I stepped inside. Three long tables in the middle of the room had been covered with white paper and neatly set with plates, glasses, and bottles of wine. There was a small kitchen behind the bar. A guy with a sandpaper beard was busily slicing something. Another man was seasoning some kind of meat.
Alphonse saw me and leapt up from his barstool, his head knocking into a string of dried peppers hanging from the ceiling. “There you are!” he said, coming over. “Let’s get you a drink.”
Alphonse installed me at the bar and introduced me to a man on the other side of the counter who went by the name of Basso. He had Popeye forearms and a walrus mustache not unlike the ones I’d seen adorning the paysans in Henri’s book of water mills.
“What’s your pleasure?” Basso said.
I asked for a beer, and Basso jerked back from the bar in mock indignation. “Eh oh!” he yelled. “You can do better than that!”
I asked for a whiskey instead.
“That’s more like it.”
Basso had deep smile lines around his eyes, which gleamed mischievously.
Alphonse corralled a plate of chorizo and a dish of anchovies skewered with toothpicks. Basso slid a bowl of potato chips in front of me. They were Pringles, an American import that the Gascons—who typically disparage foods that are extruded, expeller-pressed, or otherwise denatured—have for some reason warmly embraced as an apéro snack.
“So that you don’t feel homesick!” Basso said.
More men were coming in. A lot of them seemed to be Alphonse’s age—which I guessed to be in the vicinity of sixty-five, though with Gascons it was hard to tell—but many were younger. One man had brought his son, who looked to be about twelve and was sporting a faux-hawk. The club members were dressed mostly in T-shirts and jeans, with a few exceptions, among them Alphonse, who had draped a lavender cotton sweater over a madras shirt in the enduring French shorthand for laid-back male elegance. I recognized a few faces: Bernd and Thierry from the Coscuella classes, and also the local mechanic who had, free of charge, replaced our car’s antenna after it had mysteriously gone missing.
Basso peered at my drink and decided it needed freshening. Then he topped off Alphonse’s.
I asked what was on the menu for tonight.
“Duck steaks à la plancha,” Alphonse said, pointing toward the stove. I could see a flat-top griddle fitted over the burners. I thought of my incinerated magrets and realized that a plancha would have come in handy that night.
Alphonse showed me a duty roster tacked to the wall and explained that cooking detail fell to two different members every week.
“We eat like kings at the Esbouhats!” Basso interjected. He proceeded to reel off an eclectic list of recent dishes: lamb navarin, Moroccan-style couscous, choucroute garnie, tapas, tête de veau, goulash.
Bernd wandered over, trailing cigarillo smoke. Then Thierry joined us. Then the garagiste. I was interrogated at length about American sports and politics. Henri Michel, a retired train conductor with an equine face and thinning hair, engaged me in a protracted discussion about pigeon hunting. After that, I talked to a soft-spoken man named Doudou, a native of Madagascar who, it turned out, was the school cafeteria cook. I told him Charlotte had been regaling us with descriptions of her daily lunches (for which, incidentally, the school allotted a full two hours).
More drinks and conversation flowed. I began to wonder if we’d ever sit down to eat.
Finally, at around ten thirty, one of the guys who’d been working by the stove shouted, “À table!”
Basso hadn’t lied. The Esbouhats did eat like kings . . . or at least country lords. We started with a coarse, peppery homemade pâté de campagne, studded with soft fat. After that came a cold lentil salad with gravlax and fresh dill, as refined as the pâté was rustic. There were pickled cherry peppers stuffed with brandade. There were chive-topped deviled eggs. And at last the duck steaks, seared on the griddle for no more than a minute a side, perfectly saignant. Each man held the serving platter for his neighbor so that he could spoon up some of the bloody juices.
The men ate fast and talked faster. I couldn’t quite figure out how so much food could disappear so quickly while everybody’s mouth was running. The men jawed animatedly at one another across the tables, their words issuing forth in gusty, boastful bursts. It was the very definition of a gasconade.
Basso, sitting next to me, was the most blustery of all. He was a relentless wisecracker. Even when he wasn’t talking, a joke or a put-down seemed poised to escape from beneath his mustache. All of his salvos began with Eh oh! or Putain! or sometimes both. Putain, by the way, literally translates as “whore” but has evolved, particularly in Gascony, into a supremely versatile expletive that can range in meaning, depending on inflection and context, from a resigned “Aw, hell” to a skeptical “Oh, come on” to a mildly stunned “Holy crap” to an ejaculatory “Shit!” or even “Fuck!” Indeed, putain sees a lot more action—if you’ll pardon the idiom—in these parts than merde, a word Gascons reserve for life’s exasperating or downbeat moments, like getting a flat tire or receiving news that a friend’s dog died.
Basso was on a roll. By the time the apricot tart and the Armagnac had come out, he seemed to be winding up to a finale. He poured himself some of the brandy, laid a hand on my shoulder, and shouted to a short, straitlaced guy seated at the next table, “Eh oh! Francis! Tell our American friend what happened at the fête in your wife’s village!”
Francis groaned and swiped a hand across his face.
“Putain,” Basso said, looking at me but playing to the room, “Francis got so drunk, he climbed into bed with his mother-in-law!”
“Knock it off,” said Francis weakly. But it was too late; the sharks smelled blood.
“It’s true!” said Basso, slapping a hand against the table for want of a rim shot. “He screwed her three times before he sobered up!”
The room erupted. Francis hurled a piece of baguette across the table. It ricocheted off the Armagnac bottle and landed in my lap.
A FIXTURE OF ANY RESPECTABLE festival weekend is the morning casse-croûte. Most often a paper-plate meal of bacon and eggs, a casse-croûte is not unlike a church pancake breakfast, except that the Gascon version includes plenty of wine, has been preceded by a late night of feasting and drinking, and will be followed by a lunchtime grillade and, a few hours after that, an evening of more drinks and more feasting, all of it wrapping up with a bloody corrida.
Plaisance’s casse-croûte took place on the morning after the Esbouhats dinner—Bastille Day—and had been described by Alphonse as a beloved local tradition not to be missed. It was held under the main festival tent next to the bullring and started at nine o’clock, but Basso had advised me to get there early to beat the crowds.
By eight thirty, people were already lining up at a small ticket kiosk. I could see Basso and Alphonse inside the tent, both smartly groomed and looking impossibly well-slept. Alphonse and a couple of other Esbouhats were placing bottles of red wine on long folding tables. Basso was connecting a propane tank to a rickety portable gas range topped with a couple of beat-up skillets and a cast-iron plancha. He saw me and rushed over.
“Eh oh! We weren’t sure you’d make it in time,” he said, ushering me past the crowd. He pawed through a cardboard box. “You can cook eggs, right?”
“I’ve fried a few, why?”
Basso grinned and tossed me an apron. “An Esbouhat has to work for his breakfast!”
I tried to think of the French expression for “bait-and-switch,” but it escaped me.
Basso lit the burners on the range and handed me a spatula. “Two eggs per customer,” he said. “Alphonse will cook the bacon.” He jabbed a thumb toward a towering stack of egg crates behind us. “We cook until we run out or everyone’s fed, whichever comes first.”
At nine o’clock, villagers started streaming into the tent and lining up in front of our cooking station, plastic plates in hand. They wore the grave express
ions of Gascons not accustomed to waiting for their first meal of the day.
Basso, who inexplicably donned a cowboy hat, poured some oil into his skillet. I did the same, and then followed Basso’s lead, cracking six eggs into my pan, giving them a dusting of salt and pepper, and serving them two by two, sunny-side up, onto the attendees’ outthrust plates.
I quickly fell behind. My burner seemed to have only one setting—high—and soon droplets of sputtering, superheated oil were leaping about festively, dappling my forearms with a hundred bee stings. The uneven bottom of my dented skillet, which should have been retired from service many bacon-and-egg breakfasts ago, kept sliding partway off the burner, sloshing oil onto my shoes and, by exposing the naked flame, causing my recently regrown knuckle hairs to curl and blacken all over again. My glasses kept slipping down my sweat-slicked nose. I looked over at Alphonse, who was unhurriedly lifting tidy rounds of ventrèche—the cured, unsmoked pork belly that is a beloved Gascon breakfast meat—off the griddle and onto the plates, and wondered how he’d gotten the easy job.
The worst part was, I was breaking and overcooking the yolks, discovering in doing so that Gascons paying to attend a Bastille Day casse-croûte had no compunction about refusing an egg they deemed less than flawlessly done. I was discarding almost as many eggs as I was dispensing.
My travails seemed to cause Basso immense delight.
“Putain, Dah-veed! I thought you said you’d cooked eggs before!”
“I have,” I said, dumping another ruined specimen into the garbage can. “Just not this many!”
Basso was turning out one jiggling duo of perfect eggs after another and, as if to show me how effortless it was, kept up a stream of banter all the while. Each customer received a customized bon mot.
“Alors, Mademoiselle,” he said to a girl Charlotte’s age, “how do you like yours? Medium? Rare? Bleu?”
To the middle-aged man in line after her, Basso rattled off a joke about a cuckolded pharmacist.
The svelte woman who came next got a scolding for asking for just one egg. “How do you expect to get fat like me if you keep eating like that!”
As we were getting near the end of the eggs, Michele and Charlotte appeared in front of me, plates in hand. It took me a second to register who they were.
“What are you doing here?” Michele asked.
“Long story,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“We got hungry and followed the crowd.”
I served Charlotte her eggs. She looked entertained by the whole scene. Then I served a couple of eggs to Michele.
“Not that one!” Michele said. “The yolk’s broken.”
Into the trash it went.
By the time the eggs were gone, I was a scalded, sweaty wreck. As I was untying my apron, Alphonse tapped my shoulder. He was holding one last plate of food.
He handed it to me. “Eat up, mon brave.”
8
Beautiful People
Not all Gascons are of paysan stock, to be sure. The Gers may be France’s most agricultural district—with a greater percentage of its land given over to farming than any other département—but it’s populated by more than just farmers, winegrowers, and ex–rugby players. In the towns at least, one encounters the same predictable set of livelihoods as in the rest of provincial France: schoolteacher, shop owner, small-time entrepreneur, functionary in a backwater of the French bureaucracy, and so on. What struck me about the Gers was the curious preponderance of people who didn’t fall into the usual categories, who occupied the interesting spaces in between the strata of rural French society, or hovered around its edges.
One summer morning, a stranger appeared at our door. Stick-thin and in his late fifties or early sixties, he looked decidedly not like a Gascon, and indeed he wasn’t one.
In a thick Australian accent and a shy voice, he introduced himself as Alan. He said he and his wife, a native Gersoise named Agnès, lived just across the esplanade and took their apéro outdoors every evening around seven, and we’d be most welcome to join them.
(This would be an appropriate moment to point out that those seeking anonymity or privacy would be well advised to settle somewhere other than a Gascon village. Laying to rest my early misgivings about being an outsider, the residents of Plaisance, having gotten wind of the American family living in the old mill, proved themselves to be enthusiastic practitioners of the pop-in.)
We arrived at Alan and Agnès’s at the appointed time to find them sitting on garden chairs in front of their house.
“Ah, my dears, welcome!” Agnès said in British-accented English, setting down a glass of wine and extending her hand. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat that forced her to tilt her head back to see her interlocutor. “I’m just having my nightly vin mousseux.”
She reached over and touched Alan’s hand. “Alain, chéri?” She pronounced her husband’s name the French way. “Bring chairs for our new friends, s’il te plaît, and some of the good pâté.”
Alan retrieved three more garden chairs from the house and invited us to sit. I’d brought a bottle of floc, an Armagnac-spiked aperitif I’d grown fond of; Agnès picked it up. “Ah! From my cousin’s domaine. Alain, be a dear and fetch a corkscrew.” Alan hopped up without a word and went back into the house.
After Alan had poured drinks, I fielded a series of questions from Agnès about how we’d ended up in Plaisance. She listened to my answers intently, peering at me from under her hat and sucking on a reed-thin cigarette.
At length, I turned to Alan and asked what he did for a living. He thought this over for some time, as if it were a question that had never before been put to him.
“I suppose you could say I’m a reader,” he said at last.
“Alain devours books,” said Agnès. Alan got up once again and returned with a well-thumbed hardback.
“I’m quite enjoying this one at the moment,” he said. It was an old edition of a travelogue on Italy written in the nineteenth century.
“Alain is also a collector,” said Agnès, holding her cigarette an inch or so from her lips. “Chéri, why don’t you show them the house?”
With that, Alan invited us inside and led us around three floors of dusty, curio-filled rooms, each one accoutred with ashtrays containing the butts of Agnès’s skinny cigarettes. Here and there, Alan paused the tour to tell us quietly about the provenance of a particular item—a working Victrola he’d bought in Melbourne, an antique mantelpiece clock from a brocanteur in the Gers—or to warn us about a loose floorboard.
When we got back outside, Agnès was refilling our glasses. She asked Alan to find a doll for Charlotte to play with, lit another cigarette, and looked over at me.
“Being a writer,” she said, waving away some smoke, “you might be interested to know that I’ve written a small book myself. A memoir, you could call it. As yet unpublished.”
For the next half hour or so, as Charlotte played with the doll and Michele strained to follow along, Agnès proceeded to tell us about her life.
The account, which was quite riveting, went something like this: Agnès was born Marie-Agnès Pinon, into a local aristocratic family, a daughter of the dwindling petite noblesse that had thrived in Gascony during the ancien régime, studding the countryside of the Gers with small but sturdy châteaux. The one Agnès had grown up in was a drafty old mansion called Château de Sabazan. Agnès described her youth there as harsh and lonely. Her mother, she said, was a cold patrician who never hugged her children and left parenting to a governess. Largely ignored at home, Agnès sought kindness among the paysans who populated the village outside the château’s walls. As soon as she came of age, she spurned her roots in the nobility and, with the help of a modest inheritance, ran off to Australia. There, she married and had children with a man who turned out to be an alcoholic and also gay. She married again, this time to a Tanzanian, moved to Africa, and had more children, only to discover she was one of several wives, added to the harem because of
her money. She returned to Australia, adrift, and became ill. By divine grace she met a shy antique collector named Alan; she married him. With her new husband in tow, she returned to the Gers, reestablished contact with her children, and reunited with her siblings, who had all but given her up for lost. Finally, she reconciled with her mother, who had been forced to sell the château and now resided in the retirement home in Plaisance.
“That’s quite a story,” I said when she’d finished.
Agnès sighed and stubbed out her cigarette. “I’ve had my trials, it’s true,” she said. “But that is all behind me now.”
She smiled at Alan and took his narrow hand in hers. They gazed lovingly at each other.
We happened upon Agnès and Alan again a few nights later. They were in their usual spot, seated on garden chairs outside the house, wineglasses in hand. This time, though, they had company: an older, white-haired woman in oversize sunglasses, linen capri pants, and blue espadrilles. In one hand the woman clutched a glass of whiskey; in the other was a leash attached to a Westie terrier.
Agnès looked relieved to see us. “Ah, my dears,” she said, arms outstretched, “how lovely you’re here! And what fine timing. This is my mother, Irène Pinon.”
I blinked, surprised to see the malevolent character from Agnès’s story seated before me in the flesh.
The woman gave us the once-over from behind her enormous shades. “Ah, yes, the Americans I’ve been hearing about. Dites-moi, how are you getting on in Monsieur De Rességuier’s old mill?”
Madame Pinon spoke in a clipped, rapid-fire cadence that I imagined to be a bygone affectation of the Gascon haut monde.
Michele, whose French was inching toward the conversational level, told her we were settling in fine.
“You likely already know that the De Rességuiers are a very old aristocratic family,” she said. “Of course, they are noblesse de robe, not of blood. Monsieur De Rességuier’s forebears acquired their title through the purchase of some land, if I’m not mistaken.”
Duck Season Page 7