by Dirk Bogarde
Then we clambered across the corrugations of the honeycombed limestone, the screes of shale and fallen rocks, the low clumps of thyme, box and juniper hiding in crevasses, and round the rims of little sunken fields which had been, literally, scratched, centuries ago, from pockets in the harsh land, raked and tended, each with a cairn of stones and shards ploughed up from the thin earth.
There were no trees at this height – the wind saw to that – just stunted writhen pines, straining to exist, clinging desperately with exposed roots like aged, knuckled fists clutching the steep sides of the scratchings of fallow soil.
In the early spring, clumps of hellebore hung acid-green bells in clusters along the goat tracks, or a wind-wrenched bramble thrust tiny buds against the aching ice-blue sky. In the little fields, or dells, the new barley and wheat were a green gauze, as thin and sparse as a hair transplant. Crows and ravens stalked about grubbing, or seeking twigs and straw for nests. Sometimes, but very rarely and only when the dogs had capered miles away, you might catch a fleeting sight of a wildcat, but they melted into the thyme and rock-hugging juniper and myrtle. And one was never really quite certain that they had been there, otherwise the silence sang, and only the distant tonkle of a goat bell or the very vaguest whisper of trickling water from a hidden spring broke the perfect glory of the silence.
The summer, of course, was quite another matter. Fat green lizards baked on the oven slabs of limestone, vipers swung and curled away into the cracks and crannies, and in the places where the little springs had made modest pools among the tumbled stones, tadpoles wriggled and dived in the crystal, cold water.
However, in the winter these same springs and pools froze solid, looking shiny, like molten glass spilled across the rocks, dragging ragged curtains of icicles where they had started to trickle over ledges, until the frost had stilled them and frozen movement.
But in early spring, and before the day trippers arrived from the coast, on the high plateau the landscape was benign and sweet. Every patch of grassland was sheeted with great drifts of blue and gold crocuses, white narcissi, cowslips, clover, scarlet anemones and, in the sheltered cracks of the rock, clumps of tiny cyclamen: their combined scents on still days was overpowering, the humming of a trillion bees foraging for nectar filled the air.
Sometimes, driving up from the plain, one could be in for a surprise, although very often I was warned ahead. Washing up at the sink, I could see the top of the mountain from the window plumed with cloud, which meant that the voyage up would be hazardous. Zig-zagging up and turning at one of the steep bends, there would suddenly be a solid wall of dank, dripping, drifting fog. Visibility down to a couple of metres, sidelights on; windscreen-wipers squealed and whispered, moisture dripped and beaded and the rare car coming towards one would inch slowly past in the thick gloom, lights faded to amber through the mist, number-plates almost unreadable. The silence was odd. Profound, empty. One felt absolutely alone, isolated, with no connection to the world so recently left behind on the plain below. And then, very slowly, the fog would rip into shreds; it would tear and rend, whirl and fray, melt into tatters and suddenly, within an instant, it had gone, spiralling aloft into a sky as clear and sparkling as polished glass, blue as cornflowers. No clouds. Glittering, brilliant, washed and sharp-edged.
At the top of the pass a new world lay ahead. Looking back, the great bank of fog loomed sullenly, a sombre blanket of boiling cloud, dark and impenetrable, cold, clinging. It always amazed me that we had driven safely through.
The air up there was cool, the distant hills softer, greener, the far mountains of the pre-Alps jagged against the porcelain blue. At the far edge of the great tumble of limestone rock, proper fields, not the scratched little dells in the stone, were lush with serried rows of potatoes, peas, beans, carrots. People worked among the crops, stooping, striding, stacking boxes brimming with ‘early’ vegetables for the markets down on the plain, exhausted now by the heat. But, in time, even up there at this height, in June and July, all this bounty was shrivelled by the burning sun. The spring flowers went as swiftly as they had arrived and succumbed to the relentless heat in the high, pure air.
Up there the houses, too, altered. No longer Roman-tiled roofs and vines for shelter, no olives: now sharp-roofed chalets, with wooden balconies and log stacks amidst sentinel firs set among beech and poplar trees. A mountain landscape and a mountain people. Provence was always surprising.
Madame Pasquini was the chef de bureau at the post office in Saint-Sulpice. A trim little woman, she managed her bureau with enormous efficiency, dealt with stamps, pensions, parcels and the telephone cabinet in the corner of her small room from behind a high counter. One of the pleasantest sounds I could hope to hear was the Bang! Bang! Bang! as she franked the day’s mail ready to be sacked and collected by the yellow mail van for the sorting office. It meant that I had not actually ‘missed the post’.
Her office was sparse: apart from the counter, some scales, a pickle jar of wild flowers and the telephone, there was nothing there to make one linger. A deliberate effect: even her little pot-bellied stove for use in the bitter winter was well behind the counter so no one could huddle round it and have a chat. She was far too brisk and busy for that sort of life. When I first got to the village she was, if anything, distant. I was unfamiliar with the cost of stamps and the various bits and pieces of money. I know I often irritated her, but she did her best to say nothing. And it was only when she discovered that I had obtained my carte de séjour, allowing me to stay in the area of the Alpes Maritimes for six months, and after my indication that my stay would be permanent, that she eased up on coolness and allowed herself a flinty smile. That vanished, the flintiness, after an encounter we had up in the moon country. Vanished for ever.
She had a little red Renault and a large, hairy dog. I don’t know what sort of dog it was … a mix-up, but it was aged and she adored it. She felt secure with it curled up on a strip of grubby carpet at her feet. No one would cosh her or rob the till with Joujou about. The fact that Joujou had a sparse allowance of yellow teeth and rheumy eyes and had to be well into late, if not old, age seemed not to have occurred to her. Or perhaps it had? Anyway, she set it aside, as people do, and refused to consider the facts before her.
Driving through the limestone rocks one Sunday afternoon, I saw the red Renault parked far ahead by a stone basin into which a spring gently bubbled. Up on the top of the ridge, hard against the skyline, a tiny figure windmilled frantic arms.
‘I think that is Madame Pasquini, waving away up there,’ I said.
‘Fool of a woman! Run out of petrol probably. Women. Honestly, hopeless about cars …’ Forwood was always dismissive of women drivers, but he did, that time at least, start to slow down as the figure up on the ridge came scrambling towards us, arms flailing, legs skittering about on the rock and shale.
She was calling out, but for the moment (windows closed, dogs squealing with excitement, the air conditioning belting – it was the first really hot day of spring) she was soundless. I got out and began to clamber up towards her, waving back, I suppose to reassure her that I was on my way? Idiotic the things one does.
As we came together, she looked wretched, untidy. Hair ragged, stockings torn at the knee, one sleeve up, one down. A lady with a problem: a dead body? A sheep? It was quite obvious that she had broken nothing, she was so energetic, but her voice was hoarse with desperation.
‘Monsieur! Ah! Grâce à Dieu! Aidez moi. Help me! I have a terrible catastrophe! Come quickly, come quickly.’ She turned round and scrambled back the way she had come. I was bound to follow. It was a perilous journey skidding about on the rock. There were sudden little pits, crevasses, clutches of juniper and box: a fall, a trip even, would mean a fracture or a break.
At the top, lying in blazing sun beside a clump of thyme, was the inert body of Joujou, eyes already glazing, tongue slightly protruding. Clearly dead. Flies on its muzzle.
Madame Pasquini fell to the rocks on her
knees and grabbed a foot. ‘Can you help? It was a viper! I saw it … lying on the rock …’
I squatted beside her, opened one of the dog’s rheumy eyes wider than it already was, looked at the tongue, felt, idiotically under all that thick hair, for a heartbeat. ‘Madame, I regret he is dead.’
Forwood, breathless and irritated, had caught up with us.
‘Madame Pasquini’s dog has been bitten by a viper.’
‘I see. Is it dead?’
‘Very.’
Forwood addressed himself to the weeping chef de bureau in French, asked: how long ago? About half an hour. She couldn’t do anything to help it. It went into a coma almost instantly, it was old. Then Forwood announced the grim news himself. ‘Il est mort, Madame. Hélas!’
For a moment she remained on her knees, the sun beating down on the rocks. She ran a hand through the shaggy hair, shrugged gently, rose to her feet. ‘ Alors …’ she said.
We carried the dead animal down the hill. It was a hefty weight, and Forwood, I knew, was not absolutely delighted: he’d got on an Italian shirt of which he was particularly fond. However, apart from the droplets of blood on the muzzle, there was no mess, and we dumped the corpse, with its lolling head, into the Renault boot and, with a silent hand-shake all round, watched Madame Pasquini drive away.
Almost from that moment on she and I – well, all three of us really – became very good friends indeed. Nothing was said, there were no particular thanks given: there was merely a flow of pleasant understanding and patience when I bundled about with ‘four stamps, airmail for South Africa, ten for Japan, eight normal for Germany, twenty-four for the UK and a fat envelope of manuscript for Hitchin, Herts’, where my excellent typist, Sally, was ready to make sense from chaos. This was the usual weekly deal at the bureau de poste. Madame Pasquini got very used to the constant fan mail, and the stamp prices and fluctuations, and knew, instantly, that the buff envelope with the manuscript had to be registered, crayon-crossed and labelled ’Exprès’. ‘Tiens! Another book! Monsieur Dickeens!’
When she went away on her holiday, usually to Brittany, she always sent a card to say that she was having ‘pleasing vacances, with very good food and just a little wine’. And, one time, shortly after Joujou’s death, I bought a small puppy of mixed breed from a gipsy child, who was dragging it about on a rope in the Marché Forville in Cannes, and, cautiously, placed it on Madame’s counter beside the jar of lilac and the scales. Her immediate cry of delight, ’Oh! Comme il est beau! Si beau!’, and the fact that she took it into her arms right away indicated that, should I suggest she might accept it, she certainly would. And did. And thus was formed a firm bond which was never broken. The creature grew to reasonable size (no giant), was spirited, pleasant, loving and a wild mixture of perhaps a hound and a spaniel – one could never know what breeds had been utilized. And she didn’t care anyway, and called it ‘Jack’ … because that was an English name. The logic escaped me, but then most French logic did anyway. However, gradually I was peopling my new life with good friends who would remain with me. And they did.
It was an agreeable sensation for a foreigner in a strange land. A feeling of ‘joining’, being accepted. More ‘belonging’.
One day, checking the list of cleaned and ironed on Madame Mandelli’s table in her spotless kitchen, sorting out franc notes for payment, I said something about having to get a wall built at Le Pigeonnier as a shield against the savage mistral which roared straight across the terrace and ripped flowerpots, rakes, brooms and garden chairs across the hill and thrashed the shutters, and made life generally exhausting. I, personally, detest wind: it makes me restless and irritated. It was a phenomenon that no one had bothered to tell me about, this mistral. I mean, I knew it blew, I knew what it was; but I had not the very least idea that it came careering down the Rhone valley, which was miles away, turned sharp left when it hit the sea, and raged straight up the valley to blast my house and land, head on, rending the roof tiles into confetti, the trees into tatty feather dusters. Something had to be done pretty quickly about a deflecting wall, a barrier. Bruna Mandelli pursed carmine lips, shook henna-red hair, sighed, and said that she detested the mistral because it made her so fatiguée, and that her husband Rémy was a splendid maçon, and would I like him to come to the house to talk about the idea? She could, she said, hand on heart, recommend him as the best maçon in the district, and probably the best entrepreneur and maçon between Ventimiglia and Toulon. And he would be ‘fair’ and had worked at the house with the previous owners. Indeed, he and she had first met there in the stable (now a part of my Long Room) during the war, when they were very young. He knew every stone and tile. He was a suggestion that I simply should not refuse. I am always extremely grateful to the Fates, and Bruna, that I did not.
Rémy Mandelli was pretty large – six foot something – muscular, handsome, with a cloth cap permanently at the back of his head, a Gitane on his lower lip, a flash of gold when he grinned or laughed. His handshake was strong, his accent thick Provençal (unlike his wife he had been born in the area), and his energy was unlimited. He was to prove an excellent maçon, as had been promised, and, in the end, a loyal friend. Perhaps his ideas and mine did not always coincide: he was longing to rip out everything that was old and beautiful and stuff the house with factory tiles, chrome and glittery brass, and was constantly bewildered when I discovered a store of ancient tiles in some abandoned farm building, or a battered oil lamp with a ruby-red glass shade in a brocante, and he found it hard to come to terms with my insistence that the plaster in the house should be, at all times, rough-rendered, with the brush marks showing. This threw him into a great fuss. ’Malheur! People will judge my work is careless! That I am a peasant!’
He was even more bewildered, and irritated, when he was asked to strip down all the beams in sight to the bare, glorious, silvered oak. Coats and coats of brown or yellow paint peeled off like potato skins, and his glum look when I praised his work, his shrug, his disgusted pottle of spit into a discreet corner, forced me time and time again, to comfort him with the firm arm of friendship and a chatter of clucking praise.
In the end, after some two years, he began, very cautiously, to come round to my way of thinking, and eventually it was Monsieur Rémy who crowed with delight when, wrecking some old building across the valley, he would salvage things which he would normally have rejected as ‘ancient rubbish’ for the treasure which I considered them to be. Eventually, his battered truck would bump up the track bearing an ancient beam, a slithering of floor tiles, stacks of roof tiles, or a plate rack covered in dust and thick cream or brown paint which concealed a solid, carved olive wood glory.
He once brought his parents up to have a look. They would, he assured me, be astonished to see that I had recreated exactly what they had spent their lives, and a great deal of money, getting rid of.
‘It’s like a museum!’ he cried, and the parents, aged, gentle, she all in black, he in the church suit, cap in hand, rosebud in his buttonhole, came to Le Pigeonnier and marvelled silently to see the re-creation of an almost forgotten way of life. I hasten to add that at no time did the house ever qualify for the cover of House and Garden or the Architectural Review. It was simple and undecorated.
They were bemused, his parents, by the fact that there was no television set, no cocktail cabinet; that there were no curtains, only shutters; and that the huge fireplace burned only logs, that the floors were uneven and polished like glass.
Like my own mother before her, Madame Mandelli senior sighed that there was no carpet, that the lamps were mainly oil, that the beams were stripped and on display and not concealed tidily in the ceiling. Anyway, they were extremely polite, and left with many handshakes and nods of apparent approval. ‘C’ est comme le temps ancien!’ But the nods, I could see, shortly turned to sad, worried shakes of disbelief as they drove away, sitting in the front cabin of Monsieur Rémy’s truck. A mad foreigner! Poor fellow. All that drudgery brought back again!
Of course, Monsieur Rémy and I were not, at any time, the only people at work on the place. Forwood took charge of all the outside work, that is to say the maintenance of the terraces, the pruning of the vines, the spraying, the cutting of the hay, the raking, the never-ending cleaning of the land. This was essential by law, for fear of fire. If the land was not cleaned, the fine was instant and costly. Anyway, one’s neigh-bours in the farms about the area were quick to complain if things seemed lax. Their property was at risk too, and if a fire started in the mistral, everyone was in dire trouble. So the cleaning, or the débroussaillage never ended. Only in January and February was there a little respite; after that everything started to push up again.
I was never any good at machines, certainly not the grass-cutters with which I had to deal: enormous red things with zig-zag blades that belched and roared, had gears and exhausts, and tore away with me. I might just as well have been driving again. It required all one’s strength to guide, control and hold them. We had four of these in varying widths. All German. No other country made anything as tough and vicious. They were tanks, frankly. And they did the job. I stayed, as much as possible, around the house and the modest bit of flower garden, which I hacked out of a piece of field, the overgrown potager, where I attempted to grow vegetables and herbs, and the pond area. Otherwise I joined Monsieur Rémy and his Troupe.
The Troupe is worth a slight diversion here. It was led by Monsieur Danté, a stooped, grey-haired man of indeterminate age with a drooping moustache, probably no more than fifty. He hardly ever spoke, never smiled, and carried some profound sadness about with him like a pocket watch. From time to time I would see him stop doing whatever he was doing and consider this sadness, shaking his head slowly, sighing, brushing his eyes with an arm; and then, after a blink or two, he’d continue his work. Monsieur Rémy said he’d had ‘a bad war’, but he was a good worker. Two Arabs made up the rough-work part of the Troupe. One was vaguely retarded, kindly, silent, thin, very strong and an excellent worker with stone. Him I only ever knew as Fraj. He came from Tunis. The other fellow was very different. About eighteen, medium height, from Sousse, he fancied himself inordinately, glancing from time to time at his reflection in a tiny pocket mirror he carried in his shirt, running a piece of comb through glossy curls, bearing his lips in a wide smile to display remarkable, for an Arab, teeth as white as peeled almonds. He was known to us all as Plum-Bum on account of the purple velvet trousers, hacked off at groin level and skin tight, which he wore at all times during work. He had a pretty little wife, of about fourteen or fifteen, who was as often as not, over the years, pregnant and always dragged a small child by one arm behind her like a toy dog on wheels. It usually had a blue plastic dummy shoved into its mouth and a pink and orange knitted cap with a pom-pom on its wobbling head. She never spoke when she sometimes arrived on the site to bring Plum-Bum a message or a packet of food, but would demurely look down, and twist about on her flip-flopped feet with chipped red toenails. They lived together, with about a dozen other Arabs, in an almost derelict building on the edge of the village, and Monsieur Rémy assured me in a hoarse whisper that they were better off than most of their neighbours because Plum-Bum enjoyed unlimited sex with the ones who were without wives. He delighted, said Monsieur Rémy, in ‘jig-jig’ for money, and never lacked clients. However, he was a good worker, apparently loved his wife and got her pregnant as often as possible. Monsieur Rémy recounted all this with a degree of awe. ’Malheur!’ he would mutter. ‘He is a veritable stallion and only eighteen!’