A Year In Provence

Uncle Edward helped me load the cases into the car. Had I really ordered all this? I must have. We had been sitting in the convivial murk for nearly two hours, and one can make all kinds of expansive decisions in two hours. I left with a throbbing head and an invitation to come back next month for the vendange.

Our own vendange, the agricultural highlight of the year, took place during the last week of September. Faustin would have liked it to be a few days later, but he had some private information about the weather which convinced him that it would be a wet October.

The original party of three that had picked the table grapes was reinforced by Cousin Raoul and Faustin's father. His contribution was to walk slowly behind the pickers, prodding among the vines with his stick until he found a bunch of grapes that had been overlooked and then shouting-he had a good, carrying bellow for a man of eighty-four-for someone to come back and do the job properly. In contrast to the others in their shorts and vests, he was dressed for a brisk November day in a sweater, a cap, and a suit of heavy cotton. When my wife appeared with a camera, he took off his cap, smoothed his hair, put his cap back on and struck a pose, waist deep in vines. Like all our neighbors, he loved having his portrait taken.

Slowly and noisily, the rows were picked clean, the grapes piled into plastic crates and stacked in the back of the truck. Every evening now, the roads were busy with vans and tractors towing their purple mountains to the wine cooperative at Maubec, where they were weighed and tested for alcoholic content.

To Faustin's surprise, the crop was gathered without incident, and to celebrate he invited us to go with him to the cooperative when he made the last delivery. 'Tonight we will see the final figures,' he said, 'and then you will know how much you can drink next year.'

We followed the truck as it swayed off into the sunset at twenty miles an hour, keeping to narrow roads that were stained with fallen, squashed grapes. There was a queue waiting to unload. Burly men with roasted faces sat on their tractors until it was their turn to back up to the platform and tip their loads down the chute-the first stage of their journey to the bottle.

Faustin finished unloading, and we went with him into the building to see our grapes going into the huge stainless-steel vats. 'Watch that dial,' he said. 'It shows the degrees of alcohol.' The needle swung up, quivered, and settled at 12.32 percent. Faustin grunted. He would have liked 12.50 and an extra few days in the sun might have done it, but anything above 12 was reasonable. He took us over to the man who kept the tallies of each delivery and peered at a line of figures on a clipboard, matching them with a handful of slips of paper he pulled from his pocket. He nodded. It was all correct.

'You won't go thirsty.' He made the Provencal drinking gesture, fist clenched and thumb pointing towards his mouth. 'Just over one thousand two hundred liters.'

It sounded like a good year to us, and we told Faustin we were pleased. 'Well,' he said, 'at least it didn't rain.'

October

THE MAN stood peering into the moss and light undergrowth around the roots of an old scrub oak tree. His right leg was encased up to the thigh in a green rubber fishing wader; on the other foot was a running shoe. He held a long stick in front of him and carried a blue plastic shopping basket.

He turned sideways on to the tree, advanced the rubber-clad leg, and plunged his stick nervously into the vegetation, in the manner of a fencer expecting a sudden and violent riposte. And again, with the rubber leg pushed forward: on guard, thrust, withdraw, thrust. He was so absorbed by his duel that he had no idea that I was watching, equally absorbed, from the path. One of the dogs went up behind him and gave his rear leg an exploratory sniff.

He jumped-merde!-and then saw the dog, and me, and looked embarrassed. I apologized for startling him.

'For a moment,' he said, 'I thought I was being attacked.'

I couldn't imagine who he thought was going to sniff his leg before attacking him, and I asked what he was looking for. In reply, he held up his shopping basket. 'Les champignons.'

This was a new and worrying aspect of the Luberon. It was, as I already knew, a region full of strange things and even stranger people. But surely mushrooms, even wild mushrooms, didn't attack fully grown men. I asked him if the mushrooms were dangerous.

'Some can kill you,' he said.

That I could believe, but it didn't explain the rubber boot or the extraordinary performance with the stick. At the risk of being made to feel like the most ignorant of city-reared dunces, I pointed at his right leg.

'The boot is for protection?'

'Mais oui.'

'But against what?'

He slapped the rubber with his wooden sword and swaggered down toward me, D'Artagnan with a shopping basket. He delivered a backhand cut at a clump of thyme and came closer.

'Les serpents.' He said it with just the trace of a hiss. 'They are preparing for winter. If you disturb them-sssst!-they attack. It can be very grave.'

He showed me the contents of his shopping basket, snatched from the forest at the risk of life and limb. To me, they looked highly poisonous, varying in color from blue-black to rust to violent orange, not at all like the civilized white mushrooms sold in the markets. He held the basket under my nose, and I breathed in what he called the essence of the mountains. To my surprise, it was good-earthy, rich, slightly nutty-and I looked at the mushrooms more closely. I had seen them in the forest, in evil-looking clusters under the trees, and had assumed that they were instant death. My booted friend assured me that they were not only safe, but delicious.

'But,' he said, 'you must know the deadly species. There are two or three. If you're not sure, take them to the pharmacy.'

It had never occurred to me that a mushroom could be clinically tested before being permitted to enter an omelette but, since the stomach is by far the most influential organ in France, it made perfect sense. The next time I went into Cavaillon, I toured the pharmacies. Sure enough, they had been converted into mushroom guidance centers. The window displays, normally devoted to surgical trusses and pictures of young women reducing the cellulite on their slim bronzed thighs, now featured large mushroom identification charts. Some pharmacies went even further, and filled their windows with piles of reference books which described and illustrated every species of edible fungus known to man.

I saw people going into the pharmacies with grubby bags which they presented at the counter rather anxiously, as though they were undergoing tests for a rare disease. The small, muddy objects in the bags were solemnly inspected by the resident white-coated expert, and a verdict was pronounced. I suppose it made an interesting change from the usual daily round of suppositories and liver tonics. I found it so distracting that I almost forgot why I had come to Cavaillon-not to loiter around pharmacies but to shop for bread at the local shrine of baking.

Living in France had turned us into bakery addicts, and the business of choosing and buying our daily bread was a recurring pleasure. The village bakery in Menerbes, with its erratic opening hours-'Madame will reopen when she has finished making her toilette,' I was told one day-had first encouraged us to visit other bakeries in other villages. It was a revelation. After years of taking bread for granted, more or less as a standard commodity, it was like discovering a new food.

We tried the dense, chewy loaves from Lumieres, fatter and flatter than the ordinary baguette, and the dark-crusted boules, as big as squashed footballs, from Cabrieres. We learned which breads would keep for a day, and which would be stale in three hours; the best bread for making croutons or for spreading with rouille to launch into a sea of fish soup. We became used to the delightful but initially surprising sight of bottles of champagne offered for sale next to the tarts and tiny individual pastries that were made fresh every morning and gone by noon.