Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Transported
April 8
Renée is mon ange de conduire, or, in other words, the remarkable woman who so selflessly has put herself at my disposal to drive me to and from school, for no apparent reason other than friendship with my landlady Michele, and now with me. She does not speak any English, and her lower teeth lean sharply inward, so that her French is projected over an underlying gust of air to create something between a whistle and a lisp. I would say this reminds me of the difference between Mexican Spanish and Barthelona Spanish, except that I don’t really know much about either. In any case, the French here is much different from Parisian French, and there often seems to be an extra NG sound attached to the end of words here. Its rapid fire, too, flying by at a dizzying speed for a novice like me.
Like many women in their 50s and 60s in France, Renée’s has hair dyed a very strange and unnatural purplish-red color and cut quite short. She was born in Bonnieux, as was her father, who recently passed away, much to the sadness of the whole town. Several people have told me about him, sitting every day on a stone outcropping in front of his driveway on Rue de la République, carefully taking note of all the village goings-on. He was the town character, apparently, as well as its sage and collector of local gossip. I don’t know who all Renee lives with now—certainly her mother-in-law, and I think also her mother, and presumably there’s a husband somewhere, but I’ve never seen him. One of the few things I have understood her to say is that she has a daughter who is a travel agent in Apt. She tries to teach me words in French as we drive the five kilometers to and from Lacoste, and she does some really superb pantomiming in order to help me understand. She can be seen walking up and down the narrow street to the Café Saint Andre — which seems as if it will be my home base, since it is one of the few places with WiFi — in jeans and bedroom slippers, and she always greets me as if I were a dear old friend, with the three-kiss salute (right, left, right, as opposed to Paris’s two-kiss left then right) and a remapping of her lined face into a delighted smile. Her glasses magnify her eyes to an almost startling degree, which gives her a look of extra sincerity.
She and Michele introduced me to Frederique, the one-man-show at Café Saint Andre—part waiter, part maître d’, part town busybody. (I wonder if he took over as the gossip hound when Renée’s father died, or if they were in competition when he was still around.) I don’t know if Michele or Renée specifically said to him, “This is Carla, take care of her,” but he wasted no time taking on that role, and has tried to mother-hen me into a corner since. “How old are you? I am 46.” “You have a fiancé? Why not?” “Where is your family? My father is dead.” (Only it comes out more like “My fazer iz ded,” in the most perfect Pépé la Pew accent you can imagine.) He looks like a little owl, with a round face and glasses and a bald spot right on the pinnacle of his scull. He is small, like most French men, but with a hard, round gut out front, and he moves quickly, more like a scuttling seabird than an owl, except when he is smoking and looking up the street to see what’s going on up there, which is much of the time. He announced the very first day we met that he was coming to stay with me in San Francisco this winter. What could I say but OK? This guy is my connection to the Internet, and therefore the world. And his English is comparatively great to everyone else’s in town. “I was butler. In New York,” he has told me several times. I don’t know what kind of cred he thinks that endows him with, but ten years in Brooklyn has certainly made him the only person in the village I can have an actual conversation with.
Renée and Fred must talk several times a day, because it’s impossible for me to give him any news of her without him shutting me down and telling me he knows all about it. He widens his eyes and arches his brows at me and makes a perfect O of his mouth when he says, “I know! See told me dat!” He informs me that Renée is a little batty, though I think the actual word he used was fou — or crazy. This statement clearly does not cancel out his loyalty to her, he’s just reporting the facts. He says she’s on some kind of permanent disability, having had what I interpreted to be a repetitive stress injury by his demonstration of typing on air, and according to him, she has settled quite nicely into the non-working life. He still thinks she is slightly compromised, though. “See forget everyzing,” he tells me. He gave her a pair of pants to sew a button on, and she lost them. He’s told me about those pants at least five times already.
But indeed, just yesterday, I was waiting for her after class at the spot she had indicated she would pick me up, and she did not come. I waited there for about an hour before lighting off on a trail in the general direction of the village. I had read that there were signs and hand-painted symbols on the trails to guide hikers, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. It was fairly rugged walking — lots of steep climbs and descents, like all the terrain here, and a stream to cross and lots of mud from recent rains. I had my very heavy computer bag with me and many times wound up at forks where I stood for a moment before making an arbitrary decision about which direction to pursue. Lots of the little roads I ran into turned out to be just exceptionally long driveways, and I had to backtrack when they ended at a gite or stone house. From the higher slopes, I could sometimes see my village perched atop its little mountain, and this was encouraging, though the distance and height less so. Also, two days before, I’d taken a fairly significant spill on a cobblestoned street in the dark and had slammed one knee and seriously torked the ankle on my other leg (not to mention putting a hole in the one pair of jeans I brought), so that was a hindrance, too. But I soldiered through, finally giving up on the trail, which seemed to be meandering far west of my destination, and started going overland, which was an adventure. I traversed several cherry orchards and walked between rows and rows of grapevines that were just starting to show the tiniest green leaves, picking up what felt like pounds of caked-on mud that adhered to my boots up past my ankles and gave me a Frankenstein gate. I climbed between brambles and skirted numerous ancient stone walls. I think I barely escaped electrocution with some wire fencing around one property — I recognized it from my horse-pasture experience. I met some farmers in an old truck who vaguely waved me toward Bonnieux when I asked, and after a while, I finally hit the main road to the village. It was nice to know I was on the right track, but that was where the huffing and puffing really began, as the ascent got really intense. The last leg of the journey, up the steep incline along the fortified walls of the old city, toward my apartment in the ramparts, was really the worst physically, with the burning lungs and the complaining ankle and the sore ass, but I was semi-elated to have made it back to the right place. I stopped at Renée’s house to see what had happened and to make sure she wasn’t combing the countryside with hounds looking for me, but she was fairly blasé about the whole thing, expressing with arms open and shoulders shrugged her confusion that I had not been there when she came to get me. She had gone to the wrong café, it seems. She didn’t seem terribly concerned, however, which I found a little strange in comparison to the uproar of protest it causes here if ever trouble to carry a dish to the kitchen or get into the back seat, rather than the honored front, of a car with other passengers.
The whole hike, surprisingly, took only about an hour and a half, but I napped a good three hours afterward and had to wrap my ankle in part of an old cut-off sock to try to get the swelling down. I’ve got to get a car.
Renée is mon ange de conduire, or, in other words, the remarkable woman who so selflessly has put herself at my disposal to drive me to and from school, for no apparent reason other than friendship with my landlady Michele, and now with me. She does not speak any English, and her lower teeth lean sharply inward, so that her French is projected over an underlying gust of air to create something between a whistle and a lisp. I would say this reminds me of the difference between Mexican Spanish and Barthelona Spanish, except that I don’t really know much about either. In any case, the French here is much different from Parisian French, and there often seems to be an extra NG sound attached to the end of words here. Its rapid fire, too, flying by at a dizzying speed for a novice like me.
Like many women in their 50s and 60s in France, Renée’s has hair dyed a very strange and unnatural purplish-red color and cut quite short. She was born in Bonnieux, as was her father, who recently passed away, much to the sadness of the whole town. Several people have told me about him, sitting every day on a stone outcropping in front of his driveway on Rue de la République, carefully taking note of all the village goings-on. He was the town character, apparently, as well as its sage and collector of local gossip. I don’t know who all Renee lives with now—certainly her mother-in-law, and I think also her mother, and presumably there’s a husband somewhere, but I’ve never seen him. One of the few things I have understood her to say is that she has a daughter who is a travel agent in Apt. She tries to teach me words in French as we drive the five kilometers to and from Lacoste, and she does some really superb pantomiming in order to help me understand. She can be seen walking up and down the narrow street to the Café Saint Andre — which seems as if it will be my home base, since it is one of the few places with WiFi — in jeans and bedroom slippers, and she always greets me as if I were a dear old friend, with the three-kiss salute (right, left, right, as opposed to Paris’s two-kiss left then right) and a remapping of her lined face into a delighted smile. Her glasses magnify her eyes to an almost startling degree, which gives her a look of extra sincerity.
She and Michele introduced me to Frederique, the one-man-show at Café Saint Andre—part waiter, part maître d’, part town busybody. (I wonder if he took over as the gossip hound when Renée’s father died, or if they were in competition when he was still around.) I don’t know if Michele or Renée specifically said to him, “This is Carla, take care of her,” but he wasted no time taking on that role, and has tried to mother-hen me into a corner since. “How old are you? I am 46.” “You have a fiancé? Why not?” “Where is your family? My father is dead.” (Only it comes out more like “My fazer iz ded,” in the most perfect Pépé la Pew accent you can imagine.) He looks like a little owl, with a round face and glasses and a bald spot right on the pinnacle of his scull. He is small, like most French men, but with a hard, round gut out front, and he moves quickly, more like a scuttling seabird than an owl, except when he is smoking and looking up the street to see what’s going on up there, which is much of the time. He announced the very first day we met that he was coming to stay with me in San Francisco this winter. What could I say but OK? This guy is my connection to the Internet, and therefore the world. And his English is comparatively great to everyone else’s in town. “I was butler. In New York,” he has told me several times. I don’t know what kind of cred he thinks that endows him with, but ten years in Brooklyn has certainly made him the only person in the village I can have an actual conversation with.
Renée and Fred must talk several times a day, because it’s impossible for me to give him any news of her without him shutting me down and telling me he knows all about it. He widens his eyes and arches his brows at me and makes a perfect O of his mouth when he says, “I know! See told me dat!” He informs me that Renée is a little batty, though I think the actual word he used was fou — or crazy. This statement clearly does not cancel out his loyalty to her, he’s just reporting the facts. He says she’s on some kind of permanent disability, having had what I interpreted to be a repetitive stress injury by his demonstration of typing on air, and according to him, she has settled quite nicely into the non-working life. He still thinks she is slightly compromised, though. “See forget everyzing,” he tells me. He gave her a pair of pants to sew a button on, and she lost them. He’s told me about those pants at least five times already.
But indeed, just yesterday, I was waiting for her after class at the spot she had indicated she would pick me up, and she did not come. I waited there for about an hour before lighting off on a trail in the general direction of the village. I had read that there were signs and hand-painted symbols on the trails to guide hikers, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. It was fairly rugged walking — lots of steep climbs and descents, like all the terrain here, and a stream to cross and lots of mud from recent rains. I had my very heavy computer bag with me and many times wound up at forks where I stood for a moment before making an arbitrary decision about which direction to pursue. Lots of the little roads I ran into turned out to be just exceptionally long driveways, and I had to backtrack when they ended at a gite or stone house. From the higher slopes, I could sometimes see my village perched atop its little mountain, and this was encouraging, though the distance and height less so. Also, two days before, I’d taken a fairly significant spill on a cobblestoned street in the dark and had slammed one knee and seriously torked the ankle on my other leg (not to mention putting a hole in the one pair of jeans I brought), so that was a hindrance, too. But I soldiered through, finally giving up on the trail, which seemed to be meandering far west of my destination, and started going overland, which was an adventure. I traversed several cherry orchards and walked between rows and rows of grapevines that were just starting to show the tiniest green leaves, picking up what felt like pounds of caked-on mud that adhered to my boots up past my ankles and gave me a Frankenstein gate. I climbed between brambles and skirted numerous ancient stone walls. I think I barely escaped electrocution with some wire fencing around one property — I recognized it from my horse-pasture experience. I met some farmers in an old truck who vaguely waved me toward Bonnieux when I asked, and after a while, I finally hit the main road to the village. It was nice to know I was on the right track, but that was where the huffing and puffing really began, as the ascent got really intense. The last leg of the journey, up the steep incline along the fortified walls of the old city, toward my apartment in the ramparts, was really the worst physically, with the burning lungs and the complaining ankle and the sore ass, but I was semi-elated to have made it back to the right place. I stopped at Renée’s house to see what had happened and to make sure she wasn’t combing the countryside with hounds looking for me, but she was fairly blasé about the whole thing, expressing with arms open and shoulders shrugged her confusion that I had not been there when she came to get me. She had gone to the wrong café, it seems. She didn’t seem terribly concerned, however, which I found a little strange in comparison to the uproar of protest it causes here if ever trouble to carry a dish to the kitchen or get into the back seat, rather than the honored front, of a car with other passengers.
The whole hike, surprisingly, took only about an hour and a half, but I napped a good three hours afterward and had to wrap my ankle in part of an old cut-off sock to try to get the swelling down. I’ve got to get a car.
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