Veuve Cliquot Deux

I apologize for promising to write after the first of the year and then not getting around to it. I’ve been writing a novel, and that takes most of my coherent time. However, since arriving here in France on the 31st, I haven’t had much coherent time as my jet lag has been particularly ferocious.

I do not advise flying from San Francisco to Toulouse, sardined into the coach section, on New Year’s Eve, arriving at your destination at 4:00 in the afternoon, and then going out for a long dinner that lasts until 2:30am.

I will try and make up my lapse in posting to you by writing daily from now on until the 18th, when we leave for Switzerland. And, TA DA, by posting photos – if my husband can figure out, and then show me, how to post the photos from our new digital camera.

Our American friends, who just moved to Italy, flew up to join us for New Year’s Eve, and spent three fun, but probably boring (for them) days, watching us sleepwalk. Roger joined us for dinner on the 31st. It was the first time I ever saw him in a tie, a very chic and tasteful tie. The five of us had the most incredible dinner at the fancy new restaurant in our nearest village. We were serenaded by two men: one played the guitar and sang, the other played the accordion. When they walked into the room, my friend said, “Oh no, an accordion.” She had bad memories of her uncle in New Jersey whipping out an accordion after family repasts and bellowing out some abomination of a song. But this accordion player changed her mind, and mine, about the usually wheezy instrument. The way this man played, it sounded as if the accordion was a cross between a violin and an organ. The songs were old French songs that had everyone swaying, and Roger singing. I felt as if I was transported back to an elegant restaurant in 1920’s Paris. Roger was a little embarrassed when the owner of the restaurant was making his New Year’s speech, and after he had finished speaking to the room in French, he turned around, faced our table, and repeated his remarks in English. Roger whispered to me, “Now everyone thinks I’m American.” His face was flushed and he sounded worried.

Heading back to the Moulin after dinner, I looked up and saw that the lights were still on at the mayor’s office/community center that hangs over the cliff overlooking the river valley. So we dropped off our sleepy guests and headed up the hill, where our neighbors were still dancing and drinking champagne. Horatio Alger was there with his family. The man I purchased Soixante-Douze from was there. And our housekeeper/caretaker was there with her husband.

This was a distressing sight. He’s known as an untrustworthy, violent, LePen supporting kind of guy. He left our H/C this fall, and because she needed to make money to stay in her house if they divorced, a mutual friend recommended her to us. My husband was wary of taking her on because of all the bad things we had heard about her husband. Even though he had left, we really didn’t want to have him turn his attention to us or our property for any reason. But we hired his wife, and she is a wonderful worker. She keeps house better than I can – we arrived and our beds looked as if they were in the Ritz, the sheep were well cared for, and all the weeds around the house/Moulin/barn had been pulled! The place had never looked so good.

So, while she seemed happy that her husband was back in her life, I wasn’t because I didn’t want her to leave us if he didn’t want her working, and I didn’t want to have to deal with him in any way. Already the Nazi is too much in my life, for I kissed him good-bye when we left at 3:30am. You know, the French cheek kiss.

Waking up on New Year’s Eve, our guests informed us that they were roused in the night from their sleep by water dripping on their heads. Upon hearing this, the color drained from my husband’s face and I thought he might have a coronary . . . we’re still trying to get the roof repaired on the Moulin (see previous post “Waiting for Fargal.”). A huge sigh of relief went up when the leak was determined to be coming from a heating pipe in the attic; making the three stories of water seepage staining the walls seem trivial and even humorous. Unfortunately, our lesbian plumber is on vacation until next week.

We drank Roger’s Veuve Cliquot last night. Two evenings ago, he had us over for aperitifs, to officially hand over the check from the walnut buyer. I was surprised that the buyer gave us 10 cents (Euro) a kilo MORE than he had quoted. Now that’s something that doesn’t happen often in a business transaction. We arrived for the aperitifs, and on the table was the famous bottle of Veuve Cliquot, this year’s batch of moonshine Ratafia, Wild Turkey, and a type of moonshine made from Armagnac grapes. He let us know that if we desired REAL wine, he had that too. Oh, and he had some moonshine made with prunes that he said he gave to my son but it was too strong and my son ran to spit it out in the sink. Then Roger proceeded to bring out enough appetizers that would feed fifteen to twenty French people, but only two Americans.

We decided not to drink the Veuve Cliquot because we didn’t think we could finish the bottle, so I told Roger to bring it to our house for dinner the following evening. He arrived “a l’heure” and the other two guests were ten minutes late. He took advantage of the private moment to tell me that he had called one of the three assisted living centers in our departement that are sponsored by his farmer’s union, to find out about the details of moving in. I didn’t like hearing this. Just the day before, I told my husband that I would be very sad if Roger moved away, because he’s the last of the working old farmers in our neighborhood. He knows how to farm in the most simplistic, economical way, and I really want to learn from him. Furthermore, if he leaves, the vrai France, the mythical France that is my fantasy, atrophies away and the new, modern Euro-France takes its place.

One by one, they’re all dying: the guys who wear the berets, the women who raise their own hens for eggs and kill their own chickens for dinner, the people who remember the World War I veterans, and the people who lived through World War II, and the endless stories they know are disappearing with them. Our discussion last night at dinner centered on all the people that Roger and our other guests know who are now living in the Maison de Retrait. After the assisted living centers, that’s where you go to die, and one of our guests had just signed her mother in last week.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why I have to be so sensitive; but, if I leave the house and drive down the road, I become very sad. Because all I can see, despite the incredible beauty, is the disappearance of the France I want to live in. This simple, elegant, rural lifestyle died decades ago in the United States: that’s why I had to come here, I thought it still existed. But what exist are just the remnants of a very beautiful civilization which is slowly being washed away in an acid bath of modernity. Some chain stores are now staying opened through lunch. Therese across the street doesn’t have any rabbits any more and told me that she’ll get rid of her chickens this year. Roger is going to close up his farm that has been in his family for hundreds of years. Some Dutch, or English, or American will buy it and they’ll invite us to aperitifs and we’ll sit in their newly redecorated, centrally heated modern kitchen, drinking some booze they bought at the supermarché, and it will be fun, but it will be sad because it isn’t life in France. When Roger goes, France goes. We’ll be left with the Euro Zone: with box stores and straight, wide roads no longer lined with sycamores, processed foods, outlawed foie gras, no-smoking in restaurants, no moonshine, no old people riding bicycles, with people eating while they watch television, with garbage disposals, with big refrigerator/freezers, with frozen fruit (which you still can’t buy here), with pasteurized cheese, with warehouse grocery chains.

I’ve got to go now. I’m going to take my sheep and head out for a walk into the woods and fantasize about stopping time. I’ll walk past the ruined chateau, the crumbling stone walls that line the paths, the achingly beautiful little arched bridge that some poverty haunted serf built two hundred years ago. The sheep and I will stand on the hill, peeking through the holes in the last remaining wall of the castle, destroyed in the Hundred Years War, which once symbolized the power and influence of our village. The valley will spread out below us dissected by the fat river winding its way to Bordeaux, and I’ll be happy knowing that I was lucky enough to witness this beauty. I was blessed to breathe in the sweet air of the decaying grapevine leaves that rise up from the valley. I was able to experience France before it disappeared under a blanket of asphalt.