“And there is always wine,” rejoins Michel, replenishing glasses all around.
LATER, WINED AND REPLETE, our numerous guests set off down the drive, heading over the hills to the cozy amiability of the little hotel and perhaps a last nightcap at the bar. There is much kissing and embracing; much drunken teasing, a dozen repeated “good nights,” bonhomie and promises of outings to the beach and the various flea markets over the course of the next few days. Then, with the receding hum of the last of the cars, we are left alone. En famille.
For a short while before turning in, we sit together gazing at the canopy of stars, arms slung loosely around one another; a man, his two adoring daughters and the new woman. An actress. Another breed of woman, nothing like Maman. Little is said. I occasionally read perplexity or guilt in the girls’ behavior, particularly today, when a thick letter arrived from Maman and they snatched it like small squirrels and hiked it off to read in the privacy of their bedroom. I am aware that to like me might well be seen as an act of infidelity to their mother or their parents’ past life, but still I sense we are creeping toward one another. Shattered after work-filled days, in the hot sticky evenings, in the silence or the lack of language, mosquitoes buzzing like dive bombers, slowly, I dare to believe we are growing to accept one another.
After an embrace, we all drift off to bed.
Michel’s back is acting up. I think it is the result of scaling the hills and spending our nights on the lumpy old mattress, but it doesn’t seem to stop him from sleeping while I lie awake thinking a million different thoughts, such as how I wish we could afford a proper bed. Yet, I am happy. I love the man breathing peacefully at my side. I love this old house, although I am beginning to comprehend the enormity of our task. But we are not in any hurry. This is our first summer. Officially, the property is not yet ours. That hurdle—oh Lord!—has yet to be faced. For the moment, we have achieved electricity and water. With these two precious commodities, we can live here in a basic sort of fashion. Tomorrow, work on the pool-cleaning system will begin. We have a barbecue for summer, plenty of fresh salad from the colorful market in Cannes, a choice of fine cheeses, oven-warm bread and many bottles of local wine. How better fed could we be? Michel says that when we return at Christmas, he will teach me how to cook on the open fire.
I reshuffle myself, trying to avoid the springs, and cuddle into the arc of his soft back, preparing to dream of our first winter here: log fires, barbecued turkey and outings in search of woodland cèpes, when I hear a pitter-pattering above me. I lift my head into the warm starry darkness, trying to locate the sound. The roof is flat. Is it a small animal running to and fro? Then, as the sound grows faster and more furious, I realize that it is rain. Yes, it is raining. The first I have seen here. I drag the flimsy summer sheet fast around me and listen to its falling. Summer rain, after so many parched and waterless days. With it will come a whole host of new perfumes. Drenched nature. We have our own thin stream of water trickling into the pool, and as if to assist it, the heavens have opened. What a cloudburst. I fall asleep to streams of it drumming fast overhead.
The next morning, the rain has stopped. The ground is damp and earthy-smelling and the air is clear, washed of its heavy, thick heat.
Unusually, I am the first out of bed, and I creep sleepy-eyed to the kitchen to brew coffee. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly find it is wet underfoot and look down to discover three puddles sitting like rain clouds on the tommette-tiled kitchen floor. At first, I am ready to blame poor Pamela for slinking into the kitchen in the dead of night in search of food and piddling there. Then the horror awakens me. I lift my head ceilingward and realize that in among all the flaking strips of plaster there are three holes. Tiny holes, barely bigger than pencils, but they are lethal for they are letting in rainwater.
“Michel! We have a leaking roof!”
CHAPTER THREE
HOLIDAY BOARS AND HENRI
We haven’t a centime left to plow into the leaking roof, or the kitchen or the replastering, not any of the rest of the projets that await us. On top of which, the house still has to be purchased—I wake nightly, soaked in perspiration, haunted by Madame B.’s proviso: if anything should go wrong, you lose everything. We have certainly invested more than we had bargained for at this stage. However, our first major hurdle—the water—has finally been resolved, so in the company of the girls, Michel and I decide to ignore the rest and take it easy. We allow ourselves to be en vacances.
We sleep with the French doors open, ready to greet the next dawn. Our room looks out onto a scruffy rear terrace, partially shaded by two fragrant eucalyptus trees and a Portuguese oak, an evergreen whose silvery-hued leaves rather resemble those of the olive tree. This terrace is where we spend time alone. We breakfast here while the girls sleep late: toast, fresh fruit, coffee. Although it is the only terrace that doesn’t look out over the Mediterranean, I love it; tucked away at the back of the house, it feels like ours. The rising sun filtering through the treetops embraces us, promising another warm day.
While I put the coffee on, Michel drives down the hill, a kilometer or so, to the village baker who has been up baking since three A.M. There he purchases fresh warm baguettes and pain au chocolat so light they practically melt at the touch and, usually, a sablé, a large round biscuit flavoured with almonds, which, in spite of my perennial weight-watching, I devour with a greed that would put Pamela to shame.
By now, my morning trips to the beach have been abandoned. Instead, I head for the pool, entering by the steps because there is still insufficient water to dive in. The level in the shallow end has now reached my thighs. I tumble in and doggy-paddle to the deeper end, where I can swim a decent width or two. I try not to splash noisily, so as not to wake the girls, who sleep till noon, then throw open their shutters to blinding, hot light.
After the frenzy of the past two weeks, a more languorous pace is taking hold, and we give ourselves up to it readily. I am beginning work on a novel, my first—having already completed its storyline and treatment—which Michel has found the financing to produce as a television series in Australia at the end of the year. Michel is never without his camera now. Photography is his passion. There are the obvious “before and after” house snapshots for future albums, but mostly he shoots plants, usually flowers. He spends hours gazing through a lens into the stamen of this yellow flower, that wild rose. It is quite staggering how many varieties of flowers have survived among the brambled chaos of this garden and manage somehow or other to find the light, to hold their heads up toward the sun and blossom richly.
I begin to notice the similarities between Clarisse and Michel as I watch them discussing the intricacies of a bud, the feather-thin line drawings on a leaf, the shape of a frond, even a blade of grass. Together, they disappear down unseen tracks for hours on end in their search for ever more layers of nature. They are true children of the earth. In our different ways, we all are. All four of us are Taureans!
In the quietness of a heat-infested afternoon, while they explore and Vanessa, munching one crispy apple after another, sunbathes or studies or washes her long hair and myriad bees busy themselves collecting honey, I decide to take an inventory. For starters, I count fifty-four olive trees growing along the front terraces and to either side of the house. There may be others farther up the hill, but at this stage, it is impossible to reach them. I try to recall tales and myths I have read or heard about the olive tree. Surely the most ancient of all trees? The Greeks brought it to Provence, I believe, two or more thousand years ago while trading in the Mediterranean.
I intend to farm ours. The olive is a bitter fruit and cannot be eaten directly from the tree. The four ways I know to serve it are pressed for oil; bottled or marinated in salted water to be offered with aperitifs or tossed in with salad; cooked; or as a paste known as tapénade, created by a Monsieur Meynier in Marseilles toward the end of the nineteenth century. It is made by pulping the fruit and mixing it with anchovies (best fresh, parti
cularly those from the Camargue) and capers. It can be spread on warm toast and served with crisply chilled wine, and is delicious. The name comes from tapéno, which is the Provençal word for capers.
But perhaps these ancient trees have other offerings that I have yet to discover. Since being here, I have learned that the timber burns on an open fire better than almost any other wood, and we will find ourselves with plenty of spare timber; every tree needs pruning. They are far too bushy and tall. A perfectly pruned olive tree is one through which a swallow can fly without its wings brushing the branches.
Slowly, I am gleaning such snippets of information. As I stroll the land, making a list, I promise myself that the next time I am in Cannes, I will find a manual on olive farming. No matter how much I study, we will need to find a hands-on person who can perform this highly specialized task; down here, it is a much respected occupation. I have no idea how to go about this, but I feel confident that, in the fullness of time, the right individual for the job will come along.
We have four almond trees, the largest of which is at swimming-pool level to the right of the house, beyond the frostbitten orange grove. It leans forward at a rather precarious angle and will need cutting back and shoring up before a mistral rips it from the ground, taking roots and a drystone wall with it. I should hate to lose it. Its position is perfect for its powderpink blossoms to be in full view from all sea-facing terraces. Almonds flower earlier than most fruit trees, so I expect that we will see the first of the blossoms sometime in February, and later, the nuts, removed from green shells that resemble soft furry caterpillars, can be roasted on our open fire.
Our tiny orange grove is a sorry spectacle. All six trees are dead. Before we close up the house, I will cut them down.
Over to the left, facing the sea, I can make out two cherry trees in need of pruning. They will probably be fruiting around the time of the Cannes Film Festival—we could munch them instead of popcorn during the screenings!
On the opposite side, there is a tall bay tree which, due to the growth, I cannot get near, but I can almost taste the many soups and roasts to come, all seasoned with rosemary, olive oil from our own pressed crop and freshly picked bay leaves.
So far I have counted eight fig trees, one of which must be the largest fruit tree I have ever set eyes on. It reminds me of a prehistoric beast, its trunk thick and gnarled. It shades a segment of our steep driveway and hides a very ugly EDF (Électricité de France) cement pylon which, as soon as funds allow, we will do away with by cabling the electricity underground from lane to house.
Several of the fig’s branches reach across the drive and hang down over the pool: temptation itself. I imagine relaxing in between laps, stretching for a ripe fruit and devouring it while idling in the water. In the past, I have never been particularly fond of fresh figs, and I wonder if living with them will reeducate my tastes. Gorging on freshly picked figs strikes me as hedonistic. It conjures up images of Roman baths with slaves serving bowls laden with overripe fruit. Even without such a picture, it is a sexual fruit—luscious, rich in seeds with a sticky juice. As I stand in the driveway with my head tilted upward and my fingers pressed against my Panama hat, gazing into its green vastness, it occurs to me that the fig tree has no flowers. I wonder why. And how it pollinates. So much syrupy fodder and the poor bees have no reason to visit.
I TOOK OFF MY WATCH a fortnight ago and have not worn it since. The sun has become my timekeeper. It rises behind us and greets us in the bedroom, breakfasting with us. From there it passes around the cherry-tree side of the house and then, noon-high in the sky, makes its arc around the front, over the glinting sea, until it hovers in the west, where it sinks slowly and graciously behind the hills and leaves a sky of bleeding colors.
Now it is high above the Fréjus promontory. Four o’clock. Time for tea.
I begin a slow meander back up toward the house to face the dratted water heater in our primitive kitchen, still cogitating on my list and wondering where everyone else has gone.
Apples, mandarins, lemons; cut down the dead orange trunks and plant new trees, pears… No, there is a pear. I caught sight of it on the level below the pool, next to where we are constructing the pool-cleaning system. A smattering of fruits on it, all misshapen and worm-eaten. It needs treating. I have always fancied an orchard. My parents bought a home with an orchard when I was small, but we never lived in it. Visits there were the few occasions I ever saw my father pottering in the garden. And what about a modest vineyard? Where did Spinotti order his vines to be planted?
So many dreams. But the stuff of dreams are the food of life, and I marvel at what we have achieved this summer on a shoestring and a bit of graft.
Appassionata is slowly, very slowly, coming back to life. After neglect, the house is waking up. Its essence is reemerging. Shapes, colors, aspects of light are speaking to us.
Michel and I met on a film in Australia, a mass of land we both love profoundly. Its colors, its light, its vast expanses speak to us. Had our lives not been so locked into our careers here in Europe, this house might have been another somewhere on the Australian continent.
It is widely known that the Australian aboriginals go walkabout, but what I did not know until I crossed the world to work there was that one of the purposes of their walkabouts is to sing nature back into existence. I find that such an enchanting image. To walk a land every so often and sing the mountains, the rivers, streams, caves, animals, insects, nature in all its diverse magnificence, back into existence. I equate that image with what we are attempting to achieve here. Appassionata has been abandoned. It—sorry, but I see the house as she, perhaps because the French word, maison, is feminine—she, Appassionata, was rented out for many years. Bills were unpaid, the fabric of the building has been left to ruin, its fruits have dropped from the trees and lie rotting. The plants, every bush and shrub, are being strangled. The house has lost its voice. Or rather, its voice has gone unheard.
In my understanding of the aboriginal walkabout—and I am not saying that this is the meaning of the image, it is merely my interpretation of it—nature and its every mountain, hill, waterfall, ant nest and pathway have a voice. To stand at any moment in front of the miracle of any particle of nature and to listen, truly listen, is to hear its song. To hear its song is to allow it to sing. That is how I understand “singing a place back into existence.”
Michel and I are rediscovering Appassionata. We are attempting to sing this small holding in the south of France back into blooming existence. We will try to listen to what it has to offer and to celebrate its uniqueness. Of course, all this is subjective, and anyone eavesdropping on my train of thought might very well accuse me of being loco, suffering from a touch of the midday sun.
THE OTHERS ARE nowhere to be found. I abandon the idea of tea, which I am not fond of anyway, and hike a gaudily striped deck chair to the top terrace. There I settle in to gaze upon the sea. It is a very pleasing sensation to spend hour after hour sitting still, simply watching the plays of light on sea and sky. I have not done it for a very long time. Too long. Time passes and I unwind, looking and listening. Even in its silence, it is furiously busy. Ants, lizards, ghekkos, cicadas, they are all going about their day, searching for food, fending off the enemy, screeching their mating calls, thriving on or surviving the heat. They are not on holiday.
But then neither am I, I suddenly remember. In the short term, for a few weeks with Michel and his daughters, but not the long term. I am moving the rudder, shifting the course of my existence. I had not thought of it in those terms before, but that is what I am doing. And there is nothing more sacred or precious in life than that. Choosing a direction, but how often do we miss the signposts?
“What have you been up to all afternoon?”
“Oh, hi there! Counting trees.”
Clarisse and Michel are returning. They are dusty and shiny from walking. Clarisse shows me a tiny crayon drawing she has done during the course of the afternoon. It is
very impressive, and I tell her so. She beams contentedly. “C’est la lumière,” she replies modestly, and Michel ruffles her tousled hair.
Yes, there is a quality about the light here—it has seduced so many great painters. It enhances all photos and frames of footage each moment of the day. As I live with it on a daily basis, its subtleties begin to draw me in. On certain days, its purity is blinding; then its colors alter as clouds, winds, hours of heat seep in. Here, light is a living experience. I have known it thus only once before, in Australia. As with Michel and the reproducing of his flowers on film, its contemplation becomes a spiritual experience.
THE CONTEMPLATION OF Pamela, however, is another matter altogether. I watch her with dismay as she heaves herself from one shady spot to the next, continuously hunting out respite from the broiling sun. She has lived all her life on the outskirts of Paris, and I fear that this relentless Riviera heat is going to kill her. “Her heart will give out,” I predict. The others tease me and my sense of the dramatic, but I pay no attention to them and announce one morning at breakfast that I am putting the corpulent creature on a strict diet.
“Carol, why must you be so strict? Drink your coffee and leave la pauvre Pamela in peace!” chides Vanessa.
“Is it a foolish interference?” I ask Michel, who is not listening. He is kneeling on the ground, like a mutt himself, staring concentratedly at a wall.
“You will live to regret it,” Clarisse warns me.
“Come and look at these little chaps!”
A procession of brown furry caterpillars linked to one another causes us all great delight. United, the length of them measures more than a meter.
“They look as though they are bound for somewhere.”
They are certainly moving with purpose and visible speed. Are they being led to a conducive hideaway where in tranquility and privacy they can transform themselves into butterflies? All four of us are completely taken with observing them, mesmerized by their single-mindedness. A family of four on all fours, staring at a wall. Must be a curious sight.
Olive Farm Page 6