At Home in France Read online

  Monsieur Hironde is an avuncular gentleman, with a gurgling laugh that starts deep in his throat and erupts in a snort through his nose. A natural-born teacher, he is a storehouse of facts and figures—the depths of chasms, heights of mountains, historical data, that sort of thing. And he speaks slowly and exactingly to me—though with a pronounced, endearing lisp—as if he were addressing, well, a foreigner. I don’t regard this as the least condescending, but rather as a sign of perceptiveness, an ability to recognize my need. (I have given up pleading with the Bézamats to speak more slowly.)

  He said he could readily supply me with wood. The very next afternoon he arrived with a tractorload of logs of various thicknesses, cut to fit my fireplace. There had been no discussion of the amount; he had simply cut down a tree. He dumped the logs in a great heap outside the house. I paid him for the firewood and hoisted two logs under either arm. It was going to be a day’s work, carrying them piecemeal down the flight of stone steps to the cave. He stood rooted in place, looking conflicted. Then, with a generosity of spirit from which I would benefit for years and an allez-y, he picked up an armload himself, balancing the bundle as if he were cradling a baby, and paraded after me to the cave. We passed back and forth, like soldiers, up and back, up and back. In the end, the cave held a tidy, mountainous stack of logs, a supply for many winters to come. I was deeply satisfied with this physical exploit. That night I would have a glass of wine in front of a roaring fire.

  Monsieur Hironde, I eventually learned, was retired from his position as a middleman in the mushroom industry (an agriculteur), employed by the Boy-Maury factory located in nearby Biars-St-Céré. During the mushroom season in the fall, he would travel approximately two hundred kilometers a day to a dozen collection points where pickers amassed the harvest. He would pay the harvesters, and in turn, the factory would pay him. In a good year, he would earn perhaps twenty thousand francs—all in the course of several months. On the side, he also supplied wood.

  He lives in a house built by his grandparents in 1912. When his parents married in 1914, they moved to the house, where Raymond was born in 1922. When he married his first wife in 1950, they lived with their parents in the house. Raymond and his first wife had five children.

  Simone was born in Carennac in 1922 and married her first husband in 1941. They had four children. When both Raymond and Simone’s spouses died, they married in 1984. That was the year I met them, though at the time I assumed they were a longtime married couple. They’d known each other since childhood, which goes a long way toward explaining their obvious compatibility.

  Whenever I stop by their house, the Hirondes invite me in for a coffee or a glass of Monsieur’s homemade prune eau de vie, even in the late morning—despite the rumored French reluctance to welcome foreigners into their homes. Over the years we have graduated to using first names with each other. The ice was broken when Madame Hironde sent me a Christmas card signed “Simone and Raymond.” Subsequently—I can’t recall the specific occasion—she addressed me by my first name. I warmed as if she’d physically touched me. After that I gingerly tried out “Simone” and “Raymond”—lyrical to my ears—which caused no tremors. So we were established on a more intimate basis, though we’ve never gone so far as to tutoyer each other.

  When I visit, we sit in the small, spartan dining room, furnished simply with a wooden chest for dishes and a plain wooden table and chairs within the hand-warming vicinity of a small fireplace. The adjoining kitchen has sparkling white walls and tile. There is a third room on this floor, a study across the front hall, with an astonishingly ostentatious armoire that Simone proudly points out as a family heirloom. Otherwise, there is not a picture or photograph, decorative object or bibelot adorning any of the rooms. The Hirondes are not impoverished. They’re just clutter-free, detached from material goods. Yet where is their sense of nostalgia, their taste or fancy? Without clues or context, they seem ill-defined. I feel, selfishly, that something is being withheld from me.

  We talk of travel (they have been to Portugal, Spain, Hungary, countries that are among the more affordable vacation spots), politics (which, given the complexity of the subject and Raymond’s excitability when roused by an issue, often leaves me in the dust), family matters, and, often, at my instigation, food and cooking. They are rarely prompted to inquire about my life in New York, which must seem terribly remote. It’s more natural to talk about our immediate world.

  Raymond warms to the role of raconteur, especially after some eau de vie. In fact, he looks something like a vaudevillian, with slick brown hair parted on one side and naturally uplifted eyebrows that give him an air of perpetual surprise. Simone sits somewhat formally beside him, sometimes with the distracted air of one who has heard all this before. He is fond of recounting a story about the first time he left his homeland, as a soldier during the war. In the prologue, he explains his strict Catholic background, his sole experience with the priesthood. The main story recounts his service in Hungary, and his first attempt to attend church there. To his utter shock, the priest arrived with a wife on one arm and a child in tow. A blatant flaunting of sin! Then, enlightenment: this was a Protestant church! Everything was put to rights: one man’s sin was another’s virtue. As he retold this tale, flushed and full of good cheer, his laughter would cause his head to tip back in merriment.

  Simone, in contrast to his unfailing jolliness, has a sensitive, selfless temperament. Although I have seen her grow animated when talking about a travel adventure or anticipating a visit with friends, she is more often focused on problems of family or friends. On one of my visits, she wept openly over the recent, premature loss of a daughter-in-law, who left behind young children. A sturdy-looking woman—though she is troubled by bronchitis—she has a tidy, fastidious manner, habitually attired in a crisp belted dress in warm weather and a plain woolen dress and sweater in the cold. Her silvery blue hair always appears freshly coiffed (early one morning, she greeted me in a bathrobe with her hair in tight little rollers, and on several occasions I’ve encountered her on the way to the hairdresser). Simone is a familiar type of person to me—not unlike the Midwestern women I grew up with—down-to-earth, religious, family-oriented, without airs. I’m always at ease in her company.

  Five years ago I discovered a surprising aspect of the Hirondes’ relationship. I had stopped by their house to see if Monsieur could come over to trim the lawn. He promised to come over that afternoon. He would be leaving later, he said, to fetch Simone—mon compagnon, he called her—who was taking a cure in the Pyrenees for a bout of arthritis. Mon compagnon! The words—not ma femme—jumped out of the sentence and gave me a jolt.

  All this time I had thought they were married. Perhaps that had only been a polite way of signifying their union in 1984. Still, why should I be shocked? Obviously, I had stereotyped them as a straitlaced, traditional country couple, whose living together out of wedlock would be unacceptable to family and neighbors. But I was also a little put out. The Hirondes, who were so protective of me, had become something of parental figures. The child in me surfaced; this felt like a small betrayal.

  That same spring of 1991, Simone proposed that the two of us take an excursion to the property her petit-cousin, Jean-François Fraysse, was restoring. This was something I must see. This distant relative, she said, lived most of the year in New York, while his seventy-year-old uncle, Georges Fraysse, did the lion’s share of the labor.

  The place was only a mile away. When we arrived we found the elder Fraysse on his hands and knees, planting shoots of lavender. A stocky figure, he had a ruddy moon-shaped face with a picket fence of grayish teeth, bushy eyebrows, and a shock of flyaway white hair. He stood to greet me, with the agility of a twenty-year-old. Etiquette requires a Frenchman with soiled hands to avoid a gritty handshake with a woman. Yet, not to appear unwelcoming, he may extend a bent wrist—or, if that’s soiled as well, an elbow to be shaken instead. I shook Monsieur Fraysse’s elbow.

  The vast property, Simo
ne said as he led us to the main house, included approximately fifty hectares, or a hundred and twenty-five acres, as I later calculated, and had been in the family for three generations. Monsieur Georges Fraysse had already cleared an expanse on the highest hill behind the house where he had planted three hundred chestnut trees. On the far side of the house was a magnificent grange in the ubiquitous stone and red tile, and on the other side an enormous beehive of a four à pain, or woodburning bread oven, which would be restored to working order.

  When we entered the house, I could see that this was no ordinary undertaking. The structure was little more than a bare skeleton of roof and walls, the dirt floor covered by rickety wood planks. The best-preserved feature was a walk-in fireplace where the cooking would have been done in the past (in fact, there were some old iron cooking pots gathering dust on the hearth for which I, or a New York City antiques dealer, would have given a pretty penny).

  I asked Monsieur Fraysse how long he thought the restoration would take. He shrugged his shoulders with an “ah, ben,” not in a sense of defeat but as if to say that things like this have a way of unfolding in their own time.

  At the end of our brief tour of the house, Simone said she had something to show me. She prodded Monsieur Fraysse into rummaging through a cluttered drawer of an old wooden chest. Eventually, he produced a single sheet of heavy paper. On one side was a reproduction of a photograph depicting a once-familiar rural scene in this part of France—a farmhouse with a young paysan leading a team of oxen to the fields. On the other side was a menu, with the name La Luncheonette scrolled across the top. Her petit-cousin, Simone announced, was the chef and owner of this restaurant in Manhattan.

  I studied the small selection of classic French dishes, momentarily mystified. At the bottom of the menu was the restaurant’s fringe, if not to say seedy, address on Tenth Avenue, along with the phone number—proof to me that it did, in fact, exist. Standing on the wobbly floorboards, I squinted my eyes to imagine a French restaurant on Tenth Avenue, owned by a cousin of Simone’s. It was so improbable, a thread connecting here to there.

  Simone didn’t suggest that I look him up, but I immediately made a resolution to do so.

  Back in New York, I stopped in for an early dinner. The entrance to the place was on Eighteenth Street. The intersection is at the heart of a desolate stretch of warehouses. The view through the lace-curtained window is the parking lot of a truck-leasing operation. Hardly the setting for a pâté de lapin and cervelles au beurre noir, which is what I ordered.

  I asked the young waitress if Jean-François was free for a moment. He emerged from the kitchen, a man in his midforties, who, I could see, might in old age resemble his uncle Georges. I explained that we were something of neighbors (voisins) in France. He collapsed in disbelief into the chair across from me. I finger-drew a small map on the tablecloth, the roads leading from my house to his. His face softened into a broad smile. He knew precisely my little road—a mere hairline on the most detailed map of the region. When I asked him when he would be going back to France, his face clouded. The work of the restaurant took up all his time. Was he worrying if it would survive? I wondered. Then his face brightened, as if he had been transported a world away. He raised cupped hands, as if testing for raindrops, and said that as his house there was undergoing restoration and was at the moment roofless, it was like being on a continual pique-nique.

  He returned to the kitchen. I lingered over my tarte tatin, still warm from the oven, and coffee. I was overcome with a disturbing and unpleasant sense of dislocation. For a moment that intimate, closed world of Pech Farguet had taken root on unsavory Tenth Avenue. It didn’t belong here. It was diminished, unappreciated in these surroundings. I wanted to lock up La Luncheonette and throw the key away.

  In the fall, as soon as I settled in the house, I walked the short distance to the Hirondes. The little road cuts a swathe over the high hill. You’re at the top of the world. The meandering, glittering river coils like a loose bracelet in the valley. Sheep grazing in a lower pasture are immobile, like ceramic figures in a crèche scene. The piercing shrieks of the woman driving her cows home on the lower road puncture the air like gunshots.

  The trees were just beginning to show hints of gold; the full glory of fall doesn’t arrive in the Lot until late October or early November. The air was so cool that I quickened my pace, feeling the tug in the muscles at the backs of my legs. I was exhilarated, feeling victorious. My meeting with Jean-François was a little trophy that could forge a closer bond with the Hirondes.

  Simone opened the door and motioned me into the dining room with her usual warm greeting—unsurprised, as if I’d been there just yesterday. We sat on two stiff wooden chairs before the fire. I told her straightaway about my meeting with her petit-cousin, ending with the treat of the wonderful tarte tatin. That, she said, beaming, was probably her recipe. Or, she amended, the family recipe. I patted my stomach, as if I was still digesting the last bite, and waxed on about the light crust, the warmth of the apples contrasting with the coolness of the whipped cream.

  Would I like the recipe? Simone asked. She knew it by heart, the way she knew most of what she cooked. To three cups of flour … she began her recital. I listened contentedly. I knew I’d never be able to equal that tarte tatin. I wouldn’t even attempt it. It was her confiding the recipe that counted.

  3

  MY FIRST GUESTS

  (i.e., Jean and the Bats)

  My first houseguest was Jean Breton, a former lover, who, despite the dissolution of our romance, has remained a close friend. In our romantic days, before my acquisition of the house, we had taken a number of vacations together in France: to Provence, Alsace, the Basque country. Jean’s family is French-Canadian and he grew up speaking French at home. In France, people were sometimes baffled by his accent. Despite this, his ease in the language has always been a source of envy to me, although he has no comprehension of the rules of grammar and, to my amusement, cannot recite the alphabet phonetically. If something complicated needed saying in our travels, I relied on him. If something needed spelling (a far less frequent occurrence, of course), he relied on me.

  Jean liked to travel in style, so we frequently stayed in plush country inns or châteaus. He is ten years older than I and worked his way up from the position of clerk to the president of a bank in Connecticut, where he lives. He could afford luxurious travels—and I couldn’t have been happier to be the beneficiary. Yet Jean is not pretentious. We have also stayed in some second-rate and offbeat places, and he can roll with the punches. Traveling with another person is a supreme test of compatibility: it’s not only a matter of shared interests, but of pace. Jean and I are completely in sync: quick to be ready to go at the same time, flagging and seeking a break simultaneously, identical in our attention spans. We also agree on the critical matter of baggage: one piece of luggage is the limit. That means reappearing in the same outfit, but who cares? No one but ourselves would see our clothes tomorrow.

  Jean was thrilled at my acquisition of the house, and the following year he responded enthusiastically to an invitation to spend a week in the spring. I spent several days at the house before his arrival, obsessing over the possible combinations and permutations of excursions and menus. I picked him up at the train station in Brive.

  The first day we marketed in a local village—Jean and I share a love of cooking—and that evening had a golden roasted chicken stuffed with rosemary from the bush in the yard and a whole head of lavender garlic; tiny sautéed potatoes that tasted as if they’d just been plucked from the earth; coarse, crusty pain de compagne; and a big green salad. For wine, we had a buttery Meursault I’d been saving for a special occasion (Jean is a wine connoisseur), and for dessert, a specialty of the region: an apple tart with furls of pastry as thin and crisp as parchment, flavored with an eau de vie de prune. After the fire was reduced to glowing embers—in early spring, there is a chill in the air after the sun goes down—we climbed the stairs for bed
.

  There is only a double bed in the tiny upstairs bedroom, but neither of us felt awkward about sleeping side by side. Former passion is similar to vanished pain: a fact remembered but no longer felt. We burrowed under the covers and turned off the light, with the distant hooting of an owl—why is it always only a single owl?—an invitation to dream.

  In the middle of the night, we were abruptly awakened by the most alarming sounds. They emanated from the other side of the wall by the headboard: a frantic scratching, sounding like the fingernails of a thousand skeletons clawing their way from their graves, accompanied by faint, poignant cries, the whimperings of monster babies. We bolted upright and grappled for the light switch.

  “Bats,” Jean pronounced. I was aghast but believed him—he’d grown up in the country, and spent summers on his grandparents’ farm in Canada. “Only a nuisance,” he added, now that he’d gotten a grip on himself.

  His words had the opposite of the soothing effect he intended. “Bats!” I shrieked, tunneling under the covers, as if they would swoop through the window in a hellish swarm.

  Jean pounded on the wall with his fist. “Taisez-vous!” he shouted, commanding quiet with mock ferociousness.

  And sure enough, there was a sudden, blessed silence. It was a relief, but far from reassuring. Jean switched off the light, slid under the covers, and hardly missing a beat, was soon breathing deeply in sleep. I lay staring into the dark; the wicked, jagged-winged creatures, their eyes an iridescent green, soared through the nighttime of my mind.