Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  Maurice tied the other end of the twine to a seat leg and bopped the poor duck on the head with his index finger. “You are going into the oven, so accept your fate like a man,” he told it.

  The duck quacked.

  “You’ve insulted him,” I said.

  Maurice corrected himself. “Er, like a duck.”

  Down the road, a matronly woman wearing an apron and a white kerchief hailed us.

  “There’s your second lady in distress,” André said.

  Maurice brought the bus to a halt and opened the door. “Adieu, madame. At your service.” He handed her the duck through the open door.

  She took it in both hands. “This fellow’s going to be pâté de canard in a few days. I’ll save you some. Does your wife still want the feathers?”

  “Yes. For a pillow. Adieu, madame.”

  And the bus bounced back into action.

  “Why do you greet someone with adieu instead of bonjour?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Think of ‘à Dieu,’ madame. It’s the Provençal way to wish a person to be with God when you meet him as well as when you leave him.”

  A satisfactory answer, although I suspected that other Provençal ways were backward as well.

  We stopped for a girl who was crossing the road while flicking a willow wand at half a dozen goats, then for an old man who was piling broken-off branches into his donkey cart—picturesque enough for a painting.

  The road climbed steeply on switchbacks through terraces of orchards. Maurice identified the trees as pear trees. That sent me back to the painting of the Madonna in the chapel of the orphanage. A golden pear rested by itself on a railing in the foreground. Countless times I had asked Sister Marie Pierre why it was there, but she’d never answered me. All she said was to love the Virgin Mary and I wouldn’t miss the mother I barely remembered. Her response never satisfied me. As I grew older I recognized that Mary was wrapped in her own thoughts, unconscious of the child she was holding, an assessment that may have had more to do with my mother’s abandonment of me than with what the artist had intended to portray.

  It was only a copy, but it was by an Italian named Giovanni Bellini, which made it all the more exotic. The chapel had only one painting. That was enough for me, then.

  Maurice’s voice swearing an oath as he ground the gears brought me out of my reverie. Just below a hill town topped by a castle and a church, he set the brake.

  “Roussillon?”

  “Gordes,” he corrected. “I have to make a delivery here.”

  I looked around inside the bus. “What do you have to deliver?”

  “Pastis. From the glass to my throat. It is the first apéritif hour. Come. I will initiate you, madame.”

  We picked our way up a long, uneven stone stairway to a café in the square. Maurice greeted the people he knew with more adieus and ordered a pastis for each of us. The tall slim glasses held only a couple of centimeters of clear liquid, a disappointment until Maurice poured water into his glass, which turned the pastis cloudy.

  André prepared my drink along with his. “Ah,” he murmured. “One of the pleasures of the south. I’ve been waiting for this.”

  “Santé.” Maurice held up his glass and took a drink, then carefully wiped his trimmed mustache and the short whiskers of his white goatee, which, oddly, didn’t match his bushy black eyebrows.

  “I like the aroma.” I took a sip, then another, then a gulp.

  “It pleases you?” He raised his eyebrows. “The mix of anise and other herbs?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Beware, Lise,” André said. “It creeps up on you. Pour in more water if you feel …” He swiveled his hand in a circle.

  “To suit yourself and the weather,” Maurice said. “A true Provençal drink.”

  “And you are a true Provençal chevalier, monsieur. But please, tell me your surname.”

  “Chevet, madame.” He put his hand out palm down about a meter above the floor. “Un petit chevalier,” he said, chuckling at his own joke.

  As we descended the long stretch of stone steps to the bus, I felt pleasantly dizzy.

  “Hold on to her, André. The steps can be treacherous.”

  “I am. I will never let her go.”

  “Your grandfather Pascal, he will be furious with me if I deliver her to Roussillon with a sprained ankle. When my friends learn that I have brought a Parisienne to live in Roussillon—oh là là!—they will be so proud. But I wonder. Can a Parisienne ever become a Roussillonnaise?”

  Would any Parisienne ever want to?

  “Depends on how much we love her,” André said as we boarded the bus.

  “Me, I love her already!” Maurice declared.

  “You are too kind, monsieur. Is this town of yours nearby?” I asked.

  “Just down and up. Look for a sickle stuck in a fence post.”

  We had bounced along for a kilometer or so when I noticed a curious-looking group of stone huts in the shape of beehives. “I hope that’s not Roussillon.” I giggled. “Is it?”

  “No, madame. They are only bories. They’re scattered all over the Vaucluse. Some say the older ones were built a thousand years before Christ. Others say two. Because these are more intact than ruins elsewhere, we think they are more recent.”

  Eventually I saw the sickle protruding out of a post like a giant comma. “What is it doing there?”

  “Waiting for its owner, who left it there a few years ago.”

  “A very patient sickle. More patient than I am.”

  That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t impatience I felt. It was dismay. All I might be able to see would be folk artists who carved ducks at country fairs. I turned to André. “How are we going to survive in a town without a gallery?”

  “I can do other work.”

  “I didn’t mean survive that way.”

  “But, Lise, you’ll be living in a gallery. Pascal’s seven paintings.”

  I had never seen them. Pascal had left Paris and had moved back to Roussillon before I met André. All I had heard was stories. Would these paintings be enough to compensate for the pleasure of working in a Paris gallery someday? I could feel that dream shrinking to a crevice of a shop in this village: LISETTE’S DUCK FEATHER PILLOWS AND PTÉ. Meanwhile, Monsieur Laforgue would train someone else as an assistant while I would be stuck here taking care of an old man I didn’t even know.

  André grew quiet and restless. I placed my hand on his thigh.

  “Pascal made a train for me when I was a very little boy,” André murmured. “Out of wood, it was. I learned to count with that train. As he made each new wagon, he taught me a new number. He carved the numbers on the wagons. He’ll remember that. He has an incredible memory.”

  “That’s a lovely story.”

  After a period of silence, he said, “I just hope he hasn’t lost his spirit.”

  I reached for his hand. “I do too, dear.”

  Soon I saw in the distance what André had described—a village of yellow-ochre, coral, rose, and salmon perched atop a mountain and skirted by deep green pine forest, houses all in harmonious warm colors stepping up to the summit like a pyramid of blocks, as if inhabited by fairy godmothers, tale-telling godfathers, and elfin children. Below it, in the same colors, rutted cliffs and warty-fingered pinnacles gave it support, altogether like some fantasy kingdom from a child’s folk legend, altogether dazzling.

  “Voilà, madame!” Maurice announced. “There you see it—the village of Roussillon, queen of the commune de Roussillon, canton de Gordes, arrondissement d’Apt, département du Vaucluse, région de Provence, nation de France”—all of this delivered with the pride of a patriot. I felt his spirit beguiling me.

  I chuckled. “Pascal certainly chose a hard place to get to.”

  “Three hundred meters up,” Maurice said. “He didn’t choose it. He was born here. Just like me. Who would have guessed when we took up our fathers’ pickaxes and went to work in the ochre mine that he would becom
e un amateur d’art, a devoted lover of paintings, and would bring home a collection. From Paris, no less.” He shook his head in amazement. “That Pascal. But no matter all the great things he’s seen in Paris, I can still make him bite the dust at boules.”

  André laughed. “He says the same about you.”

  As for a list of what I would like in Roussillon, I was sure of only two items so far: Maurice and pastis.

  “Ah, yes, dear madame. I suppose there is one more truth beyond les quatre vérités. Love. We struggle, we complain, we grumble, but we love, more fiercely than the mistral blows. You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THIS VILLAGE, THIS MAN

  1937

  MAURICE PARKED THE BUS IN THE LOWER PART OF ROUSSILLON, in a tree-shaded square he called place du Pasquier, at the edge of a cliff. He insisted that we stroll through the village for my first glimpse of it, saying he would deliver the crates later.

  I had to squint in the brightness that bounced off the buildings as we walked up the incline of the main street—or was it the only street?—and passed a humble post office, a boulangerie sending out the homey aroma of fresh bread, a small épicerie offering a smattering of groceries, and a boucherie, where a lamb rump covered with flies and a spread-eagled calf with a red rose planted impishly in its anus hung in the window. A blacksmith clanged away at his anvil, his open-air shop tucked tightly between houses. I held my breath until we passed, hoping that André wouldn’t say that one of those houses was Pascal’s.

  An upper square bore a sign identifying it as place de la Mairie, and indeed, a mildly imposing stone-and-stucco building looking very much like a town hall did have the word MAIRIE carved in its lintel. Next to it, people sat outside a café. Beyond that, grâce à Dieu, a hair salon. Opposite it a water faucet dripped into a large shell-shaped stone bowl attached to a building. Was that where the hairdresser washed hair? Farther up the street, a belfry stood alongside an impressive Gothic arch of honey-colored stone.

  An upper and a lower road continued onward from the arch into a residential area. What we had passed was apparently all there was to the village center.

  André directed me to take the upper road. “It’s called rue de la Porte Heureuse.”

  Street of the Happy Door. “Sounds cheerful,” I remarked, but I was afraid my voice revealed otherwise.

  The array of houses smoothly stuccoed in the ochre colors of the bright Roussillon earth and accented by vivid blue shutters and window frames and ruby oleanders leapt straight out at me, as if from a Van Gogh painting. Houses had their doors right on the street, some draped with ivy or grapevines. One doorframe was garlanded with green beans. How convenient. From the vine to the cook pot in two seconds.

  Pascal’s house was a two-story dwelling of cracked rosy ochre stucco. There were no windows that I could see. Apparently this was the north side. A sparse vine crept over the doorway, and a jardiniere surrounded by a fringe of weeds held a withered lavender plant. The door was unlocked, so we entered, and André called, “Pascal?”

  No one answered.

  Paintings surrounded me. I whistled out my astonishment, counting seven paintings in this isolated village!

  A plain little one of a simple building in the countryside hung between two windows opposite the front door. Behind me, on the wall without windows, four landscapes hung in a row. On the left, a panorama of fields with a bridge in the distance and a mountain beyond, then a girl with a goat on a yellow path, then autumn trees with red-orange leaves in front of houses, and on the far right, a pile of large, squared-off rocks in front of a mountain. Puzzling. To the right of the stairway, a still life with fruits, and to the left—oh, mon Dieu! Bodiless heads with noses flattened to the side, dark lines around the eyes, mouths only black slits. Spooky.

  “What’s that?” I cried.

  “Pascal?” André called.

  “That one looks like it was painted by an angry child.”

  I caught only a glimpse of the paintings because André pulled me upstairs, again calling, “Pascal?”

  The two bedrooms were both empty, although one bed appeared to have been slept in.

  “Where could he be?” I asked. I had expected him to be moaning beneath a quilt.

  André headed downstairs, toward the door, to search for him. I held him back. “I have to pee.”

  His face looked ashen. “We don’t have a toilet.”

  “No toilet! What do you mean? What do you expect me to do?”

  “We’ll get a nice chamber pot for our bedroom,” he offered with a grimace. “We’ll toss the contents over the cliff. Or you can use a public toilet. There’s one to the left of place de la Mairie beyond the water faucet, near the boules court.”

  “And I have to live like this? You didn’t tell me!”

  Now I really was a lady in distress. I nearly ran downhill, with André trotting close behind, exasperation at this situation exploding in my mind. To be confined in a village a day and a half from Paris; to stay indoors for nine days at a stretch, a prisoner in my own house while the wind usurped my freedom, going wherever it wanted, blowing everything to smithereens; to live in such a backward place that they said goodbye when they meant hello; to forgo window-shopping, cabaret hopping, gallery gazing; to become stale of fashion, destitute of culture, starved for art; to have my dream postponed, my ambition annihilated, my soul shriveled; and as if those circumstances weren’t enough, to be forced to advertise my private bodily functions by clattering downhill at breakneck speed before an embarrassing public catastrophe overtook me, to reach a public toilet conveniently situated—by men, no doubt—adjacent to the boules court: Adieu, monsieurs, pay me no mind, I’m just going to pee.

  From the street, the outhouse looked clean enough, a lovely urine-ochre stucco, but inside I found only a hole in the cement and a raw beam about knee height over which I was supposed to hang my derrière. Even at the orphanage of the Daughters of Charity, we’d had porcelain toilets with oval wooden seats, and they were flushed from a water box mounted on the wall.

  When I came out and faced the spectators in the boules court, I could do no more than greet them with a witless smile, then give André a look that conveyed unmistakably the impossibility of the situation.

  “Oh, André” was all I could manage.

  “I’ll build you a toilet. Don’t worry.”

  He turned to the boules court, where a man flung a fist-sized steel ball.

  “Pascal!” André shouted.

  “Ah, quelle surprise! Adieu! Adieu!” cried a man whose wrinkled trousers and shirt matched his wrinkled skin. Seeing me, he slapped his hand on his head, on a worn yellowed chamois cap with a narrow rolled brim that sat on his skull like a second skin.

  He held his arms out wide. “So this is the legendary Lisette. André, you should be ashamed. She is far more beautiful than you led me to believe.”

  Pascal kissed me on my cheeks three times, once more than was customary in Paris, his drooping mustache scratching away at me.

  When he approached André to do the same, André grasped him by the shoulders with a quick shake. “What in the world are you doing out here? Are you crazy? You should be in bed!”

  “I didn’t know when you would come. Or if you would come. Ah, but I’m so glad you are here.”

  “Playing boules! You write that you see death lurking around the corner, and you plead for us to come and take care of you in your last days, so we pack up everything, let our apartment go, abandon my position in the guild and my thriving business with nine steady painters, pry my wife away from Paris for some isolated village she knows she won’t like—all because you say you’re dying. And here we find you playing boules!”

  “Oh, please, André. Don’t be angry.” He clasped his palms together in front of his chest and shook them as a beggar would.

  “What do you expect me to be?”

  “I just wanted so much to have you here with me.”

  He whined the words and m
ade such a piteous face that it was almost humorous, except for the fact that it was dire. We had made a grave mistake, throwing away our future for an old man’s fancy. It wasn’t likely that the guild would reinstall André as an officer. The position would have already gone to someone else. The same with my hoped-for gallery apprenticeship. If Pascal didn’t feel sick, I certainly did.

  “Besides, how could an old man like me get my wood in for winter? Do you want me to freeze to death?”

  “I’m of a mind to turn right around and go back. Lisette would love that.”

  “Non, non, non. I am sick. I only play every other day.”

  “You’re sick every other day?” André’s voice thundered, harsh and accusatory.

  “Some days I am only un peu fatigué, a little tired. Other days I am fatigué. Then I stay in bed. On my worst days, I am bien fatigué and … and frightened.” He crossed his arms over his chest and hunched his shoulders. “Would you much rather have found me on such a day? That’s when I wrote you. Today I am”—he held up his index finger and thumb a centimeter apart—“un peu fatigué.”

  “So you rest every other day,” I offered.

  “See? She understands. I don’t play boules when I am fatigué. But sometimes, after I rest all day, I get out of bed to play just one hand of belote in the café. Some days two.”

  “You’ve done a deceitful thing, Grandpère.”

  “Please, please don’t be upset with me.” His forehead contorted with the pain of contrition. “It’s shameful for an old man to have his grandson be angry with him.”

  Despite my own frustration, I agreed. André and Pascal were each other’s only living blood relative. Pascal had lost his wife two years before I met André, whose own mother had died in childbirth. Pascal’s only son, Jules, was killed in the Great War when André was six. So there was a missing generation, which made the two of them very close. Pascal and his wife had raised André in Paris, and Pascal had taught him his trade. Even though I didn’t know this man, and as angry as I was, I hated to see André berate him so.