When Luce met the
Americans at the Marseille airport, feeling foolish to be holding up a
sign with his name, he could see they were surprised to hear him speak
in flat Midwestern tones, even when he shifted to French for the
baggage clerks, fluent but unable to
nasalize.
"We expected a native
host," one of the women said, her hair closecropped and dark even
though she was as old as the others.
"I am," he told them. "In a way. I live here. As far as I know, it
will always be where I live."
He
expected a barrage of questions, accusations of disloyalty to the
States. But one man said, "Lucky you. All this sunshine." And that was
it.
Luce drove them in a rented van,
six elderly couples, the first group of visitors he would host in the
village, the start of his new occupation. It struck him that they were
all in remarkable condition for their ages and then understood anybody
who could afford this trip probably would be. He loaded their luggage
into a low trailer hitched to the rear of the van and didn't stop the
men from helping.
Luce watched them
point at the landscape -- the grey mountains in the distance, the
absolute blue sky, the palms, the villages embedded into the rock face
-- each one animated, regarding the mundane details of his routine as
scenic marvels. They had dozens of questions -- about the weather, the
food, the history -- that he answered brusquely, without smiling.
Though he was being paid to be cheerful, he doubted that it was in his
nature.
At first he couldn't tell
the American couples apart. He was too busy watching the road,
constantly glimpsing the trailer in the side mirror as if he expected
to lose it at the next bump in the road. Gradually, their voices
started to take on distinctions. Eventually, he realized, he would
come to know each one by name. At the end of the third week, when they
were ready to go home, they would be as familiar as old acquaintances.
That's the way it was with Americans -- quickly met and quickly
forgotten.
When he delivered them
to the car rental agency on the highway outside the village, he saw
one of the couples whispering under a tree, the wife glancing at him.
It struck him that she was still a sexy women, though decades too old
for him, long grey hair swept over one eye, legs tanned, a suggestive
thrust to her posture. The husband was trim in jeans and a baseball
cap, swaggering like a teenager though he had to be close to seventy.
They were called, Luce learned by
evening, Irene and Vern. Now he deciphered what she was whispering:
"Should we tip him?"
For an instant,
Luce was furious, ready to quit, drive off and leave them all
stranded. Then he threw back his head and laughed, making the
Americans look about them, eager to learn what was so funny.
His house in the village was a place
Luce had chosen with Nicole, his French wife, wedged into a narrow
street, four damp rooms with minimal light even when the shutters were
open. Now she was gone with the children, back to her parents'
vineyard at the base of a mountain, and he lived alone.
Luce's business had failed with the
marriage, his third attempt to represent American companies in a
territory that ranged from Avignon to Nice, this time farm equipment,
spending hours drinking the local wines, discussing soils and seeds
and weather, perfecting his agricultural vocabulary but selling
little.
The French language he had
started in college, encouraged by A's in the classroom, though in
practice, when he first arrived in the country, he made Nicole giddy
at his barbarisms. Every time he spoke to her, she would place a hand
on his arm and shake her head, "Non, non, non." One day, thinking why
not, he covered her hand with his and didn't let go. Then he had been
young and promising, on a two-year appointment with an American bank
in Paris, she a national employed in the same department. Because of
Nicole he stayed in France when the assignment ended, quit the bank,
married and moved south to the Midi. As often as he asked her twelve
years later, she wouldn't explain if her resentment was the result of
his botched ventures or his morose reactions, his furious demands that
their monolingual children speak
English.
When Nicole left, taking
one whole Saturday to load the children's furniture and her personal
belongings in her father's open truck, no one in the village mentioned
the fact to Luce, though everyone had seen. They had known him as part
of a family for a decade, and now treated him as if he had always been
alone. Madame Duvall, the old widow directly across the street,
forever hanging her bird cages outside and taking them back in at the
hint of clouds, gave him stews several days a week, each time claiming
that she had made too much for herself. Some of the men requested his
help on projects -- plastering walls, laying new drain pipe, never
offering money but compensating with gifts of wine and food, a rabbit
or a chicken, a wedge of blueveined cheese.
Then, by a fluke, Luce fell into a
job. A thumping on his front door startled him from an afternoon doze,
and he opened it to a man who was clearly American, crewcut, all in
khaki, looking like a retired general. "I need somebody bilingual,"
the man said. "People at the market tell me that's you." It turned out
the man, Charlie Poling, had been a NATO officer for years. Now, in
civilian life, he was a would-be travel entrepreneur, finding
Americans flats in the south of France for three-week holidays. The
villages around Luce's were perfect places, away from the tourist
crowds but teeming with art and history, a short drive from the sea.
He needed a local representative to check out accommodations, meet
planes at Marseille, arrange rental cars, and troubleshoot. Pay would
be on a per capita basis, so much for each vacationer. Luce would have
an incentive for keeping people happy. "Build relationships for the
future," Charlie told him. "This could keep us both going for years to
come."
Every American, man and woman, was
twenty to thirty years older than Luce, flourishing in retirement,
hair in thick grey waves. They moved quickly, the women taut and
smiling, the men broadshouldered, flat-stomached, bounding on the
mountain paths, up steep castle
stairways.
From Charlie Poling's
explanation, Luce had expected to be a geriatric caretaker. But when
he met the first group, he stared at himself in the bedroom mirror,
lifting his shirt, turning sideways, ashamed of his bloated middle.
People had been feeding him too well with rich sauces, and he
exercised too little.
The Americans
were obsessed with fat and cholesterol, asking him more questions
about diet than any other topic. Didn't any of the restaurants have
healthy menus? They looked forward to excess now and then but weren't
willing to clog their arteries for the sake of a small
pleasure.
Luce made jokes about them
to the villagers, waiting until the Americans were off on jaunts, not
sure how many of them understood the language. "They dread delight."
That was his refrain each time he mimicked their concerns, holding out
a croissant at arm's length. "Horreur!" He would throw up his hands
and let his eyes roll back. His neighbors responded with much
laughter.
In the tavern, at Luce's
lead, the men would imitate the Americans' movements, flip through
imaginary guidebooks, peer down at a page and then point into the
distance, shaking each other's shoulders in feigned excitement. They
strode rapidly from one side of the room to the other, pretended to
wolf down food, and rush out the
door.
"But they are rich," Francois
said one day, a large man with a shaggy black mustache who owned the
garage but spent most of his time fishing on the river that curved
through the village.
"Perhaps their
money gives them energy," Jean-Paul suggested. He was their butcher,
always carrying a small white poodle in a straw basket. Now it slept
on the stool beside him.
"If Luce
had stayed in America, he would be a rich man too." Francois broke
into a wide grin and winked at Luce.
"Living in a huge house with a swimming pool," Patrice added from
behind the bar, filling their glasses from a cask of red wine.
"Driving a Cadillac. No, two."
"Eating only safe food and jogging twenty kilometers a day." Jean-Paul
was grinning too, the men making a game of imagining Luce's American
fortune.
Luce made himself smile
back, as if he were amused. "But think. I would have missed so many
refreshing times with such good friends." He lifted his glass and held
it out to the sunlight. "And the best wine in the
world."
"Which you have in the
family." Jean-Paul tried to swallow his words as soon as he spoke. The
other men looked down at the bar
top.
Luce broke the silence. "Theirs
was sour. I have a wider choice now." But he realized saying that was
a mistake. It would have been better to ridicule the Americans again.
Irene and Vern were all over. Luce
ran into them in the village almost every day, jogging down the main
street in matching blue outfits before the shops opened, patronizing
the boulangerie before the midday closing, buying one of Patrice's
best wines in the evening. Yet they ranged for miles in their
adventures, reciting itineraries for Luce as if he would be pleased to
know. They had explored the Roman arenas at Nmes and Arles, the
theater in Orange, the caves at Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Cezanne's atelier
in Aix, van Gogh's sanitarium in St. Remy, the bulls of the Camargue,
the beaches at Cannes.
"How do you
find the time?" Luce asked, exhausted just to contemplate their days,
watching the old men of the village crouched in their perpetual game
of boules on a triangle of dirt behind the
shops.
"It's the air here," Irene
told him. "It energizes."
"We've
barely begun." Vern jingled his car
keys.
"How long have you two been
married?" Luce surprised himself with the inquiry because he rarely
asked personal questions.
They
looked at each other as if to decide who would have the pleasure of
answering. Vern gestured with his chin, and Irene said, "Forty-two
years."
"Have you always been this
way?" Luce said.
"What way?" Irene
winked, and Vern hugged her.
Luce had loved Nicole, but he had
trouble telling her. "Je t'aime" didn't seem right coming from him,
not the way it sounded in French movies. Though she never did, he
always expected her to laugh and correct his accent. And "I love you"
seemed foreign, inappropriate in this place, with this woman. So, in
the first years, he gave her caresses, seizing her for sudden kisses
in the hope that he was expressing
himself.
But over the years, when
the children came and need led her to become a cashier in the village
bank, the only work available despite her supervisory experience in
Paris, he began to sense that such physical expression was an
infringement. She was always so tired; the children were always about,
watching everything their parents did. Even as toddlers they spoke
their first words with such perfect accents that Luce couldn't believe
they were his.
"Has this been a
mistake?" Nicole came to ask him, more and more
frequently.
"What?" he would say
each time, as if he had no idea what she
meant.
And should would repeat, as
if in a ritual, "Leaving your country. Making your life
here."
"I'm very happy," he would
tell her, sure she was wondering how could someone who had such great
promise as a young man be such a failure now.
Then she stopped asking, soon after
announced that she was leaving, and two days later appeared with her
father's rusted truck, the children helping her load, Luce standing
rigid on the stones of the street, uncertain whether he should offer
to help too.
Charlie Poling called at noon one
day with an idea. Why didn't the villagers throw a party, a picnic,
for their American visitors? Extend local hospitality and boost the
economy.
Luce didn't like it. He
almost told Charlie he didn't want to mix his life and his job, though
he knew his real concern was that one of the villagers -- Jean-Paul --
would slip into the mockery he had initiated.
But Francois was enthusiastic when
Luce started to grumble about the assignment. "It will be a great
entertainment, my friend. We'll all be very
amused."
"I thought people in the
village resented the Americans," Luce said. "Walking around with their
cameras and their maps while everybody else
works."
"You've got it all wrong. We
love the Americans. They stroll about with baguettes under their arms.
They smile as us and say, 'Bonjour.' It's as if they've finally
discovered life in their old age."
"Would you want them to stay?"
"Of
course not. One permanent American is enough for any village."
Francois wrapped Luce in his large arms and loomed over him, a head
taller.
Francois and Patrice made the
arrangements for the picnic with the Americans, calling it a f te,
planning for hours, treating it like a sport. They waved off Luce's
suggestions, sent him on errands. "You organize your countrymen," they
told him. "Make sure they don't get lost on the way to the
park."
Everyone gathered on the bank
of the river just outside the village, where great trees shaded an
expanse of rich grass and branches overhung a broad pool of water.
Bright sun gleamed from the rippling surface, and flowering shrubs
colored the fields of the opposite bank. The Americans exclaimed as
they arrived on the path from the car park, overwhelmed by the
setting. The villagers, all there in advance, nodded at each other,
proud that this was their home. But Luce moved among them anxiously,
rearranging canvas chairs, straightening the tableware, making
introductions, waiting for the first
disaster.
There was much hand
shaking, broad grins. Several villagers spoke a little English, and a
few of the Americans words of broken French, each amused at the
other's efforts, as if their failures in communication were a comic
performance. Everyone was making elaborate gestures, touching their
chests with fingers, sweeping hands outward toward the horizon. Luce
had no idea what they were trying to say.
Francois got them all seated,
alternating Frenchmen and Americans at an assemblage of folding tables
twenty feet long. "Hello down there," one of the Americans called to
people at the other end, and everyone laughed. Francois sat between
Irene and Vern, turning from one to the other, speaking the phrases he
had rehearsed with Luce.
Patrice
poured wine, a bottle of red in one hand, white in the other. There
were five or six toasts. The mayor, the only person wearing a suit,
made a speech that Luce felt compelled to translate, summarizing every
hundred words in ten. "He welcomes you all on behalf of the village.
He's very happy that we have so many new friends. He wishes you great
enjoyment in his country."
Food was
served, Francois up and about, helping Patrice and Jean-Paul and a
group of the local women pass around platters heaped with pate and
chops and pizza and salad. Old Madame Duvall carried a stack of
baguettes in her apron, handing out one to every person at the table,
overjoyed at their thanks. Despite the guests' inability to understand
each other, the gathering was raucous, much laughter, the same words
shouted again and again as if in lessons. Jean-Paul's poodle ran among
them, wagging its stub of a tail, yipping happily. Glasses were raised
and touched. Patrice wiped his brow, lifted his eyes to the blue sky,
and hurried back to the car park for another case. Luce sat at one end
of the table, surprised when the others turned to toast him, as if all
this had been his doing. He smiled back, touched his own glass to his
lips, but did not drink.
It
perplexed Luce that people who had mocked the Americans so much could
suddenly behave as their friends. It had taken years before they
allowed him to become part of the village even though Nicole had been
a great favorite.
At the end of the
meal, Jean-Paul carried in a huge cake that he had baked himself,
thick with white icing and decorated with crude approximations of the
French tricolor and the Stars and Stripes. People exclaimed. Luce
heard Vern's loud, "Tres bien!" The mayor made the first slice, and
Madame Duvall passed around wedges on paper plates. People ate with
plastic forks, licking their
fingers.
Then the village children
appeared from behind the trees, the girls costumed in billowing
dresses of the delicate local prints, the boys in dark trousers and
ruffled shirts. A single musician banged a drum strapped to his middle
and blew into a wooden pipe. The children danced, circling, clasping
hands, converging and fanning out over and over again. The little ones
stumbled to keep up, but the teenagers were graceful and synchronized.
One tall girl, barefoot, hair braided to her waist, leaped into the
center and twirled on her toes while the others spun rings about her.
The Americans were on their feet, cheering, snapping photographs,
Irene and Vern both clinging to Francois' shoulders, as if they were
sharing something quite wonderful.
For all his years in the village, Luce had never seen these costumes
or these dances. He wondered when they practiced, whether his own
children had been among them without his ever knowing
it.
When the dancing was over and
the table cleared, the park quieted, people sprawled in their chairs,
the villagers lighting pipes and cigarettes, the Americans not
smoking, just leaning back and studying the
trees.
Then Luce heard a splash of
water. Francois was coiling a rope and pushing his flatbottomed boat
away from the bank. Irene was with him, sitting in the rear, running
both hands through her rich grey hair. Francois stood and pushed his
long pole at the river bottom. The boat rounded a bend and disappeared
behind the trees.
Luce looked for
Vern, curious to see the man's expression, and was surprised to find
him approaching, reaching out to seize his hand in a solid grip.
"Terrific party, Luce. The highlight of our
vacation."
"Glad you like it," Luce
muttered. "The villagers did all the
work."
"I'm really pleased we came
here. This is one of the greatest places in the world. But I don't
have to tell you that."
"Actually,"
Luce said, "you've seen much more than I have. Just about everywhere
I've gone since I moved here has involved some kind of
work."
"But you're missing so
much."
"I've seen almost
nothing."
A crazy image flashed into
Luce's imagination, Francois' boat sheltered under a sweeping branch,
Irene seducing him, the two of them with jeans down to their ankles,
the boat rocking.
"Then do yourself
a favor." Vern squeezed his shoulder, a friendly gesture that gave him
pain. "Live a little."
Luce looked
out toward the river and watched Francois and Irene reappear on the
river in the drifting boat, seated side by side, sharing a bottle of
wine, laughing happily as they saluted him with their glasses.
He lifted his glass in return, then
threw it in the river, the red wine streaking out and quickly
dissipating. Vern gave him an odd look and touched his
arm.
At the contact, Luce twisted
away and leaped into the water, then just stood there, submerged to
the waist, his shoes stuck in the muddy bottom, the wine glass between
them. Without looking up, from the silence, he could tell that
everyone on the bank had stopped their conversations to watch him. He
heaved forward with a loud splash and let himself sink into the chill
current, inert, arms at his side, refusing to
breathe.
Eyes closed, Luce felt men
lift him out, knew from the voices that it was Francois, Patrice,
Jean-Paul, and Vern. They set him on the grass, Francois miming the
kiss of life, exaggerating his gestures, huffing and groaning, as if
saving Luce were an elaborate joke, an entertainment staged for the
occasion. Circled around him, all the others French and Americans
broke into happy laughter.
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Fiction from Web Del Sol