Deep France Page 10

  Not very far away was a traditional brass combo playing jazz, while at the far end by the bar a huddle of singers, formed up defensively in a circle with their arms around each other’s shoulders, were belting out some folk songs a cappella. There were a good five hundred people in the tent, including one man in such immaculate housewife drag that he looked like an extra from an old Monty Python sketch. Dozens of shrieking children, dressed as fruit, flowers, princesses and superheroes, played tag around the edges of the crowd.

  After a couple of hours of cacophony and aperitifs, during which the three musical groups played almost non-stop, a rock band took the stage and began the evening’s disco with Béarnais line dancing. It really didn’t look too difficult, the people on the floor were of all ages and states of trendiness, and we were not encumbered by any husbands, partners or children who might be embarrassed, so after a while we walked into the lines of dancers and joined in.

  Quite soon, we found that potential dance-partners had attached themselves. Annabel was approached by a stocky man with a weather-beaten complexion who helped her jump at the right moments by grabbing her round the waist and tossing her into the air. I found myself dancing with a lanky student who was dressed as an ear of genetically engineered maize, which meant he was wearing a Tina Turner wig, a green cape and yellow balloons pinned all over his shirt and trousers.

  On hearing of our adventures, Fiona decided that she could not pass on an opportunity for the children to dress up. Happily, we soon discovered that half the towns and villages in the region were planning their own carnivals, each with their own spelling for the king’s name: in Bayonne he was San Pansart; in the mountain village of Tardets, he was Zan Panzar; in Orthez he was San Pançard. In fact, the whole of February was going to be nothing but one big fiesta. Such a sensible thing to do with February, which has to be the most miserable month in the calendar.

  The next weekend we piled the kids into the back of my car and went to Bayonne, where the execution of San Pansart was to take place on the ramparts of the old castle. The children did not go willingly. Cam sulked and stuck his nose in Harry Potter, volume IV. Margo whined. I tried to sell it to them by talking about the fireworks, the opportunity to eat doughnuts in the street and the burning alive of the fat man, but without success. It was like going back fifteen years, to the middle stretch of parenthood, which is all about bribery and manipulation.

  The wind whistled viciously through the alleys of the old town, where every street was again occupied by a marching band, each followed by a cavalcade of people in costume. Cam and Margot were underwhelmed by the opportunity to dance along behind a large samba band and throw confetti at each other, although Margot quickly came round when she noticed girls of her own age in fairy costumes. We took her into the local branch of Sephora, the world’s first makeup supermarket, and covered her face in multicoloured glitter from the sample ranges before anyone noticed.

  Cam eventually stopped griping when he spotted other boys dressed as Harry Potter, in black capes, brandishing wands and with the telltale scar drawn on their foreheads in their mother’s eyebrow pencil. His scowl melted and he munched through a bag of fritters from a street vendor with a thoughtful expression.

  The bands eventually converged by the bridge over the Nive which leads to the old castle, and fell in behind the bloated papier-mâché figure of San Pansart, his sausage necklace resting on his ballooning belly. The Basque nationalists had made the most of the opportunity to protest about the torture of ETA members by the Spanish police, and draped a huge banner across the bridge, demanding, ‘Are we still in the Middle Ages?’ It seemed so.

  Being a great party town and not a million miles from Spain, Bayonne was doing carnival with bags of style, as a warm-up for the great feria in July, when the bars don’t close for a week. In the cafes around the castle square, un happy-hour had begun, and trays of free tapas were already on the counters to sustain the exhausted revellers.

  The castle ramparts were a perfect stage for the mock trial of San Pansart, which began with a denouncement by the master of ceremonies. ‘You’ve stuffed your gob with food! You’ve pigged out until your skin’s fit to burst! You’re disgusting!’

  The bonfire was lit immediately and the effigy of San Pansart lurched face-first into the flames surrounded by great plumes of sparks from the fireworks. The bandas were called upon to play him out with a blast of brass while the crowd bellowed the carnival song, ‘Adiou, Praoube San Pansart’. Cam found the spectacle thoroughly satisfying and, finding that I had not lied to him about the fat man being burned to death, viewed me briefly with something which could have been respect.

  The last carnival of the season was held in Orthez, by when we were fully equipped. Cam had sorted himself out a Harry Potter costume and Margot had dug out her fairy tutu and wings. Announcing the event, the Centre Socio-Cultural, its major sponsors, sternly emphasized that the regrettable new fashion for throwing eggs and flour was expressly forbidden.

  Orthez, for all its medieval patrimony and its proud title of the city of Gaston Fébus, is a real old cow town, where subtlety is not appreciated. The least attractive citizen seems to progress rapidly from being a cheeky kid to a boisterous teenager, then on to become a mouth-breathing hulk in a plaid shirt or a housewife with heifer hips draped in Day-Glo viscose.

  In Orthez you also find the trailer trash, meaning the travellers, or the last of the migrant workers who once travelled from village to village helping with the various harvests, but who now live in caravans beside the Gave, getting by on the dole and being generally marginalized by more prosperous citizens.

  San Pançard, as Orthez conceived him, was an effigy towed by a tractor through the streets, accompanied by one banda and a group of drummers. A long parade of children in fancy dress followed, and gangs of adolescents charged about trying to stuff confetti down each other’s necks and cover their enemies in shaving foam.

  In the trial, San Pançard was accused of being responsible for inaccurate weather forecasts and rubbish on the television. It was a freezing day and Fiona and I, having at last refined our carnivalling skills, sent the kids off to watch the bonfire while we retreated to a cafe for hot chocolate and brandy.

  How’s the Writing Going?

  My English collapsed. With nobody in the house to talk to me in my own language, French started to take over. Halfway through a sentence, I would find myself scrabbling in my memory for the words I needed. Even simple bits of vocabulary seemed to have erased themselves. One morning, I couldn’t think of the word ‘adapt’. Another time, when I wanted to say ‘lorry’, all that came forward was the French word, ‘camion’.

  English idioms vanished as well, melting away before the brilliance of French. ‘Vous voulez louer le matériel pour le ski du fond?’ asked the man in the ski shop, meaning did I want to rent the complete kit including everything you needed for cross-country skiing. ‘Le matériel!’ How nifty was that? One gorgeous little word with all that subtext of necessity and importance! I fell in love with ‘le matériel’ and saw and heard its adorable letters everywhere, in street conversations, on newspaper ads, all over Maisadour, the agricultural supermarket. The cumbersome way to say the same thing in English just evaporated.

  Soon my mind started flailing for the simplest English expressions. The whole machinery of the language, which normally turned over so smoothly and constantly, processing my thoughts and making them into words with effortless facility, had suddenly turned rusty and was clanking to a standstill.

  My respect for bilingual writers rocketed. Now I appreciated the immense achievement of authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie or Anita Desai, who could create supple and evocative prose while all the time, in their heads, two entirely different systems of thought were struggling for supremacy. Now I understood why children who were not native speakers underachieved in school. A brain working in two languages has to work twice as hard.

  The effort of moving betw
een two tongues all the time was utterly exhausting. A sustained conversation in French took as much physical effort as a ten-kilometre run. On a day when I had gone out for coffee or for dinner with French friends, I would be completely wiped out by 10 p.m.

  Sandy, who speaks fluent bar French, reported the same problem. Like me, he suffered from living between the two languages and having mastery of neither. In French, we had the added problem that came with a good ear. While we still had to struggle for meaning, we sounded too good for the people who talked to us to realize that we weren’t getting the whole message.

  Since we both looked intelligent, behaved with confidence and sounded much better than we were in French, people would rattle on in conversation, chucking in slang and dialect and God knows what else, assuming that we were following when really we’d lost the plot after the first sentence.

  Asking people to slow down didn’t seem to work. You’d get one sentence at baby speed, and then the conversation would accelerate and leave you to eat its dust. It was probably no help to us that we were living in a region where in daily life people get their ears round three living languages, French, Basque and Spanish, as well as the regional dialect, which is spoken in various strengths and with slight changes in meaning from one village or one valley to another. This means that to native Bearnais listeners most people have a funny accent, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t understand what’s being said.

  Sandy’s strategy for surviving a long conversation was to nod gravely and say, ‘Ah, oui.’ This, like the English ‘Oh, really,’ or the American, ‘Oh, sure,’ can be inflected in a dozen different ways to express anything from warm agreement – ‘Ah, oui!’ to complete amazement, ‘Ah, oui?’ or even, with a falling cadence, omniscient wisdom, ‘Ah, oui.’

  If you think you’re using ‘Ah, oui,’ so much that you’re going to be rumbled, you can progress to ‘Mais, c’est ça!’, which does the same job but with a little more elegance and enthusiasm. Also useful are the expressions which you can tuck into the beginning of a statement to buy yourself thinking time, the little bits of verbal polystyrene that not only slow your sentence down while you’re groping for your tenses, but also make you sound more polished and less schoolgirly.

  There’s ‘De tout façon …’, which is much like the Yorkshire ‘Any road up’, and makes an acceptable preamble to almost anything you want to say. ‘En effet’, which is close to ‘actually’, is handy, but a bit prissy. In intellectual debate, the equivalent is the classic one-word delayer, ‘effectivement …’ which the worthies discussing weighty issues on the radio used lavishly, drawing out the syllables over a full four seconds.

  The radio eventually came to the rescue of my English. In the interests of keeping up with affairs back home, I had installed the ex-pats’ best friend, ‘le parabole du Sky’, which was tucked into the wisteria under the eaves at Maison Bergez, its antenna pointing south to the Pyrenees and the vital satellite.

  Since I had hundreds of channels of TV and radio at my disposal, all that was necessary was to pass up the mind-fracturing fun of watching the reports on Afghanistan on Al-Jazeera or aerobics on the foreshore from Sydney, Australia, and tune into BBC Radio 4 while I made my morning coffee. An hour or so with the shipping forecast and Farming Today was all I needed to refresh my English and keep it on track for the morning.

  In the afternoon, however, a few words with the proprietor of the Maison de la Presse or a short chat with a friend on the street would be enough to send me back into linguistic no-man’s-land. Fortunately, all I worked on in February was the revisions to Mister Fabulous and Friends, the novel I had completed seven months earlier. Already, I worried that I was losing the ability to write spot-on dialogue for English characters, but since most of what was needed was structural work, moving scenes to different places in the narrative to make it flow more strongly, this was not yet a problem.

  Fire in the Mountains

  On my way down from the ski-station one Sunday, I drove through a valley full of smoke. The farmers had been burning off the undergrowth, a process called ‘écobuage’ in French, and known as ‘swealing’ in the north of England. Its purpose, as Renée explained it, was to ‘clean the mountain’, meaning to burn off brambles and thorny scrub, and leave the higher fields ready to grow lots of sweet young grass for the sheep who would be pastured there later in the spring.

  That Sunday, Mari, goddess of the thunderbolts, was obviously watching over me, because I passed through an inferno without being harmed. The weather had turned stormy and high winds were howling over the mountains. The higher ski stations, where the ski lifts and cable cars were in serious danger, closed completely, and the departmental government had issued a statement banning écobuage until the wind died down. Up in the mountain valleys, the most remote farmers had either not heard of the prohibition or decided to defy it. ‘Nobody told us,’ they said afterwards, ‘we didn’t hear anything about anything.’

  Once they had set a few bushes alight, the violent winds, blasting down the valleys at 100 kilometres an hour, had fanned the flames so quickly that the farmers lost control. By the end of the day the fire had raged over thousands of hectares, burning everything from the valley above Aramitz through which I drove to the lower slopes of La Rhune in the West, and threatening to wipe out areas of dense forest.

  Every firefighter from Hendaye, on the coast, to Pau was called out and fought all night beside the local people to stop the blaze spreading. Eventually, in the small hours of the morning, torrential rain came down and put out the flames. Six people had died in the fires, all of them elderly shepherds who had not been able to out-run the billowing smoke.

  The Monsieur

  The carnival in Pau was the first lesson I had in the reverence which the Béarnais have for their blood stock. Gathering in public to honour their animals was a natural and important element of every festival, and the finest specimens were always selected. No wonder that nothing I was or owned won me more respect than Podge, my white Chinchilla Persian cat. So, Mr Bond, you have an animal of pure race?

  Pure-bred cows, sheep or pigs, with bows on their forelocks, flowers round their necks or pompoms on their fleeces, were ceremonially paraded by their stockmen at a high proportion of the festivals which were staged throughout the summer. The connection between the living animal and the eating of its meat was fully acknowledged; at the Fete du Sel in Salies, I found one sausage maker enthusiastically grilling his products on a barbecue right next to the pen where a Black Gascon sow was lying on a bed of straw with her litter of suckling pigs.

  These simple ceremonies have a spiritual quality and certainly trace their origins to ancient rituals celebrating the fertility of the animals and giving thanks for their lives. They are at the heart of the respect which the French have for their food and its origins.

  The legend of Sent Pançard is an unsubtle piece of propaganda against binge eating, teaching the restraint which is an important principle in an agricultural cycle in which famine would inevitably follow feast. For centuries, the pig was the foundation of a Gascon family’s nutrition and a single animal, well reared, well fed and skilfully slaughtered, would provide meat for quite a large family for a full year.

  It wasn’t long before the rest of the world noticed the special status of the pig in the agricultural and domestic economy of the region. The conquering Romans marvelled at the local tribesmen’s skill in rearing pigs, and in the Decameron, Bocaccio wrote of Cornucopia, an imaginary part of the Basque Country so abundant that in the vineyards the vines were tied up with sausages.

  The Gascon pig was an honoured member of the family. Living close to his owners, he would know their voices and come when called. Nobody thought it was strange to hear people talking to their pigs. He was always addressed respectfully, as ‘lo Monsur’, (Monsieur), or even ‘lo Noble’ or ‘lo Ministre’. Paula Wolfert observes, ‘There is a mystical feeling about these beasts on farms of the South-West, similar to the way bread is r
egarded in some parts of France.’

  In another legend, the pig itself boasts that none of its body goes to waste. The charcuterie which the British admire so much in traditional French cuisine was originally devised as a varied and delicious way of preserving as much pork as possible through the depth of winter, when the chickens were no longer laying, and the fields and orchards were bare. In the days before freezers, a Béarnais housewife would set to work to preserve a year’s supply of pork, making ham, confit, rillettes, pâtés, terrines, sausages and puddings.

  The lean meat was either preserved en confit, slow-cooked in fat then sealed in a large pottery jar, or cured to make ham. The trotters, the tail and the ears were treated the same way. Small portions of ham or confit were then used in the signature dishes of the South-West: cassoulet, the bean stew, and garbure, the hearty soup that often comprises most of the evening meal. A thick slice of ham is also traditional with piperade, the Basque dish of eggs with peppers and tomato.

  The liver and some of the back fat were minced and mixed with garlic, herbs and spices, sealed in glass jars or in tins, and slow-cooked to make pâtés. The fattest cuts of meat were rendered, drained, shredded, seasoned and potted up as rillettes. The intestines were carefully washed out, and stuffed with a minced mixture of fat, offal and meat scraps, spiced and mixed with stale bread, to make sausages.

  Even the blood was saved. Glynn was hugely amused by a recipe for a dish made with nothing but the fat and blood of a duck. When the pig was slaughtered, his blood was mixed with breadcrumbs, any leftover fat and gristle, seasoned generously with quatre épices and poached. One recipe produced a succulent black pudding, for immediate consumption. Another method required the pudding to be dried to make the dark Bearnais sausage which actually tastes a lot better than it looks but has never found an export market.