Encore Provence (10 page)

This still, quiet moment before the first trump of thunder is your final chance to go through the house unplugging your fax, your computer, your answering machine, your stereo, and your television set. Once the storm gets going and the lightning starts to ricochet around your ears, it is almost inevitable that the domestic power supply will be cut off. But before that happens there will often be one last violent electrical spasm—nature’s vengeful swipe at high technology—powerful enough to scramble the brains of any sensitive appliance. We have lost two faxes in this way, and one answering machine that was so traumatized it developed an incurable stutter.

Our consolation is a front row seat for one of the greatest shows on earth. The valley acts like a monstrous amplifier for the rolling growls of thunder that swirl around the house, ending in cracks that threaten to shatter the roof tiles. Lightning dances along the crest of the mountains, and for a brilliant moment or two every rock and every tree is floodlit, their shapes etched against the evening sky. The dogs stay close to us, ears flat against their heads, content for once to be indoors. We eat by candlelight, grateful for the protection of solid stone walls, watching the storm move up the valley until it disappears with a distant mutter and a final flicker of light, far away in the hills of Haute Provence.

The air turns cool, then moist, as the first fat drops of
rain hit the ground, and there is the sudden welcome scent of wet earth. Within seconds, the drops become torrents. Water falls from the overhanging roof tiles in a continuous sheet, gouging channels in the gravel of the terrace, crushing plants, flooding flower beds, bouncing head-high off the outside table—two months’ rain in half an hour. It stops as abruptly as it began, and we go paddling across the terrace to rescue a bedraggled parasol that has been knocked off its feet by the downpour.

The next morning the sky is as blue as ever and the sun returns, making steam rise from the newly washed fields. By the end of the day, the countryside has regained its parched appearance, as if the storm never happened. But inside the house, souvenirs of the deluge linger in the pipes and cisterns and U-shaped crannies of the plumbing system. Subterranean flooding causes prolonged gurgles. Normally mild-mannered faucets have violent sneezing attacks, spewing out gouts of muddy water. By some baffling process, items of kitchen waste—odd fragments of lettuce, a sprinkling of tea leaves—take a wrong turning in the pipes and find their way into the bowl of the downstairs lavatory, causing some consternation among visitors who are accustomed to uneventful urban plumbing. Well, they say, we never expected
this
.

But it is only one of many small surprises that make daily life in Provence unlike life anywhere else. One Sunday last summer, my wife came back from Coustellet market still shaking her head. She had been drawn to one of the stalls by a tray of
courgette
(squash) flowers, which are delicious either stuffed or deep-fried in light batter, a favorite late-summer recipe. I’d like half a kilo of those, she said.

But nothing is that simple. The stall-holder snapped off a plastic bag from a roll behind the stall. “Of course, Madame,” he said. “Male or female?”

More recently, one of our guests, a man prone to the extravagant gesture while talking, knocked a glass of red wine over his trousers. The next day he took them to the dry cleaners. Madame spread the trousers on the counter, examining the stains with a professional eye and a discouraging shake of the head. It was possible, she said, that the stains could be removed, but that would depend on the wine. Was it a Châteauneuf or one of the lighter Luberon reds? Amazed that he couldn’t remember, she then gave him a short lecture on the staining capabilities of various wines, according to their tannin content, and seemed ready to move on to particular vintages when the arrival of another customer distracted her.

Our friend returned to the house greatly impressed. He said he had spilled wine on his trousers all over Europe, and in several major cities in the United States. But never had the provenance of his stains been so thoroughly questioned. Next time this happened, he said, he would be sure to take the wine label and perhaps a few tasting notes in with his trousers.

The Provençal loves to give advice, to impart superior knowledge, to set you straight and save you from the error of your ways. As a foreigner who has had the temerity to write about Provence, I am frequently trapped in a corner with an accusing index finger wagging under my nose, and corrected. I’ve come to enjoy these educational exchanges, whether the subject is the best way to eat a melon or the mating habits of wild boars, and there have actually been occasions when conclusive evidence has been on my side. But this is dismissed or ignored. My instructor does not
allow himself to be confused by the facts, and he will always have the last word.

One of the most persistent crimes that I have committed is to put an acute accent on the “e” in Luberon, an innocent but clearly uneducated act that inspires considerable scorn in the breast of the Provençal purist. Letters arrive, rapping me over the knuckles, quoting other writers such as Jean Giono and Henri Bosco, and telling me to follow their excellent, accentless examples. And then one day, Monsieur Farigoule, the self-anointed linguistics professor, took me to task for tinkering with someone else’s language. In self-defense, I went back to my reference books.

It seemed to me that I had some rather distinguished and scholarly allies. In the Larousse dictionary, on the maps of the National Geographic Institute, in the
Etymological Dictionary of Names of Rivers and Mountains in France
and on the Michelin maps of the Vaucluse, the Luberon appears with an accent. These are not lightweight publications, but serious, official records, compiled by serious, official people. For once, I thought, the last word was going to be mine.

But no. As I recited the list to Farigoule, I could see him pursing his lips, and he allowed himself one or two eloquent, disdainful sniffs.

“Well,” I said finally. “There you are. Larousse, Michelin …”

“
Bof
,” he said. “Parisians, all of them. What do they know?”

Ah, the poor Parisians. Despite being French they are regarded as foreign, and therefore to be treated with suspicion and ridicule. They are renowned for their arrogance, for their condescending attitude, for their fashionable
clothes, for their shiny cars, for buying all the bread in the bakery, for just being Parisian. A derogatory word—
parisianisme
—is now creeping into the local language to describe their insidious and unwelcome influence on certain aspects of Provençal life, and they have even been accused of attempting to tamper with nature. Last year, a story circulated about the Parisian owners of summer homes in one of the more chic villages—
St. Germain sud
, as it has been called—complaining to the mayor about noise. Their siestas were being ruined, they claimed, by the insufferable racket of the
cigales
. How could anyone sleep with all these creatures rubbing their noisy legs together?

One might imagine the mayor treating this as a
crise municipale
, putting aside less important business to organize a squad of
cigale
hunters, armed with nets and insect sprays, to patrol the bushes on tiptoe, alert and ready to pounce on the merest whisper of a chirrup. It is more likely, of course, that the mayor gave the Parisians the standard Provençal response to unanswerable questions or ridiculous demands: the full shrug, which is executed by local experts as follows:

A certain amount of limbering-up is required before any major body parts are brought into action, and your first moves should be nothing more than a frown and a slight sideways tilt of the head. These indicate that you cannot believe the foolishness, the impertinence, or the plain dumb ignorance of what the Parisian has just said to you. There is a short period of silence before the Parisian tries again, repeating his remark and looking at you with some degree of irritation. Maybe he thinks you’re deaf, or Belgian, and therefore confused by his sophisticated accent. Whatever he feels, you now have his complete attention.
This is the moment to demolish him and his nonsense with a flowing, unhurried series of movements as the full shrug is unfurled.

It might almost be a yoga exercise, and I must have seen it hundreds of times. It can be used to signify disagreement, disapproval, resignation, or contempt, and it effectively terminates any discussion. As far as I know, there is no countershrug, or satisfactory answering gesture. For these reasons, it is an invaluable gesture for anyone like myself whose command of the French language is far from perfect. A well-timed shrug speaks volumes.

I was on the receiving end of one not long ago when I went into Cavaillon, lured by reports of an elaborate facelift that had been given to the
toilettes publiques
at the top end of the Cours Bournissac. I remembered them as being unobtrusive and underground, dank in the winter and sweltering in summer; functional, certainly, and not a particular eyesore, but by no means decorative.

Changes have taken place, dramatic changes that are
obvious even from a distance. The top of the establishment has been covered by a circular bed of earth, planted with bright flowers. In this floral setting, her face tilted away from the sun, is a reclining nude carved from pale, smooth stone. She undoubtedly has a symbolic significance, possibly something to do with rushing waters and the joys of hygiene. In any event, she is a handsome and well-formed addition to the Cavaillon landscape, promising blessed relief to those who venture down the stairs to take advantage of the other improvements.

One of these is human, an attendant who will direct visitors to the appropriate section of the
toilettes
according to gender and need in return for a modest tip. He is the first surprise. The second is the choice of equipment. France being a country that likes to embrace every kind of technological achievement from the Concorde to electronic mole killers, you might expect to find a gleaming array of the latest in sanitary engineering—automatically sterilized cubicles at the very least, maybe with a seat-warmer option for the colder months.

Instead, you will find a piece of bathroom history: a flat porcelain tray about three feet square with a hole in the middle and two rectangular protuberances, one on each side of the hole, on which to place your feet. It is an arrangement that has been in use since the earliest days of modern plumbing, and is known in French sanitary circles as the
à la turque
model. I had thought it was no longer manufactured and virtually extinct, only to be found in those corners of France that are too remote to benefit from the march of progress. But there it was, solid, new, and strangely out of place at the end of the twentieth century.

Before leaving, I asked the attendant if he knew of any
reason why the contemporary lavatory had been passed over in favor of this more primitive installation. Was it to frustrate vandals? To discourage readers of magazines and others who might occupy the premises for selfishly long periods? An aesthetic choice? Or just nostalgia for the good old days? I might just as well have been asking him to explain the secret of life. He delivered the full shrug. “
C’est comme ça
,” he said. That’s how it is. Take it or leave it.

What is there to like about this catalogue of Provençal quirks, most of which are inconvenient and seem to have been devised with the express purpose of taking up as much of your time as possible? An errand that might take half an hour in other, more streamlined societies can easily occupy an entire morning. Appointments are postponed or forgotten. The simplest domestic problems always seem to require complicated solutions. Very little is straightforward. The climate is intemperate, often destructive. And the foreign resident, whether Parisian, Dutch, German, or British, no matter how many years he may spend in Provence, will never be considered anything more than a long-term tourist. These are not conventional attractions.

And yet I like them, almost all of them, almost all the time. They are part of the character of the place and of the people. It’s true that a number of accommodations have been made for visitors—there are more festivals, more small hotels, more restaurants, an increased willingness to accept new technology. It’s not unusual, for example, to see cell phones glued to the dusty ears of tractor drivers in the vineyards, and sometimes I have the feeling that Provence is attempting to do the splits, with one foot in the past and the other testing the temperature of the
future. But I don’t see much in the way of fundamental change since the first time I came here more than twenty years ago.

Life has not accelerated, but still dawdles along keeping time with the seasons. The markets still sell real food that has escaped the modern passion for sterilizing and shrink-wrapping. The countryside is still wild, and unscarred by golf courses, theme parks, or condominium colonies. It is still possible to listen to silence. Unlike so many other beautiful parts of the world which progress and ease of access have made noisy, predictable, and bland, Provence has managed to retain its individual flavor and personality. This can be delightful or exasperating, like a difficult, cantankerous old friend. But that’s the way it is, with no excuses. Take it or leave it.