read the International Herald Tribune and then drive home. I walked the stalls, past rows of clothing and sausage merchants. The boules courts were busy so I stopped and watched a few throws, listening to the click of one metal ball striking another. I walked to the tabac presse for the Herald Tribune and then headed for our rendezvous point.
As I walked up, Marie-Hélène was waiting in the shade of a plane tree. She gleefully waved her basket at me and then held it open to show me the contents. “I got everything we wanted. Madame had three lapin thighs and she sold me the best one, but the asparagus looked dreadful so I got some green beans instead. I bought a dozen farm eggs. Do you remember those deep yellow yolks we found so delicious? . . . How did you do?”
I rummaged in my own panier to show her the hot container of paella and two packages of sliced meats. “I got everything, and luckily I ran into our gardener, François, who says he’ll be over tomorrow.”
The next day François arrived. We heard his truck rumbling up the road and stopping in the driveway at seven in the morning. We leapt out of bed and dressed quickly to save ourselves from looking like lazy Canadians. He was as reliable as clockwork, and when he said that he would be there chaque vendredi, it was the case. Work for him started early and continued after a brief lunch until five or six. For some unknown reason François called me by my middle name, James, so for him I was “Jeem.” . . .
At the end of April we were anxious to start work on our guest suite. The workers had all been contacted in the weeks before we left for France and had promised that they were available to start the moment we arrived. Everything was a go.
However, we hadn’t counted on the month of May. In France some months seemed to have more holidays than work days. So May is either the best month or the worst month, depending on whether you are a worker or an owner trying to get some work done. There is Labour Day, Victory Day, Ascension, Pentecost, Whit Monday and more. Sometimes two such events fall on the same day or on a weekend, thereby cheating the workers out of a day off. This hardly presents a problem, for if a holiday happens to fall on a Tuesday or Thursday, many of the workers take the Monday or the Friday off as well. This is known as a pont, or bridge. It was very logically pointed out to us that it would be foolish to break up a holiday with one day of work. We began to realize that May could easily be viewed as a month off, interspersed with a few days of work.
Quite apart from the holidays, there was a peculiar loose sense of time for some of the provençal tradesmen that we got to know. Was it safe to leave the house in case that day a tradesman happened to show up, even though for the last three days he had failed to do so?
We created strategies to hold onto the workers until a project was completed. The young man who installed the kitchen cabinets was offered an apéritif and dinner so that he would work to finish the job before he got away that evening.
The mason had said that he would arrive at our place at dawn on Monday, hadn’t he? So by noon on Wednesday I called his wife and said that probably with my poor grasp of French I hadn’t understood him properly, and could she possibly ask him to call to set another day to start the work. We didn’t receive a return call, but the next morning the doorbell rang, and with some curiosity about who was there so early in the morning I opened the door to find the mason standing in front of me.
“Bonjour, Albin,” I cried with some delight, while a measure of surprise must have shown on my face. The custom in Provence, even if two people pass each other on the street for the third time in a day, is to shake hands. If one person is lax about extending his hand it would likely be taken as almost an insult or that one was angry with the other. Albin’s hand had been half-extended while he watched to see what I would do. I reached out and vigorously shook his hand. This ritual demanded looking each other squarely in the eyes at the same time. I could see him visibly relax and then smile.
“Entrez, entrez . . . Marie-Hélène, Albin is here and I’ve invited him in!”
Down the stairs to the front door she came almost at a run.
“Albin, je suis ravie de vous voir,” she enthused.
He obviously missed the irony in the greeting as he glowed with pleasure and stepped inside. I noticed Tabitha slip past our legs and out the door, only to stop when she saw Myrtille sleeping on the flagstones warming in the morning sun. She quickly changed directions and headed off behind the house.
After exchanging all the necessary pleasantries with Albin, we got down to business. There were several hundred floor tiles that had to be returned to the magasin de bricolage, the equivalent to a lumber yard in Canada. Albin had delivered a load of tiles last fall that I had later unwrapped to discover they weren’t the ones we had ordered. I put on some work gloves and pitched in to help load his truck. Albin stacked them one on top of another onto wood pallets in the middle of his truck bed.
“Albin, ce n’est pas possible. Elles glissent et tombent,” I said, making a sliding motion with my hands to indicate the tiles were piled too high and would fall as soon as the truck was set in motion.
“Pas de problème.” he responded casually, smiling at me.
I couldn’t see why he thought loose stacks of tiles would be safe to move, but reluctantly accepted that he knew what he was doing—after all, this was what he did for a living. We finished loading the truck and hopped into the cab. As we began to pull out of the driveway a loud crashing noise erupted behind us. I looked at Albin, who eased the truck to a stop with his mouth hanging open.
“Merde!”
Turning to look back, I saw the tiles spread across the truck bed. Albin climbed up and began to restack them, the broken ones on the bottom, the whole ones on top, arranging them more evenly and wrapping them loosely with plastic in an attempt to prevent further sliding. We started off again, this time very slowly. Fortunately the magasin de bricolage was less than a kilometre away and we arrived without further incident. Albin waved at one of the yardmen to come over with a loader and move the pallets into the storage shed. We walked into the office where he had the salesman credit his account. He had forgotten about the broken tiles.
Albin didn’t stay at the house to do any work that day, nor did we see him for another week. After all, this was the month of May.
“You know,” I said to Marie-Hélène over lunch on the balcony, “I think I’m beginning to understand why we’ve had so much trouble with Albin’s work,” and I related the whole story to her.
We began to realize the drawbacks of owning a house so far away that travelling there was an event in itself. If the job was left with the tradesmen to do in our absence, they inevitably did it as they saw fit, regardless of our instructions.
In our second week the Thursday market was on, so we left the maçon and his crew with specific instructions as to where to open a doorway through a stone wall, and then went to the village to shop that morning. When we returned home, they had marked out with chalk a completely different location on the wall and were getting out hammers and drills to start in. After redirecting their efforts back to where I wanted the door, I asked why they had decided to move it. Apparently they had looked at the wall and thought they had a better idea.
As this was not the first time something like this had occurred—spikes were driven into the exterior stucco while we were in Canada—we put a stop to all work unless we were present to keep a close eye on the progress. This was a sensitive matter, for if they felt they were being watched too closely they would think we didn’t trust them—which in fact was true. And if we weren’t nearby, they reverted to their own decisions despite all instructions to the contrary. I learned to be very precise about what we wanted, both verbally and with gestures,
