To the extent possible, we will live our daily lives on this terrace. Larry, wearing a floppy white canvas hat, will paint the rooftops and the houses below, angling his watercolor pad on the rampart’s rough edge. Or, if I’m not around, he’ll steal a smoke. We’ll play Scrabble on the large, round metal table, or we’ll eat, or read, or stare into space. Is it possible that we have caught a touch of la flemme? Are we relaxing?Perhaps we’re turning into lowercase type a’s.
Nighttime on the patio is even better. The lights of the towns below us will begin to turn on, creating grids, star shapes, and arabesques of illumination. At exactly 9:06 the lights of the castle go on—not all at once but gradually, theatrically. It takes several seconds for the castle to emerge from the dark in all its crenellated glory. Why 9:06 p.m. instead of 9:00 p.m. we can’t imagine. We ask. Nobody knows for sure, but a friend blames the lag time on the new sluggish, energy-saving fluorescent lighting that, by law, has replaced incandescent bulbs. We, of course, were hoping for a more romantic explanation. Still, whenever we are at home, we will watch the clock and make sure we’re on the terrace in our places to watch the lights brighten.
Although we didn’t bother to notice the interior of the house when we made a beeline for the patio, it will turn out to be almost as extraordinary as the view. When we step from the patio into the salon and refocus our eyes, there, on the coffee table, in front of the fireplace, is a welcoming vase of sunflowers from Vincent and a bowlful of home-grown organic tomatoes from Vincent’s father. They live in the house next door. We value this welcoming neighborliness. Larry will quickly respond with his version of peasant soup, which M. Giles’s father will pronounce “the best he’s ever eaten,” thereby initiating a month-long potlatch of culinary exchanges.
Clearly, the house has been added to over the centuries. The kitchen is located two steps down from the salon. It’s small but large enough to cook up some boiling oil to throw over the ramparts. Larry must duck down in order not to hit his head. People were smaller in the thirteenth century. We figure such historic legitimacy is worth a few cracks on the head.
I look under the sink and attempt to translate the small print on the mysterious plastic bottles. No matter which house we live in, the owners stock different brands of cleansers. They’re for washing—but what? The label on one box reads Le Chat. It can’t be cat detergent. I read the directions but am still unsure, due to my ignorance of a word or two. Place in the what? Turn dial on what and wait for what? It’s either dishwashing or laundry detergent. A picture of a T-shirt, nearly concealed by the price sticker, solves that problem. After three seasons in Provence, I still have to rely on rebus.
A tower near the entrance to the kitchen and just off the salon leads by way of a daunting spiral staircase to the bedroom floors above. I hug the walls, mounting the isosceles-shaped stone steps, wide at one end and narrow at the other, with extreme caution. If a twenty-first-century preosteoporotic person were to fall, her bones might crumble like halva. That can’t have worried women in the thirteenth century since most people didn’t live long enough to develop osteoporosis. They didn’t know about fitness or weight-bearing activities either, unless it was a hoisting a load of firewood or swinging a battle-ax. This is the oldest house we’ve ever lived in. Age is authenticity to us. More than any of the other centuries-old houses we’ve rented, this one gives us the illusion that we are living in a time we never knew.
We like Bonnieux’s dark and bloody past. From Neolithic times until the sixteenth century, inhabitants of villages perchés like Bonnieux were perched for defensive purposes, first to fight off the various raids and sieges by Franks, Arabs, and Berbers, kicking up limestone dust in the valley below. In Roman times, Bonnieux, the largest hill town in the area, saw the worst of these sieges due to its strategic location on the route between two popular Roman destinations, Cadiz and Milan. The town took such a beating from rival, warring tribes that in the twelfth century it was moved further up the hill, and ramparts were built for extra protection. Our ramparts. These villages were not located on the tops of hills so that centuries later tourists could enjoy their charms, or so that Larry and I could climb onto our bikes and compete to see who could get to the top first.
By the sixteenth century, most of the town’s inhabitants were Catholic, many of them wealthy bishops who lived in mansions. This situation so infuriated the less wealthy Huguenots in the neighborhood—later known as Protestants—that they laid siege to Bonnieux, killing three thousand of its four thousand citizens. The town has never recovered its population.
We do not dwell on the negatives of medieval times, when life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” even before Hobbes said so. Our teeth would be rotten or gone altogether, my hair would be white, and, with a life expectancy in the thirties, we’d both be dead by now, most likely of the bubonic plague. Medieval is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Vincent Giles is more than a good neighbor and caretaker. He rents the Neolithic cave across the street, where he sells antiques. In between waiting on customers, he sits on a tiny wooden chair, which wobbles a bit on the uneven limestone cavern floor. Small antique items—silver spoons, bowls, candlesticks—rest on centuries-smoothed ledges dug into the cave walls.
Le Fournil, the restaurant at the bottom of our hill, where we will dine often and happily, is also set into a natural troglodyte cave, which formerly served as the village bakery. These caves are blatant evidence that the earliest people, before there was a Provence or a France for that matter, lived in these caves.
There’s an active street life just outside our door. Weddings march by on their way to the church. Shoppers duck in and out of Vincent’s antiques cave. Friends stop to chat. Others trudge by at a slant, carrying groceries from the convenience store at the bottom of the hill. Tourists pause in front of our house, which is about halfway up the hill, to catch their breath. Attracted by the view, they peer shamelessly into our front windows. One exhausted woman plops herself down on our doorstep and calls for help. We lift her up and haul her in for a glass of water.
These villages seem like natural communities to us. I understand that I’m in danger of naïveté and that even as I sing its praises, village life in the Vaucluse is on the way out. Here the old and the new mix uneasily. The ringtones of cell phones compete with bongs of church bells; plumbing pipes that run down the outsides of thirteenth-century homes disperse wastewater from twenty-first-century bathrooms. People park their cars in old stables. Some streets are simply too narrow to drive down, but the government doesn’t respond by seizing the houses on one side or the other by eminent domain to widen the roadways. If they did, these towns would lose the aesthetic authenticity and the richness of history the French, the tourists, and we so cherish.
M. Giles, the father, and his retired cronies make a daylong occupation of leaning against the doorway of their house next door, shooting the merde. There they stand at a constant tilt, one foot on the up side of the street, the other anchored on the down side. If Darwinian adaptation worked at warp speed, these guys would have developed one long and one short leg, but so far they haven’t mutated.
Housewives call to one another from window to window across the narrow street. To find community in my suburban hometown, people have to get in their cars and drive somewhere to something organized—a library activity, or the women’s club, a bridge game, a reading group, or the senior center. It’s hard to imagine an old man or woman being lonely in Bonnieux, as long as they are still able to lean against a wall.
I have begun to worry about my old age. So have my friends. We fear the loss of our spouses. We fear loneliness, dependence, and declining health. We don’t want to be a burden to our children, although, only God knows why; they’ve been a burden to us.
We’ve had lots of conversations about how we might live communally. We’d sell our houses. Maybe we’d buy an abandoned summer camp. We’d a
ll share a kitchen and cook together. We’d take care of one another. Those of us who could still walk would push the wheelchairs of those who couldn’t.
The discussions invariably break down. Pool our money? Share a bathroom? Live in Florida? Why not the Berkshires?
Americans are individualists; the French not so much. When the time comes, we’ll probably all end up in what Larry calls “insistent living.” The French have developed their own version of continuing care, much of it government funded, but at least in villages like Bonnieux, it is still common for elderly parents to be cared for by their children. Apparently, they’re not a burden, at least not yet.
The More Things Change, the More They’re Different
Our first act after unpacking is a phone call to Ulli and Bettina to invite them to dinner. We are eager to see them. We last saw them when they visited us in the wintertime on their tour of New England. Even though their jobs didn’t allow them much spare money, the euro was still high against the dollar; they couldn’t resist the temptation. Besides, it was Bettina’s fortieth birthday, and Ulli had never been to the United States. Bettina was eager to show her around. The climax of their trip would be a side trip to New York City where Ulli was determined to sample American jazz. Their spirits were high, or at least we thought they were. We had had a wonderful time in their company. When they headed north toward Boston, Lexington, and Concord to visit American revolutionary sites, we sent them off with a bottle of champagne, since they’d be in Boston on Bettina’s birthday.
Ulli answers the phone and accepts the invitation. We instruct her to park her car at the bottom of the hill and meet us at Le Fournil. At the appointed hour, we go to greet Ulli and Bettina and find only Ulli. They have broken up. Ulli tells us that Bettina has fallen in love with another woman who is married and has three children.
“I was happy with Bettina,” Ulli tells us over dinner at Le Fournil. “I thought Bettina was happy with me. I thought we’d be together for a lifetime.” Ulli cried for a few days, she allows, but now she has pulled herself together. Her French is good enough so that she has secured a position working with handicapped children in the very same facility where Bettina works. In fact, Bettina helped Ulli get her job.
Why isn’t she carrying on as I would? How could Bettina be so unkind, so fickle? How could Bettina commit to a lifetime with Ulli, move with her to a foreign land, buy a house, and then, after only two years, leave Ulli in the lurch? I am prepared to share my outrage with Ulli, but she’s having none of it. Is she already that French, all that c’est la vie? Or maybe her stoicism is leftover Teutonic.
Throughout the rest of the month, Ulli will invite Bettina to dinner whenever she invites us, but Bettina will always find an excuse to refuse. Perhaps she is embarrassed. Perhaps she finds it impossibly awkward to mix her old life with us with her new life and new love. Perhaps we do, too, since we never ask Ulli for Bettina’s current phone number. We never see Bettina again, and we miss her.
Happily, our friendship with Ulli will deepen. She introduces us to the special-needs adults with whom she works. She has joined a chorus. We go to hear her sing. After two years in Provence, she seems fully integrated in the life of the region.
We attend a concert of Haydn chorales together in the church in L’Isle along with her friend Dominique. After the concert, Dominique invites us back to her house in L’Isle for what she calls a snack. Do all fully employed French women have leftovers in their refrigerators that are the equivalent of a first-class, three-course meal? Out come a variety of pâtés, a rice salad, and an apricot tarte. Surprise me at my house, and you’d be lucky to get an apple and a PBJ.
We meet Dominique’s husband, Damien, and their two children. We sit with them in their modest garden at a table set beneath a fig tree, swagged with necklaces of twinkling white lights. Every so often, Dominique plucks a ripe fig and hands it to us.
This season, Ulli, not Monique, becomes the gravitational center of our social lives. In large measure, this is due to the fact that we have decided not to study with Monique. Why? We have difficulty distinguishing our reasons from our rationalizations. Because we have moved further east, it would take us at least forty-five minutes to get to her house. And there’s the matter of money; the dollar remains weak against the euro. And then there’s our perception that Mo has changed. There’s a new love in her life. She has begun to invest modestly in rental real estate. She must look out for her retirement. We will visit with Monique, we will have her to dinner, we will delight in her company as always, but she will no longer fill our hours or jumpstart our social lives. Although I’m a Democrat and don’t endorse the Republican theory of trickle-down economics, I do favor my own theory of trickle-down fluency.
We’re convinced that if we stayed here for six months in a row, just wandering around, without even taking lessons, we will become something resembling fluent.
We spend a lot of time window-shopping, or what the French more aptly call “window licking.” Wouldn’t you know it would have something to do with tongues? We venture into particularly appealing stores, hoping to strike up a conversation. Each of these forays is an opportunity to prop up our French. I learn how to say “zipper,” “Will the waist band stretch?” and “Do you have this in a large?”
One week into our sojourn, we are smart enough to realize that without some focus, without some order to our days, we will be in danger of slipping into our very own version of continental drift. We find a French teacher. She comes highly recommended. Her name is Solange Brihat. She lives in Bonnieux. We can walk to her house.
Studying French for two hours, two days a week serves as a much-needed organizing principle. The fabric of our lives this month feels flimsier. The minimal routine of our lessons keeps the threads from unraveling altogether.
We were right to soldier on in our pursuit of fluency. Mme Brihat is a very good teacher. She looks like Joanne Woodward. She is married to Denis Brihat, an internationally acclaimed naturalist photographer. He looks like Santa Claus. We study with her twice a week for two hours, seated at her dining room table in a lovely room full of books and art.
Her home, her husband’s work, and her pleasant manner make us want to know her, but she maintains a professional demeanor. She doesn’t offer conversation and lunch—even for a price—nor does she make any effort to introduce us to the community. We like her, and we sense she likes us, too, but, not surprisingly, she’s doesn’t want to be friends. She wants to be our teacher and get paid, just like teachers in real life. We call her Madame. We look forward to our lessons. Our French improves.
About midway through the month, Madame wonders if we’d like to take a daylong tour of Aix en Provence. Her fee is reasonable, and we’re always up for something new, especially if it takes us out of the classroom. We fail to realize that being out of the frying pan will catapult us right into the fire. We will have to speak and be corrected for an entire day—a rare opportunity to suffer, learn, and enjoy.
Larry and I were in Aix three seasons ago, but our visit, because we’re lazy tour snobs, was superficial. We visited the university and wondered carelessly about whether we’d like to study there the following year. We even picked up some brochures. What’s a fantasy without brochures? We stopped to listen to two musicians playing Baroque music next to one of the city’s many fountains. We had a coffee on the main drag, Le Cours Mirabeau.
At that time, we were nearing the end of our first season in the Vaucluse and had been thinking about what kinds of authentically Provençal gifts we might bring home to our friends. Other friends who have visited Provence have already gifted them with enough patterned cloth sachets of herbes de Provence to last a lifetime. Surely there must be something else. As we walked about, we couldn’t help but notice the profusion of boxes of inexpensive cookies, called Calissons d’Aix, on display at the numerous souvenir shops we passed. Monique had once suggested that these cookies made
very nice house gifts. They were, she explained, cookies with a fascinating past.
In the fifteenth century, Good King René, Provence’s last ruler, wanted to give his future wife something unique, so he ordered his pâtissier to invent a special treat. The baker created a calisson, an almond-shaped cookie, made, not surprisingly, with almonds and studded with candied melon and orange peel.
We bought a few tiny boxes, one for ourselves and the rest for our friends. When we got back to Saumane that year, we opened up our box to take a taste. Or tried to. The calissons were stale—rock hard, actually, very fifteenth-century, very authentic.
A visit to Aix with Mme Brihat is different and fascinating. Mme Brihat knows her historical and architectural stuff. She walks us through the concentric rings of this originally Roman city. Like the rings of a tree, each circle tells its age. Collectively, they demonstrate how the architecture changed as the city developed toward le Cours Mirabeau. We make a quick stop at the Musée Granet, the walls of which should be but are not hung with paintings by Cezanne, perhaps Aix’s most famous citizen. The largest collection of Cezannes is far from home, at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.
Madame suggests we return to Bonnieux by the Route de Cezanne so that we can see la montagne Ste.-Victoire. Approaching it from Aix on a winding road, one catches periodic, dazzling glimpses of the mountain, the bright sunlight illuminating the white limestone of its highest ridges. Each brief sighting builds our anticipation until, after a final turn in the road, we are rewarded with a full view of the mountain in all its massive glory.
La montagne Ste.-Victoire, in spite of its name, seems more like a craggy, gigantic boulder that has been placed on the landscape than a mountain that has erupted from the ground. It is 3,317 feet high, half the altitude of le Mont Ventoux, but its base extends over eleven miles. It crouches majestically alongside the highway, its weathered limestone bare of all greenery, except at its base. It is one of the most stunning, natural sites I’ve ever seen. Perhaps part of its wonder is that we are seeing it up close. La montagne Ste.-Victoire so demands my attention that I don’t want to leave.
Playing House in Provence Page 13