My father spent his war in Africa. He was a corporal in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, but his remit was never to fly planes, bomb cities or fight. Always a big kid at heart, he happily occupied himself by dressing in high heels and women’s clothes, sporting face powder and streaks of carmine-red lipstick. All in the broiling desert heat. This along with sliding out of camp, hitting the hot spots and getting roaring drunk with the likes of such veteran comédiens as Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock. This trio was imprisoned together on several occasions when discovered by their commanding officer falling about the streets of Cairo completely plastered, attempting to hitch a ride back to base, instead of being already tucked up in their bunks. Never dejected by a night in the slammer, my father continued to sing his young heart out and play the fool and was applauded enthusiastically for it, for he was a proud and dedicated member of one of the most renowned of the wartime entertainment troupes, the Ralph Reader Gang Shows.
I spent much of my childhood sitting on his knee or on the floor at his feet, listening to his stories of those days in far-off Africa. They were outclassed in brilliance only by my grandfather’s tales of big-game hunting, though now, looking back on it, I don’t believe my father’s father ever set foot in Africa, whereas my own father’s tales of high jinx were certainly true, if a little embellished.
I mention this now because, over the years, those stories painted in my mind’s eye a scintillating and very colorful picture of the dark continent, of Arabs and bazaars, of South African beaches and Zulus. It was one of my favorite bedtime victories to persuade my father to sit with me a while and speak to me in Zulu. All that clicking on the upper palate, short phrases spoken in deep and resonant tones, used to thrill and excite me. I pictured those seven-foot natives clicking and communicating and banging tall, hand-painted spears, all to ask little more than after your general health! If there had been an Oscar awarded for ham acting, my father would have been a serious contender.
But nothing matched up to his tales of the Arabs. In retrospect, I see that in some ways, his attitudes were shockingly rascist: “Never trust an Arab” was a regular piece of wisdom which I took to be the gospel truth. Many times I heard his sorry tale of the day he was sitting on a train outside Cairo, returning to camp after a few days’ leave in England only to have the reading glasses snatched off his face as the train was pulling out of the central station, leaving him unable to see, let alone recognize the escaping culprit. His only certainty was that the blasted thief had been an Arab!
France was long the imperialist power in northern Africa. The horrors of Algeria are known to us all. Today, France’s second labor force is African, predominantly Arab. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right who preaches France for the French, is their enemy; or rather, they are his. He is more extreme in his rabble-rousing than the late Enoch Powell, and less intelligent in his rhetoric. In spite of the stories bequeathed to me by my father, I have never felt the slightest empathy with Le Pen, nor any other xenophobic demagogue, but what I had never reckoned on was the possibility that one of the local Arab workforce would become one of my closest friends and our greatest ally in the dark days that lay ahead for us and Appassionata.
I HAD SETTLED IN FOR the summer, with no plans to travel anywhere. I had my scripts to complete, the hill to maintain, the arrival of guests to prepare for. I could not be more content. Then the telephone rings. It is Michel.
“We have won an award,” he announces.
My first book, which we filmed as a miniseries in Australia the previous autumn, has been screened at a film festival in the States and has picked up an award. I am speechless. I had not known the series was being presented.
“The Australians want you to publicize it for them.”
“Where?”
“Australia.”
“When?”
“Leave on Friday.”
The line goes silent while I take this in. Actors are used to this. We live with our passports in our pockets. These calls come at any moment, usually when they are least expected. But this time, I am not prepared. It coincides with another film I shot which is opening across Australia any minute now. I know I should go, but I am in a quandary.
I am thinking about No Name, I am worrying about my schedule which is of no one’s making but my own. And the trip, it turns out, is only for one week. I won’t even suffer jet-lag because I’ll be there and back before it hits me. “Fine,” I say eventually.
I begin to set matters in motion. All I need is to close up the house and ask René if he would be kind enough to pop by twice a day to feed No Name. Or as a last resort, I could telephone Amar, who I know will do it for a price. René agrees without a second’s hesitation to house my beloved dog, chez lui, for a week. No Name will be in loving hands; I have nothing to be concerned about.
It is Thursday. I am leaving at the crack of dawn Friday, flying to Sydney via Paris. Alone in my gecko-infested workspace, I settle down to a day’s writing when I hear the whirr of machines start up like an orchestra tuning. They are right beyond the window. Puzzled, I go to take a look, and to my horror, I see three men, their heads and faces masked by plastic helmets, cutting back the strip of land that borders the road to the left of us and lies alongside our olive groves. The jungle of vegetation there has been the only deterrent to entry from that quarter. Recalling the unsavory sensation I felt when I learned that we had been burgled, I throw my pen back onto my desk and go running to stop them.
They have been sent by the mairie, one of them informs me. The land has to be cut back. The neighbors along the lane have complained. It is a fire risk, très sérieux. I look back along the winding lane to where the man indicates. I cannot even see the house he is pointing at. “What neighbors?” I squawk. Their concern exasperates me. “But we are at more risk than those neighbors should a fire break out,” I protest, to no avail.
“Have you been here during a fire?” he asks.
I have to admit that I have not, which seems to be the concluding point.
The workman, who is covered from head to foot with bits of vegetation and sheets of aluminum protective clothing and looks rather like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz, shrugs, dons his helmet and is about to walk away.
“Couldn’t it wait just one week?” I plead. I am thinking that when I return we could buy some fencing and secure this section of land.
He reiterates that he has been sent by the local council and it has nothing more to do with him. He takes up his machine and begins to cut. Stones, strips of split bramble, roots, all go flying into the air. I move out of range of traveling herbage and shooting flint. I know there is nothing I can say or do to stop this now. I return to the house and telephone Michel.
“I can’t leave,” I tell him.
“Don’t be foolish. The publicity tour has been arranged. You can’t not leave.” He is right and I know it. “We will have to take our chances. No Name will be there.” At this stage I don’t bother to explain that I have agreed with René that No Name should stay with him. I drop it. We must continue as planned and hope for the best.
Tormented by the steady drone of the brush cutters baring our home and farm to all and sundry, I give up on my script and set off for the village to buy a week’s supply of dog food. As I round the bend, I am forced to halt because the road is blocked by two large trucks parked one in front of the other. There are also several workmen standing in a huddle, pointing and shouting upward to one of their crew who is strapped onto a crane extension and is slicing chunks off the tops of the complaining neighbor’s exceedingly spiry pine trees. At first I assume this to be part of their disquiet over possible impending fires until I notice that there are cables swinging freely in the road. Some of the telephone wires seem to have broken loose, or maybe a tree has fallen. Cars are banking up behind me, honking insanely. So few cars ever pass this way that I am bemused by this line and cannot think where it has come from. There must be a road closed somewhere else, other cables down. Musing, I sit patiently, listening to the discordance of chainsaw, whirring brush cutters, French and Arab voices disputing the length of time all this is taking, and asking myself what ever happened to the tranquility of this barely known corner of the coast arrière.
Suddenly, I hear two men in front of me begin to shout loudly, “Non, Monsieur, s’il vous plaît, non!” I crane my head out of the window and see a car approaching from the opposite direction. It is attempting to pass the parked trucks. This is a perilous insanity, for our narrow little lane drops sheer to a busy road a lethal hundred meters beneath the cliffside. Everybody takes up the call, Danger! Arms are waving, men are rushing to and fro, yelling, jumping, all engaged in the frenzied business of refusing to allow this driver’s impatience to risk lives. I, along with several other motorists, temporarily abandon our cars to wander along the lane and take a closer look, for what else is there to do? Beyond the trucks and the driver hell-bent on getting through no matter the consequences, are several stationary vehicles, their drivers stone-faced, waiting to move on.
Behind this caravan of rising blood pressure and ranting workers, I spy the approach of the postman on his motorbike, weighed down as always with his satchels of letters hanging like floppy leather ears on either side of his post office–yellow scooter. He draws close, weaves his way in and out of the traffic, circling the screaming, hysterical human beings and slips along the lane by the inner side of the trucks. Engaged in their fury, no one notices him, and he pays the show in progress not a blind bit of attention but presses his foot on his accelerator intending to whizz by the trucks on the inner side of the lane. Unfortunately, he has underestimated the portliness of his own figure or misjudged the width of the passage, no wider than the narrowest of mountain defiles, because he finds himself sandwiched, man and bike, between truck and cliff. I alone hear his cries, for his voice is lost among the general furor.
As I hurry to seek out the driver of the offending truck, I throw a final glance at Monsieur le facteur, whose arms are now stretched wide and waving high above his head, eyes turned skyward and mouth gaping open in frozen horror. His blue postman’s cap has fallen to the ground behind him.
It is only then that I grasp what is about to happen. High above us all, the chainsaw worker in the crane has remained diligently at work. A fairly substantial upper trunk of pine tree is about to give and, any minute now, will come barreling to the ground. Our postman will definitely be its target.
“Attention!” I yell. “Attention!” My actress’s voice booms to full capacity. I am shouting, pointing and running. There is a general cry of “Mon Dieu” as half a dozen men scuttle like a twelve-legged beast to save the postman. The obvious move is to shift the truck, but this cannot be done because the driver has disappeared down the lane for a pipi, so the crowd is obliged to push and drag postman and scooter. Several others are yelling to the mec up on the crane, who eventually gets the message and halts work, leaving a very wobbly-looking pine tree. The driver returns, whistling while closing up his pants, just as the group to the side of his truck is yanking the postman by the shoulders and literally dragging the poor fellow backward off his bike. Everyone, including the postman, is yelling hysterically. He seems barely able to stand, even with the assistance of the rockface behind him, and is rubbing his face with a large spotted handkerchief in an attempt to calm himself.
By now, cars are streaming freely to and fro, while those on foot—the workers—are shaking hands and congratulating themselves and one another. A crisis has been averted.
It is then that I happen upon one of the Arabs who had been lending a hand and who is now making his way toward the house across the lane, our neighbor Jean-Claude’s abode. He sees me, nods and returns to his task of trimming the hedges. I watch him for a moment. I have often heeded him there and, more importantly, have frequently remarked on the gardens and well-pruned orange groves. I walk over to him and introduce myself. He smiles shyly, revealing a toothless mouth save for one tobacco-stained front tooth and a golden nugget farther to the back on the upper left side. He also sports a small blue tattoo in the center of his forehead, reminiscent of the red spot worn by Hindu women. His eyes are warm, if yellowed by age. He knows who I am, he says. He has seen us frequently entering and exiting our property. I ask him if he would be interested in doing a spot of work for us. I explain my dilemma, and we both stand and regard the men relentlessly cutting back the triangular strip of land.
He accepts without hesitation and introduces himself. “Je suis Harbckuouashua,” he says.
Sorry? He repeats his name, and I still cannot grasp it, which tickles him. “Call me Quashia.”
He agrees to begin the following morning. I explain what needs to be done. He lists what he requires, and I set off for the builders’ merchants in search of meters of meshed wire fencing, cement and iron pickets, as well as the almost forgotten dog food.
The following morning, he arrives late. I fear he is not coming. I will miss my plane and am about to give up on him when I catch sight of his silhouette sauntering along the lane. Trust me, he reassures. And so I do.
When I return from Australia a week later, zapped by an overload of radio, newspaper and television interviews—added to turning my body clock on its head twice in the space of a week—I find the fence in place and completed.
Quashia is there waiting for our return from the airport, keen to display his work. In my absence, Michel and he have become the best of buddies: we have acquired the able-bodied man we spoke of at the start of summer. His skills include masonry, tiling, trimming, tree pruning, as well as any other odd job I can come up with.
Proudly he is claiming Michel and me as “ma famille française.” From here on, he addresses Michel as mon cher frère. This greeting is followed by four kisses, two on each cheek, much hugging, followed by back-slapping of a force that leaves Michel limp. At first I have to confess to a certain mistrust of such hearty bonhomie, but I am soon forced to reconsider my unvoiced reservations.
On the other hand, I am not always regarded as a chère soeur, but on occasion, as a potential second wife. When Michel is away or out of sight, even on nothing more than a quick trip to pick up some fresh salad, I have to watch my step. “Sleep with me once, just for the hell of it!” pleads Quashia, and I flee indoors. Glancing back, I catch the tobacco-toothed grin lighting up his sun-cracked face.
HIGH SUMMER IS APPROACHING fast, which means the influx of guests. The first this year will be my parents, who are visiting us for the first time. After their concerns about the purchase of this farm, I fear they will be testing, rigorous, difficult to please, so their imminent arrival makes me edgy. Added to which, Michel has been called to Paris and will not be back until tomorrow. This leaves me running around alone like a headless chicken. I have never claimed to be a good housekeeper and in fact am pretty hopeless, but here I am now dragging sticks of furniture, such as we have—garden chairs as clotheshorses or dressing tables and the like—from room to room, corner to corner, in a pathetic attempt to create ambience and a home which might realistically be judged as up to snuff.
An hour before I am planning to set off for the airport, believing all is about as together as it is going to get, I flop over the balustraded terrace, breath a deep sigh of relief, peruse the shorn grounds all around me and smile proudly down upon our swimming pool. Michel has spent hours vacuuming and treating it, and now it is crystal-clear. That will impress them, I am thinking, rather too overconfidently. Oh no, they can’t call this place a pig in a poke, I am muttering to myself smugly, and then, to my horror, I notice movement. The sanitation cover on the terrace alongside the pool is heaving. An emission of dark brown waste is creeping out from beneath it. Another twenty minutes and the excrement will be slopping like green-jellied aliens into the pool. No, I cry, but the only soul heeding me is No Name, who runs for cover. I scoot inside. My heart is pounding fast. I have to combat this impending disaster before I leave for the airport, or when we return… the image does not bear thinking about.
I rip through the pages of our villa address book, searching for the number of Monsieur Di Fazio. Of course, it is eleven in the morning, and he will have left home for work hours ago. Crazed with panic, I ring anyway. I must meet that plane. I have to stop the seepage. There must be an underground leak in the pipes; by this stage, I am yammering to myself. Desperate, my brain is spaghetti. What in heaven’s name is the French word for leak? I simply cannot recall it.
Madame Di Fazio answers, “Je vous écoute?”
I am still trying to get my head around how to explain the excrement oozing across the terrace beneath me. Truite! Yes, that’s the word I’m searching for! Truite!
“’Ello?”
“TRUITE!” I yell into the phone.
“’Ello?”
“Hello. Madame Di Fazio, c’est Madame—”
“Bonjour Madame. Yes, I recognized your accent.” She laughs kindly. “Are you all right?”
I have no time for such chitter-chatter this morning. My parents’ plane must be sweeping over Lyon by now.
“Madame, I have a serious problem. It’s very urgent.” I am speaking in French, of course.
“Oui, Madame—?”
“Please contact your husband and ask him to come over here right away, please. It is gravement urgent. There is a huge truite which has… somehow… come up through the plumbing and is now moving along the downstairs terrace. It must have escaped through the… er”—I cannot think of how to explain the problem. I have no idea what the translation is, or even the English words for what I am trying to put across are. “Une truite… in the thing… yes, and it’s making for the swimming pool, la piscine.”
Madame Di Fazio is giggling. “Une truite, Madame—?”
“Yes, a truite, heading for the swimming pool.” I am a demented being, shouting and waving my free hand in the air, worse than those lunatics who are convinced that if you speak forcefully enough in English, anyone, no matter what their mother tongue or how nonexistent their grasp of our language, will understand you. “IT’S MOVING TOWARDS THE SWIMMING POOL AND IS ABOUT TO SLIDE INTO THE WATER ANY SECOND NOW AND MY PARENTS WILL BE HERE WITHIN THE HOUR!”
“I’ll call my husband.” She laughs and puts down the phone.
I cannot drag myself away from the upper balcony. I am standing dead-still, staring at the excrement seeping like poison across the terrace beneath me. No Name approaches it gingerly.
“Get away from there!” I yell from way above her. If she treads in it… I scream at her again. “No Name, get away from there!” Her tail disappears beneath her, she glances up at me curiously, regards what from her point of view must be a red and furious face and then slinks away, completely baffled.
Within ten very drawn-out minutes, Mr. Di Fazio’s cranky old motor croaks up the drive. He climbs from his van, covered head to toe in soot, as ever, white teeth grinning like piano keys. “Where’s this monster fish, then?” he chortles.
“What fish?” I cry, believing this to be yet another of his witty cracks alluding to my television career, or rather the career he continues to insist is mine. Right now I cannot contemplate programs with fish in the title; I am in no mood for it. “Look! Look there!” I lead him to the drainage, and he laughs long and loud. His fat stomach heaving with merriment.
“Why are you laughing, Mr. Di Fazio? This is serious! My parents are on their way. My mother already thinks I have no common sense. Please, do something. HELP!” And help he does. Out of his van, he unwinds meters of thick coiled piping. The underground canal is suctioned and emptied in no time, along with two others situated at various points descending the drive, which according to our plumber could also cause us distress. Then off he goes, explaining happily that he and Michel can discuss a cash price during the weekend. “For the removal of the fish.”
I am completely baffled but extraordinarily grateful, and I cannot spend time now trying to get to grips with his sense of humor. I need to leave for the airport instantly. I am late.
I arrive frazzled, zipping like a demented lizard. Naturally, I am not on time. Their plane has landed, they have collected their luggage and are awaiting me outside, smiling and unruffled. “Hello, dear.”
Back at the villa, after they are installed in their clean but basic room, which is bettered by plentiful bunches of Marguerite daisies picked from the garden, I take them on a tour. They drink it all in silently. “Well, what do you think?” I ask at last.
“I’m glad you’ve got big windows,” says my mother. “I don’t like those small ones the French foreigners always have here.” My father’s response is “I think you might have bitten off more than you can chew.”
WHILE I HAVE BEEN occupied with the tending of my family, word has been spreading fast on the village bush telegraph. I am now known as the actress who can take on the world as Emma Peel but who calls in the plumber to remove a giant trout from her drainage system. In scatterbrained panic, I have muddled my nouns: fuite, or leak, and truite, trout.
It’s time to learn the language, I concede when I hear my linguistic confusion repeated back to me. Sheepishly, I take myself off to Nice, to the university, where I enroll in an intensive summer course.
During my lunch break which, being French, last at least two—if not three—hours, I wander the streets and coastal strip of Nice, keen to learn a little about the city at close quarters. It has flavors to it other than Cannes. For one thing, it is a university city, and even though it is summer and the students have disappeared to the countryside or mountains and the profs are on congé, which means the university is only catering to linguistic numbskulls like me, the city still gives off a very different energy. There are myriad bookshops, a healthy majority of young people, a wide choice of movie theaters, an abundance of excellent museums and restaurants and a working population which is not dominated by the idle rich. It teems with bustling life, with inhabitants going about their days trying to make a living, and sports a magnificent harbor where colossal white passenger liners lie in dock preparing departures to Corsica or Italy, even to the Nordic lands or some as far afield as Russia.
Set back from the harbor is the old town, where the street names are written in both French and Niçoise, which is the patois language once spoken here. Perhaps the crowning glory of the vielle ville is the flower market to be found a few steps from the famous opera house, where Rigoletto is to be performed this evening.
The language I am hearing everywhere around me is Italian. Every week, the most avid and passionate of French shoppers cross the border to buy produce and very reasonably priced Italian clothing (and booze) at the frontier market town of Ventimiglia. In turn, the Italians are drawn here on Mondays to spend their lire on antiques and fresh produce every other day of the week.
Along the street Rue St-François-Paule, written in patois as Carriera San-Francés-de-Paula, is a huilerie, an oil shop, belonging to the Moulin à Huile d’Olive of Nicolas Alziari, a famous name in the business of oil production. His groves are situated in the granite hills up behind this city, and the fruit is a mix of the same small Nice olive, the cailletier, as ours and another, the picholine olive, which is longer and thinner. Picholine olives are named after a Monsieur Picholine, who developed a method of curing green olives using the ash from the green oaks that grow everywhere in this region—we have plenty on our terrain. I would have enjoyed a short browse, but the shop is closed for lunch. Across the street, also gone for lunch, a competitor is situated. The huilerie of Caracoles, where it is written—although I have not come across this maison before—the products are regionaux, les articles provençaux.
Making a short detour along the rue de la terrasse, the carriera de la terrassa, I am drawn to a hand-painted sign reading cave, Pierre Bianchi & Cie, where the painted glass windows are proof of its heritage. It announces proudly three siècles d’existence. Three centuries of trading. Quite a feat, considering the history of this city. It means they were here before the French; Nice was ceded to France in 1860.
I step up to the glass to read its hours of business, thinking that I might return after my afternoon course, and am amused to read that it reopens at two and has no particular hour of closing and on Sundays is closed only si grosse fatigue. If enormously tired!
The colors and architecture of the tall shuttered buildings crammed alongside one another in streets so narrow a bicycle can barely pass through (certainly not our postman!) are Italian-influenced: vibrant red ocher, yellow ocher and mustard hues, all decorated with faded green or bleached turquoise shutters, or pale dusty lilac, a color so fragrant you can almost inhale it.
Until 1860, this ancient city was governed by the House of Savoy and was adjoined to the kingdom of Sardinia, Piedmont and Liguria. Shortly after this date, these other provinces became part of a new unified Italy. But even today, there is much about Nice that boasts of its Italian heritage, not least its fabulous Mardi Gras carnival, with its masked balls dating back to the thirteenth century and known by the Italian name of veglioni. This famous carnival still parties here nonstop during the three weeks leading up to Lent and proudly claims the use of a ton of papier-mâché for every float!
Behind partially shuttered windows, I glimpse local craftsmen beavering away in ateliers barely larger than postage stamps. A bald-headed cobbler repairing the soles of a pair of leather sandals puts them to one side and shuts up shop for lunch. Along a crooked dead-end alley leading off one of the many squares, I encounter a mechanic disgorging the engine of an ancient pram-size Fiat Cinquecento. He is seated in the driver’s seat with the door hanging open, facing out to the world at large. In his lap is a dish of what looks like pork in a rich, winy sauce. On the ground at his feet are a half-emptied flacon and a glass of rosé wine, fruit, cheese, a half-eaten baguette and two hungry curs salivating at a safe distance, waiting for scraps. Clotheslines of sheets, shirts and undies are festooned like bunting everywhere above me, reaching across the narrow lanes from one side to the other. I hear the hum of a carpenter or cabinetmaker planing great sheets of wood. He must be the only craftsman still at work, for the midday siren has sounded and the world of les ouvriers has downed tools.
I am also growing hungry and make for the Cours Saleya, or in patois, Lou Cors, to the marketplace. It is sensational. The central square is an amphitheater of ancient colored buildings, the most magnificent of which is now the home of the Préfecture des Alpes-Maritimes and was once the palace of the Dukes of Savoie. The flower market, operating alongside the fish and food stalls, is a glorious blaze of colors and perfumes, crowned with pot after pot of brilliant green, aromatic herbs. It is a feast for all my senses, and I cannot resist a dozen long-stemmed birds of paradise. Now I must hurry and move on to the food. One stall is selling, they tell me—and I take their word for it, since I haven’t the time to count—one hundred and fifty different varieties of spice. Each is neatly laid out on dishes dressed in brightly hued Provençal cotton with the name of the spice handwritten in black ink. Muscade, poivre concassé, poivre Sichuan, exotique, but they are being whisked away and stored in the rear of a van parked in the cobbled square. Another marketeer offers olives. His array is a fête! Among a mind-boggling choice are olives de la Puglia, from Italy. They are the largest I have ever set eyes on and resemble in size, as well as shape, small green lemons. I help myself to one and slip it into my mouth, sucking on it with the glee of a child savoring a piece of hard candy. It is sharp and peppery and delicious.
At various corners and angles in the alleys near the market, there are dozens of busy restaurants where knives and forks clatter, glasses chink, voices chatter, laughter peals and diners await their meals being served al fresco; the acoustics of the ritual of lunch are amplified by the tall buildings.
I press my nose against the windows of one or two enticing traiteurs, hungry to gorge on everything. I must decide, since everyone is packing up for lunch. I creep inside the second where the flagstone floors are cool and clean, where the pastry smells so warm and soft and yielding you might lie down on it, and where every plate on offer is of psychedelic shades. Mayonnaise has never looked so rich, so yellow and creamy. I want to dive into the large round dish and behave rudely with it.
The dishes of Nice are not necessarily the same as those of Cannes; here again, the Italian and the Provençal influences are in evidence. I buy myself a workingman’s portion of tourte de blea, which is a local specialty. Still piping from the oven, its pastry is as delicate as papier poudre, and I carry my thick slice in a paper bag like a trophy to be consumed with a bottle of mineral water on a bench overlooking the Med, now bobbing with oily, shrieking people.
The beaches along this Promenade des Anglais are filling up by the day. To the right, half a kilometer along the coast, the planes sweep low, disgorging yet another batch of holidaymakers. Summer is upon us with its whiffs of suntan lotion, children splashing and screaming with joy, the bells of ice-cream vans ting-a-linging and the ceaseless impatience of drivers leaning on their horns. Two youths, skinheads with radiant pink mohawks, come to a standstill alongside me. The one farther to the left takes an asthmatic drag on a joint, then passes it to his friend, who does the same. They gaze out at the languid sea flopping against the beach in small curls of foam. “S’foockin’ grea’ ’ere,” says one, in a thick, lazy Scottish accent. His pal grunts and they move on.
Within the hazy, heat-drenched distance, I am able to discern the contours of the Alps which are, whatever the season, the magnificent backdrop to this sweeping seafront. Few of these visitors ever see this coastline at its most breathtaking, which, for me, is on a sharp wintry day when the limpid sea is a brilliant turquoise, the coast is depopulated save for a lone inhabitant or two strolling, windblown, close on the heels of racing, excited dogs while behind them the mauve mountains rise up, crisp, clear and snowcapped.
Ambling along a return route previously unknown to me, toward the university, I spot a poissonnerie that has reopened and slip in to buy succulent clovisses and praires clams, perfect for spaghetti alle vongole, which I now decide to make this evening and serve on the terrace by candlelight.
As I consider whether my family will enjoy this dish, a memory flashes by of my father’s mother, who sat by her fireside in the east end of London, a cigarette smoking between her nicotine-stained fingers, a glass of stout beer on the tiled hearth, picking cockles and winkles with a pin from their shells. Here cockles are known as fausse praire. How many worlds make up a life!
In a winding labyrinthine lane somewhere toward the heart of the city, I pass by a butcher specializing in game and poultry and pause to take a closer look. Beyond the glass is a still-life menagerie. It is crowded with heads, curly-tailed haunches and an array of hosed, furry bodies dangling from meat hooks. There are rabbits and hares, unplucked pigeons, quails, chickens and ducks, plump geese alongside tiny birds no bigger than sparrows. And on an oval silver platter in the foreground, like John the Baptist as presented to Salome, the pièce de résistance, are the heads of two wild boars. Their fanged teeth jut from semiclosed mouths, smiling with misjudged confidence. Although their days of hunting are over, they remain tusked and bristly but, decapitated, have lost much of their menace. Studying them at close quarters, I have no desire to rekindle an intimacy with any of their cousins living on our land.
BACK AT HOME, DAYS slide by, and the gentle splash of bodies paddling to and fro in the pool is the music of the afternoons. My script moves on apace. No Name grows healthier by the day, springing from one terrace to another like a gazelle in flight. While my mother siestas or reads and my father—with No Name constantly padding or sleeping at his side—snores in the shade or bakes himself a lurid red in the sun and my mother nags him to get in out of the heat before he gets sunstroke, Michel and I wander endlessly and aimlessly, taking stock and sharing our visions. Perching on stones buried in the drying grass, plucking daisy heads, we chalk up lists of projects. Mine are of orchards, fruit trees, farming, vegetable beds to nurture, a compost to dig, terraces furnished with succulents in tall terra-cotta pots; the produce of the earth surrounded by space and tranquility and the freedom to write: self-expression.
Michel’s perspective on the future contains a communal esprit, and architecture. He has a more structural approach to the place: overview. There it is again, his favorite German word: überblick. I am passionately involved at close quarters, while he is pursuing the larger canvas. He reads the lines of the terraces, the symmetry of the olive groves which I haven’t even noticed, the shapes and curves of walls. He detects cracks, fissures, the balance or imbalance of windows, aberrations that have been added to the property over the years and have destroyed its overall elegance, its simplicity of form. He draws up plans for future watering systems and reflects upon a practical choice of plants for this mountainous region. Agave cacti, palms, yuccas, citrus fruits, eucalyptus, olives. He never would have handed over cash for a hundred roses to wilt in the hot sun, obliging us to pass half our days hiking hoses or buckets up and down the hill in a never-ending attempt to keep them watered, but we don’t talk about my hundred roses, nor about the trader who took my money for them and never returned.
And he talks of artists, filmmakers, writers in wooden huts buried at work in corners of our pine forest… here we disagree! But in our shared idyll, all debate is amiable, nothing acrimonious.
Back at the villa, I catch my mother watching us; clearly, she is concerned. My father, who always has a useful aphorism on the tip of his tongue, is baffled: “You’ve got a career back home, love. A bird in the hand…” He has risen from his postlunch slumbers and is playing with the dog, or rather, she yields to him like a puppy, on her back, legs in the air, while he strokes her stomach and examines her. I see him fiddling with her teats, a frown crossing his beetroot-flushed face.
“What’s wrong? Is No Name ill?”
I barely hear my mother’s concerns: “I’ve seen you do some daft things, Carol, but… if you want a swimming pool, why not work in Hollywood? Think champagne and you’ll drink it!”
I giggle. It’s true that for the sake of “art,” my untamed nature or the whims of la passion, I have dived headlong into some “daft things”: hung out in Rome doing little better than extra work at Cinecittà and learning Italian, lived a week inside a live volcano, dived the seven seas, had a crack at tracking snowy regions of Lapland with a sleigh and six dogs, got blazing drunk on some deeply suspect concotion with headhunters in a longhouse in Borneo, traveled unaccompanied up the Amazon… oh, the list is endless, and I don’t regret most of it (the longhouse was a bit precarious; one more glass, and my head might have ended up on a key ring), but the purchase of Appassionata does not equate. It is an exploration of another kind because it requires commitment and faith. It is a canvas, and we are two creating this journey. My parents’ final words on the subject are: “Well, I hope you know what you’re doing!”
I don’t. It would be arrogance to claim that I do. I know where I have come from, what I am attempting to leave behind, the habits and experiences I want to shed like a skin, but not where I am going or even what exactly I am seeking. I am taking it as it comes, making it up as I go along. Pushing the boundaries of identity, hopefully to enrich, deepen, cultivate the spirit. Better to give it a shot than stare at the rain through wrinkled rheumy eyes, sighing What if…
“This dog is pregnant,” my father pronounces. This stops all metaphysical philosophizing. Within seconds, all of us are on our haunches surrounding No Name, who looks from one to the next, uncertain and puzzled. She nuzzles close to Daddy.
“No, it’s not possible,” I say, staring at her swollen black nipples.
“We should call the vet.”
“No, she’s fine. There’s no way she could be pregnant.”
IF QUASHIA IS TO CONTINUE his sterling work of fencing then we must, by law, call in a surveyor, a géomètre, to stake out the boundaries of the land. Once this has been done, he will notify our neighbors in writing—including scale maps as drawn up by the department of cadastration—of our decision. If no boundary neighbor (which is only one) contests our rights within a period of twenty-eight days, then the same expert forwards the necessary documents to be signed by the adjoining landowners, which will confirm that they have no claims against the ownership of our land.
All this to fence our property and keep the burglars out! Farmland and buildings—every square meter, every stone fence, every stable—are clearly defined in numbered plots and detailed sketches on the maps and plans filed with both the notaire and the local council registers. Still, it has to be done. French bureaucracy is French bureacracy, and it is tireless!
So the géomètre can actually find the boundaries of the property to stake, a traversable pathway needs to be hollowed out of the weeds and jungle. This means hacking land way beyond the acres cut back by Amar, which to our dismay are growing faster than we can earn the cash to keep them at bay. And due to the enormous fire hazards in the area, all landowners are responsible for the safety level of their herbage. I am beginning to get a sense of the never-ending battle that lies ahead if we are to keep the tangle of growth on the farm under control, and the prospect of it exhausts me.
Quashia arrives. He and Michel are going to attack the grounds together. With trimming machines on their shoulders, water bottles in plastic bags and face visors to protect their eyes, the pair hike up the stone track behind the house and disappear into the forest.
As he heads up the hill with Michel at his heels, Quashia points to a mass of small spindly stalks which are growing everywhere. Wild asparagus, he tells me, delicious. I pick a huge bunch and steam them with the idea of adding them to a salad or serving them with prawns or as an accompaniment to another spaghetti alle vongole. In fact, I serve them as a first course to my family for lunch. “They’re rather bitter, dear,” says my mother. I add lemon juice, olive oil and pepper, and we find them… bitter.
“I can’t eat this! What is it? Some type of grass?” my father says.
I chuck them out and decide to leave the rest in the garden.
WHILE I AM CHEERFULLY chanting verbs in Nice, Michel’s parents telephone to say that they have decided to accept his invitation and visit us; they will be arriving in two days. My parents are not due to leave for a while yet, and before their departure, Michel’s daughters are flying down. We lack habitable bedrooms. So while my father and Michel work the land with Quashia, my mother offers to help me tear out what Michel and I have christened “the brown room.” It remains as we found it, a hideous, smelly space. After scrubbing, buckets of Eau de Javel and a slap of whitewash, it has the potential to become a cool, airy retreat with a fine view across the valley and a perfect situation right alongside the swimming pool. Its previous function seems to have been for puppy breeding. The tenant who skipped out on the bills must have run some kind of kennels here—we have come across one or two rather ghastly examples of her workmanship—but in this room she surpassed herself. It has been divided into eight nests that are entirely covered in a foully stained brown carpet. Not only is the entire floor done in this dank rugging but all four walls as well. Lack of air and years of puppy pee seeping into the rotting weave added to an outside temperature of 80°, and you can understand why we have left this room till last.
My mother loves to clean and scrub, to make bonfires and burn great mounds of rubbish. She seems to find fanatical joy in all such activity. I, on the other hand, loathe it, but she soon has me up and at it. Dragged away from my computer, I am armed with mops, sponges, scissors, bread knives, ladders, hammers and hot water. As we rip at the walls, dead plaster and white dust crash down upon with us with the force of an imploding mine. Within minutes, we resemble bakers. My throat is dry as a bone, and I am giddy with trying to hold my breath because the acrid air has me reeling, but worse is yet to come. Living beneath the carpet is an entire microworld of insects and small black worms, disgusting little beings wriggling free from the shock of having been unearthed. Everywhere around us, creatures are on the move.
Perspiration stings my eyes, dust is engrained in my hot, sticky flesh. Spiders and other bodies are marching over my feet, and some are ascending my calves. I shout across to my mother that we should give up. She answers, “Why, dear, we are getting on nicely.” I glimpse her across the room. Scraping and scrubbing, ripping and tearing, she is having the time of her life. I can tolerate spiders as long as they are not too large and hairy, but these small black worms look venomous. We begin to lift up the floor covering. Beneath the carpet are twelve-inch gray cement blocks which have been stacked and grouted into a maze of small walls, presumably to discourage the puppies from crossing from one nest to the next. Settled in among them is a mass of black stirring life. I think I am going to throw up and suggest most emphatically that we leave it, but my mother shakes her head. “We’re nearly finished, dear,” she says. I have to get this over with fast. I cannot bear one more black being mountain-climbing over me. I run to the tool shed, where I dig out a mallet. Back I come. Swinging my arm like a discus thrower, I begin to smash at the cement blocks. I am sweating and heaving, thrusting and crashing. Shards of cement shoot all over the place. Furry and shiny carapaced creatures are whizzing through the air. My mother is yelling at my incompetence. My legs are bleeding. I have no expertise for this, but I am determined until finally even my mother runs for cover. “Stop,” she cries, “stop,” pleading with me to leave the dislodging and dismantling to Michel or Quashia “before there’s an accident.”
I am satisfied. With brooms and black bags, we begin to shovel up the mess we have created, stripping the room bare. It is then we notice the floor.
“Look at this!” Yet another original find. The tiles are obviously Italian. Each has a blond stone base with terra-cotta triangular insets and, at the center, sunflowers in brilliant yellow.
They are exquisite and as far as we can tell—given the mountains of general detritus, rotting carpet piled everywhere and insects who won’t stay where they have been swept—barely damaged. How could anybody in their right mind have cemented blocks on top of such craftsmanship? I am bemused but thrilled and can picture this bedroom in days to come with crisp white linen and sunflower-yellow walls nestling behind our Matisse-blue slatted shutters. Well-rested guests waking to the music of water trickling into the swimming pool. Open the shutters to a new day, swallows wheeling overhead, and there, on the tiled surround, tall terra-cotta pots ablaze with scarlet-red geraniums to greet them.
It was worth the work and the worms.
We stagger out into the hot afternoon, promising to reconvene for tea. My mother disappears to shower and put the kettle on while my father reminds me we should call the vet, which I agree to do after I have hiked the hill in search of Michel and Quashia. I am too excited to await their return, and I need an oxygen tank full of fresh clean air.
At the summit, it is a veritable rain forest. The broom bushes have been left for so long they are twice any man’s height. Even here, there are olive trees hidden in the canopy of rampant growth. Branches whip against my arms, unknown leaves pricking and jabbing as I force my way through. A holly scratches my damp, plastered shoulder. It stings unreasonably. I am calling every few minutes, but the whirring of machines and cicadas drowns out everything. I spy Michel. He is bent over, hacking away with a scythe, liberating strangled trees, disentangling brambles, suckers and vines. Quashia is working at ground level, clearing roots with the strimmer. They crack and thud as they fall.
As I draw near, I pause for breath and take in the staggering beauty of the surrounding hillside. In every direction, there are pines and dusky olive trees, dry stone terraces falling away like snow slopes and, way off in the distance, toward a dense cobalt horizon, the seductive sight of the sun-kissed sea dotted with clear white sails.
Deep hot stillness.
On the terrace beneath me, I spy a twisted, ailing pomegranate engulfed in trumpet vine. Roots and stripped branches lie like dead men on a battlefield. Michel straightens up, lifts his visored head and spies me. Quashia is thankful to switch off the machine, a moment’s respite from the sweltering graft. I recount the news of our treasure buried beneath the muck. I watch Michel’s delight, the smile spreading and breaking across his sticky, muddied complexion. “We have a surprise, too.” He grins, pointing.
Way off to the left of where I am standing is our ruin, uncovered for the first time in at least a decade. We hike over to it and discover the remains of a picturesque little cottage. In what still exists of the living room, there is a fireplace and chimney, terra-cotta tiles—no roof—and crumbling walls; beyond are outhouses where the animals would have bedded down, a fabulous semicircle staircase which leads us up to a higher terrace shaded by a fig tree and a monumental, very ancient Judas tree. I had often wondered why Lawrence Durrell described this magnificent, deep-rose flowering tree as “tragic” until I read legend has it that Judas hanged himself from the branches of one. In the distance, looking back beyond our land, our tiled terraces, the pool where my family is relaxing, swooping down past the olive groves, is a wide blue expanse of Mediterranean. Perfect.
Time for tea.
Quashia and Michel put down their tools, and we trail in single file back down the stony pathway. Quashia pauses to point out a clump of pale green plants which I don’t recognize.
“What is it?” I ask him. An aromatic herb. The name he gives is Arabic. “Excellent for the stomach. Drink it as an infusion.” The leaves have a pungent scent, sweet yet spicy, but we cannot place it. “Shall I pick some for tea?”
I tell him next time. After the wild asparagus, I prefer to leave well enough alone.
We seat ourselves in the garden and drink Indian tea. I am fascinated to watch my father with No Name forever at his side. Though neither he nor Quashia can understand a word the other says, they are fooling together, and an image returns. I picture myself as a child on his knee, entranced by his exotic tales of those Cairo nights, of that wicked Arab who stole his glasses, and I regard the two men in front of me now, a million worlds apart, clowning like schoolboys. My father is attempting to recall a word or two of Arabic but gives up and instead offers his welcome greeting in Zulu, to which Quashia falls about with toothless, good-natured laughter.