A Year In Provence

July

MY FRIEND had rented a house in Ramatuelle, a few kilometers from Saint-Tropez. We wanted to see each other, despite a mutual reluctance to brave the bad-tempered congestion of high summer traffic. I lost the toss, and said I'd be there by lunchtime. After driving for half an hour I found myself in a different country, inhabited mostly by trailers. They were wallowing toward the sea in monstrous shoals, decked out with curtains of orange and brown and window stickers commemorating past migrations. Groups of them rested in the parking areas by the side of the autoroute, shimmering with heat. Their owners, ignoring the open countryside behind them, set up picnic tables and chairs with a close and uninterrupted view of the passing trucks, and within easy breathing distance of the diesel fumes. As I turned off the autoroute to go down to Sainte-Maxime, I could see more trailers stretching ahead in a bulbous, swaying convoy, and I gave up any thoughts of an early lunch. The final five kilometers of the journey took an hour and a half. Welcome to the Côte d'Azur.

It used to be beautiful, and rare and expensive pockets of it still are. But compared with the peace and relative emptiness of the Lubéron it seemed like a madhouse, disfigured by overbuilding, overcrowding, and overselling: villa developments, steack pommes frites, inflatable rubber boats, genuine Provençal souvenirs made from olive wood, pizzas, water-skiing lessons, nightclubs, go-kart tracks-the posters were everywhere, offering everything.

The people whose business it is to make a living from the Côte d'Azur have a limited season, and their eagerness to take your money before autumn comes and the demand for inflatable rubber boats stops is palpable and unpleasant. Waiters are impatient for their tips, shopkeepers snap at your heels so that you won't take too long to make up your mind, and then refuse to accept 200-franc notes because there are so many forgeries. A hostile cupidity hangs in the air, as noticeable as the smell of Ambre Solaire and garlic. Strangers are automatically classified as tourists and treated like nuisances, inspected with unfriendly eyes and tolerated for cash. According to the map, this was still Provence. It wasn't the Provence I knew.

My friend's house was in the pine forests outside Ramatuelle, at the end of a long private track, completely detached from the lunacy three kilometers away on the coast. He was not surprised to hear that a two-hour drive had taken more than four hours. He told me that to be sure of a parking spot for dinner in Saint-Tropez it was best to be there by 7:30 in the morning, that going down to the beach was an exercise in frustration, and that the only guaranteed way to get to Nice airport in time to catch a plane was by helicopter.

As I drove back home in the evening against the trailer tide, I wondered what it was about the Côte d'Azur that continued to attract such hordes every summer. From Marseilles to Monte Carlo, the roads were a nightmare and the seashore was covered with a living carpet of bodies broiling in the sun, flank to oily flank for mile after mile. Selfishly, I was glad they wanted to spend their holidays there rather than in the open spaces of the Lubéron, among more agreeable natives.

Some natives, of course, were less agreeable than others, and I met one the next morning. Massot was en colère, kicking at the undergrowth in the small clearing near his house and chewing at his mustache in vexation.

"You see this?" he said. "Those salauds. They come like thieves in the night and leave early in the morning. Saloperie everywhere." He showed me two empty sardine cans and a wine bottle which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that his archenemies, the German campers, had been trespassing in his private section of the national park. That in itself was bad enough, but the campers had treated his elaborate defense system with contempt, rolling back boulders to make a gap in the barricade and-sales voleurs!-stealing the notices that warned of the presence of vipers.

Massot took off his jungle cap and rubbed the bald spot on the back of his head as he considered the enormity of the crime. He looked in the direction of his house, standing on tiptoe first on one side of the path, then on the other. He grunted.

"It might work," he said, "but I'd have to cut down the trees."

If he removed the small forest that stood between his house and the clearing, he would be able to see the headlights of any car coming down the track and loose off a couple of warning shots from his bedroom window. But, then again, those trees were extremely valuable, and added to the general desirability of the house he was trying to sell. No buyer had yet been found, but it was only a matter of time before somebody recognized it for the bargain it was. The trees had better stay. Massot thought again, and suddenly brightened up. Maybe the answer was pièges à feu. Yes, he liked that.

I had heard about pièges à feu, and they sounded horrendous-concealed snares that exploded when they were disturbed, like miniature mines. The thought of fragments of German camper flying through the air was alarming to me, but clearly very amusing to Massot, who was pacing round the clearing saying boum! every three or four yards as he planned his mine field.

Surely he wasn't serious, I said, and in any case I thought that pièges à feu were illegal. Massot stopped his explosions and tapped the side of his nose, sly and conspiratorial.

"That may be true," he said, "but there's no law against notices." He grinned, and raised both arms above his head. "Boum!"

Where were you twenty years ago, I thought, when they needed you on the Côte d'Azur?

Perhaps Massot's antisocial instincts were being intensified by the heat. It was often in the nineties by mid-morning, and the sky turned from blue to a burnt white by noon. Without consciously thinking about it, we adjusted to the temperature by getting up earlier and using the cool part of the day to do anything energetic. Any sudden or industrious activity between midday and early evening was out of the question; like the dogs, we sought out the shade instead of the sun. Cracks appeared in the earth, and the grass gave up trying to grow. For long periods during the day the only sounds were those made by the cigales round the house, the bees in the lavender, and bodies toppling into the pool.

I walked the dogs each morning between six and seven, and they discovered a new sport, more rewarding than chasing rabbits and squirrels. It had started when they came across what they thought was a large animal made of bright blue nylon. Circling it at a safe distance, they barked until it stirred and finally woke. A rumpled face appeared from one end, followed a few moments later by a hand offering a biscuit. From then on, the sight of a sleeping bag among the trees meant food. For the campers, it must have been disquieting to wake up and see two whiskery faces only inches away, but they were amiable enough about it once they had recovered from the shock.

Strangely enough, Massot was half-right. They were mostly Germans, but not the indiscriminate rubbish-tippers that he complained about. These Germans left no trace; everything was bundled into giant backpacks before they shuffled off like two-legged snails into the heat of the day. In my short experience of litter in the Lubéron, the French themselves were the most likely offenders, but no Frenchman would accept that. At any time of the year, but particularly in the summer, it was well known that foreigners of one stripe or another were responsible for causing most of the problems in life.

The Belgians, so it was said, were to blame for the majority of accidents because of their habit of driving in the middle of the road, forcing the famously prudent French driver into ditches to avoid being écrasé. The Swiss and the noncamping section of the German population were guilty of monopolizing hotels and restaurants and pushing up property prices. And the English-ah, the English. They were renowned for the frailty of their digestive systems and their preoccupation with drains and plumbing. "They have a talent for diarrhea," a French friend observed. "If an Englishman hasn't got it, he is looking for somewhere to have it."

There is just enough of a hint of truth in these national insults to sustain their currency, and I was witness to an interlude in one of Cavaillon's busiest cafés that must have confirmed the French in their opinion of English sensitivities.

A couple with their small son were having coffee, and the boy indicated his need to go to the lavatory. The father looked up from his two-day-old copy of the Daily Telegraph.

"You'd better make sure it's all right," he said to the boy's mother. "Remember what happened in Calais?"

The mother sighed, and made her way dutifully into the gloom at the rear of the café. When she reappeared it was at high speed, and she looked as if she had just eaten a lemon.

"It's disgusting. Roger is not to go in there."

Roger became immediately interested in exploring a forbidden lavatory.

"I've got to go," he said, and played his trump card. "It's number two. I've got to go."

"There isn't even a seat. It's just a hole."

"I don't care. I've got to go."

"You'll have to take him," said the mother. "I'm not going in there again."

The father folded his newspaper and stood up, with young Roger tugging at his hand.

"You'd better take the newspaper," said the mother.

"I'll finish it when I get back."

"There's no paper," she hissed.

"Ah. Well, I'll try to save the crossword."

The minutes passed, and I was wondering if I could ask the mother exactly what had happened in Calais, when there was a loud exclamation from the back of the café.

"Poo!"

It was the emerging Roger, followed by his ashen-faced father holding the remnants of his newspaper. Conversation in the café stopped as Roger gave an account of the expedition at the top of his voice. The patron looked at his wife and shrugged. Trust the English to make a spectacle out of a simple visit to the wa-wa.

The equipment that had caused such consternation to Roger and his parents was a toilette à la Turque, which is a shallow porcelain tray with a hole in the middle and footrests at each side. It was designed, presumably by a Turkish sanitary engineer, for maximum inconvenience, but the French had added a refinement of their own-a high-pressure flushing device of such velocity that unwary users can find themselves soaked from the shins down. There are two ways of avoiding sodden feet: the first is to operate the flushing lever from the safety of dry land in the doorway, but since this requires long arms and the balance of an acrobat, the second option-not to flush at all-is unfortunately much more prevalent. To add to the problem, some establishments install an energy-saving device which is peculiar to the French. The light switch, always located on the outside of the lavatory door, is fitted with an automatic timer that plunges the occupant into darkness after thirty-eight seconds, thus saving precious electricity and discouraging loiterers.

Amazingly enough, à la Turque lavatories are still being manufactured, and the most modern café is quite likely to have a chamber of horrors in the back. But, when I mentioned this to Monsieur Menicucci, he leapt to the defense of French sanitary ware, insisting that at the other end of the scale were lavatories of such sophistication and ergonometric perfection that even an American would be impressed. He suggested a meeting to discuss two lavatories we needed for the house. He had some marvels to show us, he said, and we would be ravished by the choice.

He arrived with a valise full of catalogues, and unloaded them onto the table in the courtyard as he made some mystifying remarks about vertical or horizontal evacuation. As he had said, there was a wide choice, but they were all aggressively modern in design and color-squat, sculptural objects in deep burgundy or burnt apricot. We were looking for something simple and white.

"C'est pas facile," he said. People nowadays wanted new forms and colors. It was all part of the French sanitary revolution. The traditional white was not favored by the designers. There was, however, one model he had seen recently which might be exactly what we wanted. He rummaged through his catalogues and-yes, he was sure of it-this was the one for us.

"Voilà! Le W. C. haute couture!" He pushed the catalogue over to us and there, lit and photographed like an Etruscan vase, was the Pierre Cardin lavatory.

"You see?" said Menicucci. "It is even signed by Cardin." And so it was, up on the top and well out of harm's way. Apart from the signature it was perfect, a handsome design that looked like a lavatory and not like a giant goldfish bowl. We ordered two.

It was a saddened Menicucci who telephoned a week later to tell us that the House of Cardin no longer made our lavatories. Une catastrophe but he would continue his researches.

A further ten days passed before he reappeared, now in triumph, coming up the steps to the house waving another catalogue above his head.

"Toujours couture!" he said. "Toujours couture!"

Cardin may have left the bathroom, but his place had been taken by the gallant Courrèges, whose design was very similar and who had exercised remarkable restraint in the matter of the signature, leaving it off altogether. We congratulated Menicucci, and he allowed himself a celebratory Coca-Cola. He raised his glass.

"Today the lavatories, tomorrow the central heating," he said, and we sat for a while in the 90-degree sunshine while he told us how warm we were going to be and went through his plan of attack. Walls were to be broken, dust would be everywhere, the noise of the jackhammer would take over from the bees and the crickets. There was only one bright spot about it, said Menicucci. It would keep the guests away for a few weeks. Eh, oui.

But before this period of enforced and ear-splitting seclusion we were expecting one last guest, a man so maladroit and disaster-prone, so absentminded and undomesticated, so consistently involved in household accidents that we had specifically asked him to come on the eve of demolition so that the debris of his visit could be buried under the rubble of August. It was Bennett, a close friend for fifteen years who cheerfully admitted to being the World's Worst Guest. We loved him, but with apprehension.

He called from the airport, several hours after he was due to arrive. Could I come down and pick him up? There had been a slight problem with the car hire company, and he was stranded.

I found him in the upstairs bar at Marignane, comfortably installed with a bottle of champagne and a copy of the French edition of Playboy. He was in his late forties, slim and extremely good-looking, dressed in an elegant suit of off-white linen with badly scorched trousers. "Sorry to drag you out," he said, "but they've run out of cars. Have some champagne."

He told me what had happened and, as usual with Bennett, it was all so unlikely that it had to be true. The plane had arrived on time, and the car he had reserved, a convertible, was waiting for him. The top was down, it was a glorious afternoon and Bennett, in an expansive mood, had lit a cigar before heading toward the autoroute. It had burned quickly, as cigars do when fanned by a strong breeze, and Bennett had tossed it away after twenty minutes. He became aware that passing motorists were waving at him, so in return he waved to them; how friendly the French have become, he thought. He was some miles up the autoroute before he realized that the back of the car was burning, set on fire by the discarded cigar butt that had lodged in the upholstery. With what he thought was tremendous presence of mind, he pulled on to the hard shoulder, stood up on the front seat, and urinated into the flames. And that was when the police had found him.

"They were terribly nice," he said, "but they thought it would be best if I brought the car back to the airport, and then the car rental people had a fit and wouldn't give me another one."

He finished his champagne and gave me the bill. What with all the excitement, he said, he hadn't managed to change his traveler's checks. It was good to see him again, still the same as ever, charming, terminally clumsy, beautifully dressed, permanently short of funds. My wife and I had once pretended to be his maid and manservant at a dinner party when we were all so broke that we shared out the tip afterwards. We always had fun with Bennett, and dinner that night lasted into the early hours of the morning.

The week passed as uneventfully as could be expected, given that our guest was a man who could, and often did, spill his drink over himself while looking at his watch, and whose immaculate white trousers never survived the first course of dinner unsoiled. There were one or two breakages, the odd drowned towel in the swimming pool, a sudden panic when he realized that he had sent his passport to the dry cleaners, some worrying moments when he thought he had eaten a wasp, but no true calamities. We were sad to see him go, and hoped he would come back soon to finish the four half-empty glasses of Calvados we found under his bed, and to pick up the underpants that he had left hanging decoratively from the hat rack.

IT WAS BERNARD who had told us about the old station café in Bonnieux. Solid and serious was how he described it, a family restaurant of the kind that used to exist all over France before food became fashionable and bistrots started serving slivers of duckling instead of daube and tripe. Go soon, Bernard said, because la patronne talks about retiring, and take a big appetite with you. She likes to see clean plates.

The station at Bonnieux has been closed for more than forty years, and the path that leads to it is potholed and neglected. From the road there is nothing to see-no signs, no menus. We had passed by dozens of times, assuming that the building was unoccupied, not knowing that a crowded car park was hidden behind the trees.

We found a space between the local ambulance and a mason's scarred truck, and stood for a moment listening to the clatter of dishes and the murmur of conversation that came through the open windows. The restaurant was fifty yards from the station, foursquare and unpretentious, with faded lettering just legible in hand-painted capitals: Café de la Gare.

A small Renault van pulled into the car park, and two men in overalls got out. They washed their hands at the old sink against the outside wall, using the yellow banana of soap that was mounted over the taps on its bracket, and elbowed the door open, hands still wet. They were regulars, and went straight to the towel that hung from a hook at the end of the bar. By the time they had dried their hands two glasses of pastis and a jug of water were waiting for them.

It was a big, airy room, dark at the front and sunny at the back, where windows looked over fields and vineyards toward the hazy bulk of the Lubéron. There must have been forty people, all men, already eating. It was only a few minutes past noon, but the Provençal has a clock in his stomach, and lunch is his sole concession to punctuality. On mange à midi, and not a moment later.

Each table had its white paper cover and two unlabeled bottles of wine, a red and a pink, from the Bonnieux cooperative two hundred yards away on the other side of the road. There was no written menu. Madame cooked five meals a week, lunch from Monday to Friday, and customers ate what she decided they would eat. Her daughter brought us a basket of good, chewy bread, and asked us if we wanted water. No? Then we must tell her when we wanted more wine.

Most of the other customers seemed to know one another, and there were some spirited and insulting exchanges among the tables. An enormous man was accused of slimming. He looked up from his plate and stopped eating long enough to growl. We saw our electrician and Bruno, who lays the stone floors, eating together in a corner, and recognized two or three other faces that we hadn't seen since work had stopped on the house. The men were sunburned, looking fit and relaxed as if they had been on holiday. One of them called across to us.

"C'est tranquille chez vous? Peaceful without us?"

We said we hoped they would be coming back when work started again in August.

"Normalement, oui." The hand waggled. We knew what that meant.

Madame's daughter returned with the first course, and explained that it was a light meal today because of the heat. She put down an oval dish covered with slices of saucisson and cured ham, with tiny gherkins, some black olives, and grated carrots in a sharp marinade. A thick slice of white butter to dab on the saucisson. More bread.

Two men in jackets came in with a dog and took the last empty table. There was a rumor, so Madame's daughter said, that the older of the two men had been the French ambassador to a country in the Middle East. Un homme distingué. He sat there among the masons and plumbers and truck drivers, feeding his dog small pieces of sausage.

Salad arrived in glass bowls, the lettuce slick with dressing, and with it another oval dish. Noodles in a tomato sauce and slices of roast loin of pork, juicy in a dark onion gravy. We tried to imagine what Madame would serve up in the winter, when she wasn't toying with these light meals, and we hoped that she would have second thoughts about retiring. She had taken up her position behind the bar, a short, comfortably proportioned woman, her hair still dark and thick. She looked as though she could go on forever.

Her daughter cleared away, emptied the last of the red wine into our glasses and, unasked, brought another bottle with the cheese. The early customers were starting to leave to go back to work, wiping their mustaches and asking Madame what she proposed to give them tomorrow. Something good, she said.

I had to stop after the cheese. My wife, who has never yet been defeated by a menu, had a slice of tarte au citron. The room began to smell of coffee and Gitanes, and the sun coming through the window turned the smoke blue as it drifted above the heads of the three men sitting over thimble-sized glasses of marc. We ordered coffee and asked for a bill, but bills were not part of the routine. Customers settled up at the bar on the way out.

Madame told us what we owed. Fifty francs each for the food, and four francs for the coffee. The wine was included in the price. No wonder the place was full every day.

Was it really true she was going to retire?

She stopped polishing the bar. "When I was a little girl," she said, "I had to choose whether to work in the fields or in the kitchen. Even in those days I hated the land. It's hard, dirty work." She looked down at her hands, which were well kept and surprisingly young-looking. "So I chose the kitchen, and when I married we moved here. I've been cooking for thirty-eight years. It's enough."

We said how sorry we were, and she shrugged.

"One becomes tired." She was going to live in Orange, she said, in an apartment with a balcony, and sit in the sun.

It was two o'clock, and the room was empty except for an old man with white stubble on his leather cheeks, dipping a sugar lump into his Calvados. We thanked Madame for a fine lunch.

"C'est normal," she said.

The heat outside was like a blow on the skull and the road back to the house was a long mirage, liquid and rippling in the glare, the leaves on the vines drooping, the farm dogs silent, the countryside stunned and deserted. It was an afternoon for the pool and the hammock and an undemanding book, a rare afternoon without builders or guests, and it seemed to pass in slow motion.

By the evening, our skins prickling from the sun, we were sufficiently recovered from lunch to prepare for the sporting event of the week. We had accepted a challenge from some friends who, like us, had become addicted to one of the most pleasant games ever invented, and we were going to try to uphold the honor of Ménerbes on the boules court.

Long before, during a holiday, we had bought our first set of boules after watching the old men in Roussillon spend an enjoyably argumentative afternoon on the village court below the post office. We had taken our boules back to England, but it is not a game that suits the damp, and they gathered cobwebs in a barn. They had been almost the first things we unpacked when we came to live in Provence. Smooth and tactile, they fitted into the palm of the hand, heavy, dense, gleaming spheres of steel that made a satisfying chock when tapped together.

We studied the techniques of the professionals who played every day next to the church at Bonnieux-men who could drop a boule on your toe from twenty feet away-and came home to practice what we had seen. The true aces, we noticed, bent their knees in a crouch and held the boule with the fingers curled around and the palm facing downward, so that when the boule was thrown, friction from the fingers provided backspin. And there were the lesser elements of style-the grunts and encouragements that helped every throw on its way, and the shrugs and muttered oaths when it landed short or long. We soon became experts in everything except accuracy.

There were two basic types of delivery: the low, rolling throw that skittered along the ground, or the high-trajectory drop shot, aimed to knock the opponent's boule off the court. The precision of some of the players we watched was remarkable, and for all our crouching and grunting it would take years of applied effort before we would be welcomed to a serious court like the one in Bonnieux.

Boules is an essentially simple game, which a beginner can enjoy from the first throw. A small wooden ball, the cochonnet, is tossed up the court. Each player has three boules, identified by different patterns etched into the steel, and at the end of the round the closest to the cochonnet is the winner. There are different systems of scoring, and all kinds of local bylaws and variations. These, if carefully planned, can be of great advantage to the home team.

We were playing on our own court that evening, and the game was therefore subject to Lubéron Rules:

1. Anyone playing without a drink is disqualified.

2. Incentive cheating is permitted.

3. Disputes concerning the distance from the cochonnet are mandatory. Nobody's word is final.

4. Play stops when darkness falls unless there is no clear winner, in which case blind man's boules are played until there is a torchlight decision or the cochonnet is lost.

We had gone to some trouble to construct a court with deceptive slopes and shallow hollows to baffle visitors, and had roughened the playing surface so that our luck would have a sporting chance against superior skill. We were quietly confident, and I had the added advantage of being in charge of the pastis; any signs of consistent accuracy from the visiting team would be countered by bigger drinks, and I knew from personal experience what big drinks did to one's aim.

Our opponents included a girl of sixteen who had never played before, but the other three had at least six weeks of practice between them, and were not to be treated lightly. As we inspected the playing surface, they made disparaging comments about its lack of regularity, complained about the angle of the setting sun, and made a formal request for dogs to be banned from the court. The old stone roller was trundled up and down to humor them. Moistened fingers were held in the air to gauge the strength of the breeze, and play commenced.

There is a distinct, if slow, rhythm to the game. A throw is made, and play stops while the next to throw strolls up for a closer look and tries to decide whether to bomb or whether to attempt a low, creeping delivery that will sidle round the other boules to kiss the cochonnet. A contemplative sip of pastis is taken, the knees are flexed, the boule loops through the air, thuds to earth, and rolls with a soft crunching sound to its resting place. There are no hurried movements and almost no sporting injuries. (One exception being Bennett, who had scored a broken roof tile and self-inflicted concussion of the toe during his first and last game.)

Intrigue and gamesmanship make up for the lack of athletic drama, and the players that evening behaved abominably. Boules were moved by stealth, with accidental nudges of the foot. Players poised to throw were distracted by comments on their stance, offers of more pastis, accusations of stepping over the throwing line, warnings of dogs crossing the court, sightings of imaginary grass snakes, and conflicting bad advice from every side. There were no clear winners at halftime, when we stopped to watch the sunset.

To the west of the house, the sun was centered in the V made by two mountain peaks in a spectacular display of natural symmetry. Within five minutes it was over, and we played on in the crépuscule, the French word that makes twilight sound like a skin complaint. Measuring distances from the cochonnet became more difficult and more contentious, and we were about to agree on a dishonorable draw when the young girl whose first game it was put three boules in a nine-inch group. Foul play and alcohol had been defeated by youth and fruit juice.

We ate out in the courtyard, the flagstones sun-warm under our bare feet, the candlelight flickering on red wine and brown faces. Our friends had rented their house to an English family for August, and they were going to spend the month in Paris on the proceeds. According to them, all the Parisians would be down in Provence, together with untold thousands of English, Germans, Swiss, and Belgians. Roads would be jammed; markets and restaurants impossibly full. Quiet villages would become noisy, and everyone without exception would be in a filthy humor. We had been warned.

We had indeed. We had heard it all before. But July had been far less terrible than predicted, and we were sure that August could be dealt with very easily. We would unplug the phone, lie down by the pool, and listen, whether we liked it or not, to the concerto for jackhammer and blowtorch, conducted by Maestro Menicucci.