A Pinch of Time Read online

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s very nice. The bed seems comfy, and the view… By the way, that star must have quite a story…”

  “Té, pardi! Quite a story indeed, and historic, too!”

  As he put on a large white apron, our host at the hotel – he was also the cook and owner of the Belvédère – launched into a story, apocryphal, no doubt, of the local lord who left for the first Crusades, first promising a lady of Moustiers that upon his return from the holy war, he would bring back a star and, to honour her, would hang it, yes indeed, on a heavy chain between the two sides of the mountain. And the lady apparently encouraged him with these words: “Return as a victor, valiant knight, and you shall have my heart. But return defeated…” – our storyteller paused here for effect – “and you shall have nothing. Do not imagine you may return empty-handed for, consider it, how could you then honour your promise?”

  I spoke to the innkeeper of my youth. We were about the same age but didn’t know each other. He’d come to Moustiers a dozen years before. He was originally from L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in the Vaucluse – “the homeland of the poet René Char,” he added with ostensible pride, then recited in grand style:

  Camped on the hillsides above the village are fields of mimosa. During the season of harvest, it may happen that you meet an extremely sweet-smelling girl whose arms have been busy all day among the fragile branches. Like a lamp with a bright nimbus of perfume, she goes on her way, her back to the setting sun.

  To speak to her would be sacrilege.

  Her slippers tread upon the grass. Let her pass. You may be lucky enough to sense the chimaeras of the dew on her lips.

  Wind Away. [10]

  What is the link between this poem and Moustiers? None at all. Simply pride in its purest form: to come from a landscape that produced such a poet!

  “I’m sure you know my friend Antoine Audibert.”

  “Boudiou, Toinou! He’s my pétanque partner. As good a shooter as a maker of faience – the best in Moustiers and the whole region! His workshop is just five minutes away, above the village. Cross the bridge and the Couvert Square, turn right, go up Rue de la Diane past the church, and you’ll be at the Montée de la Clappe that leads to the Riou falls. Well, it’s right there, on your right, the Riou Workshop. You’ll see it easy enough.”

  “Thanks, I know the place. We’ll go right away.”

  “Right away? Capoun, you haven’t been back here in a blue moon…”

  “Yes, and…?”

  “You’re forgetting the sieste – it’s naptime, pardiéu! The sieste is sacred around here… You won’t find Antoine anywhere before four o’clock. He chose the right profession, he did. As you can see, no sieste for me. I’m just about to head to the kitchen. If you want to have supper here tonight – I’m making wild boar stew! It’s been marinating since yesterday morning. We serve supper from seven-thirty to nine-thirty only. It’s still off-season for at least another week.”

  “We don’t know what we’ll do tonight. For Antoine, not before four, is that it?”

  “Four or four-thirty.”

  “Well, if Antoine is having his sieste, we’ll do the same.”

  “Right you are. An hour of sleep never hurt, eh?”

  We lingered a moment, leaning by the open window, looking at the multicoloured checkerboard of the landscape, counting fields of lavender and grain, tracing the flow of streams with our fingers – the Riou (trout) that flows into the Adou and the Adou (crawfish) into the Maïre, its own waters reaching the Verdon. These scenes are such a part of me that when I describe them to Nela, I’m describing myself.

  Four-thirty. We left the hotel under a bright sun, the undisputed master of the skies. The church bell sounded once, echoing against the flank of the mountains; it came back to us as a vibrato. We crossed the bridge once again and made our way through the square, which had now become a meeting place for the entire village. The conversations sometimes had a bit of Provençal in them, and they were always punctuated with expansive hand gestures.

  “Do you hear the ing of the local dialect? The sound rises into the air like balloons, while their eu and their ang, much heavier, tumble like the river down a ravine.”

  Oh, Holy Mother of Marseille, the ache of having a linguist for a wife! Nela took her revenge for the eich and the aouch I point out in the palabras I hear when we visit her native Portugal.

  On the other side of the Place du Couvert lies Hamel’s butcher shop. The opulence on display there paradoxically reminds me of the time when, in the middle of an almost empty window, we could read a message on a slate that informed the customers of the endemic shortages. During the war, a time when France was systematically exploited by Nazi Germany, goods were conspicuous by their absence. But today… With parsley filling its nostrils, posing on a wide white plate is a pig’s head that seems to be smiling at a decapitated sheep that lost its skin at the slaughterhouse, its thorax open, hanging pitifully from a hook. Next to it, also hung vertically and carved up, two bug-eyed rabbits nose-dive towards the grinning pig. A capon hanging from its legs shows off its sprinter’s thighs; a garland of sausages hangs around it, beckoning to me: “Eat us! Eat us!” “No way! Speak to me of chouriço, and you might have an audience. Those aren’t even smoked!” Nela’s taste clearly points towards the large piece of raw ham on the left that she stubbornly calls presunto.

  The Rue de la Diane, then the church. On its stairs, a panhandler clearly unconcerned about his begging bowl sleeps in the shade, stretched out like a cat, his hands over his chest in the august position that characterizes recumbents. Sacred sieste!

  “Dominique, I can’t decipher the plaque over the fountain.”

  “It says it’s the starting point of the diane.”

  “The diane?”

  “Back in the day, in the army, the diane was the bugle blow that sounded at dawn to wake the soldiers. It was called ‘sounding the diane.’”

  “Nobody says that anymore?”

  “No. But it was still used in my grandfather’s time. Today, we just call it the reveille. Here in Moustiers, the word now refers to a small troop of five or six musicians – fifes, pipes, drums and folkloric dress. They leave from here, the church steps, on the day of the votive celebration, and they serenade the town. At five in the morning.”

  “Too early for me. What were the votive celebrations like when you were a child?”

  “Religious and pagan, in that order. They would start the preceding evening with a procession. At ten-thirty, we’d meet near the church’s lesser door, on the other side, which gives onto the square. The whole village would be carrying lanterns, torches, multicoloured paper lanterns…”

  “Lampiões, made from pleated paper with a candle inside?”

  “Exactly. And the whole troop, with the priest in front, would make its way to the Notre-Dame-de-Beauvoir chapel.”

  “You’d climb all the way up?”

  “Indeed, while singing canticles, to boot. Three hundred and sixty-five steps, one for each day of the year, to reach the top – not much fun, I’ll tell you that! But we would stop at every station, and there are twelve on the way up.”

  “And once you got there?”

  “Once we made it, we kids would swing on the bell rope – balalìn, balalan – until the priest would tell us to stop, just before midnight, to say mass. Once it was over, the procession would reform and we’d go down the steps, in the dark, with our torches and lanterns lighting our way.”

  “You’d go to bed late!”

  “Around two or three. A lot of people would stay up and wait for the diane. The next morning, though, we had to be on the church square at ten sharp for the pétanque game. It would end in mid-afternoon. A few hours of sieste and then, rascle! back to the church square where a platform had been set up the day before for a band – a real one – with four or five musicians. A handsome platform crowned with foliage – holly, mistletoe, ivy, rosemary… First came the singing contest
at eight o’clock, then balèti, dancing, around ten. In their Sunday clothes, big and small would dance together, all of us: the baker with the hairdresser, the butcher-woman with the policeman, Émile with Marie, Mireille with Roger…”

  “And you and Dany.”

  “Not always.”

  “What about school? You must have needed a few days of rest after such celebrations.”

  “School didn’t start until October back then, and the celebrations were in September.”

  Another twenty metres and we came upon the Clappe trail.

  “A clappe?”

  “A clappe is, uhh…”

  “You don’t even know what it is!!”

  “Vé! It’s this, in front of us… Look, there’s the Atelier du Riou! The door is open, let’s go in.”

  In the middle of the shop, a friendly octogenarian with her white hair pulled into a bun was showing a pair of elderly tourists around, ahead of the hordes of summer tourists. They were hesitating over several large pieces.

  “It’s for our grandniece, you see, she’s getting married next month.”

  “Take your time. It’s a difficult choice, but you can’t go wrong. All three pieces are wonderful.”

  Indeed, a fruit bowl, a vase, and a planter: “wonderful” is the word. The faience was nicely displayed on shelves throughout the store, some hanging on walls, the larger pieces set on a heavy oak table. In one corner, on an old dough trough (copiously rubbed with bee’s wax, considering its sheen) were a group of practical objects – salad bowls, mortar and pestles for garlic mayonnaise, bottle openers – made from olive or vine wood. But what attracted Nela’s attention, sitting since time immemorial on the same table near the entrance: the toupin!

  “Look how beautiful that baking tray is! It’s wonderful, don’t you think?”

  “Indeed! It’s a Joseph Olerys toupin. Antoine’s grandfather bought it at the beginning of the century.”

  “You knew him?”

  “The grandfather? Yes, I knew him. He died in the sixties.”

  “Joseph Olerys, parvo!”

  “I know a little of his story. He was born in Marseille in the late seventeenth century, and did his painter’s apprenticeship (probably at the Clérissy’s, faience-makers who were in vogue back then) before founding his own workshop in Alcora, under a Spanish lord. He then moved to Moustiers in 1738, where he introduced the polychromatics. He stayed here until his death in 1748. As for his toupin, it’s always stood right here.”

  “A magnificent piece!”

  Assuredly so. A “grand feu” faience, meaning that the paint was applied after a first baking. It is some thirty centimetres high, with two handles and a cover. And a decoration of blue, orange, and green garlands on a blue-tinged white background, as clear as a child’s eyes. The handles show horrific heads – half-man, half-lion – of comical ugliness, wearing Pharaonic headbands with orange stripes. Mounted on the cover is a pine cone with orange scales. And, around the circumference, a mythological scene repeated four times: two mermaids with superbly pointed breasts sit haughtily enthroned on a rock, defying the waves breaking at their feet. Not for sale, of course. “And do not touch us, please! We cost a lot and are not for sale.”

  The tourists, from Belgium, if I was to believe my ears, decided to take the planter. Expertly swaddled in fine paper, delicately placed in a cardboard box, buried under an avalanche of polystyrene bits. “Té! So you don’t risk any damage on the way back.”

  They paid and left with a few kind words.

  “Good afternoon. I see you like the dough trough there. Unfortunately it’s not for sale. For the same reason as the toupin by the entrance. I saw it also interested you. They’ve been in the family for at least one hundred and fifty years. But this beautiful mortar and pestle – carved out of olive wood from a tree one hundred years old – they can be yours if you want them. With a tool like that, you’ll never spoil a single garlic sauce, I’ll guarantee that. Here, everything gets better with age. Look at me, eighty-five next month!”

  “Bah, I’m sure that isn’t true, more like twenty-five, if you ask me! What’s your secret?”

  “It’s the air here, my dear, and the water. Everything is pure in Moustiers.”

  “The village water comes from a spring that flows right near here, next to the rocks in the valley. We’ll go see it afterwards.”

  “See it and taste it, I hope! And this salad bowl, do you like it? Also made of olive wood. The olive tree is Provence’s standard, as Giono said. It’ll look great on a beautiful tablecloth made from local fabric.”

  She pointed to her apron, a streak of colour over a black dress. From the colour of her cloth to that of the faience around us, the visit was tinted with the glow of my childhood.

  “On this side of the shop, you have your traditional Moustiers faience. This is a pretty motif of fantasy creatures in the Bérain style from the early eighteenth century, inspired by the Commedia dell’Arte. The other side is different, more modern. Mostly polychromatic motifs.”

  From casseroles to ewers, we’d soon looked at every piece of pottery in the store.

  “These insect and wildflower motifs are really quite nice.”

  “They’re original creations from our master faience-maker, Antoine Audibert.”

  “And he’s the one we’ve come to see. You don’t recognize me, Madame Audibert?”

  “No…”

  “Émile and Marie’s nephew?”

  “Boudi! You’re Dominique, the nephew of poor Émile and poor Marie?”

  “Yes, Mireille’s son. And this is my wife Nela.”

  “A pleasure.”

  “The pleasure is mine, my dear lady. Aquest’aco! Come and let me kiss you, Dodo, moun bèu! Tell me, your mother, how is she?”

  “So-so. She’s sad.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “Ninety next year.”

  “It’s true, there are almost five years… We were really quite sad, you know, for Gérard. We saw him only a bit before. So thin, pécaïré! Death… qué tarasque, qué putarasse! So young… Only two years older than my Toinou… He’s working next door, I’ll go get him for you.”

  Our embrace had the warmth of good bread straight from the oven. We didn’t want to break off that embrace. “Fan de chine, you haven’t changed a bit, Dodo!” “And look at you, Toinou, you look the same!” It would be sad indeed if, between friends, you couldn’t lie a little.

  Under the spell of Olerys, Nela finally decided to buy a traditional soup tureen, one of Antoine’s works. Quite beautiful, with a fantasy motif in blue monochrome – the same tureen we still have today, in Toronto.

  If my reunion with Antoine and his mother was uplifting, my walk through the village, a bit later, was quite different.

  On every corner, I expected to see him again. At the fountain, bent under the weight of the watering can he’d come to fill. On the church square, in the first row of the crowd surrounding the pétanque players. Everywhere his image, his presence, as surprising as a slap in the face when he’d want to wake me up: “Are you dumb or something, Dodo?” Bent over the bridge railing, throwing pebbles into the rushing waters below. In school, holding Dany in his arms… Gérard the great, the generous, the impish – all at the same time.

  “Your old school is completely new!”

  “It was rebuilt in exactly the same place as the old one. One, two, three: three classrooms now.”

  “You stayed here until June of 1945?”

  “Yes. After that I went to Marseille. In October, at the start of the new year, I went to Saint-Victor school with Gérard, just in front of the church, where there’s a small square now.”

  “With that plaque honouring the Resistance fighter, the Companion of the Liberation?”

  “Berthe Albrecht, killed in 1945.”

  “Your father knew her?”

  “I don’t think so. They didn’t really know anyone outside of their cells.”

  “How long did you
stay at that school?”

  “Only a semester, until the end of 1945, when my father left Rue Chaix. In a few months, he put on several kilos and his health progressed quickly. It was a strange reunion with a new character from my life. He had deserted his own portrait, then ended up resembling it as he nursed himself back to health. One day, he came out of his room dressed as a sailor: it was a total success… In January of 1946, he was offered a post at Veterans Affairs.”

  “What kind of post?”

  “For six months, he was the director of a reception centre for returning deportees who hadn’t yet found their families. A large building – previously a spa – in Camoins, a small village not far from Marseille.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I returned to live with my mother, who’d settled down in Aubagne with Roger.”

  “Now, Dominique, why don’t you take me to the Riou waterfalls?”

  First down Caterwaul Lane.

  Gérard was still there, shirt open, hair blowing in the wind, a single lock over the left eye, a wide smile, striding his way back home. And as I passed with Nela, I noticed that the embankment covered in bramble on which fennel grew was still there.

  But Noiraude the goat had disappeared a long time ago.

  We passed Uncle Émile’s house. Sold by uninspired heirs (for very little money, I was told) to Parisians who had but a single desire: to remodel the old building to today’s standards, inflicting on it a face-lift of sorts to make it look more modern. The façade was sprayed with liquid stucco, then painted orange-red – the colour of blood oranges. The kitchen door and the doors to the upstairs rooms were painted green – parrot green, slightly milky, a little like pastis with mint syrup – along with the windows. Green being the complementary colour to red, the whole house cried out for attention from afar. Disappointing!

  Further down, the stable had been turned into an apartment, quite comfortable I’m sure, with an entrance that gave directly onto the garden where the linden tree grew. Pécaïré! Our old friend was in a sad state indeed. How could he still feel comfortable in his bark living in a time that was no longer his? Though it was late spring, there was no sign on the ground of the sweet-smelling flowers of old. What good would a nap be in the shade of an anaemic tree that offers only a faded perfume? Was it still watered, like Gérard and I used to do, twice a day, with cool, clear water from the Clérissy fountain? Or did it receive only the water from downpours and, in the manner of the Brassens’ great oak, was our linden tree sprayed with the urine of dogs come to lift a leg against it?