throughout the year. But during summer I’d say that we have an exchange rate of around ten weddings for every funeral.
The weddings are both a pleasure and a pain for those of us who live under the church’s wing. It’s always exciting to watch the preparations, the stone staircase of the abbey being decorated with bows and flowers, the caterers and musicians delivering their equipment, all the bustle that reaches a climax with the noisy arrival of the wedding party. It’s the custom here that every car in the wedding procession – and all passing cars, too – hoot loudly and persistently. Just so you’ll know that a wedding procession is on the way when they’re still in the next village.
But this noise is nothing compared to what you can expect late at night. Once the reception is in full swing, we lie in bed listening to booming techno-music, disco from the seventies, American pop from the eighties and nineties and – much worse – French pop from any era. Now and again we’re surprised by a live music group that makes a more pleasant kind of noise. Last summer there was a jazz band hired by a wealthy British wedding party, which played the loveliest swing from the forties, with a hoarse singer who sounded exactly like Satchmo. We made our supper under the plane tree last until long past midnight and felt as if we had the most expensive seats at an excellent open-air concert. But something like that is a rare treat. Mostly you flee to your bedroom, close the windows and shutters, turn on the air-conditioning, hide your head under the pillows and hope for the mercy of sleep.
The worst trial of all comes at around four in the morning when the inebriated guests take their leave and loudly bid each other goodbye in the street just below our bedroom window.
Sometimes the festivities continue past sunrise. One morning recently I was standing in the kitchen, pouring coffee and yawning, when the previous night’s bride appeared on the abbey steps like a hallucination. Still in her fairytale wedding gown, a wreath of flowers on her curled hair, her lips amazingly still painted pink, she showed no sign of exhaustion although she’d been dancing the entire night. While you could tell at a glance that I had just endured a night of erratic dreaming to the beat of a techno soundtrack.
And don’t think it’s all over once the last guest has finally left. Above all, don’t think that you can go back to bed and catch up on the sleep you’ve lost. In a few hours the entire wedding party will be back to continue the celebration. The French call this tradition le rebond, ‘the rebound’, and according to my French husband it originated in the need to get rid of all the left-over food after the feast. In other words, you invite the previous night’s wedding guests for lunch and at the same time they help you clean up the hall, wash the glasses and carry off the empty bottles. A practical bunch, the French, who know how to get dull things done in a delightful way.
But for our family in the stone house opposite the abbey, le rebond only means another restless Sunday after a restless Saturday night.
Now that I live here, I watch weddings the way other people watch sport: from the sidelines. I’ve been an official participant at just three French weddings – and one of those was my own rather modest one.
But where funerals are concerned, I’ve become a participant rather than a spectator. Not because I have a morbid interest in death, but because that’s simply what’s expected of you when you live in a small village. If anyone in the village whom you knew vaguely (and in a village like this you know everyone vaguely), or even a distant relative of someone you know vaguely, is buried, then you’re there. Even Jean-Pierre temporarily abandons his throne in the bar to perform his duty. Weddings are exclusive occasions to which a limited number of guests are invited. Funerals are open to everyone. The more the merrier.
No, I don’t suppose you can say that.
And yet I’m surprised time and again, especially at the funerals of older people, by how many of the guests don’t look sad at all. They don’t even go inside the church (granted, the church is usually packed anyway), but stay outside and talk during the service. Nothing about their appearance makes you suspect that they’re funeral-goers. And I don’t just mean the lack of sanctimonious sadness, I’m talking about the way they’re dressed. Nowhere is there a sober black suit or a smart black dress in sight. Nowhere a tie or even a pair of high-heeled shoes. The men, farmers mostly, look as if they’ve come straight from the field to quickly bury old Roger or Rolande. In winter they wear muddy boots; in summer, work shoes covered in dust. The women usually remember to remove their aprons, but make no effort beyond that.
Madame Voisine, who of course never misses a funeral, has a lifelong aversion to black. She reminds me of Edith Piaf, such a little bird of a woman with a sharp beak for a nose, but unlike Piaf you’ll never ever see her in a black dress. The furthest she’ll go for the sake of the departed is perhaps a blouse with a dark-blue pattern. Frightfully demure compared to the brightly coloured patterns she usually wears. But even in her quietest outfit there is no risk that she’ll blend into the crowd. Not with a head of hair like hers. For years, Madame Voisine’s thin fuzz of hair has been dyed as orange as the inside of a ripe melon. Forget the Sparrow of Paris. Meet the Parrot of Provence.
At my first funeral here in the countryside I felt as if I’d turned up at a braai in my Sunday best. Not that my clothes were all that smart, I’d just traded my usual jeans and walking boots for a black skirt, black tights and flat black shoes. But it was in the middle of winter and I was the only woman under eighty braving the icy cold in a skirt. There were exactly four frock-wearers in the church – two ancient crones, the priest and me. And the priest was wearing several layers of clothing underneath his frock to keep him warm. After the church service, when the entire funeral procession braved the steep hill to the cemetery on foot in a swaying row behind the incense-swinging priest, I cursed my unsuitable black city shoes with every laboured, muddy step.
Back home I tried to warm my frozen toes in front of the fire and promised myself that for the next funeral I’d dress better. Or worse, as my grandmother would have said. Less proper, at any rate. Next time I’d keep my jeans and my hiking boots on.
But when the next funeral came, it was as if I heard my grandmother’s voice somewhere: ‘That simply wouldn’t do, my dear. One must have respect for the dead, you know!’ And respect, according to my grandmother, just doesn’t lie in jeans and boots. At the last minute I ripped off my jeans and put on a more decent pair of pants. More decent shoes, too.
It’s now many funerals later – and I’m still struggling with the casual dress code. Where I grew up, a funeral was a terribly black, terribly formal, terribly terrible business. Imagine my surprise when at a recent funeral I spotted the deceased’s teenaged sister dressed in frayed jeans and tackies and on her head a knitted hat with a picture of a marijuana leaf. She’s a lovely girl who certainly wasn’t trying to provoke anyone. That’s just the way teenagers look around here – whether they’re going to the shop, to school or to church.
It’s not just the informal clothes that make funerals here different from the ones I’m used to. Everything is different, from the custom of going to look at the body to the appearance of the hearse. Where I grew up you didn’t look at dead people. Except when you saw them lying in the road after a car accident. But the dead people you knew, those you didn’t look at. They were nailed into a coffin and dug deep into the ground as soon as possible. Or handed over to a crematorium and shoved into an oven. Where I grew up we didn’t decorate the body like the ancient Egyptians, we didn’t wrap the body in a cloth and feed it to the fish like the seafarers of old, we didn’t watch the corpse being consumed by flames as Indians do and we certainly didn’t get drunk beside it like those wild Irishmen. We Calvinists prefer to pretend that the body isn’t there. The spirit is all that really matters.
Where I live now, there is no such vigorous denial of the bodily remains. Here the dead is a physical presence, an object to be exhibited so that the entire neighbourhood can say good-bye. I’ve seen more dead
