The way she had lived took courage. When I was near Mémé, inhaling the scent of her cooking, I felt that somehow I was also soaking up some of her boldness.
Mémé pulled out a bubbling escargot from the oven and with her oven mitts placed it down on a little napkin in front of me.
“Goûtez.” She winked at me. “Tell me if you think they are ready.”
At ten to eleven, after a feast of the delicious escargots and foie gras on tiny toasts with honeyed Sancerre wine, we staggered up the road toward the thundering bells of the village church. The midnight mass wasn’t something Franck’s parents – who had been very religious at one time but who had since become almost atheist – attended regularly, but Franck in particular had pushed for it this year. Even though I was usually no fan of church, given the state of our new home, prayer could hardly hurt.
Penetrating the inside of the church after walking through the silvery winter air was a shock. Inside, the temperature was roughly on par with Tahiti. I looked around and saw that the Père Bard had fitted out the church with six humongous heaters that emitted a burning stench reminiscent of the heaters at our new home.
We found seats together near the middle of the pews and underneath a swaying archway that seemed to have been constructed solely from dried vines and scotch tape. Cut out stars and drawings of the Virgin Mary made by the children hung down from these gravity-defying structures.
“I wonder how that thing is staying up?” I mused. I was sitting just underneath a Blessed Virgin who bore an uncanny resemblance to Pamela Anderson. She quivered in the tropical air. Baywatch had been a hit here in Burgundy too.
“Must be the Holy Spirit,” Franck surmised.
A few raggedy hymns were sung and then the Père Bard eased his crooked body down on a rickety plastic chair that had been placed in the aisle between the two flanks of pews. He began to talk in that singsong tone of his and very quickly his sermon veered from the birth of Jesus to one of his favourite topics – the Blessed Virgin of Lourdes. For a non-Catholic, I knew an impressive amount about her. She just so happened to be a key figure in the lore of Franck’s family. According to Michèle, who was paying close attention to Le Père, the Blessed Virgin of Lourdes was responsible for the existence of Franck’s little brother Emmanuel-Marie, who sat perched like a blond cherub on my other side.
Michèle’s brutal cancer treatment should have, according to every shred of medical evidence, rendered her sterile. Throughout her illness and her recovery she visited Lourdes several times and prayed to the Virgin. A few months after her treatment ended she began to have stomach-aches. Terrified that her cancer had metastasized she reluctantly booked an abdominal ultrasound. The doctor took his time in examining her. She was certain as she lay on the table that he was measuring new and inoperable tumors.
He finally wiped off the gel and announced cheerfully, “You will be feeling much better in seven months or so.”
“Why? Will I be dead by then?” she asked.
He laughed and patted her shoulder. “Non. You’ll have had your baby by then. You’re around two months pregnant.”
Unfortunately, when she shared her incredible news with her oncologist he was horrified. He was convinced that due to the extensive radiation she had endured, her baby would certainly be deformed and handicapped - if it survived at all. He urged her to have an abortion, or at least an amniocentesis. Michèle refused, unswerving in her belief that her baby was a miracle. Seven months later Emmanuel (meaning “God is with us”) -Marie (to thank the Virgin) was born. He weighed in at over nine pounds and was perfectly healthy. Despite the fact that in the years following his arrival, Michèle and André had soured on the Catholic religion, the belief that the Virgin of Lourdes had played a part in Emmanuel-Marie’s existence remained unassailable in Franck’s family.
The Père Bard leaned forward on his cane, lowered his voice, and moved on to a different Virgin apparition - Our Lady of Fatima. I found myself leaning forward too. Apparently she had appeared in Portugal in 1917 and predicted the spread of communism, making prophesies about the annihilation of certain nations. Père Bard stood up shakily, galvanized by the topic. He began to thump his cane on the floor as he warned us all that we were going to die in a blaze of terror and flames, any day now.
I looked around me. This from a priest who, last time I had seen him, told me that God put us all here on earth to have fun. Emmanuel-Marie was fiddling with his hymnbook, the portly winemaker in front of me was picking the wax out of his ear, and Mémé was polishing the wooden pew with a corner of her shawl. Nobody was the slightest bit fazed.
“So what can one do?” the Père Bard asked, then looked out at his congregation. I listened carefully. I really wanted to know. Le Père turned his face up to the swaying arch that had miraculously, all stayed aloft. “All we can do is pray. Tous ensemble. Altogether, now.”
He bowed his head, and I followed suit. If the end of the earth was truly imminent, that certainly put my house-related problems into perspective. Besides, it was comforting to feel for once as though I wasn’t the only one who was doomed. We were all in this together. Maybe that feeling of not being alone was part of the reason why people had been coming to church for centuries.
In my head I asked the Virgin of Fatima and the Virgin of Lourdes and Jesus and God and basically whoever was listening for help, so that we could complete our renovations in time. I prayed that the neighbor wouldn’t try to extort half of our house or kill Franck. I prayed that we would find a car (a cheap car, preferably). I prayed that I had made the right decision in leaving law and jumping into this house thing. And I prayed that somehow, even though I couldn’t possibly see how from my current vantage point, everything would work out. After we had kissed our neighbours and walked back out into the winter air to the sound of church bells, I almost believed it could.
Chapter 15
Boxing Day isn’t Boxing Day in France. It isn’t a holiday at all, which is an oversight of epic proportions as anyone who has enjoyed a Christmas feast à la française needs a full two days to digest. In Franck’s family, as with many other Burgundians, presents were small and secondary; the meal together was the true gift.
In Franck’s house, the Christmas lunch went from half past eleven in the morning until nine o’clock at night. It included escargots, foie gras on little toasts with fig jam, paper thin slices of smoked salmon from Scotland, a roast turkey with chestnut and sausage stuffing, a huge cheese platter, and two bûches de Noel, one with chocolate ganache and the other with mocha butter cream. Plus there were after meal coffees and mandarin oranges and, last but not least, praline chocolates for those of us who hadn’t already exploded.
Christmas Day really was a gift for me. For a full twenty-four hours, I managed to pretend that we had never bought the house at all and that we were just in Burgundy on a lovely vacation. I savoured every morsel of food and sip of wine that passed my lips, and the cashmere shawl of satisfaction they created.
There was no point in worrying anyway; we couldn’t do anything until we had a car. That was on the agenda for the day after Christmas – the day that wasn’t Boxing Day. Olivier had orchestrated the whole event. We were scheduled to meet with René in the town of Louhans, a market town in a region about an hour away called La Bresse. René worked there as a garagiste and was taking a day off to help us pick out a car.
I was shaken awake by Franck at six o’clock in the morning. We had a Spartan breakfast of big black bowls of coffee. Those escargots hadn’t completely made their way down the digestive track yet and we didn’t want to confuse them with any toasted slices of baguette. A few minutes later we set out in the dark to Louhans in André’s car. Franck spent the drive telling me what I would be seeing if it was, in fact, daylight - pink and golden stone villages and rolling hills of the Côte D’Or giving way to flat farmland of La Bresse region. The houses in La Bresse were rambling one-level brick affairs built with deep eaves to shelter a multitude of drying
cobs of corn. Part of me listened to his tour guide commentary, while part of me fretted about the probability of finding the right (meaning dirt cheap) car in a day.
The black sky paled to blue just as we entered the outskirts of Louhans. Franck rolled down his window and breathed in the cool air that was ripe with the smell of manure.
“La vraie France!” he declared.
This was confirmed by the river of berets and livestock and flowered pinafores which streamed by the window of the car as we entered town. Traffic slowed to a standstill; cows lowed in the distance.
“Is it always this busy?” I asked Franck as a man on foot with a crate of chickens hoisted on his shoulder weaved in front of us.
A beatific glow spread over Franck’s features. “Monday is market day. Pépé Georges brought me here a few times when I was little.” Franck, like his paternal grandfather, loved nothing better than a good French market. The ability to wile away a morning squeezing fruit while chatting to friends and strangers was imprinted in his DNA.
“But we’re here to find a car,” I reminded my husband. “Not go to a market.” Franck didn’t answer. Instead he watched with sparkling eyes as a man crossed the road in front of us with two goats in tow. “Where are we meeting René?” I asked with growing suspicion.
“At the market.”
“You knew it was market day?” He had neglected to mention anything about that to me.
“Bien sûr. Monday is always market day in Louhans. Has been since the dawn of time.”
I felt it best to clarify. “You agree that we are here to get a car, right?”
Franck tore his gaze from the livestock streaming by our car windows long enough to spare me an exasperated glance. “We have the whole day ahead of us Laura. Relax.”
I loved markets, and I would have loved to relax, but I also knew my husband. Franck suffered from what I had loosely termed as “time dyslexia”. In his mind, he could pack in a whole day’s worth of activities between nine and ten o’clock in the morning. The car shopping was destined to get the short shift.
“We only have today - one day - to find a car.”
“René is giving up his whole day to help us and Olivier told me he really wants to take us around the market first,” Franck replied. “We can’t be ungracious.” Franck pulled an illegal U-turn and wedged the car into a tight parking spot just at the mouth of a narrow street thronging with people.
René was waiting for us. He leaned against the curved stone wall of the rue principale, which gave way to a covered passageway that ran down the entire length of the street as far as my eye could see. There was a matching passageway on the other side as well. The town had clearly been built with markets in mind.
René looked quite different than I had imagined. The knife-edge pleat down the front of his jeans was sharp enough to cut a round of comté and they were topped with a plaid dress shirt equally ironed within an inch of its life. He was smoking industriously. He changed his cigarette into his left hand in order to give Franck a manly shake with his right.
Franck’s arm went around my shoulders. “Let me introduce you to Laura, ma femme.”
René leaned down and gave me an enthusiastic kiss on each cheek. “This is your first time to Louhans, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui.”
René’s arm swept over the street and its beguiling passageways on either side. “Just look at those arcades! There are 157 in total. Louhans has one of the oldest preserved market arcades in all of France.” That was an edifying fact, to be sure, but I was actually more interested in learning the number of used cars in Louhans.
Franck took his camera out of his backpack. When had he slipped that in? He began framing a photo.
René marched into the throng of market-goers and stands. “Venez!” he beckoned to us. The scent of chicken manure and hay wafted over the cobblestones and René spouted facts like a seasoned tour guide. Without realizing it, I must have slowed down as we passed a table piled high with brightly coloured Emile Henry casserole dishes, Dutch ovens and pie pans.
“Non, non, non,” René tutted. “We can’t start looking at things yet. It’s strictly forbidden. ”
“Pourquoi?”
“No decisions can be made until we’ve had our petit blanc and our tête de veau.”
Dread consumed me. I had tried to develop a taste for offal since falling in love with Franck, but so far it had proved to be an uphill battle. To me, kidneys smelled like hot urine, tripes tasted like la merde, and veal’s head…I couldn’t even wrap my mind around that one. Franck’s eyes danced. Tête de veau, or veal’s head, was one of his favorite meals, right up there with blood sausages and calves’ liver.
René forged onwards until we popped out of the crowd and into a bistro packed with men wearing berets in every possible shade of indigo. Several wicker baskets containing chickens added an original note to the rumble of male conversation.
“I remember this place now! My Pépé used to bring me here.” Franck breathed in the air thick with the smoke of gauloises cigarettes. I was one of only a handful of women in the place, and I was the only one who wasn’t either wearing a flowered housedress or serving customers.
There wasn’t an empty table in the place. Maybe we could forgo…
René weaved through the room to the smokiest table at the very back where two wizened men were nursing icy glasses of white wine. René nodded at them. “Do you mind?” he asked. The two men gave me a strange look, but after a moment one of them lifted his glass infinitesimally. Using his cigarette, René ushered Franck and me to sit down beside the men.
“I’m going to order for us.” Before I could figure out a polite way to tell him that I didn’t feel quite up to tête de veau at seven o’clock in the morning, René had been swallowed up by the crowd milling around the bar.
“What am I going to do?” I hissed at Franck in English. I didn’t figure expressing my reservations in French would win me any popularity contests in this crowd. “I can’t actually eat the stuff!”
“I wish I still smoked,” he answered, surveying the room with a dreamy look.
René reappeared at our table with a carafe of white wine, the clear glass slick with condensation, and three glasses.
“Ladies first.” He filled up a glass and handed it to me.
I took a sip. It was icy and delicious.
“This is what people drink here in the morning instead of coffee,” René began, but was interrupted by the waitress who slung down three steaming platefuls of white, bumpy looking stuff on our table and a basket of sliced baguette. That cloying smell unique to innards hit my nostrils. My stomach lurched.
The wizened men beside us watched with growing respect. “Bon Appétit.” They lifted their glasses in a salute.
René picked up his fork and dug in. Franck quickly followed suit. I nibbled on a piece of baguette. Oh God, I just couldn’t…but it would be so impolite to refuse…I took a few more gulps of wine.
The old men were watching me. I took a deep breath, scored one of the biggest pieces of white stuff with my fork, and slipped it in my mouth. I chewed. It was precisely the same consistency as something you would cough up at the tail end of a nasty case of bronchitis. I gagged as silently as possible.
Thankfully, René didn’t look up but Franck arched a questioning eyebrow in my direction. I swallowed and gagged as discreetly as possible. With a feeling of impending doom, I forked another piece and repeated the same procedure, this time taking several gulps of wine to help it on its way down. It didn’t help much. I did it again and again, but hardly seemed to be making a dent in my plateful of steaming veal’s head. Franck’s fork had been keeping pace with René’s, but now he took it up a notch and polished off his plate with mind-boggling speed.
Then a man with the most florid nose I had ever seen tapped René’s shoulder. René swivelled around in his chair; they shook hands, and launched into a conversation about the cow of somebody named Serge. Franck discreetl
y swapped his empty plate for my full one. I reached under the worn melamine table and squeezed his thigh in gratitude. I avoided looking at the men beside us.
After a minute or two, René and his acquaintance bid their au revoirs and René turned back to us and eyed our plates.
“Good work, Laura! There is nothing more charming than a woman with a good appetite.” He eyed Franck’s plate, which my husband had already almost emptied. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?”
Franck shrugged off the notion with disdain. I’m just savouring every mouthful,” he said.
Chapter 16
More than an hour later, and after a second carafe of white wine and a round of stiff espressos, René led us out of the bistro. Now that we had honored the breakfast traditions of Louhans, he would surely lead us to a car lot.
Like a raging river, the market mob carried us to a crosswalk commandeered by a majestic gendarme kitted out in a winter cape and square hat. He ushered us across, stopping oncoming cars with the sheer force of his sartorial splendour. We found ourselves on the other side of the road in a large square which, according to the blue enamel sign, was called Place de la Charité.
“Now are we going to look for a car?-” I began to ask.
Franck’s shoe came down hard on my foot. René flicked his cigarette.
“A car! That is easy. The perfect chicken…now there is a challenge.”
“A chicken?” I made the mistake of asking.
“Do not think you are in the presence of just any poulet!” he remonstrated, and proceeded to lead us on a circumambulation of the stands. Apparently, we were in the presence of the world’s only blue-footed chickens known as poulet de bresse. These pampered specimens were prized amongst chefs and French people from all walks of life including, it seemed, garagistes.
My Grape Escape Page 12