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Where the heart is
A writer in Provence
Marita van der Vyver
Translated by Annelize Visser
Tafelberg
To our guests
1 We live in Church Street
Dear reader, let me introduce myself:
There are really several ways in which I could do this. If I wanted to create the illusion of exoticism, I could say that I was an Afrikaans writer living in a medieval village in the south of France. If I wanted to make a romantic impression, I could say that I lived in a Provençal stone house with lilac shutters, pink roses and lavender outside the kitchen window, and an enormous plane tree beside the gate. But if I were honest I would have to say that I am a tired housewife with a large family who lives in Church Street.
‘That you’ve had to travel so far’, my friend Michiel observes ruefully, ‘just to end up in Church Street.’
That’s probably what friends are for. To keep you in your place. And these days my place is in Church Street.
It may sound more exotic in French – Rue de l’église – but it remains a street with a church in a country village. Every country town, in France as in South Africa, has a Church Street. Fortunately, no French town also has a Voortrekker Street.
There are six of us in the house made of stone: my French husband Alain, me, and four children between the ages of three and seventeen. His, mine and ours. His two sons, Thomas and Hugo, don’t live here all 365 days of the year. But if you add together all the weekends, the four short school holidays and the more than two months of the long summer holiday, they’re here about half the time. My son Daniel finishes primary school in this village this year and will soon start collège (secondary school) in a bigger town. And our daughter Mia joined the baby class of the little local school last year.
It is said that there’s an invisible line that runs somewhere through the middle of Europe. People who live above the line are large and blond and cook with butter. Those who live below the line are small and dark and cook with olive oil. We live in the olive-oil half of Europe – and we do cook everything with olive oil, except frites – but we don’t look like olive-oil people.
Eleven-year-old Daniel and I are big and blond. At the moment Mia is still small and blonde but she’s already taller than most of her classmates. Alain and Thomas have dark hair but neither of them is exactly small. They don’t look as if they really belong here either. Thomas the Teenager has the longest hair in the village, which includes both men’s and women’s hair. His thick ponytail hangs way below his shoulder blades. Hugo, the same age as Daniel, is probably the closest our family will ever get to the Mediterranean look. Small, with dark hair and dark eyes, but far too pale to be considered an indigenous species.
That’s us. But that’s not all. In the summer our number increases on a daily basis. Provence in the summer is like Stilbaai in December: great fun for holidaymakers, less fun for permanent residents. Last summer we had sleepover guests every night for three months, sometimes five or six at a time. Along with the six of us, the teenaged Nephew from the North who spends every summer here, and Daniel’s friends who hang around the Playstation in his bedroom like pot plants, this means large-scale meals every day – as in food for a church bazaar, meals for at least fifteen people at a time. No, make that twenty, because the three boys, the Nephew and the friends each eat like three normal people. They can’t help it, they’re at that age.
And then of course there’s Mia’s invisible double who goes by the name of Heloïse and draws on walls, messes with water and fiddles with the TV. In short, if mischief has been made, Heloïse gets the blame. Thank goodness Heloïse eats only invisible food. I mention her here just to avoid confusion later.
Fortunately, Alain likes to cook. Fortunately, he’s the kind of cook who can conjure up a pot of soup for twenty people with just three onions and a carrot. I’ve learned to like cooking (what else could I do?), but I hate everything that goes with it: the shopping before, the cleaning up after, the dishes, the dishes, the dishes.
That’s us. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Pleased to meet you.
The church across the road from our house looks completely different from the Calvinist churches with their skinny white spires in the country towns of my childhood. And it’s centuries older than any building in any town in the country of my birth. It’s a Roman Catholic stone chapel that was built early in the twelfth century – as a newcomer from the Third World, I still marvel at that date – along with a Cistercian abbey next door.
The abbey was inhabited and guarded for a few centuries by a group of formidable nuns who weren’t afraid of anything, not even bloodthirsty hordes. One of their legendary defence strategies was, for example, to release a swarm of bees from one of the towers at a horde of Protestant attackers. That is why residents of this village still have a rude nickname today, the local historian Jean-Pierre tells us over a glass of pastis, his moustache quivering with pleasure as his whispers the Provençal word. We don’t understand the Provençal language (it is a language, the old folks tell us, not merely a regional dialect), but Jean-Pierre translates it for us into ordinary French – pique-cul. In ordinary English it means ‘stung in the arse’.
Now I must introduce you to Jean-Pierre, because I cannot possibly paint the picture of our village without including his distinctive profile somewhere on the canvas. Jean-Pierre isn’t really a historian. No one knows what Jean-Pierre really does to stay alive. In summer he sometimes helps the farmers pick fruit, in autumn he lends a hand with the grape harvest, in winter he potters around the tourist houses, laying roof tiles or floor tiles, acting the plumber or electrician, whatever is expected of him. But mostly he sits behind a glass of pastis in the local bar.
Every time I pop in for a quick coffee or to buy ice cream for the children, from early in the morning till late at night, I find Jean-Pierre there. Like a king on a throne, that’s how comfortable he looks on his high bar stool, his black-olive eyes glittering in his bronzed face, his grey moustache always perfectly groomed and his grey-black hair combed back neatly. In his younger days he was apparently quite a Casanova. These days his stomach is probably larger than his libido or his vanity, but he still can’t help kissing women of all ages on the hand and disarming them with flattery. The power of habit, that’s all.
And because he’s a proud pique-cul he considers himself an expert on everything to do with the life of any pique-cul. The history of the village, the weather of the region, the vineyards and the olives, the best wines, the most beautiful women, the funniest jokes. The other villagers tolerate his pedantry because most of them aren’t authentic pique-culs. To earn this honorary title, you and your ancestors have to have lived here for generations, not in the next village three kilometres away. The next village is a different world.
When I asked our mayor one day if he was originally from this area (meaning the south of France, more or less), he sighed and reluctantly admitted that his mother’s side of the family were ‘newcomers’. They hadn’t been here for two centuries. I thought he was joking in the deadpan way the French sometimes joke, and I started to smile. Until it dawned on me that he was serious.
That was the day I realised that my family and I would always be newcomers, étrangers, with the echo of the English word ‘strangers’. Alain grew up in the north of France, which might as well be another country. And I grew up on a different continent. Another planet, you might say. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t treated with friendliness. Far from it. But we know our place.
