The airport at Nice is closed. I cannot get back. Each day I telephone Charles de Gaulle and am told that the situation has not changed. René is holding the fort, but the olive season is commencing and he has over seven hundred trees to tend. I must return. Michel’s health is improving. He works from his little studio in the mornings, then we meander for an hour or so up and down the crooked, cobbled lanes of the Latin Quarter, pausing in the small garden facing Notre-Dame Cathedral before poking about in the musty corners of the English-language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, until it is time for him to return and put up his feet for the remainder of the day. The pains have subsided. Our last visit to the doctor was very reassuring. If Michel’s health continues to improve at this rate, there will be no need for the operation, and before too long, he will be able to return to a more civilized diet. I feel a little quieter about leaving him. In an ideal world, I would stay, but there is work to be done, and in a few more days, he will join me at the farm for a quiet and simple Christmas.
Curiously, frustratingly, the airport remains closed. What is going on? When I finally get through on the telephone, I am informed by a member of the Air France ground staff that the problem is the weather. Yes, but for five days now I have been trying to get a flight. What weather could possibly close an airport in a climate as temperate as ours for such a period of time? She does not know.
I check the weather pages in both Le Monde and Libération. In both papers, alongside Nice, is a miniature drawing of the sun, beaming at me beatifically. I am baffled. Eventually, I hire a little car and set off with everything we will need for the holidays. Just before my departure, Michel receives a fax to say that the first sale on the series has been made, to Greece. We are over the moon. And how fitting it seems to us both that Greece, mythological land of the olive tree, will allow us to make our first reimbursement to the bank. It buoys me, for the thought of separation never gets easier. These days together have been harmonious and dulcet. Parting, particularly under these conditions, hurts.
I LOVE TO DRIVE LONG distances. The solitude and the passing landscape clear my thoughts. Whenever I am blocked with my writing or have a problem to unravel, I will get in the car and go for a spin. This trip offers me the perfect opportunity to mentally catch up on the time I have been falling behind with my work. I stop for a quick lunch and, to stretch my legs, stroll around the medieval town of Beaune, gazing in the windows of antique shops, before continuing my journey. It is a pleasing drive. The weather throughout the day is crisp and topaz bright. The passing countryside is naked but for row upon row of twisted vines, smoking hillsides, frozen runnels of dark earth and occasional sightings of farmers or country folk clad in gloves and scarves and overcoats.
It is somewhere around Montelimar that night falls; early, because we are approaching the shortest days of the year. The sky is clear, a deep wisteria blue, and the stars resplendent. At first I mistake the glaringly bright light behind me for a car approaching on high beams and feel irritated by the selfishness of certain drivers. Then I glance in my side mirror again and look harder. There is no traffic. The great globe of light is the moon. I slow, move over into the truck lane and, because the road is deserted, pull up on the hard shoulder.
Everything on earth seems to be illuminated by the lunar glow. I have never seen the moon this bright, waves of flaxen light on the silent, distant hillsides. I step out of the car and tilt my head to gaze heavenward. It seems so close I could caress it or draw it down, cradle it in my arms. A platinum balloon, a great round scoop of Montelimar nougat. Its proximity is eery, awesome, but it lights my path all the way home.
Journey’s end. I cross the bridge and turn into the lane. The familiarity of the approach is gratifying. Here are sweet-scented orange groves and agave cacti to welcome me. Here, silhouettes of lofty coned cypresses. Here there is peace. I draw up outside the gates to search for my keys. The cottage, meant for a caretaker and sadly empty since the departure of Quashia, is lit up. For a fleeting moment, I think that someone is in there, and then I see that it is this same extraordinary moon casting beacons of light across the desolate garden, knee-high in weeds, illuminating it as though with electricity.
The dogs plunge down the drive to meet me. Three of them. Ella, Lucky and who? No Name? No, the third animal is too small to be No Name. They yap and bark, panting and frolicking with excitement, following the unknown car the full reach of my ascent. Flanking us are the olive groves and, at the foot of each tree, our circular sprays of netting. Ah, it is a joy to be back. I wind down the window and breathe in the perfumed air. An owl screeches from somewhere in the forest high above. I step from the car and am instantly bowled over by three pairs of paws landing against my hips. There is much licking and tail-wagging happiness. The third fellow is a black and white hound with long, droopy ears and an even longer piebald body. He is compact and muscular with legs like a soccer player’s. “Who are you, where did you come from?” I ask him, but he backs off shyly and begins to yowl like a country and western singer, which makes me laugh. Before going inside, I walk the terraces for a few minutes, stretching my legs. Twisted galaxies of stars dazzle like tinsel in the moonshine. The world is as clear as broken daylight.
Dare I take it as a sign that our days of darkness are coming to an end? That life will soon be reconciled and polychromed once more?
I AM DEAD TO THE WORLD the following morning, coming to consciousness only when I hear the diesel spit of René’s sturdy Renault climbing the drive. His arrival is followed by a chorus of barking dogs. I turn over and glance at the clock. Seven-thirty. Downstairs, I hear the clatter of aluminum dog bowls scraping the ground as they slurp and guzzle greedily. I grab a robe and head out onto the terrace in bare feet, calling as I go. The tiles are cold beneath me. The air is brisk. The day is clear and ominously still. René looks up and waves. “Bonjour! Tu vas bien?”I nod, yawn, stretching my sleepy, bed-warm body as I glance out across the sweeping valley to the sea, where white horses are discernible on choppy waves. A sign of wind. Bad weather coming in. “Tu veux un café?” I ask him.
He tells me yes and heads to the trunk of his car, drawing out a chainsaw. One of ours. Needed sharpening, he explains.
“By the way,” I call as I head back into the house. “Whose dog is that?”
“The hound? He turned up about a week ago, following behind your shepherd. Never leaves her side. I tried to shoo him off, but he’s not budged. He’s only a puppy.”
Coffee mugs in hand, on the terrace by the pool, we study the olive groves. Birds trill and echo in winter song. Overhead, a buzzard tracks and circles.
“Have you looked at the trees?” he asks.
“Briefly, last night. What is it? The paon?”
“No, no. I said it would be a bumper crop, but even I underestimated. We’ll need help. When’s Michel back?”
I explain the news, and he nods thoughtful concern, then asks me to take a walk with him. We leave our cups on one of the garden tables and set off to tour the terraces. The trio of dogs canter at our heels until our new arrival lets out a curious and rather comical baying, then takes off like a streak of lightning and the other two follow.
“He’s a proper little hunter, that fellow.”
“I wonder where he’s come from. I’ll have to call the vet and the refuge, find out if he’s been reported missing.”
“Runt of the litter, I’d say. You might be stuck with him.”
I laugh, wondering what it is that makes our home such a popular hostel for stray dogs. In spite of our renovations, is it possible that they can sniff the old kennels here? Do scents linger as long as memories?
During my absence, the olives have grown plumper, slightly softer, but remain purply-green. The weight of such a crop is dragging the branches low. A few are brushing the nets. René drops onto his haunches and scans my famous green netting. There is barely an olive in sight. “They are clinging fast to the trees. Not ripening. It’s the same everywhere. I don’t want the branches to start snapping.”
“What’s the forecast?” I ask. “It doesn’t look too good out at sea.”
“I didn’t hear. We should harvest some of this fruit. Of course it won’t yield the same quantity of oil, being so green, but I have—I don’t know, a feeling in my bones.”
“What about?”
“Not sure. Never in all my years of oléiculture have I known the fruit refuse to ripen like this.”
“Could it be the paon?”
“It’s not only your farm, it’s all over.”
The hound returns, tail wagging, a dead rabbit hanging limply from his jaws. His front legs are bloodied. I am appalled and want to chide him but what’s the use, the little fellow is a hunter. He pants, pleased as Punch with himself. I confiscate the still-warm corpse and carry it to the dustbin while three disappointed mutts stare at me miserably, watching their postbreakfast treat disappear before their eyes. I pretend to be cross with the little fellow, but I cannot help grinning, for what a splendid threesome they make: retriever, shepherd and hound, tails awagging.
René and I agree that he will make a start within a day or two. Ideally, if I can find someone to lend a hand, it would save him some time; or he can try to rope in some of his own cronies, but the problem is they are harvesting elsewhere. I promise to do my best, but thoughts of Manuel stunt my expectations. As René settles in his car, he asks, “You better collect your oranges. My wife makes excellent marmalade, and I’ll make you the finest vin d’orange you’ve ever tasted. By the way, did you see on the television that this region is going to be granted an AOC next year? It won’t be for the likes of you and me, but it should improve the local oil prices on the national market, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?”
I smile. I have never tasted vin d’orange.
“Diable! I’ll make you bottles of the stuff. You won’t forget it!”
An Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée for the finest of the olive oils from this region. One or two areas of northern Provence have already been granted this coveted mark of respectability, and certain connoisseurs believe the olives from our coastal strip—particularly the modest cailletier, which is the variety we farm—to be the one that produces the most delicious of all oils. I think it would be a rather splendid tag.
AFTER COMBING THE EMPLOYMENT pages of the Nice Matin, our local rag, phoning one or two possible candidates, even interviewing one rather pompous ex-military chappie who arrives with a list of rules of what he will and won’t do and then, due to his overaggressive demeanor, gets bitten by Lucky (I spend the rest of our farcical interview bandaging his hand and generally pampering him for fear he will report both us and dog), I give up and put through a call to Quashia in Africa. It takes me several attempts, each time trying to make myself understood in either French or English while at the other end a male voice—le patron of le café?—replies in Arabic and replaces the receiver.
“How are you?” I ask several hours later, when I eventually touch base with him.
“What’s happened?”
“Any chance you could get back? René is inundated with work and—”
“And the olives need harvesting. Yes, I’ve been thinking about it. I gave you my word. If you need me, I’ll come.”
“What about your family?”
“I’ll be there. Don’t you worry about them. Is it urgent?”
“Pretty much. When could you be here?”
“I’ll find out about flights tomorrow, or I’ll organize a boat ticket. It shouldn’t be too hard. All the traffic is going the other way, men returning to their families for Ramadan. Call me Saturday.”
We settle on that and linger a while longer, chatting about his life at home in Constantin, news of his ever expanding family. I can hear the background hubbub of the Arab café, that world, so alien to mine, surrounding him. I picture him—where?—leaning up against a counter, occupying the proprietor’s one crackly phone line. In the background, well-worn plastic tables and chairs crowded with crease-faced elders, sticks at the ready, drinking minuscule shots of pitch-black coffee, putting the world to rights. Who else, aside from us, I am asking myself, telephones a bar in northern Algeria to book the gardener? I smile; the image amuses me.
“Saturday, then,” we agree, and say our good-byes.
“If there are any problems, I’ll ring you tomorrow,” he shouts as a parting afterthought.
The next day, around one, I am working and hear the phone. As a rule, I would let it ring or let the answering machine get it, but I have a hunch it might be Quashia, which indeed it is.
“Bonjour.” My ears are keen to the fact that he is not calling from his local café. The background is silent, a truck or two roaring by, nothing more. Is he in a phone booth in some dusty Arab side street? I fear the worst but try hard not to reveal how desperately I need him to return. “What’s the news?”
“I am in Marseille. My train gets me to Cannes at three-seventeen.”
“When? Today?” I am speechless. “But how did you… ?”
“I took the boat, traveled overnight. I’ll see you later.”
We say nothing about me meeting him off the train in Cannes. I have no idea if that is what he has in mind, but by quarter to three I am down at the station, sitting in front of an express at a café across the street. From a well-chosen seat, in case his train should arrive early, I can keep an eye on all the comings and going of passengers. His TGV is on time, and then I sight him, black Persian wool hat on his head, carrying not even so much as an overnight bag. One split shopping bag with Arabic lettering printed on its side is his sole piece of luggage. He looks exhausted and unshaven. I wave and shout and run to greet him. His warm eyes dance merrily, and he grins his tobacco-toothed grin and we embrace like long-lost family. People look on, some with disapprobation. After all, this is Le Pen country and here am I embracing an Arab workman.
“Here, I brought this for you.” He hands me the shopping bag. Inside are swags of fresh, sticky, honey-colored dates clinging fast to skeletal fronds. There must be a thousand of them. I thank him and picture the little pencil box of dried dates my mother used to buy us as a treat at Christmastime. On its lid were colored illustrations of camels trekking a desert. How exotic they seemed to me then.
“My grandson picked them from the garden before we left for the port. He said that next time you and Michel are to come and pick them yourselves.”
“We will,” I promise.
“My family wants to meet you. We’ll go to the desert, take off on a trek.”
Arm in arm, we thread our way through the tangle of vehicles, impatient scooters and pedestrians to Michel’s car, which is barely more roadworthy than mine was and twice as unmangeable because it is extremely ancient and has no power steering.
“Where’s the Quatre L?” he asks. It is pronounced “Katrelle” and is the nickname the French use to fondly describe that most typical of all workman’s cars, my sadly missed Renault 4.
I sigh. “It drowned.”
“Drowned?’
“A storm in Nice swelled the banks of the river alongside the airport. The place was closed for days. I couldn’t get back, and when I went to collect the car, I found the lot had been flooded and all the cars had drowned. How forlorn it looked, the little Quatre L. Swimming in silty mud, dilapidated, tires sinking…” I recount, smiling. “The attendant said to me, ‘No charge for the parking!’”
Quashia roars with infectious laughter. Climbing the hills, blue smoke billowing from the exhaust, I listen to his tales, at ease in his company. First his journey: at such short notice, there were no bunks to be had. He traveled across the sea sitting on the upper deck, perched against a lifeboat, watching the stars.
“You must be dead.”
He grins, and a solitary gold tooth glints his happiness. “Yes, but it’s how I like to travel. Not a soul around. Constellations of stars and a full moon to guide us, and the roll of the sea beneath me, wending my way back.” I glance toward him. His wrinkled, baked-brown features are animated with the recollection of it, and any guilt I may have felt about having dragged him out of his early retirement disappears instantly, for I understand him well enough to know that he is positively delighted to be back. Quashia is not a man made for retirement. And this corner of France is for him, as it is for us, a spiritual home.
THE FOLLOWING BRIGHT winter’s morning, while gathering our first crop of oranges, Quashia begins to talk of his past. He was twelve years old when his father died, leaving behind a wife, three sons and two daughters, but not a penny. Their sole possessions were two barns. It was during the Algerian war with France; the soldiers came, the family fled and the soldiers burned the two barns. Quashia went up into the mountains and began to cut wood which he sold to buy food for his family. His eldest brother left for France, where he found work and each month sent money back to Algeria. With the modest income Quashia acquired from his wood sales, he constructed a small homestead for his family which, even today, he assures me—and will show us when Michel and I go there to visit his family—is still standing, although now abandoned. He had never placed one stone on top of another before, but he built the little house by watching others at their work. Reassured that his family was safely esconced in a home, a roof over their heads at last, he left by boat for Marseille to join his eldest brother here on the coast and to learn the masonry trade in earnest. He had been in France only a week when his brother was run over and killed instantly by an American army jeep, Marines on shore leave driving along the seafront in Cannes. There was no inquest. Quashia returned to la mairie, the town hall, day after day begging for justice, but his French was minimal, he was a lad of fifteen and no one listened. The Americans were the liberators here, the Arabs had been the enemy and those living in France were—still are—nothing but a secondary labor force. The matter was never investigated. A couple of years later, his mother received a check for the equivalent of five thousand French francs: a settlement for the death of her eldest son. Strangely, Quashia bears no grudges. He tells the tale of fifty years ago as though recounting the history of another man’s life. It is the way of Allah, he says, shrugging. And the healing of time, I am thinking.
THE WEATHER IS STRANGE, unpredictable. Yes, clear and warm, typical for this pre-Christmas season, but unnaturally still. Every now and again, the vegetation shivers a warning. Out at sea, the whitecaps are still on the waves, but no wind comes in. René arrives, and we begin to gather olives. “If they don’t fall at the touch, don’t force them,” he commands. Quashia cuts himself a long sturdy stick to beat the upper branches, but René forbids him.
I leave them to their debate and drive to the airport to collect Michel. First, though, I make a stop at the fruit and vegetable market to buy the fresh food essential to his diet. There I find kiwi fruit on sale, twenty for ten francs. Delicious for breakfast along with mandarins, bananas, grapes and two succulently ripe mangoes flown in overnight from the Dom Tom—Départements et Territoires d’outre-mer—islands belonging to the Republic of France; in this instance, the island of Martinique. Michel prepares the best fruit salads known to man. They are a feast not only for the taste buds but also for the eyes. He serves them sliced and arranged in a rainbow of colors and shapes which would rival any decorative plate designed by Picasso in the nearby village of Vallauris. I arrive at the airport to greet him, merrily swinging my shopping bag of exotic fruit and crisp verdant salads, which has cost me in total the princely sum of fifty-seven francs, ninety centimes.
He is looking far more relaxed but has lost a great deal of weight. At first this scares me, and then I remind myself that anyone who has spent a month or more living on chicken broth, mineral water and herb teas would have lost weight. Our Christmas diet will be regulated but not untenable. We hurry to the car park holding hands. It seems an age since he was home, and I want nothing more than to cherish and feed him.
Back at the house, we find a message from René. He delivered our olives to the mill this afternoon, where they were pressed immediately. Six and a half kilos of fruit required for every liter of oil. He sounds very depressed. If the fruit does not ripen and the yield is no greater—a third more fruit for each liter of oil—the season will be a catastrophe for the local farmers.
I understand his deep concern in a way that I might not have a year or more ago. We are not dependent on our farm for our livelihood, but we have known the icy winds of scarcity this autumn, and we are still battling very unfavorable odds. All the hard work and determination in the world cannot change the tides of fate, it seems, whether it’s a shortfall in a film budget or a poor harvest. The point is, somehow or other, to outride it. “Gardez le cap.”
FUNNY VALENTINE. WITH Chet Baker on the CD player, we stoke up the fire, ditch the dishes from our pâte à langoustines in the kitchen and prepare for an early night. From the terrace, while shutting up the shutters, I notice the waves rippling fast across the water. They glint in the soft shadows of night like chain mail, while high up on the hill behind us, an owl screeches raucously and I hear creaking and moaning in the treetops. The weather is spooky tonight, unsettling. It is as though nature were on the move, shifting, readjusting, reclaiming its territory. I think of Macbeth, I don’t know why. That forest, or wood, rather, creeping closer.
“Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak—”
We curl up in bed together, and I feel grateful not to be alone in the old house tonight.
It is the crashing of pottery on the flat roof right above my head that wakes me, jolting me back to consciousness. Outside, beyond the solid stone walls which encircle us, a storm has whipped up. I lie still, listening. There have been storms here before, many of them, but this is furious. At my side, Michel sleeps on. I creep from the bed and tiptoe across cold tiles to peer from the windows. Beyond, everything is pitch black, which means that the electricity has been cut. Not only ours—whenever there’s a storm, our trip switch in the garage cuts off the current as a safety precaution—but way across the hills and valleys. I can make out nothing but black shapes that look like hunched goblins. Out at sea, the horizon is murky with cloud or spumy spray. In the foreground, the tall, pointed cypress trees are bending and swaying, wraithlike beings lost in a frenzied voodoo dance.
I pad back to bed and close my eyes. I want to sleep, but the storm grows. Its force escalates from one minute to the next. It blows relentlessly, screaming, howling like a banshee—the Irish fetcher of the dead. This image terrifies me, and I rise up from the bed again. My heart is beating too fast. I want to wake Michel but decide not to. He needs to rest. The shutters everywhere in the house are slapping against their locks. I fear this wind will rip them from their hinges. I light a candle, which gutters furiously and then dies. I return to the window. I consider the dogs in their stable. They must be petrified. I am. I would go out and fetch them but if I opened the door, it would be whipped from its hinges and carried off. Garden chairs are flying everywhere. A table sinks to the depths of the pool. Things—Lord knows what—are crashing and shattering.
Nothing stands in the way of this untamed wind. Its raging has risen to tempest, even hurricane, force. I press my trembling body against the glass, recalling lines from Eliot’s The Waste Land:
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain.
Every tree is bowed over, mastered by the gale. And then a groaning, a destruction, which is akin to a werewolf’s howl: a tearing of life to shreds. Freaked, I retreat to bed and curl up like a squirrel. Michel, from somewhere within his slumbering subconscious, must hear my wakenings, because he stirs. “Be still, chérie,” he whispers and wraps his arms about me, drawing me to him, and I fall in with his breathing, breath for breath, heartbeat for heartbeat, and drift off to sleep, dug into the crook of him, from midnight to dawn.
MORNING COMES. EVENTUALLY. The wind has not abated. We are woken around six by furious thumping: the wind beating at our door. We leap from the bed and rush to shove furniture in front of it. A wooden chest, two chairs and a bookcase which totters in the panic and causes my precious, well-thumbed orange Penguins to slap to the floor. It takes all this to hold the door in place. Peering from the one unshuttered window in my workspace, we see that the landscape has been flattened. The views are wider where trees have been ripped from the ground, crashing everywhere like tin soldiers. But it is not over.
“How will we get to the dogs?” I ask.
“I’ll go out by the front door. As soon as I’m out, push the furniture back in place.” We haul our wooden pieces into the corridor, and the door begins thumping again. Michel turns the key and opens the door less than an inch. A blast of wind and the pungent scent of pine engulfs us. Felled like a monster, an underwater sea beast with tendrils, is our beautiful blue pine tree. It has swamped the entire length of the upper terrace. There is no exit.
“My God, that must’ve been what I heard crashing. It must’ve taken part of our renovated wall and some of the balustrades with it.”
We cannot make coffee, as we have no electricity. There is nothing to be done but to wait it out. I return to the window, staring out at this raging, chaotic world. This pertubation of nature. We could go stir-crazy on this windswept hilltop, and what of those poor three dogs? Have they fled in fear? And then I light on a vision that warms my heart.
“Michel, look!” He comes to join me, and together we regard Quashia, hand pressed against his wool hat, mounting the drive, tacking in wide zigzags, blown from one step to the next in a slow, heavy slog as he battles against the weather. When he reaches the summit alongside the pool, in front of the garage, he pauses and stares about, horrified. We cannot see what he sees, but the devastation must be shocking. I beat on the window, but he cannot hear me. And then, as a reflex, he looks up, sees us and beckons. Michel signals our dilemma.
Once the blue pine has been dragged away from the door, we are free to go out. I consider Noah and how it must have been to step from that ark, and I smile, remembering the dove carrying an olive branch that told him the floods were ended. But our wind has not abated. It is calming but is far from done.
Michel lets out the dogs, and then we check out the wreckage. As far as we can tell, we have lost about fourteen trees. All pines, our glorious blue among them, and possibly one oak farther up the hill. At the foot of our recently discovered Italian staircase, a very tall pine has been ripped from the ground. Its roots have dismembered the lower part of the ancient wall, while the massive trunk has smashed and sundered into thick chunks a romantically sequestered stone table and banquette I had placed there. A cypress, one of a dozen that encircles the driveway, has been uprooted and taken with it a dry stone wall and a opuntia ficus-indica, a giant prickly-pear cactus. We should be grateful that it has fallen toward the vegetable gardens—mercifully missing them—and not the driveway or our sole means of transport, Michel’s decrepit thirty-year-old Mercedes, which would have been flattened in its wake. I am heartbroken to discover that four of my antique Moroccan Barbary pots, a birthday present from Michel, have been smashed to smithereens.
We set to clearing up the devastation of this first night, dragging entire branches of wood pregnant with clusters of pine balls. Small yolk-yellow flowers gild the dusty blue boughs of our favorite pine—the only one of its kind on the estate—while the potent perfume from its seeping, sticky gum pervades the clear, crisp morning. It is as though the dying tree is bleeding, or weeping.
The wind is bitter. It has an arctic bite to it and stings our sweating flesh. As we work, Quashia talks of his youth again, of the long, cold winter after the death of his father, recounting endless journeys marching alone over several days into the mountains, in search of wood for his mother and her brood. There, in the snowy mountains, he gathered and stacked until he had all that he could carry. Then he began the slow march back, like a donkey, his body weighed down with strips of wood, to the humble dwelling where he and his grieving family were hibernating. In my mind’s eye, I picture that small dark-skinned Arab youth, his loss and his determination, and I feel honored that through the sharing of his memories he has taken us with him, back half a century to an Arab world that we might never have entered without him.
It reminds me that the Australian aborigines have no words in their language for yesterday or tomorrow.
In return, Michel talks of his childhood in northern Germany not far from the Belgian border, of a countryside ravaged by war, of a father who, before Michel was born, spent several of those war years in a prison camp, though he was an army cook and not a soldier. I am moved when I hear that Anni, Michel’s mother, walked from their village all the way to the camp, a trek that took her several days, carrying her firstborn son with her to introduce the boy to his father. And then it is my turn. I spin tales of my English and Irish past. I paint the rolling verdant landscape, the incessant soft rain, salmon fishing down at the coursing, bouldered river with my uncle, the lingering smell of potatoes boiling on the wood stove, losing my sister in a corn field, a maze of gold taller than the both of us, the warm cackling voices of my grandparents’ neighbors, as well as illicit friendships with “those Protestant kids” huddled in packs behind the village post office. And I recall the scenes of violence I witnessed. The bloodshed. Family member against family member. Hesitantly, I touch upon those.
And so we pass our day. At sunset, we settle around our big table and drink hot mint tea sweetened with lavender honey, and Michel reminds me that we should be thinking about acquiring our own hives and planting vines. I invite Quashia to stay and eat with us, but he waves his hand and smiles. He has a pot prepared, he says, and bids us good night, wending his way down the drive to the cottage where, because it is situated in a sheltered nook, there has been no damage whatsoever.
I wonder at his solitary existence, but it seems to suit him. Months in Algeria and then other months here with us: his two families.
And now the wind is rising again, but according to the news on the radio—for we have electricity again—it will be less forceful tonight. We are worn out from the physical work of the day but also deeply grateful, because in one of the neighboring villages, the toll this morning was eight dead. At its peak, the wind on this Alpes Maritimes coast reached one hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. The roads are closed, even our little lane. We cannot get our car out to buy food. If we need supplies, we must walk the towpath by the stream to the village. We learn that three million families in France are without electricity and half as many again without telephone. Thousands are without homes, and the death toll is rising.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, this holocaust of nature is at an end. We step from shuttered darkness out into blindingly bright sunlight and a sky as clear as cut glass. The air still has a frisson of danger; every now and then a branch stirs and shivers a reminder. Bushes and trees have been twisted and split out of all recognition. They will forever bear the imprint of this tempest’s passage.
There is so much work to be done.
The hillsides are alive with the whir of chainsaws. I find it a reassuring sound, like the summer song of the cicadas. On neighboring peaks, folk are beginning the work of cutting and stacking the trees torn from the earth and riven. Sawdust floats like snow in the bright clean air. Nature’s quiesence today feels almost as alarming as the roaring winds of the past two nights, its quiddity disturbingly manifold.
Michel and I repot the yucca plants lifted from the smashed pots. When we are less up against it, I will need to buy more. We shovel debris, wheeling the barrow backward and forward to the compost and to dozens of small hillocks piled high with stripped branches, ready for burning. I lift the plastic cover off one of the pool skimmer baskets and put my hand in to dig out the fallen leaves and there, to my horror, coiled like a spring, is a snake. My shrieks bring gales of laughter and the perfect opportunity to pause for refreshment. In the devastation, early cyclamen are flowering rich reds and luscious pinks. I come across an uprooted palm, one of a dozen baby ones we had planted which had grown tall, furnished with long prickly fronds. It will not survive.
All day we labor in a garden bathed in seductively warm Christmas sunshine. High above us in a perfect blue sky, the birds are returning. Gulls wheel and pipe lazily, on the lookout for food. In the treetops, tiny, busy birds are chirruping insanely. Their chatter seems so urgent and engaged. What fun to be able to understand, eavesdrop or even participate. And three, no four, even five, cooing turtledoves, settle in the Magnolia Grandiflora. Les tourterelles; welcome, timely visitors.
René arrives. He is depressed. Damage to his olive farms everywhere. Trees destroyed. Magnificent, centuries-old oliviers split, amputated, fallen. The moon’s proximity to the earth, they say, is the cause. Once in a century, it draws so perilously close. What of his crops? Tons of fruits lying on the ground, scattered everywhere. Now the olives will never ripen. We take a tour of our own groves and discover that a pair of our trees, growing alongside each other, have been severed in two by the storms. It is as though a colossus came by with an ax and sliced right through the heart of the trunks, sheer, like a knife through butter. In each case, one half of the tree remains upright, bearing its semiripened fruit, while its twin lies on the ground like a smashed bird, wings limp and broken. Its fruit is still intact but drying up fast, wrinkling toward death. It is a tragedy. We must begin collecting the fallen fruit without delay. Our windblown nets are all over the garden, curled like sleeping caterpillars. Inside, they bear the fruit that had fallen to the ground before the storms.
Elsewhere, the fruit has been blown hither and thither and needs to be collected by hand from the earth. The four of us, baskets at our sides, pass the sunny afternoon on our hands and knees. Gathering the windblown fruit is a slow and painstaking task. All my nails crack and break as my fingers root between the grass shoots and dig into the earth to lift out the buried olives. Every drupe is collected individually. Many of them have already begun to wrinkle or, worse, rot.
Later, we relax with several glasses of rich, ruby-red vino from Chianti—not for Quashia, who accepts only water citronné with sliced lemon off our own tree. As the sun sets behind distant hills, the view is as clear as shined windows, and dusk falls. All at once, the sky grows gentian with bold, untidy streaks of orange, brilliant as a ripe Jaffa from Seville. It must have been raining somewhere along the coast, for a rainbow appears and straddles the calm sea. This earth made out of chaos is settling back into peace.
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Manuel turns up. He happened to be passing, he says, though there is no reason on God’s earth to ever pass this way. He staggers the length of the hilly drive, spluttering and perspiring, shakes our hands enthusiastically and asks after a spot of work. “A bit of tidying after the wind?” Our answer is a most emphatic no! to which he shrugs amicably and, as he turns to go, remarks on how very much he enjoyed his time working for us!
THE NEW YEAR COMES and passes tranquilly. The olives are ripening at last; each day we watch the shift in colors as they turn from green toward violet, then a luscious grape purple and onward to deep succulent black. They are plump, fleshed out with oil, and and there is a packet of them, or as the French would say, un vrai pacquet! Christophe greets us at the mill with a dramatically sullen expression. This year is a tragedy, he repeats over and over while shaking his shaggy hangdog head. He peers into one of our brimming baskets, picks up a fruit or two and pulls that Provençal face which could mean one of many things. In this case, Pas mal, pas mal. Michel needs to make some phone calls, so he and I take off for a coffee and leave René to oversee the pressing. When we return, the pair of them are as gleeful as children. René grabs Michel by the arm and asks anxiously, “You did mail that form, didn’t you?”
Michel is confused. “Which form?”
Christophes pushes forward impatiently. “I gave René a form for you to register yourselves as oléiculteurs. Did you or did you not fill it in and send it to Brussels?” He is bawling like a madman while Michel responds with a composed “Mais oui, pourquoi?”
Christophe sighs a dramatic sigh of relief. We are puzzled by the intensity of his concern. “Your farm is the first this year,” he goes on to explain in a more reasonable manner, “to produce oil at less than four kilos a liter. And what is more, the quality is exceptional.” And with that he yells for wine. His young son, the miller, obliges. René is pouring glasses. Their ebullient mood is contagious. The wife is called down to the mill floor, as well as the brawny chap who shovels the olives into the chute and whom I have never seen without a cigarette clued to his lips; also the youngest son, who is responsible for the quality of the tapénade; even a customer or two is roped in to celebrate what they are all but claiming is the future of the local olive industry.
Everyone congregates in a grand circle while, in the background, noisy machines belch and deliver. More glasses are poured, cookies flavored with essence of orange are offered. This is a real fête, and all in our honor, it seems.
“Any week now,” Christophe bellows, “the inspectors from the AOC will be arriving. How could I admit that not a single farm in the vicinity is producing oil at anything less than six kilos a liter? And even that is of average quality. I would be disgraced. All my new equipment, transported from Italy to comply with Brussels, bah, it would count for nothing. Rien! Rien du tout! We, this region, would be a laughingstock. Dismissed! Nul! Zero!” By now he is roaring at the top of his very forceful voice. It must be because he spends his life battling against this thundersome machinery, I am thinking. His red cheeks are shiny with exertion and proclamation while his long-faced audience hangs on his every word. This could be a rally. “Mais, vous, mes chers amis”—Here, wineglass in hand, he points at us, while René, flushed and proud, smiles on benignly as though we were his children—“have proved that this area is worthy of the honor. A la vôtre!” And all glasses are raised to us!
Back at the house, a fax awaits us from Michel’s production office in Paris. It tells us that the Greek money has arrived, and with it details, pages of news of a dozen or more other sales. Dollars are finally en route to the bank.
We should whoop and dance, open bottles of champagne, pour them over ourselves, yell and jump for joy. That is how I have imagined this moment over and over in my mind, and prayed for it. But we don’t. We stand quietly, reams of floppy fax paper in Michel’s hands, and smile at each other.
“Looks as though we’re going to make it,” he whispers.
“Looks like it.” I smile.
And so we can be confident that, in the fullness of time, the debt will be cleared entirely. We will not lose our farm. Not this time. Our crazy little ramshackle farm, which boasts herb and vegetable gardens but still no kitchen, where the walls continue to flake and chunks of plaster still occasionally fall on our heads, which now, thanks to Christophe and René and the work of dear, loyal Quashia, looks set to be awarded an AOC status for the quality of its olive oil. How did this all happen? We never intended to be farmers!
The girls, les belles filles, are arriving later this evening. Tomorrow we will party. We are taking them to Menton, where a street festival in celebration of the lemon is to take place, La fête des citronniers. Menton, the Franco-Italian border town where every garden is gilt with sweetly scented citrus fruit, and where every hot-blooded Latin lover will be ogling our two teenage beauties and not giving a damn for the tons of lemons and oranges adorning the floats—which, by the way, have been imported from Spain!
SPRING IS RETURNING. Baby geckos scuttle out from behind the shutters. A red fox sits in the sun on one of the upper terraces, among the wild irises which deck the dry stone walls. A beetlelike insect trundles over a rose-pink wild garlic flower. Today his carapace is a deep, iridiscent bottle green. In a month or two, he will be bracken brown. The almonds are in palest bloom once more. The lizards who spent the winter holed up in a million fissures in the walls are zipping to and fro, shy as ever. Shiny lime- green leaves are breaking out everywhere. Orange blossom scents the air. I pause and gaze upon our ruin, bathed in flaxen stalks of dappled sunlight. Budding Judas trees, peaches and figs encircle it, and I know I woke up in a poem. Soon, there will be heavenly purple and white lilacs, pear and cherry blossom, and apple blossom on the trees in the little orchard I am creating in memory of my dear much-missed father.
Yet another year is unfolding, flush with romance and exploration. And while I am musing on where to place a sundial, Michel comes running toward me, smiling and healthy. News of another sale has just come in. An important market, rich in dollars, a small percentage of which can go to the bank.
“Yes!” I whoop. “Yes! I was considering a sundial. I have always fancied a garden with an antique stone sundial.”
“You are such a romantic, chérie.”
We chatter on about the projects we might begin when we return from our travels, of the baby olive trees we want to plant. Michel sees beehives and vine on the hillsides. I picture myself atop a tractor trundling up and down the terraces, mounds of fumier de mouton behind me to feed our sapling trees.
Arm in arm, we hike the terraces, three loyal dogs at our heels—including our comical hound who answers to the name Bassett. We are searching out the first spiky tulip shoots when unexpectedly, from the radio on our balustraded balcony, I hear, “I’ll be with you in apple blossom time,” and I am reminded that love is timeless and regenerative. There is no beginning or end. All things are changing; nothing dies. And like the wind, love leaves its imprints everywhere.