It was an ominous sign. As much as we disliked having its hulk parked outside, it was at least a guarantee that Didier and his masons would return. Now they had crept in and taken it-our cement mixer-probably to use on a six-month job somewhere the other side of Carpentras. Our hopes of having a finished house by Christmas suddenly seemed like a bad attack of misplaced optimism.
Christian, as usual, was sympathetic and reassuring.
"They had to go to Mazan… an emergency job… the roof of an old widow's house…"
I felt guilty. What were our problems compared to the plight of a poor old widow exposed to the elements?
"Don't worry," Christian said. "Two days, maybe three, and then they'll be back to finish off. There's plenty of time before Christmas. It's weeks away."
Not many weeks away, we thought. My wife suggested kidnapping Didier's cocker spaniel, closer to his heart even than the cement mixer, and keeping it as a hostage. It was a fine, bold scheme, except that the dog never left Didier's side. Well, if not his dog, maybe his wife. We were prepared to consider almost anything.
The unfinished jobs-temporary windows and chinks in the masonry in particular-were made more apparent by the first sustained Mistral of winter. It blew for three days, bending the cypress tree in the courtyard into a green C, tearing at the tatters of plastic in the melon fields, worrying away at loose tiles and shutters, moaning through the night. It was malevolent and inescapable, a wind to lower the spirits as it threw itself endlessly against the house, trying to get in.
"Good weather for suicide," Massot said to me one morning as the wind flattened his mustache against his cheeks. "Beh oui. If this continues, we'll see a funeral or two."
Of course, he said, this was nothing like the Mistrals of his boyhood. In those days, the wind blew for weeks on end, doing strange and horrible things to the brain. He told me the story of Arnaud, a friend of his father's.
Arnaud's horse was old and tired and no longer strong enough for farm work. He decided to sell it and buy a fresh young horse, and walked the fifteen kilometers to Apt market one windy morning leading the old nag behind him. A buyer was found, the price was agreed, but the young horses for sale that day were poor, thin specimens. Arnaud walked home alone. He would return next week in the hope that better animals would be on sale.
The Mistral continued all that week, and was still blowing when Arnaud walked again to Apt market. This time he was lucky, and bought a big dark horse. It cost him almost double what he had made on the sale of the old horse, but, as the dealer said, he was paying for youth. The new horse had years of work in him.
Arnaud was only two or three kilometres from his farm when the horse broke free from its leading rein and bolted. Arnaud ran after it until he could run no more. He searched in the scrub and in the vineyards, shouting into the wind, cursing the Mistral that had unsettled the horse, cursing his bad luck, cursing his lost money. When it became too dark to search any longer, he made his way home, angry and despairing. Without a horse, he couldn't work the land; he would be ruined.
His wife met him at the door. An extraordinary thing had happened: a horse, a big dark horse, had come running up the track and had gone into one of the outbuildings. She had given it water and pulled a cart across the opening to block its escape.
Arnaud took a lantern and went to look at the horse. A broken lead rein hung from its head. He touched its neck, and his fingers came away stained. In the light of the lantern, he could see the sweat running down its flanks, and pale patches where the dye had worn off. He had bought back his old horse. In rage and shame he went up into the forest behind his farm and hanged himself.
Massot lit a cigarette, hunching his shoulders and cupping his hands against the wind.
"At the inquest," he said, "someone had a sense of humor. The cause of death was recorded as suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed by a horse."
Massot grinned and nodded. All his stories, it seemed, ended brutally.
"But he was a fool," Massot said. "He should have gone back and shot the dealer who sold him the horse-paf!-and blamed it on the Mistral. That's what I'd have done." His reflections on the nature of justice were interrupted by the whine of an engine in low gear, and a Toyota four-wheel-drive truck, as wide as the footpath, slowed down briefly to give us time to jump out of the way. It was Monsieur Dufour, the village grocer and scourge of the Lubéron's sanglier population.
We had seen the heads of sangliers mounted on the walls of butchers' shops, and had paid no more attention to them than to any other of the strange rustic decorations that we saw from time to time. But once or twice during the summer the sangliers had come down from the dry upper slopes of the mountain to drink from the swimming pool and steal melons, and we could never look a stuffed head in the eye again after seeing the living animals. They were black and stout and longer in the leg than a conventional pig, with worried, whiskery faces. We loved our rare glimpses of them, and wished that the hunters would leave them alone. Unfortunately, sangliers taste like venison, and are consequently chased from one end of the Lubéron to the other.
Monsieur Dufour was the acknowledged champion hunter, a modern and mechanized Nimrod. Dressed in his combat uniform, his truck bristling with high-powered armaments, he could drive up the rocky trails and reach the sanglier-infested upper slopes while less well equipped hunters were still coughing their way up on foot. On the flat bed of his truck was a large wooden chest containing six hounds, trained to track for days on end. The poor old pigs didn't stand much of a chance.
I said to Massot that I thought it was a shame the sangliers were hunted quite so relentlessly by so many hunters.
"But they taste delicious," he said. "'Specially the young ones, the marcassins. And besides, it's natural. The English are too sentimental about animals, except those men who chase foxes, and they are mad."
The wind was strengthening and getting colder, and I asked Massot how long he thought it would last.
"A day, a week. Who knows?" He leered at me. "Not feeling like suicide, are you?"
I said I was sorry to disappoint him, but I was well and cheerful, looking forward to the winter and Christmas.
"Usually a lot of murders after Christmas." He said it as though he was looking forward to a favorite television program, a bloody sequel to the Mistral suicides.
I heard gunfire as I walked home, and I hoped Dufour had missed. No matter how long I lived here, I would never make a true countryman. And, as long as I preferred to see a wild boar on the hoof instead of on the plate, I'd never make an adopted Frenchman. Let him worship his stomach; I would maintain a civilized detachment from the blood lust that surrounded me.
This noble smugness lasted until dinner. Henriette had given us a wild rabbit, which my wife had roasted with herbs and mustard. I had two helpings. The gravy, thickened with blood, was wonderful.
MADAME SOLIVA, the eighty-year-old chef whose nom de cuisine was Tante Yvonne, had first told us about an olive oil that she said was the finest in Provence. She had better credentials than anyone we knew. Apart from being a magnificent cook, she was olive oil's answer to a Master of Wine. She had tried them all, from Alziari in Nice to the United Producers of Nyons, and in her expert and considered view the oil produced in the valley of Les Baux was the best. One could buy it, she told us, from the little mill in Maussane-les-Alpilles.