by Tony White
An older sign that was fixed above the door of the building to which the veranda was adjoined spelled out the words ‘bar-tabac’ in lower-case joined-up writing that appeared to have been wrought from a single, ribbon-like length of grey zinc, set sideways on, which may once have been painted but was now bare metal. To the left of this sign, fixed to a stone corner piece upon which one of the veranda’s great roof joists also rested, was a red-painted metal object, an elongated diamond. JJ had seen many of these signs since arriving in France – on streets and stations and from train windows – and he remembered from French lessons at school that these were displayed outside government-licensed tobacconists. Whatever this building was now, it was not an officially licensed bar-tabac.
Inside, and dark behind its shuttered windows, the ground floors of two houses had evidently been hollowed out. Any internal, structural and party walls had been replaced by two centrally placed and elegantly proportioned iron pillars – shallow pedestals at their bases and with cast frieze and cornices where they supported a single mighty wooden beam above – to create a large room some twenty feet square. But if this had indeed been a bar, all other vestiges of that function had long disappeared. Where once there would presumably have been a scattering of tables and chairs, and a bar counter behind which would have been displayed a glittering array of spirits and liqueurs and the various specialised means of dispensing and imbibing them, all that now remained were several layers of worn linoleum on the floor. A rectangular gap in this linoleum, running roughly parallel to the back wall, near the rear of the room, traced the former location of the bar counter itself, perhaps, but behind this were no longer any lights or mirrors, no glittering bottles, jugs and glasses, no ashtrays, and no stacked packs of cigarettes and matches. Just a filthy-looking metal sink and drainer above the former of which two ill-matched taps had been soldered – slightly askew, as if by an amateur plumber – to some old pipes of a dull bronze colour. It looked as if thick layers of paint had been burned off each pipe to give enough clean metal that the taps might be affixed, but beyond this the pipes were encrusted with layer upon layer of the same thick, green paint that covered walls and joinery indiscriminately. To the right of the sink, and set into a broad, stone chimney breast that took up the right-hand third of the back wall, was a rusting iron kitchen range – a wood-fired oven – which might also presumably have been the primary source of heat in winter. Now the range evidently wasn’t even used for cooking, but for storage, as various large and battered cooking pots, fish steamers, saucepans, wire crates, cardboard boxes and plastic barrels were stacked from hob to chimney around the flue. To the left of this and more or less in the centre of the back wall stood a single four-burner gas cooker, of relatively modern design, that was attached to a blue butane cylinder by means of an orange rubber hose. Two further cylinders, either spares or empties, had been placed between cooker and sink. On the other side of the cooker, beneath a single casement window that overlooked the gorge beyond, was a wooden kitchen table upon which were stacked more pots and pans, knives, chopping boards and an old olive-oil can filled with wooden spoons, spatulas and whisks; plus pepper grinder, salt cellar and another gallon-can of the same brand of olive oil. The table itself had presumably been so placed that whoever was preparing food might also look out at the ever-changing play of light and weather over the ravine and the hills beyond to the west. Beneath the table was an old-fashioned suitcase-style portable record player, along with some LPs by Jacques Brel, The Rolling Stones and reggae bands like Culture, The Congos and The Royal Rasses.
There were scatterings of some type of blue pellet on the floor, along the skirting boards and in the corners of the room, which JJ guessed might be a rudimentary form of pest control.
JJ had the distinct impression that Béatrice and Pea-tag might be girlfriend and boyfriend, but did not want to ask. He wasn’t sure if a presumption on his part of their adherence to such traditional romantic concepts would be approved of, or not. Of slim build, with long red hair tied back in a loose ponytail, Béatrice wore a flowing cotton skirt in a dark paisley print and a loose cut-off T-shirt that continually fell off one or other shoulder.
‘This is JJ,’ Pea-tag said in English, as much for JJ’s benefit as Béatrice’s. ‘He is a punk from England.’
A few doors down from Nos Resto, on the northern side of the square, was a house where several rooms were kept made up for guests, and Béatrice showed JJ around. A tour of the amenities did not take long. There was an old-fashioned hole-in-the-ground-style toilet downstairs, with two raised platforms to stand upon and a tap for flushing or cleaning. Flies buzzed over the hole. There was no kitchen, just a stone sink set into an alcove next to a large fireplace. At the centre of this, set on the large, flat hearthstone, the grate was a complex wrought-iron affair. It looked as though cooking pots might once variously have been placed upon the flat iron plates on either side, or hung from the hooks and chains above it. The wall behind this grate, which disappeared up into the chimney piece above, was black with soot, as was the underside of the chimney piece itself.
Béatrice showed him upstairs to a first-floor room that overlooked the square. Instead of a bed, there was a Japanese-looking flat mattress laid on to some wooden pallets. There were terracotta tiles on the floor, and the walls were covered in a dingy wallpaper.
‘You ’ave futon in England?’ she asked, then added, ‘They are so comfortable.’
There were no pillows or bedclothes, but a paisley-patterned throw had been folded up and laid at the foot of the bed, and there was a knotted piece of calico hanging in the window. A tin candlestick on the windowsill reminded JJ of the illustration in a childhood book of nursery rhymes, of Wee Willie Winkie running through the town. Apart from this, the room was empty.
‘Vous pouvez laisser votre sac,’ she said. ‘Your rucksack, it will be safe here. Come and find us when you are ready.’
JJ was relieved to shrug off the heavy pack, and even more so that he wouldn’t need to pitch a tent tonight. Unable to believe his luck, he unlaced his DMs and lay down on the futon for a while, kicking his boots off on to the tiled floor and gazing up at the two massive wooden beams that ran across the ceiling, and which presumably held up the roof. Attached to the plaster in a nook where one of these beams met the wall were what looked like a couple of insect pupae or chrysalis casings, reddish-brown in colour and each about an inch and a half long. JJ wondered what kind of creature might emerge from these; perhaps a type of moth.
From what JJ had seen so far, the entire village seemed like the insect accretion of found materials, in this case tree trunks and stone, that had been, if not exactly chewed and regurgitated, then worked and fashioned into some repeating pattern of habitable units. A spiralling growth of variations on a theme that was informed by the characteristics of the local materials, and certainly had not been curtailed by any lack of these, but perhaps only by the amount of space available to its creators, the people who had once lived on this narrow rocky buttress beneath the cliff, with its deep gorges on either side. Where had those people gone, JJ wondered, that Pea-tag and his friends could simply move in? He had been to a couple of squats back at home in Exeter, mainly to buy dope from a small-time dealer and student ne’er-do-well named Phil, who had been living in one of them, or to go to a party, but the idea of squatting a whole village – if that was even what was happening here – seemed extraordinary. Perhaps he was still slightly stoned, but JJ felt as if his expectations of this trip were undergoing some sort of kaleidoscopic shift. ‘We’re not in Toto any more, Kansas!’ he said to no one in particular.
‘Hey, lazybones,’ Béatrice said, when he went back down to Nos Resto an hour or so later to see what was happening. ‘Why not do something? You could fry the pork.’ She pointed at a ceramic bowl heaped with what looked like cubes of bacon.
‘What—?’
JJ had barely formed the question when Béatrice pointed at the olive oil and a stack of frying pans
on the table and said, ‘Do you need me to show you?’
The answer to that was an unspoken ‘No’, so, while she peeled some boiled eggs at the table, JJ chose a heavy pan and splashed in some olive oil from the can. He used his cigarette lighter to ignite the cooker flame and once the oil was spitting a little he threw in the bacon, stirring it occasionally as the pieces began to turn pink, so that it would cook evenly.
Once she had peeled the eggs and cut them into halves, Béatrice drained the dandelion leaves into a large colander over the sink, rinsed them through once more and then tipped them out on to a tea towel, which she gathered into a tight bundle, Dick Whittington-style, and took outside, where she swung it around her head to force off any remaining water in a kind of centrifugal spray.
While JJ continued to fry the bacon, he watched Béatrice mix Dijon mustard and vinegar to a sloppy paste in a small bowl before gradually stirring in drop after drop of olive oil to make a glisteningly consistent greeny-brown goop.
‘What are you staring at?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you ’ave this in England?’
JJ shook his head. He didn’t really know what ‘this’ was.
‘It is vinaigrette,’ she said, incredulous. ‘For the salade?’
The bacon was browning nicely, and where it had once been merely coated in olive oil, it now swam in its own hot fat. Béatrice motioned for JJ to stand aside, and then she took the pan, using the spatula to hold the bacon in place while she poured this hot fat into the bowl of vinaigrette, before tipping cooked bacon pieces and boiled egg halves on to the pile of dandelion leaves. Finally she stirred the vinaigrette and bacon fat mixture then poured it over the salad, and put some wooden salad servers into the bowl.
JJ followed Béatrice outside, and was surprised to see several people sitting around the table, which someone had evidently laid in the meantime. ‘Hello,’ he said, to everyone at once, then sat down at the end of a bench and tore himself a piece of the nearest baguette.
‘Maybe we should speak English for our guest,’ said Pea-tag as he tossed the salad, and took some, then passed it on.
The man sitting to JJ’s left turned to shake his hand. Skinny and very suntanned, perhaps in his mid-twenties, with short brown hair, he had shaved the sides of his head and was possessed of what JJ thought of as a very French look, which was mainly to do with his aquiline nose. ‘I am Milo,’ he said – pronouncing it ‘Me-lo’ – then poured some red wine into JJ’s glass from an earthenware jug.
‘In English?’ said a bearded and barrel-chested dark-haired man in work-stained overalls. ‘Okay, then. I was saying to Milo that the problem with Mondale was that ’e could not offer a better story than Ronald Reagan. No wonder ’e lost. What do you think, Englishman? If you are a punk, then you must be the anarchist, oui?’
Pea-tag raised his glass and proposed a toast: ‘To the revolutionary pissenlit! Tonight we piss the bed!’
JJ tore himself more bread and used it to wipe the dressing from the plate between mouthfuls of the salad, which was delicious. More than that, it might have been the best meal he had ever had in his life.
‘Better than the usual pea soup,’ said Milo.
‘Better than eating them by the roots, non?’ said the bearded man, to much laughter.
‘Victor was making the joke,’ said Milo to JJ. ‘Eating them by the roots means you are dead and buried, comprends-tu? Is from Les Misérables, do you know this? Is a novel by Victor ’ugo. For some reason it is Victor’s favourite book.’
‘The potter cannot read,’ said Pea-tag. ‘’e just recognise the name on the front because it is the same as ’is—’
‘Why. You. Little … Pip-squeak!’ retorted Victor in a kind of exaggerated upper-class English accent that sounded like an even more clipped James Mason. ‘If I cannot read, then what is this?’ He took a book out of his overall pocket and threw it on to the table.
‘Would you like me to read it to you?’ said Pea-tag.
‘Oh, it’s so boring,’ said Béatrice, then to JJ: ‘Do you know this one? The Iceman Cometh. Is by Eugene O’Neill?’ She pronounced it ‘You-zhen’, with the emphasis on the second syllable. ‘Such dull, you know, political explication. C’est trop didactique, non? So unrealistic.’
‘Yes, how unrealistic,’ said Victor. ‘As if a bunch of losers would meet every night and talk politics around some shitty table! All representative of their particular stereotype, and each with ’is predictable quotient of motivation, prejudice and opinion. Yes, that is so … unrealistic, Béatrice.’ He sighed and gestured around the table. ‘I cannot even begin to imagine such a thing.’ He looked around, pointing first at Milo then at each of them in turn: ‘The green, the ’istorian, the artist, the potter, the anarchist—’ He gave up with a shrug. ‘It is not … like us … at all! Not at all! Salut, mes amis!’
With a gruff laugh, Victor held up his glass and then drained it. ‘So,’ he said, turning to JJ, ‘which one are you? The anarchist or the idiot?’
‘I am happy to be the idiot,’ said JJ, laughing. ‘It’s my favourite Iggy Pop LP; side two, anyway.’
Conversation around the table was agile and lively. Full of convivial vim, it jumped from topic to topic, and was accompanied by much of what JJ would call piss-taking, good-natured ribbing, to which no one seemed immune, himself included. One moment he was being tutored in his French by Milo, who said that he should conjugate the main verb, but that a second is infinitive. ‘Like in English: you have to breathe,’ he said by way of illustration, ‘but I live to fuck.’ The next moment, Victor – whose family were Polish Jews only some of whom had survived the Holocaust by hiding out in the Pyrenees during the Nazi occupation – might be holding court, telling terrifying stories of his travels in Eastern Europe or Latin America: some narrow escape in La Paz involving the vice-principal of Bolivia’s leading Catholic boarding school, a crooked cop and a cocaine dealer, perhaps, or some disastrous farce in Mexico City involving a prostitute, a taxi driver and Victor’s ex-wife.
At times the conversation touched on those generic subjects that greeted any young man travelling at that time, such as whether there was national service in whichever country. Then Pea-tag, rolling another joint, might explain, for example, why Milo’s Moroccan double-zero hash – fragrant and strong as it was, and imported by a friend in the French Aéronavale who was stationed along the coast at Fréjus – was an instrument of colonial oppression, while his own home-grown grass – cross-pollinated over the years from strong and favoured strains – was not.
JJ found himself talking at length to Élise, a dark-haired woman whom he kept mistakenly calling Elsie, and who may or may not have been Milo’s ‘significant other’. Of all of them, she seemed to be the repository of historical knowledge about La Fontaine-en-Forêt, which she told JJ had been settled, in common with other promontories in the region, by Celts and so-called Ligurians – including, supposedly, some tribe called the Nerusii – more than ten thousand years earlier.
To JJ this was not only fascinating, but topical. One of the books that he had been reading on his travels was a second-hand copy of the 1969 English-language edition of Peter Vilhelm Glob’s book The Bog People, which told of Iron Age and Celtic peoples who had been found eerily well preserved in peat bogs across Northern Europe, the theory being that they may have been human sacrifices to some ancient goddess of fertility. The idea that he was now sitting and eating local produce on the site of a Celtic settlement reminded him of the strange feeling of timelessness that he had experienced at the menhir earlier that day.
‘Yes! I ’ave seen this, but we ’ave no peat bog in this part of France,’ said Élise, sadly. ‘So I guess there is no chance of finding any such body ’ere. But Milo found a néolithique arrow’ead one time. Look, ’e keep it round ’is neck.’
Élise told him that while what was now La Fontaine-en-Forêt had not offered quite the strategic advantage of other settlements nearby – such as Vence, Tourrettes-sur-Loup, Saint-Paul de Vence or
their nearest neighbouring village, La Fontaine-lès-Vence, with their uninterrupted observation points – its position between the two gorges and its relative inaccessibility, plus the presence of two very reliable springs in caves at the foot of the baou – the local word for any huge cliff, like the one behind the village – meant that the site had been further occupied, developed and fortified, first by the Romans, who valued it primarily as a source of drinking water, even laying lead pipes that had intermittently supplied nearby villages. The settlement had then been subject to further waves of invasion and subjugation from about the fifth century onwards, including by Huns, Visigoths and Franks, until the tenth century, when Élise said it had been occupied by Saracens and further fortified, again being valued primarily as a source of water. These Arabic settlers were masters of hydraulic engineering, and according to one medieval engraving they created an animal-or more likely slave-powered hydraulic pump, probably on the site of today’s largely eighteenth-century fountain. While it lasted, the Saracens’ engine ensured that water from La Fontaine-en-Forêt provided a more secure supply, even forcing it to flow uphill to more elevated nearby villages.
Plague and other diseases, including the manifestations of lead and other heavy metal poisoning caused by the continued use of the Roman pipes and cisterns, and those sicknesses of the rural poor such as beri-beri and scurvy that are caused by what we now know to be vitamin and mineral deficiencies, saw the village abandoned for more than two centuries during the early medieval period. This was only reversed when Marie of Brittany awarded the site to the Villeneuve family in the late fourteenth century as part of her gift of lands surrounding the nearby La Fontaine-lès-Vence.
Was she boring him?
JJ assured her not. He found it fascinating.
Guichard de Villeneuve had, of course, restored the square, removing the remains of the Moorish pumping engine and converting the few stables, byres and pigsties that surrounded it into small houses – ‘Like this used to be,’ Élise said, gesturing at where they sat – and finally laying the foundations for what was nowadays known as ‘chez Sylvie’ – she pointed at the blue-shuttered house on the opposite side of the square – for the Master of the Water. Villeneuve had primarily seen La Fontaine-en-Forêt as a reliable source of water for its larger namesake and its hinterland, which stretched as far down the mountains as Villeneuve-Loubet. The last descendants of those same Villeneuves, Élise said, were put to death at Ventimiglia as they attempted to escape the Revolution by fleeing across the Var towards the then Kingdom of Sardinia, in what is now Northern Italy. They surely could not have known, she said, that, by relying so heavily upon the water from La Fontaine-en-Forêt, they had been systematically poisoning their own populace, but this was in fact the case, and so it continued. The legacy of this long-term lead poisoning had apparently caused the area to become infamous, indeed a byword, for the various forms of cretinism it produced, a reputation that – incredibly – had continued into the beginning of the twentieth century.