Changing Hemispheres (12)
Part Five of Moving Over and In A Segue to Spain, autumn, hunters and closure I’ve just realised a couple of things that have somehow gone unmentioned in all this long tale. One is that I joined a choir shortly after arriving. Many of the villages have choirs, as they have walking groups, dance classes, exercise groups for the elderly… They tend to be subsidised locally, so those taking part pay not very much for their regular community involvement. The second is that summer sees a number of choral events featuring choirs from England or around Europe, brought out I’m not sure how by those who run the Maison Verte, which is a centre in Roujan run by English people. Astonishing concerts, held in the local and other churches, are held through summer, for which you may pay a small donation on your way out. In late September, there is much busyness over a couple of days as all the buildings and gardens that were closed to the public most of the year are suddenly open for a brief viewing. Time to beg for information (in this case, there was a woman from the Mairie of E at my local café/restaurant) and hurtle off around the countryside. At last I got to see our local Romanesque Church, which has a great curved entranceway and massive stone walls, but needs so much work it is unsafe and is therefore unused most of the time. We then rocketed off to see the Romanesque (with Tuscan influences) tower in Puissalicon. There was a local historian giving the background to this – we gathered from him and photographs that this was what was left of an ancient church, and incorporated stone portraiture of some souls who had been involved in its building some time ago. Also, it so impressed an American in the 80s that, when he couldn’t actually buy the Puissalicon tower and take it away, he had a bigger and better one built back home. You’d guessed that, of course. Around about then, my friend Jo travelled to Europe from Australia. We’d decided that it would probably be easier and possibly cheaper in general for her to fly to Barcelona, where we could spend a couple of days together in exploration and then catch the train for the two hours to Béziers. And that kind of thing is a large part of my reason for moving to France. Anyway, the adventure in Barcelona was organised and added to with a visit beforehand to the holiday house my cousins have in Spain, in the extremely hilly
and wealthy town of Begur, which is about an hour from Girona, which itself is about an hour and a half from Béziers. I think there is a bit on the train-‐ride where you actually go through the Pyrenees, but I blinked so I couldn’t swear to it. Begur really is the kind of place you hang around if you have the money, which I really don’t, so I did feel a lot like the country cousin that I am. It has, being made up of precipitous rises, mostly spectacular views across blindingly blue sea and sky, and roads that scare me to death, given my enduring trauma after my first car died (years ago) while valiantly attempting to climb a giddy height in Melbourne’s Heidelberg. Melbournites will know what I mean. But I digress. Begur also has a series of bewitching little half-‐moon coves (pebbled), which are, I suspect, a good deal more comfortable at the September-‐October end of the season. I assume in July and August everyone on the beach has to turn over at the same time. Traditional fishing continues despite the tourists. Up the vertical slopes various housing ranges from modest and whitewashed to monstrous, such as the one rumoured to be being built by an obscenely-‐wealthy Russian. The cranes swing languidly across that bit of the horizon. You can eat a leisurely and almost affordable lunch while gazing at the sea from behind your sunglasses, then go see the medieval chapel and the remains of pre-‐Roman dwellings. Begur itself presages the eccentricities of Catalanesque art and architecture, with enormous creativity and wit, in my humble opinion. And you are liable to come across ancient towers erected to gaze out to sea and warn of marauding Barbary pirates. It’s not an enormously-‐long drive to the Dali Theatre-‐Museum at Figueres, which is immediately evident from the street by the strange eggs leaning at angles on its parapet. Inside, it is of course all a presentation of the outpourings of Dali’s strange mind, from the tiny to the enormous, from the meticulous sketch to the great trompe-‐l’oeil constructions. When you consider Gaudi and various feverish artists over time, you do begin to wonder about the Spanish, or should I say the Catalans. There’s a very wild fire burning there. It’s wonderful.
Eventually, my cousins very kindly drove me to Barcelona (courageous in itself, as I really don’t advocate foreigners trying to find their way around this city), where Jo and I met up and spent three nights in an AirBnb overlooking a small and very busy square in the old part of the city. Quiet? Not at all, but fascinating and our hosts were lovely. She is Hungarian and he is from Brazil, and I think it’s serious. Awww. We tramped about the town, looking at the evidence of all that wild and eclectic Catalonian fire (speaking metaphorically, see above). From the monumental, tempestuously decorative medieval cathedral full of astonishing art and home to the Holy Geese (my friend Jo suggested this proved there had been a misprint in the Bible. Work it out for yourselves) to the dream-‐ nightmares of Gaudi’s creations of unlimited passion. What Barcelonans will do when his cathedral is finally completed, I can’t imagine. They’ll be at a loss. There was the gallery for works by Juan Miro. Then there was the Art Nouveau flight of fancy that is the Opera … and I hunted down a flamenco dance night held in a venue decorated in a fin-‐de-‐siecle indolent style of sweeping staircases, chaise-‐ longues and huge portraits of signors and signoras. At last, I made Jo fall in love with women dancers who make the air crackle with their stamping, hair-‐tossing power. O god. The only glitch to the Barcelona experience was when I went to take money out of an ATM and hadn’t realised that for some reason Spanish number keyboards are laid out differently from everyone else’s. And that we remember our passwords as much by their shape on the keyboard as anything else. So I thought for a day or so that I couldn’t take any money out. Luckily for me, there doesn’t seem to be a rule of three-‐ attempts-‐and–you’re-‐blocked and eventually I managed to conjure up the number and some money. I’m not certain that as a general rule that is the safest situation, though. We said farewell to Barcelona and hopped on the train. Two hours to Béziers, picked up at the station by a friend and driven home. That’s the sort of thing you can do in Europe.
The end of summer and the season brings, as ever, another series of celebrations – the first taste of the new drop and rather a lot of roasted chestnuts. Apropos of this, an English friend told me how he had been waiting for the chestnut festival to start, but couldn’t see anything to tell him where or when (of course). Eventually, he saw a sign by the side of the road, which announced the forthcoming festival – same time, same place as last year! In any case, I think the various chestnut festivals are nice, but the wine is perhaps best kept for later. An amusing little wine, but barely five minutes old …. Jo and I and an Irish friend, R, who does all the twinkling and eccentricity we have all been brought up to expect of Irish people but had assumed guiltily was merely a stereotype, went off one day to a general opening, set of workshops and brief choral concert at the Abbaye Fontfroide, near Narbonne. Yes, it is ancient, though parts are quite new, relatively speaking – ranging from its beginnings in 1093 AD when its grounds were donated, through 1145 when its Cistercian monks really got it started, and all the way to the last Louis… until the revolution put paid to all that and it became a hospice in 1791. There was an attempt at a return by monks in the 19th century, but the imposition of the principle of the separation of church and state put a stop to that in 1901. After that, it was bought privately and used to promote the arts (and a rose garden established and planted with of all sorts of rare hybrids). Jo is a trained opera singer and wanted to take part in a workshop about ancient musical notation, which we did and managed to understand, largely even though it was entirely in French. The choral concert over, we leapt back into the Twingo to find out way home, with the argument continuing for some time in the back of the car between Jo (who held the map) and R (who did not) as to how to do this. All might have gone sadly awry had I not remembered that drivers should not go cross-‐eyed in times of stress. We finished by repairing to the restaurant in E where Jo and R drank much wine and R persuaded Jo to demonstrate some bars of opera of which R is particularly fond. And so we moved quietly into autumn and the colours changing in the vineyards. Each variety of grape brings a different shade, and sometimes fields hold several varieties. At its peak, the show glows for miles around, and sunsets bring fire and gold to everything. We took a trip up to the gorges in autumn, up to the ancient village of Minerve, the Cathars’ last holdout before the Catholics and Simon de Montford wiped them out altogether in 1210. The village itself has a certain sadness to it – the stones of the houses merging with the rocks they sit on, perched high above the gorge where winter rains bring a roaring flood, I assume. In
medieval terms, it is very well protected, and the Catholic hordes fulminated for some time until they hit on the ploy of erecting a catapult and hurling stones at the village well. Thus were the Cathars (or ‘Parfaits’) brought low, the villagers having then to give them up to the victors. They were forced down a narrow street, the Avenue des Martyrs now named after them, and burned at the stake. There is a small number of places to eat in Minerve, and we ended up at the ritziest, all three of us – me, my friend C and Jo – and we shouted Jo a birthday lunch of the usual three courses, exquisite and well-‐presented, with excellent wine and, truly, very reasonable price. Further from Minerve we stopped many times to look at cliffs, rocky gorges full of jagged limestone, and those blazing vineyards glimmering everywhere. It was a great way for Jo to remember Hérault, as she took the 34-‐hour journey back to Tasmania. Winter was taking a long time to set in now, was very mild and for this I was grateful. The heat pump had had to be rescued again a while before the cold set in properly, with a couple of intrepid electricians trying everything to find parts for it. At last, once more it seemed fine and I was assured it should work for several years despite its great age, and I gratefully handed over several hundred Euros. However, this new lease on life lasted for around two months only before it gave up and blew cool air, which exertion actually made the lights dim. I gave up and fell to using the feeble wall units and a range of heating borrowed from friends, and gearing up to a large expenditure on a replacement which, I was assured, would not be anything like as expensive as it could have been since the new machine will come from elsewhere else in Europe. That is, it would cost perhaps one arm as opposed to two arms and both legs. This while the Australian dollar diminished gracefully toward nothing. Ah well. And of course, there were before this the attacks on Paris, which alarmed friends and family. Understandably, of course, though I was quite safe the whole time and on the other side, quite literally, of the country. Once again I had no idea until the phone calls began, and then I discovered all the worried conversations about me on Facebook. There was a tale a couple of days later that the Béziers police found and destroyed a van full of guns, but the whisper is that it was actually empty and alarmed the cops mostly by being without a driver and having Belgian number plates. I was not in a great position to find out more from the local French, who mostly just stoically go about their business whatever is happening. One neighbour informed me that this extended autumn meant it would be bitter at Easter. We say hello quite often, but it does puzzle me that, no matter how often I mention my own name, she has never told me hers. She even gave me some onions and a lettuce once, and introduced her mother. But I still don’t know her name, or her mother’s. This may stem from her own sense of privacy, or it may come from the same place as the local habit of giving a complicated set of directions rather than a simple address, despite pleading. Even people from Paris have remarked on this oddity.
The hunters were now out, now that it was winter, and would keep on hunting for months. The country stillness was broken not just by the clock chiming the hour and the rooster crowing every two minutes or so (‘It’s a dwarf rooster’, my neighbour told me. ‘We are looking for someone to buy it.’ We laughed ruefully, though I don’t know if that means the dwarf variety crows more often), but also by explosions not so distant. Occasionally, an angry scene was played out between high-‐viz-‐clad hunters and a motorist gone red in the face, and one could only guess why. They hunt wild boar (there is a theory that evolution will thus produce a very canny, tough breed of boar indeed) and, well, anything that moves. Occasionally, this may accidentally include joggers or even, once, a couple driving along who were startled as a shot went through one window and out the other, side to side. Best not to go walking the dog after 11am, due to the imbiding of pastis at this time, followed by wine at lunch. This is even though hunters do undergo a rigourous training for their licence. I held fears for the Loony Tunes bird I had seen a while back, and for the pheasant I saw dashing into a bush on my return from the supermarket. As you do. My friend C said that he once saw a family of wild boar – mum and the kids – coming out of the door of his local church. We can only assume they had been claiming asylum. A side-‐story. On country drives you often see signs warning of leaping deer. I am reliably informed that there are probably no deer, but there had been not enough signs in stock about boars. So when you see the leaping deer, be prepared for boar. I suppose this may be apocryphal, but it’s a good one. Over the way, Monsieur G put on a spurt of energy on his house and it now had a concrete floor and a new window. Personally, I would have fixed the roof first, but what would I know. This work meant he could not go north to his wife and actual home in Savoy, and was anxious to find a restaurant that served Christmas lunch. I asked around for some information on this, and came up with one in nearby Roujan, at which I have eaten before. Nice place. Monsieur G invited a friend and made a booking, and now I feel like a good neighbour. He told me he enjoyed it. I had gone through the annual rigmarole now of renewing my visa, and the final stage had happened, when I presented my passport for the stamp, and give them money. At the same time, I began to sort out the ‘licence exchange’ and hopefully end up with a proper French licence – luckily Australia is one of the countries that has an agreement with France on the subject of licences. The licence exchange looked to be fairly straight-‐forward, which was suspicious in itself. I almost felt relieved when a complication cropped up. The French licence is awarded (I gathered) for life and they place great stress on the date on which it was first given. Whereas Australian licences are renewed every ten years, so it’s the dates of renewal, past and future, which are important. I was therefore missing the date I first received my licence, and had to wait up late one night to phone VicRoads to get it. I had a lovely chat with the person there and
carefully spelled out my address, and then she read out the document she was to send me. Very oddly, she misquoted the date my licence began wrongly, by ten years. And even more oddly, I found myself disputing this with her as she insisted I must myself be in error. Oh well, I thought – don’t suppose anyone really cares. I waited patiently for my document to arrive – by winged snail, since they wouldn’t send by email, and discovered that my friendly person had discovered my correct dates. Well, good. In the meantime, while winter crept up to us it was still possible to go sight-‐ seeing relatively comfortably. There is a ‘Roman villa’ at Loupian – also roughly 40 minutes away – where an astonishing array of mosaics were found a few decades ago, unearthed and set up in a large shed. The foundations of the villa were also found, so it was possible to indicate where the walls of the house had been. The mosaics have been filled out a bit in monochrome so that you can see more of their shape yet be aware of the originals. Our guide said that the owner would have lived in Béziers and visited his country estate once in a while to see how the vineyards and workers were going, to entertain, to receive reports and complains and to adjudicate in local disputes. He had a special room for that, with a raised floor. A friend, J, also offered me a flying visit to Nice, since she was dropping her brother off at the railway there as he went on his travels. ‘Flying’ is perhaps a misnomer, as it takes four hours to drive there. Travelling east by train to Nice, apparently, takes an inordinately long time compared with travelling west. It was raining too, with clouds acting as drapery around the local hills. The Côte was not very Azur. When we got to Nice, her brother safely stowed, J suggested we go to Monte Carlo for lunch, which of course we did, taking the tunnel to Monaco rather than the one to Italy. (I just wanted to say that.) Monte Carlo is, of course, very conscious of its wealth, but is nevertheless very beautiful with mansions that were built before the taste for chrome and glass, set on top of one another all the way up the hill … overlooking the yachts. Naturally. Then back to Nice, where narrow streets have been lovingly restored to a jewel-‐like state and the beach is of pebbles. For some reason. I suspect it is not an easy matter to go swimming in summer on all these pebbly beaches. Nice is so used to visitors, of course, that restaurants actually stay open way beyond 2.30 pm. Honestly! We proved it by having coffee. Home again, home again, through wind and rain. J intended to set off from Nice for home for a weekend in February, and offered to drive
me to Nice and pick me up for home. I began to augment my wardrobe with woollies. * * * And so, just about, ended that year of 2015. There was a New Year’s party held by a local British/French/Assorted Others’ Petanque club, which was beautifully catered. A matter of honour, really, in this country. There was in February the second Repas des Ainés I had attended in my little hamlet. Once again a cabaret with various acts including the young lady (a different one, this time the lovely Célie) in sequinned strings and feathers (‘She dances well, does she not?’ ‘Oh yes, Monsieur, she dances well’)… and so it went on. Life is mostly full of charms, sometimes of horror. It would be a wonderful thing if those who are so bent on using social control would try tolerance and acceptance in the search for the path to security. I speak, especially, of the current move by some to ban the burkini from French beaches. It is hard to see how preventing women from enjoying the leisure activities everyone else enjoys (sometimes wearing nothing at all) is going to help anything. Given the emphasis, at least in this end of France, on a formal courtesy and on community – far above any considerations of money or profit – you’d think the authorities might extend the logic of inclusion to everyone. Muslims, after all, have been here a long time and are here, indeed, as a direct result of France’s previous conquests. There. I did my best to avoid political commentary for the length of this series of blogs. I have, at the last, failed miserably. But I hope you have liked the long tale, including its end. All my very best to you all.