A Year In Provence

It was a true family effort, and by the end of the afternoon we had a pristine ribbon of crushed, putty-colored gravel worthy of being entered for the Concours d'Elegance sponsored by Bulldozer Magazine. The compacteur was inserted into the back of the truck; the parents into the front. Young Sanchez said that the price would be less than his estimate, but he would work it out exactly and his father would come around to deliver the bill.

The next morning when I got up, there was an unfamiliar van parked outside the house. I looked for a driver, but there was nobody in the vines or in the outbuildings. It was probably an idle hunter who couldn't be bothered to walk up from the road.

We were finishing breakfast when there was a tap on the window and we saw the round brown face of Monsieur Sanchez. He wouldn't come into the house, because he said his boots were too dirty. He had been in the forest since six o'clock, and he had a present for us. From behind his back he produced his old checked cap, bulging with wild mushrooms. He gave us his favorite recipe-oil, butter, garlic, and chopped parsley-and told us a dreadful story about three men who had died after an ill-chosen mushroom supper. A neighbor had found them still at the table with wide, staring eyes-Monsieur Sanchez gave us a demonstration, rolling his eyes back in his head-completely paralyzed by malignant fungus. But we were not to worry, he said. He would stake his life on the mushrooms in his cap. Bon appetit!

My wife and I ate them that evening, studying each other between mouthfuls for signs of paralysis and eye rolling. They tasted so much better than ordinary mushrooms that we decided to invest in a guidebook and to share a pair of anti-snake boots.

THERE COMES a time in the restoration of an old house when the desire to see it finished threatens all those noble aesthetic intentions to see it finished properly. The temptation to settle for the shortcut nags away as the delays add up and the excuses multiply: the carpenter has severed a fingertip, the mason's truck has been stolen, the painter has la grippe, fittings ordered in May and promised for June don't arrive until September, and all the time the concrete mixer and the rubble and the shovels and pickaxes become more and more like permanent fixtures. During the hot months of summer, tranquilized by the sun, it had been possible to look with a patient eye at the uncompleted jobs throughout the house. Now that we were spending more time indoors with them, patience had been replaced by irritation.

With Christian the architect, we went through the rooms to establish who had to do what, and how long it would take.

'Normalement,' said Christian, a man of great charm and implacable optimism, 'there is only six or seven days of work. A little masonry, some plastering, two days of painting, et puis voila. Termine.'

We were encouraged. As we said to Christian, there had been dark moments recently when we imagined waking up on Christmas morning still surrounded by the debris of a building site.

He threw up everything in horror-hands, eyebrows, and shoulders. What a thought. It was inconceivable that these mere finishing touches should be delayed any longer. He would telephone the various members of the equipe immediately to organize a week of intensive activity. Progress would be made. No, more than progress; a conclusion.

One by one, they came at odd times to the house: Didier and his dog at seven in the morning. The electrician at lunchtime, Ramon the plasterer for an evening drink. They came, not to work, but to look at the work that had to be done. They were all astonished that it had taken so long, as though people other than themselves had been responsible. Each of them told us, confidentially, that the problem was always that one had to wait for the other fellow to finish before one could start. But, when we mentioned Christmas, they roared with laughter. Christmas was months away; they could almost build a complete house by Christmas. There was, however, a common reluctance to name a day.

When can you come? we asked.

Soon, soon, they said.

We would have to be content with that. We went out to the front of the house, where the concrete mixer stood guard over the steps to the front door, and imagined a cypress tree standing in its place.

Soon, soon.

November

THE FRENCH PEASANT is an inventive man, and he hates waste. He is reluctant to discard anything, because he knows that one day the bald tractor tire, the chipped scythe, the broken hoe, and the transmission salvaged from the 1949 Renault van will serve him well and save him from disturbing the contents of that deep, dark pocket where he keeps his money.

The contraption that I found at the edge of the vineyard was a rusty monument to his ingenuity. A 100-liter oil drum had been sliced in half lengthwise and mounted on a framework of narrow-gauge iron piping. An old wheel, more oval than round, had been bolted onto the front. Two handles of unequal length protruded from the back. It was, so Faustin told me, a brouette de vigneron-a wheelbarrow, custom built at minimal expense for the pruning season.

All the vines had now been stripped of their leaves by the autumn winds, and the tangled shoots looked like coiled clumps of brown barbed wire. Sometime before the sap started to rise next spring they would have to be cut back to the main stem. The clippings, or sarments, were of no agricultural use, too fibrous to rot into the ground during the winter, and too numerous to leave piled in the corridors between the vines where the tractors would pass. They would have to be gathered up and burned; hence the brouette de vigneron.

It was the simplest kind of mobile incinerator. A fire was lit in the bottom of the oil drum, the sarments were clipped and thrown on the fire, and the barrow was pushed along to the next vine. When the drum was full, the pale grey ash was scattered on the ground and the process began again. It was, in its primitive way, a model of efficiency.

Walking back to the house just before dusk, I saw a slim plume of blue smoke rising from the corner of the field where Faustin was pruning and burning. He straightened up and rubbed his back, and his hand felt cold and stiff when I shook it. He pointed along the rows of clipped vines, twisted claws black against the sandy soil.

'Nice and clean, eh? I like to see them nice and clean.' I asked him to leave some sarments for me to gather up to use on the barbecue next summer, and I remembered seeing them once in a shop which called itself a food boutique in New York-Genuine Vine Clippings, they were labeled, and they were guaranteed to impart That Authentic Barbecue Flavor. They had been trimmed to a standard length and neatly trussed with straw twine, and they cost two dollars for a small bunch. Faustin couldn't believe it.

'People buy them?'

He looked at the vines again, estimating how many hundreds of dollars he had burned in the course of the day, and shook his head. Another cruel blow. He shrugged.

'C'est curieux.'

OUR FRIEND, who lived deep in Cotes du Rhone country north of Vaison-la-Romaine, was to be honored by the winegrowers of his village and admitted to the Confrerie Saint-Vincent, the local equivalent of the Chevaliers du Tastevin. The investiture was to take place in the village hall, followed by dinner, followed by dancing. The wines would be strong and plentiful and the winegrowers and their wives would be out in force. Ties were to be worn. It was that kind of occasion.

Years before, we had been to another Chevaliers' dinner, in Burgundy. Two hundred people in full evening dress, rigid with decorum at the start of the meal, had turned into a friendly mob singing Burgundian drinking songs by the time the main course was served. We had blurred but happy memories of watching the sozzled