Hot Night in the City

Nowhere is our disinclination to burden others with accurate information more evident than in financial matters. It is common for a shepherd with a fruitful flock to complain long and bitterly, not only because God hates a braggart, or to prevent relatives from asking to borrow money, but also because the posture of poverty gives one moral leverage when selling one's cheese to the traveling wholesalers. The only peasants who do not claim to be impoverished are the truly poor, who seek to avoid the scorn of their neighbors and—even more galling!—the pity of those who might assume that their poverty is God's punishment for wrongs committed by past generations of their family.

No one in my village is fooled by the conventions of speech and behavior that oblige the fortunate to minimize their possessions and the miserable to pretend they haven't a care in the world. Oh, those dim souls from Licq, our neighboring village, might be fooled by such dodges, but not us. We all know that those who pretend to be content with their lot are probably as poor as stones (and perhaps deservedly so, within God's Great Scheme of Retribution), while those who bemoan their poverty most shrilly are secretly well-off, like the Colonel, who became our village's richest man from his practice of snapping up land from the feckless and the unlucky, but who was so tightfisted that he even resented having to pay his share to repair the school's roof. But the Colonel no longer worries about collecting other people's land, not since God reached down last winter and collected him.

Oh yes, we all know how the rich moan while the poor sing, but the glory of the Basque mind lies in its capacity to see subtleties within subtleties, so it is accounted a great gift to be able to judge just how rich are those who complain, and exactly how poor—and therefore vulnerable in commercial dealings—are those who walk about lighthearted and smiling, like an idiot stunned by a loose tile falling from a roof.

But a wise old Basque dicton tells us: Every rule has its exceptions, even this one. Such an exception was the case of old Uncle Arnaud, who never complained about losing his best sheep to wolves and the lightening and never cursed the rich merchants of Paris (known collectively as 'the government') for depressing the price of wool so they could steal it from us. He accepted these strengthening Trials of God with a resigned shrug and a calm smile—exactly as though he were poor, while all the time he was as rich as a tax collector! But even the sly and subtle Uncle Arnaud was not so admired for craft and obliquity as the man who came to earn the title, 'that Fox-of-a-Benat'.

Benat was our village idiot (or 'village innocent' as our parish priest insisted we call him, reminding us that the Treacherous Apple was the fruit of knowledge, and that those who know the least are often—indeed, almost always—better Christians than those burdened with facts and understanding). Every village in those days had at least one village idiot—save for Licq, of course, where nearly everyone could lay claim to that title—and it was not uncommon for dark and dire histories to be attached to these poor souls. Our Benat attracted more creative biography than most, for he lived in the loft of the late Widow Jaureguiberry's barn, where he sustained himself on bread and raw onions—no doubt in penance for some (probably unspeakable) sin. Equally suspect was Benat's custom of taking long walks—not walks such as some lazy dunce of a Licquois might take—but long walks from which he would return with muddled tales of Saint Palais, fully forty kilometers away down the valley, or of Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, half again as far, and over the mountains! Sometimes people encountered him on the road as he slouched along in his awkward, jerky gait, muttering and grinning to himself in that mysterious way of his, and there was no mistaking our Benat, with his wide, crooked mouth and his huge ears, and eyes set not quite at the same level, to say nothing of the baggy, low-crotched trousers he had worn from longer ago than the collective memory of our village stretches. There were even rumors that Benat had walked all the way to Paris and back, and the fact that he never spoke of Paris lent a certain credibility to these rumors; for isn't it just like an idiot to imagine he has only been to Saint Palais, when in fact he has been in Paris?

The widespread suspicion that he had visited Paris was finally substantiated. Each fall, foreigners from Paris and Bordeaux appeared in our village, dressed in crisp new hunting costumes and filling our cafe/bar with talk of their prowess as hunters of the palombe. The money these northern hunters spent was important to our narrowly balanced economy, and it was a source of some puzzlement and distress to us that many of them were so stupid as to allow themselves to be seduced away from simple, clean accommodations in our honest village by the tarted-up restaurants and overdecorated hotels of Licq.

These northerners sometimes mistook us for quaint rustics and amused themselves by imitating the chanting music of our speech, though they could never achieve the melody of our expression because they were crippled by the Parisian's inability to pronounce final e's. Naturally, we repaid their discourtesy by renting them only the worst bird blinds in the valley, while we ourselves shot and netted the palombe from the best positions and always had a few extra to sell to them, so they could support their boasts of manful skill when they returned to whatever Paris or Bordeaux they came from.

One day several of these northerner 'hunters' were in the new cafe/bar that Monsieur Aramburu had made out of his father's old-fashioned wineshop by the simple expedient of changing its name and keeping a pot of filter coffee on the back of the stove. Aramburu was also our mayor, as he had the village's only telephone. Well, that Fox-of-a-Benat (though he had not yet earned that title) came shambling past the window in his ragged old clothes, grinning and muttering to himself as always. One of us asked the tableful of boasting Parisians if they had ever happened across old Benat on the road to Paris. The loudest and best-equipped of them (the ones with the fancy costumes never bag the birds, as Basque palombes are not so stupid that they cannot recognize a hunting jacket) winked at his companions and told us that indeed he had often seen our village innocent in Paris, riding through the park in a fancy carriage filled with young and beautiful girls. Well, of course none of us missed the wink, and we knew better than to think that any young and beautiful girl would ride about with a man who ate mostly onions, but we could discern a seed of truth in this story, nevertheless. Any man who was such a fool as to be unable to tell a good hunting blind from a miserable one would be perfectly capable of passing within ten meters of our Benat without recognizing him. So here was this Parisian trying to ridicule us by pretending to have seen Benat in Paris, when in fact he had seen him and was too stupid to know it! The laugh was on him!

But it was not only because of his enigmatic wanderings as far as Saint Palais and Saint Jean Pied-de-Port (and now even to Paris!) that our village innocent attracted so many stories to himself. There was rich fodder for gossip in Benat's very peculiar drinking habits.

Benat didn't drink. Never. Not a drop.

It is true, of course, that our village priest (a man who had been educated both in Pau and in Bayonne, and who therefore knew something of this world, unlike that simpering simpleton who babbled from the pulpit of the Licq church) had often reminded us that good Catholics drink only in moderation. But who can claim that never touching a drop is 'drinking in moderation'? It is quite the opposite! There were two bodies of opinion concerning Benat's strange immoderation in the matter of drink. Some suspected that perhaps the old idiot was not a Catholic but a Jew or a Saracen—or, worse yet, a Protestant!—and was therefore not obliged to drink in moderation like the rest of us. Others dismissed this view as ridiculous, pointing out that Benat spoke excellent Basque—for an idiot— and all the world knows that speakers of Basque must be Catholic, for Basque was the language of the Garden of Eden and is currently the language of heaven, although there have been efforts by French-speaking bishops of Paris to suppress this historical fact. The most widely accepted explanation for Benat's suspicious refusal to take a little glass now and then was that in result of some grave sin committed while drunk during his youth, he had made a vow to give up the pleasure of wine forever. His great sin was understood to have involved you-know-what, and this meshed nicely with the newly uncovered reports of beautiful girls in carriages in Paris!

When teased about his abstemiousness, old Benat used to grin and say that he didn't drink because he was too poor. And this always elicited guffaws as men tugged down the lower lid of their eyes with their forefingers and nudged one another, because it was universally understood that Benat was very, very rich. Not just rich as some miserly old piss-vinegar of a Licquois might be rich, but rich! As rich as an Amerloque!

The evidence of his wealth was overwhelming. For one thing, following the rule that everyone who is poor pretends to be comfortable and everyone who is rich pretends to be wretched, it was obvious that old Benat was wealthy beyond the dreams of a coin-biting merchant. Also, here was a man who was older than the church tower and had in all those years spent nothing on clothes and eaten nothing but bread and onions and the occasional blood-of-Christ apple 'borrowed' from the village's most famous apple tree. How could such a man fail to be rich? And what about all these mysterious voyages to Paris... and perhaps even beyond! Do poor men travel in search of