Sunday Papers: Charles de Gaulle

"How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?"




On the turntable:  Palace Music, "Arise, Therefore"
On the nighttable:  Marcel Pagnol, "My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle

Pastis and Petanque

Another of my goals this summer was to sit at the edge of a dusty town square somewhere and sip pastis while watching the locals play boules.  Late Saturday afternoon we chose Cogolin, since it was short drive away.  

Despite the lingering heat of the day we found a number of games in progress, side by side across three makeshift courts.  They stood out in the open sun, the square having been renovated and the stubby plane trees still a few years away from giving shade.  The men playing were younger and had more of the look of bowlers or billiard players, with their T-shirts, sneakers, and disappointing absence of good mustaches.  Worst of all was that my vantage point was blocked by people standing out along the front of a similarly renovated cafe, with glassed-in sides and nary an outdoor table.   

It was all a far cry from what I had envisioned from watching  films based on the novels of Pagnol.  LYL assured me that the old ways do exist, but more so further up in the hills, though it is doubtful anyone wears suspenders and fedora as well as Yves Montand.  So I soothed myself with my first taste of pastis, heavy and thick like licorice.  I'm not a spirits person, and the high alcohol content quickly brought a heat into my body that could rival that of out in the square.  I could see that it was drink only for a dry climate, for the liquor itself is like humidity in a glass.  The thought of sipping it on a sticky August Kyoto afternoon brought a feeling of claustrophobia.  

Glass empty, we needed to run a few quick errands in town, one of which was the pharmacy.  As we stood in the queue, a woman came in leading her dog on a leash, one of those bull terriers with their weird shark-like head.  As we all waited, the dog plonked itself onto the cool tile floor with a great burst of a sign, its belly flattened like a yogi to completely maximize the cooling effect.  The woman took little time with her prescription, and as she left, the dog seemed unwilling to go, ignoring the first couple of tugs on the leash.  Instead the woman dug her heels in, and walking backward, turned the still supine dog completely around and began dragging it toward the door, its legs still splayed behind, and in between,  a pair of its own boules glided steadily across the floor. 


On the turntable:  Blossom Dearie, "For Cafe Apres-Midi" 
On the nighttable:  "Paris Was Ours"  (Various)

(untitled)

Footsteps absorbed by stone.

Searching for

What lies behind silence

On the turntable:  Bay City Rollers,  "Bay City Rollers"

Sunday Papers: Ernest Hemingway

“In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.”


On the turntable:  Conor Oberst, "Here's to Special Treatment"

A Meal in the Maures

The silence at Chartreuse de la Verne had emptied all, including even our bellies.  We found respite a dozen twisted kilometers away, in the village of Collobrières.  There had been a settlement here at least since the bridge was laid in the 12th Century.  The town's current layout was like a bell jar, with long narrow streets leading away toward a central point from which they splayed away like the typical medieval town.  The base of this bell was the long Boulevard Lazare Carnol, shaded completely by tall plane trees.  We sat ourselves in front of the Bar Tabac de la Mairie, facing the village square, which was as quiet as the ruined church that had greeted us on our way into town.  The proprietress upon seeing us seemed surprised that we didn't prefer to eat overlooking the river.  The river?

Passing through to the back, we found a wide veranda had been built across the narrow Réal Collobrier, a number of its tables filled with food and conversation.  We settled into a bowl of linguine and a nice piece of beef, along with the obligatory glass of rosé.  This is a dangerous sort of wine, as unlike a fuller-bodied white (or red, though in the summer, forget it), it is barely felt and goes down like water, and before you know it, a half bottle is gone.  Being midday, and needing to drive those sinuous roads home, I chose the smallest volume. 

We had started late, and not long after our plates arrived, so did the staff, tucking into a tall plate of mussels now that the kitchen was closed.  A jolly, full-bellied man stepped out into the doorway, who we presumed was the cook. He called greetings over to a man at an adjoining veranda, one filled with diners looking more buttoned down and touristic.  LYL and I complimented ourselves on choosing the one that was more authentic, where the other guests looked like locals.  When our proprietress came to drop our check we complimented the food, and asked her to pass on these sentiments to the chef.  She looked at us and laughed and said, "But that's me!"  The full-bellied 'cook' smiled at us from behind her, still playing the charade that it was he rather, who was in charge.  

After such a good meal, the level of satisfaction is usually so complete that there is really little point in trying to surpass it.  Aside from the drive home, there was little else to do.  We had a token peek at the Chapelle Notre Dame de Pitié, as bright and colorfully painted as the shutters in the windows of the houses lining the long lanes.  Next door at Confiserie Azuréenne we took as dessert some samples of the chestnuts that gives this village its renown. (Though their ice cream seemed a bigger seller on a day as hot as this.)   Followed up by a cafe au lait on the village square, in a bistro whose platters were as big as the rims on our car. Little moved here, least of all the air, so we initiated a bit of motion ourselves, and walked across the dappling shadows of the plane trees, in the direction of a nap.  


On the turntable: Bill Evans, "Live at the Village Vanguard"
  

Ce qui se Trouve Derrière le Silence

It is a scene encountered a hundred times in Asia, of a woman sitting on her haunches on the floor, feet spayed out sideways to the left, her body contours hidden by flowing cloth.  She is sitting directly before the idols lined up on the other side of the room, sitting in complete stillness, the perfect manifestation of the message written on the sign on the door, a single word: Silence.  
 
The woman looks a part of this room, as if she has grown out of this stone which was laid here 900 years before.  The chairs that flank her were a later addition of course, as was the custom of sitting in them.  And the idol that those chairs face is far from the crowded riot of colors found in the bustling temples of Asia. Rather, it is a single simple figure of Christ on the cross, carved from a single piece of wood and of very subdued colors, a Christ gaunt and be-ribbed.

The angularity of the Christ matches that of the trees of the hills outside.  The woman at prayer would have passed thousands of them on her way here, a journey of some effort, along a road that sinuated its way through the oak and chestnut of the Maures, a road that clung miraculously to the hillsides, a road transformed with the coming of feet, of hoof, of tire.  After that long winding almost metaphoric road, this woman would have had to undertake the final part of her journey alone, on foot, over the dust of sunburned trail.  And finally, the silence would welcome her, as would the cool.     

We leave her be and step outside into the light.  The paths are lined with lavender bushes humming with the throb of bees, and every step brings us deeper into their scent.  More arched doorways await at their end, leading us into another stone chamber, then another, and another.  Chartreuse de la Verne is a labyrinth, with all passages leading eventually to the chapel.  It is the largest chamber of all, bare but for simple wooden pews, a container built for silence. For silence is the real work here, not the baking of bread, nor the grinding of olives for oil, nor the chanting of female voices high sweet.  In the beginning may have been the Word, but words have all but transcended this place.       

Some words do remain of course, as this is an abbey founded on the law of God.  But as I walk around I feel that that law is a mutually agreed upon vision of a shared existence, one based on faith rather than externally-imposed precepts.  Faith can take many forms, and like snowflakes, each is unique and personal.  I lie the idea of that.  And though I am far from the Catholicism of my childhood, I feel that faith resonate within, in the form of silence.  And despite the cliché, silence doesn't fill; it empties.


On the turntable:  (---------)

And My Time Went so Quickly

I've mentioned before that the best meals in France are usually found in its smaller villages, a theory that I've tested against the templates of Paris and San-Tropez.  But one meal that I've returned to can be found just outside the latter, off the beach road that climbs toward Ramatuelle.  Because a  Club 55 is a place where the experience outweighs the food.  

Plus it seemed the best place to enjoy a birthday lunch to celebrate LYL's 55th.  The drive out was more of an adventure than we'd planned, as a missed turned led us higher and higher into the hills until the pavement fell away.  Luckily we had chosen to take the Jeep Wrangler, which bounced and hopped over the rocks and deeper ruts. Light fell upon us between openings in the trees, and finally after one last hairpin, the shiny sea appeared and our tires once against kissed the tarmac somewhere above La Croix Valmer.

Arriving just inside the noon cutoff for a rented paillote at the beach, we were able to spread out our things and settle in beneath the shade of its fronds.  Pamplona Beach was pleasantly quiet here in the back row, but there was a bit of action up beneath the umbrellas at the water's edge.  It was still reasonably early in the season, a time when English remains the lingua franca, until the first of August when Paris empties out and heads south.       

Our lunch booking came up quite quickly.  LYL had made two reservations, one in her name and one in mine, unwilling to lose a table to a party of itinerant Russians as she had last year.  We were led to a nice table beneath the spread of a low pine, a small forest of which helps to shade the beachfront terrace.  (Cracks and fissures in the boughs also make for convenient cubbyholes for the waitstaff.) Neither of us were hungry so we chose a simple lunch of mussels, salade nicoise, and a platter of stuffed vegetables, and I had my token lunchtime glass of rosé.  I'd had the mussels on a previous visit (as a starter for an under-cooked horse meat burger), and again found myself facing the familiar black mountain of astounding height, which I began then to scale, using as climbing equipment a single empty shell with which to extract the others. (For those more OCD, perhaps you could remove each new mussel with the shell of the previous.)  As we ate, more and more diners came to fill the tables decorated with a simple beachside motif of white and pale blue.  Our Parisian server was still in good spirits, though for how long remained to be seen, as he told us that Club 55 had 1000 reservations that day.  Surely not all to celebrate the birthday of LYL?

We settled back under our paillote and read awhile, me refreshing myself with an espresso that the waiter brought.  The beach was full now, revelers moving from bar to shade.  It was funny to watch the younger people trying not to show the obvious pain from walking across hot sand, while others began to gradually pick up their pace the further on they went.  I cheated a little by pouring water over my soles, then walking cool and slow like Lawrence of Arabia. 

LYL had marveled at the deep blue of the Mediterranean as seen from the beach, but from within, the waters were a clear emerald green.  I dove and bobbed then floated awhile, quite effortless due to the high salt content.  Further out was the obligatory flotilla of pleasure boats, some as massive as naval vessels.  Their owners would be shuttled by rubber dingy to the dock jutting just off shore in time for lunch.  On their way back, a number of them would weave giggling, if they could stand at all after four too many glasses of Cristal.  

We watched these, and eavesdropped discretely on others.  Then three pm arrived, and we walked toward the jeep, moving back past the dining area now at the height of its frenzy.  We had been wise to choose the early seating.    

Wisdom too was with us in choosing the paved road home, though again we favored the high-road through Ramatuelle and Gassin.  Top down, wind in the hair, we didn't need a birthday to appreciate another of the Riviera's long traditions:  the siesta.


On the turntable: Bill Evans, "Undercurrent"
On the nighttable:  Paul Webster, "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Life and Death of the Little Prince"

Three nights at the "Hotel Chevalier"

On the turntable:  B.B. King, "The Vintage Years"
On the nighttable:  Marcel Pagnol, "My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle"
 

(untitled)

Monuments in
Iron and stone.
Let them eat eye-candy.

On the turntable:  Bill Haley and His Comets, "Bill Haley and His Comets"
On the nighttable:  M.F.K. Fisher, "Long Ago in France"

Dawn of the Dead...

On the turntable:  Banda Bassotti, "Asa Es Mi Vida"

(untitled)

With the sudden rain,
We seek regeneration in
Left Bank coffee and art.

On the turntable:  The Beatles, "Anthology Outtakes 3"
On the nighttable:  Edmund White, "The Flaneur"