Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  It was a quarter to twelve when the siren went; just after the thirteenth recitation and the fourteenth comic song. Murier had stood on his hands “just to prove” something or other; Thoma the notary had sung a selection from an unidentifiable opera; Gradon had done the can-can and sung a little song which had for chorus the refrain: “Merde Merde Merde au flic” It was clear that he was due for a court martial if he went on like this. I was just about to recite (on request) the speech “from Hamlet by Laurence Olivier” (sic) when the first haunting moans filled the air.

  “The siren! It must be the widow,” cries Pepe tearing his hair and gazing wildly around him as if hunting for his sense of duty. Clearly I had just time to get to the station. The telephone began to ring slowly, painfully in the little vestibule of “The Knights” where my rucksack already lay, its straps adjusted against my departure. One of the duty pompiers clattered up to answer the call, and clattered down again grinning. He did not need to utter the words, for they were taken out of his mouth by the company which intoned fervently: “The widow Chauvet is on fire again,” before breaking into croaking guffaws like so many bull-frogs on a lily-pad.

  But they were also racked with an apologetic sense of hospitality steadily floundering in that slow insistent wail. Pepe, like the captain on the bridge of a sinking ship, cried: “Fetch the machine and the casques,” and four of the guests left at the double.

  “Listen,” says Pepe to me with anguished deliberation. “Fear nothing. All is in order. We will drop you at the station on the way to the widow’s house.”

  That is how I came to find myself perched on the Gaussargues fire engine, surrounded by grim-faced gentlemen in formidable casques of gleaming brass, while Murier piloted us down the main street at what seemed to me to be the speed of sound itself. Sound! The horn of the machine honked dolefully like a series of dying swans as we swerved across the esplanade and over the bridge, and out along the road to the railway station.

  “Fear nothing,” said Pepe, himself by now accoutred in huge rubber boots and an axe. “All will be well. You will see.”

  The functionaries of the railway were clearly under the impression that I was pretty important as visitors go—perhaps an atomic scientist or mad oinologist. I was rushed on to the platform by a posse of gentlemen in tremendous brass casques with such impetus that the station-master bowed from the waist. It was not a moment too soon; our watches must have been bedevilled by the town clock—a not uncommon thing in Gaussargues. Doors were shutting and flags were being waved. A dozen brown hands were flung out to clasp mine. “Goodbye,” I cried inadequately. “You had better hurry.” Up there on the hill there seemed quite a fire; it looked as though the widow had done it properly this time for the roof itself was alight. Pepe drew a deep breath as we shook hands: “You will come back?” he asked. I nodded. “As yet you know nothing of Provence, nothing.” I admitted it. The train jerked once, twice, and began to slide. “Good luck,” I said, “and good weather in Gaussargues.” Pepe waved his casque in stately fashion; through his shirt I caught a glimpse of his tattooed hide—Montélimar to Avignon, unless I am mistaken. “We’ll always have a place for you at the Anciens Combattants,” he yelled suddenly as the distance widened, and then we turned a corner and he vanished.

  It is some months since I left Gaussargues. I am writing these words in Paris. I have seen and heard nothing of Pepe since I left, and though I occasionally scan the meridional press for news of my friends in the Midi, Gaussargues itself is never mentioned. It is a pity. It would be nice to round off the story in some way, perhaps even by being able to report Pepe’s marriage to the widow Chauvet; but I think he is not very much interested in furniture worth nine millions.

  Old Mathieu

  Published in Time and Tide. London. 6 December 1958.

  HE MUST BE in his early sixties, yet though his hair is white and his face as wrinkled as that of a tortoise he is still sprightly of step. He swings up the hill to his holding of vine and olive with the air of conqueror and is prodigal of good-mornings. His greeting sails over the garden wall like a thrown flower. On his way back at dusk he occasionally stops for a gossip. Yet somehow this year he has become less cheerful, less confident—and indeed his concern is understandable, for it matches that of his fellow vignerons. The failure of the ’57 harvest was a blow whose full effects are only now beginning to be felt with the appearance of imported Spanish table wine and the hushed incredulous talk of wine-rationing by next August. In France! “Yes, the Spanish wine has come,” he admits with an air almost of self-reproach. He is not critical of its quality—everyone admits that some is even superior to the local gros rouge. No. He utters the words with the hangdog air of a cricketer who might say: “We have been forced to invite three American baseball players to join the Test team!”

  Wine for Old Mathieu is neither a cult nor simply a business; rather is it something between a livelihood and a vocation. Talking of it he sounds rather like old Wilfred Rhodes discussing famous spin-bowlers of the past. The little soiled and folded copy of the trade paper peeps out of his pocket—Le Vigneron. Sitting down on a stone he unfolds it slowly and reads out the report of the last harvest with the wounded and shrinking air of a soldier studying a casualty list. “C’est bien grave, monsieur.” And indeed it is. On his lips the famous names sound full of the regional poetry of old county regiments or county cricket teams decimated in a year of bitter crisis. “Bordelais. N’a que la moitié d’une récolte normale. Nettement inférieure à ’52, ’53, ’55, sauf quelques rares crues. Bourgogne. 1957 ne représente guère plus que la moitié d’une récolte normale.” Here and there, however, there are frail gleams of hope to mitigate this terrible casualty list, and over these few items he lingers. In the Bourgogne report, for example, satisfactory production was signalled from several points on the battlefront, notably in the Côte de Nuits—at Gevrey-Chambertin, Morey, Chambolle-Musigny, Nuits St. Georges; but “très faible” production on the Cote de Beaune, notably Le Maçonnais and Le Beaujolais. Nevertheless on the Beaujolais front (his voice picks up) there are bonnes cuvées to be signalled from Fleurie, Moulin à Vent, Côte de Brouilly, Morgon, and in the Beaujolais villages. “Mais le Beaujolais ’57 est bien loin d’être un grand millésime.” Sighing he turns a page, first carefully picking his finger and peering shortsightedly at the small newsprint. “Vous voyez? C’est bien grave, monsieur.” The news of Champagne is nothing less than calamitous—160,000 hectolitres against a normal production of 350,000—and this only of “qualité moyenne” The news from the Alsace and the Jura is equally sad with production tumbled down to below half and all the qualities indifferent. The production in the Loire region down to six-tenths of its normal size with some total failures to be recorded after the bitter spring frosts of last year. “Rècoltepresque nulle à Pouilly sur Loire, très faible à Sancerre, Vouvray, Savennières. Mais …” and once more the old voice rises hopefully as he records, “une bonne qualité dans les Côtes de la Loire” But it is quality against quantity. On the home front, so to speak, things are not quite so bad. The Côtes du Rhône and Provence production was up to three-quarters of normal with some superior wines to be signalled, notably from Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Also the Vins Doux Naturels show a silver lining with production standing at well over half the normal and quality relatively high all round. But in the Southwest once more the tale of disaster is repeated, with production whittled away to under half—vine-regiments decimated by the frost. How marvellous their names are! Montbazillac, Rosette, Pecharmant, Montravel, Bergerac. Côtes de Duras. Jurançon, Madiran, Pacherenc, Du Vic Bilh. “Le vignoble de Monbazillac fût particulièrement éprouvé par les gelées. Qualité moyenne.” An epitaph for a famous vineyard.

  He folds up the little magazine and tucks it carefully back in his pocket. “The Vines!” he says reflectively, shaking his head as if over their beloved incorrigibility. Indeed in this anxious year they have become presences standing out there in the rain. And the weather rep
orts for April and May have deepened the gloom everywhere with their talk of snap-frosts and rainy spells to come. Are the vines to fail again this year? I am beginning to see them through the eyes of Old Mathieu. They are planted from end to end of the wintry horizon in regular symmetrical lines, as if on a chessboard. In the landscape foreground they look like small pagan headstones in some huge cemetery; and as they fade back into the hills in diminishing lines they dot the fields of tobacco-coloured earth like cloves.

  And the plants themselves … hairy as the thigh of a village Pan they writhe out of the dark ground, ash-dark and swollen with the promise of leaf and fruit, bit nude now; and everywhere by March there are men in blue blouses bending over them as if over street casualties, binding a limb, setting a splint, tending them. All the silences in these white villages are full of the snap of sécateurs, and carts trudge round in the mud collecting the dead vines—or those which for one reason or another have failed to bear. Spades dig them coarsely up—extirpating them like rotten molars and tossing them into the carts which soon brim over with these little brown statuettes, arms raised on high, primitive woodcarvings of Dionysus himself; each a small figure with raised arms, knotted, tumescent, as if from the pressures of the soil itself—a strength cut back, contained, muzzled by the surgeon’s sécateurs. The April rain hisses down among them, condensing in great glistening beads on their shaggy skins, like sweat—sweat and tears from the drawn-out agony of growth.

  Each elbow of vine is left with two points, two dry points of contact with the sky like terminals. Each shaggy little statue raises two arms, each arm has two fingers. And then, as the slow spring advances, a leaf appears on each of the fingers—a frail yellow pilot-light. It questions the air delicately, timidly, like the horns of a snail. Another follows and another. So the great hairy thigh of Dionysus blossoms in yellow leaves which advance with a downward-pressing movement, wriggling along between earth and sky as if uncertain which to seek; a curious snake-like downward movement.

  But by the time June comes the whole valley will be in leaf, plum-dark, transformed. The dry brickdust and tobacco-veined earth will have become smothered by the new heraldic green of the vines, manufacturing the shade in which the fruit is to ripen.

  It is Old Mathieu himself who taught me how to trim the vines in the neglected and abandoned vineyard in which this old house stands and which we will soon be leaving for good. In a single year of neglect the vine can throw out a four yard withe which sprouts upon it like those long and silky antennae upon the heads of certain nocturnal beetles. These must all be trimmed back to “make the vine push,” in the words of Old Mathieu. He brings up his sécateurs on two successive Sundays and patiently shows me how the operation must be conducted. It is not unlike a spell at the nets under an exacting yet patient coach. Holding the long-shanked cutters you straddle the vine, cutting downwards, having first chosen your trimmings. Gravely he instructs you: press down and keep the sharp side of the cutters against the body of the vine. “Il faut tourner doucement avec la souche” (I am reminded of a difficult shot to cover-point—or of a glide through the slips.) “Tourner,” he cries softly. “Il faut tourner, Monsieur.” It has its own rhythm, this downward cut with the sécateurs, but it is not too difficult to learn. Together we work slowly through the orchard in front of the house. “The one at the back you shall do by yourself,” he says with a smile. “And when I pass up the hill in the morning I shall see if it is properly done or not.”

  One can trim about sixty or seventy vines in a day, and it is absorbing work. First the choice of the shoots to be cut away, the cleaning and barbering of the trunk, and then the operation which will leave two fingers upon each branch, and not more than six upon each single vine. “Il faut de la patience. Il faut bien le juger.”

  Working with the invisible presence of Old Mathieu at my elbow I complete the job. Anxiously as a student I await his early morning passing. Presently I hear his cheery good-morning on the road below. I find him standing with his critical and friendly eye upon the vineyard. “C’est pas mal,” he says. For an amateur vigneron this is an accolade indeed.

  Women of the

  Mediterranean

  Published in Réaltiés. Paris and New York. June 1961.

  ASUGGESTIVE TITLE, A phrase full of echoes and associations—although at first it is a little difficult to say why. Perhaps it is due to the qualifying of a mysterious noun by an even more mysterious adjective.… Are they really any different from other women in other places, and if so, how? Certainly you could not alter the adjective without damaging the rich mental image conjured up by the phrase. (Try to say “British Women” or “Swiss Women”—and all at once you feel that you are talking about a different genus.)

  The Mediterranean woman has never subconsciously forgotten that, by origin, she is descended from her foam-born prototype Aphrodite. If the Nordics ever had a type-goddess of the same epoch she must have been a goddess of fertility, of marriage, of domesticity, and not one who raised woman’s independence into a cult which combined freedom and sensuality in equal parts. As for the actual historic specimens of Mediterranean womanhood, a poet could get drunk simply by making a rosary of the great names they have bequeathed us. (“When Mausolus died, his wife Artemisia pounded his bones in wine and drank the potion that she might get his skill in battle.…”) Metanira, Cleopatra, Hypatia, Theodora, Beatrice, Laura, Catherine Cornaro, Sappho, Agrippina, Lucrezia Borgia, Clytemnestra, Thaïs, Penelope, Bouboulina … the list could be prolonged almost indefinitely. They are all children of this mysterious sea, occupying its landscapes in human forms which seem as unvaryingly eternal as the olive, the asphodel, the cypress, the laurel, and above all the sacred vine.

  I would be right, I think, in suggesting that the word “Mediterranean” should be applied to all the wine-drinking countries around the basin; and that the character of their women emerges as distinctly as the odour of thyme bruised by the hoofs of the sheep on these sun-drunk hills and dales. I must remind the reader that the vine was first discovered in Egypt.

  In this context, then, as a creature of a landscape one sees her very clearly. She is to be distinguished from other women by the violent coherence of a character which is composed of fierce extremes. The poetry and the vehemence of her feelings are both proverbial; but they combine happily with a certain innocence, a purity of mind. You will easily see what I mean if you reflect upon the Nordic version of her—if you think of Catherine the Great or Queen Elizabeth. The contrast is instructive, for in the North something had had to be sacrificed in order that these women might become as great as they undoubtedly were. The something is femininity. In order to perform their great deeds they had to become, in a sense, mannish women. What characterizes the southerner is that she can do just as great deeds without once sacrificing the female side of her character. (Theodora, Semiramis, Cleopatra.) There is a constant in the character which does not change however various different women were. This difference of character seems all the more marked when we reflect upon the long battle which women in the North have fought for equal rights. In the South, no such battle has been necessary, for women do not envy men at all. Why should they ask for equality with the feebler sex—man? They know that nothing is stronger than the mother and the cult of the mother—and they have been content with their role as procreators, the handers-on of the man-children.

  She is as various as the history of the Mediterranean itself, the Mediterranean woman, whether she is skirting the dark labyrinths of Crete, whether she walks knife in hand along the blood-soaked corridors of Tiryns or Mycenae, whether she poisons with a Renaissance smile or accepts with beating heart the blood-spattered trophy from the toreador’s crimson hand. But we dare not imagine that she has no weaknesses—for her overpowering sensuality and single-heartedness, the pride and naivety of her feelings have more than once driven great poets to open their veins, or great soldiers to start unjust wars in her name like Helen did. Yet we would not wish her otherwise th
an she is. Even the Moslems who say that women have no souls are unable to imagine a Paradise which is not perfected by her presence: their after-world is peopled by the fluttering shapes of the “hanoumi,” brilliant and soulless as fireflies on an autumn night.

  Her struggle, it seems to me, has always been the same one: to break through the pattern of sexual greed and self-indulgence in order to discover herself, to find a magical identification with the earth-rhythms whose slow pulses beat in her blood. [I am thinking of the abstracted faces of Greek women as they join in the age-old dances and beat up the red dust with their bare soles. Faces purged of everything except the sensual concentration on the music’s throb and swing. They burn inwardly like altar candles. I am thinking of the Spanish dancers with their proud-shrill parrot-voices and the maddening rataplan of their castanets upon the watchers’ heartstrings. I am thinking of the peasant dancers in Italy who pause as the first flights of fireworks stain the dark velvet sky in honour of a patron saint (as in Ischia), only once more to resume the grave poignant measures which have been handed down to them through the generations and which were first intended, perhaps, to copy the motions of the stars.]

  But the Mediterranean is older than history and stronger than religion; one of the reasons why we love it so much is this unfailing sense of continuity with which it invests the present. If you go to an Easter service in a Catholic church at Marseilles, Naples, or Madrid, you feel very certainly that the Christian mysteries were evolved out of the Eleusinian mysteries and that invisibly the worshippers are linking hands with their ancestors through the communion of the saints. This feeling is even stronger in an Orthodox church, because the Greek language of the service vibrates like the wind in the Aeolian harp of the mind. What do these faces tell one except that nothing Mediterranean can change for it is landscape-dominated; its people are simply the landscape-wishes of the earth sharing their particularities with the wine and the food, the sunlight and the sea.