At Home in France (24 page)

It was a Sunday morning. I had had a long run along the river road and had just finished up a rich brunch of large slabs of golden Armagnac-scented French toast, country bacon, steaming black coffee. I had planned to take a little afternoon excursion and hurried to wash up the dishes.

When I turned on the faucet, it coughed, gurgled, and sputtered. I turned it off—a little air pocket, a glitch, whatever, I thought—and tried again. This time there was no cough, but a gasping and hissing, as if it was drawing a last breath. And so it was. There was no water. The cistern, I realized, had run dry. And, of course—the bitter little pill—it
would
be a Sunday.

I resurrected “Points on the Obvious and Obscure.” I quickly scanned passages under the heading of
WATER:

Not a word on droughts.

I rooted around for the Pinckney letter, which I hadn’t reread for years, hoping to glean something there. What I found only unnerved me:

What was a “fosse septic”? What was a “pitch fibre socketed drain”? “Rodding eye”? It left me shaken.

What to do? Who to call? I decided to award this problem to the Hironde Rescue Squad. I stifled my reluctance to call on them on a Sunday—the day of the big midday meal with friends or relatives—and walked to their house. Luckily, they had no company and had just finished their lunch.

Raymond took it all in stride. In fact, he seemed energized, after his nap-inducing meal. Immediately he was on the phone to the fire department,
les pompiers
. This seemed a dramatic solution, to my mind. Fire engines in Manhattan are a constant and terrifying presence. I’m accustomed to their wailing part in the general cacophonie backdrop, but when one carooms right past, blaring its dizzying alarm, I quake. I picture flames licking at windows, mothers clutching babies and leaping to their deaths. A fire is one of my worst fears. There is a frequently mentioned figure in our family, a Great-Aunt Mary, who was said to have saved every one of her dozen children from their burning house. The story, and Mary
herself, had taken on the dimensions of legend. In the family album that I inherited after my mother died, there is a photogravure of an unidentified, staunch-looking woman surrounded by her brood, to whom I’ve attached this tale of heroism.

Wasn’t a dried-up cistern a rather mundane matter for the fire department? Raymond’s decision seemed an over-reaction—but mine was not to question why.

While Simone and I carried on a distracted conversation—the trials of the summer’s drought—I overheard his account to the man at the other end of the phone: his neighbor, an American woman, had a
maison secondaire;
the cistern had run dry. Pause. No, the house was not attached to the town’s water system. Pause.
“Une heure et demi? D’accord.”

A great wave of relief swept over me. Help was on the way within an hour and a half! I applauded. Raymond proceeded to give the firemen directions to both his house and mine, concluding with his phone number. He hung up. The firemen were in Cahors, he explained. Cahors, an hour’s drive away! What if my house
had
been on fire?

Then he sat down, with a self-important lift of his shoulders. Assuming the grave avuncular look my problems sometimes elicited, he said that perhaps I should consider hooking up to the local system. Then I would avoid this problem, and my tap water would be drinkable. The initial investment was high, he said, but the yearly fee negligible.

“Oui, ce n’est pas le Moyen Age,”
I said jocularly. It did seem smarter than relying on this antiquated system based on iffy rainwater.

So—he slapped the table—I was to return home to await the firemen. He wasn’t sure if they would arrive at my house or theirs.

I diddled about the house for well over an hour and a half. Then doubts began to needle my mind. Where were they? Why not run, really
run
, over to the Hirondes; I would meet the firemen head-on if they were close, and could maybe put through another call if they were not. Just to see if they were on the way. Just to see that they weren’t lost, or had the wrong phone number.

About halfway down the road to the Hirondes, moving at a steady clip, I heard the roar of a car behind me and a repeated honking. It was the Servais. Madame rolled down the window and shouted excitedly that the firemen had arrived at my house and, finding no one home, had come to their house! She’d called Hironde, who was on his way!
“Allez! Vite! Vite!”
She rolled up the window, and they sped off in a cloud of dust.

Damnation. The afternoon had turned into a sort of Toad motorcar chase out of
The Wind in the Willows
, everyone tearing up the roadways in mad circles. I ran for home.

A sparkling, cherry-red fire truck—looking like a very large toy you’d find under the Christmas tree—was parked in the drive. Several firemen were unraveling the fire hose, with Raymond in the lead. When he saw me, he raised his arms in grateful salutation.

“La cave”
I shouted.
“C’est ouvert!”

The firemen trundled into the
cave
. I drew Raymond aside. The flurry of officious activity made me wonder about the cost.
“Vraiment rien,”
he said—nothing really—but, with a shuffling of the fingers, indicated that a tip for the men would be in order.

He bowed and said he would be off, with a slight mock mopping of the brow suggesting the strenuous activity he’d been through. I waited on the patio while the firemen filled the cistern in the
cave
, pondering the delicate
matter of the tip. Having never called on firemen to refill a cistern, I couldn’t imagine what amount to offer. There were three of them, one who was apparently the supervisor and two younger men. Too little (ten dollars?) would be resented. Too much (forty dollars? fifty dollars?) might appear ugly-Americanish. I eventually settled on five dollars apiece—fifteen dollars.

The men tramped out of the cave, looking oversized in their great slickers, hats, and boots—especially for this rather minor task. They wound the hose back on the truck; the whole thing had taken no more than a half hour. The supervisor advised me not to turn on the taps for several hours, in order to let the water settle in the cistern.

I asked him, feigning ignorance, what I owed them for the service.

“Gratuit,”
he said graciously.

Now was the time to offer compensation. I smiled faintly, feeling embarrassed and awkward—especially being a woman making this somewhat crude gesture. There are some things better left to men.
“Pour votre ennui,”
I said, slipping him the money.

The lagniappe seemed to have struck the right note.

T
h us began a seemingly never-ending effort to connect the house to the local water system. I started at the
mairie
in Carennac, which, I discovered, is open on a limited basis. It is a rather stately but plain little building, set off from the main road next to the elementary school. Class was in session and I took the occasion to peek in the window. Some two dozen children were seated at their desks, reciting grammar drills. Their voices drifted like a muffled
hymn through the windows. Their number surprised me. I’d never seen children on the streets in Carennac, a fact that contributed to the village’s placid atmosphere. I had seen kids on surrounding country roads, walking along with their
copains
—their buddies—or standing alone outside a house, waiting for transport. Where did they come from? How did they get here? I had no idea how the elementary-school system worked in the country.

A stout, pretty woman, with a budlike mouth and the merest hyphens of eyebrows, rose from her desk when I entered the
mairie
. Her name was Madame Claudine Sanchez; her husband was Spanish. I explained that I was the owner of Pech Farguet, to which she nodded knowingly. The water system established by the former owners, I said, was inadequate. The Pinckneys, she assented in recognition. (Once again I was struck by the villagers’ knowledge about the particulars of Pech Farguet.) Not only was I unable to drink or cook with tap water, but the drought had been
une catastrophe
. The solution was to connect my house to the municipal water system. How was I to proceed?

She came around the counter and led me to a table where enormous maps were mounted in metal racks and covered in plastic. With some difficulty, she eventually found the proper map. It was on a minute scale, such as the incredible
série orange
maps done by the Institut Géographique National that I keep at the house. Each and every domicile is recorded with an infinitesimal square smaller than the head of a pin. We hovered over the map. She pointed a bright red fingernail to Magnagues. My eyes traveled down the spiderweb line representing the road to the Hirondes’ house, then back up the road to the fork: to the left the Bézamats, to the right
Pech Farguet. A little ant on the map, but there it was, my house. It was
on record
, verifiable, official, on the town-hall map!

She circled back to the counter. Surveyors would have to investigate the property and determine the location of the pipelines—she believed they weren’t far—to which my house could be hooked up. The next step was to write a letter to Saur, the company in Figeac, who would do the job. They would then be able to give me an estimate of the cost. Here we go, I thought. I coughed apologetically. I was not too adept at writing letters in French, I said, especially one that required technical explanations. Could she possibly compose the letter for me?

She glanced at her watch. It was almost noon. Lunch was beckoning. This presented a real conflict.
“Alors”—
she sighed—and drew out a piece of blank paper. Her letter was brief and straightforward, with just a brushstroke of formal French circumlocution.
“J’ai l’honneur de vous demandez le rattachement à ce réseau.”
(It is an honor for me to ask you for the connection of this network.)
Voilà!
Letter in hand, I went home for lunch and that afternoon sent off my copy.

A
fter a trip in the early spring of 1992—when I put through a call to inquire if my correspondence had come to anyone’s attention—I received a letter from Saur in New York, with a detailed two-page document setting forth the procedures that would be necessary for the
branchement
—the connection—as well as a printed folder with thirty articles devoted to the
Service des eaux
in the
département du Lot
. The estimate for the job was more than I’d anticipated. Yet, on the other hand, it didn’t seem an outrageous amount for such a major undertaking.

Expenses for the house are minimal. I pay two taxes each year:
taxes foncières
and a
taxe d’habitation
. I have a basic Assurances Mutuelles de France with Groupe Azur, in Bretenoux, which covers fire and theft. The gas-and-electricity bill is automatically deducted from my BNP account twice a year. I try to keep some reserve funds in my bank account for the unexpected (one year a section of the roof needed repair). There is no phone bill to pay; it seems simpler to stop at the Carennac post office to make a call than having the expense and going through the rigmarole of paying bills. And, in truth, I prefer being phoneless, televisionless, radioless—out of touch, living a step back in time. Generally, Pech Farguet is like a little fort and percolates along at its own pace.

After the initial expenditure for the installation, the bill for water would be quite reasonable, according to the Hirondes. A drop in the bucket, so to speak, and well worth it. For that I would save buying bottled water and trips to the Salges’ well. Friends had also pointed out that if and when I decided to sell the house—fat chance—this would be an important factor in its favor.

The contract was terribly complicated; in fact, impenetrable.
“Je préfère qu’on parle en personne,”
I wrote back. I explained that I would be coming to France in the fall, when I would come to the Gramat office to discuss the particulars.

I
n October, I went to Gramat. After many inquiries I eventually found the tiny office of Saur on a little back street behind the cathedral. I tapped on the door.

“Entrez!”

Seated at the only desk was a strikingly handsome man in his thirties.

“Monsieur Carsac?”
I ventured, hardly expecting this to be the man attached to the letter.

“Oui, je vous attend,”
he said, as if we’d had an appointment that very minute. There was a deadly professionalism about him—not a crack in his demeanor.

He began riffling through papers on his desk. He’d not been able to find the right map for my house, he mumbled, and then threw up his hands, as if he was always ambushed by this sort of problem. Well, we could proceed anyway. He wasn’t sure when the work could be done—maybe July, maybe August. He raised his hand to chin level, indicating an invisible stack of papers on his desk.