October winds post crisp deliveries of dry leaves, torn petals, pine needles, and grit-rolled insects under sun-shrunken doors.
For generations, we women swept them up with the brush and pan, on our knees. Twice a day, when the mistral raged.
There are one hundred and eighty different winds that blow across Provence, all with their different and special names: the mistral, of course, from the northwest; the tramontane from the north; the south wind; and all the minute grades in between. They say there are more than six hundred different variations of the names of the winds.
Here in the Luberon, where around thirty of them are regular visitors, a softer wind from north-northwest is called a biset, a little kiss, but the might of a cold north wind is l’air noir, or bise noire, black air, black kiss. It is violent and chill, like a storm in the depths of a winter’s night without a moon.
A northeasterly is l’orsure, or le vent de l’ours, the wind of the bear—which, they say, is the wind of melancholy poets, artists, and dreamers. The north-northwesterlies are the vents de farine, the winds that grind the millers’ flour. The kindly vent roux, the russet winds, are east-southeasterly, close in spirit to the North African sirocco, bringing warm, dry breezes ridden by pollinating insects and rusty Arabian dust.
During autumn and winter, when the worst winds howled, the summer lived on in the red and orange and green of the fruit and vegetables pressed into glass jars and sealed. As the temperature dropped, olive oil went cloudy in the bottle.
Once, when I was still too young to dispute the facts, Pierre warned me that the eerie white shapes held in the oil were imprisoned spirits.
“Like ghosts?” I asked.
“Bad ghosts.”
“Will they escape?”
“They might,” said Pierre.
“If they do, what will we do? Will they catch us if we run?”
“We will be pinned to the ground, unable to move, while they do terrible things.”
“Like what?”
While I stared in wide-eyed horror, he went over to the glass jar with a devilish look on his face, which made his chin look more pointed than ever. He made to drop the jar on the floor.
“Don’t! Don’t!” I begged him.
He gave one more unsettling laugh, but then slowly replaced the jar on the shelf. He would have gone through with his threat, I was sure, but for the rattle at the back door that announced our father’s return from the fields.
Change is not always visible, as the turn of the seasons is, or the natural process of aging. We are so many different people in one lifetime. But even now I think Marthe can sense my thoughts, would feel the rough textures of my indecision under her fingers, and taste my failings as easily as she could smell the changing seasons.
As for Pierre: what disturbance occurred inside his head, under his skin, so early in his life? I never understood him.
Why had he come back now? To laugh at me and mock my efforts? Why couldn’t it have been gentle Maman, or Marthe, or, best of all, Mémé Clémentine? A grandmother would have been in the natural order. I might have welcomed her return, given a choice of phantoms. Hers would have been a watchful presence by the hearth, by the entrance to the wine cave maybe, or in the quiet spot in the orchard or the kitchen garden.
I still grow my own food. I eat vegetables mainly, and fast-growing chickpeas, that peasant standby. I keep as fit as possible, though my joints are not as flexible as they once were. When I wring out the washing, and try to pinch the pegs to hang it out, my fingers take longer than they should to grip. I’ve noticed that after a few hours in the vegetable patch, soil gets stuck in the deep grooves of my hands. Such a lot of scrubbing it takes to get out, and when that’s done, the things are red and bent like claws. It creeps up gradually, old age, all the more insulting when you were convinced it was a state that would never happen to you.
How much more I understand now, though! I still use the same utensils and pots that Maman used, and clean the copper with lemon juice, just as she did, the acid biting into the cuts in my fingers, just as it must have into hers, though she never complained. It’s important to keep up tradition.
“Go to town for work?” she’d cry. “But there’s always so much to be done here!” A countrywoman to the bone, she found the very notion of leaving the hamlet, let alone the village commune, for work unbelievable. It was enough to make it necessary for her to sit down (a rare event) with a restorative cup of lavender tisane. I don’t think I ever told her how much I would have loved to train as a nurse or a teacher.
Do I look like a mad old woman now? I suspect I do.
Maman’s little mirror is long gone. What would be the point of looking in a mirror, anyway? The only visitors are the birds and the wild animals, and the children who dare each other to play mean tricks and risk catching sight of the madwoman who lives here alone.
Better to be invisible.