Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

I reminded Menicucci that the drive was not possible for an ordinary car.

"He's used to that," said Menicucci. "He will come on his moto with special tires. He can pass anywhere."

I watched him negotiate the drive the next morning, doing slalom turns to avoid the craters and standing up on his foot-rests as he drove over the mounds of earth. He cut the engine and looked back at the drive, a study in color-coordinated moto chic. His hair was black, his leather jacket was black, his bike was black. He wore aviator sunglasses with impenetrable reflective lenses. I wondered if he knew our insurance agent, the formidably hip Monsieur Fructus. They would have made a good pair.

Within half an hour, he had made a tour of the mine field on foot, estimated a price, telephoned to order the gravel, and given us a firm date, two days away, for his return with the bulldozer. We had our doubts that he was real and, when Menicucci called that evening in his capacity as supervisor of catastrophes, I said that Monsieur Sanchez had surprised us with his efficiency.

"It runs in the family," Menicucci said. "His father is a melon millionaire. The son will be a bulldozer millionaire. They are very serious, despite being Spanish." He explained that Sanchez père had come to France as a young man to find work, and had developed a method of producing earlier and more succulent melons than anyone else in Provence. He was now, said Menicucci, so rich that he worked for only two months a year and lived during the winter in Alicante.

Sanchez fils arrived as promised, and spent the day rearranging the landscape with his bulldozer. He had a delicacy of touch that was fascinating to watch, redistributing tons of earth as accurately as if he were using a trowel. When the drive was level, he smoothed the surface with a giant comb, and invited us to see what he had done. It looked too immaculate to walk on, and he had given it a slight camber so that any future downpours would run off into the vines.

"C'est bon?"

As good as the autoroute to Paris, we said.

"Bieng. Je revieng demaing." He climbed into the control tower of his bulldozer and drove off at a stately fifteen miles an hour. Tomorrow the gravel would be laid.

The first vehicle to disturb the combed perfection of the drive's surface crawled up to the house the next morning and stopped with a shudder of relief in the parking area. It was a truck that looked to be even more venerable than Faustin's grape wagon, sagging so low on its suspension that the rusty exhaust pipe nearly touched the ground. A man and a woman, both round and weatherbeaten, were standing by the truck and looking with interest at the house, obviously itinerant field workers hoping for one last job before heading further south for the winter.

They seemed a nice old couple, and I felt sorry for them.

"I'm afraid the grapes have all been picked," I said.

The man grinned and nodded. "That's good. You were lucky to get them in before the rain." He pointed up to the forest behind the house. "Plenty of mushrooms there, I should think."

Yes, I said, plenty.

They showed no sign of going. I said they were welcome to leave their truck outside the house and pick some mushrooms.

"No, no," said the man. "We're working today. My son is on his way with the gravel."

The melon millionaire opened the back doors of the truck and took out a long-handled mason's shovel and a wide-toothed wooden rake. "I'll leave the rest for him to unload," he said. "I don't want to squash my feet."

I looked inside. Packed tight up against the back of the seats and stretching the length of the truck was a miniature steamroller, the compacteur.

While we waited for his son, Monsieur Sanchez talked about life and the pursuit of happiness. Even after all these years, he said, he still enjoyed the occasional day of manual labor. His work with the melons was finished by July, and he got bored with nothing to do. It was very agreeable to be rich, but one needed something else, and, as he liked working with his hands, why not help his son?

I had never employed a millionaire before. I don't have much time for them as a rule, but this one put in a good long day. Load after load of gravel was delivered and tipped onto the drive by the son. The father shoveled and spread, and Madame Sanchez followed behind with the wooden rake, pushing and smoothing. Then the compacteur was unloaded; it was like a massive baby carriage with handlebars, and it was wheeled ceremoniously up and down the drive with Sanchez the son at the controls, shouting instructions at his parents-another shoveful here, more raking there, mind your feet, don't tread on the vines.

It was a true family effort, and by the end of the afternoon we had a pristine ribbon of crushed, putty-colored gravel worthy of being entered for the Concours d'Elégance sponsored by Bulldozer Magazine. The compacteur was inserted into the back of the truck; the parents into the front. Young Sanchez said that the price would be less than his estimate, but he would work it out exactly and his father would come around to deliver the bill.

The next morning when I got up, there was an unfamiliar van parked outside the house. I looked for a driver, but there was nobody in the vines or in the outbuildings. It was probably an idle hunter who couldn't be bothered to walk up from the road.

We were finishing breakfast when there was a tap on the window and we saw the round brown face of Monsieur Sanchez. He wouldn't come into the house, because he said his boots were too dirty. He had been in the forest since six o'clock, and he had a present for us. From behind his back he produced his old checked cap, bulging with wild mushrooms. He gave us his favorite recipe-oil, butter, garlic, and chopped parsley-and told us a dreadful story about three men who had died after an ill-chosen mushroom supper. A neighbor had found them still at the table with wide, staring eyes-Monsieur Sanchez gave us a demonstration, rolling his eyes back in his head-completely paralyzed by malignant fungus. But we were not to worry, he said. He would stake his life on the mushrooms in his cap. Bon appétit!

My wife and I ate them that evening, studying each other between mouthfuls for signs of paralysis and eye rolling. They tasted so much better than ordinary mushrooms that we decided to invest in a guidebook and to share a pair of anti-snake boots.

THERE COMES a time in the restoration of an old house when the desire to see it finished threatens all those noble aesthetic intentions to see it finished properly. The temptation to settle for the shortcut nags away as the delays add up and the excuses multiply: the carpenter has severed a fingertip, the mason's truck has been stolen, the painter has la grippe, fittings ordered in May and promised for June don't arrive until September, and all the time the concrete mixer and the rubble and the shovels and pickaxes become more and more like permanent fixtures. During the hot months of summer, tranquilized by the sun, it had been possible to look with a patient eye at the uncompleted jobs throughout the house. Now that we were spending more time indoors with them, patience had been replaced by irritation.

With Christian the architect, we went through the rooms to establish who had to do what, and how long it would take.

"Normalement," said Christian, a man of great charm and implacable optimism, "there is only six or seven days of work. A little masonry, some plastering, two days of painting, et puis voilà. Terminé."

We were encouraged. As we said to Christian, there had been dark moments recently when we imagined waking up on Christmas morning still surrounded by the debris of a building site.