A Year in Provence(72)

The room was still empty, but he said it would be full within fifteen minutes. He shrugged in apology. He looked at my wife, so near and yet so far from a good lunch, her face a study in tragic deprivation. At the sight of a woman so clearly in distress, he relented, sat us at a table facing the fire, and put a thick glass carafe of red wine between us.

The regulars started coming through the door in noisy groups, going straight to the places they occupied every day. By 12:30 every seat was taken and the patron, who was also the only waiter, was a plate-laden blur.

The restaurant worked on the simple formula of removing the burden of decision from its customers. As in the station café at Bonnieux, you ate and drank what you were given. We had a crisp, oily salad and slices of pink country sausages, an aioli of snails and cod and hard-boiled eggs with garlic mayonnaise, creamy cheese from Fontvielle, and a homemade tart. It was the kind of meal that the French take for granted and tourists remember for years. For us, being somewhere between the two, it was another happy discovery to add to our list, somewhere to come back to on a cold day with an empty stomach in the certain knowledge that we would leave warm and full.

We arrived at the olive oil mill in Maussane two months early. The new crop of olives wouldn’t be gathered until January, and that was the time to buy oil at its most fresh. Luckily, said the manager of the mill, last year’s crop had been plentiful and there was still some oil left. If we would like to have a look around, he would pack a dozen liters for us to take away.

The official name of the establishment—Coopérative Oléicole de la Vallée des Baux—was almost too long to fit on the front of the modest building that was tucked away at the side of a small road. Inside, every surface seemed to have been rubbed with a fine coating of oil; floors and walls were slick to the touch, the stairs that led up to the sorting platform were slippery underfoot. A group of men sat at a table sticking the Coopérative’s ornate gold labels onto bottles and flasks filled with the greenish-yellow oil—pure and natural, as the notice on the wall said, extracted by a single cold pressing.

We went into the office to pick up the squat, two liter jugs that the manager had packed in a carton for us, and he presented each of us with bars of olive-oil soap.

“There is nothing better for the skin,” he said, and he patted his cheeks with dainty fingertips. “And, as for the oil, it is a masterpiece. You’ll see.”

Before dinner that night, we tested it, dripping it onto slices of bread that had been rubbed with the flesh of tomatoes. It was like eating sunshine.


THE GUESTS continued to come, dressed for high summer and hoping for swimming weather, convinced that Provence enjoyed a Mediterranean climate and dismayed to find us in sweaters, lighting fires in the evening, drinking winter wines, and eating winter food.

Is it always as cold as this in November? Isn’t it hot all the year round? They would look dejected when we told them about snowdrifts and subzero nights and bitter winds, as though we had lured them to the North Pole under false tropical pretenses.

Provence has been accurately described as a cold country with a high rate of sunshine, and the last days of November were as bright and as blue as May, clean and exhilarating and, as far as Faustin was concerned, profoundly ominous. He was predicting a savage winter, with temperatures so low that olive trees would die of cold as they had in 1976. He speculated with grim enjoyment about chickens being frozen stiff and old people turning blue in their beds. He said there would undoubtedly be extended power cuts, and warned me to have the chimney swept.

“You’ll be burning wood night and day,” he said, “and that’s when chimneys catch fire. And when the pompiers come to put out the fire they’ll charge you a fortune unless you have a certificate from the chimney sweep.”

And it could be much worse than that. If the house burned down as the result of a chimney fire, the insurance company wouldn’t pay out unless one could produce a certificate. Faustin looked at me, nodding gravely as I absorbed the thoughts of being cold, homeless, and bankrupt, and all because of an unswept chimney.

But what would happen, I asked him, if the certificate had been burned with the house? He hadn’t thought of that, and I think he was grateful to me for suggesting another disastrous possibility. A connoisseur of woe needs fresh worries from time to time, or he will become complacent.

I arranged for Cavaillon’s premier chimney sweep, Monsieur Beltramo, to come up to the house with his brushes and suction cleaners. A tall man with a courtly manner and an aquiline, sooty profile, he had been a chimney sweep for twenty years. Not once, he told me, had a chimney cleaned by him ever caught fire. When he was finished, he made out the certificat de ramonage, complete with smudged fingerprints, and wished me a pleasant winter. “It won’t be a cold one this year,” he said. “We’ve had three cold winters in a row. The fourth is always mild.”