Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

"Don't need an architect," he said, "I know exactly what I want." He would. "Why should I pay him an arm and a leg for a couple of drawings?" There was no helping him. He knew best. I asked him when he was going back to England. "This evening," he said, and then guided me through the next hectic pages of his Filofax: a client meeting on Monday, three days in New York, a sales conference in Milton Keynes. He reeled it off with the mock weariness of the indispensable executive, and he was welcome to every second of it. "Anyway," he said, "I'll keep in touch. I won't finalize on the house for a week or two, but I'll let you know as soon as I've inked it."

My wife and I sat by the pool and wondered, not for the first time, why we both found it so difficult to get rid of thick-skinned and ungracious people. More of them would be coming down during the summer, baying for food and drink and a bedroom, for days of swimming and lifts to the airport. We didn't think of ourselves as antisocial or reclusive, but our brief experience with the thrustful and dynamic Tony had been enough to remind us that the next few months would require firmness and ingenuity. And an answering machine.

The approach of summer had obviously been on Massot's mind as well, because when I saw him a few days later in the forest he was busy adding a further refinement to his anticamper defenses. Under the signs he had nailed up saying PRIVÉ! he was fixing a second series of unwelcoming messages, short but sinister: Attention! Vipères! It was the perfect deterrent-full of menace, but without the need for visible proof that is the great drawback of other discouragements such as guard dogs, electrified fences, and patrols armed with submachine guns. Even the most resolute camper would think twice before tucking himself up in a sleeping bag which might have one of the local residents coiled at the bottom. I asked Massot if there really were vipers in the Lubéron, and he shook his head at yet another example of the ignorance of foreigners.

"Eh oui," he said, "not big"-he held his hands up, about twelve inches apart-"but if you're bitten you need to get to a doctor within forty-five minutes, or else…" He pulled a dreadful face, head to one side, tongue lolling from the side of his mouth, "They say that when a viper bites a man, the man dies. But when a viper bites a woman"-he leaned forward and waggled his eyebrows-"the viper dies." He snorted with amusement and offered me one of his fat yellow cigarettes. "Don't ever go walking without a good pair of boots."

The Lubéron viper, according to Professor Massot, will normally avoid humans, and will attack only if provoked. When this happens, Massot's advice was to run in zigzags, and preferably uphill, because an enraged viper can sprint-in short, straight bursts on level ground-as fast as a running man. I looked nervously around me, and Massot laughed. "Of course, you can always try the peasant's trick: Catch it behind the head and squeeze until its mouth is wide open. Spit hard into the mouth and plok!- he's dead." He spat in demonstration, hitting one of the dogs on the head. "But best of all," said Massot, "is to take a woman with you. They can't run as fast as men, and the viper will catch them first." He went home to his breakfast leaving me to pick my way cautiously through the forest and practice my spitting.

EASTER WEEKEND arrived, and our cherry trees-about thirty of them-blossomed in unison. From the road, the house looked as if it were floating on a pink-and-white sea, and motorists were stopping to take photographs or walking tentatively up the drive until barking from the dogs turned them back. One group, more adventurous than the rest, drove up to the house in a car with Swiss plates and parked on the roadside. I went to see what they wanted.

"We will picnic here," the driver told me.

"I'm sorry, it's a private house."

"No, no," he said, waving a map at me, "this is the Lubéron."

"No, no," I said, "that's the Lubéron," and pointed to the mountains.

"But I can't take my car up there ."

Eventually he drove off, puffing with Swiss indignation and leaving deep wheel marks in the grass we were trying to turn into a lawn. The tourist season had begun.

Up in the village on Easter Sunday, the small parking area was full, and not one of the cars had local plates. The visitors explored the narrow streets, looking curiously into people's houses and posing for photographs in front of the church. The young man who spends all day sitting on a doorstep next to the épicerie was asking everyone who passed for ten francs to make a phone call and taking the proceeds into the café.

The Café du Progrès has made a consistent and successful effort to avoid being picturesque. It is an interior decorator's nightmare, with tables and chairs that wobble and don't match, gloomy paintwork, and a lavatory that splutters and gurgles often and noisily next to a shabby ice-cream cabinet. The proprietor is gruff, and his dogs are indescribably matted. There is, however, a long and spectacular view from the glassed-in terrace next to the lavatory, and it's a good place to have a beer and watch the play of light on the hills and villages that stretch away toward the Basses-Alpes. A hand-lettered notice warns you not to throw cigarette ends out of the window, following complaints from the clientele of the open-air restaurant below, but if you observe this rule you will be left undisturbed. The regulars stay at the bar; the terrasse is for tourists, and on Easter Sunday it was crowded.

There were the Dutch, wholesome in their hiking boots and backpacks; the Germans, armed with Leicas and heavy costume jewelery; the Parisians, disdainful and smart, inspecting their glasses carefully for germs; an Englishman in sandals and an open-necked striped business shirt, working out his holiday finances on a pocket calculator while his wife wrote postcards to neighbors in Surrey. The dogs nosed among the tables looking for sugar lumps, causing the hygiene-conscious Parisians to shrink away. An Yves Montand song on the radio fought a losing battle with the sanitary sound effects, and empty pastis glasses were banged on the bar as the locals started to drift off toward home and lunch.

Outside the café, three cars had converged and were growling at one another. If one of them had reversed ten yards, they could all have passed, but a French driver considers it a moral defeat to give way, just as he feels a moral obligation to park wherever he can cause maximum inconvenience and to overtake on a blind bend. They say that Italians are dangerous drivers, but for truly lethal insanity I would back a Frenchman hurtling down the N100, late and hungry, against all comers.

I drove back from the village and just missed the first accident of the season. An old white Peugeot had gone backwards into a wooden telegraph pole at the bottom of the drive with sufficient force to snap the pole in two. There was no other car to be seen, and the road was dry and dead straight. It was difficult to work out how the back of the car and the pole had contrived to meet with such force. A young man was standing in the middle of the road, scratching his head. He grinned as I pulled up.

I asked him if he was hurt. "I'm fine," he said, "but I think the car is foutu ." I looked at the telegraph pole, which was bent over the car, kept from falling by the sagging phone line. That also was foutu.

"We must hurry," said the young man. "Nobody must know." He put a finger to his lips. "Can you give me a lift home? It's just up the road. I need the tractor." He got into the car, and the cause of the accident became clear; he smelled as though he had been marinated in Ricard. He explained that the car had to be removed with speed and secrecy. If the post office found that he had attacked one of their poles they would make him pay for it. "Nobody must know," he repeated, and hiccupped once or twice for emphasis.