I could do that, I was tested for every possible and impossible disease and complaint. The French really can be overly efficient when it comes to health.
But if I was found to be suffering from some mysterious condition that hadn’t emerged during all those prenatal medical examinations, I asked Nathalie of the mairie – could the mayor refuse to marry me? Not as far as she knew, Nathalie said with her usual Gallic shrug. So what was the use of such a doctor’s certificate? She wouldn’t know, Nathalie said, she was just doing her job. Look, there it was on the official form, at the bottom of the extensive list of required documents: All foreign women under the age of 50 who want to marry in France have to submit a medical certificate.
Maybe it’ll be easier to wait until you’re fifty before you marry, was my brother’s laconic comment.
I would be fifty anyway by the time I’d assembled the entire stack of papers, was how it seemed to me.
And when at last we walked into the mairie, triumphantly, with a plastic bag full of papers to set a date for the wedding, Nathalie’s face fell as if she had to give us news of someone’s death. The mayor wouldn’t be able to marry us the coming Saturday. Or the next one. Nor probably on the Saturday after that. It was harvest time, you see, les vendanges as they call it in this wine region, and the mayor wasn’t just the mayor. He was also the owner of a vineyard. And of the village’s only wine
cellar.
Les vendanges is something to experience in the French countryside. Because most of the farmers don’t have permanent workers helping on their farms, every available body has to pitch in during the harvest. This means all the housewives in the village, all the unemployed men in the area, the adolescent children, the nephews and nieces. Even the barflies like Jean-Pierre tear themselves away from the bar counter for the sake of this communal task. (Not entirely without self-interest, since they’re going to be drinking quite a lot of the wine that will be pressed from these grapes.) Hakima sends word that for a week or three she won’t be able to come help in our house because she must help in the vineyard. (Unlike the barflies, she’s doing it for purely economic reasons. Her Muslim family are about the only people in the village who don’t drink wine.) Until a few years ago even Madame Voisine did her share – although she’s so frail that you wonder how she ever managed to lift a basket of grapes. She was driven by neither economic reasons nor intemperance. She just did it out of curiosity. Now that she’s too old to stand crouched all day long, she misses out on the juicy stories that are spread so literally through the grapevine.
Seasonal workers appear from every direction overnight. Large families from Spain and the poorer East European countries, dark wandering gypsies and bored university students from the cities, Rastafarians and backpackers, Algerians and other North Africans. The green vineyards instantly turn into a kind of United Nations, a confusion of tongues from the crack of dawn till the sun sets, for seven days a week, until the last bunch has been picked. And then, just as suddenly as the Babylonian business began, it’s over. You wake up one morning to find all the seasonal workers gone, the housewives back in their houses, Jean-Pierre back in the bar, and the vineyards empty and still.
Until next year.
I like the vendanges. I even feel a little melancholic every year when it ends. But it isn’t a good idea to get married during the harvest – especially not if your mayor is a wine farmer. Even if you managed with some effort to convince him to take a one-hour break from the vineyard, there’s still the risk that the official witnesses to your wedding ceremony won’t arrive on time. Their car will probably be delayed by the rows of tractors on their way to the cellars with their wagonloads of grapes.
Our witnesses, two of Alain’s colleagues, arrived so late that we almost had to cancel the wedding. Our mayor, short and round with a pair of wild black eyebrows and a head of black hair standing permanently upright as if he’s just been electrocuted, walked up and down impatiently and kept frowning at his watch. There were still a lot of grapes to be picked that day.
And because France is France, we couldn’t simply ask two other friends (our only guests aside from our children) to take over the role of official witnesses. Among the many forms we had to complete beforehand, there were two for all the information about our witnesses that you could think of: full names, where and when and why they had been born, that sort of thing. In other words: if your witnesses don’t arrive, you might as well go home to change out of your wedding dress and start filling in forms again for permission to get married on another Saturday.
In our case that would definitely have been after the harvest.
The main reason why the mayor did after all agree to marry us on this inconvenient Saturday in September was that, for the first time in years, possibly decades, there had been two requests for wedding ceremonies. The other couple were, just like my less-than-radiant groom and me, not exactly spring chickens either. It was also a second wedding for them both and they also came to be wed in the presence of their children. The only difference was that they had more guests than children.
And oh yes, the other bride also looked decidedly more bridal than I did. She arrived in a smart hat, with a beautiful bouquet and a professionally made-up face. I was still feeding the baby half an hour before the wedding, with a dishcloth tied around my neck to keep my ‘wedding gown’ more or less clean. I’d bought the dress at a flea market a few days before – after briefly considering wearing the magnificent silk creation in which I’d embarked on my first marriage more than a decade earlier.
Like many inexperienced brides (you know better the second time round), I’d hung my designer wedding dress in a wardrobe years before in Cape Town, in the vague hope that it might one day enjoy another existence as an elegant evening gown. The problem was that I was never really invited to the kind of glamorous events where you’d need an elegant evening dress. A few literary award ceremonies were more or less the highlights of my social calendar, and a writer doesn’t want to look like a bride when she’s receiving a literary prize. Or worse, when she’s not receiving the prize. So the wedding dress stayed in the wardrobe year after year.
When I moved to France, the wedding dress came along, partly for sentimental reasons, partly because I thought that it might finally be revived in another country, where no one knew my wedding dress or me. Alas, in the French countryside my social life was even more limited than in Cape Town. And after my daughter was born it disappeared completely. My second wedding therefore seemed like the very last chance I’d ever have to wear my beautiful wedding gown. Although I shuddered in advance at what any guide to etiquette would say of a bride who got married in the same dress twice.
And yet I knew from the start that it wouldn’t work. You couldn’t wear such an immodest dress to such a modest wedding. And I was determined that the wedding would be modest. My first marriage had begun with an impressive dress and ended with an impressive lawyer’s bill. This time I would do it differently.
Besides, the groom didn’t even own a tie, let alone a smart suit or a pair of suitable shoes.
However, my brother decided to lend his new brother-in-law a suit and, as my brother is also not really the suit-wearing type, it was a fairly flamboyant one with a collar of black brocade and a lining of scarlet satin, something that dated from London’s Carnaby Street in the sixties. Such a wedding suit encouraged the groom’s sense of the theatrical, and underneath the red satin lining he wore the frilly shirt he’d worn in an amateur theatre production a few months earlier.
It was therefore one of those rare weddings where the bride’s outfit drew less attention than the groom’s.
And because it was such a historical day for our little village, the local correspondent for the newspaper La Provence came to take our picture, which was published the following week under the
