THE FOLLOWING BRIGHT winter’s morning, while gathering our first crop of oranges, Quashia begins to talk of his past. He was twelve years old when his father died, leaving behind a wife, three sons and two daughters, but not a penny. Their sole possessions were two barns. It was during the Algerian war with France; the soldiers came, the family fled and the soldiers burned the two barns. Quashia went up into the mountains and began to cut wood which he sold to buy food for his family. His eldest brother left for France, where he found work and each month sent money back to Algeria. With the modest income Quashia acquired from his wood sales, he constructed a small homestead for his family which, even today, he assures me—and will show us when Michel and I go there to visit his family—is still standing, although now abandoned. He had never placed one stone on top of another before, but he built the little house by watching others at their work. Reassured that his family was safely esconced in a home, a roof over their heads at last, he left by boat for Marseille to join his eldest brother here on the coast and to learn the masonry trade in earnest. He had been in France only a week when his brother was run over and killed instantly by an American army jeep, Marines on shore leave driving along the seafront in Cannes. There was no inquest. Quashia returned to la mairie, the town hall, day after day begging for justice, but his French was minimal, he was a lad of fifteen and no one listened. The Americans were the liberators here, the Arabs had been the enemy and those living in France were—still are—nothing but a secondary labor force. The matter was never investigated. A couple of years later, his mother received a check for the equivalent of five thousand French francs: a settlement for the death of her eldest son. Strangely, Quashia bears no grudges. He tells the tale of fifty years ago as though recounting the history of another man’s life. It is the way of Allah, he says, shrugging. And the healing of time, I am thinking.
THE WEATHER IS STRANGE, unpredictable. Yes, clear and warm, typical for this pre-Christmas season, but unnaturally still. Every now and again, the vegetation shivers a warning. Out at sea, the whitecaps are still on the waves, but no wind comes in. René arrives, and we begin to gather olives. “If they don’t fall at the touch, don’t force them,” he commands. Quashia cuts himself a long sturdy stick to beat the upper branches, but René forbids him.
I leave them to their debate and drive to the airport to collect Michel. First, though, I make a stop at the fruit and vegetable market to buy the fresh food essential to his diet. There I find kiwi fruit on sale, twenty for ten francs. Delicious for breakfast along with mandarins, bananas, grapes and two succulently ripe mangoes flown in overnight from the Dom Tom—Départements et Territoires d’outre-mer—islands belonging to the Republic of France; in this instance, the island of Martinique. Michel prepares the best fruit salads known to man. They are a feast not only for the taste buds but also for the eyes. He serves them sliced and arranged in a rainbow of colors and shapes which would rival any decorative plate designed by Picasso in the nearby village of Vallauris. I arrive at the airport to greet him, merrily swinging my shopping bag of exotic fruit and crisp verdant salads, which has cost me in total the princely sum of fifty-seven francs, ninety centimes.
He is looking far more relaxed but has lost a great deal of weight. At first this scares me, and then I remind myself that anyone who has spent a month or more living on chicken broth, mineral water and herb teas would have lost weight. Our Christmas diet will be regulated but not untenable. We hurry to the car park holding hands. It seems an age since he was home, and I want nothing more than to cherish and feed him.
Back at the house, we find a message from René. He delivered our olives to the mill this afternoon, where they were pressed immediately. Six and a half kilos of fruit required for every liter of oil. He sounds very depressed. If the fruit does not ripen and the yield is no greater—a third more fruit for each liter of oil—the season will be a catastrophe for the local farmers.
I understand his deep concern in a way that I might not have a year or more ago. We are not dependent on our farm for our livelihood, but we have known the icy winds of scarcity this autumn, and we are still battling very unfavorable odds. All the hard work and determination in the world cannot change the tides of fate, it seems, whether it’s a shortfall in a film budget or a poor harvest. The point is, somehow or other, to outride it. “Gardez le cap.”
FUNNY VALENTINE. WITH Chet Baker on the CD player, we stoke up the fire, ditch the dishes from our pâte à langoustines in the kitchen and prepare for an early night. From the terrace, while shutting up the shutters, I notice the waves rippling fast across the water. They glint in the soft shadows of night like chain mail, while high up on the hill behind us, an owl screeches raucously and I hear creaking and moaning in the treetops. The weather is spooky tonight, unsettling. It is as though nature were on the move, shifting, readjusting, reclaiming its territory. I think of Macbeth, I don’t know why. That forest, or wood, rather, creeping closer.
“Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak—”
We curl up in bed together, and I feel grateful not to be alone in the old house tonight.
It is the crashing of pottery on the flat roof right above my head that wakes me, jolting me back to consciousness. Outside, beyond the solid stone walls which encircle us, a storm has whipped up. I lie still, listening. There have been storms here before, many of them, but this is furious. At my side, Michel sleeps on. I creep from the bed and tiptoe across cold tiles to peer from the windows. Beyond, everything is pitch black, which means that the electricity has been cut. Not only ours—whenever there’s a storm, our trip switch in the garage cuts off the current as a safety precaution—but way across the hills and valleys. I can make out nothing but black shapes that look like hunched goblins. Out at sea, the horizon is murky with cloud or spumy spray. In the foreground, the tall, pointed cypress trees are bending and swaying, wraithlike beings lost in a frenzied voodoo dance.
I pad back to bed and close my eyes. I want to sleep, but the storm grows. Its force escalates from one minute to the next. It blows relentlessly, screaming, howling like a banshee—the Irish fetcher of the dead. This image terrifies me, and I rise up from the bed again. My heart is beating too fast. I want to wake Michel but decide not to. He needs to rest. The shutters everywhere in the house are slapping against their locks. I fear this wind will rip them from their hinges. I light a candle, which gutters furiously and then dies. I return to the window. I consider the dogs in their stable. They must be petrified. I am. I would go out and fetch them but if I opened the door, it would be whipped from its hinges and carried off. Garden chairs are flying everywhere. A table sinks to the depths of the pool. Things—Lord knows what—are crashing and shattering.
Nothing stands in the way of this untamed wind. Its raging has risen to tempest, even hurricane, force. I press my trembling body against the glass, recalling lines from Eliot’s The Waste Land:
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain.
Every tree is bowed over, mastered by the gale. And then a groaning, a destruction, which is akin to a werewolf’s howl: a tearing of life to shreds. Freaked, I retreat to bed and curl up like a squirrel. Michel, from somewhere within his slumbering subconscious, must hear my wakenings, because he stirs. “Be still, chérie,” he whispers and wraps his arms about me, drawing me to him, and I fall in with his breathing, breath for breath, heartbeat for heartbeat, and drift off to sleep, dug into the crook of him, from midnight to dawn.
MORNING COMES. EVENTUALLY. The wind has not abated. We are woken around six by furious thumping: the wind beating at our door. We leap from the bed and rush to shove furniture in front of it. A wooden chest, two chairs and a bookcase which totters in the panic and causes my precious, well-thumbed orange Penguins to slap to the floor. It takes all this to hold the door in place. Peering from the one unshuttered window in my workspace, we see that the landscape has been flattened. The views are wider wh
ere trees have been ripped from the ground, crashing everywhere like tin soldiers. But it is not over.
“How will we get to the dogs?” I ask.
“I’ll go out by the front door. As soon as I’m out, push the furniture back in place.” We haul our wooden pieces into the corridor, and the door begins thumping again. Michel turns the key and opens the door less than an inch. A blast of wind and the pungent scent of pine engulfs us. Felled like a monster, an underwater sea beast with tendrils, is our beautiful blue pine tree. It has swamped the entire length of the upper terrace. There is no exit.
“My God, that must’ve been what I heard crashing. It must’ve taken part of our renovated wall and some of the balustrades with it.”
We cannot make coffee, as we have no electricity. There is nothing to be done but to wait it out. I return to the window, staring out at this raging, chaotic world. This pertubation of nature. We could go stir-crazy on this windswept hilltop, and what of those poor three dogs? Have they fled in fear? And then I light on a vision that warms my heart.
“Michel, look!” He comes to join me, and together we regard Quashia, hand pressed against his wool hat, mounting the drive, tacking in wide zigzags, blown from one step to the next in a slow, heavy slog as he battles against the weather. When he reaches the summit alongside the pool, in front of the garage, he pauses and stares about, horrified. We cannot see what he sees, but the devastation must be shocking. I beat on the window, but he cannot hear me. And then, as a reflex, he looks up, sees us and beckons. Michel signals our dilemma.
Once the blue pine has been dragged away from the door, we are free to go out. I consider Noah and how it must have been to step from that ark, and I smile, remembering the dove carrying an olive branch that told him the floods were ended. But our wind has not abated. It is calming but is far from done.
Michel lets out the dogs, and then we check out the wreckage. As far as we can tell, we have lost about fourteen trees. All pines, our glorious blue among them, and possibly one oak farther up the hill. At the foot of our recently discovered Italian staircase, a very tall pine has been ripped from the ground. Its roots have dismembered the lower part of the ancient wall, while the massive trunk has smashed and sundered into thick chunks a romantically sequestered stone table and banquette I had placed there. A cypress, one of a dozen that encircles the driveway, has been uprooted and taken with it a dry stone wall and a opuntia ficus-indica, a giant prickly-pear cactus. We should be grateful that it has fallen toward the vegetable gardens—mercifully missing them—and not the driveway or our sole means of transport, Michel’s decrepit thirty-year-old Mercedes, which would have been flattened in its wake. I am heartbroken to discover that four of my antique Moroccan Barbary pots, a birthday present from Michel, have been smashed to smithereens.
We set to clearing up the devastation of this first night, dragging entire branches of wood pregnant with clusters of pine balls. Small yolk-yellow flowers gild the dusty blue boughs of our favorite pine—the only one of its kind on the estate—while the potent perfume from its seeping, sticky gum pervades the clear, crisp morning. It is as though the dying tree is bleeding, or weeping.
The wind is bitter. It has an arctic bite to it and stings our sweating flesh. As we work, Quashia talks of his youth again, of the long, cold winter after the death of his father, recounting endless journeys marching alone over several days into the mountains, in search of wood for his mother and her brood. There, in the snowy mountains, he gathered and stacked until he had all that he could carry. Then he began the slow march back, like a donkey, his body weighed down with strips of wood, to the humble dwelling where he and his grieving family were hibernating. In my mind’s eye, I picture that small dark-skinned Arab youth, his loss and his determination, and I feel honored that through the sharing of his memories he has taken us with him, back half a century to an Arab world that we might never have entered without him.
It reminds me that the Australian aborigines have no words in their language for yesterday or tomorrow.
In return, Michel talks of his childhood in northern Germany not far from the Belgian border, of a countryside ravaged by war, of a father who, before Michel was born, spent several of those war years in a prison camp, though he was an army cook and not a soldier. I am moved when I hear that Anni, Michel’s mother, walked from their village all the way to the camp, a trek that took her several days, carrying her firstborn son with her to introduce the boy to his father. And then it is my turn. I spin tales of my English and Irish past. I paint the rolling verdant landscape, the incessant soft rain, salmon fishing down at the coursing, bouldered river with my uncle, the lingering smell of potatoes boiling on the wood stove, losing my sister in a corn field, a maze of gold taller than the both of us, the warm cackling voices of my grandparents’ neighbors, as well as illicit friendships with “those Protestant kids” huddled in packs behind the village post office. And I recall the scenes of violence I witnessed. The bloodshed. Family member against family member. Hesitantly, I touch upon those.
And so we pass our day. At sunset, we settle around our big table and drink hot mint tea sweetened with lavender honey, and Michel reminds me that we should be thinking about acquiring our own hives and planting vines. I invite Quashia to stay and eat with us, but he waves his hand and smiles. He has a pot prepared, he says, and bids us good night, wending his way down the drive to the cottage where, because it is situated in a sheltered nook, there has been no damage whatsoever.
I wonder at his solitary existence, but it seems to suit him. Months in Algeria and then other months here with us: his two families.
And now the wind is rising again, but according to the news on the radio—for we have electricity again—it will be less forceful tonight. We are worn out from the physical work of the day but also deeply grateful, because in one of the neighboring villages, the toll this morning was eight dead. At its peak, the wind on this Alpes Maritimes coast reached one hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. The roads are closed, even our little lane. We cannot get our car out to buy food. If we need supplies, we must walk the towpath by the stream to the village. We learn that three million families in France are without electricity and half as many again without telephone. Thousands are without homes, and the death toll is rising.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, this holocaust of nature is at an end. We step from shuttered darkness out into blindingly bright sunlight and a sky as clear as cut glass. The air still has a frisson of danger; every now and then a branch stirs and shivers a reminder. Bushes and trees have been twisted and split out of all recognition. They will forever bear the imprint of this tempest’s passage.
There is so much work to be done.
The hillsides are alive with the whir of chainsaws. I find it a reassuring sound, like the summer song of the cicadas. On neighboring peaks, folk are beginning the work of cutting and stacking the trees torn from the earth and riven. Sawdust floats like snow in the bright clean air. Nature’s quiesence today feels almost as alarming as the roaring winds of the past two nights, its quiddity disturbingly manifold.
Michel and I repot the yucca plants lifted from the smashed pots. When we are less up against it, I will need to buy more. We shovel debris, wheeling the barrow backward and forward to the compost and to dozens of small hillocks piled high with stripped branches, ready for burning. I lift the plastic cover off one of the pool skimmer baskets and put my hand in to dig out the fallen leaves and there, to my horror, coiled like a spring, is a snake. My shrieks bring gales of laughter and the perfect opportunity to pause for refreshment. In the devastation, early cyclamen are flowering rich reds and luscious pinks. I come across an uprooted palm, one of a dozen baby ones we had planted which had grown tall, furnished with long prickly fronds. It will not survive.
All day we labor in a garden bathed in seductively warm Christmas sunshine. High above us in a perfect blue sky, the birds are returning. Gulls wheel and pipe lazily, on the lookout for food. In the treetops, tin
y, busy birds are chirruping insanely. Their chatter seems so urgent and engaged. What fun to be able to understand, eavesdrop or even participate. And three, no four, even five, cooing turtledoves, settle in the Magnolia Grandiflora. Les tourterelles; welcome, timely visitors.
René arrives. He is depressed. Damage to his olive farms everywhere. Trees destroyed. Magnificent, centuries-old oliviers split, amputated, fallen. The moon’s proximity to the earth, they say, is the cause. Once in a century, it draws so perilously close. What of his crops? Tons of fruits lying on the ground, scattered everywhere. Now the olives will never ripen. We take a tour of our own groves and discover that a pair of our trees, growing alongside each other, have been severed in two by the storms. It is as though a colossus came by with an ax and sliced right through the heart of the trunks, sheer, like a knife through butter. In each case, one half of the tree remains upright, bearing its semiripened fruit, while its twin lies on the ground like a smashed bird, wings limp and broken. Its fruit is still intact but drying up fast, wrinkling toward death. It is a tragedy. We must begin collecting the fallen fruit without delay. Our windblown nets are all over the garden, curled like sleeping caterpillars. Inside, they bear the fruit that had fallen to the ground before the storms.
Elsewhere, the fruit has been blown hither and thither and needs to be collected by hand from the earth. The four of us, baskets at our sides, pass the sunny afternoon on our hands and knees. Gathering the windblown fruit is a slow and painstaking task. All my nails crack and break as my fingers root between the grass shoots and dig into the earth to lift out the buried olives. Every drupe is collected individually. Many of them have already begun to wrinkle or, worse, rot.
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