by Mary Byrne
Zorica too is no stranger to righteous indignation, although she has never been able to develop it sufficiently. The finest example she has never forgotten is the day, shortly after her arrival, when—having learned what it was and how to ask for it—she ventured into a bakery shortly before midday and asked for a croissant. The bakery assistant glowered, consulted her watch and bellowed at the now deeply embarrassed Zorica: ‘The idea!’ and looking to the other customers for confirmation of the misdeed. Trying to buy a croissant near midday! Parisians made the laws, and would make sure everyone else followed them. If not, they might erupt in violence again as they had done in 1789. The threat was there. It was effective. French farmers frequently made use of a similar threat, by throwing vegetables and fruit around the motorways, or dumping animal carcasses in front of a local Mairie. In Paris, the threat had reached its finest expression in righteous indignation, and required no further action.
They are in luck—at the post office there’s no queue and Mme F actually has her ID card with her. They limp over to the desk. ‘This looks like Monsieur F,’ says the official behind the counter, examining the envelope. ‘Couldn’t be, he died three years ago,’ says Mme F. ‘Let’s see the letter anyway,’ says Zorica. The clerk returns with a letter from the electricity company addressed to Monsieur Georges F, which he says he cannot give to Mme F because it is not addressed to her. ‘But Georges died three years ago and I’ve been paying the bills ever since,’ wails Mme F. The man behind the counter studies her briefly, but he has no intention of giving in: ‘Have to produce a death certificate,’ he says. Mme F doesn’t bat an eyelid. Drawing herself up to her full, unrheumatic height, she makes an announcement, to all and sundry, at the top of her voice: ‘Elle est belle, la France.’ Then she and Zorica limp defiantly out for the long walk home. Zorica has to refuse her offer of drinks at every corner bar.
The minders take care of the registered letter—which was about nothing important, in fact. Mme F is admonished again about unaccompanied journeys abroad. The next time Fernande turns up chez Zorica she is considerably disheveled, but defiantly wearing crumpled mauve from head to foot. She leans on the new walking stick. There’s a nephew she likes to whom she’d like to leave the room when she dies, but it would cost him huge state taxes since he’s only a distant relative. Maybe she’ll just sell it now and give him the money, thereby avoiding inheritance taxes. She’ll think about it. Let the minders go to hell, she says. She never carries more than twenty Euros in her purse, so there’s no point in anyone trying to rob her. And they’re hardly likely to want to rape her, now. She and Zorica have iced tea from the painted bottle, cooled by plastic colored golf balls from Zorica’s freezer. There’s no shortage of atmosphère.
Old Wood Best to Burn
1965
Angel walked northwards—away from his own country, Spain—for the second time in five years, a free man after five years in the French Foreign Legion, a new French passport in his pocket. He kept going for days on end, got lifts on trucks, slept in barns, ate with people working in the fields. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, but he didn’t want to go home.
At St Gervais du Bosc, something made him stop. It could have been the familiar location: garrigue above, vineyards and orchards below, the village crouched at the butt of the hill where the water was available. He entered the café, stood at the bar and ordered a beer.
‘Trabajo?’ he asked the cafetier when the beer was almost finished. His mix of French and Spanish didn’t faze people in the Languedoc, their own language poised somewhere between the two.
‘You missed the grape harvest,’ the cafetier said. Angel knew that. Agricultural work was the only thing he knew besides fighting Arabs.
‘Boismal could use someone who can prune vines,’ another client offered. ‘The last man hung himself from a beam in the kitchen.’
At the upper end of the village stood a big old house on three floors, one above the hill, one below, and one level with the road. A little apart from the other houses, its irregular angles were resisting but nevertheless undergoing severe renovation.
Angel stood at the door and shouted ‘Maison?’ a few times until a disgruntled elderly woman shuffled out in slippers. This was Boismal’s wife. She put him in a sitting-room. Angel realized it was the first real house—with women—that he’d been in for eight years, if you didn’t count the whorehouse in Algiers.
Warts and blotches covered Boismal’s skin. He had a hacking cough. This didn’t stop him being master of the moment. He pronounced the name the French way. Ann-jell.
‘I’ll take you,’ he announced benevolently, ‘lowest hourly rate. Under the table. I’ll deduct a small rent for a house in the village. Start pre-pruning tomorrow.’
Number 6, rue Sans Nom was a three-story house with one room on each floor. The ground floor cellar had a bulging outside wall and contained a toilet. A steep staircase led to a room with a sink.
‘Kitchen,’ Boismal said, as if it were true. A tall dresser kept some of the ceiling from falling in. ‘Hard winter snow lay around attics till it melted,’ Boismal shrugged. ‘Bit of a clean-up and it’ll be fine.’
At the top was an attic bedroom containing a rabbit hutch. Someone had dipped a sponge in deep blue wash and stippled the white walls. Layers of dust covered the forgotten bunches of dried onions that hung neatly from a shelf, and equally forgotten bunches of grapes that hung from big hooks.
Back in the kitchen, alone, Angel didn’t wonder which hook his predecessor had used.
A thorough cleaning of new premises with little or no equipment was something Angel had learned in the Legion. He made a broom from twigs and cord and went to work. Rue Sans Nom, a street in existence since medieval times, was narrow and dark. The vaulted cellar bore traces of verdigris which the women had once carried to the market, on foot, twenty-five kms away. The musty smell reminded Angel of the cellar at home where a few goats were kept. As he scrubbed and dusted, he thought of his journey from home to here.
1957
Home was a small village near Valencia. Angel hadn’t been very good at school, but he liked his old teacher, especially on wet days in winter. ‘Valentia in Latin means ‘strength,’ ‘valor’’ the old man told his unruly pupils. ‘Then the Berbers came and called it Balansiyyya.’ He drew out the word and the boys giggled at his pronunciation. ‘Listen well,’ the old man insisted. ‘Information and ideas will help while away your time in the fields. Some Roman historians were farmers too.’
Angel’s older brother Rodrigo suddenly appeared before the glass window at the top of the classroom door.
‘Sir!’ he burst in, ‘Oh, sir! Please can I have my brother—the floods have carried people away!’
Their parents were never found. Angel left school and he and his brother worked so hard on the little farm that Rodrigo forgot that he bore the same name as El Cid, until his childhood sweetheart, Gloria, reminded him.
Before leaving for military service Angel, a skinny teenager who didn’t even curse, went to see his old schoolmaster one last time. It was winter. He listened outside the classroom door as the master talked about a French monk who had once been bishop of Valencia. ‘For centuries, government of our region seesawed between Spaniards and Moors.’ The boys were quiet, glad to be indoors and resting. ‘Later it was besieged by the English, and even the French. A peasant carries the blood of all cultures, working the land in spite of all the wars carried on around him.’
The boys stirred and Angel knew the master had risen from his desk. ‘Never forget,’ the old man shouted above the noise.
Later, on the train with his fellow conscripts, laughing and joking to hide their fear, Angel didn’t look back or wonder when he would see again the lagoons, the rice fields, the oranges bright in the trees and the garrigue behind. He didn’t understand the proverb his master had imparted before he left: ‘Quemad viejos leños, leed viejos libros, b
ebed viejos vinos, tened viejos amigos.’
1965
After a sound first night’s sleep in 6, rue Sans Nom, Angel rose at sunrise and went to meet Boismal’s old vines. Among these lines of tortured old friends, he clipped and trimmed and hummed, feeling the familiar strain on his back. At ten a.m. he ate olives and bread and drank half a bottle of the local piquette from the village shop. Around two he went home, made a tortilla and salad and had a snooze. Later, back in the vineyard, he watched the gnarled little shadows lengthen. Above the village, the dark garrigue was still in blazing sunlight, but the valley floor was already dark. The bosc, after which the village had been named, had burnt one summer, leaving one side of the mountain looking like an elephant’s hide. Angel could still distinguish the old hill terraces, each with its little grove of olive trees, many of which were now being re-invaded by surrounding bush. Walls that once contained the terraces, if not tended, would one day crumble. For Angel forthcoming disaster meant two things: one, that he himself was not in trouble even if someone else was, and two, that there’d be work to do in the future, which made him feel secure. As smoke rose languorously from his home-made brazier—a rusty barrel split in two and mounted on wheels—it seemed to him that St Gervais might be okay. He made bundles of clippings for barbecuing chops and sausage and maybe even the odd fish.
1958
After training, he and his fellow-conscripts found themselves in Ifni in the Western Sahara. ‘You are holding Spanish Southern Morocco against bands of guerrillas coming in from Mauritania and Algeria,’ the sergeant said. None of them cared about Saharawi politics, or deals between France and Spain. The sergeant handed them a Spanish communiqué stating ‘You are protecting the zone from those who disobeyed the king of Morocco.’
They knew nothing of the wiliness of the new Moroccan king. They disliked the food and the nights were cold. The new uniform chafed Angel’s skin. Comrades were being killed by groups of guerrillas in repeated bouts of fierce fighting. ‘You will be part of Operation Ouragan,’ the sergeant said, ‘a Franco-Spanish effort. You’ll back up paratroopers dropped into Smara.’
1968
Because Angel was accustomed to adapting to new circumstances, Boismal quickly saw that he knew his job and employed him officially, for full time work but at low wages. Angel came and went, becoming acquainted with Marinette and her stories of the past, as well as Simone and her preoccupations with the present, and enjoying René Boismal Jr’s visions for a shining future with a revamped Coopérative.
‘They’re mixing good and bad grapes and making slop,’ René would say. ‘Now that heavy Algerian wine is finished they’ll have nothing to mix the slop with. I’ll plant new vines, get some quality going. Mark my words, the old man’ll have to give in.’
They’d raise a glass. René would say what a loss Algeria was, although he didn’t really care because he wanted change. Everyone wanted something. Thinking about such things made Angel’s head spin.
When a hot wind blew sand from the south under the door in rue Sans Nom, Angel recalled the sandstorms of that early spring as the Spaniards and French swept through the Rio de Oro together, gaining courage as they went. ‘Valor and strength!’ Angel and the others cried. Few of them were killed. When it all became routine, Angel’s dark beard grew faster and he spat and cursed like the older men, although he still didn’t feel quite like the others. Now it seemed that all of his life had been spent trotting behind everyone else, trying to fit in.
A neighbor rented Angel a small garden next to the irrigation canal. He grew tomatoes and peppers, carrots, turnips, green beans and soggy potatoes for tortillas, his favorite lunch which he usually prepared the night before and ate cold, out among his friends, the vines. His relentless routine betrayed no visible difference between himself and his neighbors or the other men in St Gervais. But apart from René Boismal—his only real acquaintance—the local men kept their distance. The very real difference was that Angel was the only man without land of his own or even the promise of it. Angel was aware of this, but gave the matter as little consideration as he had other such aspects of his life, for what could he do about it? He sent money home to Rodrigo regularly. Rodrigo wrote very occasionally. ‘My hands shake from work,’ he wrote unsteadily. ‘We’re building a two-room place by the sea for renting to tourists.’
The news from Spain was confirmed in the autumn by the Spaniards who arrived for grape-picking.
Boismal Jr had known them since he was a kid.
‘The Rubios have been coming for generations. This year one of the boys has brought his new wife.’ Boismal laughed. ‘They work so fast they outpace the lady of the house, La Meneuse; not the done thing at all.’
Angel often sat with the Rubios on the village square, watching the last of the tourists eat out, aware that this would set him further apart from the villagers.
‘France is very expensive, compared to Andalusia,’ they told him.
The new Rubio wife did all their cooking from food they’d brought with them, in the small bare house that was their free lodgings. Angel often heard a pressure cooker as he walked by and guessed chickpeas.
‘Near Algeciras,’ they replied, brightening, when he asked where they were from.
‘You’d have passed Valencia on your way up,’ Angel said.
They smiled. The Spaniards and Angel nodded to three boys Angel had seen around the village.
‘From Morocco, Cameroon and Northern Ireland,’ the Rubios told him. ‘All students, they argue all day among the vines then hitch a ride into town in the evenings to drink and meet girls.’
‘That is just the beginning,’ the oldest Rubio woman said. ‘Machines will soon take the place of all of us.’
1960
The day the army had let them go, the first thing Angel did was phone his brother Rodrigo. The grocery store, in the same street as Rodrigo’s house, had always been everyone’s telephone exchange and message center. The grocer replied, sent a child with the message, and told Angel to phone back in a while.
By the time Rodrigo finally came to the phone, Angel was almost out of change and Rodrigo was out of breath.
‘I was working.’ He sounded rattled.
‘Well, I’m through here, I could come home and help.’
‘I can manage the farm,’ Rodrigo replied brusquely. The real problem seemed to be that the farm was too small to bring in enough to rear a family. ‘We’re married now,’ he said, ‘me and Gloria.’
Then Rodrigo’s tone changed. ‘Apartments on the coast for tourists are the coming thing.’
Angel waited for more then realized that was all he was going to get. After waiting for a while, Rodrigo finally said what was on his mind: could Angel keep sending the money?
Angel left the phone booth and walked for a long time without purpose. In a café in Perpignan, a family—their accents markedly different from those of the locals—described, in a mix of Spanish, French and Arabic, how it was, ‘down there’ and wondered what they were to do now, in this France which was foreign to them.
‘We have French papers but we never set foot in the place before,’ they appealed. ‘Not even our fathers ever visited.’
‘Maybe France hasn’t time, place or money for pieds noirs.’ A man at the bar winked at Angel. ‘Ye got the best of Algeria, but now that ye’re refugees, don’t expect the best of here as well.’
The pied noir father ordered his wife and family out. ‘Fissa!’ he hissed in the Maghrebi dialect learned by his parents and grandparents.
Angel got up too and headed straight to the recruitment center of the French Foreign Legion. After passing the tough initial physicals and medicals, he only just passed the IQ test. Most of his fellow aspirants were dismissed. After that there were four months of even harder training, walking and running, day and night, carrying heavy packs often containing just sand. The trip in the truck to M
arseilles, although hot and uncomfortable, provided a panorama of a hot dry landscape that was familiar.
In no time at all Angel found himself back in North Africa, working in the mess kitchens. This time it was Algeria and once again the enemy North Africans. His colleagues called the locals ‘Arabs,’ but more often ‘melons.’ ‘Tuer les melons—dadadadada!’ the legionnaires would imitate the sound of gunfire, and laugh.
1980s
By the early 1980s René Boismal Jr was married and refereeing arguments between his wife and mother over the color of curtains at home. Sometimes, when René talked of ‘ma vieille,’ my old lady, Angel wasn’t sure which woman he was referring to.
Increasingly, Angel took supper in the local restaurant, his only luxury. He smiled to himself as he handled the knife and fork delicately, relishing fancy desserts like crème brulée or the sweet crêpes they brought flambée’d to his table. That invariably got attention. He always slyly eyed the other diners under the stone vaults.
It was here one evening that Angel’s fancy desserts drew him into talk with an English couple, he of tall military bearing, she equally lanky with a wide-brimmed straw hat and a noisy come-hither attitude. Angel was pleased because they spoke to him, and they liked him because they could understand the peculiar French he spoke.
On the husband’s retirement from a multinational, they had bought a huge old house with vineyards and olive groves in an isolated spot above the village at the back of the cirque formed by the river. Now they lived here permanently and were struggling with everything: climate, farming, house. Very soon all three were watching out for each other in the evenings, having a carafe of rosé or sweet crêpes at adjacent tables, or together if there wasn’t much room. Conscious that they were different, Angel was very careful not to encroach on their time or space. When they used the familiar ‘tu’ he stuck to a respectful ‘vous.’
One evening the couple arrived at the restaurant to find it packed with tourists, a poetry reading in full swing. Angel sat in the middle, odd-man-out in his working clothes and three-day beard. They strained their necks for spare seats and caught his eye. He squeezed them in beside him and yelled for food. He was a little drunk. He was fighting with old Boismal about wages and conditions. He was going to see some sort of tribunal tomorrow and was very nervous: ‘My balls are in a cravat,’ he said. Boismal’s terms were just not good enough. Boismal was ill, and crabby, saying take it or leave it. Angel was threatening to take it a lot further. It seemed Angel had decided, for the first time, which side he was on.