A Year In Provence

December

THE POSTMAN drove at high speed up to the parking area behind the house and reversed with great elan into the garage wall, crushing a set of rear lights. He didn't appear to have noticed the damage as he came into the courtyard, smiling broadly and waving a large envelope. He went straight to the bar, planted his elbow, and looked expectant.

"Bonjour, jeune homme!"

I hadn't been called young man for years, and it wasn't the postman's normal habit to bring the mail into the house. Slightly puzzled, I offered him the drink that he was waiting for.

He winked. "A little pastis," he said. "Why not?"

Was it his birthday? Was he retiring? Had he won the big prize in the Loterie Nationale? I waited for him to explain the reason for his high spirits, but he was too busy telling me about the sanglier that his friend had shot the previous weekend. Did I know how to prepare these creatures for the pot? He took me through the whole gory process, from disembowelment to hanging, quartering, and cooking. The pastis disappeared-it wasn't, I realized, his first of the morning-and a refill accepted. Then he got down to business.

"I have brought you the official post office calendar," said the postman. "It shows all the saints' days, and there are some agreeable pictures of young ladies."

He took the calendar from its envelope and leafed through the pages until he found a photograph of a girl wearing a pair of coconut shells.

"Voilà!"

I told him that he was most kind to think of us, and thanked him.

"It's free," he said. "Or you can buy it if you want to."

He winked again, and I finally understood the purpose of the visit. He was collecting his Christmas tip, but since it would be undignified simply to arrive at the front door with an outstretched hand, we had to observe the ritual of the calendar.

He took his money and finished his drink and roared off to his next call, leaving the remnants of his rear light on the drive.

My wife was looking at the calendar when I came back into the house.

"Do you realize," she said, "that it's only three weeks until Christmas, and there's still no sign of the builders?"

And then she had an idea that only a woman could have had. It was obvious, she thought, that the birthday of Jesus Christ was not a sufficiently important deadline for the completion of work on the house. Somehow or other, Christmas would come and go and it would be February by the time everyone recovered from their New Year hangovers and holidays. What we should do was to invite the builders to a party to celebrate the end of the job. But not just the builders; their wives must come too.

The intuitive cunning of this suggestion was based on two assumptions. First, that the wives, who never saw the work that their husbands did in other people's houses, would be so curious that they would find the invitation irresistible. And second, that no wife would want her husband to be the one not to have finished his part of the work. This would cause loss of face among the other wives and public embarrassment, followed by some ugly recriminations in the car on the way home.

It was an inspiration. We fixed a date for the last Sunday before Christmas and sent out the invitations: champagne from 11 o'clock onward.

Within two days, the cement mixer was back in front of the house. Didier and his assistants, cheerful and noisy, resumed where they had left off as though there had never been a three-month hiatus. No excuses were made, and no direct explanation given for the sudden return to work. The closest Didier came to it was when he mentioned casually that he wanted to have everything finished before he went skiing. He and his wife, he said, would be delighted to accept our invitation.

We had worked out that if everyone came there would be twenty-two people, all with good Provençal appetites. And, as it was so close to Christmas, they would be looking for something a little more festive than a bowlful of olives and a few slices of saucisson. My wife started making lists of provisions, and terse footnotes and reminders were scattered throughout the house: Rabbit terrine! Gambas and mayonnaise! Individual pizzas! Mushroom tart! Olive bread! How many quiches?-the scraps of paper were everywhere, making my one-word list-champagne-look sparse and inadequate.

The gastronomic highlight was delivered one cold morning by a friend who had relatives in Périgord. It was an entire foie gras-raw, and therefore a fraction of the price of the prepared product. All we had to do was cook it and add some slivers of black truffle.

We unwrapped it. The previous owner must have been a bird the size of a small aircraft, because the liver was enormous -a rich, dark yellow mass that filled both my hands when I lifted it onto the chopping board. Following our friend's instructions, I cut it up and compressed it into glass preserving jars, inserting pieces of truffle with nervous fingers. This was like cooking money.

The jars were sealed, and placed in a huge saucepan of boiling water for precisely ninety minutes. After cooling off, they were refrigerated, then laid to rest in the cave. My wife crossed foie gras off her list.

It felt strange to be coming to the end of the year under blue skies, and without the frenzy that characterizes the weeks before an English Christmas. The only hint of festive preparations in our valley was the strange noise coming from the house of Monsieur Poncet, about a mile away from us. On two successive mornings as I walked past, I heard terrible squawks-not cries of fear or pain, but of outrage. I didn't think they were human, but I wasn't sure. I asked Faustin if he had noticed them.

"Oh, that," he said. "Poncet is grooming his ass."

On Christmas Eve, there was to be a living crèche in the church in Ménerbes, and the ass of Monsieur Poncet had an important supporting role. Naturally, he had to look his best, but he had an aversion to being brushed and combed, and he was not the kind of ass to suffer grooming quietly. Doubtless he would be presentable on the night, said Faustin, but one would be wise to stay well away from his hind legs, as he was reputed to have an impressive kick.

Up in the village, casting was in progress for the Infant Jesus. Babies of a suitable age and disposition were required to present themselves, and temperament-the ability to rise to the big occasion-would be all-important, as the proceedings did not start until midnight.

Apart from that, and the cards that the postman stuffed in the mailbox, Christmas might have been months away. We did not have a television, and so we were spared the sight of those stupefyingly jolly commercials. There were no carol singers, no office parties, no strident countdowns of the remaining shopping days. I loved it. My wife was not so sure; something was missing. Where was my Christmas spirit? Where was the mistletoe? Where was the Christmas tree? We decided to go into Cavaillon to find them.

We were rewarded at once by the sight of Santa Claus. Dressed in baggy red bouclé trousers, a Rolling Stones T-shirt, red fur-trimmed pixie hat, and false beard, he came weaving toward us as we walked down the Cours Gambetta. It looked from a distance as though his beard was on fire, but as he came closer we saw the stub of a Gauloise among the whiskers. He lurched past in a cloud of Calvados fumes, attracting considerable attention from a group of small children. Their mothers would have some explaining to do.

The streets were strung with lights. Music came through the open doorways of bars and shops. Christmas trees were stacked in clumps on the pavement. A man with a throat microphone was selling bed linen from a stall in an alley. "Take a look at that, Madame. Pure Dralon! I'll give you five thousand francs if you can find a fault in it!" An old peasant woman began a millimeter-by-millimeter inspection, and the man snatched it away.

We turned the corner and nearly collided with the carcass of a deer, hanging outside the door of a butcher's shop, gazing blindly at the carcass of a sanglier hanging next to it. In the window, a line of tiny nude birds, their necks broken and their heads neatly arranged on their breastbones, were offered as a special pre-Christmas promotion, seven for the price of six. The butcher had closed their beaks and set them in a garnish of evergreen leaves and red ribbon. We shuddered, and moved on.

There was no doubt about the most important ingredient in a Provençal Christmas. Judging by the window displays, the queues, and the money changing hands, clothes and toys and stereo equipment and baubles were of incidental importance; the main event of Christmas was food. Oysters and crayfish and pheasant and hare, pâtés and cheeses, hams and capons, gâteaux and pink champagne-after a morning spent looking at it all we were suffering from visual indigestion. With our tree and our mistletoe and our dose of Christmas spirit, we came home.

Two uniformed men were waiting for us, parked outside the house in an unmarked car. The sight of them made me feel guilty, of what, I didn't know, but uniformed men have that effect on me. I tried to think what crimes I had committed recently against the Fifth Republic, and then the two men got out of the car and saluted. I relaxed. Even in France, where bureaucratic formality approaches the level of art, they don't salute before they arrest you.

In fact, they weren't policemen, but firemen, pompiers from Cavaillon. They asked if they could come into the house, and I wondered where we had put our chimney sweep's certificate. This was obviously a spot check designed to catch any householder with a soiled flue.

We sat around the dining room table. One of the men opened an attaché case. "We have brought the official calendar of the Pompiers de Vaucluse." He laid it on the table.

"As you will see, it shows all the saints' days."

And so it did, just like our post office calendar. But, instead of photographs of girls wearing coconut-shell brassieres, this calendar was illustrated with pictures of firemen scaling tall buildings, administering first aid to accident victims, rescuing mountaineers in distress, and manning loaded fire hoses. The pompiers in rural France provide an overall emergency service, and they will retrieve your dog from a pothole in the mountains or take you to a hospital, as well as fight your fires. They are in every way an admirable and deserving body of men.

I asked if a contribution would be acceptable.

"Bien sûr."

We were given a receipt which also entitled us to call ourselves Friends of the Cavaillon Fire Department. After more salutes, the two pompiers left to try their luck farther up the valley, and we hoped that their training had prepared them for attacks by vicious dogs. Getting a contribution out of Massot would be only marginally less hazardous than putting out a fire. I could imagine him, squinting out from behind his curtains, shotgun at the ready, watching his Alsatians hurl themselves at the intruders. I had once seen the dogs attack the front wheel of a car for want of anything human, ripping away at the tire as though it were a hunk of raw beef, slavering and spitting out shreds of rubber while the terrified driver endeavored to reverse out of range, and Massot looked on, smoking and smiling.

We were now a two-calendar family, and as the days before Christmas slipped by we anticipated the delivery of a third, which would be worth a substantial contribution. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for the past twelve months, the heroes of the sanitation department had stopped at the end of our drive to pick up shamefully large piles of empty bottles, the evil-smelling remains of bouillabaisse suppers, dog-food cans, broken glasses, sacks of rubble, chicken bones, and domestic fallout of every size and description. Nothing defeated them. No heap, however huge and ripe, was too much for the man who clung to the back of the truck, dropping off at each stop to toss the garbage into an open, greasy hold. In the summer, he must have come close to asphyxiation and, in the winter, close to tears with the cold.

He and his partner eventually turned up in a Peugeot which looked as if it was enjoying its final outing before going to the scrapyard-two cheerful, scruffy men with hard handshakes and pastis breath. On the backseat, I could see a brace of rabbits and some bottles of champagne, and I said that it was good to see them picking up some full bottles for a change.

"It's not the empty bottles we mind," said one of them. "But you should see what some people leave for us." He wrinkled his face and held his nose, little finger extended elegantly in the air. "Dégeulasse."

They were pleased with their tip. We hoped they would go out and have a glorious, messy meal, and let someone else clear up.

DIDIER WAS SQUATTING on his haunches with a dustpan and brush, sweeping crumbs of cement out of a corner. It was heartening to see this human machine of destruction engaged in such delicate chores; it meant that his work was over.

He stood up and emptied the dustpan into a paper bag and lit a cigarette. "That's it," he said."Normalement, the painter will come tomorrow." We walked outside, where Eric was loading the shovels and buckets and toolboxes onto the back of the truck. Didier grinned. "It doesn't bother you if we take the cement mixer?"

I said I thought we could manage without it, and the two of them pushed it up a plank ramp and roped it tight against the back of the driver's cab. Didier's spaniel watched the progress of the cement mixer with her head cocked, and then jumped into the truck and lay along the dashboard.

"Allez!" Didier held out his hand. It felt like cracked leather. "See you on Sunday."

The painter came the next day, and painted, and left. Jean-Pierre the carpet layer arrived. The wives had obviously decided that everything should be ready for their state visit.

By Friday night, the carpet was laid except for the last couple of meters.

"I'll come in tomorrow morning," said Jean-Pierre, "and you'll be able to move the furniture in the afternoon."

By midday, all that remained to do was to fit the carpet under a wooden batten at the threshold of the room. It was while Jean-Pierre was drilling the holes to screw in the batten that he went through the hot-water pipe which ran under the floor, and a jet of water rose in a small and picturesque fountain, framed by the doorway.

We cut off the water supply, rolled back the sodden carpet, and called Monsieur Menicucci. After a year of alarms and emergencies, I knew his number by heart, and I knew what his first words would be.

"Oh là là." He meditated in silence for a moment. "The floor will have to be broken so that I can solder the pipe. You had better warn Madame. There will be a little dust."

Madame was out buying food. She was expecting to return to a bedroom, bathroom, and dressing room that were dry, clean, and carpeted. She would be surprised. I advised Jean-Pierre to go home for medical reasons. She would probably want to kill him.

"What's that noise?" she said when I met her as she was parking the car.

"It's Menicucci's jackhammer."

"Ah yes. Of course." She was unnaturally, dangerously calm. I was glad Jean-Pierre had left.

Menicucci, in his search for the leak, had drilled out a trench in the floor, and we were able to see the hot water pipe with its neat hole.

"Bon," he said. "Now we must make sure there's no blockage in the pipe before I solder. You stay there and watch. I will blow through the tap in the bathroom."

I watched. Menicucci blew. I received a gout of dusty water in the face.

"What do you see?" he shouted from the bathroom.

"Water," I said.

"Formidable. The pipe must be clear."

He made his repairs, and went home to watch the rugby on television.

We started mopping up, telling each other that it really wasn't too bad. The carpet would dry out. There was barely enough rubble to fill a bucket. The scorch marks from the blowtorch could be painted over. All in all, as long as one disregarded the jagged, gaping trench, it was possible to look at the rooms and consider them finished. In any case, we had no choice. Sunday was only hours away.

We weren't expecting anyone before 11:30, but we had underestimated the magnetic appeal that champagne has for the French, and the first knock on the door came shortly after half past ten. Within an hour, everyone except Didier and his wife had arrived. They lined the walls of the living room, awkward with politeness and dressed in their best, darting away from the sanctuary of the walls from time to time to swoop on the food.

As the waiter in charge of keeping glasses filled, I became aware of yet another fundamental difference between the French and the English. When the English come for drinks, the glass is screwed firmly into the hand while talking, smoking or eating. It is set aside with reluctance to deal with calls of nature that require both hands-blowing the nose or visiting the lavatory-but it is never far away or out of sight.

It is different with the French. They are no sooner given a glass before they put it down, presumably because they find conversation difficult with only one hand free. So the glasses gather in groups, and after five minutes identification becomes impossible. The guests, unwilling to take another person's glass but unable to pick out their own, look with longing at the champagne bottle. Fresh glasses are distributed, and the process repeats itself.

I was wondering how long it would be before our supply of glasses ran out and we had to resort to teacups when there was the familiar sound of a diesel engine in labor, and Didier's truck pulled up behind the house, and he and his wife came in through the back door. It was strange. I knew that Didier had a car, and his wife was dressed from head to toe in fine brown suède which must have sat very uneasily on the gritty seat of the truck.

Christian came across the room and took me aside.

"I think we might have a little problem," he said. "You'd better come outside."

I followed him. Didier took my wife's arm and followed me. As we walked around the house, I looked back and saw that everyone was coming.

"Voilà!" said Christian, and pointed at Didier's truck.

On the back, in the space usually reserved for the cement mixer, was a bulbous shape, three feet high and four feet across. It was wrapped in brilliant green crêpe paper, and dotted with bows of white and red and blue.

"It's for you from all of us," said Christian. "Allez. Unwrap it."

Didier made a stirrup with his hands, and with effortless gallantry, his cigarette between his teeth, plucked my wife from the ground and lifted her to shoulder height so that she could step onto the back of the truck. I climbed up after her, and we peeled off the green wrapping.

The last strips of paper came away to applause and some piercing whistles from Ramon the plasterer, and we stood in the sunshine on the back of the truck, looking at the upturned faces that surrounded us, and our present.

It was an antique jardinière, a massive circular tub that had been cut by hand from a single block of stone long before the days of cutting machines. It was thick sided, slightly irregular, a pale, weathered gray. It had been filled with earth and planted with primulas.

We didn't know what to say or how to say it. Surprised, touched, and floundering in our inadequate French, we did the best we could. Mercifully, Ramon cut us short.

"Merde! I'm thirsty. That's enough speeches. Let's have a drink."

The formality of the first hour disappeared. Jackets came off and the champagne was attacked in earnest. The men took their wives around the house, showing off their work, pointing out the English bathroom taps marked "hot" and "cold," trying the drawers to check that the carpenter had finished the interiors smoothly, touching everything in the manner of curious children.

Christian organized a team to unload the great stone tub from the truck, and eight tipsy men in their Sunday clothes somehow managed to avoid being maimed as the lethal mass was maneuvered down two sagging planks and onto the ground. Madame Ramon supervised. "Ah, les braves hommes," she said. "Mind you don't get your fingernails dirty."

The Menicuccis were the first to leave. Having acquitted themselves with honor among the pâtés and cheeses and flans and champagne, they were off to a late lunch, but not before observing the niceties. They made a ceremonial tour of the other guests, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, exchanging bons appétits. Their farewell lasted fifteen minutes.

The others looked as though they were settled for the remainder of the day, eating and drinking their way steadily through everything within reach. Ramon appointed himself the official comedian, and told a series of jokes which became progressively coarser and funnier. He stopped for a drink after explaining how to determine the sex of pigeons by putting them in the refrigerator.

"What made a nice woman like your wife ever marry a terrible old mec like you?" asked Didier.

With great deliberation, Ramon put down his champagne and held his hands out in front of him like a fisherman describing the one that got away. Fortunately, he was prevented from going into further revelations by a large piece of pizza which his wife delivered firmly into his mouth. She had heard the routine before.

As the sun moved across the courtyard and left it in afternoon shadow, the guests began to make their tours of departure, with more handshaking and kissing and pauses for one final glass.

"Come and have lunch," said Ramon. "Or dinner. What's the time?"

It was three o'clock. After four hours of eating and drinking, we were in no state for the cous-cous that Ramon was promoting.

"Ah well," he said, "if you're on a diet, tant pis."

He gave his wife the car keys and leaned back in the passenger seat, hands clasped across his stomach, beaming at the thought of a solid meal. He had persuaded the other couples to join him. We waved them off and went back to the empty house, the empty plates, and the empty glasses. It had been a good party.

We looked through the window at the old stone tub, bright with flowers. It would take at least four men to move it away from the garage and into the garden, and organizing four men in Provence was, as we knew, not something that could be arranged overnight. There would be visits of inspection, drinks, heated arguments. Dates would be fixed, and then forgotten. Shoulders would be shrugged and time would pass by. Perhaps by next spring we would see the tub in its proper place. We were learning to think in seasons instead of days or weeks. Provence wasn't going to change its tempo for us.

Meanwhile, there was enough foie gras left over to have in warm, thin slices with salad, and one surviving bottle of champagne cooling in the shallow end of the swimming pool. We put some more logs on the fire and thought about the imminent prospect of our first Provençal Christmas.

It was ironic. Having had guests throughout the year, who often had to endure great inconvenience and primitive conditions because of the building work, we now had the house, clean and finished, to ourselves. The last guests had left the previous week, and the next were arriving to help us see in the New Year. But on Christmas Day we would be alone.

We woke up to sunshine and a quiet, empty valley, and a kitchen with no electricity. The gigot of lamb that was ready to go into the oven had a reprieve, and we faced the terrible possibility of bread and cheese for Christmas lunch. All the local restaurants would have been booked up for weeks.

It is at a time like this, when crisis threatens the stomach, that the French display the most sympathetic side of their nature. Tell them stories of physical injury or financial ruin and they will either laugh or commiserate politely. But tell them you are facing gastronomic hardship, and they will move heaven and earth and even restaurant tables to help you.

We telephoned Maurice, the chef at the Auberge de la Loube in Buoux, and asked him if there had been any cancellations. No. Every seat was taken. We explained the problem. There was a horrified silence, and then: "You may have to eat in the kitchen, but come anyway. Something will be arranged."

He sat us at a tiny table between the kitchen door and the open fire, next to a large and festive family.

"I have gigot if you like it," he said. We told him we had thought of bringing our own and asking him to cook it, and he smiled. "It's not the day to be without an oven."

We ate long and well and talked about the months that had gone as quickly as weeks. There was so much we hadn't seen and done: our French was still an ungainly mixture of bad grammar and builders' slang; we had managed somehow to miss the entire Avignon festival, the donkey races at Goult, the accordion competition, Faustin's family outing to the Basses-Alpes in August, the wine festival in Gigondas, the Ménerbes dog show, and a good deal of what had been going on in the outside world. It had been a self-absorbed year, confined mostly to the house and the valley, fascinating to us in its daily detail, sometimes frustrating, often uncomfortable, but never dull or disappointing. And, above all, we felt at home.

Maurice brought glasses of marc and pulled up a chair.

"'Appy Christmas," he said, and then his English deserted him. "Bonne Année."