2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (32 page)

I tried not to be self-conscious as I moved slowly to the bar, feeling a little like the bad guy in a scene from a Western. The square room was dotted with about eight tables and dominated by a large staircase at the back with a sign hanging over it pointing down to
les toilettes
. Further along the bar were men in grubby work clothes drinking brightly coloured spirits. Their drinks looked lethal. The barman, who was strong, greasy-haired and deeply tanned, cocked his head in preparation for my order.

“
Une biere, s’il vous plait
,” I said.

The barman nodded and the murmurs increased in volume. It was almost as if each group at every table was discussing my choice of drink:

“Did you hear that?”

“He’s gone for a beer.”

“I’d expected as much.”

“What’s wrong with our wine?”

The barman passed me my beer with a nod and I turned to see where I could sit. As I did so, I was confronted by a sea of staring faces, all quickly darting their eyes away in the vain hope of keeping up the pretence that I was of no interest. I sat at the only empty table in the place, took out my screenplay and began reading. Or rather, pretending to read. I was too fascinated by everything that was going on all around me to focus properly. And then it occurred to me how odd the music was. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before because it was loud enough, but I guess my senses were preoccupied with absorbing the new environment. Weirdly, it was marching brass band music, and it seemed distincdy Germanic. It was music that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bar full of men in lederhosen. I strained my ears for the sound of an accordion somewhere in the musical mix, but there was nothing. This was all very un-French. I started to wonder if I’d walked in on the Bigourdian division of the ‘Third Reich Appreciation Society’.

Suddenly a hush similar to the one that had greeted me upon my arrival descended over the room as a large bearded man emerged from the toilets downstairs and walked slowly to the bar. As he did so, the barman turned around, picked up a cassette and proceeded to change the music. French accordion now replaced the Germanic marching band and everything reverted to what you might expect in a French bar.

What had just happened? I ruminated on the various possibilities as I slowly made headway through my beer. Was this man so important that he demanded theme music whenever he moved anywhere? No, that couldn’t be. I decided that it must have been that he suffered from a form of constipation meaning he could only go if his toilet visits were accompanied by the sounds of a loud Tyrolean marching band. The proprietor of this joint certainly took care of his regulars. (Or not so regulars, in this case.)

Just as I was deciding whether to stay for a second beer, or call it a night before I was inducted into some strange cult, I was approached by one of the men who had been standing at the bar and indulging in the spirit-drinking session.

“You? You are English?” he demanded.

“Yes, I am.”

“
Ah bon
. Do you want to buy a house? I have a house to sell in Montauban. You buy it?”

“I have a house here already, thank you.”

The man shrugged and moved off, and rejoined his pals wearing a kind of ‘well, I tried, didn’t I?” expression. I wondered how long it would take him to sell his property if this was his sole method of marketing it. Waiting till someone English came into the bar and then confronting them brusquely might save on agent’s commission, certainly, but it might require more than a healthy dollop of good luck too.

Deciding that this might not necessarily be the place to make new and lasting friendships, I took a final swig of my beer and started to move towards the door. I was stopped by a firm hand on my shoulder, and I turned round to see an unambiguously drunk man before me, finger raised in anticipation of delivering something of great import.

“
Moi, j’suis couvreur
” he said. “
Vous avez b’soin d’un couvreur chez vous?
”

This translates as: “Me, I’m a roofer. Do you need a roofer at your gaff?”

I tried to think of a way of letting him down gently.

“
Non, merci
,” I said, just before I closed the door to the bar behind me.

OK, so I failed on the ‘letting him down gently’ front.

As I drove home I began to worry whether I could ever fully assimilate myself into this society. OK, perhaps the Bar des Sports hadn’t been the best choice that I could have made for the evening, but the truth was that there weren’t that many options. Most of the other places I’d regularly driven past had always been empty by 9pm. And what if I did manage to make the acquaintance of a few of the locals? What would we talk about? I wasn’t great on chatting about crop rotation, pigeon shooting, or the best way to slaughter a pig.

Perhaps that was why Roger had been so insistent that I should find myself
une petite Anglaise
. Maybe I’d have to call him’wise old Roger’ from now on.

§

In the morning the house performed well in its new role as ‘workplace’. By setting up my laptop close to the window, lifting my head offered me a glimpse of the mountains, and so whenever the creative muse drifted beyond reach, I was able to look out of the window and receive an inspirational tonic from the beauty that lay on the horizon.

The cooler weather and the absence of Ron meant that
une sieste
was no longer a temptation after lunch. Instead I decided I would take some exercise. In fact, in preparation for the arrival of my own swimming pool (surely to be completed some time in the next decade), I chose the option of a dip in the local baths. By and large I have noticed that French towns are well served with sporting facilities, and Bagneres-de-Bigorre is no exception. Every time I drove into town I passed the big municipal swimming pool on my left-hand side, and today was the day when I would profit from the healthy exercise that it offered within.

I am used to swimming pools being places where notices abound telling you what not to do, usually in a needlessly authoritarian manner. I can remember having been to pools in Britain and been confronted with an array of officious signs:

NO DIVING

NO RUNNING

NO BOMBING

NO DUCKING

NO PETTING

The only one missing is the one that says:

NO ENJOYING YOURSELVES.

Having changed into my swimming shorts and passed under the compulsory shower (always an irritation that, as it denies you the treat of your plunge into the pool being your first taste of the refreshing water), I made my way over to the deep end and started to contemplate whether I should dive in or not. I couldn’t see any NO DIVING signs, and even if there was one around somewhere I could claim that I hadn’t understood it if I was soundly admonished by the humourless and bored lifeguard. (Lifeguards are like this the world over. It’s mandatory.)

Just as I was about to arch my body into a beautiful dive, a piercing whistle penetrated the atmosphere and I looked up to see two lifeguard types rushing towards me as if I was some kind of terrorist.

“
Non! Non! Non, non, non, non!
” one of them shouted.

A confused conversation followed in which I tried to figure out what on earth I could be doing to cause such excitement. There was a lot of animated pointing going on, firstly at my swimming shorts and then at their own swimwear. They were wearing those ridiculously skimpy tight trunks traditionally worn by men on beaches who believe they are irresistible to women, and who try to chat up every female they see. The pointing continued but I still couldn’t understand what message these two men were trying to communicate. Did they want me to swap costumes with them?Were these men representatives of an ofishoot of the Bigourdian Third Reich Appreciation Society explaining another of their rituals? Or had everyone gone slightly mad in this part of the world since I’d last been over?

“
Il est interdit!
” said the taller of the two men, pointing to my surf shorts.

Interdit
meant ‘forbidden’. Surely they couldn’t be telling me that my choice of swimwear was illegal. We weren’t in some kind of rogue police state overseen by an eccentric dictator—we were in Bagneres-de-Bigorre. Surely it wasn’t compulsory for male swimmers to wear the obscene skimpy trunks being modelled by the two men before me?

“
Il fautles changer
,” said the second man.

But it was true. They were actually insisting that unless I changed there would be no swim for me. For some reason (which escapes me to this day), in the swimming pool in Bagneres you have to wear skimpy trunks. Nothing else is permitted. No disgusting swimming shorts like the ones I was wearing—never mind that they’d been specifically made for swimming. This was the rule and the French like their rules, and they are extremely good at making sure they’re observed. There is no French translation for the sentence: “Well, you’re here now, you may as well have a swim—but don’t forget to wear the right trunks next time.”

Unbelievably, I had to leave the pool. In fact, I was chaperoned out like some kind of criminal. My offence had been to wear a swimsuit that didn’t reveal my tackle to the small children who were dotted around the pool. I’d been well out of order. It was clear that if I wanted to swim here I would have to go out and purchase some skimpy pervy trunks, the likes of which would possibly be considered too risque for public pools in England. Oh well—
vive la difference
.

Rather chastened by this experience, I returned home and opted for a form of exercise less likely to cause such controversy. A walk around the village. It was something I’d meant to do a lot more than I had, and despite the fact that it sounded like a rather la⁄y Sunday afternoon activity, the gradients involved made it a legitimate aerobic exercise, provided you kept up a decent pace.

The trouble was, as I soon discovered, your ability to keep up a ‘decent pace’ is directly proportionate to how many people you know in the village. Yes, it may have been a weekday afternoon, but for a lot of the villagers work takes place in the fields that surround their houses, so there was a constant danger of ‘decent-pace disruption’ for the keen aerobic walker like me.

The first interruption came from Alain, the man who in some ways I could hold responsible for the large hole that now filled my garden.

“But you are English! You must have a pool!” he’d said all those months ago, slapping me firmly on the back as he’d done so.

I hadn’t seen Alain as much as I would have liked, the problem being that he lived the other side of the village and this meant that our paths didn’t cross enough. Although we lived half a mile from each other, I tended only to see him at village events, because when he returned home from work or trips to the shops he took the right fork down the hill away from my house, and consequently we never got the opportunity to flag each other down and stop and chat.

Alain was loading stuff into the boot of his car as I reached his house, slightly out of breath from the long climb that had preceded it.

“Ah, Tony! How are you?” he said, before marching up to me, shaking my hand and providing me with the now trademark slap on the back.

I explained that all was well with me and that I was over here alone on a trip to get some writing done.

“You know that you are always welcome to spend time with us—always,” he said with a big grin. “Now, about your swimming pool. Last week I saw that it is not yet finished. Why is this?”

“Problems with workers.”

“That is because you were using English.”

“There was no one available here.”

“Tssk.”

Alain threw his head back as if to suggest that this was no excuse. Even though it was. As excuses go, it was about as good as they get. His boot now fully packed, Alain jumped into his car and bade me goodbye with a twirly hand gesture out of the window.

I walked on past
la mairie
until I found myself approaching Andre’s house. Since the rhythm of my aerobic workout had already been broken, I was rather hoping that I’d bump into the man who had rapidly become my favourite elderly French farmer. (He wasn’t up against a whole heap of opposition.) As I passed his exhibition piece of a yard, busding as ever with babbling geese, clucking hens and barking dogs, I looked in to see if I could locate the man himself. There was no sign of him until a face appeared at one of the windows in the L-shaped building that bordered the yard. I could see his familiar face chewing on a piece of bread. He lifted a finger and beckoned me towards him. I felt a little buzz of excitement because it was looking like I was going to be invited into his home. I’d heard that Andre still lived much as his forefathers had done, making only a cursory nod to the innovations of the current generation. It seemed that any moment I was going to have a glimpse of what French rural life might have been like three-quarters of a century ago.

“
Bonjour, Tony
” he said, as he appeared at his door. “
Entre!
”

I walked into another world. Despite his house being substantial in size, Andre only lived in two rooms—his bedroom, and the one I was now in. I guess a modern-day estate agent would call it a kitchen⁄diner, but it was more of a kitchen⁄living room. It was dark and extremely bare. There were no tiles on the floor, just cold concrete. The crumbly walls were dimly lit by the inadequate shafts of light that fought their way through the insubstantial and grubby window. A table and chairs filled the centre of the room, surrounded by an old wood-burning stove, an antique wooden sideboard and an ancient fridge on which was perched an old black and white TV. The aerial that was balanced on top of it was a prototype that resembled a deer’s antlers. It was tied to hooks on the low ceiling by two pieces of string. (Andre told me later that he’d done this because he’d grown tired of it falling off as he walked past.)

Andre offered me a Ricard and apologised for the fact that he was finishing off his chicken stew. I watched him chatter away as he dipped his bread into his bachelor fare. His strong accent and occasional lapse into Occitan meant that I was grasping only about 75 per cent of what he said, but this was a distinct improvement on what I’d been able to grasp when I’d spoken with him earlier in the year. My ear was clearly beginning to adapt and attune itself to the alien sounds of the region. I asked Andre if the chicken he was now eating was one of his own.