Picnic in Provence (8 page)

I SET OUT
to follow Jean’s soup instructions. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the minimart on the main street was that the olive oil was almost the same price as the bottled water. There were supermarket varieties and local ones, glass-green or clear and golden, like honey. I’d been cooking almost exclusively with olive oil since I moved to France—mostly because I can’t stand the smell of melting butter (forgive me, Julia Child). There was even a three-liter
bidon
with a plastic screw cap, like a jerrican of gasoline.

Angela had warned me to leave some extra time for the butcher. When we first signed for the house, she wrote us a letter.

Apparently, if you had a rumor to spread, gossip to chew over, or simply needed to hear the hum of other human beings, the butcher shop was the place to be. I walked in the door to the murmur of a Greek chorus. As each customer joined the line, he or she was required to greet and be greeted by the entire cast. Following the example of the man in front of me, I sang out,
“Bonjour, messieurs, dames,”
to nobody in particular.

My butcher shop in Paris was a razor-sharp affair, gleaming white, clinically efficient—this was more laissez-faire. Women chatted with neighbors; two kids pressed their noses against the glass display, and when they looked up, they were each given a mini-
saucisson,
the size of a Tootsie Roll, cut from strings hanging like party streamers from the ceiling. A long wooden bench had been installed against one wall for older customers who preferred to sit while they waited. No one sat at the butcher in Paris.

After my general greeting, I went mostly unnoticed. Seeing my straw hat (I had a fantasy that living in Provence, coupled with my sensitive skin, would give me license to wear such things) and hearing my slight accent, they must have taken me for a tourist, just another of the many English, Dutch, and Germans who had summer homes in the area.

I began to consider my purchases. On one side were cuts of meat and neat little
caille
—tiny quails with their legs tucked primly underneath them. The summer selection was clearly skewed toward the BBQ: thin sausages spiced red with smoky
piment d’espelette
and something called
rouleau de Céreste
that looked like rolled pork belly with paprika and
persillade
. Without giving the impression of cutting in line, which would surely cause a diplomatic incident, if not an arrest by the local gendarmes, I pressed myself closer to the corner of the glass case. Unlike my butcher in Paris, who sold only meat, in Céreste, the butcher is also a
traiteur,
which means he sells a number of prepared foods—homemade pâtés, goat cheese wrapped in paper-thin slices of
jambon cru
soaking in olive oil and herbs, a classic salad of grated carrots in vinaigrette.

I felt an odd sensation—not exactly déjà vu, but
déjà vécu,
already lived. Suddenly, I was eight or nine, staring at the long glass case at Zabar’s.

My parents divorced when I was seven, and my father moved from our house in northern New Jersey back to New York City. Sometimes, on a summer day like this one, there would be an open-air opera in Central Park, or we would wait in line for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. A picnic from Zabar’s, the famous grocer on the Upper West Side, was a special treat. A quarter-pound container of orzo salad with roasted red peppers and shrimp cost twice the weekly allowance my grandparents sent me from Florida.

Even as a small child, I understood it was better not to ask my father for things. No one had explained his diagnosis to me—in 1982, bipolar disorder was still called manic depression; it was mysterious and not discussed at the dinner table. If I didn’t quite understand his illness, I absorbed its central theme, its underlying current of unpredictability. There were years he was so depressed he hardly spoke, others when he was so full of grandiose schemes that there was a new woman and a new business every month. Zabar’s meant things were on the upswing. I remember so clearly the queenly thrill of choosing my calamari with cold sesame noodles, the feeling that, at least this week, things were going well. My father has been dead for almost fifteen years, but as I get older, as I move from city to city, country to country, I sometimes find myself back at that counter, an odd sensation of being in two places at once. Time collapses, a new experience layered with memories of other homes, meals, conversations.

I was so busy daydreaming about Zabar’s and broccoli knishes that I didn’t notice when the man in the apron was finally standing in front of me.
“Alors, madame.”
He put his hands together like a pastor and gazed expectantly at me over the rim of his glasses. His voice was soft, hesitant to disturb my thoughts. I looked up, slightly startled. After twenty minutes surrounded by the hum of morning chatter and cuts of lamb, I’d almost forgotten I’d come to place an order.

BY DINNERTIME,
my arms ached—my twin passions of heavy books and international travel were finally catching up with me. We decided to go for a walk; the days were long, twilight stretching almost till bedtime.

We stopped to sit at the edge of the fountain in the place de Verdun. The locals call it the place des Marronniers, after the four towering chestnut trees that grow in the center. A year ago, when we crossed this way for the first time, Mireille told us a story.

“This square used to be named after René Char,” she’d said. “After the war—the first mayor of Céreste was a fellow Résistant—he named this place Capitaine Alexandre.” Capitaine Alexandre was Char’s nom de guerre.

Why isn’t it called that anymore? I asked.

“Ah, c’est compliqué...”
Which translates to “If you have a half hour to spare—it’s a really good story.”

During the war, she told me, Char had to feed his men, so from time to time he would go to the local farmers. He went to see one of the prominent landowners, a man who raised sheep. “Would you mind if occasionally one of your
bêtes
went missing…eaten by a wolf?” He let the question hang in the air.

The farmer refused.
“Je fais pas de politique.”
I don’t involve myself in politics, he said.

After the liberation, this same man came to Char and asked for an official
attestation
certifying that he had been part of the Résistance during the war.

Char looked up from his desk: “My guys eat fine now, thanks,” he said and sent him on his way.

During the 1960s, this same farmer became the mayor of Céreste.
“Et voilà,”
Mireille told us, “the first thing the new mayor did was strip away any trace of Char and rename this square the place de Verdun. It was only recently that the village finally got a rue René Char, just below your street, where you’ll find La Maison Taupin, the house that Char rented with his wife when he first came to Céreste.”

People, and places, have long memories.

We walked down the main street, the facades of the buildings painted yellow, peach, and a fiery red—pigments reminiscent of the local ocher. We passed the town hall, a tall narrow edifice, its steps neatly swept of leaves, its balcony festooned with flags and flower boxes. We turned back into the old village; the warren of narrow lanes was already deep in shadow. The stroller jumped and rattled along the uneven pavement. There was light from a small window, the muffled sound of a television, the clinking of silverware and glasses. The rue de la Liberté was so narrow I could almost touch the walls with my outstretched arms. There were shutters of light blue and dark green, some freshly painted, others that needed a touch-up. I had walked down streets like this as a tourist, out at the wrong time of day, as tourists often are. It had never occurred to me that I would live here.

Two boys threw a ball back and forth in the small
placette
. We walked under a low stone arch. In the walls around me I saw echoes of other arches, a filled-in window, a going-nowhere door. These houses had been transformed so many times over the centuries that their entrances and exits, never mind their owners, were constantly subject to revision. Instead of making a jumble, these corrections gave an air of permanence, of survival. One more pair of new arrivals wasn’t going to change a thing.

We took a sharp left and found ourselves in the open air. The oblong tower of the church, with its wrought-iron steeple, caught the last reflections of the sun against the hills. This is what a cinematographer would call the golden hour, the glowing time just after the sun sinks below the horizon and before the dark sets in. It’s the hour of watercolor skies—discreet layers of cotton-candy pink, dusky rose, and periwinkle, when the fields are their deepest green, and the wheat has a halo that rises from the surface. We were standing on the medieval ramparts, the walls that once protected this small community from the hostilities of the outside world. Just below us was a field of lavender, the rows tidy and symmetrical. Just behind, a hedge of rosemary bushes. In the distance I could make out the summit of Reillanne, golden city on a hill. We enjoyed the view in the company of a set of flowered sheets, some undershirts, and two graying, pendulous brassieres. This part of the ramparts, due south, is now the site of the communal laundry line.

FIVE GENERATIONS OF
my Russian peasant ancestors are rolling over in their graves. Long did they toil, sweat, struggle, to escape the shtetl. Hopeful, they passed through Ellis Island to live the American dream of a chicken in every pot and a dryer in every mudroom. And now one of their progeny is reduced (
voluntarily,
no less) to hanging her washing on the line in the garden. Oy.

Gwendal, of course, thinks it’s perfectly normal to hang our undies out under the stars. It smells good. It saves electricity. It’s 110 degrees in the shade.

Yes. But.

I’m an American. And God help me, I love a good tumble dryer.

Not only does the sun not fluff your towels, it comes with folklore as well. One night, Gwendal hesitated on his way out with an armful of sheets and pillowcases. “I feel like there’s something about not hanging your white sheets out in the full moon,” he said.

Huh?

This was how I felt the first time I burned my finger in our apartment in Paris. Gwendal sliced open a raw potato and put it on my hand. The starch, he said, would soothe the skin. Where do they learn this stuff? Where’s the Bacitracin? Sometimes it’s like being married to a Trappist monk.

That said, the potato thing actually works. As for the sheets in the moonlight, I’ve since heard various theories, all having to do with the combination of UV rays and bleach. Anyone? Anyone?

That night, I looked at my brightly colored silk underwear, swaying in the breeze like the pennants at a jousting tournament. My once plush sage-green wedding towels were hopelessly matted and rough. Then again, I mused, thinking back to the brassieres-at-large over the lavender field, at least I got to hang my underwear in private.

The T-shirts were warm—I stuck my nose into one, looking for that special smell. It must be an acquired thing. Alexandre’s socks hung in tiny pairs, each clipped with a single plastic clothespin. They were more than dry. But my mother was arriving from JFK in the morning.

I decided, with a pinch of irony, to leave everything exactly where it was.