Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Laura settled her shawl round her shoulders and said: “The house is not very much to see. It is on the island, and the garden is always flooded in autumn and spring. Nevertheless we lived there.”

  The lights of the gipsy fairground twinkled like fireflies against the piecrust gold of the old wall. The moon picked up its own misty reflections in the swift flowing river. By night the hideous modern bridge did not look so ugly after all. We swooped across it like a swallow, to turn right and roll steeply down to the low flat Isle de la Berthelasse with its shady ribbons of tall willows and planes and poplars. On the other side of the river the beautiful fortress of Philippe le Bel rose clear and incisive from the shadowy ramble of buildings which marked Villeneuve-les-Avignon. The little island which divides the great river is low lying and always half shrouded in river-mist. Despite the fact that it is so frequently flooded when the Rhône is in flood, the peasants still keep their tenacious grip on it, for the soil is the richest hereabouts. Indeed as you roll down its narrow willow-fringed roads you have the sudden illusion of being in Normandy rather than in Provence. Cows graze peacefully in green fields. Yes, it is a landscape by Corot. This effect was much emphasized by the weak moonlight which hazed in every perspective. Across the river the strange crocketed steeples and fortresses had receded into dark anonymity, their outlines along the ceinture of medieval wall being marked only by the lighted booths of the gipsies. We turned at last into a dim gateway. Laura’s house was a modest one built on the typical Provençal pattern over a magazine where one might store barrels of wine or other produce. It consisted of one large room approached by a flight of steep steps. She led the way and after a struggle opened the door for us. We stood outside on the porch while she busied herself in the dark interior to find a lamp and matches. “This is all,” she said at last, holding up the yellow lamp to let us see the forlorn and deserted room, unceilinged and apparently undusted for long months. “It is dirty now. I live in the town and only come here for my free Sundays. Afterwards, however, you may get a good price for it,” she added, turning to Raoul who stood on one leg picking his teeth. “There is a little land, and on the island land fetches a good price.”

  She busied herself once more to make preparations for the ceremonial drink. Raoul and his mate started poking around down below, peering into the barn. Finally they settled themselves on a fallen tree-trunk. Laura came softly deftly down the stairs with some tall-stemmed glasses on a tray with a bottle of spirits. She trod carefully holding the lamp in her left hand. In the strange mixed light—half pale moon and half butter-yellow lamplight—she looked more than ever a fitting mate for an infant Gargantua. I thought suddenly of one of those large-bosomed Pomonas of Maillol which seem to express all the fruitfulness and happy sensuality of the Mediterranean. How he would have loved to sculp this young peasant girl with her strong hands and shapely arms. We took our glasses and she filled each one with a dose of the Vieux Marc of the region. It is raw and powerful and catches one by the throat. We stood and Raoul raised his glass, saying: “To the memory of your father.” Laura herself did not drink, but stood there quietly smiling. “I promised him,” she said simply. With the ceremony completed everyone relaxed and a second dose of Marc was gratefully accepted. Raoul jogged my arm. “Look at the boat,” he chuckled. “That is in case of flood.”

  It was a small wooden coracle such as fishermen use on shallow lakes, and it lay on its side in a corner of the yard. I was intrigued to notice that the long iron chain which was attached to the prow was fastened to a staple in the house-wall outside the first-floor window. Laura noticed the direction of my glance and smilingly explained: “Sometimes the flood comes so suddenly that you don’t notice it. You awake and find that it has reached the bedroom window. But when you have a boat attached high like that it floats up and so you step into it from the first floor.”

  “Clever,” said Raoul, giving his foolish neigh of laughter. We had one more drink and it seemed time to depart. We planned to stop somewhere on the road to Béziers and have a bite of supper—Raoul knew a little place patronized by the routiers. So, locking up the house, we ran Laura back over the bridge and dropped her at the ancient gate. She shook hands with us all and with her new fiance with a grave and pleasant composure. “Then day after tomorrow,” she said and Raoul nodded. “I shall be waiting for you at the station.”

  “Everything will be as arranged.”

  “Everything will be as arranged.”

  She turned quietly on her heel and was gone through the great stone portals. Raoul sighed as we climbed back into the covered wagon and edged our way out through Villeneuve towards the dark hills. The little man in the back was definitely asleep now, I could hear an occasional snore. Raoul yawned luxuriously and lit a cigarette. “What did you think of her, eh? Isn’t she fine? Just what I needed.” I agreed, and indeed wholeheartedly. It was a great stroke of luck for him; there wasn’t much romance about the modern Laura, perhaps, but perhaps this was just as well from Raoul’s point of view. Instead of spending twenty years writing passionate sonnets he could get on with the work of the world and raise himself a brood of children shaped like spades, with red knees, huge hands, and grey eyes.…

  “You look surprised,” he was saying, “but actually as I told you it is all a matter of scientific judgement. The golden rule is never to trust an agency in a matter of real importance.”

  I told him I never would.

  Across Secret Provence

  Published, as Ripe Living in Provence, in Holiday.

  Philadelphia. November 1959.

  THE IMAGE EVOKED by the word is of course a map, but not the conventional map such as tourists obtain from a travel agent. No, it is a highly selective personal map, rich in pictorial data, and the skilful needles of an Algerian tattooist have pricked it out nobly, grandiloquently, like a musical score, upon the chest and abdomen of my friend Pepe. This map enables him, when overcome by national patriotism or simply by the desire to discourse on some elementary point of local geography, to make the gesture of a Napoleon returned from Elba—throwing open his shirt in order to growl: “This is the true Provence! I have it all engraved upon my breast!” Then he gives a bray of laughter. But of course you have to be an intimate of his first, to have shown yourself worthy of the secret country which the map depicts—Pepe’s private Provence.

  A series of lucky accidents admitted me to the great man’s company on a blazing June afternoon when the red dust was rising like smoke under the hooves of the bulls in the bull-rings of Orange. He admitted afterwards that he was intrigued in the first place by the dog-eared copy of Mistral’s poems which was sticking out of my knapsack. (Would not an American be touched to see a copy of Leaves of Grass sticking out of a hobo’s pack?) But sitting jam-packed in that thirsty throng on such an afternoon was something of an ordeal for a mere foreigner; and clearly I was a person of some discrimination—for had I not come to cheer the exploits of “Gandar,” the greatest cockade-carrying bull of the age? Our hoarse cheers mingled in the dusty air as those famous black hooves rumbled on the arena floors, as if on the vellum body of some mighty drum. Two of the seven razeteurs, as they are called, had already been disposed of—one being carried out on a stretcher, and the other helped limping from the outer ring by the gendarmes. Twice in the bull’s honour the loud-speakers had grated out the triumphal march from Carmen which is the formal accolade granted, not as an honour to human bravery, but to the power and tenacity of a champion bull successfully defending the red cockade which nestles between his curved horns and may be plucked out only by the white-clad fighter with courage enough to run across him as he charges. This peculiar form of bull-dusting is, according to Pepe, the heart and marrow of Provence. (“Provence is where the cooking is based on garlic and olive-oil, and where the course libre flourishes.”) I do not think he is wrong about this, despite the greater publicity given to the Spanish form of bull-fighting in the newspapers. That is, at best, he says, a picturesque form of ri
tualized murder; but the course libre is an exciting and extremely dangerous game, a test of strong nerves and speed. And the bull is the darling, the hero of the crowd, never the man.… Some of these facts he growled at me during that first blue afternoon while the little knot of sweating bullfighters in their white clothes and coloured sashes edged softly and circumspectly around the ring, hoping for the vital half-second of distraction on the part of the bull which would enable one of them to make his temeritous curving run in under the horns to snatch at the coveted cockade with his short metal comb (lo razet). The prizes mount with the danger, and “Gandar’s” cockade and horn-strings (which must also be snatched) have seldom been worth less than fifteen thousand francs. It is a dangerous way of earning a livelihood—for as you turn to snatch the cockade your feet must have got up enough speed to carry you like a swallow over the barricade to safety: beyond the reach of those slashing horns. Moreover it is only at the very moment when the bull lowers his crest for the toss that you can snatch at the cockade he wears! One false step here, a miscalculation in your timing.… Four or five razeteurs are killed every year, and more hurt; yet the tradition lives on.

  Yes, the odd thing about it is that the official hero of the course libre is the bull. His is the name traditionally printed in scarlet poster-type on the placards, and his the applause when a razeteur is sent sprawling over the barrier with a broken rib or tossed in a crumpled heap against the stockades. “And that is how it should be,” says Pepe roundly. “In Provence the bull is king! And that is how you will see it depicted on the Cretan vases from which our game derives.”

  I have mentioned the copy of Mistral’s classic poems in the Provençal tongue. This Pepe certainly eyed with guarded approval; but his old eyes really kindled when I confessed that I had come down the Rhône to Avignon in the traditional old-fashioned way (forgotten today by the rushing tourist)—by river barge. Yes, I had woken at dawn under those rosy battlements to watch the pearly mist lifting and to hear the lazy jackdaws calling from the abandoned Palace of the Popes; I had tasted the river-winds with their eddies of honeysuckle and rosemary bruised by the hooves of riverside cattle, and had drifted in a labyrinth of trembling stars in which, sights and sounds all mixing, I heard the background of nightingale-song interrupting the hoarse distant singing of boatmen and the heart-tugging moan of barges up-river.… This in a sort of way proved I was “genuine.” His wrinkled old face wore a smile of unwilling admiration. “She must have been a beautiful girl,” he said at last in his growling voice. I understood the allusion. In the old days Provence was the recognized cure for northerners with broken-hearts—just as the more taciturn British went off to East Africa to shoot big game! But here alas! I could only disappoint him, for my visit was of no such romantic provenance. I was simply hoping to unstick a novel which refused to get itself written, by taking a brief holiday; sometimes it is the only way. So I had idled my way south by bus and train, stopping off here and there to buy a child’s cahier in a village stationery-shop, and to sit for a while on some shady terrasse by a meandering Roman river, pen in hand, “just to see” if that missing chapter would come.…

  I told him some of this, but not all. He shook his head slowly and understandingly and then grabbed my arm in the grip of the Ancient Mariner himself. “We will be friends,” he said. “For I can tell you many things.” I smiled at the resolute brown figure with its square hands. He wiped his flowing moustache with a silk handkerchief and nodded sharply. “You will see,” he said. And then we both dutifully rose to add to the storm of clapping and cheering which greeted “Gandar’s” return to the pen. The bull’s sweat starred the red dust like raindrops.

  Pepe wore, if I remember rightly, a brown hat with a very wide brim, and more than a touch of toreador about its design, which I was afterwards to recognize as the Stetson of the Camargue (a miniature Wild West, devoted to horse-breeding and bull-raising, which extends across the shallow alluvial delta where the Rhône reaches the sea). He wore this with a distinct tilt and an air to match it. Then a leather waistcoat with beautifully stitched pockets over a ferociously checked shirt with sleeves fastened by expensive-looking cuff-links. His tie was a narrow black ribbon. His gaberdine trousers were strictly tapered into a shape which suggested riding-breeches, and their ends fitted snugly into an ancient pair of soft-leather jack-boots. His appearance was flamboyant in a reserved sort of way, though not eccentric. His head was magnificent, and his smile somewhat costly—for many of his teeth were gold. His voice was pure gravel, and every enunciation of his was a challenge. One felt that he was prepared to strip and fight for the least of his opinions—even those in which he did not believe.… What else? Yes, he snuffed instead of smoking—snuffed vigorously with great inhalations and magistral explosions into a green silk handkerchief which he wore in his sleeve and waved about a good deal to illustrate his observations on bulls and human nature in general. Oddly enough, for one so elegant, he carried no snuff-box but a twist of brown paper filled with what looked to me suspiciously like unrefined sulphur. He offered this about liberally to all and sundry, confident perhaps that nobody but himself snuffed in the whole of Provence. He regarded my packet of Gauloises Bleues with a commiserating air. Perhaps he had heard of lung cancer? I did not ask.

  His opinion of “Gandar” was high on that sultry afternoon, I remember, but his opinion of human nature low. “They call themselves razeteurs,” he growled. “Why, in my day a bull like Gandar would have been stripped of his prizes—dépouillé—in under a minute.”

  As I was no specialist in the matter it was not my business to contest his view; I contented myself only by murmuring that already that afternoon two of the fighters had been carried off, one with a rent in his thigh and the other with a broken rib, if nothing worse. Pepe snorted: “Pouf! That is nothing for Provence.”

  Our friendship survived this small disagreement, and indeed gained further ground when he found me drinking pastis at the refreshment booth—the aniseed drink so beloved of Provençals, which turns white with the addition of water. “Good!” he cried. “Moi aussi.” We seated ourselves on a fragment of Roman column under a tree, and it was now that he gave me to understand that he regarded my intentions as honourable—that I was henceforward to consider myself his familiar. “You wish to see Provence!” he said, as he slowly unbuttoned his dramatic shirt. I was to be vouchsafed a first view of his private map. I confess I thought for a moment he was taking off his shirt in order to challenge me to mortal combat, and was relieved when the proud gesture revealed only this splendid piece of art nouveau. “It is all here,” he said simply, proudly. I gazed rapturously at this copyright map printed on his body by a devoted Algerian artist. “I was homesick,” explained Pepe. “I bade him make me a map of the true Provence.”

  Roughly speaking it was diamond-shaped, pinpointed in the north by Montélimar and in the south by Marseilles, and it followed the whole romantic valley of the Rhône with its fantastic gallery of historic names. In the West it stretched beyond Nîmes, in the East as far as Apt.

  “Tiens,” I said, “it’s a beauty,” and Pepe glowed modestly. Montélimar started high on the chest, while Marseilles was all but lost in the folds of the abdomen, unless Pepe held his breath, which he was doing now in order to let me feast my eyes on this treasure. “I had to stay tight as a drum while he did it,” he explained hoarsely. “And it was painful. But I was young. I stayed drunk on arak while he worked.” It was true that with the spread of middle age and the growth of a comfortable bow-window the southern ends of the map had begun to spread a bit. The Etang de Berre waxed and waned in size with his breathing. But when all was said and done it was a most original production, though of little use perhaps to motorists. He gazed triumphantly at me. I gazed at his stomach. I had realized at once that the map illustrated his main contention about Provence, for it covered roughly the area he had already described—the garlic and cockade belt, so to speak; I had also recognized by now from his appearance that
Pepe had a particular intimate connection with bulls and horses—he was a mixture of Spanish landed gentleman, Southern Colonel, and the “Horsey Gent from Newmarket” beloved of Surtees. But he was quite unmistakably representative of a tradition which was original, was none of these things. “Do you notice the bullet-holes?” he said, after a pause, with an air of opulent complacence. “I had him paint in a few bullet-holes in order to charm the ladies. Women love a man of action. I have always tried to please, though in fact I have never been in action.” They were extremely cunning bullet-holes, most vividly executed, and I said so with conviction. He winked and grunted. “Then you will notice something else. My hometown is the belly-button. Centre of the world for me. Centre of the Universe. Gaussargues! I bet you have heard of it.” I had not. He frowned as he rebuttoned his shirt. His face wore a disapproving look.”Gaussargues,” he said in his deep voice, “is the greatest little village on earth.”

  These words, I realized, were in a way an adoption formula. So long as I stayed in Provence, he added, in a voice which made it sound as much a threat as a promise, I was to be his guest. I would learn to imagine as well as to see this hallowed ground through his eyes. Indeed, could anything have been luckier? For I had tumbled upon an initiate both knowledgeable and completely drunk on his native country. The old platitude about not being able to appreciate a place in a short time is far from true; everything depends on the company you keep. All told I was only a few weeks in Provence, yet thanks to Pepe I know it better than many other places where I actually lived—in some cases for years.