by Tony White
On the first night, JJ had simply had to sit still and say nothing, just watching and making notes, as if to demonstrate that he was sincere. It was only on the second night that he had been given jobs to do. At first the baker had thought him a half-wit, although that was simply because he didn’t speak much French, and it had seemed for a while that they were working at cross purposes, getting in each other’s way, but JJ was a fast learner and had impressed the old man with his application, quickly earning a grudging kind of respect from him even over just these few brief nights that he had been helping out.
The equipment might have been electrically powered here, most of it, but as he fed the balls of risen dough into the rollers to be flattened and then rolled into long sausage-like lengths for the baguettes, JJ was at least beginning to understand how the more primitive versions of the same machinery might be used, although he could see that each job would take ten times longer if done the old-fashioned way. He had been wondering what the twelve-pleated cloths in the bakehouse at La Fontaine-en-Forêt were for, and it was mystery solved as he first watched and then copied Monsieur Previn, carefully laying each thin flute into its own pleat before gathering up the next, and so on, in order that each loaf could prove in the racks for an hour or so – holding its shape and not sticking to its neighbour – before being quickly scored with a series of diagonal scratches and going into the oven.
JJ would need to serve a much longer apprenticeship than this before Monsieur Previn would trust him to actually make any croissants – which was something of a relief – but on the third night he handed JJ a jug of beaten egg and a large pastry brush, pointing at the tray of pains au chocolat and miming the action of painting them with egg wash.
Star-gazer that he was, JJ didn’t mind going to bed at 8 o’clock in the evening for a few more hours of sleep before rising at midnight to walk down to the next village. In fact he enjoyed it and found that he was incapable of making the journey without stopping to sit on one of the large flat boulders by the road, to smoke a cigarette or two and stare in wonder at the vast brilliance of the night sky, or to watch the slow, rhythmic pulse of what he had learned was the Phare de la Garoupe, the lighthouse on the Cap between Antibes and Juan-les-Pins far below. Once he started work, of course, he would not have time to look again until he was wheeling the last of the pains de campagne along the cobbled road to the shop, and by then it would be getting light. Or – last job of the night – delivering two dozen baguettes to the cafe on the square, where each morning, covered in flour, he would stop for a small coffee and a large brandy on the house, before staggering back to La Fontaine-en-Forêt and a few more hours of sleep.
It was all a means to an end, of course. Now that he and Pythag had cleared the yard and opened the place up, now that he and Sylvie and Élise had cleaned it, JJ’s ambition was to revive the bakehouse in La Fontaine-en-Forêt.
JJ had begun to hatch this plan not long after Sylvie had first shown him the building, and it had been playing on his mind in the weeks since then. The date of his return ticket from Aix had come and gone, and he had been looking both for a way to earn his keep – over and above hanging out with Milo and helping him out on the occasional driving job – and to learn something. He wanted to actually live here rather than just be a guest, or a tourist. Reviving the bakehouse had seemed to offer a way to do all of these things, but it had taken a while for him to muster the courage to raise it with the others. Even as a relative newcomer he had sat in on one or two village meetings, so had witnessed their consensus-based decision-making first-hand. An outsider might think it was a wonder that they got anything done, but JJ understood what was at stake here, and that it could be taken away any minute, especially if it were not well managed. JJ’s plan would obviously need everyone’s approval, since it used the resources of the village, so he had finally spoken up the previous week, and been amazed that his idea had not been laughed out of consideration. On the contrary. It and he had been taken very seriously.
Élise had responded first, reminding everyone that, in the days of the Paris Commune, employees were allowed to take over any abandoned business. Here, quite clearly, there were no surviving employees, so perhaps that should be extended to any resident who was willing to put in the time, provided that any profits were ploughed back into the commune, and that there were no objections.
There hadn’t been. Or perhaps it was just that kind of night. Wine had already been flowing and with it some trivial chat comparing notes on the TV cop show Starsky and Hutch, and whether Christopher Reeve was any good in Superman III. Then the conversation had taken a darker turn, with the friends telling of their closest brushes with death. JJ told of the time he’d once absent-mindedly put a live wire in his mouth, and of how he was sure he had felt his heart stop for a few beats after he’d accidentally-on-purpose snorted a whole gram of speed at once.
Élise’s aunt in Toulon had died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the water heater in their bathroom just a week after the young Élise and Tobie – Pythag – had been to stay with her for the holidays, each taking turns to bathe nightly in water from that same heater.
Victor had found himself on a street corner in Zagreb during a sudden storm, and the street lamp next to him had been struck by lightning!
Béatrice’s story was about how a friend of hers who worked driving a tractor on the tarmac at the Aérodrome de Niort-Souché during the air show there a couple of years earlier had narrowly missed being hit with flying debris when two PAF jets had collided mid-manoeuvre, killing one of the pilots.
‘PAF are the official aerobatic team of the French Air Force,’ she explained to JJ, ‘the Patrouille; like your “Red Arrow”.’
The only one who didn’t join in was Sylvie, who – sitting next to JJ with sketchbook on lap – drew in silence throughout the whole discussion. Watching as the tentative and feathery scratching of her pencil somehow achieved the illusion of chiaroscuro and of form and mass on the page – a cherub! – JJ felt as if he couldn’t possibly love her more. Motionless though he was, trying not to put her off, it felt to JJ as if his soul was reaching out toward Sylvie. He wanted nothing more than to fall at her feet then and there, to beg and to beseech, or whatever it would take – he had no clue – for her to love him back.
It had been a warm spring evening and with all this talk of death, when a sudden mistral had slammed an upstairs window shut with a crash of broken glass on to the cobbles below, it had broken the spell. Laughing, they had been glad to be spooked, and it was partly to change the morbid direction of the conversation that JJ had plucked up the courage to share his idea for the bakehouse. Perhaps they could be self-sufficient in bread?
JJ had felt thrilled and honoured that the consensus around the table had been, ‘Pourquoi pas?’ Although this had come with a caveat: that he should somehow learn as much as he could about it first.
That was where this idea of learning on the job from Monsieur Previn had come up.
‘Bon! Then it is agreed,’ Victor had said.
‘Okay, I will ask ’im,’ said Milo, who had evidently been hatching some plans of his own too, which he was now keen to share.
‘I ’ave always wanted to go to Stonehenge,’ he said. ‘Maybe this year, non? Before I go to New Zealand?’ He was flying in July. The ticket was booked. He had a stopover in Perth in Western Australia, and would be flying from there to Sydney and then on to join his Greenpeace friends in Auckland when their ship, the Rainbow Warrior, was due to come into dock.
‘Why Stonehenge?’ asked Pythag.
‘Why not?’
‘But we ’ave our own menhir,’ Pythag countered. ‘And many stone circle ici. You should take JJ to Carnac!’ He turned and punched JJ’s shoulder. ‘Man, you would not believe Carnac! It is immense! What is so special about the Stonehenge?’
‘Pas seulement les pierres,’ Milo said, then corrected himself: ‘Mais oui, of course the stones. Why not? They are a wonder of the ancient world, non? B
ut not just that. I mean the festival. I ’ave always wanted to go to the Stonehenge Festival.’ He turned to JJ. ‘How would we get there?’
‘Um, hitch?’ suggested JJ.
‘Or we drive? Maybe we should take the van.’
‘Regardez, mes amis: le boulanger et le druide!’ cried Victor, sensing the opportunity for some dinner-table ceremonial. ‘Apportez les tulipes et le cognac! Where are the brandy glasses, Béatrice? We need to drink a toast!’
23: POULE (CHICKEN)
Whether or not he featured in Sylvie’s dreams, JJ had no way of knowing, but she certainly featured in his. How would it go? With Sylvie’s almost imperceptible double take preceding her inviting him in for coffee? With a knowing glance and a sudden recognition of expectant complicity and suddenly they’d be fucking? With a rush of sensations? With her gently touching his erect cock? Or the arching of her back? Oh, Christ! Fantasies about Sylvie had dominated JJ’s waking and sleeping hours since the first time he had seen her. Sylvie leaning out of her first-floor window. Sylvie showing him her silver ducat. Sylvie grabbing his arm when she slipped on the wet cobbles. He would come to look back on those few weeks at La Fontaine-en-Forêt as a kind of idyll, a golden age when anything seemed possible. He had barely questioned his own unthinking assumption that it might last for ever.
And yet—
And yet somehow all of it, from Nos Resto to the rats’ nest, from driving around with Milo to feeding the chickens with Pythag, from t’ai chi with Victor to learning to bake in neighbouring La Fontaine-lès-Vence, to his endless crush on Sylvie – trop, trop belle Sylvie! – hadn’t all of it seemed a bit unlikely from the very beginning? Too good to be true? Too perfect not to have a dark side? But then, unlikely does not mean impossible! The good is not always masking the bad!
The first that JJ had heard of La Fontaine-lès-Vence’s annual Festival d’Eau – so infamous now – was when he went to take a closer look at a rainbow-adorned poster near the bus stop while walking back with a bag of his usual edible wages from another night’s work with Monsieur Previn. He realised that he’d noticed this poster out of the corner of his eye a few days before, but hadn’t quite taken it in. Looking more closely, he could see that the festival was not on until the first of June, but he was curious nonetheless.
Right now, as he walked home, La Fontaine-lès-Vence smelled of a mixture of disinfectant and of summer rain on dry ground, but it wasn’t quite summer and it wasn’t raining. Rather, a pair of street-sweepers in baggy blue cotton uniforms had attached a hose to one of the fire hydrants on the square. It was early, but they carried on about their business with no attempt to be quiet. One of them swept litter and dog shit into the gullies along the sides of the road, or scraped discarded chewing gum from the stones, while the other splashed Lysol on to the cobbles from a ten-gallon drum before hosing everything down with a drenching high-pressure spray.
‘Anyone planning on going along?’ JJ asked later on, offering around the bag of croissants. ‘What is it? Any good?’
‘Un peu nul,’ said Milo, who had made some coffee. ‘It’s, you know, what is the English word – naff? Water giving life, water for washing—’
‘“Water, water everywhere”,’ said Victor, quoting Coleridge in his best English accent. ‘“Nor any drop to drink.”’
‘Yes,’ continued Milo, ‘and they spray water to make the rainbow and—’
‘The emblem, c’est un arc-en-ciel,’ said Béatrice, interrupting. ‘A rainbow, oui? But with the village on the top.’
‘Oui,’ said Milo, pretending to stick his fingers down his throat to vomit, ‘exactement. C’est trop nul. Like Béatrice says, there are hearts and rainbows everywhere: rainbow postcards, rainbow face-painting, rainbow T-shirts, a stupid rainbow parade, food and drink, the usual kind of stupid fucking stalls, you know? It has nothing to do with tradition; it is more about attracting sponsorship and out-of-season tourists.’
‘Is that so bad?’ asked Béatrice. ‘If it ’elps them to earn a living?’
‘Well, yes, per’aps, but it is the lie,’ said Pythag, indignantly, putting the battered yellow almanac and chalk back into the pocket of his tatty combats. As on every morning, he was up the stepladder writing today’s revolutionary date on the blackboard – ‘Tridi 23 Floréal CXCIII: Bourrache’ – as if simply continuing this practice might offer some kind of revolutionary grounding or foundation to the activities of each day.
No one else had the almanac, but even if they had, no one really understood the particular method Pythag used to calculate this. They just took his word for it, enjoying the seasonal tone and flavour of the plants and herbs, the agricultural tools and foodstuffs that were thus named. They enjoyed the way that these names harked back to a simpler, pre-industrial way of life, as well as the basically irreligious and non-hierarchical structure that this implied, in contrast to the regular calendar with its saints’ days and Sabbaths, high days and holidays.
Jumping down, Pythag picked up the bag and looked inside to see if JJ might have hidden a pain au chocolat in there somewhere, but he hadn’t.
‘La Fontaine-lès-Vence might share the name with us but that is all!’ Pythag said, speaking with his mouth full and spitting flakes of pastry. ‘We are the ones with the water. If anyone should hold a Festival d’Eau it would be us!’ Not by nature much of an orator, he dismissed this evident injustice with a scowl and a sweep of his hand.
Élise was dunking a croissant in her milky coffee, and she could obviously see that JJ was puzzled by the strength of feeling. ‘The tourist, par exemple, ’e or she might infer that such a festival ’as been going on for the centuries,’ she explained, between mouthfuls. ‘But of course it is a kind of manufactured ’istory. It is completely fake, but then we are good at this in France, non? I agree with Béatrice. There are worse things. This is not so bad, but it does you no ’arm to know it. Just because you know that Père Noël does not exist that does not stop you from enjoying the present in your shoe.’
JJ must still have been looking a little blank. He may even have fallen asleep for a second.
‘I mean that it can still be fun,’ Élise said, before suddenly looking at him more sympathetically and waving him away, laughing. ‘Ah, I forget you ’ave been up all night. Alors, what you have to understand is that après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, tous ces villages, all of these villages, they were lost’ – she gestured at their surroundings – ‘not just this funny place. So they had to be reinvented. It is ingenious what they did, but this was a generation ago and kind of an accident, so people may be forgiven for forgetting that it was not always like this. And there are plenty of others who do not want to be reminded of their true ’istory. Look, JJ, go to bed, man! I talk to you later, okay?’
She was right, and JJ didn’t need to be told twice. The futon was beckoning.
Later on, after he had awoken from a strange, Orlando-like nightmare full of intimations of immortality and in which a spell seemed to have been cast upon him or her by a mysterious French nun who was perhaps not unlike the stern Mère supérieure JJ had seen at the Matisse chapel in Vence, Élise would tell JJ an extraordinary story. Although in years to come he would wonder if he hadn’t imagined it. Perhaps it was something he had dreamed during those sleep-deprived days in La Fontaine-en-Forêt when he was working all hours with Monsieur Previn.
Maybe so, but he was pretty sure that Élise told him that these two mountain villages, La Fontaine-lès-Vence and La Fontaine-en-Forêt, had been so depopulated by two world wars that, after the second, the larger of the two villages had been used as a prison. A place where an agricultural workforce of convicted Collaborators – forced labour – might be contained, with the fortified mountain village still small and isolated enough to function as its own virtual panopticon: a village of prisoners and gaolers. Élise told JJ that a gay ‘scene’ had quickly developed in La Fontaine-lès-Vence – perhaps there were homosexuals among the Collaborators – with barns and cellars converte
d into nightclubs and speakeasies, which attracted artists and film-makers such as Jean Cocteau and later Alfred Hitchcock, who came with Cary Grant in tow while he was filming exterior location shots for La Main au collet,* albeit that he contrived to use the altogether more imposing dolomitic limestone cliff at Baou Saint-Jeannet as a backdrop wherever possible, in preference to the smaller Baou La Fontaine. ‘This place was famous! They all come! You ’ave seen our Picasso, oui?’ she asked a flabbergasted JJ. ‘Le torero et le Minotaure? Dans la grotte?’
Later still, visual artists moved in. As yet unknown painters and sculptors, demob draughtsmen from the art schools of Britain, and of Europe, who were drawn by the cheap accommodation and the bohemian atmosphere. And craftspeople: potters, weavers and jewellers, with all of their wheels, their looms and kilns, their workshops and their boutique window displays.
It had been this final, more practical wave of incomers, Élise would tell JJ when he awoke, that had identified the need for a tradition, some sort of rustic heritage for their adopted village community to appropriate and celebrate. An annual festival; a date to look forward to! Something that might align this strange village of La Fontaine-lès-Vence with more archaic and traditional, if not revolutionary, forms of folk art. A festival to soften the edges, and to attract tourists up from Nice, Antibes and Cannes – to catch them on their way to the perfume shops of Grasse – who might also buy locally produced jewellery and ceramics while they were here. Why not?