The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Page 19

  ‘Come on, let’s get going!’ Apparently, Jacky’s wife, Simone, Alexandre’s mother, has lunch waiting for us.

  Lunch?

  Back in the village of Belvédère in her manicured chalet garden, Simone, with Beethoven leaping and barking at her side, has been eagerly awaiting our return. She claps her hands with joy when she hears that Jacky has been the successful trapper of the day. Jacques helps himself to a bottle of water, installs himself on a flower-patterned garden swing placed in the shade beneath a spreading vine bower and instantly falls asleep. I go in search of the loo to wash and slap on some lipstick and mascara while Jacky embarks on a game of plastic bricks with two tiny children, nephews of his, who are toddling about in a capacious pen beneath a parasol on the terrace. Alexandre and Didier set off in the van with our antelope. They must go to the village to the office of their local branch of the Alpes-Maritimes Hunting Federation, to register the animal’s death. Here, its tag number will be catalogued and the yellow bracelet handed in. The antelope will be weighed, date and time of death recorded, hunter responsible noted; all must be declared and indexed. These are legal requirements. It also means that their allowance has been reduced by one beast. The three remaining bracelets give this hunting party the right to hunt and kill three more chamois before the season is over. Each bracelet is equivalent to a licence to shoot. If a hunter is caught transporting an untagged pelleted creature, he will lose his permit and be exceedingly heavily fined, perhaps, in rare cases, even imprisoned. These men, this team of men, have three bracelets left for the season. Sangliers, wild boar, do not require bracelets. Hunters are free to shoot as many as they are capable of bagging just so long as they shoot in daylight and at a minimum of 500 metres’ distance from habitation.

  While the men are away, plates are being piled on to the table at a furious rate. It is now about half-past two, less than an hour since we enjoyed our al fresco feast. Simone refuses to allow me to lift a finger. I try to surreptitiously warn her, when I see what appears to be days of cooking and preparation being heated and served, that we will probably not be wanting very much.

  ‘Why?’ she cries out to Jacky, horrified.

  ‘Don’t listen. We’re starving.’

  The men return from the hunting association and the antelope is strung up in the garage ready for skinning after lunch. Their conversation debates the morning’s missed opportunities.

  A chilled local mountain beer is served and we all adjourn to the table. The food is laid out and waiting, hors d’oeuvres and main courses all at once, a smorgasbord of delights: mushrooms gathered from the hillside and marinated in Provençal goodies, ham from a pig slaughtered last winter by Jacky and cured in salt by Simone, a deliciously spicy chicken dish, steaming potatoes, cheeses, wines, beer, bread, cakes and then coffee and more cakes, every item home-made or home-cured. Beethoven is having a field day as everyone blithely hands him food while chattering animatedly. He is gobbling chunks of chicken, cake, ham, cheese, batting from one guest to the next, panting ecstatically, his thick-wedged tail wagging dangerously, jaws wide open with greedy glee. He’d eat the entire pig if it were on the table. No one seems to care or notice how much he is consuming. I cannot imagine what breed of dog this enormous slobbering brute might be and when I ask I learn that he is a cross between a golden retriever and a Newfoundland.

  ‘Was he named after the film?’ I ask Simone.

  She furrows her brow. ‘What film?’

  While I narrate stories of our own dogs to Simone and discuss the finer points of olive-oil pressing, the male talk still centres on the hunt. Our morning’s escapade is recounted and analysed over and over again, each man chipping in his tuppence-worth on why or how we bagged only one creature, how we lost four others by a hair’s breadth and of the extraordinary good fortune Madam brought to Jacky. Simone, who has not laid up a place for herself, does not partake of the meal and has placed her chair on the periphery of the feeding group, remarks to me that this is the pattern of life until the close of the season. Every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, the men will be up and out before dawn and for the rest of the week they will talk of what has passed or what is to come. They breathe, eat and sleep la chasse. Their lives are consecrated to the hunt.

  ‘And you?’ I ask.

  ‘I was born in this village. My first husband, Alexandre’s father, was a hunter, Jacky is and now so too is my handsome son.’ She throws a mother’s doting glance towards Alexandre. ‘What can I do? I only have the one child and he is the apple of my eye. Just so long as he and Jacky are happy, then I am.’ She brings out photographs of her granddaughters, both of whom are teenagers and exquisitely elegant.

  I compliment Alexandre who grows visibly peeved when his mother returns to the table with yet another photo. This example is a family portrait of Alexandre with his wife and the girls.

  ‘I have a lovely daughter-in-law, don’t you agree?’

  I nod.

  Alexandre rises briskly, giving his mother a withering look. ‘Let’s skin that beast!’ he snaps. Evidently there is a chapter here I have missed, an underlying tension that I am not party to and cannot read. Simone retreats. The rest of the party congregates by the garage doors.

  In the skilled hands of Alexandre, the antelope’s pelt falls from its flesh like a dancer shedding a costume. Simone arrives with notepad and pen. She has been designated the role of recording the apportionment of the parts of the beast. The meat is carved into six cuts. Each member of the six-man hunting team, whether or not they participated in today’s hunt, is assigned a morsel. Today, they were three so meat will be kept refrigerated for the second trio. The joint each member of the team has been allocated is catalogued in Simone’s book. Apparently, after each successful trip, the choice of meat rotates. Jacky offers me the succulent gigot earmarked for him which I refuse, but he insists. ‘Even if you do not want to eat it, Madam, perhaps your husband would enjoy it.’

  I think of Michel alone in Paris, struggling to keep his company afloat and I accept. Simone’s aunt, Tata, arrives accompanied by her husband, Tonton Auguste, who hunts with the others. He is eighty, the oldest member of the party and positively glowing with health. The couple have presumably popped in to collect Tonton Auguste’s share of the chamois, though I do not see him receive it.

  Everybody finds a seat out on the terrace. Yet more home-made cakes are served along with a pitcher of freshly brewed coffee. Tonton Auguste settles at a corner of the table in the shade and proceeds to read the Nice Matin. The women call me to join them. Their talk is of cooking. Simone describes at great length what she served us for lunch and how she prepared it. Tata responds with her variations on the same recipes and when they catch me smiling, they question my amusement.

  ‘The French and their cooking, their obsession with discussing every mouthful,’ I rejoin.

  The women sigh. ‘Ah, but, we can’t help ourselves. Here, taste this cake. Do you know these plums? Which liqueur have you used?’ … And so the day creeps towards its conclusion. Jacques tries once more to sleep; the hunters are wrapping up the meat, washing their knives, making all ready for the next outing, which will be the following Saturday. Jacky is crawling about on the ground playing with the babies. Beethoven is crashed out in a cool corner, farting in his sleep, dreaming, no doubt, of another hunt, another celebration. It is a convivial and very French scene and could last into the late hours when dinner might be served, but here in this mountain village the sun sets early, disappearing behind a neighbouring peak and this signals the moment to bid bonne nuit. Everyone offers farewells, throwing arms around one another, embracing and kissing and embracing again, after promises of olive oil in return for cured hams and cakes and another meal, another gathering somewhere at some point in the future, and then Jacques and I begin to wend our way home.

  Driving coastwards, dusk at our windows, in the company of this handsome pool man who is somewhere between stranger, fellow hunter and friend, I feel a keen sadness that Mic
hel has not shared this curiously original day with me, both its beauty and brutality; that he was not there with me on the plateau to witness the glorious break of morning and to feel the beat of the sun from on high. How I wish that I could deliver these rare experiences to him; how I wish I could dispel his present crisis. But lost as I am, I also feel a certain peace. The mountains have offered me that.

  Jacques and I are both silent, lost in our individual worlds, dead tired and reflective. Our thoughts trailing behind us, floating in and out of the day we have lived through. Laconic though he is, I suspect that he, like me, is facing difficulties and challenges he never alludes to.

  Eventually I ask him whether, in the light of this outing, he might consider adopting the sport. He considers the question and decides no, but he stresses that what his friends are doing is essential work. ‘As you saw, Carol, the hunts are strictly controlled and if the packs are not culled they grow too large, the grazing grounds prove insufficient and there are greater risks of disease and sickness.’

  I suggest to him that the wolves are the antelope’s natural predators and argue that they might be a more eco-friendly solution to the problem. He frowns, not understanding my drift.

  ‘In the United States, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early settlers hunted bison, elk and deer without regulation, which caused the slaughter of over sixty million wild beasts. In those days there were numerous grey wolves but, as their food sources diminished, because man was hunting their prey, the wolves began to stalk and kill the only other meat available to them: the settlers’ livestock. This created a fierce war between settler and wolf that raged for well over two centuries, until the wolf was all but driven to extinction. In those days, it was not unusual for government agencies to pay hefty sums for the carcass of a wolf. This encouraged private bounty-hunters who ranged the mountains and plains in search of wolves to trap. Many men made a healthy living hunting wolves for the cash pickings. Bounty-hunting was only outlawed in the United States in 1965. By the end of the sixties, fewer than 700 grey wolves survived in the wild. Of course, today the grey wolf is a protected species there.’

  ‘I don’t get your point,’ yawns Jacques.

  ‘If the wild game and the wolves were left to their own devices, nature would be its own regulator of numbers. Hunting would be unnecessary.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he mutters, switching on the headlights. ‘I think I’ll stick to fishing.’

  Counting Sheep

  The weather is gloriously warm; burnished and autumnal. The leaves on the deciduous trees are variations of oxblood, citrus and flecked apricot. Day after gloriously beneficent day, the temperatures average 25 degrees with sunsets synchronising the season’s colours. Unfortunately this delivers us no rain, which for the farmers is worrisome. The ground soil has turned to powder and without irrigation nothing is surviving. It is the first time that we have been obliged to water so late into September.

  Michaelmas has passed. Now begins October and Michel has flown south for the autumn television festival, Mipcom. It is a joy, a relief to have him home, though I barely see him during the five-day market. He is up and out by seven in the morning and does not return until after midnight. He has agreed to stay on for the weekend after the event but intends to spend those free days writing his ‘follow-up’ e-mails. He talks of transforming his favourite spot beneath the magnolia tree into an exterior weekend office, if the weather stays fine. I entreat him to donate Sunday to us, in the hope that we can dedicate it to more relaxing activities and spend precious time together. ‘Let’s play hookey and take off on an unlikely escapade,’ is my plea.

  While Michel is running to and fro, attempting to open new business deals, meeting with executives, lunching network personnel at one or other of the beachside restaurants, Quashia renews his attack on his never-ending shed in the light of structural comments from Michel and the garage delivers my restored car, spick and span and good as new. It must require a gentle spin, surely? The perfect excuse, I claim, for our outing. Well, an excuse. The question is to what destination? The Camargue is marginally too far for a day out.

  Jacques has been recounting stories to me of the transhumance, the shepherds’ custom of transporting their flocks to winter grasslands. Not dissimilar to bees, the sheep must be installed in pastures closer to sea-level where there is little likelihood of snow and where there will be plenty of grazing. Already, over the past three weeks shepherds everywhere have been on the move. If we took a helicopter up into the Alps, he says, we would look down upon dozens and dozens of flocks, each five or six hundred strong, descending the mountainsides, intent on the lowlands. It must be quite a sight.

  On Sunday, two shepherds with their flocks are expected to converge upon the village of Roubion, where the public have been invited, for a couple of hours only, to participate in this fabled tradition, to accompany the beasts as they are steered from one village to the next, a distance of no more than four or five kilometres.

  ‘Why don’t we join them?’ I suggest to Michel, though I am not altogether convinced that spending the better part of a day walking with sheep will appeal to him. Surprisingly, he seems enthused by the plan. He will take his movie camera along, he says. ‘It might make an interesting inset in a magazine programme. Yes, let’s make the trip.’

  We wake to Sunday, warm and sunny, and breakfast in the garden. While I swim, Michel picks grapes and prepares our petit déjeuner. I arrive at the table outside, dripping wet, to find a fruit face smiling up at me from a bowl of plain yoghurt: one grape divided into two for the eyes, a sliver of apple for the upturned mouth, a triangle of pear as the nose and eyebrows of pollen crumbs. With the sun drying the water slipping from my wet hair and this simple but delicious meal in front of me, I am reminded, as I pour us both coffee, of our early, stony-broke days here. I used to laugh then when I remarked that we would never be so happy, so carefree again. I turn my attention to the sea, to a fleet of sailboats that signal a regatta departing from the old harbour in Cannes. So much has changed. The years have marched on and this one has served us a shocking blow but the man at my side seems less damaged this morning, less withdrawn, and he remains, at least partially, in my life in spite of his words in the summer, and for that I am profoundly grateful.

  We throw our hiking boots into the car and off we go, to encounter the autumn shepherd trail as the beasts plunge seawards to their winter pasturage. If nothing else it will be a healthy and vigorous tour in the beautiful meridional Alps, an opportunity for us to be together and for Michel to de-stress after the tensions of the television market. We leave the motorway at the last exit west of Nice and begin our cruise inland, entering an industrialised zone where empty parking lots, full of curled and withering shrubs, seem eerily abandoned in this robust Indian summer sunshine. Beyond the blocks, we pass through a valley bordered on one side by a desert-dry, pebbled river and, opposite, a parade of lushly decked-out garden centres, each one open for business and teeming with weekend shoppers. Here we say au revoir to the urbanised, serviced coastland, progressing towards the lower gradients of the most southerly of the Alpes-Maritimes mountains.

  Now we commence our ascent into nature.

  At somewhere close to 700 metres, at a steep and perilous fork, we swing to the left, following the signs for La Route des Grandes Alpes. Here the road narrows and my recently installed engine begins to whine rather than purr as we continue to gain vertiginous height. The circuit is no longer consistently tarred. Long stretches remain what they always were: shingled, dusty, spiralling goat tracks. To the left, hundreds of metres below, water courses through a wooded ravine. I am beginning to silently panic about the car. It seems sturdy, but the replaced engine is a stranger to me and what of the tyre grip and the brakes? This is not quite the gentle test drive I had envisaged. Thoughtlessly – we are in the Alps, after all – I had not counted on the vehicle’s trajectory being quite so dramatically dangerous. While my imagination conjures up possible vari
ations on ‘lunging over the shelf at breakneck speed’, reality brings forth from out of the zig-zag of now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t bends an imposing Renault, appearing from nowhere, descending in the opposite direction. I am at the wheel, as I was that drizzly night outside Monte Carlo, and my memory flips me back to that nightmare encounter.

  Both the other driver and I brake surefootedly on the central curve of the bend, and my car slows to a halt without a hitch. Fortunately we had both been progressing at a snail’s pace but, even so, we narrowly avoid a head-on collision. Both vehicles are now eyeball to eyeball, precariously perched within centimetres of the drop. We are 1,000 metres above sea-level. Keeping my sights firmly fixed on the cliff wall, not daring to acknowledge the yawning abyss, I reverse, inching backwards, while the other car creeps forward, eager to hit the road again. Breathing deeply, calming my tremor, I shut out the vivid replay of our accident. When we are stationary I glance at Michel, wondering if he is reliving the same horror, but his thoughts seem locked off elsewhere. I stretch my right arm across the gearbox and lightly rest my hand against the back of his. His fingers are surprisingly cold again and, for a moment, I am freaked, but I don’t remark on it. We are together, having time off in one another’s company. Still, this fluctuating distance of mind really unnerves me.

  We continue our journey.

  The autumn colours are staggering. Alpine evergreen interspersed with a deep honey red, which, I hazard a guess, are the leaves of a variety of maple. The plane trees are elf green fading to soft yellow, like the flesh of unripened melons. Dotted here, there and everywhere within this canvas are thickets of stumpy russet bushes, which I cannot identify. Casting our eyes down the giddying cleft, ahead or to the left of us, depending on the swing of the path, is the rushing river, crystal grey with slippery-wet stepping stones that put me in mind of otters plunging through metallic jelly. It is a theatrical panorama, and as if this were not sufficient, an extraordinary, unexpected card is then casually tossed our way. We are plunged into darkness, entering a tunnel of blasted rock, and emerge out the other side into blinding daylight, where a most astounding geological transformation has taken place. The mountain itself has changed colour. No longer the limestone beige so common in this neighbourhood, it reveals itself now as aubergine. Yes, aubergine. Every cliff, every rock as far as the eye can see is resolutely, resonantly, aubergine. As a backdrop to the palette of autumnal vegetation it is breathtaking and, above it, reigns a serene sky, blue as a laundry rinse.