Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  We have coffee in Roussillon. Do they want to tour the ochre caves? They don’t. They’ve seen enough for one day. We decide to go back to the house and rest on the patio before heading out for our dinner date at La Loube, which means a female wolf in ancient Provençal. The restaurant is located in the tiny town of Buoux, which rhymes with dukes.

  La Loube is famous in the area for its authentic Provençal cuisine and the fact that it plays hard to get to, sitting, as it does, near the bottom of a canyon. The road to La Loube is nature’s adventure ride—longer and more serpentine than any amusement park ride—and potentially fatal if you don’t keep pumping the brakes as you negotiate the hairpin turns. Ten miles after crossing the highway, heading south, the landscape shifts suddenly from sunny, beige, and benign to dark and dangerous. Within minutes, you are deep into the tortuous canyons where athletes rappel down one-hundred-foot mountainsides that have been cut by time and the once torrential Aigue-Brun River.

  Often the route is more tunnel than road. Projections from the limestone canyon loom and bulge above. In some places, they threaten to squeeze a car like a vice.

  The first time we drove the canyon to La Loube, I was so terrified I inhaled, hugged my shoulders, and pressed my knees together in a ridiculous effort to make myself smaller. Larry gripped the wheel, gritted his teeth, and stared bravely ahead.

  That was two years ago. The restaurant did not disappoint. The food was as spectacular as the trip. I particularly liked the way its ambiance complemented the feral, rustic environment of Buoux. The fact that our waiter looked a little lupine himself with his grizzled beard, sharp gleaming eyes, and large, pointy, canine teeth added to the allure.

  Last year, the ride wasn’t so scary, and the food was less appealing. Was I mistaken, or was the hummus a bit too oily? And the lamb—their premier dish—didn’t seem to have that lovely taste of thyme that we had marveled upon during our first visit. We were pretty sure the waiter was the same guy, but he seemed to have trimmed his beard and had his teeth capped.

  On this, our third trip down the canyon, the Sugarmans are appropriately awed by the tunnel of rocky horror. They duck. They cringe.

  “Scary, isn’t it?” I say, feeling their fear.

  Gloria is a journalist. We met working together at a regional newspaper. We worked our way up from obituary to feature writers. Now she’s a freelancer, specializing in travel and food. Gloria is so taken by the setting, the ambiance, and the authentic cuisine that she will write a rave review of it for one of her glossy food magazines. She has never enjoyed such authentic hummus. The lamb is the best she’s ever eaten. We find we agree.

  “Can you detect a little hint of thyme in the lamb?” Larry asks.

  They can. So can we.

  “Lambs in Provence graze on it,” says Larry, the French husbandman.

  “By the way,” says Tracy, when we’re presented with the bill, “that waiter is one weird-looking dude.”

  The next day is Sunday, the Sugarmans’ last day in the Vaucluse. A trip to the market in L’Isle sur la Sorgue is obligatory. Gloria spends most of her time in the antiques section where she nearly buys a hunk of an antique mantelpiece, considering it to be such a bargain at 10 euros that it’s worth the price it will cost to ship it home. Tracy almost gives into her whim until he notices that it’s actually one hundred euros.

  We run into the Prétots. We triple kiss. We do the Ça va thing. Gloria and Tracy haul out their bonjours. Tracy has already made Ça va his own, so he throws that in for extra credit. We talk about getting together one more time before we leave. Sylvie suggests cocktails on Wednesday.

  “C’est mon jour de repos,” Alain explains, and we learn a new idiom. It’s his day off. They’ll invite Monique.

  When it’s time for the Sugarmans to leave, they have become slightly French themselves. They triple kiss. They’ve mastered à bientôt. We will see them soon. Our time in Provence is almost over.

  At Home Away

  How is it that one can seek out and respond to a life one has not experienced? Was Jung right? Is there a collective unconscious, some numinous mind to which we all belong? Are there primitive myths, patterns, instincts, and emotions to which we all subscribe? I recognize in myself a strong urge to find the beginning, to get to the bottom of things. If I were a physicist, I’d want to smash the atom. If I were an anthropologist, I’d dig for Lucy. In part, our protracted four-month expedition in Provence has been a determined effort to plunge backward in time to the historical essence of Provence. It is as if the closer we get to its Neolithic past, the more French we feel.

  There is much that is foolish, superficial, even spoiled about our quest to rent-a-life. Still, it may be that our desire to make ourselves at home in Provence constitutes our own Jungian search for lost origins and authenticity.

  Twenty-first-century life is increasingly isolating and inauthentic. We “friend” people we don’t know. We express our feelings via emoticons. Robots solicit money and give us driving directions. Drones make war. We Skype our children because they live so far away. My granddaughter, Isabelle, lays her hand on the computer screen in Tucson, and I do the same, as if we were really touching. I think of the prehistoric handprints painted on the cave walls at Lascaux. It is the human thing to do.

  Americans live closer to their history than Europeans, and so there is less mystery in our origins. A revolutionary cannon or an arrowhead unearthed in someone’s backyard during a renovation is about as far back as we get. When the oldest churches in my New England town were built in the 1800s, the Abbey at Sénanque was more than seven hundred years old. I am greedy for age, for the way things were, for the way people lived.

  Often when we’re out for a drive in search of a breakthrough adventure, we play a game called “turn right, turn left.” Today, we are heading home to pack on this last day of our month in Bonnieux. We’re just outside of town when I see a small, wooden sign on the side of the road, one I hadn’t noticed before, which points down a dirt road. The sign reads, “L’Enclos des Bories,” a borie village.

  “Turn left,” I command, and Larry does.

  No matter how many times we see these bories scattered about the landscape, they never fail to deliver a jolt of excitement, an anachronistic clue to the mysterious past. They are as close to the origins of inhabited Provence as one can get. Some of them date from between the tenth and fourth centuries BC, when warring tribes were ravaging the valley, causing the inhabitants of the lowlands to take to the hills. What was it like to live in these dwellings? There is a borie village outside of Gordes, but it’s so tarted up, so renovated, that it seems more Disney World than Neolithic. This borie village will turn out to be the real thing.

  When the road gives out, we park the car and enter the village by foot. We are explorers, not tourists, if one overlooks the entry fee, which, of course, we do. Luckily, we’re the only people there, and the guide is full of exciting information, all of it imparted in such clear French that we understand almost everything she says and can soon imagine we are not just French but Neolithic or possibly Bronze Age inhabitants. (There is some uncertainly about when the first settlers of this village arrived.) The conditions are propitious for a major breakthrough.

  The people who lived in this borie enclosure were self-sustaining. A large, stone-threshing floor evidences the fact that they grew wheat. They farmed vegetables, trapped foxes and hares, and hunted wild boar. They built cisterns, a well, an irrigation system, and gutters for the recovery of water. We see the pens where the villagers kept sheep and goats, and the square niches in stone walls where they raised bees for honey. Some of the pierres sèches walls have vertical stones on top to discourage penned animals from climbing over. We remember seeing drawings of those walls at Le Festival des Pierres Sèches in Saumane. She points out holes in the timeworn stone thresholds and indications that wooden doors once secured the entrances to these bori
es, to assure privacy and to protect homes from the frigid mistrals.

  She tells us that the cypress trees—the tallest trees in Provence, the trees so beloved by Van Gogh—played a critical role in borie village life. If there was one cypress tree standing at the entrance to the village, that meant that travelers could find a welcome, a place to pause and refresh themselves. If there were two, the hospitality included something to drink and eat; a three-cypress village meant the medieval equivalent of a three-star hotel: good drink, food, and a place to spend the night. This explanation seems so wonderful that it verges on improbable.

  She shows us some small bories, each with little window-like openings, placed strategically along the periphery of the village, allowing a panoramic view of the Luberon Valley. They are lookout huts for surveillance, to detect advancing marauders. Of course we already know that Bonnieux, Saumane, and Goult, the three villages perchés in which we have lived, were once defensive outposts, but now we see what they must have looked like at their inception.

  These same outposts were probably first used by the Celts who inhabited this village between the eighth and fifth centuries BC. In the fourteenth century AD, when the pope organized a crusade against them, the Vaudois tribes took to these same hills. Six centuries later, these very outposts, these very lookout huts, were used by members of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Even today, an occasional hippie left over from the sixties will wander into the village and treat himself to a Neolithic sleepover.

  For each of our four seasons in Provence, we had set to out to find “la vraie Provence” that exists in its quaint, medieval villages and to some very limited extent, we had. The Provençaux, themselves, have worked to keep their ancient architectural and cultural legacy alive and deceptively original, in spite of the inevitable transformative losses to modernity. What we have seen of Vaucluse village life is far less real than what visitors saw in the seventeenth century, or the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries. As American writer and Francophile Edith Wharton wrote, “Each later generation draws a new base line and finds it hard to imagine what has already been lost.” Even more will be lost to visitors who come after us. But here, in this living museum of an outpost, we have been transported. These were the first communities, the first villages, the first places the earliest settlers called home. We have traveled from present to past and arrived at the place of beginning.

  Our guide dazzles us with the details of borie life. I see the hives. I hear the bees. I can imagine villagers—people much smaller than we, who don’t have to duck their heads to enter their homes—sitting down to a meal of bread, lamb, and legumes and perhaps an intoxicating beverage made from honey.

  We stop in front of a rectangular two-story stone house, with one delineated square window on the second floor, where the residents slept. On the first floor is a doorway, taller than the usual borie doorways. This is one of the more modern dwellings in the village. Where the floor is now dirt, our guide tells us, it used to be terra-cotta tile. The living room was furnished with a crude table, chairs, cooking implements, and, of course, a fireplace. We stop at the threshold and poke our heads inside.

  “Entrez,” she says. “Faites comme chez vous.” “Go on in,” she says. “Make yourselves at home.”

  About the Author

  Mary-Lou Weisman lives in Westport, Connecticut, with her husband, Larry. She attended Brandeis University and Bryn Mawr College. She began her career as a journalist and columnist for the New York Times. Between 1998 and 2004 she served as a contributing commentator on Public Radio International’s Savvy Traveler, and wrote a feature length film for Paramount Pictures.

  Her passions include her husband, Larry, traveling with her husband, Larry, writing, reading, teaching and, until recently, when her rotator cuffs shredded, long distance swimming.

  Mary-Lou has a special flair for social satire, and for mixing humor with the most sober of subjects. Her first book, Intensive Care:A Family Love Story (Random house and iUniverse ) is such an example. New Republic reviewer Maggie Scarf called this debut book “A classic.” The late Erma Bombeck called her best-selling second book, My Middle Aged Baby Book (Workman Publishing) “A perfect gift for middle agers and those in denial.” Mary-Lou’s collected essays, Traveling While Married (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) some of which first appeared in the New York Times Travel section, are pure satire. The Philadelphia Inquirer review compared this book’s humor to that of Erma Bombeck. Mary-Lou’s last book is a biography Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, generously illustrated by Al Jaffee, (HarperCollins). Art Spiegelman called the book, “An unnerving biography with a moving graphic novel hidden inside it.” Playing House in Provence: How Two Americans Became a Little Bit French, a memoir, is her fifth book.