women. One couple, more couture conscious than the rest, had outfits of startling splendor. The woman shimmered in a dress of gray bugle beads, and small matching gray feathers were sewn to the back of her stockings so that her legs appeared to flutter when she walked. Her husband wore a white jacket trimmed with black piping, a frilled shirt with more black piping, and black evening trousers. Either his nerve or his resources had run out at that point, because his shoes were sensible, thick-soled and brown. Nevertheless, we felt sure that they were the couple to watch when the dancing started.

We found our friend and his family. He was glancing around the room, looking puzzled and almost ill-at-ease, and we thought that the solemnity of the occasion had brought on an attack of Confrère's nerves. The problem, however, was altogether more serious.

"I can't see a bar anywhere," he said. "Can you?"

There were barrels of wine against one of the walls. There were bottles of wine on the tables. We were in a village that would float on a sea of Côtes du Rhone if all the caves were emptied, but there was no bar. And, now that we studied our fellow revelers, we made another worrying discovery. Nobody was holding a glass.

We were prevented from making an indiscreet grab at a bottle on the nearest table by a fanfare on the loudspeaker system, and the Confrères filed in and took up their position behind the table on the dais-a dozen or more figures in cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, some holding parchment scrolls, one with an imposingly fat book. Any moment now, we thought, the vin d'honneur would be served to signal the start of the ceremony.

The mayor embraced the microphone and delivered the opening speech. The senior Confrère gave a speech. His assistant, the keeper of the fat book, gave a speech. One by one the three new Confrères were summoned to the dais and eulogized at length for their love of wine and good fellowship. One by one, they replied with speeches accepting the honors bestowed upon them. I detected a certain huskiness in the voice of our friend which others may have mistaken for emotion. I knew it to be thirst.

As a finale, we were asked to join in the singing of a song written in the Provençal language by Frédéric Mistral.

"Coupo santo e versanto," we sang in praise of the sainted and overflowing goblet," A-de-reng beguen en troupo lou vin pur de nostre plant"-let us all drink together the pure wine of our growth, and about time too. The investiture had taken just over an hour, and not a drop had passed anyone's lips.

There was a noticeable eagerness to be seated, and at last the sainted goblets were filled, emptied, and refilled. An air of relief spread throughout the tables, and we were able to relax and consider the menu.

Quail in aspic came first; the heads, which we were told cost two francs each, were detachable and could be used again at a future banquet. Then there was sea bass. These were mere preliminaries, the chefs limbering-up exercises before attacking the sirloin of Charolais beef en croûte. But, before that, there was a small and deadly item described as a Trou Provençal-a sorbet made with the minimum of water and the maximum of marc. Its purpose, so we were told, was to clear the palate; in fact it was sufficiently powerful to anesthetize not only the palate, but the sinus passages and the front portion of the skull as well. But the chef knew what he was doing. After the initial jolt of frozen alcohol wore off, I could feel a hollowness in the stomach-the trou-and I could face the rest of the long meal with some hope of being able to finish it.

The beef made its entrance to the strains of a second fanfare, and was paraded around the tables by the waiters and waitresses before being served. The white wine gave way to the pride of the local winegrowers, a formidably heavy red, and the courses kept coming until, after the serving of soufflés and champagne, it was time to rise up and dance.

The band was of the old school, clearly not interested in performing for people who simply like to hop up and down; they wanted to see dancing. There were waltzes and quicksteps and several numbers that might have been gavottes, but for me the highlight of the evening was the tango interlude. I don't think it is given to many of us to witness fifty or sixty couples in the advanced stages of inebriation attempting the swoops and turns and heel-stamping flourishes of the true tango artist, and it was a sight I shall never forget. Elbows were cocked, heads flicked from side to side, desperate and off-balance charges were made with twinkling feet from one end of the room to the other, potential collision and disaster were everywhere. One diminutive man danced blind, his head sunk into the décolletage of his taller partner. The couple in bugle beads and frilled shirt, molded together at the groin with their backs arching outward, lunged and dipped through the crowd with a dexterity unknown outside the tango palaces of Buenos Aires.

Miraculously, nobody was injured. When we left, sometime after one o'clock, the music was still playing and the dancers, stuffed with food and awash with wine, were still dancing. Not for the first time, we marveled at the Provençal constitution.

We arrived back at the house the following day to find that its appearance had changed; there was an unfamiliar tidiness in front of the steps that led up to the door. The cement mixer, which had for months been an integral part of the façade of the house, was no longer there.

It was an ominous sign. As much as we disliked having its hulk parked outside, it was at least a guarantee that Didier and his masons would return. Now they had crept in and taken it-our cement mixer-probably to use on a six-month job somewhere the other side of Carpentras. Our hopes of having a finished house by Christmas suddenly seemed like a bad attack of misplaced optimism.

Christian, as usual, was sympathetic and reassuring.

"They had to go to Mazan… an emergency job… the roof of an old widow's house…"

I felt guilty. What were our problems compared to the plight of a poor old widow exposed to the elements?

"Don't worry," Christian said. "Two days, maybe three, and then they'll be back to finish off. There's plenty of time before Christmas. It's weeks away."

Not many weeks away, we thought. My wife suggested kidnapping Didier's cocker spaniel, closer to his heart even than the cement mixer, and keeping it as a hostage. It was a fine, bold scheme, except that the dog never left Didier's side. Well, if not his dog, maybe his wife. We were prepared to consider almost anything.

The unfinished jobs-temporary windows and chinks in the masonry in particular-were made more apparent by the first sustained Mistral of winter. It blew for three days, bending the cypress tree in the courtyard into a green C, tearing at the tatters of plastic in the melon fields, worrying away at loose tiles and shutters, moaning through the night. It was malevolent and inescapable, a wind to lower the spirits as it threw itself endlessly against the house, trying to get in.

"Good weather for suicide," Massot said to me one morning as the wind flattened his mustache against his cheeks. "Beh oui. If this continues, we'll see a funeral or two."

Of course, he said, this was nothing like the Mistrals of his boyhood. In those days, the wind blew for weeks on end, doing strange and horrible things to the brain. He told me the story of Arnaud, a friend of his father's.

Arnaud's horse was old and tired and no longer strong enough for farm work. He decided to sell it and buy a fresh young horse, and walked the fifteen kilometers to Apt market one windy morning leading the old nag behind him. A buyer was found, the price was agreed, but the young horses for sale that day were poor, thin specimens. Arnaud walked home alone. He would return next week in the hope that better animals would be on sale.

The Mistral continued all that week, and was still blowing when Arnaud walked again to Apt market. This time he was lucky, and bought a big dark horse. It cost him almost double what he had made on the sale of the old horse, but, as the dealer said, he was paying for youth. The new horse had years of work in him.

Arnaud was only two or three kilometres from his farm when the horse broke free from its leading rein and bolted. Arnaud ran after it until he could run no more. He searched in the scrub and in the vineyards, shouting into the wind, cursing the Mistral that had unsettled the horse, cursing his bad luck, cursing his lost money. When it became too dark to search any longer, he made his way home, angry and despairing. Without a horse, he couldn't work the land; he would be ruined.

His wife met him at the door. An extraordinary thing had happened: a horse, a big dark horse, had come running up the track and had gone into one of the outbuildings. She had given it water and pulled a cart across the opening to block its escape.

Arnaud took a lantern and went to look at the horse. A broken lead rein hung from its head. He touched its neck, and his fingers came away stained. In the light of the lantern, he could see the sweat running down its flanks, and pale patches where the dye had worn off. He had bought back his old horse. In rage and shame he went up into the forest behind his farm and hanged himself.

Massot lit a cigarette, hunching his shoulders and cupping his hands against the wind.

"At the inquest," he said, "someone had a sense of humor. The cause of death was recorded as suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed by a horse."

Massot grinned and nodded. All his stories, it seemed, ended brutally.

"But he was a fool," Massot said. "He should have gone back and shot the dealer who sold him the horse-paf!-and blamed it on the Mistral. That's what I'd have done." His reflections on the nature of justice were interrupted by the whine of an engine in low gear, and a Toyota four-wheel-drive truck, as wide as the footpath, slowed down briefly to give us time to jump out of the way. It was Monsieur Dufour, the village grocer and scourge of the Lubéron's sanglier population.

We had seen the heads of sangliers mounted on the walls of butchers' shops, and had paid no more attention to them than to any other of the strange rustic decorations that we saw from time to time. But once or twice during the summer the sangliers had come down from the dry upper slopes of the mountain to drink from the swimming pool and steal melons, and we could never look a stuffed head in the eye again after seeing the living animals. They were black and stout and longer in the leg than a conventional pig, with worried, whiskery faces. We loved our rare glimpses of them, and wished that the hunters would leave them alone. Unfortunately, sangliers taste like venison, and are consequently chased from one end of the Lubéron to the other.

Monsieur Dufour was the acknowledged champion hunter, a modern and mechanized Nimrod. Dressed in his combat uniform, his truck bristling with high-powered armaments, he could drive up the rocky trails and reach the sanglier-infested upper slopes while less well equipped hunters were still coughing their way up on foot. On the flat bed of his truck was a large wooden chest containing six hounds, trained to track for days on end. The poor old pigs didn't stand much of a chance.

I said to Massot that I thought it was a shame the sangliers were hunted quite so relentlessly by so many hunters.

"But they taste delicious," he said. "'Specially the young ones, the marcassins. And besides, it's natural. The English are too sentimental about animals, except those men who chase foxes, and they are mad."

The wind was strengthening and getting colder, and I asked Massot how long he thought it would last.

"A day, a week. Who knows?" He leered at me. "Not feeling like suicide, are you?"

I said I was sorry to disappoint him, but I was well and cheerful, looking forward to the winter and Christmas.

"Usually a lot of murders after Christmas." He said it as though he was looking forward to a favorite television program, a bloody sequel to the Mistral suicides.

I heard gunfire as I walked home, and I hoped Dufour had missed. No matter how long I lived here, I would never make a true countryman. And, as long as I preferred to see a wild boar on the hoof instead of on the plate, I'd never make an adopted Frenchman. Let him worship his stomach; I would maintain a civilized detachment from the blood lust that surrounded me.

This noble smugness lasted until dinner. Henriette had given us a wild rabbit, which my wife had roasted with herbs and mustard. I had two helpings. The gravy, thickened with blood, was wonderful.

MADAME SOLIVA, the eighty-year-old chef whose nom de cuisine was Tante Yvonne, had first told us about an olive oil that she said was the finest in Provence. She had better credentials than anyone we knew. Apart from being a magnificent cook, she was olive oil's answer to a Master of Wine. She had tried them all, from Alziari in Nice to the United Producers of Nyons, and in her expert and considered view the oil produced in the valley of Les Baux was the best. One could buy it, she told us, from the little mill in Maussane-les-Alpilles.

When we lived in England, olive oil had been a luxury, to be saved for the making of fresh mayonnaise and the dressing of salads. In Provence, it was an abundant daily treat which we bought in five-liter bidons and used for cooking, for marinating goats' cheeses and red peppers, and for storing truffles. We dipped our bread in it, bathed our lettuce in it, and even used it as a hangover preventative. (One tablespoon of oil, taken neat before drinking, was supposed to coat the stomach and protect it against the effects of too much young pink wine.) We soaked up olive oil like sponges, and gradually learned to distinguish between different grades and flavors. We became fussy and no doubt insufferable about our oil, never buying it from shops or supermarkets, but always from a mill or a producer, and I looked forward to oil-buying expeditions almost as much as trips to the vineyards.

An essential part of a day out is lunch, and before going anywhere new we always studied the Gault-Millau guide as well as the map. We discovered that Maussane was perilously close to the Baumanière at Les Baux, where the bills are as memorable as the cooking, but we were saved from temptation by Madame Soliva. "Go to Le Paradou," she told us, "and have lunch at the café. And make sure you're there by noon."

It was a cold, bright day, good eating weather, and we walked into the Bistro du Paradou a few minutes before midday with appetites sharpened by the smell of garlic and woodsmoke that greeted us. An enormous fire, a long room filled with old marble-topped tables, a plain tiled bar, a busy clatter coming from the kitchen-it had everything. Except, as the patron explained, somewhere for us to sit.

The room was still empty, but he said it would be full within fifteen minutes. He shrugged in apology. He looked at my wife, so near and yet so far from a good lunch, her face a study in tragic deprivation. At the sight of a woman so clearly in distress, he relented, sat us at a table facing the fire, and put a thick glass carafe of red wine between us.

The regulars started coming through the door in noisy groups, going straight to the places they occupied every day. By 12:30 every seat was taken and the patron, who was also the only waiter, was a plate-laden blur.

The restaurant worked on the simple formula of removing the burden of decision from its customers. As in the station café at Bonnieux, you ate and drank what you were given. We had a crisp, oily salad and slices of pink country sausages, an aioli of snails and cod and hard-boiled eggs with garlic mayonnaise, creamy cheese from Fontvielle, and a homemade tart. It was the kind of meal that the French take for granted and tourists remember for years. For us, being somewhere between the two, it was another happy discovery to add to our list, somewhere to come back to on a cold day with an empty stomach in the certain knowledge that we would leave warm and full.

We arrived at the olive oil mill in Maussane two months early. The new crop of olives wouldn't be gathered until January, and that was the time to buy oil at its most fresh. Luckily, said the manager of the mill, last year's crop had been plentiful and there was still some oil left. If we would like to have a look around, he would pack a dozen liters for us to take away.

The official name of the establishment-Coopérative Oléicole de la Vallée des Baux-was almost too long to fit on the front of the modest building that was tucked away at the side of a small road. Inside, every surface seemed to have been rubbed with a fine coating of oil; floors and walls were slick to the touch, the stairs that led up to the sorting platform were slippery underfoot. A group of men sat at a table sticking the Cooperative's ornate gold labels onto bottles and flasks filled with the greenish-yellow oil-pure and natural, as the notice on the wall said, extracted by a single cold pressing.

We went into the office to pick up the squat, two liter jugs that the manager had packed in a carton for us, and he presented each of us with bars of olive-oil soap.

"There is nothing better for the skin," he said, and he patted his cheeks with dainty fingertips. "And, as for the oil, it is a masterpiece. You'll see."

Before dinner that night, we tested it, dripping it onto slices of bread that had been rubbed with the flesh of tomatoes. It was like eating sunshine.

THE GUESTS continued to come, dressed for high summer and hoping for swimming weather, convinced that Provence enjoyed a Mediterranean climate and dismayed to find us in sweaters, lighting fires in the evening, drinking winter wines, and eating winter food.

Is it always as cold as this in November? Isn't it hot all the year round? They would look dejected when we told them about snowdrifts and subzero nights and bitter winds, as though we had lured them to the North Pole under false tropical pretenses.

Provence has been accurately described as a cold country with a high rate of sunshine, and the last days of November were as bright and as blue as May, clean and exhilarating and, as far as Faustin was concerned, profoundly ominous. He was predicting a savage winter, with temperatures so low that olive trees would die of cold as they had in 1976. He speculated with grim enjoyment about chickens being frozen stiff and old people turning blue in their beds. He said there would undoubtedly be extended power cuts, and warned me to have the chimney swept.

"You'll be burning wood night and day," he said, "and that's when chimneys catch fire. And when the pompiers come to put out the fire they'll charge you a fortune unless you have a certificate from the chimney sweep."

And it could be much worse than that. If the house burned down as the result of a chimney fire, the insurance company wouldn't pay out unless one could produce a certificate. Faustin looked at me, nodding gravely as I absorbed the thoughts of being cold, homeless, and bankrupt, and all because of an unswept chimney.

But what would happen, I asked him, if the certificate had been burned with the house? He hadn't thought of that, and I think he was grateful to me for suggesting another disastrous possibility. A connoisseur of woe needs fresh worries from time to time, or he will become complacent.

I arranged for Cavaillon's premier chimney sweep, Monsieur Beltramo, to come up to the house with his brushes and suction cleaners. A tall man with a courtly manner and an aquiline, sooty profile, he had been a chimney sweep for twenty years. Not once, he told me, had a chimney cleaned by him ever caught fire. When he was finished, he made out the certificat de ramonage, complete with smudged fingerprints, and wished me a pleasant winter. "It won't be a cold one this year," he said. "We've had three cold winters in a row. The fourth is always mild."

I asked him if he was going to clean Faustin's chimney, and exchange weather forecasts.

"No. I never go there. His wife sweeps the chimney."