Days and days of deliciously golden autumn and then, from nowhere, we are pelted by a freak hailstorm. The stones are the size of golf balls and cause the loss of approximately a third of the olive crop – full and fleshy fruit ripening early after such a long dry summer; fruit that is piebald deep violet and green, falling and rolling, squashed beneath tyres, never having given of its produce.
1 November: Toussaint, All Saints’ Day. Here, in France, it is a public holiday. In the past it was the day that marked the decanting of the new year’s wines. It is also the day the Provençals regard as the beginning of winter, but this year there is not a hint of such a season. The weather is glorious, far more autumnal than wintery, and the olives that were not destroyed by the hailstones of two weeks ago have ripened way ahead of schedule. There are far fewer drupes on the trees due to that recent shock of bad weather, but those that remain are filled out and are first class: great damson-black fruits, plump, luscious, oleaginous.
I stand in the dappled sunlight beneath the twisted, hanging branches of one of the older trees and gaze upwards in admiration.
‘The birds are at a feast. If we don’t begin harvesting soon, we’ll have nothing left.’ Quashia is at my side, head tilted in the same direction. It is a day off for him – nobody works on these public holidays, and he is taking a well-deserved rest – but still he strolls up to say bonjour and lend a hand with whatever essential chores need attending to, for they are endless; work here is never done.
‘But if we collect the ripe ones and leave the green, we won’t have sufficient to make our own pressing. We’ll have to share with someone else,’ I reply.
It is true. The mill requires a minimum of eighty-five kilos to press for a single estate. If we are lucky we may gather sixty kilos of perfectly seasoned fruit. We could pick another twenty-five of underripe olives to meet the quota, but then we lose out on the quantity of oil the drupes will produce: green fruit returns less oil than black. If we leave the mature fruits on the trees and wait for the rest, or a proportion of the rest, to ripen, we will lose an extensive percentage to the birds, who will steal the plumpest of the pickings before they have been harvested. This is one of the choices to be made, a part of the delicate balance to which I would never have given a second thought before we began to reclaim this little farm. Michel is not here, so the decision will be mine.
‘I’ll telephone René and I’ll leave a message at the mill; I’d prefer to hear what they advise.’
Quashia says he’ll wait. While I go indoors to make the calls he busies himself in his newly constructed woodshed, pulling out and dusting down our green and René’s white nets ready to encircle the feet of the trees. That done, he embarks on an appraising tour of the garden to see which have branches burgeoning with ripening fruit and where the drupes have already begun to drop. We are short of netting, in spite of the thousand metres I bought. Some of it has been damaged, caught and torn during earlier harvests, other yards have been used to keep scavengers out of our vegetable gardens and the original roll was insufficient in the first place.
I am very surprised, because it is a holiday, when Christophe, the mill-owner, picks up the phone himself. He answers with a weary despondent ‘Allo?’
‘How are you, Christophe?’ I ask. Our paths haven’t crossed since last year. His mill is located a fair distance inland of us, so we have no reason to visit that village outside the oil-pressing season.
‘Ah, bonjour, Carol, not good, not good.’ He doesn’t wait for me to ask what’s up but instantly embarks upon the problem every oléiculteur is facing this year: little if any fruit yield. ‘It should have been a stupendous year with all those months of sun,’ he moans. ‘Yes, we began pressing this week, for those who have fruit. Come if you like, but we are only turning the mill on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Of course we’ll press more frequently if there’s a call for it, but I don’t think there will be. It’s a catastrophe, une vrai catastrophe.’ I smile, not because I don’t commiserate with the farmers’ situation, but because I know Christophe sufficiently well now to understand that in his eyes life is either a catastrophe of monumental proportions or a veritable triumph. Today we have the downside.
I explain to him that our fruit is ripening earlier than expected, but not all of it.
‘Same everywhere. It adds to the dilemma,’ he interrupts.
‘So I am not sure that we will have enough for a single-estate pressing.’
‘I’ll press for eighty kilos, as it’s you, but I can’t do it for less. There is the cost, you understand, of the machines, the fuel, the staff. Oh, Carol, what a catastrophe! How’s Michel?’
‘He’s fine. Working hard, as usual.’
‘Is he here?’
‘No, he’s in Paris in preproduction on an animation film.’
‘He leaves you alone too frequently. You tell him that from me.’
How can this mill-owner be party to such information? René must have been gossiping. ‘Come whenever you like. I’ll accept eighty kilos, or why don’t you find someone to share the pressing with you?’
‘We’ll look into it. Either way, we’ll see you soon. Merci, Christophe. Ciao.’
I call René. He is sniffing and coughing. ‘Only a petit rhume, nothing to fuss about. Too many olive trees to tend,’ he explains. ‘But how are you?’ He does not wait to hear; he is already affirming that the olive season is a catastrophe. At Pergomas, where one of the farms he husbands is situated, there is not one single olive on any of the 120 trees. ‘All lost in that hailstorm, every single drupe. Can you believe it?’
‘I was about to suggest we share a pressing …’
He leaps at the idea. He has fifty-two kilos gathered from the lone tree in his own garden. A yield of fifty-two kilos from one tree in a year of paucity is exceptional, though still, of course, not enough for a pressing. He needs another thirty to make up his quota. He arranges to call by to collect this amount from us.
And so Quashia and I decide to begin the harvest, la récolte, or, in the case of olives, la cueillette des olives. ‘We’ll start tomorrow morning, then,’ I tell him when I return outside.
‘Why not right this very minute?’ he asks, tugging off his shirt in his hurry to get to the garage to change into his work clothes. He looks happy.
‘Because it’s your day off,’ I yell after him, but he is already out of sight.
While I have been on the phone he has started laying the nets. He prepared the ground, cutting back the grass, clearing errant stones, several days ago, anticipating my decision.
So here we are again at harvest time. La olivaison. The olive season.
I find a butterfly caught under one of the nets and while trying to release it I lose my entire afternoon’s gathered load. With a sigh, I watch the drupes rolling down the steps and then I concentrate on the butterfly. It flaps and flutters until it is free and then flies away to alight on a terracotta pot, still, even in early November, blushed with flowering geraniums. I want to be able to identify the butterfly later so I pause to make a mental note of its markings: splashes of white with black spots, known as ocelli – they resemble dark, round eyes on its wings – and a tortoiseshell colouring which, in the sunlight, glows almost burned orange. Is this a Red Admiral? There were dozens of this species in the nectar-rich gardens of my childhood. Later, when I return to my den, I leaf through my guide and learn that I have lent a helping hand not to a Red Admiral but to another of its family: a Vanessa cardui, more commonly known as a Painted Lady. It is a resident of the Canary Islands and Madeira, but a migrant from North Africa – like Quashia! – where it establishes colonies along the coast. It can be found in the warmer parts of the Mediterranean until cold weather sets in.
While perusing my handbook I also discover that there is a whole genus of butterflies, including the Red Admiral, whose Latin name includes the word Vanessa. Is Michel aware that one of his daughters shares her name with a species of butterfly? Vanessid is the adjective, I am informed by my Oxford dictionary. So might I say of my lovely stepdaughter that her fretting about her weight, her perennial concerns about her appearance, are, in her case, Vanessid behaviour? I smile. I haven’t heard from her in a while and I wonder how she is getting along with her American sweetheart.
The following afternoon, I leave Quashia with the rest of this early gathering and set off for a short stay in London. Before I depart, René telephones to confirm that he must have the olives.
‘Call Quashia,’ I tell him. ‘He’ll give you all you need.’
In London, I pass delightful evenings with Clarisse. When she is not at college or at the bistro where she works as a waitress to earn her keep, or off visiting galleries, going to the movies or lectures with newly made friends, of which there seems to be a manifold and motley collection, we lounge on cushions, drinking wine, gorging on steaming great bowls of spaghetti we have rustled up together, and she shows me her artwork, her impressive portfolios, and then we talk and talk until dawn. We are like students together. Or rather, she brings an air of lightness to my heart. In her company, I revisit those late-teenage joys and revelations. When the phone rings it is usually a young voice enquiring after my stepdaughter and I gladly take messages. It is a special time, a privileged interval; we are discovering one another.
Here, in London, I am not the wife of her father – of course, I remain that too, but what bonds us here is her passion for this capital city where she is launching herself for the first time and all that it contributes to this encounter with her developing feminine self. Here she insists we speak in English. La France and its language are skins she has temporarily shed. Here, her pleasure is the carving of her independence within a neutral environment – a pad of her own, a city she has claimed as hers – where she can express her newly gained liberties. She speaks of Papa in a way I have never heard before and which quite takes me aback. These days he has been transformed into someone other than her father: he is a man, and I see her begin in tiny ways to look at him in a more objective light. She does not mention Serge and neither do I. Perhaps she has forgotten him among so many new discoveries. Somehow, though, I suspect not.
On the plane home, replaying my stay in London, I am reminded of a comment Michel made to me back in the summer after the eclipse. ‘You say the girls are mine. They are not, Carol. I don’t own them, nor does their mother. They are their own people and, if you want it, you have a part to play in their lives, too.’
Reflecting upon my days with Clarisse, I see that perhaps there might be a role for me and if she will accept me, I will gladly take it on.
* * *
I return to grey skies and a world blasted by yet another fierce wind, but this is not the mistral that I have grown to know. This wind is called by some the scirocco and by others vent d’est, or wind from the east, because it travels up through Spain and blows across the southern coast of France. Actually it comes from the Sahara desert bringing with it pale red sand. The cars are covered in a thick film of it and the exterior world has taken on a salmon opaqueness. From inside the house, the wind rattling through the trees sounds like a train thundering through a tunnel. I stare out of the dust-smeared windows and spy a helicopter, like a determined dragonfly, ploughing through the dense clouds. Claps of dry thunder spook the dogs. Stepping outside, I am surprised by how warm it is; such a fierce wind suggests a biting chill, but not so. A desert wind that brings desert heat.
Many of the fruits are still too green to harvest but now the wind is driving them in shoals to the ground. Traditionally, olive-gathering begins on 25 November, the feast of Ste Catherine Labouré, but it looks as though we will be forced to continue to pick up what we can and press what we have before they wither and go dry, even if we must share the pressing.
Our load turns out to be 113 kilos, more than sufficient for a rendezvous at the mill, and Christophe’s assistant is happy to book it in as a single-estate pressing.
‘There are dozens in your predicament,’ she explains, ‘forced by nature to alter their pattern.’
Michel is still in Paris, so I decide to take the six crates to the moulin alone, my first trip this year.
The wind has polished up the weather, leaving it clear and sharp. The landscape is a melody of yellows and tiger oranges. Startlingly beautiful. Ahead of me, beyond the road, the mauve and umbrous, snow-capped Alps. Weekend joggers in the pine-forested parks, dogs following at their heels, running and scampering.
Upon arrival I am greeted by Christophe, who is dressed in bright green, a gnome in a black woollen Noddy hat that ascends to a rather comical point. He waddles to and fro with a face as red as Christmas but he wears the desolate expression of an abandoned woman. Although it is a Saturday the place is surprisingly empty – fewer olives this year, hence fewer farmers. As always, the conversations around me are of ‘four kilos to this’ and ‘no, olives here’. Gravely concerned but unflustered, except for Christophe with his Noddy hat, shiny cheeks, plimsolls stained with olive paste and his air of tragedy.
He is washing out with a water spray one of his mammoth machines that clunks and gutters – the Superdecanter 1000, purchased from Firenze; a fortune forked out to align himself with European health standards. It all needs to be paid for.
A small woman less than five feet tall in a black cardigan arrives, carrying an empty plastic container which, when full, will hold fifty litres of precious oil. She nods a greeting to Christophe and his son, sits down next to me and pulls out black rosary beads. Her feet in her unpolished black slingbacks don’t reach the ground; still, she has a stalwart air about her. I watch her sneakily. Eyes front, head facing forwards, tiny pearl earrings, brittle, broken nails. I try to engage her in conversation but either she does not hear me or chooses not to – the noise in here is thunderous. Now her calloused labourer’s hands clutching the beads are beating her breast. Perhaps she is lost in the world of her prayers? This little woman is a very familiar figure in a disappearing Mediterranean society: the widow, the aged mother, the matriarch and backbone of any family.
We wait. The air is cold and reeks of mashed olives. The few farmers present are pacing to and fro, as though in a hospital corridor, attending the outcome of their pressing. ‘This year the oil-production industry is in crisis,’ I hear.
I watch the miller’s son, Gérard, who is a tad plumper this year, going about his work. He is using a small iron frying pan to catch the dribbles of pressed liquid so that not a solitary drop is lost or wasted as he changes containers, manoeuvring the trolley to position the next empty canister beneath the running nozzle.
One of the machines gets clogged. Christophe calls to Gérard and together they push and pull at the appliance. Christophe grows impatient and begins to swear, beating it with a length of wood and then, when nothing seems to make any difference, they both shrug, Provençal style, and continue with what they were previously engaged in. Seconds later, when the machine rights itself, Christophe booms triumphantly while Gérard merely nods and goes about his business.
Everyone has left, carrying off their jars of oil and their receipts. Only the Latin mother and I remain. I smile at her but she remains implacable, her short legs swinging back and forth like those of a small child.
Attending the mill, delivering the olives, seems to be becoming one of my chores, except that it is not a chore. Who would ever have thought that sitting before seven great churning machines could afford me such satisfaction? Why? It is both the beginning and the end of a process. The conclusion for nature of this year’s cycle of growth and giving and, for the farmer, the beginning of the journey to the kitchens, the tables, the stomachs – meals celebrated, eaten in ignorance of the labour this oil has required. Also, there are the medicinal properties of this ancient juice. It is indeed a revered offering from the earth, blessed and warmed by the sun and irrigated by the rains. Appassionata’s bottles will go as gifts, for we are not running a business.
While I am musing upon who will enjoy the receipts of our bounty, my oil has begun to drizzle through. The matriarch at my side nudges me. I thank her, leap to my feet to run my finger through the spluttering oil, green as a gooseberry, and suck on it. It is lighter, less peppery, more citrony than last year, but fresh and delicious. Smooth and scrumptious. I am delighted and turn to share my delight. The venerable Latin mama gets up and marches towards me. She is from Italy, she tells me now, but has lived in Provence for years. Then, when my produce is bottled and ready to go, she bends and, with one sweep of the arm, deftly lifts up all the containers and asks me where my car is.
‘Please, don’t!’ I cry.
‘Non, non,’ she insists, ‘let me. This is no work for you.’ Before I can stop her, this insect-sized woman singlehandedly transports my entire twenty-seven litres to the car, where she deposits them, shakes my hand formally and disappears back inside to await her own goodies.
When I return home I find Quashia in a state of great anxiety. The news from Algeria is worrying. Villages have been destroyed in this spate of blusterous weather. And worse, all telephone communication has been brought down and he cannot contact his family.
‘Do you want to leave? Shall I phone for a ticket?’ I realise that he must go.
But the country has been closed off. Roads are blocked everywhere. He may not even get through to his district. ‘No, I’ll stay. Let’s wait and see. How was the pressing?’ he asks.
‘Not bad. Twenty-seven litres. I’ve left five in the garage next to your clothes.’
‘Mais, non! That’s too much!’
‘Don’t be ludicrous, Mr Quashia. Without you we wouldn’t have any oil at all.’
He bursts out laughing.
I send an e-mail to Michel: ‘See you tomorrow. L’huile nouvelle est arrivée!’
I write this because it is also the week of the new Beaujolais, and the tidings ‘Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé’ are broadcast everywhere: in bars, restaurants, supermarkets. Michel is home for Sunday. We are neither of us fans of this wine, but I buy a bottle just the same, as always, to mark the season, I suppose. It is quite frequently sold in half-litre bottles of a simple and rather lovely shape, and the empties we fill with oil for the kitchen. This year, as every other, we pour two small glasses of the wine, make a toast to the new season’s produce and then put the rest in the fridge for cooking.
Michel cannot stay on to help with the olive-gathering. Paris calls, work demands his undivided attention. These preproduction periods are as critical as the timing of a farm’s harvest. It has been an all too brief visit. I drive him to the airport and we kiss our heartfelt goodbyes. ‘I want to ease up on all this travelling,’ he says. ‘And spend more time at home with you.’ His words serve only to make our parting more difficult.
As I return to the parking, in among the huggermugger of cars, the screeching traffic and impatient taxis, I spot a rusting Cortina, a boneshaker of a jalopy with English plates, left carelessly outside a bay. There is a sticker displayed on its rear window which stops me in my tracks. It makes me smile because, before returning to the farm, I have a small errand to perform. The sticker reads:
Practise random acts of kindness
Senseless acts of great beauty
The little matter ahead of me might well be judged as senseless but it has been on my mind for a while and I am keen to accomplish it. I take the coast road to Cannes and then pass on through, driving towards the Esterele, with its betel-nut red soil. Here the coastline is more rugged, the beaches less busy, though in this early-winter season there are few about. I sight a deserted cove, park the car and clamber down to the water’s edge. It is still windy. The waves are lapping at my feet. I dig into my shoulder bag and draw out four, finger-sized excisions from the photographs I took of Barbara and her friends. These are all that remain; the four impermeable shadows that were the Englishwoman. The rest I have torn up and discarded. I set down my bag on a rock, take off my shoes and wade into the water with the four blurred images clutched tightly in my hand. The wind is against me so my original idea of throwing them out to sea won’t work; they will only blow back at me. I must wade out further, which is what I do, feeling my jeans grow heavy with salt water. When I think I have shoved out far enough, I bend down and plunge the photos beneath the surface, holding them under long enough to say a silent word or two and to soak them thoroughly so that they will not fly off. Or perhaps they will, who knows? Then I release them, bequeathing my souvenirs of Barbara to the ocean, turn and, without looking back, wade out of the water, rub my feet dry and carry bag and shoes up to the car.
I am trying to contact René but he is nowhere to be found. It is now the beginning of Ramadan. Quashia is working long days gathering olives on an empty stomach. He looks tired, worrying about his children back home. I am concerned for him. Does he want me to drive him to Marseille, help him find a boat passage? He shakes his head, also refusing all offers of so much as a cup of tea, reminding me that between sun-up and sundown nothing, not even a sip of water or a puff of a cigarette, may pass his lips. Still no news from René. Quashia and I are working alone and it is backbreaking. I fall into bed exhausted but cannot sleep because the dogs won’t stop barking. Nothing quietens them. If I bring them into the house, they go crazy until I get up and let them out again. They bark and, in the case of Bassett, our little hunter, howl until dawn, until I am ragged and starved of sleep. The sangliers are about again. The wild boars are tearing up the land, foraging for food as the autumn fades and the darker season closes in. Quashia says that he spotted a family of six roaming the land the day before yesterday. They have created hummocks of mud and grass roots everywhere in their search for fallen acorns from the oaks. They must be getting very hungry, but with their fossicking I am getting no sleep. Something needs to be done about them.
Eventually, out of the blue, René turns up.
‘We haven’t heard from you since you came by and took thirty kilos of olives to the mill. How did we do?’ I tease, and I am both surprised and uplifted by his response.
‘We are the champions,’ he boasts. ‘The quality is first rate and your olives, along with mine, of course, are producing excellent quantities of oil.’
‘Any chance you could lend us a hand?’ I ask, but he is occupied at one of his other farms.
‘Everyone is gathering, fearing to lose what fruit there is. No time to waste. One of the earliest harvests I’ve ever experienced. I’m afraid I need my crates. Can you spare them?’
Usually he lends us half a dozen; it is part of our arrangement with him. I cannot spare them, but what can I say?
‘I’ll be back with them to freight your fruit to the mill,’ he promises, and off he goes.
So Quashia and I continue collecting the remainder of the crop ourselves, with nothing to store it in. The fruits on the trees are improving by the day: pudgy purple and jet drupes the size of small plums. I lay them out on a plastic sheet on the floor in the summer kitchen. The cool room reeks of them and, as I turn them, to keep them free of mould, I feel their sponginess; how oliferous they are and what a fine pressing they will make for us.
I confirm with the mill that they will still press for the allotted eighty kilos. Christophe agrees. The problem is I am not sure what quantity we have. I could gauge it easily when we were storing them in René’s crates because each holds twenty-five kilos, but now, while every evening our mound gets higher, I have no means of weighing it.
Eventually, I head for the Co-opérative Agricole to buy crates. René claimed that his are only available in Italy, which is why I have never troubled before and why I am not altogether hopeful of finding any, but Frédéric produces half a dozen which he assures me are for olives. They are a different shape and size, but otherwise similar. I ask about the capacity.
‘My guess would be around twenty kilos, perhaps twenty-five,’ he tells me.
The same as René’s, then; even though these are narrower and squarer, they are deeper.
I explain to Quashia later that it should work out the same. We agree to begin the transfer in the morning. After he has left for his cottage, I set about the job myself. I love listening to that gentle rumble as the olives roll and tumble. When the first crate is full, I try to lift it but it is too heavy. So it’s a good load, I am thinking.
Suddenly, behind me, at the door, is René.
‘I didn’t hear your car,’ I puff.
‘New crates?’
‘I had to,’ I smile.
He has dropped by to see how we are getting on and to round off a hard day in the fields with a little apéritif, which he knows is perenially on offer here.
I dig out a bottle of rosé and we go inside. I am exhausted but not sorry to have company and settle back, ready to hear yet another tale of bygone days in Provence. Tonight his story is of Nina, who collected the groceries.
In the days after the war, René was appointed manager of a sheep farm in the Alp mountains. He arrived to take up his position with his young family in a truck. He was the very first to take a vehicle up into those steep inclines. The shepherds and farmers scoffed at him, claiming that such a contraption would break down, and serve no purpose on those serpentine uphill tracks. He begged to differ and, to show neighbourly spirit, drove from farm to farm offering to purchase and transport everybody’s provisions the next time he was in town.
Each farmer shook his head and gave the same response, ‘Nina shops for me.’
René was intrigued. ‘Who is Nina?’
‘The mule.’
And, sure enough, one of the locals owned a mule who set off once a week at dawn, visiting each farm, collecting from every household a shopping list and the cash to pay for the goods. They just placed their orders in one of Nina’s two satchels. The mule then hoofed it all alone down the mountainside to the small town below. There she clopped from shop to shop, where the storeholders collected the lists and money and replaced them with the requested items. Nina was rewarded with a sack of hay and, when the shopping was done, she climbed slowly back up the mountainside, stopping to eat grass wherever she fancied, but making sure she was back by sunset. On one occasion, René’s truck gave up, marooning him in the middle of nowhere. Night was drawing in, and he was hungry, cold and had no way of getting help – until he sighted the homebound mule. He scribbled a note and put it into Nina’s packed satchel. The note read: ‘Broken down. Need a tow.’ The mule relayed the message back to the next farmstead and René and vehicle were retrieved, much to the merriment of the mountain locals.
Ah, he makes me giggle, does René. But tonight, as he is leaving, he also disturbs me with the comment: ‘You know, Carol, you should weigh those crates; they won’t hold half as much fruit as mine.’
‘Surely they will, René?’
‘Mais, non.’
The next morning Quashia and I agree that having waited ten days for an appointment at the mill – bookings are impossible to come by because everyone is harvesting at the same time – it would be a disaster if, when our load was delivered, it proved to be insufficient and I was obliged to throw in my lot with some unidentified farmer the quality of whose drupes I cannot hazard.
I run to the guest bathroom to fetch the weighing scales.
‘Good idea,’ laughs Quashia, and heaves the charged crate on to it. We are dismayed to discover that the entire crateload weighs only ten kilos.
‘That can’t be right! The scales must be wrong.’ We empty out the olives and put the empty crate on the balance. It weighs less than 200 grammes. The scales are accurate.
We have thirty-six hours left before I am due at the mill and it seems we have gathered only fifty kilos of fruit. Quashia encourages me. ‘If we keep going, work until sundown, whatever the weather, we can make our mound.’
I see that he is tired, hours without a break, or food; I send him home to eat. The rules of his faith allow that during the season of Ramadan, of diurnal fasting, he can break his fast at sunset. I continue on alone in the garden. The trees seem as laden as they were when we began, days back. And many of the olives which have fallen to the ground and are lying in the nets have been eaten; all that remains of them are the stones. It’s curious that the birds are so avaricious this year, a lean year for olives, when there is plenty of food for them elsewhere. Driving through the country lanes I have noticed bushes weighed down with bright orange berries, clusters and clusters of them. Our bay trees, too, are gravid with shiny, tar-black globules.
After the recent tempestuous winds and dramatic overnight storms, the evening has turned still. The sky is almost cloudless and there is – one of my favourite perfumes – nuttiness, woodsmoke in the air. It turns the light a mulberry-blue. I work alone, collecting errant drupes hidden beneath stones or plants, until it is too dark to see and I realise that I am gathering fallen acorns by mistake. An olive branch whips against my eye and it begins to smart and weep. Time to stop, time for a glass of wine, I tell myself, and climb back up to the summer kitchen with my laden pails. As I empty my freshly gathered fruit into the crate it dawns on me that I feel deep satisfaction; I am at peace. The pain, the loss and the sense of failure which have been tearing at me are easing.
For me the gathering of olives is a therapy. Some knit or embroider; I grow, gather and press olives. I enjoy the air on my cheeks, the earth beneath my destroyed fingernails, the rich aromas of the damp soil, the birdsong all around me; the simplicity and authenticity of life in the garden. It makes sense; adds up; doesn’t demand comprehension, though it does demand commitment and can be physically backbreaking. But even that I enjoy: working until I am dead beat.
All the next day we toil. The blustering wind is up again, the sky slate-coloured. By lunchtime we have another ten kilos, which means we are still at least twenty short. I go upstairs to my office, using the interlude to catch up on my messages. Afterwards, I go back outside and find Quashia climbing among the silvery branches of one of the older trees.
‘Did you eat?’ he calls out to me as I descend the drive with my empty buckets.
‘No time.’ I am bending to gather the fallen fruit concealed within the windblown nets.
‘You’ll never get fat on the slithers of food you consume,’ he shouts from his neighbouring tree.
‘I don’t think that’s a problem I’ll ever have to worry about,’ I jape in return.
‘How much do you think I weigh?’
‘No idea.’
‘Ten kilos!’ And he roars with laughter. ‘I just stepped on your scales. Ten kilos! Then I put one of the flowerpots on. Ten kilos. Everything weighs ten kilos!’
‘No!’
We return to the summer kitchen and conduct several tests, weighing everything in sight. The scales are accurate up to ten kilos but above that the machine is blocked. We have been pushing ourselves needlessly; we have more than the quota stipulated by the mill.
We continue gathering but now the pressure is off. Our mood grows lighthearted and there are great cries when Quashia discovers a robin trapped beneath one of the nets. He brings it to show me, clutched between his work-scarred hands, and at first I think the little creature is dead or wounded. Bassett and Lucky lope along beside him, alert to possible prey.
‘Please don’t squash him!’
The tiny bird with its downy pumpkin-orange breast trembles, turning its minute head with terrified eyes this way and that, pinned in the warm, earthy clutch of this new and unfamiliar threat.
‘He looks so fragile. Is he injured?’ I ask.
‘No, but he was panicking and flapping, tangled up in all that netting.’
‘He’s probably freaked. Release your grip a little and see what happens, but watch out for these two.’ The dogs are panting at our heels. ‘If the bird is injured we’ll have to nurse him indoors or these hounds of ours will nab him,’ I say, but the moment Quashia unclenches his grip, the tiny thing zips from the muddy cave of fingers and flees to its arboreal refuge in the sprucy pine forest up behind the house.
Later, having harvested all that there is time for, Quashia and I settle in the summer kitchen. Our crates are filled to bursting and on the floor, laid out on the plastic sheet, is our most recently gathered pile. Because we have worked under such constraint there has been no time to sort through, trier, these fruits; they are mixed with leaves, bits of twig, blades of grass and the remains of bird-eaten fruits. I am not allowed to deliver such unwinnowed pickings; we need to sift them, this hillock of what must be another forty kilos. Seated cross-legged on cushions on the tiled floor, either side of the laden sheet, we begin to work. Outside it is dark; in here it is cold and our breath rises like smoke because I have turned off the radiator to preserve the oil in the drupes. The heat would dry them out. Thelonius Monk plays on the old stereo system in the corner. We work in concentrated silence until I ask Quashia about his first wife, the mother of all those children I saw on the wedding video, who died so young.
He smiles and says nothing, staring into the speckled quilt of fruits at his fingertips.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’
He shrugs. ‘You ask many questions. What do you want to know?’
‘How did you meet her? Who chose her for you?’
He shakes his head. ‘My father died when I was twelve or thirteen. I’ve told you all that.’
‘Yes.’
‘I chose my wife. I was sixteen, she was fifteen. In those days, before the war with France, the system was less strict and we could marry younger, which is better. Look at me now: sixty-seven years old, all my children grown up and married and I have twenty-eight grandchildren with plenty more to come. That’s how it should be. These days people wait too long, women don’t have children. My present wife, she never had children. It’s not good.’ He pauses and I don’t know if it has crossed his mind that I am one of those women. It certainly crosses mine.
‘Tell me about your first wife, what was her name?’
‘Nadia. Oh, she was beautiful! Comme elle était belle! There never was a woman as beautiful who walked this earth. Aside from you, of course, Carol.’ He glances up shyly and we both grin. I clench my fists and press them to my lips to blow on them. My fingers are stiff with cold. I shift position on the cushions; one of my legs has cramp.
‘We had nine children but two died, both at seventeen months. A boy and a girl, both walking and talking. We never knew why. In those days the hospitals and medical conditions in Algeria were very bad. It broke Nadia’s heart. She never got over the loss of them, even though there were seven others to keep house for. She was living with my mother. I came here to France when I was seventeen to join my brother who, as you know, was run over and killed by an American Jeep. I went home whenever I could and I sent money every month. Fortunately, the bond she formed with my mother was very special. My mother looked on her as a daughter; she nursed Nadia at the end. The cancer was everywhere. She was forty-four and our youngest son, the one you saw on the video getting married, was only two.’
We continue for a while in silence. He is in his past with his beautiful Nadia.
‘It took me ten years to find another wife. This woman is also kind and gentle, but she’s very thin, fragile, like that robin I found. You’ll see when you come to Algeria and meet her. Nadia was robust and strong, muscular and hefty, like you, Carol. Built like an ox.’
I hope I’m not, I am thinking.
‘Yet she was the one to die. My mother survived till ninety. She returns, visits and talks to me regularly, as does my father, but never Nadia. Nadia’s never been back to see me.’
I am surprised by this remark. This man who labours for our land, who is of the earth, always practical, is talking to me about spirits.
‘Do you see your father, Carol?’ he asks. ‘Does he come to visit you?’
‘I think so. Certainly, I am aware of his presence in my life and I light a candle to him every day. Well, most days.’
‘My parents come to me in the village house where we lived, where one of my boys now lives. Never in my new house. Well, these matters are private, aren’t they?’
‘Might Nadia be sad that you remarried?’
‘Oh, no! She would have wanted it. I don’t know where she is or why she doesn’t talk to me. We grew up together. I chose her, gave her my word that she would always be mine and she knows that I would never break that word. She will always be my sweetheart.’
The record has finished and I don’t get up to change it. While Quashia dreams of Nadia, I consider our relationship and what a curious but special one it is. Who would have thought it? This creased-faced Arab, in his Persian wool hat and socks with the toes worn through, cross-legged on my floor, me opposite him. As he so often claims, we are family. I know and believe it now. And I thank whoever is out there, listening to us, watching over us, that he and we have been brought together. Quashia is the guardian angel of this farm.
I wake stiff as a board, back aching, to whiffs of last night’s log fire still smouldering in the hearth. Outside, the day is warm and bright. I swim in the pool in the late November sunshine, splashing fast, to and fro, in the icy-cold water like a plump otter, and hurry to get dressed, ready for my second visit to the mill.
The hills are cloudy green and rusty oak. Low clouds hang around the mountains. An incongruous sight on the way through Grasse is a falcon perched atop a set of traffic lights. I weigh in our olive load at 124 kilos. Hurrah!
Once the forms have been dealt with, I am greeted below, at mill level, by a handful of men staring at a whacking great basin of olives and shaking their heads despondently. ‘Trop vieilles, trop vertes,’ they are moaning. Moving alongside them, I glance at the harvest about to be pressed and must agree that the drupes do look rather sorry for themselves: skins peeling, flesh disintegrating, old yet still green.
I ask the worker who shovels and carts, always a cigarette glued to his lips: ‘What variety of olive is this?’
‘Fuck knows,’ he answers, and slouches away.
My questions and constant interest bemuse these oléiculteurs. They are not fussed about the pressing process; they grow animated only when the oil begins to drip through. Passionate or despairing, they wear their emotions on their leathered faces. Arms folded, aimlessly pacing, they await the results, knowing the yield will be mean. They watch in silence, hoping for the best. Like the weather, this process carries with it a combination of unpredictable factors. I observe five men bent like storks staring silently at a pipe, and then the oil begins to arrive, to drip and now gush.
‘Pas mal, pas mal,’ they are saying. ‘Considering the weather.’
‘Bah, the weather,’ one bleats, but their mood is softening. They chatter and begin to laugh, hands dancing, extrovert once more.
Gérard, the fils of Christophe, pays them no heed. He is cleaning, shunting bottles, stainless-steel containers, washing with jet sprays. A gush here, another there. He is careful never to mix one client’s produce with another’s. A sacrosanct affair.
Our turn next.
Christophe bustles in, a ladder rather too large for this confined space on his shoulders. He is shouting and waving, shaking hands with everyone. Due to the weight of his paunch, he waddles like a duck.
‘What news of your AOC?’ he bawls at me.
I sigh. ‘We are still waiting.’
‘Ah, oui,’ he shrugs, as though life is nothing but a business of waiting.
Our pressing begins. I pass the time talking to a retired mason who has thirty trees. He bought his plot as a hobby for his retirement. He moans about how hard it is to maintain the price of oil. ‘I tried to sell for sixty francs a litre but nobody would buy. Now I sell at fifty and they buy, but they are not happy. They moan: “Trop cher.”’
‘Perhaps because they can drive across the border into Italy and pick up oil at thirty francs a litre,’ I suggest.
‘Mais oui, but the Italians are like the Moroccans. They mix their olive oil with cashew and pistachio oils to be more competitive on the international market.’
I try to protest that this cannot possibly be so, but he will not have it.
During a lull in the proceedings I jot down what the mason has told me. He crosses over to me. ‘Are you writing about me?’ he demands.
‘No,’ I lie.
‘What, then? What are you writing?’
‘Ideas,’ I stammer, feeling embarrassed, wishing I had left my notebook where it was in my bag. ‘A thought here and there, strung together.’
‘Stories,’ he continues. ‘You’re like the Italians. Mix a bit of this and that and call it extra virgin. There’s no such thing as extra virgin. Either she’s a virgin or she’s not!’ He roars with lascivious laughter.
And now the moment for our oil. I rush to the spout and watch those first drips plopping into the steel dish. Others gather around me. All is silent. I cast my gaze across the intent faces, peering from face to weatherworn face, and then I return to the deep sea-green liquid. I am apprehensive. Though I know the yield will be less than last year, I long for it to be excellent. Suddenly, I catch myself as these others might see me. My expression is sombre, concentrated, just like theirs. I am no different. This transformation from drupe to oil is as sacred and as important to me as it is to any of these farmers. I burst into a broad smile. Would I rather be learning lines or drinking champagne at the Ivy? No, not today. For this moment in time, this olive season, I feel content, I am complete. I have melded with the old order. I have become one of them.
Upstairs, as I approach the cash desk to pay for our pressing, I spy Christophe slumped on a trolley. ‘How did you do?’ he calls out to me as one gambler might ask of another.
‘Catastrophic!’ I cry, feigning despair.
He takes me seriously and clambers to his feet, huffing and puffing. ‘Mon Dieu. How many litres?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘That’s better than most. Look at this morning’s yields. And it’s the quality. You have the quality. What would you do with thirty litres of dishwater? And wait till you’ve planted those two hundred young trees. You’ll get your AOC, have no fear. It takes time. Life takes time.’
We all shake hands as Gérard, the fils, interrupts his work to hump my bidons of oil to the boot of my car.
‘I wouldn’t do this for anyone else,’ he mutters shyly.
‘Thank you,’ I tell him, genuinely touched by his kindness.
Everyone shakes hands again and the frightful mason attempts to kiss me while the rest of us are merrily waving and calling, ‘See you soon!’
‘Four kilos to the litre next time!’
A curious band we make, I am thinking, as I trundle off down the hill in a happy frame of mind.