Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

The smudged photocopy told the story of a small boy who was waiting to go to America for a major operation, and who needed constant transfusions to keep him alive until the hospital could accept him. "Venez nombreux et vite," said the note. The blood unit would be at the village hall in Gordes at eight the next morning.

When we arrived at 8:30 the hall was already crowded. A dozen beds were arranged along the wall, all occupied, and from the row of upturned feet we could see that a good cross-section of the local population had turned out, easily identified by their footwear: sandals and espadrilles for the shopkeepers, high heels for the young matrons, canvas ankle boots for the peasants, and carpet slippers for their wives. The elder women kept a firm grip on their shopping baskets with one hand while they clenched and unclenched the other fist to speed the flow of blood into the plastic bags, and there was considerable debate about whose contribution was the darkest, richest, and most nourishing.

We lined up for a blood test behind a thick-set old man with a florid nose, a frayed cap, and overalls, who watched with amusement as the nurse made unsuccessful attempts to prick the toughened skin of his thumb.

"Do you want me to fetch the butcher?" he asked. She jabbed once more, harder. "Merde." A swelling drop of blood appeared, and the nurse transferred it neatly into a small tube, added some liquid, and shook the mixture vigorously. She looked up from the tube with a disapproving expression.

"How did you come here?" she asked the old man.

He stopped sucking his thumb. "Bicycle," he said, "all the way from Les Imberts."

The nurse sniffed. "It astonishes me that you didn't fall off." She looked at the tube again. "You're technically drunk."

"Impossible," said the old man. "I may have had a little red wine with breakfast, comme d'habitude, but that's nothing. And furthermore," he said, wagging his bloodstained thumb under her nose, "a measure of alcohol enriches the corpuscles."

The nurse was not convinced. She sent the old man away to have a second breakfast, this time with coffee, and told him to come back at the end of the morning. He lumbered off grumbling, holding the wounded thumb before him like a flag of battle.

We were pricked, pronounced sober, and shown to our beds. Our veins were plumbed into the plastic bags. We clenched and unclenched dutifully. The hall was noisy and good-humored, and people who would normally pass one another on the street without acknowledgment were suddenly friendly, in the way that often happens when strangers are united in their performance of a good deed. Or it might have had something to do with the bar at the end of the room.

In England, the reward for a bagful of blood is a cup of tea and a biscuit. But here, after being disconnected from our tubes, we were shown to a long table manned by volunteer waiters. What would we like? Coffee, chocolate, croissants, brioches, sandwiches of ham or garlic sausage, mugs of red or rosé wine? Eat up! Drink up! Replace those corpuscles! The stomach must be served! A young male nurse was hard at work with a corkscrew, and the supervising doctor in his long white coat wished us all bon appétit. If the steadily growing pile of empty bottles behind the bar was anything to go by, the appeal for blood was an undoubted success, both clinically and socially.

Some time later, we received through the post our copy of Le Globule, the official magazine for the blood donors. Hundreds of liters had been collected that morning in Gordes, but the other statistic that interested me-the number of liters that had been drunk-was nowhere to be found, a tribute to medical discretion.

OUR FRIEND the London lawyer, a man steeped in English reserve, was watching what he called the antics of the frogs from the Fin de Siècle café in Cavaillon. It was market day, and the pavement was a human traffic jam, slow moving, jostling and chaotic.

"Look over there," he said, as a car stopped in the middle of the street while the driver got out to embrace an acquaintance, "they're always mauling each other. See that? Men kissing. Damned unhealthy, if you ask me." He snorted into his beer, his sense of propriety outraged by such deviant behavior, so alien to the respectable Anglo-Saxon.

It had taken me some months to get used to the Provençal delight in physical contact. Like anyone brought up in England, I had absorbed certain social mannerisms. I had learned to keep my distance, to offer a nod instead of a handshake, to ration kissing to female relatives and to confine any public demonstrations of affection to dogs. To be engulfed by a Provençal welcome, as thorough and searching as being frisked by airport security guards, was, at first, a startling experience. Now I enjoyed it, and I was fascinated by the niceties of the social ritual, and the sign language which is an essential part of any Provençal encounter.

When two unencumbered men meet, the least there will be is the conventional handshake. If the hands are full, you will be offered a little finger to shake. If the hands are wet or dirty, you will be offered a forearm or an elbow. Riding a bicycle or driving a car does not excuse you from the obligation to toucher les cinq sardines, and so you will see perilous contortions being performed on busy streets as hands grope through car windows and across handlebars to find each other. And this is only at the first and most restrained level of acquaintance. A closer relationship requires more demonstrative acknowledgment.

As our lawyer friend had noticed, men kiss other men. They squeeze shoulders, slap backs, pummel kidneys, pinch cheeks. When a Provençal man is truly pleased to see you, there is a real possibility of coming away from his clutches with superficial bruising.

The risk of bodily damage is less where women are concerned, but an amateur can easily make a social blunder if he miscalculates the required number of kisses. In my early days of See also discovery, I would plant a single kiss, only to find that the other cheek was being proffered as I was drawing back. Only snobs kiss once, I was told, or those unfortunates who suffer from congenital froideur. I then saw what I assumed to be the correct procedure-the triple kiss, left-right-left, so I tried it on a Parisian friend. Wrong again. She told me that triple-kissing was a low Provençal habit, and that two kisses were enough among civilized people. The next time I saw my neighbor's wife, I kissed her twice. "Non," she said, "trois fois."

I now pay close attention to the movement of the female head. If it stops swiveling after two kisses, I am almost sure I've filled my quota, but I stay poised for a third lunge just in case the head should keep moving.

It's a different but equally tricky problem for my wife, who is on the receiving end and has to estimate the number of times she needs to swivel, or indeed if she needs to swivel at all. One morning she heard a bellow in the street, and turned to see Ramon the plasterer advancing on her. He stopped, and wiped his hands ostentatiously on his trousers. My wife anticipated a handshake, and held out her hand. Ramon brushed it aside and kissed her three times with great gusto. You never can tell.

Once the initial greeting is over, conversation can begin. Shopping baskets and packages are put down, dogs are tied to café tables, bicycles and tools are leaned up against the nearest wall. This is necessary, because for any serious and satisfactory discussion both hands must be free to provide visual punctuation, to terminate dangling sentences, to add emphasis, or simply to decorate speech which, as it is merely a matter of moving the mouth, is not on its own sufficiently physical for the Provençal. So the hands and the eternally eloquent shoulders are vital to a quiet exchange of views, and in fact it is often possible to follow the gist of a Provençal conversation from a distance, without hearing the words, just by watching expressions and the movements of bodies and hands.