I had to stop after the cheese. My wife, who has never yet been defeated by a menu, had a slice of tarte au citron. The room began to smell of coffee and Gitanes, and the sun coming through the window turned the smoke blue as it drifted above the heads of the three men sitting over thimble-sized glasses of marc. We ordered coffee and asked for a bill, but bills were not part of the routine. Customers settled up at the bar on the way out.
Madame told us what we owed. Fifty francs each for the food, and four francs for the coffee. The wine was included in the price. No wonder the place was full every day.
Was it really true she was going to retire?
She stopped polishing the bar. "When I was a little girl," she said, "I had to choose whether to work in the fields or in the kitchen. Even in those days I hated the land. It's hard, dirty work." She looked down at her hands, which were well kept and surprisingly young-looking. "So I chose the kitchen, and when I married we moved here. I've been cooking for thirty-eight years. It's enough."
We said how sorry we were, and she shrugged.
"One becomes tired." She was going to live in Orange, she said, in an apartment with a balcony, and sit in the sun.
It was two o'clock, and the room was empty except for an old man with white stubble on his leather cheeks, dipping a sugar lump into his Calvados. We thanked Madame for a fine lunch.
"C'est normal," she said.
The heat outside was like a blow on the skull and the road back to the house was a long mirage, liquid and rippling in the glare, the leaves on the vines drooping, the farm dogs silent, the countryside stunned and deserted. It was an afternoon for the pool and the hammock and an undemanding book, a rare afternoon without builders or guests, and it seemed to pass in slow motion.
By the evening, our skins prickling from the sun, we were sufficiently recovered from lunch to prepare for the sporting event of the week. We had accepted a challenge from some friends who, like us, had become addicted to one of the most pleasant games ever invented, and we were going to try to uphold the honor of Ménerbes on the boules court.
Long before, during a holiday, we had bought our first set of boules after watching the old men in Roussillon spend an enjoyably argumentative afternoon on the village court below the post office. We had taken our boules back to England, but it is not a game that suits the damp, and they gathered cobwebs in a barn. They had been almost the first things we unpacked when we came to live in Provence. Smooth and tactile, they fitted into the palm of the hand, heavy, dense, gleaming spheres of steel that made a satisfying chock when tapped together.
We studied the techniques of the professionals who played every day next to the church at Bonnieux-men who could drop a boule on your toe from twenty feet away-and came home to practice what we had seen. The true aces, we noticed, bent their knees in a crouch and held the boule with the fingers curled around and the palm facing downward, so that when the boule was thrown, friction from the fingers provided backspin. And there were the lesser elements of style-the grunts and encouragements that helped every throw on its way, and the shrugs and muttered oaths when it landed short or long. We soon became experts in everything except accuracy.
There were two basic types of delivery: the low, rolling throw that skittered along the ground, or the high-trajectory drop shot, aimed to knock the opponent's boule off the court. The precision of some of the players we watched was remarkable, and for all our crouching and grunting it would take years of applied effort before we would be welcomed to a serious court like the one in Bonnieux.
Boules is an essentially simple game, which a beginner can enjoy from the first throw. A small wooden ball, the cochonnet, is tossed up the court. Each player has three boules, identified by different patterns etched into the steel, and at the end of the round the closest to the cochonnet is the winner. There are different systems of scoring, and all kinds of local bylaws and variations. These, if carefully planned, can be of great advantage to the home team.
We were playing on our own court that evening, and the game was therefore subject to Lubéron Rules:
1. Anyone playing without a drink is disqualified.
2. Incentive cheating is permitted.
3. Disputes concerning the distance from the cochonnet are mandatory. Nobody's word is final.
4. Play stops when darkness falls unless there is no clear winner, in which case blind man's boules are played until there is a torchlight decision or the cochonnet is lost.
We had gone to some trouble to construct a court with deceptive slopes and shallow hollows to baffle visitors, and had roughened the playing surface so that our luck would have a sporting chance against superior skill. We were quietly confident, and I had the added advantage of being in charge of the pastis; any signs of consistent accuracy from the visiting team would be countered by bigger drinks, and I knew from personal experience what big drinks did to one's aim.
Our opponents included a girl of sixteen who had never played before, but the other three had at least six weeks of practice between them, and were not to be treated lightly. As we inspected the playing surface, they made disparaging comments about its lack of regularity, complained about the angle of the setting sun, and made a formal request for dogs to be banned from the court. The old stone roller was trundled up and down to humor them. Moistened fingers were held in the air to gauge the strength of the breeze, and play commenced.
There is a distinct, if slow, rhythm to the game. A throw is made, and play stops while the next to throw strolls up for a closer look and tries to decide whether to bomb or whether to attempt a low, creeping delivery that will sidle round the other boules to kiss the cochonnet. A contemplative sip of pastis is taken, the knees are flexed, the boule loops through the air, thuds to earth, and rolls with a soft crunching sound to its resting place. There are no hurried movements and almost no sporting injuries. (One exception being Bennett, who had scored a broken roof tile and self-inflicted concussion of the toe during his first and last game.)
Intrigue and gamesmanship make up for the lack of athletic drama, and the players that evening behaved abominably. Boules were moved by stealth, with accidental nudges of the foot. Players poised to throw were distracted by comments on their stance, offers of more pastis, accusations of stepping over the throwing line, warnings of dogs crossing the court, sightings of imaginary grass snakes, and conflicting bad advice from every side. There were no clear winners at halftime, when we stopped to watch the sunset.
To the west of the house, the sun was centered in the V made by two mountain peaks in a spectacular display of natural symmetry. Within five minutes it was over, and we played on in the crépuscule, the French word that makes twilight sound like a skin complaint. Measuring distances from the cochonnet became more difficult and more contentious, and we were about to agree on a dishonorable draw when the young girl whose first game it was put three boules in a nine-inch group. Foul play and alcohol had been defeated by youth and fruit juice.
We ate out in the courtyard, the flagstones sun-warm under our bare feet, the candlelight flickering on red wine and brown faces. Our friends had rented their house to an English family for August, and they were going to spend the month in Paris on the proceeds. According to them, all the Parisians would be down in Provence, together with untold thousands of English, Germans, Swiss, and Belgians. Roads would be jammed; markets and restaurants impossibly full. Quiet villages would become noisy, and everyone without exception would be in a filthy humor. We had been warned.