Luc didn’t come with me. He was worried I wouldn’t go if he was at the station. And he’s right: I can tell at a distance how he is simply from the way he stands or sits and holds his shoulders and head. He is a southern Frenchman to his marrow; his soul is fire and wine, he’s never cold-blooded, he can’t do anything without feeling, he’s never indifferent. People say that most people in Paris are indifferent to most things.
I’m standing at the window of the express train and feel both young and grown-up at once. It’s the first time I’m truly bidding farewell to the land of my birth. Indeed, I’m seeing it for the first time as I move away from it, mile by mile. The light-drenched sky, the calls of the cicadas from the hundred-year-old trees, the winds wrestling over every almond leaf. The heat like a fever. The golden quivering and sparkling of the air when the sun goes down and turns the steep mountains and their perching villages shades of pink and honey. And the land keeps on giving – it will not stop growing for our benefit. It forces rosemary and thyme through the stones, the cherries almost burst out of their skins, and the swollen lime seeds smell like girls’ laughter when the harvest boys come to them in the shade of the plane trees. The rivers gleam like fine turquoise threads winding through the craggy rocks, and to the south sparkles a sea of such piercing blue, as blue as the speckles on the skin of black olives when one has made love under one of those trees. The land constantly presses on us humans, comes mercilessly close. Thorns. Rocks. Scent. Papa says that Provence created humans from the trees and the bright rocks and springs, and called them Frenchmen. They are woody and malleable, stony and strong; they speak from deep within their strata and boil over as fast as a pan of water on the stove.
I can already feel the heat subsiding, the sky sinking lower and losing its cobalt streaks. I see the contours of the land growing softer and weaker the further north we go. The cold, cynical north! Can you feel love?
Maman is naturally afraid that something might happen to me in Paris. She isn’t so much thinking that I might be torn to pieces by one of the Lebanese Revolutionary Faction bombs that have gone off in the Galeries Lafayette and on the Champs-élysées; a man, more like. Or, perish the thought, a woman. One of those Saint-Germain intellectuals, who have everything in their heads and not a feeling to speak of, and who could give me a taste for life in a draughty artists’ household, where it is, as always, the women who end up rinsing the creative gentlemen’s paintbrushes.
I think that Maman is worried that I might discover something far away from Bonnieux and its Atlas cedars, Vermentino vines and pinky twilights that might jeopardise my future life. I heard her weeping with despair out in the summer kitchen last night; she’s afraid for me.
People say that Parisians are fiercely competitive about everything, and men charm women with their coldness. Every woman wants to net herself a man and turn his icy defences into passion. Every woman, especially women from the south. That’s what Daphne says, and I think she’s crazy. Diets obviously make you hallucinate.
Papa is ever the self-controlled Proven?al. What can city people offer you? is what he says. I love him when he has one of his five-minute fits of humanism and sees Provence as the cradle of French national culture. He mumbles his Occitan expressions and thinks it’s wonderful that every last olive farmer and unwashed tomato grower has been speaking the language of artists, philosophers, musicians and young people for four hundred years. Unlike Parisians, who think only their educated classes deserve to be creative and cosmopolitan. Oh, Papa! Plato with a field spade, and so intolerant towards the intolerant.
I’ll miss the spiciness of his breath and the warmth of his embrace. And his voice – rolling thunder on the horizon.
I know that I’ll miss the mountains and the mistral that sweeps and washes the vineyards … I’ve brought a little bag of soil and a bunch of herbs with me. Along with a nectarine stone I’ve sucked clean, and a pebble that I can put under my tongue when I thirst for the springs of home, like Pagnol.
Will I miss Luc? He was always there; I’ve never missed him before. I’ll enjoy pining for him. I don’t know the pull that Cousin I’m-too-fat Daphne spoke of, meaningfully omitting words: ‘It’s as if a man stuck his anchor into your breast, your stomach, between your legs; and when he’s not there, the chains pull and tug.’ It sounded horrible, and yet she was grinning as she said it.
How might it feel to want a man like that? And do I sink the same barbs into him, or do men find it easier to forget? Did Daphne read that in one of her awful novels?