Amour Provence (20 page)

Auri watched as the tractor proceeded down the edge of the vineyard.

“He's trying to kill that tree out of spite,” said Jeannot.

At the end of the row, Dombasle turned around and on his way back again jerked the tractor toward the tree. When the grinding noise came close, Jeannot threw open the window and hollered, “Manu! Are you blind? Watch where you're going!” Dombasle lifted his arm in an insulting manner and Jeannot muttered a curse. The tractor veered and regained its position in between the vines.

“Your mother's going to be furious if she sees what he's been up to,” his father said.

Auri looked out at Dombasle, hunched atop his big machine. He had a head like a square peg covered in short, feltlike hair. Auri grudgingly admired the man, thinking if he himself were Manu Dombasle he might do the same, slam that peach tree each time just to let his dad know who was boss. He smiled and thought,
Allez, Manu!

Auri skipped upstairs and grabbed the rest of his books. He wasn't a good student, but he had to do the minimum. His mother got upset when his grades were poor and he didn't like making her unhappy. When Auri left school he'd get a real job, something that paid a weekly salary so he
could have a regular life like everybody else and his mother wouldn't have to buy her clothes out of bins.

Outside, the wind made the grape leaves flip and twist on their dry stems. The mistral blew colder now, but the sky was still blue. A few elongated clouds skimmed quickly by. The good thing about the mistral was that it pushed away rain and gray and kept the sky clear. Auri heard the clink of the espresso cup on the zinc-topped table as his father remained by himself inside. The afternoon seemed to have slowed down. Maybe his father was reading. He read a great deal at night, but generally not during the day.

Then a drill began its insect hum and in a moment Auri heard the rough pounding of the hammer making a trench in the plaster and stone so his father could run the electric wires up the walls. It wasn't easy work. Those old walls were strong and made of hard stone, not like the thin plasterboard in the new villas where most of his friends lived.

Auri tried to concentrate on his homework, but the hammering made his muscles tense. He stood up and slugged his fists into the air in front of him. When the hammer stopped, Auri sat back down. He fondled the pencil that he'd sharpened into a point with his penknife. At least the red Victorinox his father had given him the year before was good for something. Jeannot had said that a man could always make use of a well-made knife, and he'd felt Auri was old enough to have a fine one.

The infernal buzz of the drill mounted to a scream as once again his father pressed the reinforced steel bit into the stone. Auri knew Jeannot didn't like making holes in the old stones. He had too much respect for them. They should be
left as they were, like he'd left the chevalier buried in the garden under his rude gravestone. Sacred stone. And then, the high, straining drill began its chorus anew. Auri covered his ears until he heard the unexpected clatter of the heavy tool crashing down against the cement floor. He imagined it broken, shattered on the hard surface. His father would be upset if it was damaged. Auri didn't run to help the way he would have just a year ago. He sat there, hands clenched together like a vise, not moving.

And then came a groaning cry from a deep unrecognizable voice, a voice as confusing as Auri's own strange peeps and croaks that changed every time he spoke. Perhaps his father had been on the ladder and fallen. Or maybe he'd driven the drill bit right through his hand. The scream resounded again, agonizing, rebelling against pain, inchoate, sending Auri to his feet. He meant to walk calmly, but instead he sprang through the doorway.

Inside, he found Jeannot on the floor, body twisted. His circular glasses lay nearby, the lenses cracked. And his father's wide blue eyes, set off by his reddened face, looked at him with horror. He'd ripped his own shirt open and one fist beat at the flesh of his breast in anguished, leaden strokes.

Auri hurled himself down next to his father on the hard floor. “
Papa! Papa!
What is it?” But his father only made a round O with his mouth as if he was trying to speak, trying to breathe, but couldn't. And then Auri heard the crunch of tires. It would be his mother with his little sister, Ada. He didn't even feel the ground as he flew through the room out into the garden and then beyond to their narrow, stony drive.
As soon as his mother saw his face she said, “Darling! What's happened?” And Auri could only point.

There was nothing to be done. The firemen had come right away with their tanks of oxygen and boxes of emergency equipment used to start up a heart again. The ambulance took Jeannot to the hospital anyway, but any effort at resuscitation was useless.

And then they brought his father's body home. His grandparents helped Auri's mother wash and dress him and lay him out on the bed upstairs in the room whose window faced east. For five days his father lay there. Everyone in the village came to pay their respects and to say how sorry they were. Some mounted the staircase to gaze at their lost friend. “It looks like he's sleeping,” they kept repeating. “It doesn't seem possible.”

Auri stayed downstairs. He'd once glimpsed the body of a friend's grandmother laid out on a bier with a little frill framing her face so her head looked like some special dried fruit wrapped in a doily. There had been dry ice beneath to keep the body chilled, as it had been summertime. The thought of seeing anything like that or even being in the vicinity of his father's corpse was unbearable to Auri. He stayed outside until it was pitch-dark, and when he found himself nodding, he slept on a cot in his unfinished bedroom so his mother could have his bed upstairs. He did his best not to imagine his father laid out in his parents' room, his father who was always up on ladders or heaving long trays of molded pots into the fiery kiln, or pulling on his
leather jacket so he could roar off on his motorcycle into the high reaches of the forest. Auri didn't want to think about Jeannot at all; the memory of his father belonged under an immense stone like the one that covered the chevalier.

Neither his grandfather Louis nor his grandmother Marie Rose cried, at least not that Auri saw. They seemed wedged together, each holding the other's forearms as if about to do a dance in tandem. “Jeannot looks so beautiful!” they said to each other when they came downstairs after visiting the body of their son, a thing that they did several times a day. They were like automatons responding to a clockwork spring, up and down the staircase.

“You should say good-bye to your father,” his grandfather said. Auri shook his head, wishing he would never have to enter the house again.

“They're strong, your old folk,” said Jeannot's friend Thierry when he came. Standing in the garden, he didn't tell Auri any jokes, though Auri wished he would. A good filthy joke might just do the trick. That would be the way to handle this. Instead, Thierry paced, smoking cigarette after cigarette, crushing them into a tin lid that had been left on the outdoor table. After a while, he went into a corner of the garden, pushed the wide blocks of his palms into his eye sockets, and stood alone. Finally, he came back and sat down next to Auri.

“Your father was unique, you know? That's the least of it. I never imagined living my life without Jeannot around. It's impossible.” Auri tried not to think as Thierry went on. “Jeannot lived the way he wanted to. Most of us don't quite manage that.”

“I thought you were down in Marseille,” Auri said, hoping not to hear any more.

“I canceled the show.”

“The gallery must be angry.”

“They'll live.”

After that, Thierry came back every day to exchange a few words with Mathilde and the rest of the family, but there was really nothing he could say or do.

When he could no longer keep his eyes open, Auri went into his new room. The wires that his father had inserted into the fissures looked like little black rivers running nowhere. There was no way he would ever go upstairs again, he told himself. Not to the room that faced east, not to the dancing gods painted on the ocher tiles, not to see his father who no longer existed, not anywhere.

He spent the days of mourning outside at the plank table. His cousin Cécile came every afternoon. She brought cards and games and they played them together. Cécile barely spoke, which suited Auri, who had no inclination for discussion of any sort. His mother, Mathilde, a pale shadow buffeted by the waves of people that took her back and forth from house to garden and up and down the staircase, was gone from him. And his sister, Ada, sent to a friend's house in order to spare her, made no appearance at all.

After three days, the mistral stopped blowing and the sky turned gray. That evening, his father's friend Didier Falque came by clutching his knitted cap. “I'm sorry, I just heard,” he said to Auri. Didier bowed to Auri's mother and put his large hand on her shoulder, but he seemed too shocked to kiss her cheeks the way others did or say a word of condolence.
He walked back to the table, where Cécile was dealing out cards, and looked down at the two young people with a blank expression, as if he knew neither of them. Auri looked up. He knew Didier had recently had some sort of trouble, there had been a scandal, but his father had never explained anything about it except to say that Didier had been unjustly accused. Auri knew that his father's friend wouldn't say the same silly phrases that most did. He certainly couldn't stand to hear any more empty words. A manly person like Didier probably wouldn't know what to say or even what to feel. Auri thought it would be good to be that way.

A thin moon shaped like a scythe rose in the darkening sky, bringing the evening full upon them. Auri's grandfather came out from the house with a bottle of wine. He opened it on the table where Auri and Cécile sat and poured a glass. He held it out to Didier, who took it without a word and stood waiting for him to pour another, or perhaps say something. But Louis simply stood there, hands by his side, looking off into the deepening night. There was no one else to pour for because all the other visitors were inside. Didier finally looked down at the glass in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. Auri's grandfather nodded and wandered back inside the house.

Didier stood there still as the night. Cécile had stopped dealing the cards. And then, without taking a sip from his wineglass, he leaned over Aurélien.

“Those vines,” he said, moving his glass to indicate the property outside the walls of the enclosed garden. “Your father talked to me about them.”

Auri stood, pleased that he towered over Didier Falque, even though the man had forearms that bulged formidably beneath his jacket. He excused himself to his cousin Cécile and motioned with his head for Didier to follow.

As they reached the gate Didier said, “I know Jeannot wanted no sale of land. But there's still money in the grapes. If I rent them from you, it will bring in a few hundred a year. Your father would have wanted you to have that.”

Later, Auri told his mother about the offer, explaining that it wouldn't be a sale. Didier Falque would simply be paying for use of their vineyards.

In the months that followed, though Auri felt he didn't study any harder, he spent long hours poring over his books to keep other thoughts away, and his grades improved. Nothing was completed in his downstairs room at home, but he moved in. He ran an extension cord from the kitchen so he could have a lamp, and at night he left the door open so the heat from the wood stove could drift in as it might. When he lay down in his cot, his long legs felt heavy as metal rails and even his rib cage was cumbersome, so that when he was on his back he could hardly breathe and had to curl into a ball like a baby to get any rest. His mother busied herself with Ada's comings and goings. When she tried to comfort him, he gently nudged her away. But there was a little money now. His father surprised them by having some insurance, and his studio and large kiln with its spiraling chimney down by the river sold for a good sum to a young potter who had been looking for a place of her own.