Notes from the Cévennes, page 11
It has to be said that the men with guns have become friendlier in recent years, rather as most politicians or tax officers have realised that a ready smile gets you further than asocial grumpiness or outright aggression (many bosses, alas, have yet to learn this). Chasseurs who don’t have behavioural issues have understood that the countryside is a shared territory; we, in turn, read signboards on hiking paths urging us to appreciate that (in my own translation for a local map-making enterprise),
HUNTING IS A LOCAL CUSTOM DURING AUTUMN AND WINTER, LIKE HERDING AND FORESTRY. IT ALSO SERVES TO REGULATE THE NUMBERS OF INVASIVE WILD ANIMAL SPECIES SUCH AS WILD BOAR. IF YOUR VISIT COINCIDES WITH THE HUNTING PERIOD, PLEASE BE RESPECTFUL OF THIS ACTIVITY AND DO NOT HESITATE IF THE OCCASION ARISES TO ASK THE HUNTERS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR HUNTING CUSTOMS.
And, in addition, KEEP YOUR DOGS ON THE LEAD.1
Some signs are less official, and show opposition. Recently, high up on Mont Aigoual, I spotted a small metal plaque propped against a beech tree, its message scrawled in yellow paint:
LA CHASSE C’EST POUR LES PDS ET LES BATTUES POUR LES BASTRINGUES [HUNTING IS FOR GAYS AND BEATS FOR NIGHT CLUBS].
A few months ago, however, I went with the spirit of the times and chatted to a hunter looking anxious on a remote forest path, next to his four-by-four with its back cage wriggling with hounds. He had lost his best dog, while another had been severely injured by a boar’s tusks. Les chiens de chasse here come in various kinds but the majority are beagles or what we term fox-hounds (hunting foxes is regarded as weird by the French because there is little culinary reward from a scraggy type of vermin). The trained dogs fetch high prices. The hunter’s colleague was searching up in the steeply sloped woods. So far that day – it was now mid-afternoon – they had bagged nothing.
We expressed our sympathy a little hollowly and carried on. On our return, approaching the bend where the four-wheel drive had been parked, a gunshot sounded off to our left, unpleasantly close. We began chatting to each other as loudly as we could. It was tending towards dusk, the danger time for unarmed humans near armed members of the species. The same amiable hunter was standing by his vehicle, his colleague a few yards away in among the trees descending into a ravine: he appeared to have been aiming at a bird.
‘He’s fed up,’ said our new acquaintance, ‘he’s having a go at anything.’
‘I hope that doesn’t include us,’ I joked.
All of a sudden, close enough to make us jump, the gun went off again. Leaves floated down around the man’s luridly orange cap. He came back to us looking much more silly than cross. His friend commented that he would, in his present state, have missed a tree if it was one metre in front of him, and then had to remind him to break his rifle. I smelt pastis. A day’s supply of victuals, including the generous arrosage of the requisite two-hour lunch break, if combined with a disappointing day, encourages last-minute compromises with safety (to put it mildly). It is, after all, a sport of the people, and not just for the nobs as it once was before the nobs were sorted: a touch of the rough-and-ready is all part of the enjoyment.
We were glad, in the folding light, to hurry on away from the duo, who were soon bouncing past us in their four-by-four, giving us a cheery wave.
‘The boars live to breathe again,’ I said.
‘And so do we,’ added Jo, with an audible note of relief.
1On the subject of translation, I am itching to be asked to work on the hunters’ own bilingual warning signs. CHASSE EN COURS remains the literal CURRENT HUNTING. This is beautifully – rather than painfully – wrong, almost in the same category as the sign I saw in the village square of Roussillon: NO PARKING ALL OVER THE PLACE (DEFENSE DE STATIONNER SUR TOUTE LA PLACE). This was topped only by the wonderful DANGER: ZONE OF SINNERS (DANGER: ZONE DE PÊCHEURS) in Saintes-Maries-de-la Mer, since removed.
14
Disaster Area
Our flat in the centre of Nîmes is part of a venerable building co-owned by two other people. The assemblée générale of the three owners always involves a flaming row, usually about money. Last month’s was no exception, and as our gathering takes place on the café terrace at the foot of our building, it is all embarrassingly public. The syndicat consists of M. Lafont, the burly locksmith with the stentorian voice, strong Midi accent and conservative views; M. Roger, the owner of a now bankrupt ceramics factory; and myself, timidly proposing this and that while the other two build up to the climactic moment when the locksmith announces his resignation as the ‘unpaid’ syndic in a dreadful roar that echoes around the square. Just as well we only meet every few years, instead of (as officially required) annually.
The problem is that our four-storey corner building, dating back to the Middle Ages on the oldest street in the city (Roman, of course, but long, narrow and twisting), is not easily divisible into three. What we hold in common is the outside fabric – walls, load-bearing floors and roof. Then it gets complicated. M. Roger owns the ground area, which includes the café opening onto the square and, giving onto the street to the left of our front door, a tiny shop which, until shortly before the meeting, was selling cheap party shoes of the gold and glittery sort. M. Lafont, the locksmith, who despises anyone who is not an artisan (I believe writers fall into the latter category, but I’ve not yet managed to persuade him), owns the two small flats on the first floor: one is permanently in a state of restoration, full of his tools, its walls knocked frighteningly back to bare stone, while the other is occupied by a succession of tenants. My wife and I have the rest: namely, the second floor and a converted attic.
The roof leaks every time there’s a bad rainstorm, its terracotta tiles vulnerable to wind, cats or human trespass; my earlier sorties through the Velux skylight window to find displaced tiles ended when I was caught on one of the steeper areas by a shower, which renders the terracotta as slippery as ice. I groped my way back from the various cliff-edges, where only a gutter lies between you and the pavement far below, but my vertigo now gets the better of me. M. Roger has conceded that he should contribute to a yearly remaniement by a properly harnessed builder, even though his own property doesn’t get dripped on directly.
More contentious are the cramped entrance and staircase, which lead only to the three flats. A large hook on a bar under the stairs points to the presence of a well underneath, which I have long fancied excavating. The entrée’s pitiably dilapidated condition, with crumbling distemper peeling off the soft ‘Pont du Gard’ blocks of limestone, is primarily due to M. Roger’s refusal to contribute to a part of the house that his tenants never use. Not having a cleaner, I sweep and swab to almost no avail.
My stretched sympathy lost some tension last week when he recounted his travails since our last meeting. Apparently, the tenant of the tiny shoe shop, a scowling young man who framed its plate glass with flashing purple bulbs, has done a bunk (‘back to Morocco’ in M. Roger’s words), leaving a smashed-up interior and €9,000 worth of unpaid rent. M. Lafont interrupted my murmurs of sympathy with the claim that he had had to fork out an additional charge for the shop’s water, simply to avoid having the supply cut off: €21. The amount sounded pitiful, and M. Roger made the mistake of shrugging it off. Over the locksmith’s rising indignation (‘It’s the principle, the principle, why should I pay your debt?’ ‘Monsieur, by law I am not responsible for the debts of my tenants!’), the even sadder tale of the café unfolded.
When Henri had taken it over some years back, it became a café-restaurant and the smells grew buttery with hints of charred sirloin. As the pressure of failure mounted, the menus grew starker and the dishes surprisingly low in price. We were living in France, but it smelt like England. Eventually, dismissing our corner as ‘a disaster area’ (‘une zone sinistrée’), Henri sold the lease to a threesome of amiable, square-shouldered women, who moved into the tiny flat below ours. They gutted the café, turning it Spanish-sombre apart from a large rainbow in the window: just around the corner, down a narrow alleyway, lies the city’s famous nightclub for gay men, so perhaps this was a stab at gender equality. The new sign said ‘Casa Chicas’, the lettering swiftly defaced by a scrawled ‘Las putas’. Free tests for HIV were offered sur place along with the tapas, and there was a modest Friday night disco. The furniture was light. For a year or so, everyone was happy. One of my more heavily body-pierced and tattooed art students (she had befriended the three for a while and started the disco project), warned me never to eat there. ‘It’s filthy, they don’t even wash themselves!’ I knew there had been a tiff, but I reassured her that I was unlikely to test their steak frites. ‘Thanks for the tip, though.’
The chief advantage to us was that, because of a dramatic drop in clientele, the noise level sank. All three women were heavy smokers; they kept a tiny dog; the staircase felt even more authentically seedy. I tried pretending I was Hemingway in 1920s Paris. Looking down from my lofty study on the odd tourist innocently tucking into the day’s sirloin, I hoped my student’s comments were just the result of spite.
The women threw in the towel like their predecessors, the staircase air cleared. We awaited the next lot with trepidation, our proximity to the cathedral and a primary school theoretically ruling out any kind of nightclub: but practice tends to overrule theory. After a brief hiatus, the tables reappeared with paper covers sporting quotes about food from Rabelais, Flaubert and Daudet, while the blackboard offered curried pork or ‘spaghetti au fromage’, the last resort of those with meagre culinary gifts. According to the new owners, a couple in their forties, the trio had had enough. ‘But we’ll do things differently,’ the woman added crisply from behind the bar of what now called itself a Brasserie.
Expressionistic bullfighting scenes were painted inside and out and everything was served – including beef – on predictably peculiar plates. Despite the daubed toreadors, the refurbished interior was still dark and dingy, the terrace funereally empty under its black parasols. Looking at the three other busy cafés in the square, I decided that our corner was cursed.
The crisply confident couple then also did a bunk, owing €25,000 to poor, long-suffering M. Roger: French law favours tenants over landlords in the spirit, presumably, of the Revolution. Wicked landlords may be a literary trope, but wicked tenants are probably just as common. The café had no takers for six months, much to my relief, but eventually a Moroccan couple arrived, warm-hearted and friendly. Fatima cooked a delicious tagine and served authentic mint teas. Our hopes rose. This was the context in which our syndic meeting took place: among the tables of the café’s latest incarnation – bright and tasteful with Arabian curves and pale violet walls. ‘I did it all myself,’ explained Ajwad, who has what looks like a bullet scar on his forehead and a half-white eyebrow, along with a voice vying with M. Lafont’s in decibel level. ‘I used tadelakt, our traditional chalk paint. You have to apply it in one go and on your own, or the pauses and transitions show up.’
Towards the end of the meeting, M. Roger agreed with me that the café now had a chance to thrive. The business of the €21 surfaced again. I quietly slipped a €20 note under M. Lafont’s saucer. ‘That makes me even more enraged,’ he boomed, shoving it back. The only time he has spoken to me without booming, in 15 years, is when he told me recently that a new tenant had just moved into the small flat on the first floor. The previous one, following the square-shouldered female trio, had sublet to a barman with tattooed flames licking at his jaw, ankles and wrists: a human inferno.
I asked whether the fresh arrival was a man or a woman. He whispered a conspiratorial reply, which I had to get him to repeat twice, hoarser each time, my imagination whirling with possibilities.
‘Il est transgenre! Ni homme, ni femme!’
He mimed absurdly exaggerated breasts and a short skirt (revealing an unlikely talent for mincing) and said, again sotto voce, that he only realised the gender when he saw the identity papers. ‘As long as he pays his rent, I don’t care,’ he added, like someone out of a Zola novel.
His mime turned out to be accurate. In the spirit of officialdom, M. Lafont sticks to ‘he’ when discussing the new arrival, while I can’t use anything but ‘she’. Even our building’s tenants seem divisible, and just as confusingly so. A little yappy terrier accompanies Claude whenever she goes out, and she likes to spray the staircase with liberal helpings of magnolia air freshener, to which I appear to be as mildly allergic as to the cigarette smoke it overlays.
As she’s a native of Brazil, the odd spicy waft rises up the staircase at meal-times, stirring our taste buds. So far, we have not been invited. Oddly clad strangers insistently buzzing our bell, occasionally signalling to me from the pavement with obscene gestures or passing us on the stairs with furtive glances, point to her belonging to the world’s oldest profession. Hemingway would have been delighted.
15
Martens in the Roof
Up until last week, the only marten I had ever seen up close was dying. This was over a decade ago. It had crawled into our ‘barn’ and looked at me with uncharacteristic plaintiveness, even when I came near. Normally, armed with its 38 razor-sharp teeth and badger-like claws, it would have leapt for my face. I left out a saucer of milk and when I came back it was empty. Soon after, I found its long, slim body stretched out in our garden, its beautiful fluffy tail, somewhere between a fox’s and a squirrel’s, limp as a feather duster. Poisoned, I assumed, probably by something intended for rats. I buried it in our little animal cemetery, along with the cats, goldfish and rabbits who had accompanied us through the years. I identified it, thanks to Google, as a stone or beech marten, close cousin to the pine marten. Few people know much about them, as they are mainly nocturnal.
This spring there were noises in our living-room ceiling. I am a ratophobe, and feared the worst. Our cat brings in brown rats almost as large as herself, depositing them in my study in a mutilated state. Fortunately, I glimpsed a bushy tail disappearing into a gap above the balcony’s gutter. ‘We have martens,’ I told Jo. ‘But the upside is, they’ll keep the rats away.’ The Romans kept martens as deterrents against vermin, in the days when every wild creature was much more numerous. Martens are now a protected species, so there’s nothing we could have done, anyway. The downside is that, although sensibly shy of humans, as they mature they get very noisy – chattering and tussling with each other – and very smelly: they eat everything, and do not clear up after a meal. ‘They are fond of raves,’ as one friend put it.
A litter consists of three or four youngsters, who are nurtured by the mother for three months until forced to fend for themselves in their adolescence. The fathers are always absent. The marten is hyper-sensitive to both sounds and smells that are not self-produced: joss-sticks and mothballs and loud music can be enough to persuade them to up sticks. On the other hand, familiar sounds and smells can reassure them. We glimpsed the mother’s tail a few times over several weeks. When we spotted a juvenile wandering about on our balcony, we rejoiced but approached cautiously. It is rare to see martens at all, let alone so close, and we took photos, identifying it as another beech (or stone) marten rather than a pine marten from the way its handsome white chest bib divided into two, running down each leg. It is a beautiful and endearing animal, despite its weasel-like ferociousness when threatened. This one’s colour was a deep chestnut. We assumed it had tumbled from the eaves, and wondered how to help it return. It was now nestling almost at ground level in a recess in the wall, big enough to take its slim form. Its youthful, curious, sharp-snouted face was adorable.
Fetching the cat basket, I encouraged it to enter by tapping inside the recess with a pole. It backed in deeper, without making a sound, then emitted a sudden, unearthly screech a hundred times larger than itself with a lunging movement of its head. I leapt back in shock, dropping the pole. Chipmunk-like chatterings over a low growl were interspersed by further screeches and lungings. It struck me, once I’d recovered, that the screech was a kind of missile defence system before the need to retaliate: evolution’s gift to a small, no doubt tasty mammal. It was certainly enough to persuade me to put away the basket and construct, out of a ladder, plank, chairs and a table, a climbing frame that reached up to the hole in the eaves. I had read that they were skilled climbers, but maybe not when youngsters. I also put out a shallow bowl of water, as the day was warm and dry. By now it had settled in and appeared to be asleep, sweetly curled, as if sensing that we meant it no harm. We were hopelessly besotted, and it could have got away with almost anything.
Later in the day, after the long sleep, I was astonished to spot it inching up the wall, using its broad claws and pressing its body against the gutter’s downpipe in the angle to give it extra leverage. Ever since I spent hours, as a boy in the Congo, entertaining myself through those long tropical days without TV or radio by watching squadrons of red ants on manoeuvres on our bathroom wall – they would even line up to be inspected by the captain’s feelers – I have harboured a suspicion that non-human creatures are far brighter than we realise, or dare to realise. They may not solve equations or write books or walk on the moon, but their extraordinary intelligence is of a different order, and is certainly not trashing the planet. This stone marten, young as it was, had worked something out. It had seen the opening and gone for it. Perhaps it hadn’t tumbled carelessly onto the balcony. Perhaps it had copied its mother and deliberately descended to explore. It reached the horizontal gutter and hopped onto the roof, from where it lowered itself into the hole in the eaves with one sinuous wriggle.
My theory was proven the following day. We were having breakfast on the balcony when we noticed a slim, furry form sliding from one pot to the next around the edge of the wall. It was in no hurry. Our cat, a keen hunter, watched it nonplussed, without a single twitch of the tail. For Phoebe, this sight was no doubt normal, especially at night. She knew her match. Far stronger and more vicious than a brown rat. Not to be bothered with. A marten recently killed a domestic cat in Germany. Presumably because of the familiarity of our smells, and of our voices heard from birth coming up through the ceiling, the marten did not react at all when we started speaking, or when we shifted to watch it better. It felt secure, it wasn’t watching its back. If we had approached too close, it would have screeched and chattered, then leapt at our faces (if sufficiently pushed). There was comfort in its coolness, as if the pure wildness resident in our house was accommodating us. It was a kind of pact. Maybe this was why the Romans preferred them to rats, whose parasitic cunning makes us uncomfortable and disgusted with ourselves. It lapped at the water and began climbing back, flattening itself against the wall as before and inching up with hardly any claw-holds on the limewashed wall, increasingly confident, almost gecko-like. Our cat was already nodding off.
