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27 Poor Country Boy Midi was chicken stuffed with a bouquet of fragrant herbs. Tender and delicious. Long flat noodles and salad. Dessert was figs from the tree in Madeleine's backyard with thick raspberry sauce. We finished with wonderfully tangy black currant ice cream. Bon appegross! For Easter, Madeleine had three invitations to visit friends that she cancelled. We assured her we could take care of ourselves while she went to see them. "I see them every year," she said, waving away our protests. She kept two invitations that Sharon and I were going to accompany her on. One had been a dinner invitation, but Madeleine downgraded it to just a visit. When she phoned to cancel, she needed an excuse why she was phoning at such a late date. Lying, she said: "My Canadian friends just arrived unexpectedly last night." It was my fault: I didn't think we would still be at Madeleine's by the time Easter weekend rolled around. We visited André and Andrée first. Andrée was Madeleine's yoga instructor. They fed us French pastries; coffee with cane sugar; and chocolates shaped like turtles and fish. They had a large property with many flowers and trees. A vineyard was off to one side. Their monstrous stone house used to be owned by silkworm farmers. When I asked how old the house was, André said, "We're not quite sure. Records for the area date back over two hundred years and it was built before that." There was a large cellar with a spigot poking through the rock wall. In days of yore a huge cask on the other side of the wall held wine. Nowadays, André stored his wine on shelves. The outside of the house was scabby and peeling. Inside was gorgeous. André explained, "I keep the outside like that on purpose to fool thieves. They will think I'm just a poor country boy." I remembered then that Madeleine had Monsieur and Madame Bolot on her shutters. It was to fool thieves into thinking she was married. And she kept four toothbrushes in the bathroom holder so if thieves broke in they wouldn't think she lived alone. I told her to get the largest pair of old construction boots she could find and set them out on her doorstep. We promenaded la voiture to Les Arcs, stopping to see Hélène and Paul. Madeleine brought lilacs. She said it was a traditional gesture when visiting someone's house for the first time one brought a single flower. Hélène was dressed up to meet Madeleine and looked exquisite. Even Paul was out of his ever-present blue bathrobe and had gone through the trouble to dress smartly and put in his teeth. They both looked less tired than when we last saw them, although Hélène said their departure date felt as if it was getting farther away rather than closer. She hadn't received any mail in the last six weeks due to the strike. On the tv news, postal workers were shown throwing bags of mail into the sea. I hoped it wasn't my journal. Coincidentally, the wine that we were drinking nightly at Madeleine's came from the woman who lived downstairs from Hélène and Paul. Paul said her Saint Pierre chateau label was very good, but it was expensive. Madeleine had good taste in wine, and we were well on our way to acquiring it. Hélène hadn't sold her car yet. It was on a car lot, but she hadn't had any offers. Almost everyone in France drove a standard; Hélène's car was an automatic. Only very old people drove automatics. "Why would I want an automatic? I'm not crippled yet," was the standard reply from prospective buyers. "They are so backward," Hélène sniffed. Actually, automatics made a great deal of sense in France with all the stopping and starting on steep hills in towns. (Sharon got too close while stopped behind someone on a hill and almost got rolled over when they let out the clutch. "Remind me not to get so close from now on," she told me.) There were a few other backward things I had noticed: Electric wires for lights just dangled from the ceiling; cords from lamps looked terrible: plug-ins were four feet up the wall; the shower didn't automatically switch back to the faucet when the water was turned off. (Madeleine got sprayed when she turned the tap on after I had used the shower but didn't turn the lever back. I meekly explained to a sopping Madeleine that in Canada it automatically went back to the faucet. I should have known. They liked standards--no automatic anything.) Hélène had been laughing at Madeleine's tales since we arrived. Madeleine told Hélène that Sharon and I were like children. But I thought she herself was the biggest kid of all. Clowning, she called it, telling us not to tell her grand kids whenever she did something silly. I was sure they knew all about Grandma already. Madeleine told a story about one time Jean-Jac was visiting with his family. At supper his seven year old girl wouldn't eat. She sat at the table with her arms folded. "Eat," Jean-Jac commanded. No response. "Claire. Eat!" Still no response. "Claire!" "I'm reflecting!" she informed her father. At that point Claire was sent to her room to reflect some more. Sharon said to Paul: "You sure are looking good! I hope you continue to improve." "Well, I'm seventy-five," Paul responded wryly. "So I have no illusions." He was always the pragmatist. Or, as Sharon later told me: "He sounds like he already has one foot in the grave." As we said good-bye, Hélène whispered in my ear that Madeleine was priceless. "She's perfect for you guys." From Hélène and Paul's we continued on our way to Madeleine's friends in Les Arcs. They had two foster children. Sebastian, was the blind ten year old Madeleine had told us about earlier. He greeted Madeleine warmly, then Madeleine introduced him to me: "Sebastian, this is Neil." "Bonjour Neil," he said, shaking my hand, then kissing me on the cheek. He turned his head so I could return the greeting. "Sebastian, this is Sharon," Madeleine said. A breathless "Wow!" escaped his awed prepubescent lips. Passing Madeleine's car on the way into the yard he stuck out his hand and felt along the trunk until his fingers found the nameplate. "Peugeot," he said triumphantly. In the backyard was their two year old grand daughter. The little girl kept moving the latch on the shutter, swinging the door open and closed. Her tiny French voice uttered "Voilà," over and over as she played with the latch. When they asked Sharon what she wanted to drink she just asked for water. They told her: "You will get frogs in your stomach if you drink too much water." Frogs? I explained I thought it was pigs. They thought that was quite hilarious. No wonder Madeleine had laughed till tears ran down her cheeks when I drank my big glass of water and told her my pigs were thirsty. It was a tricky language trying to keep everything straight. I was right about the fat ankles though. I almost blew Madeleine's cover. These were the people she had phoned to cancel the dinner invitation by telling them: "My Canadian friends arrived unexpectedly last night." Everyone was talking about eating rabbits. They asked me if I had ever eaten rabbit before. I was about to tell them we had some with Madeleine at the canteen a couple of days ago. The only thing that prevented me was by the time I constructed the sentence in French I remembered Madeleine's lie. Sometimes, if one spoke too quickly, they said something they hadn't thought of yet. Madeleine would have died from embarrassment! Shakespeare was right: What a tangled web we weave when at first we practice to deceive. They asked what we ate when we camped. "Pasta." "Surely, not everyday?" "Oh, yes. Nearly. Different types." "No fish?" "No. Too many cats follow us." We had more expensive French pastries and Swiss chocolate. Bon Pâque! We returned to Madeleine's for a supper that lasted five hours with much eating, drinking, talking and laughing. We had asparagus tips dipped in homemade mayonnaise. No mayonnaise from a jar for them. "It'll only take me half an hour to whip up some fresh stuff." I thought the domestic asparagus was a little less potent than the wild stuff we had with Bruno and Iole. The main course was a Tunisian recipe of triangle pastry shells filled with mashed potatoes, herbs and egg. All that stuff took so long to prepare. It was amazing that there was a whole nation possessing the patience it took to spend so much time cooking. There was even a tv quiz show featuring three chefs competing against one another answering cooking questions. Only the French. At bedtime, Sharon told me that when she went shopping at the market with Madeleine they first looked for asparagus. At the first table Madeleine said: "Too old. No good." At the second table Madeleine said: "Too expensive." At the third table the asparagus looked good and the price was all right. Did she buy it? Not a chance. They checked the fourth table and with a "Hmmm" evaluated the asparagus. Only then did they return and purchase the asparagus from the third table. "Now we're looking for eggs," Madeleine said. With a quick survey of the market Sharon noticed only one table had eggs on display. They passed it going to another table that didn't have eggs on display. Madeleine asked the vendor, "Eggs?" "No. All gone." They passed the display of eggs again on their way to another table. "Eggs?" "No. All gone." She continued to check until she was satisfied that no one was hiding any eggs under the table, and may be keeping her from getting a good deal. Only after that they went to the display they had passed three times and bought the eggs. I found it all very amusing. It took a long time to buy groceries. And they did it everyday, buying for just that day's meal. Egad. At home, I used to go once a week to buy perishables and I hated going that often. The French markets weren't passive enjoyable places. People were squished together, milling about. It was noisy and smelly (both the people and the produce). Money was tossed back and forth. I thought it was neat to go once. After that.... |
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