I walk alongside the canals populated by swans and ducks. Swimming to avoid blooms of algae, these balls of living thread give purpose to the birds’ movements. They make me think about my current lack of direction. It is weeks since I have been book hunting. Marmite has an idea. To put up an ad — ‘We buy English books/On achete livres en anglais’ — in the Le Sémaphore cinema where English films are regularly shown en version originale. There is no immediate response but the initiative serves to assuage the guilt arising from a Protestant work ethic that lingers despite attempts to kill it off.
Minutes before arriving at the boulodrome, I hear the collective hum of conversations punctuated by the clink of pastis-filled glasses. Marmite is already in position, spliff in hand, doing a convincing impression of Withnail. He points out the ‘young pretender’. Too young as yet to convincingly pretend, his skills might one day mount a credible challenge to the bellyman. He already has the measure of the wigman who resorts to his chief spoiling tactic by putting the jack in the vicinity of the trees. This does not unsettle the young pretender now he has hit form. But the young pretender lacks consistency and Marmite questions his temperament. A silver ring in his left ear glints in the sun, catching the eye as does the young man’s easiness of carriage and gesture. Endowed with charisma, he has a cigarette perpetually on the go. It releases into the fresh but warming days of April, plumes of pungent Gitane smoke.
On most days the ‘flashman’ is the fourth member. On late Tuesdays and even later Thursdays, however, a thin man, with a gentle arm action, participates by default, stepping into the bellyman’s illustrious corridor of play. There is a price to pay for his flashiness, namely a job, one requiring his attendance elsewhere. It enables him to arrive at place Picasso in a Porsche, out from which he swaggers, clad in Armani. When present at the boulodrome, he lacks nothing in dedication. His costly garb captures the dirt and dust when he curls himself up into a human ball. A rapid upright movement then brings about the release of the boule. His skills, though considerable, are not given sufficient time to be honed. Before departing for work the ‘flashman’ gives the boules a thorough clean before attending to his own appearance. He keeps a tin of brown shoe polish in the boot of the Porsche.
It is a most civilised way of whiling away an afternoon; an indulgence really, like the mixing of Pernod and water. We are utterly seduced by this ambience of lazy talk and cigarettes. This state of torpor, it lasts until the jack bounces unexpectedly close to the bank of spectators. A melodramatic rush of activity then ensues; people shuffling back, others having to extricate themselves from chairs. The boules also, on occasion, whizz through the air like cannons. Missing their target (a boule needing to be dislodged), they then scatter spectators in all directions.
The Mairie and everyone at the art school are getting worked up about the imminent arrival of Julian Schnabel. New York’s high priest of abstract art will be making an appearance at the Musee des Beaux-Arts for the vernisage. Marmite explains that this is like a private preview-cum-party to mark the start of an art exhibition. He gives me an invitation.
What first strikes me about the paintings are their huge size (twenty-two-foot-square paintings) and all the crucifixes on show. I don’t really get it. Marmite is more analytical and says Schnabel’s success is a natural evolution of the art scene, as predicted by Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, a book Marmite finds in the English centre. It concludes that modern art has become as academic and as cliquey as the salon painting against which it first rebelled. Marmite isn’t wholeheartedly in agreement. He, after all, has to make his way in this world.
I fail to decipher the Schnabel art on show, finding it painful, almost, to behold. There is adequate compensation though: delicious canapés and champagne, courtesy of the Mairie’s largesse. I don’t hang around long enough to catch a glimpse of Schnabel but I do get to meet an art student called Anne.
The exhibition ends three weeks later but three of Schnabel’s works are left to grace the walls of the Maison Carrée, a well preserved temple built in the first century bc and dedicated to Lucius and Caius Caesar, grandsons of the Emperor. This is an irritant to us because every time we walk back to Marmite’s flat after a pétanque session, we pass the temple and are reminded of the Emperor’s new clothes inside.
Marmite has begun sketching the boules players. We keenly observe their idiosyncracies. The bellyman displays fewer than the others, preferring to spend as little time as possible in sizing up his throw. When presented with a throw requiring a fine judgement, he plucks from his back pocket a handkerchief into which he noiselessly blows his fat nose. Slow in settling down to throw, the wigman tends to pace up and down the corridor of play before remarking the throwing circle by scraping his shoes hard and repeatedly into the ground. After badly misjudging a throw he is inclined to go through the motions with an imaginary boule, rectifying the error in his mind if not in reality. In spite of his tender years, the young pretender has already acquired several habits; energetically hitching up his jeans in a general air of self-exhortation to perform well, then banging the ground with the boules before knocking them against each other as though putting them through a test of loyalty. The flashman, we joyfully note, likes to juggle with his.
The largest crowd gathers for the bellyman. But other pétanque players, despite carrying less esteem, also have their followers. The standard of play is variable, especially when it is friendship, as opposed to ability or generation that binds the participants together in competition. Age has modified the stance of some competitors. For those with stiffened arthritic backs, magnets, discreetly carried in pockets, are lowered on elastic to retrieve the boules. Marmite wonders if a good toke on his joint might further alleviate their discomfort.
With the afternoon’s games finally on the wane, I part company with Marmite to see how the tadpoles are faring. Eminently watchable, their food attacks are carnivorous and candid. Impatient children, seeking for proof of the promised transmogrification, don’t have long to wait. Limbs appear, tails shrink and a new creature is formed.
It happens while Anne and I are making plans to leave Nîmes. Marmite witnesses it before me. Everyone finds it hard to believe. The bellyman losing his touch? Concentration knots his facial features into an expression of unwavering determination. But his adversaries, in sensing unprecedented fallibility, gang up. The wigman scores victories without placing the jack in the bumpier regions. The young pretender is less inhibited. The flashman postpones his time of departure for work. They become aware of the bellyman’s struggle to hold his own when the jack is thrown out far from their feet, a tactic to put uncertainty into his mind.