2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (22 page)

“Prime Minister Hawks, we have to drop those bombs in the next ten minutes otherwise all will be lost.”

“Errmm, right, er…yup, gosh…right, yes…important stuff, yes…um…er…Look, I’m busy right now with my cornflakes—I’ll have an answer for you when I’m done.”

A few minutes later all was sorted. Serges had quoted a very reasonable price for the job, and he was to come back with his mechanical digger in half an hour. By the end of the day, there would be no tree and a bloody great big hole in the garden. Scary stuff.

Still Kevin and Nic slept on. The lie-in. One of the joys of being on holiday. I’d never come to appreciate this fully, never having held what could be commonly termed a proper job. Apart from the odd day here and there, I’d worked largely from home, relying on self-discipline to kick-start the day’s work. I’d rarely made use of my alarm clock, knowing that I would wake up when I was ready. The lie-in was all too available for me and consequently had never become a treat. But Kevin and Nic were enjoying it now, the length of their slumber a sign that they both needed this rest, and that they were relaxing into the new pace that life here demanded.

The same was not true of me on this particular morning. This was the closest thing to stress that life here could engender. Ron soothed my nerves by pouring me a comforting cup of tea in the kitchen. We made a pot of coffee, too, ready to offer to Serges when he returned with his digger. This, as we were soon to discover, was rather naive of us. Serges was not the ‘sit around and have a cup of coffee before you start work’ type.

Moments later we heard the distant hum of a large piece of machinery.

“That’ll be him,” said Ron.

I poured Serges a cup of coffee and we both moved outside to greet him, only to see the digger turn the corner from the road and head straight down the steep drive. Serges didn’t even glance at me or Ron, but simply aimed his speeding contraption directly at the tree and let gravity bolster his speed. The poor tree was then duly and unceremoniously rammed. BANG!

Ron giggled. A nervous kind of giggle.

“Oh well,” he said. “That’s the tree sorted anyway.”

“Bloody hell,” I said in amazement. “What if I’d changed my mind about the tree in the last twenty minutes?”

“Well, he would have just changed it back again for you.”

I heard a commotion upstairs and looked up to the window to see Kevin and Nic, sleep still in their eyes, staring down at the extraordinary scene below them.

“Tony,” said Nic. “Someone’s knocked your tree over.”

It’s always good to have someone around who’s on top of what’s going on.

“Yes,” I said. “It does look that way, doesn’t it?”

The tree was now at a forty-five degree angle, roots exposed to the sun, with a good proportion of the lawn having been hauled along with it. Serges was oblivious to the adjacent astonishment. He simply reversed his digger—or battering ram as it might be more accurately described—and rammed it straight back into the stricken tree. This successfully reduced its hanging angle by a further twenty degrees.

“Blimey,” said Kevin from the upstairs window. “He doesn’t muck about, does he?”

Serges dismounted his yellow monster and reached inside the cab of his machine. This seemed like a good moment to take over the cup of coffee that I was still holding for him. However, just as I started to move towards him, he spun round from the cab brandishing a huge chainsaw. For a moment it seemed like I was facing a character from a horror movie. I retreated to safety immediately.

“Coffee can wait,” I whispered to Ron.

“Yes, he doesn’t seem to be the hot-drink type,” said Ron with a dry smile.

We watched in awe as Serges reduced the tree to manageable-sized pieces of wood, and I could have sworn that I saw Kevin lick his lips. Soon the tree was firewood. I felt guilty. Had we done something environmentally wrong? Would it be OK as long as we planted another? And who adjudicated on these issues anyway? I decided it best to adopt a local approach to the matter, and so I shrugged my biggest shrug and sat down to drink Serges’s coffee for him.

Once the tree was history, Serges wasted no time in getting on with excavating the hole. His approach was brutal. He used his machine like a ruthless general might use an army. Any obstacle was removed or destroyed. No prisoners were taken. In, out, in, out, went the huge claw of his mechanical digger, and soon a huge pile of mud was building up on the boundary with my far neighbour.

“You’d better have a word with next door about that,” said Ron. “It’s not exactly going to look pretty by the time Serges has finished.”

“Yes, you’re right,” I replied. “His car’s there now. I might pop round in a minute.”

“And what do you want to do about those dead pine trees?”

Oh dear. Another major decision was looming. Two tall trees had died during the previous summer’s drought. Dead though they were, they offered valuable privacy from the outside world. Without them, this particular part of my garden—the pool section—would be visible from the village road. Unusually, I became bestowed with a sense of both authority and clarity.

“Let’s leave them,” I said. “We can always cut them down a bit, or remove them completely at a later date.”

“Righto,” said Ron.

§

I’d only spoken to my neighbour Bruno once before. I’d been told that he was a private man who worked terribly hard running a mountain restaurant, and he had no time or inclination to participate in village events like the dinners or fetes. When he was lucky enough to get some time off, he liked to spend it with his wife and children. All I’d managed thus far was a short and genial exchange with him when I’d driven past once and had seen him getting into his car. We’d chatted briefly and established a positive neighbourly relationship, and so I was anxious not to upset that now with the creation of the huge and unattractive pile of mud on his borders. Bruno was organising things in his garage as I walked down his drive to explain. He greeted me warmly and offered up some reassuring small talk about the weather, possibly in deference to my Englishness. He proceeded to quiz me about the pool and when I explained about the imminent mound of soil he said that he had no problem whatsoever with it, and he wished me luck. I thanked him and strolled back to my place, in splendid spirits, largely as a result of this highly successful conversation.

The feeling was short-lived, however, as I was immediately intercepted by Ron who pointed towards the boundary of my land. It looked very exposed somehow. Serges was still spinning around in the cab of his digger, its claw feverishly pounding this way and that.

“There’s something missing,” I said.

“Yes,” said a sheepish Ron. “The pines. I’m afraid Serges took an executive decision.”

“What?”

“Serges seemed to decide they were dead and that they needed to be removed.”

“So he just rammed them?”

“Yes.”

“Without asking?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you stop him?”

“What was I supposed to do? Throw myself in front of the digger?”

“Well, kind of, yes.”

“How can you kind of run in the way of a digger?”

“I don’t know. You improvise.”

“Yes, you improvise, and you get knocked over by a digger.”

Ron was right, of course. There was nothing he could have done other than wave his arms, which no doubt he had done. I’d already seen that Serges, when in full ‘digger mode’, was not the sort of chap who pays a good deal of attention to external influences such as arms. Even as we spoke he was decimating further parts of the garden.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do,” I offered with yet another shrug. “Once a tree has been uprooted, that’s pretty much the final word on the matter.”

“Yes,” said Ron. “Especially when it’s dead already.”

A fair point, I suppose.

“Some of our privacy has gone,” I announced. “Our bungling attempts to build a pool will just have to be visible to anyone who drives or walks by.”

“Should be good for village morale.”

The rest of the excavation went off largely without incident. Ron continued to oversee proceedings with an occasional authoritative thumbs-up or pointy gesture, and he and Serges continued to bond in spite of being locked into a world of improvised sign language. At 3pm Serges shook my hand and headed off home, seemingly content with his day of destruction. He was leaving us with a massive hole, two huge mounds of mud and a large pile of ex-trees.

§

That night Kevin, Nic and I decided to celebrate the miracle of Serges’s hole. Where else but with a trip to Lourdes? Up until 1858 Lourdes had been nothing more than a modest town of about 4,000 inhabitants with a castle and a few hostelries catering for mountaineers and those in search of the healing waters at nearby spas. However, all that changed—when a fourteen-year-old girl called Bernadette went collecting firewood in a cave. She heard a sound like a gust of wind and saw the ghost of another young girl, surrounded by a shaft of light. People subsequently decided that this was an apparition of the young Virgin Mary. Well, of course it was. Who else could it have been?

Bernadette continued to see this apparition on a fairly regular basis over the next six months, in spite of her parents trying her with a whole host of different breakfast cereals. On her ninth sighting, the apparition lady (or Mary, as we’ll call her henceforth) instructed Bernadette to dig a hole in the ground and bathe in it (an instruction you might more commonly expect from a middle-aged male apparition). Mary also instructed Bernadette to tell the local pastor to have a chapel built in honour of her appearances there. The pastor, for some strange reason, was reluctant. Perhaps it was because there had been nothing in his ecclesiastical training telling him to accept building instructions from fourteen-year-old girls with vivid imaginations. Anyway, he accused Bernadette of lying, and demanded proof—which Mary duly provided at the next meeting by telling Bernadette, “
Que soy era Immaculado Conception
”, which means, “She’s not lying, guv, honest.”

Naturally enough this was accepted as concrete proof and in 1862 Bernadette’s apparitions were officially declared authentic and Lourdes rapidly became one of the world’s leading pilgrimage sites. It has five million visitors every year and it has around 270 hotels, the second greatest number in France—one of which catered for an Irish clientele, with my neighbour Mary tinkling the ivories of an evening.

Jesus is well known for his ministry in Judea in which he preached forgiveness, love and good will to all men. However, few are aware that he secretly hoped one of the future spin-offs of his teachings would be that a small French town in the foothills of the Pyrenees would grow large and profitable, primarily sustained by sales of trinkets of his mum in various virtuous and heavenly poses. The good people of Lourdes have not let him down in this regard. As Kevin, Nic and I drove through the town centre in search of an elusive parking space, we noted that every other building seemed to be a gift shop, full to the brim with cheap souvenirs of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by a vast miscellany of religious iconography. Jesus would have been proud.

And then there are the miracles. Every day sick people are brought to Lourdes in their thousands, largely because many have claimed to have received miracle cures here.

“The biggest miracle of Lourdes seems to me to be that so many people have bought into it,” I said to the others as we left the car and set off on a brief sightseeing tour of the town.

“That’s a bit cynical,” said Kevin. “Don’t knock it if it works. Some people end up cured.”

“That’s more likely to be them healing themselves by believing they’re going to get better rather than as a result of any miracle occurring.”

“What does it matter if they end up getting better?”

“I suppose it doesn’t,” I replied, sceptically. “But there must be a lot of disappointed people who leave here in the same wheelchair they came in. It does look to me as if the primary aim is tourism and profit—over and above any overwhelming drive to do good.”

“You don’t know that.”

Kevin was right. I didn’t know that. And today we didn’t have time to find out. The agenda was clear and simple and time was short: quick sightseeing tour and then off to listen to Mary play in her hotel. The obvious first stop was the extravagant Basilique du Rosaire et de 1’Immaculee Conception—the big church which dominates the town. It’s very beautiful if you like big, brash Romano-Byzantine and neo-Gothic architecture, and if you don’t, it isn’t. We wandered silently around its grand environs, and then past the entrance to the Grotte de Massabielle (the site of Bernadette’s visions). Up to this day I had never seen so many nuns. They came in all shapes and sizes. The only things they had in common were uncolourful clothing and a pallid complexion. I guess that sunbathing doesn’t feature as one of a nun’s daily activities. I’ve certainly never seen a nun in a swimsuit (except in 1985 on the video my mate Geoff showed me—and I don’t think she was a real nun anyway).

“Oh Sister Josephine,” I sang, much to Kevin and Nic’s surprise, “what a very funny nun you are.”

“What?” said Nic.

“It’s a song. By Jake Thackray. He used to sing it on the telly when I was a kid.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” said Kevin.

“It was about a criminal on the run who disguised himself as a nun to escape capture,” I continued. “And all the other nuns thought he—or she—was great.”

“That’s the one,” said Kevin. “They don’t write songs like they used to.”

“
Trees, Holes and Pilgrims
’ Thanks goodness for that,” said Nic, dryly.

§

The hotel had big glass doors and we could see into the lounge bar from the street. It looked more crowded and rowdier than I had expected.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” said Nic.

“They don’t look like a bunch of pilgrims to me,” said Kevin.

“Nor to me,” I said. “Although, come to think of it, I’ve never seen a bunch of pilgrims before, so I wouldn’t know what they look like.”

“I can see a piano,” said Nic. “But there’s no lady playing it.”