So they’re an even dozen, plus Gagou, who throws off the reckoning.
•
The houses enclose a small square of bare ground — a shared space, and a place for playing at boules.
The wash house lies under the big oak.
You scrub your laundry in a sandstone sarcophagus carved on the inside to resemble a man in chain mail.
The cavity for the cadaver brims with green, brackish water that quivers with the etchings of aquatic insects.
The sides of this massive coffin hold images of women flagellating themselves with laurel boughs.
Aphrodis Arbaud unearthed this age-old stone one time when he was uprooting an olive tree.
•
The houses mirror their occupants.
A bushy Virginia creeper climbs all over Jaume’s place, and above the front door it looks just like the walrus moustache that hangs over his mouth.
And they’re all like that.
Arbaud’s: dolled up and painted with ochre twice a year; Gondran’s place, Maurras’s place, and Gagou’s.
Oh yes, Gagou’s place resembles its owner too.
•
He arrived at the Bastides on a summer’s evening three years ago, just when they were finished winnowing late-ripened wheat with the night wind.
A piece of string held up his britches; he was shirtless.
A drooping lip, a lifeless eye, but blue, blue… and two buck teeth sticking out through his lips.
He drooled.
People asked him questions. He answered only: “Gagou, ga… gou…” on two different notes, like some sort of animal.
Then he danced the way marmots do, swaying, and dangling his hands.
A simpleton.
They gave him a meal, and some straw to bed down on.
•
The Bastides had once been a market town, back in the days when the seigneurs of Aix liked to breathe the bracing air of the hills.
All of their fine houses have crumbled to dust. Only the peasants’ remain standing.
Even so, on the far side of the wash house two grass-covered pillars mark the entrance to a lane.
Pillars capped by globes with hoods of moss and Latin inscriptions.
Over there, an iron gate must have blocked the entrance to what they called a folly.
Balconies like the wombs of goddesses… terraces with the swish of a skirt and the click of high heels.
Right in the middle of the space between the pillars, and four yards back, Gagou has erected his shack, in the thick of the nettles.
He’s industrious, and surprisingly clever with his hands. He’s built his hut out of corrugated iron and flattened fuel cans.
Now that he’s cleared the grass from the feet of the pillars, you can make out a high-sounding name engraved inside a laurel-crowned cartouche.
It’s a long way to town, and the roads are rough.
When the wind blows from the south you can hear trains whistling and bells ringing down below.
Which, up here, means only that it’s going to rain.
When the heat haze disperses, from town you can spot the Bastides perched like doves on the hill’s shoulder.
•
Last year the postman came up a lot. Almost once a week. Young Maurras was doing his military service in the dragoons.
Now that he’s back he doesn’t have to write home anymore. He just has to shout from the square or from the fields, and his mother comes out and asks, “What do you want?”
So the postman has stopped coming.
Except for every once in a while at the end of the month, when the loans they’ve taken out with the notary fall due.
Which amounts to saying that they’d rather not see him at all.
Whatever comes from town is bad: the wind that brings rainy weather, and the postman.
Nobody would disagree.
They prefer the wind that blows from the wasteland of Lure. It cuts like a razor, but it scatters the magpies and it points the way, for those in the know, to where the hares hide.
•
Gondran’s house is the last one facing the plain. It’s called Les Monges — maybe because it’s on its own and robed in red like a monk; maybe because once upon a time it really was a hermitage. All in all, it has the look of a grand old priest’s house, with its stout buttresses and its low-set, curve-topped door; the house of one of those half-whoremonger priests who happily give a meal and a bed to lovers stealing away to make love in peace.
It’s the best situated of the four. It guards the road and has a view of the hill. It’s right beside the slope that runs down to the lowlands. From the terrace you can make out the switchbacks all the way down to La Clémente.
At one time Les Monges belonged to Janet, the oldest resident of the Bastides. Janet has lived here since he was thirty. He moved up after he’d done a stint on every farm down on the plain. Nobody wanted to hire him anymore, because he fought with all the other hands. Three times a week they’d have to send for the gendarmes and break out the sticking plasters. His wife died here; his daughter grew up here. Now he’s in his eighties. He’s straight-limbed, tough as a laurel trunk, and his thin lips barely crease the sculpted boxwood of his face. From his beady, chestnut-coloured eyes his blank stare flits into the sky like a moth. That’s where he divines the weather and knows when trees will come into leaf. That’s where he predicts sickness, sees faces. And that’s where he detects, he of all people — supreme liar and trickster — lying and treachery. He’s never left the Bastides, but you don’t say “Janet’s place” anymore. You say “Gondran’s place.” Gondran is his son-in-law. Janet has had to go along with all of this. You say: “Gondran’s house, Gondran’s fields. The horse, the cart, the hay — they’re all Gondran’s.” Gondran has entirely taken over from Janet. Gondran is broad across the shoulders, tall, rosy-cheeked. The plough runs true in his hands. Once, he tamed an unruly mule with a single blow to its ear.
Deep down, Janet does hold something against Gondran. He begrudges him mainly because of his daughter. It’s because of her, after all, that Gondran has taken over his place.
Since then, to his way of thinking, she’s done nothing worthwhile.
“Back in my day, they knew how to make real bean soup.”
“The hare is good, but you’ve put ten times too much water in the sauce.”
He’d be happy to see her beaten.
“If I were you,” he says to his son-in-law, “I’d tan her hide.”
“Bloody well right!” Gondran replies, with a laugh.
Stout Marguerite trots in on her stubby legs and, putting on a pout, raises her eyebrows good-naturedly: “There you go, papa, you’re never satisfied.”
•
Today Gondran steps out onto the terrace. In one hand he holds a bottle and two glasses. With the other arm he cradles a clay pitcher full of fresh water that’s trickling all the way down into his pants. He shifts the table with his foot, sets down the jug and the glasses, and then, with great care, the bottle.
Six o’clock on a summer’s evening. They’re singing over at the wash house.
With his arms swinging he stretches twice. Spade work has bent his stocky frame. At the end of the second stretch, he farts. It’s his ritual.
He sits down, drags a glass across the table. He holds the bottle up against the daylight. It’s half full of greenish liquor, and at the bottom there’s a mat of herbs, leaves, and tiny brown seeds. This is an absinthe he makes at home with artemisia from the hills, aniseed that he orders from the postman, and his own aged eau de vie.
Drop by drop he adds the water. He’s gripped the jug by the neck in his hefty, dirt-caked hand and he holds it effortlessly, tilted above his glass.
Two puffs on his pipe, then the still air carries him a hint of a sound.
He leans over, and stares at the bend in the road at Les Ponches, down there among the hawthorns. That’s where he’ll be able to see it the best.