The atmosphere at La Guinguette was more like an extended family party than a nightclub. Most people knew each other and they came and went all evening, quite casually. We usually left at about four o’clock in the morning, by which time the exhaustion of staying up all night seemed a heavy price to pay. We would drive home bleary-eyed, with dawn breaking.
I still remember my first Saturday night at La Guinguette. An electronic dance track, Bo le lavabo, was played over and over again. I recall some of the lyrics:
Ho, ho, ho, qu’il est beau
Qu’il est beau
Qu’il est beau, le lavabo,
Lavabo, qu’il est beau
Il est beau, le lavabo.
Hé, hé, hé, qu’il est laid
Qu’il est laid, le bidet,
Le bidet, il est laid
Il est laid, le bidet.
It makes no more sense in English than it does in French:
Ho, ho, ho, how handsome he is
How handsome he is
How handsome he is, the washbasin,
Washbasin, how handsome he is
He is handsome, the washbasin.
Hey, hey, hey, how ugly he is
How ugly he is, the bidet,
The bidet, he’s ugly
He’s ugly, the bidet.
Satirical, apparently.
On the journey home, I sat slumped in the back of the car, Anja sideways on my knee, her head against the door pillar. Bo le lavabo, repetitive and hypnotic, thumped continuously in my ears. Paul was behind the wheel, he braked sharply and there was a thud on the front of the car. We’d run over a fox. Sprawled by the side of the road, it was clearly dead. There was nothing we could do for it and we drove on. In the fuzziness of half-sleep, I hardly noticed. Bo le lavabo just carried on thumping inside my head.
We sometimes saw Hans and Lotte at La Guinguette. They stood out from the locals. Lotte danced intensely, swaying and dipping to the music as if in a trance. Whenever I spoke to her she was very vague, her eyes glazed; I think she was stoned. Anja spoke to her in German and seemed to get more sense out of her than I could. Hans was happy to stand at the bar and talk.
BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF
ENTRE CHIEN ET LOUP, BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF, IS AN evocative expression, describing that shifting twilight moment that is neither day nor night. One evening at that in-between time, Anja and I met by the swing in the clearing in front of the Auberge.
The air was breathlessly still; we could hear every little sound around us. We whispered so as not to intrude on the stillness. Suddenly, the silence was broken by the sound of desperate whimpering close by. We looked between the trees towards the Auberge, where we saw Pattes cowering against the front door, pleading to be let in. Then we saw the cause of his distress: two wolves came skulking round the corner of the building, followed moments later by two more. In the moonlight we could make out the outlines of their hard, square bodies, with craggy fur and pointed ears. I’d never before seen wolves in the wild. Jacques-Henri had told me about them, but they still came as a surprise.
They seemed to be intimidating Pattes rather than actually threatening him; they were making sure he stayed out of the way of their scavenging. Pattes stared wide-eyed at the prowling wolves, the most terrified dog I’d ever seen.
The family were almost certainly asleep at the farm by now, and we didn’t dare let Pattes in through the front door of the Auberge, because there were guests sleeping upstairs. We weren’t sure if it was wise to attempt to scare off four wolves by ourselves, so we called to Pattes in hushed voices and he came scampering over. By doing so we made our presence known to the wolves, who stood and glared at us with sullen contempt.
‘What do you think we should do?’ whispered Anja.
‘I think we should stay still and keep quiet,’ I said.
Crouching among the trees by the ridge, I could feel Pattes’s heart racing as I held him still. Anja and I listened to the sound of his rapid panting, accompanied by the shrill nocturnal chorus of the cicadas and the menacing, padding footsteps of the wolves going back and forth, back and forth. The tension was palpable. We watched the wolves for what seemed like hours, but in reality it probably wasn’t very long. Pattes, sitting on his haunches, was torn between wanting to stay close to us for comfort and wanting to flee.
Thankfully, the wolves decided to leave us alone. They sloped off and didn’t come back. Pattes was whimpering quietly. We had to give him reassurance before we let him go. After some friendly chest rubbing and a few encouraging words, he trotted off, back to his bed under the stairs in the courtyard.
Anja and I were alone again, enveloped by the musky night-time smell of the vegetation, the contours of the hillside and the clear, starlit air. The night had trembled, then regained its tranquillity. We lay on our backs, Anja with her head in the vee of my shoulder. The stars shone so brightly in the velvet night sky that if we lay still and looked up for long enough, we imagined we could see the movement of the Earth in them.
Perhaps the four wolves had gone back to join the other ninety-six who guard the Golden Flower, la Flor Daurada, the magic flower that sings at sunrise with the voice of a nightingale, according to Gascon folklore.
PLUM PICKING
EVERY GASCON SCHOOLBOY GROWS UP HEARING STORIES OF their national hero D’Artagnan, the embodiment of the spirit of Gascony, the impoverished aristocrat forced to leave his homeland to seek his fortune in Paris. After leaving his family home at the Château de Castelmore, D’Artagnan was half way to Paris when he suspected that some local men were laughing at him because the old horse he was riding was so exhausted it could hardly lift its tail. Quick to anger, he didn’t think twice about picking a fight when he was outnumbered. Feeling that his pride was wounded, he charged at the local men. Their ringleader turned his back. D’Artagnan told him to take his sword in his hand and fight like a man. As their leader turned to face the enraged Gascon, his friends ambushed D’Artagnan from behind. D’Artagnan ended up down in the dirt with his face bloodied, relieved of his dignity and his possessions. His hot-headed Gascon temperament could not recognize the thin line between bravery and foolhardiness.
One day in August, Paul and I went to pick plums from the orchard. The hot summer had caused many of them to ripen early. We took a stepladder, two buckets and a rake for pulling down the branches. Paul was carrying two long sticks and he gave one to me.
‘En garde!’ he said, raising his stick like a sword. ‘We have to arm ourselves.’
‘Why?’
‘Plum picking can be dangerous,’ he warned.
I imagined we might hurt ourselves falling off the ladder or poke one another in the eye with a branch, but I didn’t know why we were taking a soldierly approach to plum picking or who or what we were going to fight.
‘Frelons!’ explained Paul.
The feared creatures known as frelons are giant hornets. They can reach four or five centimetres long, they have powerful stings and they’re extremely aggressive. They attack in swarms, very angrily when provoked. Paul told me that ten stings can kill a child and twenty can kill an adult. Naturally, frelons love plums, which is why they tend to congregate in plum trees and will ambush any unsuspecting pickers who disturb them.
We walked around several trees to choose the ripest fruit. It seemed as though it was going to be a good harvest that year: some plums were purple and ripe, and many more would soon be ripening. We chose a likely-looking tree and stood on either side of it. First, we had to check for frelons.
‘Allez!’ Paul cried, and stabbed at the branches with his stick.
Is this wise? I thought. I pushed my stick into the branches on my side, moved it about in the foliage, then watched the tree carefully.
‘I can’t see any over here,’ I said.
‘Nor me here,’ said Paul.
He prodded the tree again with his stick, this time bashing it from side to side between the branches to make a noise. He peered at it intently with his head
on one side, half crouching in anticipation, waiting to see if there were any frelons lurking among the leaves.
There was a tense moment. ‘Frelons! Frelons!’ he shouted.
We heard an angry, low-pitched buzzing sound as hornets began to appear threateningly from beneath the leaves.
We both ran away from the tree, bending forward like soldiers taking cover under fire. We stopped at what we judged was a safe distance.
‘Well, what do we do now?’ I asked.
‘Give them time to calm down.’
We waited for a short while, then walked back to the tree we’d just run away from.
‘Un pour tous et tous pour un!’ Paul shouted. One for all and all for one! He seemed to want to pick a fight with the frelons. He attacked the tree again, with his feet apart and his left arm raised in the stance of a musketeer. If Paul was D’Artagnan, which musketeer was I? Athos? Porthos? Aramis? The English musketeer?
Paul stood still and looked up into the branches.
‘Shouldn’t we try a different tree?’ I suggested, slightly apprehensive.
‘No, it looks fine now.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Really sure?’
‘Of course, let’s pick some plums.’
Paul grabbed a branch and pulled it down to reach the fruit. At that moment, dozens of the fearsome insects appeared again, furious at being so rudely disturbed for a second time.
Paul let the branch thwack up into the tree, which made the frelons even angrier. We ran away again, but this time some of the frelons caught up with us. I got three stings on my forearms. Fortunately, I pinched out two of them before they really started to hurt. I couldn’t get the third sting out and could see it pulsating gently under my skin. The area around it turned red and swelled up almost immediately.
‘Aïe! Aïe!’ I heard Paul cry out.
I turned round. He was waving his arms about over his head. He’d been stung on the back of his neck.
Once the frelons had settled down, we continued harvesting the plums, both of us still grimacing with the violent, throbbing pain of the stings, hardly speaking a word to each other.
As D’Artagnan admitted, in his youth he had a tendency to pick fights with people who hadn’t insulted him at all. It took a few good thumps to the head to knock some sense into him. Paul admitted that the frelons hadn’t done anything to us until we provoked them. Perhaps the stings would teach us to be more careful next time.
THUNDER AND LIGHTNING
ONE AUGUST EVENING, JUST AS IT WAS GETTING DARK, the build-up of heat during the day triggered one of Gascony’s legendarily violent late-summer thunderstorms.
‘Ça déclenche,’ observed Jacques-Henri ominously, as the thunderstorm rumbled, then let loose its pent-up energy farther down the valley. From the front windows of the Auberge we could see the storm moving towards us.
‘Lou pericle que peta,’ the thunder is roaring, he added in Gascon, recalling the words of his mother tongue. The thunderstorms had etched themselves into the remembered landscapes of his childhood, as dramatic moments when nature was threatening and unkind.
The dogs, Labrit, Mizou, Rôti and Pattes, ran around outside, barking at the noise. As the thunder boomed louder, they became more frightened and ran in. They cowered beneath the table; all except Labrit, who really showed his mettle that evening.
Forked lightning flashed all round, illuminating the landscape with vicious, silvery shafts of light. The air crackled. The lightning backlit the clouds. In front of us towered a monstrous blue-black anvil of a cloud, looking heavier and thicker towards its summit. A thunderbolt struck a tree on a far hilltop and we felt the shockwave. Nature was unleashing its fury. Jacques-Henri uttered a Gascon saying: ‘Susquetot, ne cau pas acessà’s devath un àrber!’ Above all, don’t take shelter under a tree. He said it as a sort of incantation, as if to protect us from the storm.
Jacques-Henri, Paul and I rushed outside to cover the stack of firewood at the side of the building with a heavy tarpaulin. We got it covered just in time and ran back indoors as the rain started to fall, big drops lashing the leaves and beating the ground.
The electricity cut out, the lights flickering then dying. A power line had been hit. We set up camping torches in the dining room.
Jacques-Henri wanted to go to the farm to check on the animals. He took me and Labrit with him in the Renault. The headlights picked out huge drops of rain in the darkness, falling mercilessly, hitting the car like bullets. Labrit hopped from side to side on the back seat, as anxious as we were. Driving through the storm felt dangerous and exciting.
‘It’s raining like a pissing cow,’ said Jacques-Henri, trying to make light of the situation.
Some cow! I thought.
At the farm the cows were huddled together in the bottom corner of the field. The sheep bleated in the bergerie, showing the primal fear animals feel about thunder and lightning. Labrit ran around the outside to check that no sheep were loose, getting himself soaked in the process. There was nothing we could do in the dark and the rain, so we drove back to the Auberge.
We all spent the rest of the evening sitting in the dining room, chatting with a few of the guests, waiting for the storm to blow itself out. Jacques-Henri kept everyone entertained by taking his collection of Gascon folktales, by Jean-François Bladé, down from the shelf and reading several out loud. The stories they told – of ogres in the mountains and fairies in the swamps – seemed ancient and strange. Jacques-Henri knew the tales as if by heart, hardly looking at the book. The thunder was the Bécut, the giant of Gascony, moving rocks about in his cave. If we stayed out of his way he would do us no harm, but anyone who crossed his path would be eaten. While we listened to Jacques-Henri telling us stories of magic and arbitrary cruelty and the storm raged outside, shots of Armagnac all round helped to take the edge off things. At about midnight the Bécut stopped rearranging the rocks in his cave, the sky went quiet and the rain stopped: the storm was over.
In the morning, the power was back on. The engineers from Electricité de France had fixed the problem speedily.
The grass was healthier and greener for a while, but only in patches. The storm had been more electrical than wet and the dark clouds hadn’t shed a large volume of water. The ground was so dry that most of the water had run straight off into the rivers and the lake at the bottom of the valley.
‘Let’s go swimming,’ said Paul, the afternoon following the storm. ‘The lake will be full.’
The lake was triangular, about a hundred metres across, with woods on two sides. The front shore was flat and muddy, slimy by the water, caked dry at the edges. Small, coarse reeds poked through the mud. Trees overhung the two converging sides of the lake. At the far end, an outcrop of knobbly brown rocks formed a natural promontory over the water.
Paul and Bruno warned me that as well as the fish, we would be sharing the lake with frogs and grass snakes. This information was more off-putting than the muddy bank and the murky water.
‘Let’s race to the rocks on the other side!’ shouted Bruno.
We ran splashing into the water. I’m a good swimmer and I won the race. Bruno was a bit put out by this.
We swam around, taking turns diving from the rocks, splashing and shouting. I love being in water. I took a deep breath and dived towards the bottom, flicking my feet on the surface like a dolphin’s tail. A couple of metres down the water was green and much cooler than above. I rolled over, looking up towards the surface, I could see the sun glinting through the trees, greenish-yellow light flickering between rippling shadows.
Our splashing and shouting had disturbed the creatures lurking in the depths. I felt something smooth and lithe brush against my side, touching the soft skin just below my armpit. I flinched. Then something else touched my leg. I swam to the surface. I saw a grass snake swim deftly in front of my face then disappear. Another came over my shoulder and darted away, with its head just out of the water, leavi
ng a wiggly wake behind it. It sent a shiver down my spine and I decided I would really rather not swim with snakes, thank you, so I swam back to the shore and got out of the water. Paul and Bruno weren’t bothered and carried on swimming.
Looking into the woods, I noticed what appeared to be ruins some way off among the trees. I was curious and went to investigate. It was shady in the woods beneath the tree canopy. Here and there, narrow shafts of sunlight shone down through the gaps. I picked my way through the undergrowth. The ground was uneven and difficult to walk on, the dry vegetation crackling beneath my feet. Pushing aside some low branches, I stepped out into the small clearing where the ruins lay, apparently the remains of two or three cottages. It wasn’t easy to tell how many: all that was left were a few heaps of rubble and some rotting wooden beams. One stone chimneystack was still standing. The place was eerie. Flies buzzed around me. A bird, startled by my presence, flew hurriedly across the clearing and disappeared among the trees, and I heard its wings flap against the leaves.
Feeling uneasy, I went back to join Paul and Bruno, who were out of the water by now. When I asked them about the ruins, Paul said he didn’t know much but his father would surely be able to tell me.
Jacques-Henri was only too pleased to be asked and willingly took on the role of storyteller and local historian.
‘Those ruined cottages,’ he explained, ‘once belonged to families of Cagots. Long before I was born, you understand. The Cagots are part of the lore of the region. For centuries they lived scattered throughout Gascony; some also lived over the border in the Navarre in Spain. They were a tribe of outcasts, and to tell you the truth, people here weren’t very nice to them. The Cagots were the objects of prejudice and superstition. They were forced to exist on the margins of society. They lived a settled life, they didn’t move around like gypsies. No one knows where they came from…’
A Summer In Gascony Page 16