Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Proust Brings Cookies to Dinner

  Because we are nearing the end of our second stay in Saumane, all Mo’s students, plus Monique and Ange, decide to splurge and go out together for a farewell dinner. We choose Le Mas de Tourteron in the nearby town of Imberts. The night air is soft and balmy. The place surprises us with its beauty. The old, blue-shuttered stone farmhouse where the food is prepared serves as a seventeenth-century backdrop to the white-clothed tables set in a fairyland garden of lawn, flowers, and twinkling white lights. From where we are seated, Larry has a perfect view into one of the rectangular kitchen windows in which he swears he sees, as if framed, a living replica of the famous portrait of a Vermeer kitchen maid wearing a white linen cap on her head, pouring milk from a pitcher. The evening feels full of promise.

  We haven’t given much thought to the linguistic composition of the group, but when we are all seated around the table, we realize that we have inadvertently assembled our own little UN Security Council, only without the headphones. A newcomer to our class, Margarit, who is German, wants to brush up her almost perfect French. She also speaks some English. Margarit has brought her husband, Willhelm, who speaks nothing but German. That’s fine for Ulli and Bettina, and even Mo, who speaks some German, but it renders Larry, me, and Ange speechless, at least if we want to talk with Willhelm.

  Willhelm tries valiantly to engage with those of us who speak no German, which he has to do via Margarit, who then translates his words into either French or English, so that Larry, Ange, and I can understand.

  The food is delicious, especially the lamb, redolent of the thyme that grows abundantly where the lambs pasture. Even innocent lambs make a contribution to French gastronomy by seasoning themselves. But a beautiful setting and a delicious meal do not make up for the fact that we are in danger of splintering into exclusive, linguistic comfort zones, a serious affront to one of the most important of French cultural standards, the interdependence of food and sociability.

  Monique comes to the rescue. She would like to propose a game. “Ein spiel,” she tells Willhelm. Monique, in her clearest French, made even more comprehensible by a choreography of hand charades that almost speak for themselves, evokes the memory of Proust and his most famous book, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a title I immediately associate with laundry.

  Monique asks us, again in French, with gestures, if we’ve all read it. Everybody nods or shakes his or her head, including me. I have not. I tried, but I gave up. Nevertheless, the book speaks volumes as a cultural reference to everyone at the table. We’ve all heard of that little cookie, la madeleine, which triggers for the adult Proust a childhood memory of dipping one into a cup of tea. “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate,” he wrote, “than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me, an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses …” Monique, who undoubtedly has read Proust, calls these magical moments of involuntary memory les madeleines.

  Mo asks each of us to think of a madeleine from our own lives, an instance when, for whatever reason, we are returned by a sight, a sound, a taste, a touch, or a smell to a time in our childhoods. Monique breaks the ice by telling us that lounging on soft cushions evokes the pleasant sensation of her plump grandmother who held and comforted her against her soft, ample bosom. Her mother, she explains, was skinny and bony.

  Margarit confesses she is moved against her will when she hears one of the embarrassingly sentimental songs that her mother used to sing. Ulli, too, is suffused with feeling by the thrill of a particular song. One spoonful of farina sends Ange to his native Corsica. The smell of frying oil wafts Larry back to his parents’ food stand on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey.

  I recall being surprised one day while taking a walk to feel my eyes filling with tears, unbidden by any accompanying thought. Then I looked around and saw I was standing near a chain-link fence that was covered with honeysuckle. Its scent brought to mind my shy grandfather who used to take me for drives in his car, during which he hardly spoke to me. Still, there was always a sprig of honeysuckle in a tiny glass vase that hung from his rearview mirror, filling the car with sweetness.

  The sight of a particular kind of trivet reunites Bettina with her grandmother and a special casserole she used to place upon it. Bettina tells us that her grandmother was confined to a wheelchair. I wonder if that’s why Bettina works at a school for the handicapped.

  Middle-aged Wilhelm fills with joy when he sees a flight of swallows. As a young boy, he would flush them skyward each time he rode past them on his bike to visit his beloved grandfather. He links his thumbs to mimic the flight of birds. He pedals his feet and pretends to shift gears to indicate a bike.

  This polyglot evening, which lasts from eight until midnight, is a great success. We laugh with comprehension and delight in achieving such piercing intimacy. I don’t know about the others, but Larry and I agree that we have been given a precious glimpse into the souls of each of these people, at least two of whom we hardly know.

  If I ever see Willhelm again, I will think of swallows.

  Broken and Entered

  The day before we are to leave, someone breaks into our locked rental car, shatters the glass on the passenger side, and steals my purse. The car is parked in front of les toilettes publiques, a grungy port of last resort located in the center of L’Isle. I have left my purse in the car, because the floor of the public toilettes is not even someplace where you want to put your feet.

  “I’ll just be a sec,” I tell Larry, “but if you leave the car, remember to lock it.”

  And that’s what he does when he is seized by the urge to leave the car to study a menu posted in front of a restaurant across the street.

  When I exit the toilet and see that Larry’s not in the car, I’m ready to be angry, but I walk over to the passenger side and note that my pocketbook is on the floor and that the door is locked. I look around, spot Larry, and cross the street to join him.

  We can’t have spent more than a minute or two reading the menu and returning to the car, but it is long enough for a thief to hit and run, probably on a motor scooter. We didn’t hear a thing.

  We divide the nasty chores that lie ahead. I will cancel the credit card. Larry will report the theft at the police station. We’ll meet back at Mo’s house.

  But first I must make an inventory to give to Larry to take to the gendarmerie, an in memoriam of the contents of my purse: My green wallet, so old that the leather has darkened and softened from my touch. I meant to keep it forever. Less sentimental but far more sickening is the loss of fifty euros and my Visa card. The thief is probably charging on it right now. Missing, too, is my driver’s license—a pain in the ass to replace—all my class notes, a small plastic hairbrush—no big loss—and my supple, well-thumbed, well-loved, little yellow dictionary. Then, I almost forget, there’s my cosmetic bag, which contains a tube of lipstick—actually, it will be fun to replace that with a French one—an emery board—shaggy nails drive me crazy—and a toothbrush and toothpaste—so do shaggy teeth. Oh, and a pill bottle full of Synthroid, an endocrine-balancing medication I take for hypothyroidism. Luckily, I’ve got some extras. The proper dose is one pill a day. Two will give you the jitters. I find myself hoping that the thief, thinking the stuff will make him high, swallows a fistful and suffers the effects of a serious overdose: tachycardia, confusion, seizures, strokes, coma, and death. Good. Let him have them all, and in that order. I am really pissed.

  It’s my job to cancel the credit card. I practice the relevant vocabulary: annuler means “cancel,” and credit card is one of those loveable vrais amis, carte de crédit. I punch in a bunch of numbers that get me to an international French-speaking robot who offers me an incomprehensible list of options.

  I press buttons. I yell “Visa” into the phone. Visa. It’s got to be the same in French, right? Standing in the fron
t of this wretched public bathroom, surrounded by broken glass, on the avenue Charles de Freaking Gaulle, I hate myself, I hate Larry, and I hate France. And then my cell phone runs out of juice.

  In a panic of despair, I run off in toutes directions in search of Mo’s house. Grâce à Dieu, she is home. While Ange effortlessly cancels my card, Monique brings me a glass of wine and listens to my French tale of woe. Now that I am no longer panicked, I am remarkably fluent, and she is wonderfully empathetic, making periodic sounds of sympathy, “La pauvre,” “You poor thing,” and, “C’est la merde,” “How shitty.”

  Meanwhile, Larry is at the gendarmerie where he is met by Officer Eric Federico with what Larry later describes as hostility concealed in the guise of official rectitude. He is sure Gendarme Federico is thinking, Here comes another ugly, angry American. Did he buy a fake antique? Good. Serves him right. And perhaps that is what Federico was thinking, but when Larry starts tossing around French words like voleur, thief, and sentences like “La voiture était garée en face des toilettes publiques,” “The car was parked in front of the public toilets,” the gendarme is no longer hostile. He is kind, he is reassuring, he is even désolé. He explains to Larry that thieves usually remove only the money from purses and then throw the pocketbook, along with the rest of its contents, into a garbage bin. Does Larry have a local address to which he might return the pocketbook should it turn up? Larry gives him Mo’s address, and, sure enough, a package containing my pocketbook with everything but the money will arrive three weeks after we are back home.

  We are sad when this, our second month is over, so sad that we decide on the spot to return the following year. It is especially painful to say goodbye to Monique and to Ulli and Bettina. Ulli will continue to study French with Monique. She already speaks and writes French as well as we do.

  “When we come back next year,” I say to her on the last day of class, “you will be speaking French fluently, and we will still be speaking like children. Will we still be friends?” We both have tears in our eyes as we hug each other goodbye.

  “Toujours,” she says. “Always.”

  In the Third Place

  Not So Nice

  We have opted for a third season in the Vaucluse. We’ve decided to add some novelty to our adventure by flying from JFK to Nice instead of to Paris. We’ve never been to Nice, and we’re particularly eager to explore the older section, Vieux Nice.

  This search for novelty begins badly. First we have to drag our bags to the car rental. Then we have to wait an hour outside the rental office in the hammering Provençal sun to get the car we didn’t specify. Then we get caught up in a maze of one-way streets that guarantee that you can’t get there from here. We strain to read street signs. We ask directions. Our French is suffering from neglect. We drive in circles. We snap at each other. We can’t find our hotel. When we do find it, we don’t like it, and we especially don’t like the fact that they don’t offer parking, so we must reenter the maze and try to find a public parking garage. Then we can’t find a decent place to eat dinner, then the bathroom is too small to share, and then we hate each other and go to bed.

  After a good night’s sleep, we’re a team again, on a mission: find old Nice. It’s got to be there somewhere. It’s in Nice after all. But no matter how far we walk, no matter how many people we derange by asking for directions, we can’t find it. When we finally do, our spirits are temporarily lifted by its narrow, winding streets, mottled stone walls, and pastel shutters.

  Not surprisingly, there’s a fête in Old Nice. This one is mostly about food, so Larry immediately buys some figs, cheese bread, and several triangles of pissaladière, loaded with onions and so much oil that it runs down our arms and drips off our elbows. I’m more interested in the impressive brace of oxen attached to a cart of hay and a demonstration of what I think is an oil press.

  We hit the highway in the early afternoon, bound eastward toward the town of Goult, a town we had identified the year before as ideal for our third sojourn. The curvy, nineteenth-century art nouveau lettering on the awning of Le Café de la Poste in the center of town helped to seal the deal for me. Old signage fills me with pleasure. Best of all, this is a town that fewer tourists have discovered, probably because it’s not directly visible from the highway. And since we’re not tourists, we expect to feel right at home.

  Unlike Saumane, Goult is a real town, bustling with commerce and loaded with mossy rocks, buried telephone wires, and other evidences of well-maintained antiquity. Narrow streets wind upward to a plateau where a windmill literally tops off this medieval village perché.

  We would be twelve miles farther away from L’Isle, the Prétots, the Greeneisens, and Mo. However, we would be that much closer to Ulli and Bettina. Because of the extra distance from Mo, we decide to take two rather than three lessons a week. We tell ourselves it is the practical thing to do. Lessons are expensive. What we don’t tell ourselves is that while we have not lost our enthusiasm for Mo or her engaging teaching style, we are losing our enthusiasm for anything that smacks of work, like studying.

  When we leave Nice that afternoon, en route to Goult, the sun is so hot that the asphalt roads are licorice-sticky. As soon as we find our way out of the city and onto the highway, we are caught in what turns out to be a forty-five-minute traffic jam. “Beaucoup de circulation,” says Larry. Lots of traffic. Later we learn that there’s always a molar-grinding amount of noncirculating circulation on Saturdays on this particular highway, which leads to the popular destination of Aix as well as to Goult. We have forgotten the word for traffic jam, but I dig in my purse for my little yellow book and remind us both that, of course, it’s un bouchon, directly related to Ange’s tire-bouchons, his corkscrews. We are corked. Not a car has budged for ten minutes.

  Lots of drivers get out of their cars, some to allow their dogs to pee. The French take their dogs everywhere, even to restaurants. Eventually, I get out, too, and stand on my tiptoes, along with many others, our hands shielding our eyes from the sun, trying to see if the cars in the far distance are moving. It’s hard to tell, because the asphalt is sending up a mirage of heat waves that might be misconstrued as motion.

  “Ça bouge!” the woman next to me says. She thinks the line is moving. I have been scanning the road ahead, too, and I am quite certain that the line is not bouging. I take a swan dive into the word pool of cognates and come up with, “Non. Ça ne bouge pas; c’est une illusion opticale.” As always, I am on the lookout for vrais amis. “Il faut oser,” is my motto. One must dare.

  “Non,” she chooses to disagree. “Ce n’est pas une illusion opticale.”

  She understands me. She might even take me for French. I am ridiculously proud of myself. Some people get a thrill from getting away with murder. I get mine from committing petty lingual larceny.

  The House Speaks English

  This is the first time we have rented a French house from an American couple. We have taken the virtual tour, so we’re pretty sure we can’t be disappointed. In addition to our well-worn map of the Vaucluse and our yellow dictionary, we carry with us a file full of driving directions, recommendations, and house instructions from the owners. The directions for the Saumane house were in French. These are in English, which, we are sorry to admit, makes them much easier to understand. Apparently English is still our first language.

  We find the house without difficulty. As advertised, it is right on the square. The shutters are wine colored. The heavy wooden front door is flanked by stone pots filled with herbs. And even though I’m allergic to cats, I enjoy the sight of a French puss lounging on our next-door neighbor’s windowsill. We spot a large snail making its slimy way along one of the rough stone steps leading to the door. I point it out to Larry. He bends to pick it up.

  “Don’t!” I cry. “Snails are good luck.”

  “Snails are escargots,” he says. “A little garlic, a little butter, a splash of white wine,
garnish with parsley—and voilà!” Larry’s preoccupation with food can get a little out of control, but I’m grateful to be married to a man who loves to shop, cook, and empty the dishwasher.

  One part of the house dates to the seventeenth century; the other was added in the nineteenth. We are charmed by the ravaged plaster facing of the oldest part of the house, scabs of which have peeled off in some places, revealing the ancient stone construction beneath. The further back we travel in time, the more French we feel. Coming from a country where Alcatraz is a national historic landmark and our most popular ruin, we long for the legitimacy of antiquity. This house delivers.

  We ring the doorbell to summon the housekeeper. She is not quite finished readying the house and suggests that we put our bags inside, have a drink at Le Café de la Poste immediately across the square, and come back in about forty-five minutes.

  We retire to the café where we encounter more disappointment. The original art nouveau signage on Le Café de la Poste’s awning has been replaced by an alien, modern font. How dare they change the lettering on my sign!

  From the café, we see the housekeeper gesturing to us. The house is ready. She hands us a large antique key. She demonstrates how it requires a bit of wiggling in the lock. She apologizes for the inconvenience. We don’t mind. When we’re in France, inconvenience is mother’s milk to us.

  We meet our house in Goult as if she were a mail-order bride. We understand how critical any house is to the success of being able to make ourselves at home. We must get along. We hope that she will work out, that she’s as good as her picture.

  The hallway may have been inauspicious at first glance, but the floors are terra-cotta, just the way we like them. The small hallway gives way to an Escher of a staircase that zigs and zags its way upward. We find ourselves staring in deep perplexity at the flat side of the back of the staircase to which is affixed a very large poster of a head of a man with an accordion for a mouth. We once rented a house for a week in San Gimignano. There was a picture in the dining room of a man holding his own intestines. We can definitely live with accordion man.