Toujours Provence (13 page)

We saw no fires after that, although the pyromaniac had made more phone calls, always threatening the Lubéron. August ended. The rainfall reported for our area was o.o millimeters, compared with the average of 52. When a halfhearted shower came in September, we stood out in it and took great breaths of cool, damp air. For the first time in weeks, the forest smelled fresh.

With the immediate danger of fire behind them, the local inhabitants felt sufficiently relieved to complain about the effects of the drought on their stomachs. With the exception of the year’s wine, which in Châteauneuf was announced as
spectacularly good, the gastronomic news was disastrous. The lack of rain in July would mean a miserable truffle crop in the winter, few in number and small in size. Hunters would have to shoot each other for sport; game that had left the parched Lubéron to look for water further north was unlikely to come back. Autumn at the table would not be the same,
pas du tout normal
.

Our education suffered. Monsieur Menicucci, whose many talents included an ability to detect and identify the wild mushrooms in the forest, had promised to take us on an expedition—kilos of mushrooms, he said, would be there for the taking. He would instruct us, and supervise afterwards in the kitchen, assisted by a bottle of Cairanne.

But October came and the hunt had to be cancelled. For the first time in Menicucci’s memory, the forest was bare. He came to the house one morning, knife, stick, and basket at the ready, snakeproof boots tightly laced, and spent a fruitless hour poking among the trees before giving up. We would have to try again next year. Madame his wife would be disappointed, and so would his friend’s cat, who was a great
amateur
of wild mushrooms.

A cat?

Beh oui
, but a cat with an extraordinary nose, able to pick out dangerous or deadly mushrooms. Nature is mysterious and wonderful, said Menicucci, and often cannot be explained in a scientific manner.

I asked what the cat did with edible mushrooms. He eats them, said Menicucci, but not raw. They must be cooked in olive oil and sprinkled with chopped parsley. That is his little weakness.
C’est bizarre, non?

•   •   •

The forest was officially recognized as a tinderbox in November, when it was invaded by the
Office National des Forêts
. One dark, overcast morning I was about two miles from the house when I saw a billow of smoke and heard the rasp of brushcutters. In a clearing at the end of the track, army trucks were parked next to an enormous yellow machine, perhaps 10 feet high, a cross between a bulldozer and a mammoth tractor. Men in olive-drab fatigue uniforms moved through the trees, sinister in their goggles and helmets, hacking away the undergrowth and throwing it on the fire that hissed with sizzling sap from the green wood.

An officer, hard-faced and lean, looked at me as though I was trespassing and barely nodded when I said
bonjour
. A bloody civilian, and a foreigner as well.

I turned to go home, and stopped to look at the yellow monster. The driver, a fellow civilian from the look of his cracked leather waistcoat and nonregulation checked cap, was cursing as he tried to loosen a tight nut. He exchanged his wrench for a mallet—the all-purpose Provençal remedy for obstinate mechanical equipment—which made me sure he wasn’t an army man. I tried another
bonjour
, and this time it was more amiably received.

He could have been Santa Claus’s younger brother; without the beard, but with ruddy round cheeks and bright eyes and a moustache that was flecked with the sawdust that was blowing in the wind. He waved his mallet in the direction of the extermination squad in the trees.
“C’est comme la guerre, eh?”

He called it, in correct military style,
opération débrous-saillage
. Twenty meters on either side of the track that led towards Ménerbes were to be cleared of undergrowth and thinned out to reduce the risk of fire. His job was to follow
the men in his machine and shred everything they hadn’t burned. He banged its yellow side with the flat of his hand. “This will eat a tree trunk and spit it out as twigs.”

It took the men a week to cover the distance to the house. They left the edge of the forest shorn, the clearings smudged with pools of ashes. And following on, chewing and spitting a few hundred meters each day, came the yellow monster with its relentless, grinding appetite.

The driver came down to see us one evening, asking for a glass of water, easily persuaded into a glass of
pastis
. He apologized for parking at the top of the garden. Parking was a daily problem, he said; with a top speed of 10 kilometers an hour he could hardly take what he described as his little toy back home to Apt each night.

He took off his cap for the second glass of
pastis
. It was good to have someone to talk to, he said, after a day on his own with nothing to listen to but the racket of his machine. But it was necessary work. The forest had been left untended too long. It was choked with dead wood, and if there was another drought next year … 
pof!

We asked him if the pyromaniac had ever been caught, and he shook his head. The madman with the
briquet
, he called him. Let’s hope he spends his holidays in the Cévennes next year.

The driver came again the following evening and brought us a Camembert, which he told us how to cook—the way he did when he was in the forest during the winter and needed something to keep out the cold.

“You make a fire,” he said, arranging imaginary branches on the table in front of him, “and you take the cheese from the box and remove the paper wrapping. And then you put
it back,
d’accord
?” To make sure we had understood, he held up the Camembert and tapped its thin wooden box.

“
Bon
. Now you put the box in the embers of the fire. The box burns. The rind of the cheese turns black. The cheese melts, but” … an instructive finger was raised for emphasis … “he is sealed inside the rind. He cannot escape into the fire.”

A swig of
pastis
, the moustache wiped with the back of the hand.

“
Alors
, you take your
baguette
and split it all the way down. Now—
attention aux doigts
—you take the cheese from the fire, you make a hole in the rind, and you pour the melted cheese into the bread.
Et voilà!
”

He grinned, his red cheeks bunching under his eyes, and patted his stomach. Sooner or later, as I had learned, every conversation in Provence seems to turn to food or drink.

At the beginning of 1990, we were sent the weather statistics for the previous year. Despite an unusually wet November, our annual rainfall was less than half the normal amount.

There has been another mild winter. The water levels are still below what they should be, and it is estimated that as much as 30 percent of the undergrowth in the forest is dead, and therefore dry. The first big fire of summer destroyed more than 6,000 acres near Marseille, cutting off the
autoroute
in two places. And the madman with the
briquet
is still at large; probably, like us, taking a keen interest in the weather forecasts.

We have bought a heavy-gauge tin box to hold all those pieces of paper—passports,
attestations
, birth certificates,
contrats
,
permis
, old electricity bills—that are essential in France to prove your existence. To lose the house in a fire would be a disaster, but to lose our identities at the same time would make life impossible. The tin box is going in the farthest corner of the
cave
, next to the Châteauneuf.

Every time it rains we’re delighted, which Faustin takes as a promising sign that we are becoming less English.

The publicity preceded the event by months. Pictures of a bearded face, crowned by a beret, appeared in newspapers and on posters, and from spring onward anyone in Provence with half an ear for music had heard the news: Imperator Pavarotti, as
Le Provençal
called him, was coming this summer to sing for us. More than that, it would be the concert of a lifetime, because of where he had chosen to perform. Not in the Opera House in Avignon or the
salle de fêtes
in Gordes, where he would be protected from the elements, but in the open air, surrounded by ancient stones laid by his fellow Italians 19 centuries ago when they constructed the Antique Theatre of Orange. Truly,
un événement éblouissant
.

Even empty, the Antique Theatre is overwhelming, a place of colossal, almost unbelievable scale. It is in the form of a D, and the straight wall that joins the two ends of the semicircle is 335 feet long, 120 feet high, and completely intact. Apart from the patina left on the stone by nearly 2000 years of weather, it could have been built yesterday. Behind the wall, scooped out of a hillside whose slope lends itself naturally
to stepped seating, curved banks of stone can accommodate about 10,000 spectators.

Originally they were seated according to class: magistrates and local senators in the front, priests and members of the trading guilds behind them, then the man in the street and his wife, and finally, high up and far away from respectable folk, the
Pullati
, or beggars and prostitutes. By 1990 the rules had changed, and the allocation of seats depended not so much on class as speed off the mark. The concert was a foregone sellout; swift and decisive action was necessary to secure tickets.

It was taken, while we were still dithering, by our friend Christopher, a man who operates with military precision when it comes to the big night out. He arranged everything, and gave us our marching orders: on parade at 1800 hours, dinner in Orange under a magnolia tree at 1930 hours, seated in the theater by 2100 hours. All ranks to be equipped with cushions to protect buttocks from stone seats. Liquid rations provided for the intermission. Return to base approximately 0100 hours.

There are times when it is a relief and a pleasure to be told exactly what to do, and this was one of them. We left at six sharp, arriving in Orange an hour later to find the town in a festival mood. Every café was full and humming, with extra tables and chairs edging out into the streets to make driving a test of how many waiters you could avoid bumping into. Already, more than two hours before the performance, hundreds of people with cushions and picnic baskets were streaming toward the theater. The restaurants displayed special menus for the
soiree Pavarotti. Le tout Orange
was rubbing its hands in anticipation. And then it started to rain.

The whole town looked upward—waiters, drivers, cushion-carriers, and no doubt the maestro himself—as the first few drops landed on dusty streets that had been dry for weeks.
Quelle catastrophe!
Would he sing under an umbrella? How could the orchestra play with damp instruments, the conductor conduct with a dripping baton? For as long as the shower lasted, you could almost feel thousands of people holding their breath.

But by nine o’clock the rain had long since gone and the first stars were coming out above the immense wall of the theater as we joined the throng of music lovers and shuffled past the display of Pavarottiana on sale beside the entrance. Compact discs, tapes, posters, T-shirts—all the products of pop merchandising were there, apart from I Love Luciano bumper stickers.

The line kept stopping, as though there were an obstruction beyond the entrance, and when we came through into the theater I realized why. You stood still—you had to stand still—for a few seconds to take in the view from the front of the stage, the view that Pavarotti would see.

Thousands and thousands of faces, pale against the darkness, made row after blurred row of semicircles, which disappeared up into the night. From ground level, there was a feeling of reverse vertigo. The angle of the seating seemed impossibly steep, the spectators perched and precarious, on the brink of losing their balance and toppling down into the pit. The sound they made was uncanny—above a whisper, but below normal speech, a continuous, quiet buzz of conversation that was contained and magnified by the stone walls. I felt as though I had stepped into a human beehive.

We climbed to our seats, a hundred feet or so above the stage, exactly opposite a niche high in the wall where a floodlit
statue of Augustus Caesar, in his imperial toga, stood with his arm outstretched to the crowd. In his day, the population of Orange had been about 85,000; it is now fewer than 30,000, and most of them seemed to be trying to find a few spare inches of stone to sit on.

A woman of operatic girth, blowing hard after scaling the steps, collapsed on her cushion next to me and fanned herself with a program. She was from Orange, round-faced and jolly, and she had been to the theater many times before. But she had never seen an audience like this, she said. She surveyed the heads and made her calculations: 13,000 people, she was sure of it.
Dieu merci
that the rain had stopped.

There was a sudden crack of applause as the members of the orchestra filed on stage and began to tune up, musical fragments that came sharp and clear through the expectant hum of the crowd. With a closing rumble from the kettle drums, the orchestra stopped, and looked, as everyone in the theater looked, toward the back of the stage. Directly below the statue of Augustus, the central entrance had been draped with black curtains. The rows of heads around us leaned forward in unison, as though they’d been rehearsed, and from behind the black curtain came the black and white figure of the conductor.