In Gascony, and particularly in the Béarnais area around Pau, they think of Good King Henry as one of their own, lou nouste Henric, ‘our Henry’. He is also known as lou Gentilhome gascoun, ‘the gentleman of Gascony’. In an endearing piece of political spin, Henry said that the rest of France was annexed to Gascony, instead of the other way round.
I found working with food enjoyable, but some kitchen chores were very tedious, in particular peeling the cornichons. These baby gherkins have a subtler taste than a full-sized gherkin. They are great pickled, but first they have to be peeled. The phrase éplucher les cornichons still revives memories of sore fingers and a stiff neck. The problem was that they couldn’t be peeled; rather, they had to be rubbed with a tea towel to remove the rough outer skin. They were very small, smaller than my little finger, making the rubbing fiddly and awkward. Sometimes we did them in their hundreds and what seemed like thousands. Florence didn’t seem to mind rubbing the cornichons; in fact she actually seemed to like it. Fiddly and repetitive, it was similar to threading melon seeds.
Cordials, such as sirop de menthe, sirop de grenadine and sirop de violette, were kept on a high shelf in the kitchen, near the doorway. Marie-Jeanne had told us that the sirop de violette was the most expensive cordial, distilled from violet petals, a speciality of Toulouse. One frenetically busy evening in the restaurant, Anja became a little flustered, not helped by Nicolas acting up in the kitchen. Reaching for a bottle from the shelf, she knocked off the bottle of sirop de violette. It smashed to smithereens on the floor. The sirop made a sticky, violet puddle, oozing around the broken glass, and I have to say it smelled lovely, perfumed and slightly heady.
Anja was clearly embarrassed. I quickly fetched a dustpan, brush and mop and cleared up the mess – to be helpful, of course, not because I was trying to impress her. She seemed to appreciate my gesture. I still wasn’t sure what Anja thought of me, she kept her feelings quite guarded, but I’d like to think this was the turning point.
WHERE ARE THE BRAKES?
ABOUT ONCE A FORTNIGHT THE CAZAGNACS WENT TO A farmer’s cooperative wholesale grocers on the outskirts of Saint-Gaudens, where they stocked up with staple foodstuffs they couldn’t produce themselves, like flour, sugar, tea, coffee and huge quantities of natural yoghurt. Saint-Gaudens was the main town for the area, named after the Gascon martyr Sent Gaudenç. The locals know the town as just Saint-Gau.
Apart from the necessary trips to Saint-Gau for groceries, to L’Isle-en-Dodon for ducks, to Boulogne-sur-Gesse to go to the market or the abattoir, and to a local fête on a Saturday night, our world was largely confined to the Auberge, the village and the farm.
The Cazagnacs gave riding lessons to local children. They kept eight horses, all various shades of brown: some a light roan, some a chestnut sorrel, and a couple of big mares that were dark chocolate with dark manes and tails.
The field to the side of the Auberge served as a paddock, ringed with a portable electric fence. I remember the fence only too well. It was made from a bright orange nylon tape with fine metal wires woven into it, carrying the current. It was high voltage and low amperage, so it would shock but not harm. The tape was wound on plastic reels and stretched between metal poles with insulated hooks attached to them. With the current switched off the arrangement of poles was easily changed, allowing the horses to be moved around the field in rotation, grazing one part after another.
I had been warned not to touch the fence when the current was switched on. Curiosity got the better of me; after all, it couldn’t do me much harm, could it? Thud! The jolt made my brain thump against the inside of my skull and it felt as if my feet had left the ground. I didn’t touch the tape a second time.
There was a covered area where the horses were kept in bad weather and where they would sleep when the nights became cooler later in the year. It was a low, open-sided barn, with hay containers attached to the wooden posts. The saddles, bridles, reins and stirrups were kept in the tack room, la sellerie, to the side of the Auberge.
The local children came in small groups, by arrangement, to ride the horses for a small fee. They were matched with horses according to their size, but were too young to ride on their own. Paul, Bruno and I ran alongside the horses, holding the bridles, as we went round and round the paddock in a wide circle. The horses would walk at first, then we encouraged them to break into a trot. As the pace quickened the ride provoked very different reactions in the children. Some grew frightened and wanted to get off, others became overexcited and wanted to go faster and faster, crying out vite! vite!, laughing and waving their feet in the stirrups. It was exhausting for those of us running alongside; we panted more than the horses. The riding lessons were a slightly anxious time for the mothers watching from the sidelines.
Sometimes we rode the horses ourselves. I’d never ridden before. The first time we went out I was given a medium-sized mare and we set off towards the valley of the river Gesse. None of us wore a riding hat, showing flagrant disregard for health and safety.
As we started to speed up, I wondered how I might stop if I wanted to. ‘Où sont les freins? Où sont les freins?’ I shouted. Where are the brakes?
But I soon got the hang of riding. Lean to the left, the horse goes left. Lean to the right, the horse goes right. Pull on the reins, the horse slows down. Push the stirrups like imaginary brakes, the horse stops.
Paul led the way for our little posse, with Florence close behind him, then Bruno, then me, then Anja. We rode down into the valley of the Gesse, reaching the cascade in the river. Wild mint grew on the banks of the pool below the cascade. I caught faint wafts of the fresh smell of mint as the horses trampled it under their hooves. Leaving the clearing by the pool, we climbed the hill up the other side of the valley, where the terrain became rough. I clung on as my horse made little jumps over brambles and fallen tree trunks. The going grew steeper and the horses’ movements became laboured as they puffed and snorted their way up the narrow, stony path. They struggled to keep their footing. Small stones came loose beneath their hooves and skittered down the path.
The ride was exhilarating. At the top of the path we emerged onto an open, grassy upland and sat there on horseback to take in the view. The mellow countryside rolled on and on in all directions, bathed in golden light. Before us, a field of ripening yellow sunflowers sloped down towards Boulogne-sur-Gesse. The town capped a low hill. The tiled rooves of the houses clustered around the high gothic spire of the church. In the distance, the mountains rose up in two stages. First the land rose up towards the dark, flattish ridge of the foothills, the Piémont pyrénéen, then behind the real mountains soared steeply in a second tier. Looming and majestic, the summits were indistinct in the purple-hued afternoon haze. The Pyrenees always seemed remote and inaccessible; the mountains were a distant presence, a place where hardworking farmers didn’t go without time or good reason.
The Pyrenees have an ancient, mystical attraction. Their caves gave shelter from the cold during the Ice Age; their valleys provided good hunting and pasture as the ice retreated. Some of the earliest known art in the world was made in the Grotte de Gargas, a natural cave hidden in the forests covering the foothills. The strange prehistoric paintings, about thirty-five thousand years old, show hands with truncated fingers – some say mutilated, I’d prefer to think just folded – in outline on the cave walls. Gargas is a strange place, unsettling and chilly even in summer. The caves take their name from the giant Gargas who according to local folklore stalked the woods in the area. This mythical giant was the original for the sixteenth-century satirist François Rabelais’s literary giant Gargantua. At least that’s what the locals will tell you.
ARE YOU VIKINGS?
ANJA AND I WERE GIVEN THE JOB OF PUTTING UP A SIGN AT the crossroads in the centre of the village, directing people to the Auberge. Jacques-Henri made the sign, a sheet of metal painted brown, with two wooden posts attached. The words FERME AUBERGE were spelled out in white hand-painted letters and an arrow
pointed to the left, with a simple flower painted above the arrow.
We carried the sign between us through the village. Jacques-Henri had told us to position it on the grass embankment next to the Mairie, opposite the road coming from the next village of Mondilhan. Anja held the sign in place while I hammered the posts into the ground. The metal sheet clanged loudly with each blow. The ground was hard and it took some effort.
A council works van drew up on the opposite corner of the crossroads. A workman dressed in official light blue overalls got out and went round to the back of the van. He hauled out his toolbox and plonked it down on the ground. It was obviously heavy, and he rubbed the small of his back with both hands as he straightened up. From under his blue canvas cap he peered at us across the road, scrunching up his leathery, sunburnt face.
He walked towards us.
‘Do you think he’s going to tell us that we can’t put up our sign here?’ I asked Anja, out of the corner of my mouth.
‘No, I don’t think so, he’s smiling.’
He’d come over to speak to us simply because we looked like strangers.
‘Vous êtes pas du cwaing, eh?’ he asked. You’re not from around these parts. Cwaing for coin; his Gascon accent was very strong.
‘No. We’re here for the summer. We’re working at the Auberge.’ We pointed to the sign we’d just put up.
‘Ah, the Auberge. And this is your sign. It’s funny that. I’ve come to repair the road sign, that one there, for Boulogne-sur-Gesse. You can see it’s hanging loose,’ he explained, nodding over his shoulder.
He laughed, amused that we were all doing the same thing. ‘Why have you come to work at the Auberge?’
‘We’ve come to improve our French.’
‘Eh?’
‘Yes, it’s good to come somewhere like this, somewhere rural and traditional… an authentic experience.’
‘Haven’t you come here to learn Gascon? Monsieur Fustignac up the road,’ he gestured up the hill, ‘he only speaks Gascon. Of course, he can speak French if he has to, but he doesn’t like to.’
‘Really? No, we haven’t come to learn Gascon, we’ve come to learn French.’
‘So you’re not French?’
‘No.’
There was a pause. We began to realise we were talking at cross-purposes. The sign fixer hadn’t grasped that not only were we not from the area, we were not even from France. In his mind there seemed to be only two languages in the world: Gascon and French. He thought the problem through, however, and rapidly widened linguistic horizons.
‘If you want to learn French, why have you come here?’ he asked with a hint of irony. ‘You should have gone somewhere where they speak proper French.’
We had no answer to this.
He studied us thoughtfully for a moment, then asked suspiciously, ‘Are you Vikings?’
I think he was joking. We assured him we weren’t.
The sign fixer was very friendly towards his Nordic invaders. He knew the Cazagnacs and remarked that the food at the Auberge was getting a good reputation in the area.
Anja had her camera with her, so we asked the man to take a photograph of us. I still have a copy of the picture, showing Anja and me laughing, leaning on the sign. Behind us, an old stone barn with a red tiled roof squats beneath an achingly blue sky. Tiny white flowers on the embankment by Anja’s feet mirror the flower on the sign.
The council workman finished his job, bade us farewell and set off in his van. His apparently random question about Vikings may have had some reasoning behind it. The Gascon collective memory has Viking pillage and plunder etched into its darkest recesses. In the latter half of the ninth century the Vikings raided Gascony nearly every year, sacking and depopulating every town they reached. They sailed up the river Gironde and attacked Bordeaux, then sailed up the river Adour to attack Bayonne, Dax, Aire-sur-l’Adour, Eauze and Condom. They made their way up the Gave d’Oloron and so completely destroyed the town of Oloron-Sainte-Marie that it took two centuries to recover. It was not until the year 982 that Duke Guilhem-Sans of Gascony assembled a force sufficiently strong to turn the Vikings away for ever.
When Anja and I had finished erecting our sign, we walked across the road to check that it was straight. As we stood admiring our handiwork, Hans and Lotte drove slowly by in their big old olive-green Mercedes-Benz 500 SEL. They were quite a feature around Péguilhan and we’d seen them often but never actually spoken to them.
It was such a small village that everyone naturally talked to whomever they happened to meet, especially strangers. Seeing us there, Hans and Lotte stopped the car and got out to talk.
‘Salut! Ça va?’ said Hans.
‘It’s so lovely and peaceful here, n’est-ce pas?’ said Lotte.
They knew who we were, they wanted to speak to us because we were foreigners in the village. Hans and Lotte were German and lived in a pretty, pastel-blue house near the Mairie. They were in their forties. Hans had a sandy beard; Lotte wore a pale blue embroidered headscarf. They exchanged a few words of German with Anja, as a sort of confirmation, then they reverted to French. They told us how they’d escaped from the rat race in Frankfurt and were now living the good life under the Gascon sun. They made us promise that we would call in on them for lunch the following day. Demain, c’est promis. We happily agreed, and they got back in their car.
Hans and Lotte looked like upmarket hippies. The Mercedes was a relic from their former life and gave their new existence an air of genteel poverty. The car was getting old, but it ran smoothly, its huge engine purring beautifully.
It was time for us to go back to the Auberge. We walked round the bend in the road, past the long, crumbling wall in front of the château. Just down the hill stood a derelict house, an empty shell with no roof. It clearly had once been an elegant and formal residence: the stone around the doors and windows was finely carved and, judging by the tall windows, the ceilings had once been high. The plaster on the walls was cracked and broken and had been bleached by the sun.
We stepped gingerly into the courtyard. A small grey-brown lizard scurried up the wall and disappeared into the rusting iron frame of a window grille. The dilapidated walls were surrounded by an overgrown mass of brambles. We could see clusters of blackberries that looked as though they were nearly ripe.
‘I want to pick some berries,’ said Anja, ‘to see if they’re ready to eat.’
‘OK.’
The nearest berries were far in among the brambles.
‘I can’t reach,’ she said. ‘Could you stand behind me and hold me by the waist while I lean in?’
This was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I held her hips while she leant over the brambles and picked a small handful of fruit. Anja turned round. We were standing very close. She held a blackberry to my mouth for me to take a bite.
‘Here,’ she said.
I bit off half the berry.
She put the other half in her mouth. ‘Yuck.’
The berry tasted sour, it wasn’t ripe. Anja tossed the other berries back into the brambles.
‘Never mind.’
We paused and looked at each other. We almost kissed – almost, but this wasn’t the moment. We turned to leave, and abandoning the ruin, we walked back to the Auberge, in no hurry.
HANS AND LOTTE
JACQUES-HENRI WAS GRUMBLING. A NEW OIL STORAGE TANK was needed for the Auberge, but it was going to be expensive. The old one was going rusty. It had already been patched up with welded panels, but might leak again before long and would have to be replaced. Jacques-Henri was looking through the catalogues. The world of oil storage tanks, cuves à mazout, looked very complicated. There were different types, in different shapes and sizes, ondulée, cylindrique, rectangulaire, and an array of different specifications. It looked as though he was going to continue grumbling about the oil tank situation throughout lunch. Fortunately, Anja and I had our date with Hans and Lotte.
We walked through the village. Most of the houses we
re spread out along the one main road. Many were very old. Built of stone in a similar style to the Auberge, each was set behind an enclosed front garden, with a gate in the front wall. The gardens were given over to vegetables growing in tidy rows: runner beans, courgettes, tomatoes, onions, celery, lentils… There were very few flowers. Every strip of land was put to some use. Several of the bigger houses were quite imposing, with elaborate iron railings along the front wall and arched doorways with fanlights. One house at the crossroads had an arched window in its wall, right on the road, set up as a shrine, with a statue of the Virgin dressed in a pale blue robe, raising a beatific hand.
Turning the corner by the Mairie, we recognised Hans and Lotte’s big blue house. Their home was charmingly eccentric. The large front garden was full of different kinds of vegetables. The name of the house, Les Rossignols, was hand carved into a wooden sign by the garden gate. A rusty old bicycle stood by the gate, the basket on the handlebars used as a flower container. Flowerpots painted bright yellow and green were attached to the front of the house.
Hans and Lotte were sitting at their outdoor dining table. It was made from old shop signs bolted together and stood in the middle of the vegetable garden, in front of a line of tall, thistly-looking globe artichokes. The couple waved when they saw us walk up. Entering their garden was like stepping into an enchanted world. A calmness prevailed within the tumbling confusion of vegetables, flowers and makeshift furniture.
A Summer In Gascony Page 10