At Home in France (12 page)

“Ça marche, Charles. C’est beang,”
Madame shouted shrilly with her twist of patois.

He flushed the toilet again.

Once again, gushing, gurgling water flowed cleanly through the pipes.

“Ça marche, Charles. C’est beang,”
Madame called out at a higher pitch, as if loudness added credibility.

Monsieur descended the stairs, looking defeated and mystified, hat tipped back to allow his fingers to massage his brain.

It was a Monday, France’s day off—small chance of getting a plumber. Monsieur Prysbil, the elderly plumber
who was responsible every fall for turning off the water in my house, was known to take a siesta at this time, after his full complement of wine at lunch. (Prysbil was taken periodically to a nearby clinic for his drinking problem.) Marc Bru, Madame Servais’s nephew, who lived about ten minutes away, was mentioned, but he was away visiting in-laws.

“Mais, ça marche, Charles,”
Madame repeated.

“Oui, ce n’est pas la toilette,”
I chimed in.

Monsieur ignored us, carrying on what appeared to be a debate with himself.

He instructed us to stand by and wait for his return. Off he went in the car, without explanation. I offered Madame a cool drink and we sat on the patio. I’m normally a person who likes to feel in control, and at times like this in France I feel the reins slipping away. Okay, I say, just wait and see. I mentioned to Madame that I hadn’t known that Marc Bru was a plumber, and that perhaps it would be best if he took over Prysbil’s duty at my house. Madame wholeheartedly agreed. Prysbil, she said, was
un voleur
who overcharged me.

A sputter of gravel on the road and Monsieur was back, with a tall ladder strapped to the roof of the car—and his son, Serge. They braced the ladder on the base of the patio, resting it against the roof beneath the bathroom window. Monsieur climbed the ladder, followed by Serge. They began to turn over the tiles of the roof, one by one, sniffing at each opening. Madame and I stood, gazing upward like two children at a puppet show. Then, suddenly, they came to a halt at a spot directly above the closet.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
I asked Madame.

She wheezed, which I took to mean not to ask questions.

From high above Monsieur called down,
“C’est la bête,”
spitting out the words as if he’d bitten a rotten apple.

I knew whereof Monsieur spoke. The beast had a history at the house.

The past summer, when Marilyn and Charles had visited, they had had a run-in with the animal—and better them than I, I’d said when I heard the unnerving tale. In the middle of the night, they had heard what sounded like a one-man band in the kitchen, with a banging of pots and pans and a clatter of dishes. Charles had bounded out of bed and descended the stairs on tiptoe, Marilyn in his wake. He had flicked on the light, and there, poking out from under the stove, was a bushy tail, waving like a little flag.

It was at this rather alarming moment, Marilyn confided in me, that she realized a radical difference between herself and her husband, which, she later decided, could have a profound effect on their marriage. Charles was a gentle soul, while she was a mad avenger.

“Isn’t she cute?” Charles had said softly.

“Is there a gun in the house?” Marilyn had whispered wickedly, quaking.

Eventually, they had decided to return to bed (door firmly closed). What was there to do? By morning the animal had vanished.

But what animal? They had consulted Monsieur Bézamat, who brought out his illustrated animal book and pointed to a
martre
, which resembled a ferret.

When I arrived the next fall and stopped by the Bézamats for the keys, Monsieur announced proudly that he had shot and bagged an example of this beast. He led me around to the back of the house. He’d saved it to show me. I didn’t look too closely at the matted mass of fur in
the plastic sack, swarming with flies and maggots. Looking self-satisfied, he recounted, in dramatic fashion, its demise. Checking on my house at the end of summer, he had met up with Hironde, who had come by to trim the grass. When they spotted the beast, Bézamat went to fetch his gun. Hironde chased the animal to the other side of the house (a role Bézamat now played in the stance of a charging bull). Then he, Bézamat (now playing himself, the star of the show), followed with gun poised.
Pow, pow
, went the gun (Bézamat as gun, exploding like a popcorn popper).
“Eh, voilà!”

I was secretly unimpressed. One
martre?
How different from, say, killing a single squirrel? Surely, there were more where it came from. The
bête
under the roof at this very moment was probably a cousin.

For the next hour—time I’d planned to spend putting together a
salade niçoise
for dinner—Monsieur and Serge hacked away at the insulation and substructure of the roof over the closet. The animal, who had holed up for warmth under the eaves, had apparently dropped down into a limbo region between roof and closet ceiling. It had become trapped and died.

Monsieur Bézamat and Serge suddenly shouted in triumph. The animal had been freed to drop below, into the closet. Madame and I rushed into the house.

I now know the stench of death. It is as much an assault to the senses as a physical blow. I only glanced at the scattered remains of the corpse, unidentifiable as any form of life. Madame and I reeled outdoors, gagging. Monsieur and Serge rushed into the house—everyone was moving frantically, as if there was a fire. Within minutes, they ran out, with a garbage bag between them. Madame and I returned, not without reluctance, to sweep up the
rest of the debris—shards of the closet ceiling and fragments of roofing. We all stood for a moment on the patio, huffing from the exertion. Monsieur dusted his palms together in a gesture of good riddance. Serge, his usual taciturn self, was packing up the ladder. We called it a day.

The faint trace of death lingered. I took a tin of tuna fish, a wedge of bread, a tomato to eat out of hand, and a bottle of wine to the patio. I was famished.

Marilyn and Charles commiserated when they returned to the scene of destruction. “We’ll think about the damage tomorrow,” Charles said.

A
ll God’s creatures habitually hibernate in the house over the winter. When I close up the house, I imagine a little chorus in the woods: “She’s going, tra-la, she’s gone, ta-ta, let’s get a move on.” I’m now primed for Monsieur Bézamat’s tales—there’s usually a
martre
episode—when I arrive in the spring. Three years ago in May, when I picked up the keys, he seemed particularly perturbed. This needed an on-site explanation; he insisted on following me to the house.

Monsieur Bézamat saves supporting evidence of any unruly goings-on at the house in my absence until he sees me in person; it makes for a more dramatic account. Leading me to the fireplace, he pointed to
“caca”
—a word I don’t generally hear or use but instantly grasped. The
caca
was hardened and slightly moldy. He had preserved it, as a detective would the fingerprints of a crime, in its original position on the hearth. He pointed to the
far corner of the room. More
caca
had been discovered there. But this wasn’t the end of the trail.

“Permettez-moi?”
he asked, heading stocking-footed, stealthily as Poirot, for the stairs. I followed on his heels to the bedroom.

“Voilà!”
he exclaimed, with questionable triumph. He pointed to two feathers on the bed. Two feathers. The import of this didn’t register. Then he steered me to the waist-high chest of drawers beneath the small opaque-glass window. Five feathers (he counted them for me, in a dramatic fashion). Then he pointed out that the wooden frame around the window had been eaten away. This added up to a real puzzle, he said, piercing in his gaze. The
caca
was the size and shape of an
hibou’s
(the pleasingly onomatopoeic name for an owl). And Hironde had testified to sighting one sitting on the roof. But how could the bird have come down the chimney on its own to deposit its feathers in the room? Or could a
martre
have attacked the bird and carried its feathers in its bloody mouth into the house? The gnawed wood was the work of a
martre
. Monsieur related his findings with gravity and thoroughness, suggesting some long winter evenings spent on the problem.

I took all this in with the helpless ignorance of a city person, grasping for a meaningful response. Could the
caca
possibly be that of a
martre?
I proposed, straining for some logic. The
caca
seemed impressively large for that of a bird, even a big owl. This discussion, which might have struck me as decidedly coarse in English, seemed rather innocuous in French.

No, Monsieur declared, the
caca
could not be that of a
martre
. That was the rub. And what of the feathers? he grilled me. Bearing in mind, he said, adding another layer
of complexity, that an owl would not eat wooden molding. That was the work of a
martre
.

I was struggling with some ridiculous mental images. Of an owl fluttering down the chimney like the Holy Ghost, doing his business, and hip-hopping up the stairs to the bedroom. Or of a little weasel-like
martre
boxing with an owl on my bed, tossing the dead bird out the window and chowing down on the window frame. The whole thing was a muddle.

What was to be done? My usual question. Clearly, the frame of the window had to be repaired. Monsieur suggested an
ébéniste
, a kind of carpenter.

I put the matter on hold for several days. How to shape the problem in terms that would seem less than lunatic to an
ébéniste?
Eventually, I decided to see one, a Monsieur Ribeiro, but not without some hesitation. I’d had on-and-off dealings with him during a two-and-a-half-year period over the agonizing construction of a picnic table.

The patio outside the house is diminutive. Seating was provided by a sorely weathered postage-stamp-size table and rickety chair left from the Pinckney days. In the spring of 1988, I decided that I would use the patio more often if I had a decent table where I could have alfresco lunches and dinners, with the valley at my feet. For years I had done nothing to dramatically change the house, which in fact needed little by way of improvement. It also felt imbued with the Pinckneys’ presence, and I had been reluctant to do anything contrary to what they might have wanted. Only gradually did I begin to make a few small changes. I purchased new hand-painted dishes in a charming French faience pattern, replacing the Pinckneys’ chipped Chinese set. I commissioned the plumber Prysbil, who also did custom-made wrought-iron work—he
thought of himself as something of an
artiste
—to build a small railing for the balcony outside the doors of the living room, which, according to Mr. Pinckney’s original drawings, had been intended but left unfinished. As the balcony stood, it was no more than a useless concrete slab jutting out over the valley—a precarious perch. At the time of my purchase I wrote the Pinckneys to inquire why they’d decided against the railing—as if I needed their permission. Mrs. Pinckney wrote back to say they preferred the sense of “dining in the trees.” The picnic table, then, represented a major addition.

I spotted Monsieur Ribeiro’s display room on the road to the nearby village of Vayrac and asked Monsieur Hironde if he was reliable.
“Il est Portuguais,”
was his noncommittal reply. His xenophobia seemed unconscious and not the least bit mean-spirited. He seemed to be suggesting that Ribeiro was in a category (nonnative) that defied such judgment, like a wife saying of her mother-in-law, “She has her ways.” (Monsieur Ribeiro subsequently told me that he had lived in this part of France for nearly forty years, after coming to the country as a young boy.)

I met Monsieur Ribeiro, a large-boned man with broad features and a friendly, if slightly cloying manner, at his workshop. He had the offputting habit of standing in uncomfortably close proximity during conversation; his face loomed within inches of mine. I took a step backward and described the type of picnic table I wanted: a plain, solid redwood table with benches (we’d had one of this type in our backyard that had endured all my years of growing up). He pointed to a table that met my description—one of his best, attractive yet durable. It would cost much more than I’d planned to spend, but I reasoned that after all, this would be a table custom-made to fit a particular
area. He requested that I pay him half the amount at the outset and the remainder when the table was completed. He agreed to stop by the house the next morning to take measurements.

He didn’t show up. When I stopped by his workshop later in the day, he explained, without apologies, that he’d been delayed on another project. His manner was so gentle, I couldn’t be annoyed. We made another appointment for the next morning. He arrived in his truck an hour late, oblivious of his rudeness. Being a punctual person, I am fairly intolerant of tardiness, but I restrained myself from commenting because I wanted his cooperation. He was enraptured by the wonderful view. What a pleasure it would be to eat outdoors, he said, gesticulating as if the table were already in place. I showed him where the table should go, tucked into the corner of the patio, with the stone wall at the back to take advantage of the view. He made some preliminary sketches and took exact measurements. He reassured me that the table would be rock solid and bolted to the wall so that there would be no possibility of theft (this had not occurred to me, since I’d never had any problems along that line). I was impressed with his thoroughness. The table would be completed by the time I came back in the fall.