Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

At last the litany came to an end. "Et puis voilà," said Menicucci, and looked at me expectantly, as though I now had the world of central heating at my fingertips, and could make an intelligent and informed choice. I could think of nothing to say except to ask him how he heated his own house.

"Ah," he said, tapping his forehead in mock admiration, "that is not a stupid thing to ask. What kind of meat does the butcher eat?" And, with that mystical question hanging unanswered in the air, we went next door to his house. It was undeniably warm, almost stuffy, and Monsieur Menicucci made a great performance of removing two or three outer layers of clothing, mopping his brow theatrically and adjusting his bonnet to expose his ears to the air.

He walked over to a radiator and patted it on the head. "Feel that," he said, "cast iron, not like the merde they use for radiators nowadays. And the boiler-you must see the boiler. But attention "-he stopped abruptly and prodded me with his lecturer's finger-"it is not French. Only the Germans and the Belgians know how to make boilers." We went into the boiler room, and I dutifully admired the elderly, dial-encrusted machine which was puffing and snorting against the wall. "This gives twenty-one degrees throughout the house, even when the temperature outside is minus six," and he threw open the outside door to let in some minus-six air on cue. He had the good instructor's gift for illustrating his remarks wherever possible with practical demonstration, as though he was talking to a particularly dense child. (In my case, certainly as far as plumbing and heating were concerned, this was quite justified.)

Having met the boiler, we went back to the house and met Madame, a diminutive woman with a resonant voice. Did I want a tisane, some almond biscuits, a glass of Marsala? What I really wanted was to see Monsieur Menicucci in his bonnet playing his clarinet, but that would have to wait until another day. Meanwhile, I had been given much to think about. As I left to go to the car, I looked up at the revolving solar heating apparatus on the roof and saw that it was frozen solid, and I had a sudden longing for a houseful of cast-iron radiators.

I arrived home to discover that a scale model of Stonehenge had been planted behind the garage. The table had arrived-five feet square, five inches thick, with a massive base in the form of a cross. The distance between where it had been delivered and where we wanted it to be was no more than fifteen yards, but it might as well have been fifty miles. The entrance to the courtyard was too narrow for any mechanical transport, and the high wall and tiled half-roof that made a sheltered area ruled out the use of a crane. Pierrot had told us that the table would weigh between six and eight hundred pounds. It looked heavier.

He called that evening.

"Are you pleased with the table?"

Yes, the table is wonderful, but there is a problem.

"Have you put it up yet?"

No, that's the problem. Did he have any helpful suggestions?

"A few pairs of arms," he said. "Think of the Pyramids."

Of course. All we needed were fifteen thousand Egyptian slaves and it would be done in no time.

"Well, if you get desperate, I know the rugby team in Carcassonne."

And with that he laughed and hung up.

We went to have another look at the monster, and tried to work out how many people would be needed to manhandle it into the courtyard. Six? Eight? It would have to be balanced on its side to pass through the doorway. We had visions of crushed toes and multiple hernias, and belatedly understood why the previous owner of the house had put a light, folding table in the place we had chosen for our monument. We took the only reasonable course of action open to us, and sought inspiration in front of the fire with a glass of wine. It was unlikely that anyone would steal the table overnight.

As it turned out, a possible source of help was not long in coming. Weeks before, we had decided to rebuild the kitchen, and had spent many enlightening hours with our architect as we were introduced to French building terminology, to coffres and rehausses and faux-plafonds and vide-ordures, to plâtrage and dallage and poutrelles and coins perdus. Our initial excitement had turned into anticlimax as the plans became more and more dog-eared and, for one reason or another, the kitchen remained untouched. Delays had been caused by the weather, by the plasterer going skiing, by the chief maçon breaking his arm playing football on a motorbike, by the winter torpor of local suppliers. Our architect, an expatriate Parisian, had warned us that building in Provence was very similar to trench warfare, with long periods of boredom interrupted by bursts of violent and noisy activity, and we had so far experienced the first phase for long enough to look forward to the second.

The assault troops finally arrived, with a deafening clatter, while the morning was still hesitating between dawn and daylight. We went outside with bleary eyes to see what had fallen down, and could just make out the shape of a truck, spiked with scaffolding. A cheerful bellow came from the driver's seat.

"Monsieur Mayle?"

I told him he'd found the right house.

"Ah bon. On va attaquer la cuisine. Allez!"

The door opened, and a cocker spaniel jumped out, followed by three men. There was an unexpected whiff of aftershave as the chief maçon mangled my hand and introduced himself and his team: Didier, the lieutenant Eric, and the junior, a massive young man called Claude. The dog, Pénélope, declared the site open by relieving herself copiously in front of the house, and battle commenced.

We had never seen builders work like this. Everything was done on the double: scaffolding was erected and a ramp of planks was built before the sun was fully up, the kitchen window and sink disappeared minutes later, and by ten o'clock we were standing in a fine layer of preliminary rubble as Didier outlined his plans for destruction. He was brisk and tough, with the cropped hair and straight back of a military man; I could see him as a drill instructor in the Foreign Legion, putting young layabouts through their paces until they whimpered for mercy. His speech was percussive, full of the onomatopoeic words like tok and crak and boum that the French like to use when describing any form of collision or breakage-and there was to be plenty of both. The ceiling was coming down, the floor was coming up and all the existing fittings coming out. It was a gutting job, the entire kitchen to be evacuated- chut!- through the hole that used to be a window. A wall of polythene sheeting was nailed up to screen the area from the rest of the house, and domestic catering operations were transferred to the barbecue in the courtyard.

It was startling to see and hear the joyful ferocity with which the three masons pulverized everything within sledgehammer range. They thumped and whistled and sang and swore amid the falling masonry and sagging beams, stopping (with some reluctance, it seemed to me) at noon for lunch. This was demolished with the same vigor as a partition wall-not modest packets of sandwiches, but large plastic hampers filled with chickens and sausage and choucroute and salads and loaves of bread, with proper crockery and cutlery. None of them drank alcohol, to our relief. A tipsy mason nominally in charge of a forty-pound hammer was a frightening thought. They were dangerous enough sober.

Pandemonium resumed after lunch, and continued until nearly seven o'clock without any break. I asked Didier if he regularly worked a ten- or eleven-hour day. Only in the winter, he said. In the summer it was twelve or thirteen hours, six days a week. He was amused to hear about the English timetable of a late start and an early finish, with multiple tea breaks. "Une petite journée" was how he described it, and asked if I knew any English masons who would like to work with him, just for the experience. I couldn't imagine a rush of volunteers.