Encore Provence (20 page)

I believe he was a contented man. The lines and wrinkles of his face went upward, as though a smile were on the way. (It often arrived, more gum than teeth, but no less delightful for that.) I never saw him agitated or upset. He was mildly critical of some modern novelties, such as noisy motorcycles, but delighted with others, particularly his large television set, which enabled him to indulge his weakness for old American soap operas. He died when he was ready, somewhere in his nineties, his passing marked by an affectionate village funeral.

There are others, plenty of others, like him. You see them moving, often quite briskly and always with great deliberation, to take up their seats in the café for a mid-morning nip of wine or pastis. You see them perched, like a row of amiable buzzards, on a wooden bench by the war memorial in the village
place
, their hands with swollen brown knuckles clasped over the tops of their sticks; or sitting on chairs in the shade outside their front doors, their eyes flickering up and down the street, missing nothing. By today’s standards, they have had hard lives, working the land with little to show for their efforts but subsistence. No skiing trips, no winter breaks in the Caribbean, no golf, no tennis, no second homes, no new cars every three years, nothing of what is endlessly referred to as the good
life. But there they are, spry, happy, and apparently indestructible.

There are too many of them to be dismissed as exceptions, and whenever I see them I’m tempted to ask them to explain their longevity. Nine times out of ten, the only answer would be a shrug, and so I have been left to come to my own unreliable conclusions.

Their generation seems to have escaped the modern affliction of stress, which may be a result of having spent their working lives coping with nature rather than with a capricious boss. Not that nature—with its storms, forest fires, and crop diseases—is either reliable or forgiving as an employer. But at least it’s free from personal malice and the pressure of office politics, and it has no favorites. The setback of a bad year is shared among neighbors, and there’s nothing to be done about it except hope for better times to come. Working with (or fighting against) nature teaches a man to be philosophical, and even allows him to derive a certain perverse enjoyment from complaining. Anyone who has lived among farmers will know the relish with which they discuss misfortune, even their own. They’re as bad as insurance agents.

There must also be something reassuring about working to the fixed and predictable rhythm of the seasons, knowing that spring and early summer and the harvest season will be busy; knowing that winter will be slow and quiet. It is a pattern of life that would probably drive most corporate executives—seething with impatience and ambition—into an early grave. But not all. I have a friend who, like myself, is a refugee from the advertising business. Some years ago, he moved to the Luberon, where he now makes wine for a living. Instead of the big glossy car and matching chauffeur, he drives to work on a tractor. His
problems are no longer with fractious clients but with the weather and the drifting bands of grape-pickers who come to the vineyards for the
vendange
. He has learned to do without what the French grandly call his entourage of secretaries and personal assistants. He has some difficulty remembering when he last wore a tie. He works long hours—longer than he ever used to in Paris—and makes less money. But he feels better, sleeps more soundly, and has a genuine pride in his work. Another contented man.

The day may come when he will want to join the ranks of what he calls the living antiques who spin out the days in the village café. In the meantime, he leads a life of sustained physical activity, and this must be an important ingredient in the recipe for ripe old age. The human body, so we are told by men of science (who spend most of their time sitting down), is a machine that thrives on use. When left idle, muscles atrophy, and other working parts of the system deteriorate more rapidly than they would if subjected to regular exercise. The urban solution is the jog and the gym. A more primitive alternative is the kind of manual labor that comes with country life, the rural aerobics necessary for existence. Bending and stretching to prune, lifting and piling sacks of fertilizer, cutting brush, clearing ditches, stacking logs—these are unglamorous chores, but wonderful exercise. A day of this produces an epic crop of blisters and excruciating stiffness. A month rewards you with a feeling of well-being and a distinct looseness of the waistband. A lifetime works wonders.

Even during the winter doldrums, the joys of hibernation will often be interrupted for exercise in the form of hunting. Now that game has become scarce in the Luberon, this is usually nothing more than a man taking
his gun for a walk. But what a walk it is—steep and hard, a challenge for the legs, a flood of clean air for the lungs, a workout for the heart. And there seems to be no age limit for these armed optimists. I have occasionally come across hunters in the forest who look old enough to have preceded the invention of gunpowder. In a city, you might offer to help them cross the street. In the Luberon, they will walk you into the ground, chatting while you sweat to keep up with them.

The average age of cyclists, whom I always remembered as young men barely out of their teens, appears to have gone up, although the outfits remain misleadingly youthful. Brilliantly colored blurs, gleaming in skins of emerald green or purple Lycra, whir along the road like monstrous low-flying insects. It is not until they stop at the café for a beer that you see the grizzled heads and ropy veins of men who qualified for pensions years ago. Where does their energy come from? Don’t they know they should be riddled with arthritis and tottering along to the pharmacy instead of knocking off a hundred kilometers before lunch? What are they taking?

What else but good food and a glass or two of wine? I once read a gloomy prescription written by the Greek physician Hippocrates: “Death sits in the bowels; a bad digestion is the root of all evil.” If this is true, I have to assume that the long-lived Provençal bowel is a remarkably efficient item of equipment which, one can logically assume, is a direct result of what it has to deal with on a daily basis.

There are various worthy and quite appetizing theories to account for the healthy workings of the Provençal intestine. The regular consumption of olive oil is one, or frequent doses of garlic, helped down by red wine—anything
from one to five glasses a day, depending on which scientific study you choose to believe. (Five glasses a day seems a good round number.) But I have yet to see any theory from learned nutritionists that explains my favorite statistic. The rate of heart disease among inhabitants of the southwestern part of France is lower than anywhere else in the country, which is frequently quoted as being lower than any other developed country except Japan.

And what do they exist on, these fortunate people of the southwest? Low-sodium gruel? Macrobiotic bean curd? Nut cutlets, with an occasional wicked glass of nonalcoholic, sugar-free sparkling-wine substitute? Alas for conventional dietary wisdom and the accepted rules of gastronomic prudence, a significant part of the southwestern diet is fat, particularly goose and duck fat. Potatoes are roasted in it, beans for the noble cassoulet are smothered in it, confits are preserved in it, and foie gras is goose fat gone to heaven. (Foie gras was actually invented by the Romans. The French, never slow to recognize a good thing when they eat it, gave it a French name and with their customary modesty have been claiming it as a national treasure ever since.) How is it possible that this rich and delicious regime can be part of a long and healthy life? Can we look forward to the day when foie gras will replace tofu and the soybean on nutritionally correct menus? Can it be that fat is actually good for you?

This might well depend on where the fat comes from, but the food police are not in the mood to make any trifling distinctions like that. For years, they have lectured us on the evils of fat; any kind of fat. I have even been told that in California, where one can marvel at people constructed of nothing but skin, bone, muscle, and health-giving amounts of silicone, authorities have seriously
considered declaring fat a prohibited substance. Food products, even here in France, have to confess on their labels that they have committed a crime against the innards of society by including a percentage of fat. Fat has a terrible reputation. And so to find this corner of France thriving on massive amounts of something so sinful, so cholesterol-loaded and artery-threatening is, to say the least, mysterious.

Ever hopeful of discovering a link between foie gras and perfect health, I looked through several books on diet and nutrition, only to see the same old theories, variously disguised. But they were consistent about fat. It is a killer, so they all said, and if taken regularly will probably make you fall off your perch, clogged to death, in what should be the prime of your life. Looking for a second opinion, however unscientific, I decided to seek out a source closer to the grass roots of French nutrition. At first, I thought of consulting a chef, but the chefs whom I know and respect are more concerned with taste, which they consider to be their responsibility, rather than with the state of your heart, which is your affair. All I could hope for from them would be advice about which Sauternes go best with foie gras. What I needed was a more balanced view.

Monsieur Farigoule can rarely be accused of having a balanced view, but I went to see him anyway, hoping that he might have picked up some nutritional knowledge during his days as a schoolteacher. I found him defending the traditions of France in his usual spot at the bar, in his usual state of high indignation.

This time, the villain was a bottle of Chinese rosé that some mischievous friend had found in a local supermarket and given him, no doubt to get his blood pressure boiling.

He slid the bottle along the bar toward me, and I took a
look at the label: Great Wall Rosé Wine, produced by the Huaxia Winery in Hebei, China.

“First they try to inflict their truffles on us,” he said. “And now
this
—this abomination in a bottle.”

Abomination or not, I saw that the bottle was half empty. “What does it taste like?” I said.

He took a swig from his glass and chewed on it for a moment. “
Dégueulasse
—like a rice paddy strained through a sock. And not a very clean sock, either. As I said, an abomination. God knows why they allowed it into the country. Do we not make the best rosé wines in the world? The Tavel? The Bandol? The Ott? And what can we expect next? Chinese Calvados?”

With that, he climbed on his hobby horse and galloped off on a ten-minute rant about the evils of free trade, the threat to honest French wine-growers, and the horrendous possibilities that could easily follow now that the Chinese had their foot in the door. I tried once or twice to bring the conversation around to the benefits of a foie gras diet, but he wasn’t having any of it. Chinese infiltration was the subject of the day, and for once the Americans were off the hook. However, it didn’t get me any further in my research.

I didn’t do much better with Régis, a normally reliable source of highly biased support for the French way of life. Of course foie gras was good for you, he said. Everybody knew that. And had I tasted the foie gras made by the Rivoire sisters in Gascony?
Une merveille
. But as far as solid medical evidence was concerned, Régis had nothing to offer.

In the end, I had to settle for Marius, the funeral connoisseur, who beckoned me into the café one morning. He obviously had some news, but before he could deliver himself
of it I asked him if he had any theories about diet and longevity.

“You can eat what you like,” he said, “but it doesn’t make much difference.
La vieillesse nuit gravement à la santé
. Old age is hazardous to your health. No doubt about it.”

At that, he brightened up, and leaned forward to give me the details of an interesting death that had just occurred. As usual when he discussed another man’s plunge into eternity, he spoke in a low, serious voice. But it was clear that the story of
l’affaire Machin
gave him considerable enjoyment.

It seems that Monsieur Machin, now deceased, had been devoted throughout his adult life to the Loterie Nationale. Every week, hoping for fortune, he bought his ticket, which he tucked away for safekeeping in the top pocket of his only suit. The suit was locked in an armoire, and never saw the light of day except for rare brief outings at weddings and one memorable five-minute period when the President of France was driven slowly through the village. Once a week, the armoire was unlocked and the old unlucky ticket was replaced in the suit pocket by a new one. This had been Machin’s habit for thirty years—thirty years during which he had never won even a centime.

The end came suddenly for Machin, in the full heat of summer, and he was buried in the correct manner befitting his status in the community. (He had served for many years in the local post office.) The following week, such is the unfairness of life, it was discovered that his final lottery ticket was a winner—not of multimillions, but of a substantial sum that ran into several hundred thousand francs.

Marius paused to allow the injustice of it all to sink in,
and to feign surprise at his empty glass. Before continuing, he peered around the café, as though making sure that what he was about to say remained confidential. There was, he said,
un petit problème
. Machin had been buried in his one and only suit, as was right and proper. In the top pocket of the suit was the winning ticket, just two meters underground. And the lottery rules were very strict: No ticket, no money. To dig up the body, to defile a grave, was unthinkable. To leave it would be to lose a small fortune.

“
C’est drôle, n’est-ce pas?
” Marius nodded and grinned, a man with an infinite capacity for being amused at the vagaries of fate—always providing they affected someone else.

“Not so funny for the family,” I said.