A cat?
Beh oui, but a cat with an extraordinary nose, able to pick out dangerous or deadly mushrooms. Nature is mysterious and wonderful, said Menicucci, and often cannot be explained in a scientific manner.
I asked what the cat did with edible mushrooms. He eats them, said Menicucci, but not raw. They must be cooked in olive oil and sprinkled with chopped parsley. That is his little weakness. C’est bizarre, non?
• • •
The forest was officially recognized as a tinderbox in November, when it was invaded by the Office National des Forêts. One dark, overcast morning I was about two miles from the house when I saw a billow of smoke and heard the rasp of brushcutters. In a clearing at the end of the track, army trucks were parked next to an enormous yellow machine, perhaps 10 feet high, a cross between a bulldozer and a mammoth tractor. Men in olive-drab fatigue uniforms moved through the trees, sinister in their goggles and helmets, hacking away the undergrowth and throwing it on the fire that hissed with sizzling sap from the green wood.
An officer, hard-faced and lean, looked at me as though I was trespassing and barely nodded when I said bonjour. A bloody civilian, and a foreigner as well.
I turned to go home, and stopped to look at the yellow monster. The driver, a fellow civilian from the look of his cracked leather waistcoat and nonregulation checked cap, was cursing as he tried to loosen a tight nut. He exchanged his wrench for a mallet—the all-purpose Provençal remedy for obstinate mechanical equipment—which made me sure he wasn’t an army man. I tried another bonjour, and this time it was more amiably received.
He could have been Santa Claus’s younger brother; without the beard, but with ruddy round cheeks and bright eyes and a moustache that was flecked with the sawdust that was blowing in the wind. He waved his mallet in the direction of the extermination squad in the trees. “C’est comme la guerre, eh?”
He called it, in correct military style, opération débrous-saillage. Twenty meters on either side of the track that led towards Ménerbes were to be cleared of undergrowth and thinned out to reduce the risk of fire. His job was to follow the men in his machine and shred everything they hadn’t burned. He banged its yellow side with the flat of his hand. “This will eat a tree trunk and spit it out as twigs.”
It took the men a week to cover the distance to the house. They left the edge of the forest shorn, the clearings smudged with pools of ashes. And following on, chewing and spitting a few hundred meters each day, came the yellow monster with its relentless, grinding appetite.
The driver came down to see us one evening, asking for a glass of water, easily persuaded into a glass of pastis. He apologized for parking at the top of the garden. Parking was a daily problem, he said; with a top speed of 10 kilometers an hour he could hardly take what he described as his little toy back home to Apt each night.
He took off his cap for the second glass of pastis. It was good to have someone to talk to, he said, after a day on his own with nothing to listen to but the racket of his machine. But it was necessary work. The forest had been left untended too long. It was choked with dead wood, and if there was another drought next year … pof!
We asked him if the pyromaniac had ever been caught, and he shook his head. The madman with the briquet, he called him. Let’s hope he spends his holidays in the Cévennes next year.
The driver came again the following evening and brought us a Camembert, which he told us how to cook—the way he did when he was in the forest during the winter and needed something to keep out the cold.
“You make a fire,” he said, arranging imaginary branches on the table in front of him, “and you take the cheese from the box and remove the paper wrapping. And then you put it back, d’accord?” To make sure we had understood, he held up the Camembert and tapped its thin wooden box.
“Bon. Now you put the box in the embers of the fire. The box burns. The rind of the cheese turns black. The cheese melts, but” … an instructive finger was raised for emphasis … “he is sealed inside the rind. He cannot escape into the fire.”
A swig of pastis, the moustache wiped with the back of the hand.
“Alors, you take your baguette and split it all the way down. Now—attention aux doigts—you take the cheese from the fire, you make a hole in the rind, and you pour the melted cheese into the bread. Et voilà!”
He grinned, his red cheeks bunching under his eyes, and patted his stomach. Sooner or later, as I had learned, every conversation in Provence seems to turn to food or drink.
At the beginning of 1990, we were sent the weather statistics for the previous year. Despite an unusually wet November, our annual rainfall was less than half the normal amount.