ABOUT LOOKING ALONE AT A PLACE
Arles
In December of 1970, after several fine months in Provence with my sister Norah, I went alone to Arles and Avignon and then Marseille. We had been in all these familiar places lately, and I thought that after she left to catch a slow freighter from Le Havre to San Francisco, it would be an interesting idea to see how well I could return by myself to towns where I had always been with loved and trusted people.
The experience was indeed interesting. I found Arles bound into the first days of what was to be a national disaster of cold and wind, involving much more than the traditional mistral. Avignon was even colder. Marseille, later, was in a state of near-siege, and indeed most of France was half paralyzed, although the outside world stayed almost unaware: Army helicopters rescued stranded motorists and farmers; Red Cross workers fed them in village stations and churches; passenger trains and planes stopped running. I got the last train from Avignon to Marseille, and after some days there I told the concierge at the Good Old Beauvau that I might stay for another week or more, without a penny, until planes and trains ran again, and he laughed for one of the few times in his professional life and said, “Don’t worry.” So I did not.
There was time to think about Arles, among other things, as I looked down on the Old Port heaving heavily under a strong mistral. I decided that it had been a good stern adventure, mostly for reasons I have clipped from my discursive report, the rambling kind written by solitary people. What remained was of others’ vitality rather than my own doggedness. Why write about walking alone along the Rhône in bitter wind when there is still the sound of superb Gypsy music in one’s head?
I think the winter view of this fascinating town in Provence is not a familiar one, even to people who love the place as I do. Myself, I do not want to see it again that way, although I know that it would be easier with a partner.
I The Calendar
In Arles there were no porters. I asked a lot of the people delivering mail and cartons if somebody might come to help me. They were very busy, but kept telling me not to move. It was cold on Quai 2, and the trains that tore through the station made a terrible wind of blowing sand. In about a half hour an electric wagon loaded on my three bags, and I went through the underground passage and met it at the baggage office, and a taxi took me to the Hotel Nord-Pinus. I had always liked it because a part of the Roman Forum is carefully built into its walls.
The reception clerk was a tall youngish man, not hostile but not friendly, not offensive but not inoffensive, in a veiled way. He never looked at me over the next days when he took my key. He seemed impatient, not directly but not indirectly.
He told me wearily that a room on the Place du Forum, which I had asked for, would be very cold at this season. At my request he showed me one, and then two others at the side and back of the hotel. He was right: the radiators were turned off for the winter, on the front. I decided to settle in a room on the first floor, with a little brass plate on the door, Chambre Jean Cocteau. (There were others down the hall: L’Empéreur, Edith Piaf, Jean Marais, L’Archevêque, etc.)
Inside my room, pleasant with a big bed and toile de Jouy wallpaper, there was a framed photograph of Cocteau and a beautiful male companion at a banquet, probably downstairs. I looked at it. I looked at the big bed. They slept in it, too. It was comfortable.
The armoire was the biggest I ever saw, probably twelve feet high. Inside it was like a little room. Outside it was handsome, with pewter hinges and locks and plaques. It was grotesque. I liked it.
The bathroom was nice, too, roomy and old-fashioned, with cracked white and blue tiles, and a separate toilet with a chain and a wrought-iron tank high above. Good hot water. Ample light.
I walked here and there, taking my bearings in the town again, after I’d put things away. It got dark soon. I bought some carnations, red and white—they cost 1.50 francs apiece, instead of the 20 centimes or so I was used to in Grasse and La Bocca! I bought a bottle of cognac, four fine tangerines, and some grapes, for a possible emergency.
I went down to have a light dinner in the hotel, since I’d seen that the Vaccarès next to the Nord-Pinus was closed for the season (Michelin said February!). But so was the hotel restaurant and bar. Damn, I said. Why did you not mention this when I wrote for reservations? Damn. I asked in my mild way where I could go. “Oh, a dozen places,” the bored young man said nonchalantly, not looking at me. “Jean will indicate them whenever you wish.” “I am hungry now,” I said. “Jean!” he said, and a handsome, weary-looking man about seventeen appeared from somewhere and we went out onto the icy sidewalk. He was shivering in a thin dirty white jacket, and his long blond hair blew into his eyes. “Go down to Les Lices, the big boulevard,” he yelled into the wind. “Turn to the right. They’re all there, quantities of them!” He ran back into the warm foyer.
Across from the Restaurant Vaccarès, on the other side of the Nord-Pinus, is the Hotel du Forum. It has the same number of rooms, the same prices, but no old piece of Roman wall in its façade, and for vaguely sentimental reasons, that (like the bronze statue of Frédéric Mistral in the Place) had decided me to stay at the older hotel. That first night, I walked once around the little square and then up the Forum’s steps, and instantly wished I were no place but there, even without Cocteau’s ghost in the armoire or nearby. It was friendly.
There was a big fire in the living room-bar. Electric Christmas decorations went on and off in a bothersome way, but there was a nice homely crèche in the corner. I read a copy of Le Provençal and had a good drink and listened to a little boy, plainly of the family, explain the crèche to his visiting uncle. There were sounds from the kitchen, and upstairs somebody was practicing on the piano, very skillful advanced stuff. I was comfortable, as I could never have been in the “lobby” of the Nord-Pinus even if the restaurant and the bar had been ready to welcome me.
In the small dining room, well and snugly decorated, a workable fire burned on the big grill. There was one waiter, perhaps thirty-five and among the best I have ever watched, constantly attentive but never obtrusive. When one client was called to the telephone, he immediately brought two plate heaters to the table, etc. There were a few single men, en pension, and they were served with real elegance. There was a large fat couple. Two old men, short and with the authority of position and probably of affluence, ate well in a corner. They spoke Provençal most of the time. When they spoke French, one of them had an American accent and inflection, as if he had lived in the States a long time.
I ate a plate of the famous saucisson d’Arles, which really I do not like any more than I like salami, except perhaps on a picnic. But it was served with a pile of delicious chilled radishes and a pat of butter marked Forum, and the waiter set a tall black jar of olives on my table. The long spoon had a little twig of fresh olive leaves tied to its handle. Then I ate some good braised endive. Then I ate a large wedge of apple tart, one of the three or four best of my life. I drank a half-bottle of Tavel.
I walked a little after the good supper, and decided to stay on in the Cocteau Room but eat mostly at the hotel next door, where I would not feel subtly unwelcome as I did at the Nord-Pinus.
The next day, my head ringing happily with all the night’s BELLS, I walked a lot more and went to the big CHRISTMAS MARKET, and here and there. In front of the Town Hall, I listened to two Gypsies play beautiful guitar MUSIC (see Notes). Far across town I found the Brasserie Provençale, which I’d seen mentioned in Michelin and then on my way from the station in the taxi. One woman in a pastry shop showed me how to get there when I felt lost. “It’s a fairly good place,” she said, to encourage me.
It was empty when I went in, but soon filled with many men, mostly young in groups, with older ones eating alone, reading Le Provençal, like me. I’d seen so many fine coquillages in the Market that I asked if I could have some mussels. The woman owner looked quite baffled, and then said that some could be brought from across the street, but was I sure I meant mussels and not oysters? I said I was sure. Then we decided on not one dozen, not two dozen, but eighteen. Then I looked at the menu and said I would like some pieds-paquets. She said warningly, “You know that is tripe!” I said, “Yes, I know.” She kept on looking baffled. I added to the general puzzlement by asking to have an order of gin and an order of red vermouth and no ice, to mix by myself at the table. By this time the whole family (a little boy and an old man playing cards, and two young girls helping during Christmas vacation as waitresses) watched me anxiously—and I went right on, because I knew I was almost meaningless, almost invisible. There was no hostility, no resentment. I was not really unwelcome, but on the other hand I was not welcome.
This seemed true everywhere, almost, in Arles. It was partly because it was not the season for outsiders, so that the citizens could enjoy each other as if the few tourists were not there at all. Everywhere the family had moved into the open, in little shops, in CAFÉS, hotels (see Notes). The Christmas decorations were part of the family life. The family crèche was not there to show off to the rare customers but because the family was there, enjoying the space and comfort that is sold by the square inch during the season. I knew that the crèche the little boy at the Forum was showing his uncle was for his family. Perhaps that is why the Nord-Pinus seemed hostile? Its foyer had an artificial tree, rather pretty. The chairs were soft, and the brass was polished. But there was no reality, no clutter and warmth, no family. There was the tall almost-rude clerk, and now and then Jean in his dirty white jacket, and a remote small elderly maid who worked until noon. Jean was the clerk’s pretty-boy. But it was not a “family.”
Another reason for my feeling subtly unwelcome in Arles was that I must depend upon people to feed and house me and the Arlesians are closed PEOPLE, remote, in spite of their reputation for robust gaiety (see Notes). They have a haughty toughness about them, with possible anger and suspicion not far back of their outward courtesy. And when I went into a restaurant or a bar, I was given a table when I asked for it, and I was brought what I ordered to eat and drink, and when I asked for the bill, I was given it, but there was seldom even a pretense of interest in whether or not I liked my table, my meal, whether or not I wanted to drop dead right there. Good evening, yes, no, goodbye.
Of course this was not always true; I was given an occasional fleeting but not perfunctory smile. I think the waiter at the Forum had an interest in my welfare that was not completely professional.
I wandered again. I went to the XIIIth International Salon of Santons in the old town house where Mistral spent his Nobel Prize money to start the Muséon Arlaten. It was interesting. There were a lot of children looking baffled by all the Baby Jesuses in one place.
I felt tired and cold, but stopped at the Town Hall on my way to the hotel because I saw a group of tambourinaires go in. There was a crowd outside, waiting with photographers, the cars all beflowered for a couple of weddings. One group came out, the bride pretty, the groom handsome, the men wearing huge white carnations. I went into the great vaulted foyer. Another bride stood in the stone-cold air, a plain girl, and I hoped she wore winter underwear. The groom was a tiny man at least twice her age, as thin as a mosquito but less hungry-looking. People surged in and formed a line behind them, and they went up the fine stairs to the marriage office, after the flustered bride figured out how to manage her bouquet, her rosary, and her long stiff skirts. It was sad and pointless, and made one wonder: Why? How much?
A big door was open, off the main hall, and some sort of dedication was going on, I think of the opening of a show of Provençal photography, with a table in the middle for wine. People looked dressed up, and the tambourinaires waited in a corner. I would have liked to hear them, but I was very cold, and not invited anyway. (Nobody would have minded …)
I rested under Cocteau’s feather puff. For a sou I’d have stayed there. I talked sternly with myself, put on a new face, and stopped on the way out at the desk: Jean was there and I feel more at ease with him than with his boss. I told him I was a little desperate about food. He wrote the name of a restaurant, L’Assenage, and I knew where it was because in the morning I had searched out the municipal theatre and read several restaurant signs, mostly saying Annual Closing. It was empty but open, and gradually filling when I left in time for the play I’d bought a ticket for in the morning. I sat close to the GRILL (see Notes). I drank a vermouth-gin, a kind of game by now to see what it would be and how much it would cost. (This one was generous, and cost 6 francs. They ranged from undrinkable to delicious, puny to goblet size, expensive to exorbitant, everywhere in Provence from village pub to grand-luxe bars.)
The crudités were really so, except for the bowl of cooked rice, routine in Arles near the Camargue: carrots, céleri-rave, red cabbage, all shaved, and radishes, and a bowl of good thickish vinaigrette. The waitress grilled a piece of lamb on the hearth—asked me how I liked it done. I drank a small rosé. I had to leave too soon. The waitress was vaguely dismayed. I’d return, I said.
Les Nonnes, presented by the leftist Southeast Cultural Center, was the kind of earnest theatrical effort that makes one wonder. A general gloom lies like dust everywhere in a dingy provincial theatre, especially in cold winter. I would have left at the entr’acte, but was not ready for bed so soon again.
It was strange, to walk home. The Christmas lights strung across all the STREETS gave a white glare, almost without shadows (see Notes). I felt a little shaky and old, and crossed the silent intersections cautiously, with vague thoughts of stumbling and lying unseen until morning in the icy gutters. Ridiculous, I said.
By the next morning I was plainly counting hours, not daring to count days, until I could leave, go away, go where? I dawdled in the room, and ate more breakfast than I wanted, because it tasted good and I felt hungry.
St. Trophime was locked when I went by at noon, and it was Sunday! What if I had needed sanctuary? I felt peevish. All the bar-tabacs were closed, even the one supposed to be open seven days a week, so I could not buy a paper. The light was thin, and the air very cold. On the Boulevard, the brasseries were filled, at least in the front windows, by solid couples out for their Sunday apéros. I went into one, and sat with a vermouth-gin as long as I could stand feeling thin and invisible among so many fat people. Then I went further toward the back for some lunch. The waitress was a tall skinny blond girl, very worn and with a lovely impudent profile which sat oddly on her air of bitter experience. I ordered a demi of rosé, a very good one from a small vineyard near Les Baux, and a salade Camargaise and roast chicken. The salad was good, of tomatoes, olives, ham, chicken, and of course rice. The chicken was not well enough done, very bloody, but there were good frites with it, and a small lettuce salad. I drank an espresso, loitering.
It was a good afternoon. I walked to Les Alyscamps. Down on the caravan square (no market wagons, no nomads), many games of pétanque went on. The men all wore Sunday black and brown. The hard earth was sandy-grey, and the trees, some of them with enormous gnarled trunks, were silvery and bare. The only color was from some neat green and blue trailer homes. The Youth Hostel was closed.
Until just as I left Les Alyscamps, I was the only person there besides the old guardian and his dog Pimpette. I walked on as slowly as the cold air allowed me to. Inside St. Honorât the light slanted through the dirty faded windows. I felt fine, quiet, almost cheerful among all the empty sarcophagi: little, enormous, mostly plain. I wondered how they were sealed, to hold in the first hundred years or so of rotting flesh. By now they were pure. One side chapel, at its first step, had a white marble marker in the floor, with three crouching dogs and a pair of scissors still showing on it. Why? I wanted to ask the guardian, but when I went out he was busy with two late tourists. Pimpette yapped busily.
I stopped again at the brasserie on Les Lices, to thaw myself. The crowd was younger and noisier, and I sat in a window and watched the Sunday strollers try not to walk faster than usual to beat the wind.
In the morning I had planned to have a good friendly supper at the Forum: the tureen of hot soup on a little warmer, perhaps a grilled chop, certainly more apple tart. I would order a red wine for a change. But when I found the first of several tabacs closed, and went across the Place to the “new” hotel, there was by its brass push button a small card in French, English, German: Restaurant closed. I felt bleak. So after my second drawn-out stop at the smoky mediocre brasserie I walked back to St. Trophime. It was open, but dim and shabby, with no crèche. I looked in the few lighted windows of small dull shops, and went across town to the Rhône: Once I heard some good hot gospel rock from a tightly shuttered house, and the sound of talking and laughing.
Coming back toward the hotel I stopped at the one little pastry shop I saw open, and bought a heavy-looking sausage roll and talked for a minute with the comparatively friendly woman there, about weather of course, and then the gastronomical hazards of being a stranger in a town closed for the winter season. She knew of one place that might be open: L’Assenage. I went on back to the Nord-Pinus, and took a hot bath, and the little supper tasted pleasant, after I put the fruit on the outside windowsill to chill and warmed the roll on the radiator, and made myself a brandy and tap water.
I felt angered, but in a remote way. When I had come in with my paper bag of supper, the tall young man was for the first time more than almost civil (he was never exactly un-civil). He asked me in a roundabout rather mocking way if my work was going well (the maid and Jean came in for bed and tray while I was writing). I said it was, but that my problem was finding a place to eat. (I wanted to add that it was unfortunate that I’d not been told that the hotel’s restaurant was closed.) He laughed scornfully, and said as he walked away, “Oh, that doesn’t matter! You’re simply on a diet—good for your health to stop eating!” You rat-bastard, I thought in a controlled and somewhat bored and automatic way. But halfway through the pastry roll I forgot my anger. Sleep was good, wrapped in goose down and the sound of bells.
The next morning I walked across to the Forum, because I saw different notices on the menu board: it would be open that night! I felt lightsome. I went to the Musée d’Art Chrétien. I paid the gardien in his little warm glass cage and a girl, plain but nicely rounded and neat, asked me with a fairly “good” British accent if I was going down to the Roman galleries. If so, she wanted to go with me. I agreed, feeling amused and je-m’en-fichiste and perhaps welcoming of company. The girl was nice, not effusive or silly. We went together into mysterious warmth, the never-changing UNDERGROUND (see Notes). The lights were artful, and of course we grew used to them. And it was a peculiar experience to be there under the old city. There was no sound except for the full rushing of a source, and then diminishing drops from it into lower galleries. The air was dry, with a metallic polish to it, perhaps in the mind. I did not feel at all uneasy as I would have on top of a tower, and when we came up the girl went one way and I another, courteously.
I walked down Les Lices and had a slow drink at “the” brasserie, sitting in the glassed sunlight reading Maigret. There were no people to watch. Then I went to the place where a sad billboard said Ici Se Habla Español. It was bleak and shabby. The waiter on one side was exhausted, with broken feet. He motioned me without even a flicked lip muscle to the other side when I said I would like to eat. I sat at one of the six or eight tables with the usual paper mats on them, and my waiter was young and doomed to low-grade jobs, very unprepossessing physically, although I saw him laugh once, back at the bar, and he had a flash of pure joy to him, like a child.
I asked for crudités and a cheese omelet and a demi of rosé, and read more. Next to me a family of pieds-noirs, all blue-eyed and pale except for one dark boy with a Spanish accent, spoke what I think was Algerian. Later two young salesmen ate pieds-paquets. Across the big ugly room young people, mostly girls, drank beer or espressos at a few tables.
I heard chair legs scrape, and looked up from my book to see if the mute sickly old waiter was going to let people eat on his side. But almost at once a quick rhythmical whimpering began. Was a child ill? The sound went on, and the owner came wearily from behind the bar, took a look, went back for his wife. She showed more emotion, and clutched her breasts. A young man sat down heavily at the edge of the circle of girls bending over, and looked as if he might faint or vomit, and I wondered if he’d seen some kind of fit, the stiff foaming kind. But the sound was not right for that.
The few other customers went, looked down, went away again with pale faces. The boss’s wife called for an ambulance. The soft measured whimpers changed to a steady gentle mumble, almost like speech. One girl hurried into her coat. A red ambulance, Secours Routier, whipped around and in front, and the sick girl, all of this within five minutes or so, was on a litter and gone, and people went soberly back to their tables. I watched her from across the room as she was lifted from the floor to the stretcher and then carried out. Her mumble had stopped. She looked beautiful: young, peaceful, and above all, pale. Had she taken poison? Had her heart failed her? Was she dead? I think she still breathed. I’ll never know. I think that she was unconscious before she uttered a sound.
I returned to my Maigret. It was as if I were a fish in a bowl, watching another world through curved glass. The girl’s first moans meant something, for I have heard a whipped child sob that way in final exhaustion. But I felt no pain to absorb, and could not guess possible grief. My curiosity, in other words, was numb. Now I can hear some astonishment in the first whimperings, and I shall always see the purity of her unconscious face on the stretcher.
The food was very bad. I was hungry, too; the wine was all right, but full of shards from its cork, which the distressed young WAITER had broken (see Notes). When I went out, the old one with the bad feet held open the door for me and said, “Bien! Bien!” as if to get rid of the last customer who had heard the girl.
I walked a lot, finally out to the Musée Réattu on the great river. It is a beautiful place, beautifully tended, with a fine permanent collection of photographs of Provence, always something new, repairs always going on. The Rhône rushes by. That day it was bitterly, brutally cold, and the concierge looked strangely at me, and with some relief, as I finally left the old stone townhouse.
I thought about places, at dinner. In some, one is at ease. I was, in the Forum. I almost breezed in, and the waiter breezed out to meet me, and I hung my coat on a rack as if it was familiar instead of the only time I’d done it. I sat at a table reading, with a drink. The other people, near the fire on the hearth, were two young ones kissing and murmuring at the end of the room. The dining room was fine. I asked myself why I’d turned my back shyly to it, as soon as I sat down and thought. But I had. So I read now and then, listened, ate. Two more couples came, and two men alone, and two women together. People whispered in spite of the discreet and excellent radio music and the kitchen sounds. It was a good place, like a balm on some unidentified sore or wound. I decided some things about Arles that were doubtless borne on the wind that now howled between my two places, my chosen table and my chosen bed. The next day I would move north to Avignon, where a kinder hostel awaited, but for this sheltered moment I was freely warm and alive.
II Notes
BELLS. Very early in the mornings, after midnight that is, I could hear five—perhaps four, because two of the clocks or steeples rang two or three. The first one on each hour was the town clock, near to my window. Sometimes when the wind was right it sounded almost on top of me, in my guts: the three first quarters, on two notes, then a ponderous deeper note. This took quite a time, for the elevens and twelves. And every quarter hour sounded, 1•2 for fifteen minutes, 1•2-1•2 for the half hour, and so on. The next-nearest bell may have been on St. Trophime—almost in my room at times. It sounded only the hours, one minute after the town clock had finished and, of course, with another tone. Then in the quiet of the early day I could hear two other bells, sweeter and far away, on the hours or in chorus.
The tones outside my window were harsh and not true. They pleased me only because I love bells in a town, any town. But they were literally flat, as if they were gongs or cymbals being struck, and not curved hollow instruments. They had a powerful and jarring vibration, which sometimes set my teeth to hurting when I was not even aware I listened. Still I liked them, since they were bells.
Two or three times a different deep old solemn bell tolled, probably from St. Trophime. It was plainly some religious signal, as for a funeral. And at odd times every bell in town, in my hearing anyway, rang at once—Saturday midnight, Sunday morning at seven, and Monday too, one night at six. Perhaps it was something to do with Christmas week. And once there seemed to be a definite pattern, like change ringing except from several steeples instead of only one.
This auditory awareness is considered an assault by many people who think nothing of the noise in an American city. They are, by assumption anyway, driven half mad by an intrusive bell ringing in the night, when constant police and fire sirens do no more than reassure them. The bells of Arles must be a torture to such wanderers from their familiar decibel-tolerance. Fortunately for me, I drew reassurance from them, no matter where they came from to my warm downy bed in the Nord-Pinus, and their night pattern soon grew to be a part of my own.
Up toward the theatre, when I got sucked into the flow, there were racks and piles of all kinds of clothing—sheets, caps, shoes, complete outfits for all sizes and sexes, shapeless pinafores, glittering gold sequin tunics, shoddy modish pants suits for fat women. There were piles of “genuine imported tweeds,” and brocades and mattress ticking. It was dull to look at, but the people shuffled along warily, sniffing out good buys for Christmas, school, work.
Somehow I got across Les Lices, heading the other way. I must have been pushed across with a surge of people when a policeman held up his white mitten. It was all food, in endless stands on both sides of the packed walk. I have never seen so many different kinds of sausages, meat pâtés and rolls, cuts of horse-cow-pig, dead rabbits dripping blood into little paper cups tied over their noses, bunches of wild birds hanging like feathery grapes, more wild birds naked and tiny on white enameled trays. I have never seen so many great wooden buckets of olives of every kind and size and color. There was one tub of green olives mixed with little pickled onions and slices of sickly-looking bitter orange. There were olives stuffed, smooth, wrinkled, shiny, dull. And there were tubs of all kinds of pickles. And never have I seen so many spices, in packets-boxes-jars, aromatics from Provence, pepper from far places.
Then there were dozens of stands of nothing but grains: rice of countless kinds and qualities, ten different types of couscous, pounded wheat and millet. There was a formless section of unattractive dry sweet cookies of peculiar shapes and colors, and great glittering tins of hard candies. At one modest stand I asked for a 2-franc sack of honey drops, and said in a foolish way, “Is it Alpine?” and the young man said, “Of course! Please try one!” and he held out a big plastic bag to me. He had a nice smile, and was stamping his feet to keep warm. The honey drop was good. I felt warmed by him, too. He was not doing any business. His little sacks were lying there in the pale cold light, filled with herbal cough drops, mint tablets, my honey. He looked more like a farmhand than a market man, and I shall no doubt remember him now and then until my mind dies.
There were vegetables, on and on. Perhaps I have never walked past so many unattainable beauties. I was hungry, and I thought of what I could do, if I were home, with the crisp gleaming glowing brilliance of all the lettuces and endives and purple eggplants and tiny turnips and strange twists and pats and whorls of live freshness. It was beyond my grasp, except spiritually, for any nourishment past my eye, occasionally my nose. I was hotel bound.
All along the surging pushing alleyway between the stands were women crouching in front of baskets of lemons, or holding out handfuls of garlic. They did not even have a plank and two boxes for a little table, like the boy with the honey drops. And there were thick clots of people waiting for slabs of hot nasty-looking pizza at stands with stoves and fancy ovens: pots of sausages boiling and steaming, piles of split rolls stuffed with pink diced ham. And there were stands with kettles of hot oil where strange Tunisian sweets bobbed, to be fished out onto greasy papers and doused with bright yellow and pink syrups. The ground was littered with half-eaten snacks, and wind caught up the papers now and then, in a hollow in the mob of people.
I found myself across the Boulevard again, in a surge of laden women and men dragging children. There were endless rows of live barnyard fowls crowded into pens. Huge geese ambled about on long cords, and turkeys lay on their sides with their legs tied, their heads up like plumed snakes. More bunches of dead field birds, and pheasants with their plumage dimming, hung from racks. And there were rows of potted plants, Christmas trees, clumps of mistletoe, and a wide walkway up to the Théâtre Antique with tables and chairs, old clocks, swords, dueling pistols, tile washtubs, piles of shabby books, portfolios of prints, a trunkful of rags of silk and damask.
Back down onto Les Lices, there were the inevitable ghosts who sell knife sharpeners, carrot slicers, magic glue that will mend anything—then more clothes, so dismally shoddy.…
My feet hurt, through their general numbness. All the brasseries were jammed with men waiting to reload their stuff after the Market. They drank standing, and the air was blue. At the tables beautiful young Algerian and Gypsy men played cards and drank orange sodas. I stumped along the cold pavement covered with trash, and it felt good to turn off Les Lices, out of the ruthless surge of the dark crowd—the black eyes, black clothes.…
Later that day, in perhaps two hours, I went back to the Boulevard, and there was not one scrap of paper, one smudge of greasy water, to show the hundreds of stands, the thousands of people that had pushed and eaten and spat there for several hours. The wind lifted a little dust in front of the empty Hotel Jules César. Across the wide street, on the town side, the cafés were empty. I went into one. It still smelled of pastis, or perhaps it would anyway. It was warm, and quiet, and I sat drinking a brandy and Perrier and wondering about the human belly and bowels.
Never had I seen so much to eat-wear-devour-suck-tear-kill-ravel-sew—and suddenly I thought of the long double line of open tables and vans behind the two main alleys, toward the country, with a tang of salt, and with more fish and shellfish than I have ever dreamed of, dripping down onto the cold pavement, bubbling, crawling, trying to hop or writhe away, sloshed now and then to stay gleaming, hacked alive according to one’s uses, some flesh marble white, some bruised or bloody red. The flea-like crevettes grises waved their hairy legs in tiny impotence. There were a few elegant live lobsters. Most of the oysters were small, not costly big ones. The mussels were little, dark purple. There were millions of sea urchins slowly moving their spines. A man picked up a pale supion (a small, delicate cuttlefish), pulled out its bone with thumb and finger, tipped back his own head to let it slide down his throat, tentacles first, and he chewing as it went. It looked easy, but not enticing—rather crisp, to bite along, like a new eraser at school?
I wondered where all the fish and shellfish went, in Arles, for even in the few eating places still open, there was absolutely no sign of selling them, nor had I even seen a store with fish on the counters. There were a lot of tubs of tiny shells and fishes too small to bother to eat whole. Of course there was wilted sea lettuce everywhere, great beds of it, and the whole look and smell of the Market there, even in the hard cold, was sharp and salty, very good.
There was one short orderly demonstration against the Burgos trials in Spain—perhaps two hundred well-organized young people with a banner I never did see to read, and a few red flags. Behind them straggled a hundred mixed older people, mostly men. They chanted, “À—bas—le fasCISme” People paid no heed at all, that I could see—no scorn, no sympathy.
Everyone was alone, concentrating. I went along, not pushed or shoved but unseen in the concerted need to provide for Christmas, for school clothes, for something good to eat. There was no gaiety about marketing, if there ever was any in Arles: Christmas was a serious problem, one to be faced with tough realistic courage, and not some crazy pagan festival as it would be farther south, in Aix or Marseille. People were not freezing, at least outwardly, as they surged along Les Lices past all the goodies, but they did not smile.
The music grew more insistent. I seemed to melt into the ring of youths, so that now and then the musicians looked straight into my eyes, through me, as far as fishes look through water, not at all, infinitely. A third man stood tensely near the two players, and now and then put back his head and cried out in a strange beautiful wail that was not like anything I had ever heard, not Flamenco, not Arab, but still familiar and right.
The music was good. It had authenticity and power, and as far as I could tell it was being played because it had to be, there and then, for indisputable reasons never explained: not for money, certainly, nor for any apparent ceremony. Later I read in the paper an ad for a nightclub where “The Three Gypsy Brothers” were going to perform for a Christmas réveillon. Perhaps this was a rehearsal at the side of the small square lined with ancient massive stone buildings. The music made it logical, with its strength and resonance.
It was extremely intricate, like some of the recordings by Manitas de Plata, technically far beyond me, but with a control and a rhythm that spoke directly to the stones, to the air. I felt stirred, and my mind laughed.
The leader was theatrically handsome, dressed in gaudy stylish clothes: black, tight, flaring, pinched, with impeccably white shirt, high collar touching the ears. He had a moustache as thin as a knife-cut, and his lips were carved and scornful. He directed the others with little grunts and moans, and with his intense eyes, while his face stayed almost like stone.
One younger man was tall and svelte, with a darker skin than the leader, and handsome too. To my ear he played beautifully, but the older man was fiercely observant and critical in an almost mute way, and they seemed in perfect agreement. The third boy carried his guitar, and stood at the edge of the bunched crowd. Once he let out a soft wailing song, a few bars, and the leader gave him an impatient glare and then flashed his eyes back to the one playing with him. They faced one another, almost touching their instruments, and their hands went too fast to follow.
The crowd was all male, mostly under twenty except for one man about forty who was probably Northern or English, shabbily dressed and obviously knowledgeable about the music. Once he looked at me in a detached way with blue eyes, and then he was like the leader, as remote as a fish. I was not a female, not even there—his fellow traveler.
The music pounded and pressed into the cold air. Suddenly I knew I must walk away from it, from the silent crowd in its cheap modish clothes, from the two willowy boys, one waiting and one being swept along by the leader. He whipped sound until it crackled around us, seemed almost to stop, and then rushed ahead with a look of contempt lifting the thin scar of hair above his beautiful lips. I almost staggered into the hall of the Hotel de Ville. I could not look again into his blind eyes; he was probably the most absorbed human being I ever saw. He was coupled to his instrument like a fine stallion to a mare, and as unaware of anything but his own rhythmic necessities. I walked into the great vault of the marriage hall refreshed and different, if dizzied.
That was the realest music, in Arles and perhaps ever.
It was good, too, the first night at the Forum, to hear that piano being worked at, upstairs in the hotel. There was a radio, which one of the sons turned up and down from the bar now and then, the way young people do. It was inoffensive, and better than the plain sound of the one waiter’s footsteps and the crunchings of a few clients!
And one day, Sunday I think, when I walked on toward the Nord-Pinus after going to Les Alyscamps as slowly as I could in the cold to make the time pass, I went down a steep street from the Public Gardens behind the Théâtre Antique and from an elegant house came a very good sound of gospel rock, surely a recording. It was fine, very gutty. I slowed as much as I dared, in the bone-cold wind. Then it stopped, behind the closed shutters. It came from the ground floor: perhaps teenage children of the concierge? There was no other sound but the wind.
And that was all the music I heard in Arles. It was too cold for beggars to sing, if they ever do in Arles.
There were several fairly big, indeed barn-like brasseries along Les Lices. In the summer the terraces must be lively; they were wide, and probably crowded with tourists, and half the young men I saw wandering in twos and threes could well have jobs in them, doing “limonade” The one across from the Hotel Jules César (Fermeture Annuelle, which was fine with me, since I have no good memories of it, over some forty-one years!) was the best maintained. It seemed popular, with a mixed crowd of aimless young men, their girlfriends, businessmen, on Sundays elderly bourgeois couples out for a weekly drink after church, and families in from the farms, eating enormously of mediocre food.
The ton diminished fast as one went along the Boulevard toward the municipal theatre: smeared windows, weary broken waiters. The first day I walked down that way, it was during the Big Market, and every café was crowded with slender dark men smiling while their women worked in the countless stands. The next day, two or three of the brasseries were closed, with their chairs tipped over the tabletops behind the greasy glass. Once I ate lunch in one, and the clients were sparse and poor in purse—and very ill fed.
And as far as I know, there is no alternative in Arles, no compromise between the tight little neighborhood bar and the big ugly brasseries along Les Lices. Of course, they all manage to put out two or a hundred tables in the summer. But I saw them when they were run solely, if at all, for the “regulars.” They were very personal, plainly for the people who needed them daily. The two big brasseries I went into treated me with carefree attention, not really courteously but not rudely. And I can see how, in such circumstances (a closed-off town, asleep between bouts of tourisme), somebody like me needs a good small hotel bar. If there had been one open in the Nord-Pinus, I almost surely would have gone into it once or twice a day, in spite of my lasting dislike of the whole place. It would be a fairly easy change of pace, after a day of looking at Roman carvings and shop windows.
Les Nonnes, given by the leftist Southeast Cultural Center, was the kind of play that makes one shrug about the relative values of current success. And about acting as such. And about stage décor. And lighting.
The audience was bourgeois: rather dissipated-sophisticated-country-gentry trying to keep up with local attempts at culture. They wore casually stylish informal clothes, and knew each other and went out to the nearest bar at the entr’acte and came back with the studied and rather rude nonchalance of people who feel as if they belong to a different club from the rest of the audience—which indeed they do—different accents, hair, manners. “The rest of the people” that night were young, rather obviously the town’s “freethinkers” hoping for a good modern piece of theatre: after all, the playwright was a Cuban, and therefore a Communist; he was half Negro and therefore all-knowing; he was anti-Christian so therefore the play would be shocking, etc., etc.
But except in those two places, the ugly café and the shabby old theatre, and partly because of the closed season, I saw only people of the working level, and of all ages. I noticed that there were few oldsters. I think this was mostly because of the hard cold. I saw a few old women, in black shawls of course, bent over in the exaggerated spinal curvature of people who have for generations picked grapes and cultivated the earth with short tools.…
In the vigorous years, I suppose between twenty-five and forty, the people were short, and broad. The men had wide shoulders, as did the women, and they all had a stocky look, part bone and muscle and part fat. They were like the famous little sausages of the town: solid, meaty, gutty. They wore their heavy dark clothes in a tight way, as if they were literally stuffed into them. The men still looked light on their feet, as if they had once been part of the amateur boxing clubs or the bands of youths who train for small roles in the corridas at Les Arènes. The women were tough and hard, but I could see the soft alluring girls they had been so fleetingly.
On the streets, on Sundays in the brasseries, these people wore their children like badges, with real pride. I felt that at home they were firm and even rough, but in public the handsome sturdy little boys and girls were treated like familiar but still honored guests. If they wanted an edifice of ice cream and Chantilly and chocolate sauce instead of the apple tart suggested, they ate the former, after firm quiet protests on both sides, larded with affected little grimaces and eye rollings from the children. (The boys were as coquettish as their sisters in their task of involving the neighbors in any such contretemps, to make the parents lose face.)
In the few public eating places open, I saw children. It was as if they could for one time of the year, when there were no tourists, be where life ran full tilt, instead of split between the family café and the rooms upstairs. There would be a little boy (less often, a wee female) solemnly playing a card game near the café stove with an uncle, a grandfather. It was manly. The game looked like a modern version of Authors to me, with suits of four books and so on, but in terms of lunar conquests instead of literary. Nothing disturbed these long slow games, although a few older men might drift by, give a quick downward handshake to the uncle or grandpapa, pat the little boy’s head. (As a player in a café, he was not required to stand up politely, etc.)
At the Hotel du Forum there was a good feeling that the big family had directly but fairly thoroughly taken over the whole operation. In the corner of the pleasant room which during the Season is a salon de thé-bar, there was a nice crude crèche, and the youngest son showed it to a visiting elderly relative, with whom he later played cards. I wanted to tell him how nice I thought it was: the camel of one of the Magi was smaller than the Bébé Jésus, as seemed right, and instead of putting the half-body of the Éveillé in a lighted window, his truncated santon was simply tucked into a little pile of cellophane grass near the manger, where he waved his lantern dangerously. It was all as it should be—as it would have been with any little children arranging it for Christmas. I wanted to say this, or at least a thank-you, but there was an intimacy between the boy and his old uncle that I dared not intrude upon.
Several times, in the two dinners I ate in the Forum, a tall nice-looking boy of perhaps sixteen came into the ex-salon de thé and put logs on the fire. I wondered if he was the one practicing on the piano upstairs. He may have been a little arrogant and vulnerable (“Deuxième en lycée, beau et intelligent—parents, hoteliers—ambitions d’etre avocat,” etc.). He would make a handsome man.…
The other young males in the town, at least on the cold streets of that season, were taller and more meager than their parents. They went mostly in pairs or trios. They wore smartly cut clothes of last year’s fake English-Mod style, with tight pants, pinched waists, flaring collars and lapels. They walked up and down Les Lices on Sunday, hands in pockets so that their hips and genitals were sharply evident, like San Francisco gays but with a different twist and message. They wore their hair fairly long, intricately waved and lacquered over their coat collars. They spoke a language unheard but intimated by grimaces and leers of understanding, and an occasionally hard mocking laugh. They held on to, and belligerently, a recently discovered machismo. I felt that it was holy to them, forever burning like the Grail: they were finally men, and they had possessed at least a girl or two and therefore they knew and owned the world. In due time they would be engaged, through their families, to some female of their own or a higher level, and they would become more serious, heavier of outline. Meanwhile they were like roving cocks, pecking behind the hens of Les Lices, crowing and rustling their beautiful feathers.
The hens: they seemed to be a skinny lot, dressed shoddily in imitation “high style,” girls of fleeting prettiness, working in shops and offices, lonely and on the prowl for almost any boy who might possibly be seriously amorous, or easy to trick into a forced marriage by pregnancy. They came out in little groups when offices closed at noon and six, laughing together as if with a shared secret, going together to a brasserie for an espresso in hopes of splitting from the others to join a boyfriend or a pickup. They were not prostitutes. There was a special desperation about them: they mostly did not couple for money, and they tried with naïveté and an awkward inexperience to arrange their lives as, a few years before, their families would have done for them. Some of them would bring it off, and grab many a helpless boy against his parents’ hopes, and almost at once they would become square-set and dominant like their mothers-in-law and the mothers they had defied.
A few of the girls I looked at would end on the streets, in other towns than Arles—or on the municipal stretcher, like the pretty one who fell whimpering but unconscious between two tables the day I was there. She was probably drinking a tiny coffee, to keep her nymph-like figure and save money for a pseudo-smart costume for Easter. She would have gone back behind a counter until six, then got home in time for a hot supper and a row with her parents, and then perhaps made love for a few hours with her helpless lover.
There was a characteristic detachment about the young people. It reassured me to feel this in an enclave as small and tight as Arles: it would be the same in Chitry-les-Mines as in Lyon, a kind of shying-off—young animals afraid of what they sensed ahead; they were not much aware of a mistrust and resentment of people older than themselves, but they insisted on being apart for their own dances around the candle flame.
There was natural cruelty in them, the kind that earlier they had practiced toward a weaker school friend or a fly or cat. By now it was directed toward a more defined goal, as when one night about eleven-thirty I walked through almost deserted streets from the theatre to the Nord-Pinus. On the Place de la République, completely still, I skirted the steep steps up to the façade of St. Trophime. I knew I was in a hypersensitive phase, over-aware of things like heights to look down from, steps to stumble from, so I was walking with induced attention. As I minced along a narrow unsure step halfway up from the street to the carved stones, a car with perhaps six boys and girls tore past as close as possible to the bottom of the steps, with a great and immediate roar, and exactly as it passed me, tottering up there, several of the kids let out an abrupt terrible shriek. I jumped in my skin, something I do very seldom. My adrenals surged in a flash, and I felt hot and angered, and perhaps a little jaunty, for I waved to the swerving careening insolent car. Everything was silent again, except for me, and I wondered about the need for human mischief. That had been a Till Eulenspiegel gesture, in a dull small French town. It had satisfied some basically sexual need for overt defiance, revenge against whoever had condemned the culprits to their current servitude. All that was ahead of most of them was to turn heavy and short-breathed, plain, resigned. I raged for them, and went on to my sepulchral lodgings buoyed by the hope and wish that one of the people yelping suddenly like a banshee to startle me would escape the Arlesian trap, the world trap, long enough to know other quick satisfactions, if not slow ones.
I think I have not spoken of other Gypsies I saw, besides the guitar players. There were many of them, because Arles is so near Les Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer, the place of pilgrimage. Of course, the Algerians could have been Gypsies, now and then—mysterious flash of the eye, half-smile baring the white teeth, set of head on neck. Some of the men were unmistakable, especially if about twenty-five. They had an almost flaming arrogance and beauty, and once in the pushing crowds just before shops closed, at the corner of the big square, I caught my breath at the sight of a man moving quickly past the people. I’ll never see anything like him again.
One day, on the wide sidewalk of Les Lices which in summer is covered with café chairs and tables, a woman was standing alone by a shop window. She was so dramatically a Gypsy that I almost laughed: slim, dark, dirty, beautiful. She wore her hair long and tangled. Her skirt had the full soft swing of any fancy-dress costumer’s best offering. Her filthy beautiful feet were tiny and bare, in very high heels. She wore a lot of lipstick, and of course much “typical” gold jewelry. She was impossibly right: La Gitane! Perfect typecasting.
And she knew all her cues and lines, so that I was immediately and helplessly clutched by her, hypnotized by the rush of her insistence, which I knew could rise to shrieks and insults if I did not “cross her palm with silver.” She gave me the whole act, from first whine for a piece of money, any piece, for the love of … and in charity. So ponderously, fatalistically, I undid my purse and pulled out a franc. “Oh—you are kind—you are good—let me reward you—” and she dragged at my arm and told me of how she could help me. I smiled at her. She kept saying, “Don’t be afraid—have no fear,” and I said flatly, perhaps challengingly, “I’m not afraid. I know some Gypsies.” I said this more than once, but she kept harassing me, in a low rattle of supplications to take off my glove and let her see my left palm. Why not?
I pulled off my thick mitten, and she seized my hand with her icy little claws, and said some nonsense about life-line, travel, illness, and then smiled brilliantly at me and told me to put a silver coin, any silver coin, in her hand. “Don’t be afraid!” she kept saying in a hurried daring way. Then I said, “NO.”
Apparently I do not want my future bandied about. I seem to have a strong aversion to fortune-telling as such, just as I have to hypnosis in public (and perhaps in private?). She understood me, and dropped my hand, and gave me another wild flashing smile. “All right, ma belle! You are a nice girl. Be happy! See you sometime,” she babbled to me, and she almost dove away.
I turned down Les Lices. As far as I know, she vanished like smoke from the broad empty sidewalk, but I could feel the bony coldness of her little crab-like hands on mine, long after I had warmed myself in the café. And she was the most beautiful female I saw in Arles. I hoped in a detached way that she and the man at the corner were lovers.
One of the best things about the new style was that it demanded an open fire, which in that wintry season was highly pleasant to sit near. At L’Assenage, and I think in many other restaurants in the region, it was part of the décor, and the waitress used it casually in her job, pulling more coals forward as needed, pushing the small logs back.
I ordered a cut of a gigot of lamb I saw waiting near the grill. She asked me how I liked it and I said, “Rare.” She poked some coals nearer to the edge of the hearth, which was about three feet high under a long mantel, and perhaps four feet deep. She sprinkled the meat heavily with dried herbs, and put it on a light three-legged grill over the fresh glowing coals. In about thirty seconds she turned it over, sprinkled it again on the other side, and then turned it only once more in about ten minutes. It was delicious: juicy, simple, with no need for salt or bastings. She did it in flight, really, while she served about ten other people.
I noticed that chicken, in large pieces, was grilled in loosened foil packets, moved about now and then with long-handled pincers. At the last minute of roasting, the packet was opened onto a large hot plate on the hearth. Sometimes the chicken, once done, was put directly on the coals to singe and color. There was a jar on the hearth where extra chicken juices were poured, and then they would be dripped over the vegetables the assistant brought. It was simple, but intricate in its simplicity.
I suppose all this could be done with fish: the foil, the marinade. It seems impossible that it was not. But that time in Arles I never saw or smelled anything from the nearby sea, except in the great Christmas Market and the one time I demanded fresh mussels.…
At the Forum the open grill at one end of the dining room was disappointingly half behind a high service counter. It was in steady use, and sent out good sounds and smells. I never ate anything from it, but some steaks I saw looked good, and they were prepared nonchalantly by the waiter as part of his job, without any pomp at all. I suppose in a crowded time he might need a helper.
It is interesting to see this primitive form of cooking return to the dining hall, after so long a time relegated to picnics and Boy Scout jamborees. It must be boring to the chefs of la haute cuisine: no place for subtle sauces, for inventions …
In any city where the pedestrians are used to red and green lights in their own areas, they often cheat and run across or through them, with general immunity. But in Arles, this seldom happens: the townspeople recognize themselves, as drivers, when they happen to be on foot! They look in all directions. They are extremely cautious. Above all they listen. If there is a recognizable roar of a car within any possible area of several blocks, they wait. This is unusual, I think, especially in a small French town. But they know that any fellow Arlesian behind a wheel will go at top speed and make unpredictable turns.
The noises from this kind of game are loud: the quick revving of a car whenever an open space of more than fifty feet offers itself; the wheezing scream of brakes; often yells and curses. It is exciting, and the Arlesians play the whole thing with melodramatic enjoyment. Surely they practice, from the minute they can be juvenile passengers! They remember such and such a street, where between five-thirty and six-fifteen at night, the most crowded hour, one can still build up a speed of more than 75 km.p.h. in less than 300 meters, unless a feckless old woman or a dog adds another bit of excitement, and when at the right-angle turn at the end one has an equal chance of making it at 55 km. on two wheels (preferably after 11:00 p.m.) or of meeting another car head on.
The street below my windows was narrow and more straight than curving, from the little Place de la Cour to the Place du Forum. There were narrow sidewalks that diminished to nothing and then existed again. Along the side of the Place there was a heady stretch of perhaps seventy-five yards, for which any Arlesian in his right and sporting mind got up all speed, with special backfiring if possible, to add extra drama. All this, resounding up from the cold walls and pavement, made my nights lively, as well as bell-bound. Never once, though, did I hear the sound of a human scream or thud or crunch, nor even that of breaking glass or metal or, most surprising, a siren either of police or of ambulance.
One night for a few hours when my perceptions seemed too aware for comfort, I found both the bells and the wild abrupt roars of automobiles almost too loud. I suppose it was an expression of my general apathetic frustration: the cold, the wind, the dismal restaurants, the general air of proud detachment. Mostly the noises interested me, and I feel sure they were part of the whole nonchalant yet surly bravado of the people, a kind of audible cock-snoot.…
Upstairs, the beautiful sarcophagi looked ornate, prettified, after the bare stones laid so skillfully on and on, below, and the unornamented arches, the practical ditches and drains made for grain, for sleeping soldiers.
I don’t like tunnels and caves. But I would not have minded staying down there. Not alone. Not too long. I know increasingly that I do not suffice unto myself, always. But in the galleries I would be my only enemy, as always: the place itself was not evil. But the girl said shyly to me as she left that she could never have gone down by herself.…
He was thin and lopsided. His face was pallid, and his hair was a dank ugly pale brown, too long in the wrong places. His shoes were either brown or black, plainly secondhand and unkempt, and they had once been high-heeled, now run over so that his feet were half out on the floor. He wore one untied, and when he had a moment to stand still, he eased first one foot and then the other, and bent his ankles out to help the muscles. It was painful to watch. I felt sure that his feet were not only filthy but discolored and covered with calluses, corns, scars. And from his face, so doughy and deep-lined, hot twanging wires went down and rubbed against the floors as he shuffled over them with trays of food and bottles and glasses. He was plainly an old hand at his job, deft and fast, and most of the customers knew him. Simenon was right again, and I knew the wretched young man, so careless of his feet, would not live to be an old waiter, even an ex-waiter.…
In the other brasserie I went to, there was a dour elderly man (elderly like fifty-six, for often third-grade waiters seem ageless from twenty on) who had the same hopeless shuffle, but whose shoes were solid if light, and well polished. He took care of the drink-side of the big ugly room, jammed on market days and probably all summer, and on the eat-side there was a very unattractive boy of about sixteen, dirty and clumsy but willing to go back for a forgotten knife. Once, at the long high bar at the service end of the room, I watched him laugh, in a merry child-like way. And when the girl on the drink-side fell to the floor and then was taken away in an ambulance, he stood watching her with sheep-like curiosity, and held a carafe in his hand in case water was needed—no great pity, no horror, but a tacit acceptance. The older waiter stayed impersonal, and as soon as the stretcher was gone he pushed all the chairs and tables back into line, so that people would not see that there had been trouble.
In the little L’Assenage, where I ate hurriedly before the theatre, the serving was done nicely, impersonally, by a member of the family. They were all young. They must have invested a lot of money in the Camargues décor, and their menu was simple and good.
The best waiter I had watched for a long time was at the Forum: about thirty-five, the kind of man who in Provence could be native or Italian, a chauffeur, a gangster, an artisan, not a farmer. He did his job expertly, without any obvious show of interest. He was quiet, deft, attentive, not mechanical but not really human. I could have been difficult or too docile, ugly or friendly, and he would have shown exactly the same detached skillful politeness toward me. Now and then, because I was bored, I tried deliberately to make him aware of my needs as a person. I asked for advice about a wine, for instance. My question was answered as briefly as possible, with absolutely no sign of interest either in it or in me for asking it.
In the countless little cafés in Arles, the owner usually took care of the few tables, at least in winter, and most of the customers stood at the counter. I suppose a lot of the young waiters were working the ski country. And the short tough wives-cousins-daughters-in-law were useful. They joked a little in a taciturn closed way with the familiar customers. They were not giving off any merriment. People in Arles do not have happy natures—at least in the winter! They frown and scowl a lot. There is a kind of surly belligerency in them. They are, subtly, ready for a fight, looking for a slur, an insult. The legends are violent and sad. The mistral is a cruel part of life. The bullfighting, la corrida, is the formalized rhythmic death-pattern. The violent heartbeats of the drum and the Gypsy guitar are held together by the insistent breathing, very shrill, of the pipes. Yes, I think the place is filled with suspicion and haughtiness, over-defensive. I have not read about this, and may be wrong, quite wrong. I give my own feeling as an observer. I met Arles head on, in a cold lonely wind, and my inner winds had blown me there, and it was hard, but did no harm at all to anyone that I can know of, in the twisted mysterious little town. And I am not sure if the shuffling sad waiters are a part of the raison d’être of Arles—its defensiveness, its need to be bent and pained. How could I know? But why would a young man plainly skilled in his job let his prime asset destroy him so early? A good waiter babies his feet, and it seems wise to me. Is there a strong self-destruction there? Is it perhaps in defiance of the brutality of life, all that cold wind blowing the seeds away, the trees bent, the ground sucked dry and poor?
—Marseille, 1971