by Mary Byrne
‘Come over tomorrow evening after the tribunal and I’ll cook you dinner,’ the Englishwoman said to Angel.
Her husband nodded.
For a moment Angel looked puzzled, even shy. Then he raised his glass and said loudly, ‘Viva la Revolución!’ They drank to that, finished the bottle and ordered another.
1960
Angel’s first drinking bouts were among argumentative legionnaires. This involved political discussion—even they understood that de Gaulle’s offer of self-determination to the Algerians had outraged the local French population. ‘Serious trouble brewing—French against French,’ the sergeant warned. ‘Don’t get rat-assed tonight.’ Newspapers were full of the posturing of generals and statesmen. Rumors and counter-rumors bounced around them of possible army revolt and military take-overs. ‘Tomorrow we leave the desert for Algiers to back up 1st REP paratroopers.’
In Algiers, the legionnaires remained apart from the French row, trained dogs waiting for the order to strike. On those clear cool days, amidst the rattle of trolley-buses and the tapping of glaziers repairing shattered windows, Angel noticed chic French girls and beautiful dark girls. In spite of the tension, many of them eyed the smart young men in their smart white hats. Even wearing his képi, Angel was far too shy to even think of speaking to them.
One evening, carried away by the evening street sounds, by drink, by his companions, he was led to a whorehouse, where the women were subject to checks by Legion doctors.
Angel’s young woman had the unaccustomed features of a South American.
‘Hola,’ she said.
The business between them was dismal. As she buttoned him up again like his mother used to, Angel’s attention was drawn to a reproduction above her bed. He didn’t understand why the girl in the foreground lay stiff and nakedly white against the deep blue, green and red background.
‘What is wrong with her?’ he asked.
‘Paul Gauguin, Loss of Virginity,’ the girl said, matter of factly.
‘Is that meant to be a fox at her shoulder?’ Angel asked.
The girl nodded. ‘Where I come from, it is the animal of the devil.’
Angel looked alarmed.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘you’re no fox. Anyway, the real devil was Gauguin—he got the model pregnant then walked away.’
Angel had never had such a conversation before, least of all with a woman. Afterwards in the barracks, he found he couldn’t lie like the others, and said nothing.
‘Angel’s in love!’ they laughed.
1980s
After the tribunal determined the conditions of his job with Boismal (minimum wage, regular hours, written arrangements for the rent of rue Sans Nom), he headed off for the Mas du Cirque, still suffering from a hangover. Two cars were parked in the avenue. Three German shepherds bounded out the gate and Angel was impressed when the biggest took his wrist in its teeth and led him straight to its master.
The English couple gave him whiskey—‘Hair of the dog,’ they said—and took him on a tour of the property. The stone walls had been tastefully pointed. There were bright new shutters in pale green. Inside flagged floors, old furniture, patchwork quilts, Persian carpets and books abounded. A superb fitted kitchen opened onto a terrace with a gigantic pool. Angel had never seen so much vegetation used purely for decoration.
Then suddenly through another door it all came to a halt in a series of derelict rooms with a patchwork of cracked terracotta, open fireplaces, old wallpaper, dust. There were ladders, signs of work begun.
‘Our son,’ the Englishman said. ‘Had to go back to college. Be back next year to carry on.’
‘Now—I bet you’re hungry,’ she said.
They dined outdoors. Angel was astonished to find that good cuisine other than Mediterranean existed. There was still enough light to distinguish the cirque floor, once the village wheat field, now a balding football ground. Olive and fruit trees had been left to their devices for decades.
‘Those olive trees are sick,’ said Angel.
‘Bug of some kind,’ the Englishman said.
‘I might have a cure for that,’ said Angel.
‘Why don’t you come up and have a look at them,’ she asked. ‘Saturday?’
‘Buy the ingredients and I’ll make you a paëlla,’ Angel said. ‘It’s my specialty.’
1962
Angel first learned to cook in the legionnaire’s mess in Algeria. He passed the time experimenting with paëlla and other dishes, adding little touches he had seen his mother use. He also learned to smoke the short untipped cigarettes of dark tobacco he still prefers. The legionnaires waited. They played cards. The French Army was under attack from the French themselves. All that ‘Week of the Barricades,’ as it was later called, chaos reigned. There were rumors that some regiments of the French Army might refuse to budge if ordered onto the streets.
Sharing tagine from a large dish one night, Angel was reminded vividly of home, of his mother’s kind eyes and his father’s rough hands as they all dipped their bread in a dinner that was mostly sauce conjured with tasty care from few ingredients.
When the legionnaires had finished the tajine Angel went outdoors and sat on a hummock. He smoked, listened to a dog bark, and felt homesick.
Angel and his comrades trained, dozed, cooked, waited. This was not their war. What did Spaniards, East Europeans, and Germans care about firing on French people who sang the Marseillaise and shouted ‘Vive l’Algérie Française’? They told stories, about sixty-five legionnaires who resisted two thousand Mexicans in nineteenth-century Mexico and who, down to their last five survivors, had fixed bayonets and charged. Legionnaires were considered not men, but devils. They had captured Algeria for the French. When ordered, Angel and his comrades-in-arms would fire. They would serve France with honor. Most knew why they were in the Legion: passports, jobs, a better life. Some would make a career of it. Many were escaping their past. Most enjoyed the adventure. Only Angel had no ideas at all.
1980s
Angel abandoned his own garden to plant oleanders among the English couple’s olive groves. An insect on the oleanders ate the beetles on the olive trees. He tidied terrace walls after rain and generally looked after things as best he could.
When old Boismal finally quit work because of his lungs, René Boismal Jr came to see Angel at rue Sans Nom.
‘He’s had it,’ he said. ‘You can hear him breathing in the next Département.’
They’d all heard about the effects of pesticides. One farmer wore an outfit like an astronaut when he went spraying.
‘Papa never followed the rules,’ René said. ‘I learned my lesson the day I forgot my watch after spraying. Walked back down the line to get it and woke up flat on my back. Stuff knocked me out cold.’
‘The watch still working?’ Angel smirked.
René didn’t laugh. ‘I’m afraid the joke’s over,’ he said.
Angel had already guessed what was coming. ‘I’m to be let go.’
‘Look at it from my point of view,’ said René. ‘I can manage on my own with the machines now. And my son’s coming up. Besides, the new vines I’m going to plant will take five years to come on.’
‘You’ll still have to prune ’em,’ said Angel half-heartedly.
‘I’d be glad to pay you by the hour occasionally. It’s the social security no one can afford. I bought Maurin’s next door, the whole lot is to be cleared.’
‘No more slop,’ said Angel with a curl of the lip.
René. nodded. ‘I’ll plant Chardonnay and Merlot and if they don’t want to give them Apellation Contrôlée it’ll be the best Vin de Pays in the world.’
‘Que conneria,’ said Angel.
They went to the café and drank a bottle of pastis between them. The next day Angel sent a sick note and stayed in bed for a week. He never w
orked for old Boismal again and the old man never left his house again, sitting alone coughing and wheezing noisily, watching the valley through a chink in the shutters.
1962-1965
Rodrigo wrote to Angel wherever he was stationed. He wrote of Gloria, now his wife, and of babies as they were born. The paper became less smudged, the writing firmer, more confident. ‘I enclose photos,’ Rodrigo wrote. The photos had different handwriting on the back with the children’s names and three kisses, signed Gloria.
When Algeria finally got independence from France in 1962, Angel and his group went on to spend periods all over Africa and the French Midi: Djibouti, Madagascar and finally various barracks in Carcassonne, Castres, Castelnaudary.
On his walk away from the Legion, his new passport in his pocket, St Gervais du Bosc presented a physical barrier of some kind, stopped Angel on his inland walk, became his home away from home. If something was missing, Angel could not have defined it.
1985
Old Boismal’s death marked other changes in St Gervais: Co-op wine slowly improved; more and more tourists came from the north, and some bought houses. Change didn’t affect everyone: Simone continued to worry that late frost might ruin her peach harvest, handling the delicate fruit in her palm like a cloud. Old Marinette continued to tell of past floods and natural disasters. Many sold land to neighbors wanting to expand their vineyards. A gap began to show between the new farmers and the old. René Boismal Jr was one of many who lived in half-built new villas and worked their farms alone with machines and maybe an eldest son. ‘Young people these days have no interest in farming,’ he told Angel, ‘they only want out—to bigger discos in Nimes or even Paris.’ The hippies who had settled in the hills in the late ‘60s to make goats’ cheese had finally gone back to the cities to earn money. A few ageing ones remained, drove big old cars or painted. ‘They deal heroin,’ René Boismal said.
No one wanted the old vines, especially those on difficult slopes that had to be harvested by hand. Angel’s English friends were the only people still producing what Boismal called slop.
‘Would you consider working for us full time?’ they asked Angel, ‘under the table, of course.’
Angel took from them less than it was worth, and drew unemployment benefit as well. He was able to send more money to Rodrigo. With the extra hours he got for helping Boismal Jr he bought two-tone jackets and peaked caps, which he sported in the evening at the restaurant or the café. ‘The boys will continue their studies,’ Rodrigo wrote. There were photos of a Spain Angel no longer recognized, with large white box-like structures sprawling along the coast and over the hills.
Angel shared any vegetables that still managed to grow in his own garden with the English couple, and stopped paying rent for the garden.
‘They deserve it,’ he said to the Englishwoman one evening as they sat together on the terrace. They’d being doing this for several evenings since her husband had left for England on business.
‘Who?’ she asked, turning the cool glass provocatively in her hands.
‘The French,’ he said.
She smiled.
‘I wouldn’t give you a centime for a Frenchman,’ he said.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said.
‘Una mierda,’ said Angel. ‘They think they’re worth more than the rest of us. Do you want to become a billionaire?’
She waited.
‘Buy a Frenchman for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth.’
She read the Tarot cards for him, holding his hand in candlelight. There was a lot of talk about the Hanged Man. She pronounced his name Ann-hell, and giggled.
Never quite sure why the couple had been so friendly towards him, Angel was now very much at a loss to interpret this new attitude of hers. If anyone had asked, he’d have described himself as the man without a country from a street without a name.
After that he kept out of the Englishwoman’s way until her husband returned, hiding on the terraces towards evening, watching tourists in shorts rush down the mountain, their legs torn from scorpion broom, their arms full of orchids and other rare plants that it was illegal to pull. He listened to the hammering at Boismal’s house and the other new villas until it was time to go home.
1990
On his return, the Englishman announced that their son would not be back to continue work on the house. There had been some money disaster. The word equity was used a lot. Angel couldn’t follow any of it although he gathered it was bad.
‘We’ve decided to rent accommodation,’ the Englishman said.
For a while Angel found himself assisting with interior arrangements, hanging curtains and carrying furniture. She was so preoccupied she did not confuse him with strange behavior and odd signals, and he liked her better that way.
Angel moved into the mazet at the foot of the vineyard nearest their house, and enjoyed living mostly outdoors again. He began to sport a full beard. The two-tone jackets became dirty and were abandoned. Summers were marked by listless people sitting around the pool, walking bareheaded in the afternoon, complaining about local habits and attitudes. ‘Why don’t the French...?’ they would whine. Angel imitated them perfectly for René Boismal. ‘Who burned Joan of Arc?’ René replied. It wasn’t a question.
‘I’m going to stop taking grapes to the Co-op,’ the Englishman announced one day. ‘I want you to rehabilitate the old wine-press—a fine specimen and once the peak of village progress.’
Busloads of people came to taste and grimace. Le Mas du Cirque became synonymous with bad wine.
‘Since when can the English make wine?’ René Boismal asked, sitting on his tractor on the square, waiting for his lunch. ‘When I hear talk of oak casks, I reach for my gun.’
‘Leche,’ Angel spat on the hot flagstones.
Changes came faster now. The Englishwoman took groups for painting holidays, and Sunday painters could be seen all over the village wearing shorts and drinking to excess in the evening. Many of them purchased small houses, drank the worst of the wine and generally boosted the local economy. Angel’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated at the Mas, overlooking the finest view of the cirque and the valley, with a gigantic outdoors paëlla which he made himself, not talking much to anybody, just tending the giant dish on the fire. When people asked how he was, he replied ‘Comme un vieux.’ Like an old man.
If anyone got into discussion with him after a few drinks, he said, ‘If I’d done fifteen years in the Legion instead of five, I’d be retired now with a pension, anywhere I wanted.’
The Spanish families stopped coming to pick grapes. The largest local landowners brought in North Africans to live in the least attractive of the smaller houses and work in the fields, as people like Angel had once done.
In the autumn, carloads of students from the former East Bloc countries drove down for the grape-harvest. Angel and René Boismal watched beautiful, pale, blonde, creased young things pile out of cars on the village square. Angel wondered if farming in Valencia was under similar pressure. He imagined a world of displaced people—his schoolmaster once said there had been economic migrants even in Roman times.
‘Economic migrants. Caught in other people’s crossfire,’ Angel muttered to René Boismal. René frowned and didn’t reply.
1991
Prices rose, and the French dropped out of the holiday and house market, leaving foreigners the main source of income.
Then one day, a day like any other, the first Gulf War broke out and the world came to a standstill. Foreigners dried up. The international market crash followed. ‘For Sale’ signs went up everywhere. It was a while before the mood at Le Mas du Cirque was finally allowed to slip into despair. By then the English couple owed Angel four months’ pay. He heard drunken quarrels in the night.
* * *
Angel wakes from a dream in which his mother is calling
him to dinner across a surface of dark green water. He emerges from his mazet to find the two cars, the three dogs and their owners gone. The house is locked. A ‘For Sale’ sign hangs on the gate in three languages.
Angel knows his luck has run out.
For a long time no one will come to ask what he is doing there or if he has any right to draw water, grow vegetables, harvest olives. He will let the vines go wild. They’ll be pulled up anyway, subsidized by government grants whenever a new owner is found. They will make roaring winter fires.
And some evenings, when he sits alone at the door of the little mazet, smoking and watching the sunset, he feels sorry for the vines: these gnarled, dry blackened things may be his only friends—unless you count the Arabs. Angel exchanges the odd word of Arabic with them. Dark, slight women with babies on their backs picnic among the vines, laughing, although they remain subdued in the village. Locals frown on noisy Arab children skipping in the shade of rue Sans Nom on summer afternoons. Angel pats the odd little head as he walks by. He doesn’t joke about killing ‘melons.’ He doesn’t go to the café or the restaurant. He no longer sends money to Rodrigo, who has probably made a tidy income from rentals on the coast. He knows Rodrigo and Gloria will not miss him, although it pleases him to think they may miss his money, now that business is bad in Spain too.
One of the Arab parents, Ahmed, has become a friend and visits regularly. He arrives now, carrying a packet of biscuits, puffed from the climb.
‘Qahwah?’ Ahmed nods and Angel goes about making coffee in the little ibrik his friend has given him. One of his few, treasured belongings, it doesn’t require electricity.