Toujours Provence (19 page)

A shaded clearing above the car park had been taken over by an elite group of dealers who were selling specialist breeds, or hybrids, dogs of particular and valuable skills—trackers of the wild
sanglier
, hunters of rabbits, detectors of quail and woodcock. They were strung like a living necklace on chains beneath the trees, twitching in their sleep. Their owners looked like gypsies: slender, dark men with gold teeth flashing through dense black moustaches.

One of them noticed my wife admiring a wrinkled black-andtan specimen who was scratching his ear lazily with a
huge back paw.
“Il est beau, eh?”
said the owner, and shone his teeth at us. He bent down and took hold of a handful of loose skin behind the dog’s head. “He comes in his own
sac à main
. You can carry him home.” The dog raised his eyes in resignation at having been born with a coat several sizes too big, and his paw stopped in mid-scratch. My wife shook her head. “We already have three dogs.” The man shrugged, and let the skin drop in heavy folds. “Three, four—what’s the difference?”

A little further along the track, the sales presentation became more sophisticated. On top of a hutch made from plywood and wire netting, a printed card announced:
Fox-terrier, imbattable aux lapins et aux truffes. Un vrai champion
. The champion, a short, stout brown and white dog, was snoring on his back, all four stumpy legs in the air. We barely slowed down, but it was enough for the owner.
“Il est beau, eh?”
He woke the dog up and lifted him from the hutch.
“Regardez!”
He put the dog on the ground and took a slice of sausage from the tin plate that was next to the empty wine bottle on the bonnet of his van.

“Chose extraordinaire,”
he said. “When these dogs are hunting, nothing will distract them. They become
rigide
. You press the back of the head and the rear legs will rise into the air.” He put the sausage down, covered it with leaves and let the dog root for it, then placed his foot on the back of the dog’s head and pressed. The dog snarled and bit him on the ankle. We moved on.

The
stade
was recovering from lunch, the small folding tables under the trees still scattered with scraps of food and empty glasses. A spaniel had managed to jump onto one of the tables and clear it up, and was asleep with its chin in a plate. Spectators moved with the slowness that comes from
a full belly and a hot day, picking their teeth as they inspected the offerings of the local arms dealer.

On a long trestle table, 30 or 40 guns were laid neatly in a row, including the new sensation that was attracting great interest. It was a matte black pump-action riot gun. If there were ever to be a mass uprising of bloodthirsty killer rabbits in the forest, this was undoubtedly the machine one needed to keep them in order. But some of the other items puzzled us. What would a hunter do with brass knuckle-dusters and sharpened steel throwing stars, as used, so a hand-printed card said, by the Japanese Ninja? It was a selection that contrasted violently with the rubber bones and squeaky toys on sale at English dog shows.

It is always possible, when dogs and owners gather together en masse, to find living proof of the theory that they grow to resemble each other. In other parts of the world, this may be confined to physical characteristics—ladies and basset hounds with matching jowls, whiskery little men with bushy eyebrows and scotties, emaciated ex-jockeys with their whippets. But, France being France, there seems to be a deliberate effort to emphasize the resemblance through fashion, by choosing
ensembles
that turn dog and owner into coordinated accessories.

There were two clear winners in the Ménerbes
Concours d’Élégance
, perfectly complementary and visibly very pleased with the attention they were attracting from less modish spectators. In the ladies’ section, a blonde with a white shirt, white shorts, white cowboy boots, and a white miniature poodle on a white lead picked her way fastidiously through the dust to sip, with little finger cocked, an Orangina at the bar. The ladies of the village, sensibly dressed in skirts and
flat shoes, looked at her with the same critical interest they usually reserve for cuts of meat at the butcher’s.

The male entries were dominated by a thickset man with a waist-high Great Dane. The dog was pure, shiny black. The man wore a tight black T-shirt, even tighter black jeans, and black cowboy boots. The dog wore a heavy chain-link collar. The man wore a necklace like a small hawser, with a medallion that thudded against his sternum with every step, and a similarly important bracelet. By some oversight, the dog wasn’t wearing a bracelet, but they made a virile pair as they posed on the high ground. The man gave the impression of having to control his massive beast by brute force, yanking on the collar and growling. The dog, as placid as Great Danes normally are, had no idea he was supposed to be vicious or restive, and observed smaller dogs passing underneath him with polite interest.

We were wondering how long the Great Dane’s good humor would last before he ate one of the tiny dogs that clustered like flies around his back legs when we were ambushed by Monsieur Mathieu and his tombola tickets. For a mere 10 francs, he was offering us a chance to win one of the sporting and gastronomic treasures donated by local tradesmen: a mountain bike, a microwave oven, a shotgun, or a
maxi saucisson
. I was relieved that puppies weren’t among the prizes. Monsieur Mathieu leered. “You never know what might be in the
saucisson,”
he said. And then, seeing the horror on my wife’s face, he patted her. “Now,
non. Je rigole.”

In fact, there were enough puppies on display to make a mountain of
saucissons
. They lay or squirmed in piles under almost every tree, on blankets, in cardboard cartons, in homemade kennels, and on old sweaters. It was a testing time as
we went from one furry, multilegged heap to the next. My wife is highly susceptible to anything with four feet and a wet nose, and the sales tactics of the owners were shameless. At the slightest sign of interest they would pluck a puppy from the pile and thrust it into her arms, where it would promptly go to sleep.
“Voilà! Comme il est content!”
I could see her weakening by the minute.

We were saved by the loudspeaker introducing the expert who was to give the commentary on the field trials. He was in
tenue de chasse
—khaki cap, shirt, and trousers—with a deep tobacco voice. He was unused to speaking into a microphone and, being Provençal, he was unable to keep his hands still. Thus his explanation came and went in intermittent snatches as he pointed the microphone helpfully at various parts of the field while his words disappeared into the breeze.

The competitors were lined up at the far end, half a dozen pointers and two mud-colored dogs of impenetrable ancestry. Small clumps of brushwood had been placed at random around the field. These were the
bosquets
in which the game—a live quail that was held aloft by the quail handler for inspection—was to be hidden.

The
chasseurs
microphone technique improved enough for us to hear him explain that the quail would be tethered in a different
bosquet
for each competitor, and that it would not be killed (unless it was scared to death) by the dogs. They would simply indicate the hiding place, and the fastest find would win.

The quail was hidden, and the first competitor unleashed. He passed by two clumps with barely a sniff and then, still yards away from the third, stiffened and stopped.

“Aha! Il est fort, ce chien,”
boomed the
chasseur
. The dog looked up for a second, distracted by the noise, before continuing
his approach. He was now walking in slow motion, placing one paw on the ground with exaggerated care before lifting another, his neck and head stretched toward the
bosquet
, unwavering despite the
chasseurs
admiring comments about his concentration and the delicacy of his movements.

Three feet away from the petrified quail, the dog froze, one front paw raised, with head, neck, back, and tail in a perfect straight line.

“Tiens! Bravo!”
said the
chasseur
, and started to clap, forgetting that he had a microphone in one hand. The owner retrieved his dog, and the two of them returned to the starting point in a triumphant competition trot. The official timekeeper, a lady in high heels and an elaborate black and white dress with flying panels, marked the dogs performance on a clipboard. The quail handler dashed out to replant the quail in another
bosquet
, and the second contestant was sent on his way.

He went immediately to the
bosquet
recently vacated by the quail, and stopped.

“Beh oui,”
said the
chasseur
, “the scent is still strong there. But wait.” We waited. The dog waited. Then he got tired of waiting, and possibly annoyed at being sent out on a fool’s errand. He lifted his leg on the
bosquet
and went back to his owner.

The quail handler moved the unfortunate quail to a new hiding place, but it must have been a particularly pungent bird, because dog after dog stopped at one or the other of the empty clumps, head cocked and paw tentatively raised, before giving up. An old man standing next to us explained the problem. The quail, he said, should have been walked on its lead from one
bosquet
to the next so that it left a scent. How else could a dog be expected to find him? Dogs are not
clairvoyants
.
The old man shook his head and made soft clicking noises of disapproval with his tongue against his teeth.

The final competitor, one of the mud-colored dogs, had been showing signs of increasing excitement as he watched the others being sent off, whining with impatience and tugging at his lead. When his turn came, it was obvious that he had misunderstood the rules of the competition. Disregarding the quail and the
bosquets
, he completed a circuit of the
stade
at full speed before racing into the vines, followed by his bellowing owner.
“Oh là là”
said the
chasseur. “Une locomotive. Tant pis.”

Later, as the sun dipped and the shadows grew longer, Monsieur Dufour, president of
Le Philosophe
hunting club, presented the prizes before settling down with his colleagues to a gigantic paella. Long after dark, we could hear the distant sounds of laughter and clinking glasses and, somewhere in the vines, the man shouting for his mud-colored dog.

Place Pie, in the center of Avignon, is a forlorn sight in the dingy grey moments that come just before dawn. It is an architectural mongrel of a square, with two sides of seedy but elegant old buildings looking across at a hideous monument to modern town planning. A graduate of the
béton armé
school of construction has been given a free hand, and he has made the worst of it.

Benches, crude slabs, have been dumped around a central eyesore. On those benches, the weary sightseer can rest and contemplate a second, much more imposing eyesore, three stained concrete stories that on weekdays are crammed with cars by eight in the morning. The reason for the cars, and the reason I was in the Place Pie in time to see dawn’s rosy flush come up on the concrete, is that the best food in Avignon is displayed and sold under the car park, in
Les Halles
.

I arrived there a few minutes before six and parked in one of the few free places on the second level. Below me on the
place
I saw two derelicts with skin the same color as the bench they were sitting on. They were sharing a liter of red
wine, taking turns swigging from the bottle.
A gendarme
came up to them and gestured to them to move on, then stood with his hands on his hips, watching. They walked in the slouched, defeated way of men with nothing to hope for and nowhere to go, and sat on the pavement on the other side of the
place
. The
gendarme
shrugged and turned away.

The contrast between the quiet, dull emptiness of the
place
and the interior of
Les Halles
was sudden and total. On one side of the door was a town still asleep; on the other, bright lights and bright colors, pandemonium and shouting and laughter, a working day in full and noisy swing.

I had to jump aside to avoid collision with a trolley piled to head height with crates of peaches, pushed by a man chanting
“Klaxon! Klaxon!”
as he careered round the corner. Other trolleys were behind him, their loads swaying. I looked for somewhere to escape from high-velocity fruit and vegetables, and made a dash for a sign that read
buvette
. If I was going to be run over, I would rather the tragedy occurred at a bar.

Jacky and Isabelle, so the sign said, were the owners, and they were in a state of siege. The bar was so crowded that three men were reading the same newspaper, and all the tables nearby were taken up with the first sitting for breakfast, or possibly lunch. It was difficult to tell by looking at the food which meal was being eaten.
Croissants
were being dipped into thick, steaming cups of
café crème
next to tumblers of red wine and sausage sandwiches as long as a forearm, or beer and crusty squares of warm pizza. I felt a twinge of longing for the breakfast of champions, the half-pint of red wine and the sausage sandwich, but drinking at dawn is the reward for working all night. I ordered coffee, and tried to see some semblance of order in the surrounding chaos.