The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Read online

  ‘One spectrum of the Camargue, pure white tinged with rose,’ I say. ‘You are not Camarguaise, are you?’

  She shakes her head. ‘But, alas, our patio is not in use this evening.’ My hostess calls to a young man to run outside and take down the drapes before they are blown away in the storm, which is growing more violent.

  I am placed at a table with the bald-headed gentleman and his family. It is his birthday and they have come from Toulouse for this party. I discover that his father was a great friend of Claude, our water-diviner. This is not as remarkable as it might seem, given that our man is a very celebrated figure in the south of France, and it creates an amiable point of conversation between us.

  The meal on offer is positively sumptuous and way more than I can manage.

  The gypsies arrive. Annette is deep in discussion with them about what is clearly a change of programme, an interior performance instead of the garden show. The singer scans the room, clocking his audience but catching no one’s eye. He is no longer the young stud in the photograph. He struts proudly into the dining room in black, stack-heeled boots and discreetly checked cream waistcoat, guitar hanging at his side, but he is fifteen years the senior of the image by the fireplace and a chubbier version of his younger self. His hair is still collar-length and curly but now it is streaked with grey. Still, this gypsy, Ricao, remains devastatingly handsome.

  ‘He is a relative of Manitas de Plata,’ a fellow diner informs me. ‘Manitas is in his eighties now. He lives in the Languedoc.’

  The Languedoc is the neighbouring region to this western outpost of Provence. Manitas de Plata – the name means ‘little silver fingers’ – is a legend in France as well as a hero to his own people, the Gitans, who are Spanish gypsies. He preceded the Gypsy Kings in gaining worldwide recognition for his popular guitar music and was also renowned for a much-publicised affair in the 1960s with the sex kitten of those hip Saint-Tropez years, Brigitte Bardot. To boast kinship to such a godfather would give this performer a certain royal lineage. I study the gypsy singer and speculate on the truth of the claim.

  Three chairs are placed up against a wall near the door. Our entertainer considers them and wanders back out of the dining room. Another course is served. Hermès, who is originally from Paris, refills my wine glass. ‘This is your first time here, madame?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose you have seen these performers on many occasions?’

  He nods, ‘Many times, madame. They have talent but they are gypsies.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘They would steal rather than work. A franc stolen is more cherished than ten earned. They come here without a cigarette or coin in their pockets and expect us to supply them.’

  I am disappointed by the prejudice in this remark and do not pursue it. The singer returns, settles himself in the central chair and waits. His gaze alights on no one. He is not of our universe; he is contained in his own. We are tourists and, for a brief moment, I wish that I hadn’t attended. Seconds later, two other guitarists appear, one whose face is as lined as a stone carving, the other a younger man. With them arrive two women in long blue dresses laced with frills, their hair tied tightly back in severe buns in the flamenco tradition. Inaccurately, I take them to be mother and daughter. The women are the dancers. They stand shyly to the side, pressed against the wall, like young girls at a high-school dance. The singer strums one chord and then begins to sing unaccompanied, letting out an extraordinary, chilling ululation. His voice is higher-pitched than I had expected from one so earthy and the sound is almost oriental, the melody Moorish. I have given up on my meal but others are still eating, and further courses are still appearing. I am transfixed by the voice of this gypsy, now partnered by his own guitar and that of his fellow musicians. He is mesmeric.

  The younger woman orbits to centre stage, unfurling herself as though being released from a fishing net. Semi-bent with arms outstretched, she dances, weaving and spinning like a seducing spider. Two arms seem to become ten as she twists and reels. The older woman clack-clacks her feet. To this she adds handclaps like castanets, and moves to centre stage where she, too, begins to dance. The image of Michel’s gyrating body on that hospital trolley in Monte Carlo flashes into my head and, shocked, I push it forcefully away. This woman’s style is quite the opposite of the younger female’s. She barely moves her torso but her stillness is electric. It brings to mind two other images. The first is the late Nina Simone in performance at the Juan-les-Pins summer jazz festival shortly after we moved here. Centre stage, alone, beneath a diorama of stars, umbrella pines her amphitheatre, she sang the blues without accompaniment, bewitching an audience of over two thousand.

  The second is from my days at drama school, where the professors spoke to us of Lorca’s essay ‘In Search of Duende’. I had never heard this Andalucian-Spanish word before. Duende. Its meaning is ghost or goblin, but what it actually describes is a quality equivalent to ‘soul’. Lorca depicted it as an inner force, a black sound. ‘A mysterious power that everyone senses and no philosopher can explain.’ There is no true synonym in English. Some might suggest charisma, but I would debate that. Charisma can exist without the emotional depth, sensibility or ‘soul’ that is at the root of the energy known as duende.

  I had feared that I had fallen upon a tourist show, but not at all. I excuse myself from the table and move to a seat alongside the players. Here I can better focus on the interaction between them and the subtleties of their art. For, indubitably, they are artists. They perform for almost an hour and then, without taking a bow or curtain call, without applause, they exit the room. Their departure goes unremarked.

  The meal continues. I drift through to the empty salon and sit alone by the fireside, my thoughts running deep. The music replays in my head, the dancing, clapping women, and the memory of Michel lying on that hospital table, his figure clattering in spasm. How I dreaded the extinguishing of his life that night and how I grieve alone now for other losses, less comprehensible wounds and emptiness.

  After dinner, coffee is served in the salon, and the guests begin to wander in, ordering brandies or another bottle of wine, or disappearing out into the night or, in the case of those who are staying over, to their beds. The cowboy, I notice, has left the party. A short while later, one of Annette’s young waitresses appears with a bucket of water and starts chucking handfuls on to the log fire. It hisses and smokes and guests begin to complain.

  ‘It is too hot for the women to dance here otherwise,’ explains the nymphet. I had not expected that the musicians would return – only five diners remain – but, within no time, the quintet reappears, gathering between us and the fireplace. Backs to the hearth, they face us. Loosely speaking, we are an untidy circle. I wonder if it conjures up for them the time-worn tradition of sitting by camp fires, singing together or narrating their stories. They talk amongst themselves as though we, the onlookers, were not present. I am trying to identify the language they are using when, without warning, our star, Ricao, breaks into song. His wringing note, in this smoky candlelight, evokes a wolf howling into the shadowed night. The women clap in syncopated volleys while the men strum and the dying embers crackle. We sit by the fading firelight bewitched by their music. The women dance again and when they are not dancing they tap-tap their hands, led by the guitars, and my heart wants to burst.

  Annette appears with a glass of wine in her hand and settles herself on the back of one of the sofas. Her Labrador follows, bumping against her legs, knocking into chairs, until he eventually slumps heavily at her feet. I am surprised by his clumsiness, his lack of grace.

  Outside, the storm is raging. I hear a branch snap and thud heavily to the ground. Poolside chairs clatter and roll. Angry goblins are about, making mischief. The power of the duende is at large in the windswept night, and then the music fades to silence. We who are within applaud. Ricao bows his head; that is all. Silence rules until the bald-pated birthday man calls for champagne nightcaps and the gypsies are each served a
flute. I, too, am included in this celebratory moment. Now the gypsies, sitting with us by firelight, seem amenable to conversation. They answer a question or two and then they break into song. And after, we return to silence. They ask nothing. They express no interest in us or our lives.

  ‘Manouche gypsies are Provençal gypsies, they tell me. We are Gitans, Spanish gypsies. Our mother tongue is Catalan.’ Though tonight they speak to us in heavily accented French. The international language of the gypsies is Caló, but it is slowly dying out.

  ‘Are you fluent?’

  Ricao shakes his head. ‘Not at all. None of us speak it. Few do, these days.’

  Their songs are sung in Catalan and others in Spanish. They live near Montpellier, in flats, not caravans. Slowly they are being forced to give up their itinerant lifestyles. It is a choice they must make if they want health care and education for their children. It is one of the reasons why Caló is falling into disuse. In olden times, when they were always on the move, they would meet up with other caravans from far-off places and share their stories and experiences, communicating in their international tongue. That happens less and less now. Their lives are more insular, more chained to the system of the countries where they reside.

  One of the women, the elder, mentions Lorca.

  ‘Do you know his work?’ I ask her. ‘His Gypsy Ballads?’

  ‘A little, not intimately, but I know he spoke of duende. It is the soul in our music.’

  And then, mid-conversation, they rise to leave, bowing reservedly. It will be a long drive back on a night such as this. The rest of us wander off to our rooms. I fall asleep to the sound of doors closing everywhere within the ranch house, then silence. The gypsy’s voice slowly returns, breaking into song. Ricao’s howl, like a lone wolf yowling in the steppes, like the sorrow tearing at my heart.

  The following morning, I rise early and return to town for the mass. As yesterday, it is a bilingual service. Afterwards we leave the packed-to-the-rafters church to make the procession to the sea. This is the highlight of the weekend’s pilgrimage. The crocodile is headed by those in Arlesian costume, the women in lovely long dresses with lace shawls accompanied by menfolk in black velvet jackets and flat hats. In their footsteps come the priests and celebrants and then the châsse, the sea-chest reliquary containing the relics of the Saint Marys. Outside the portal, proud riders on horseback await us. Every horse is white; an authentic Camarguais stallion. These men are gardians, the dexterous horsemen who tend the herds. Each carries his trident, a three-pronged metal fork attached to a long wooden pole instrumental in the rounding-up and herding of the yearling bulls. When the horsemen are singling out the young taureaux for branding on the ranches in the spring, they prod the beasts’ buttocks with these sharp forks to drive them to the branding sites.

  The reliquary is ferried on the shoulders of four young men with the solemnity accorded to a coffin. It appears to be extremely heavy and the procession is slow-moving. To share the burden, two teams of four bear it through the streets, passing it back and forth between them every three hundred metres or so. I wonder how the bones of two thousand-year-old women could weigh so much. During this procession to the sea, the chant of ‘Vive les Saintes Manes’ is nons-top.

  On arrival at the beach, the chestful of relics carried aloft by the men is borne into the water. The gardians head the column, cantering forth on their stallions, wading way out into the wavy sea. When the horses are thigh-deep, the riders sodden to their breeches, and the men carrying the châsse waist-high in water, the train turns to face the beach. It is a theatrical moment.

  The crowd has been asked to hold back. Aside from a pushy journalist or two, even the most zealous of the pietists obeys. The priest has forgone the pleasure of a salty bath and is seated on high in an upturned fishing vessel. He puts me in mind of Neptune, waving his arms and chanting blessings in French and then Provençal. The instant the sea-based line-up turns, cameras begin flashing from every direction. Photographers are shouting to the parade to face this way, now that, ‘horses to the left!’ and so on, and I cannot dispel the idea that I am attending a miniature-scale Cannes film festival with its posing and its paparazzi. I turn from the beach and leave them to it, hiking back across the sand and along the high street, milling with onlookers, to find my car. On my way out of town, I stop at a wooden shack by the roadside to ask directions for Pont de Gau, which I have read about in the leaflets I was given at the tourist office. A handsome, muscular man comes out to greet me, proffering slices of ‘saucisson de toto’.

  ‘What is toto?’ I ask.

  ‘Taureau.’

  ‘Ah, it’s beef sausage then?’

  ‘You could say that,’ he sighs, dismayed by this foreigner’s lack of poetry.

  I am offered a small plastic cup of chilled muscat. The wine is too sweet for my palate so he swiftly moves on to a vin du sable rosé.

  ‘It will make delicious drinking for you next summer, this gris de gris rosé,’ he enthuses.

  Though I have no notion of what life between now and next summer might bring, I end up buying an example of half the produce in his wooden shack, which is the point, of course, of all this hospitality. This tradesman, Renato, lives about five kilometres’ distance from here, on the far side of one of the lakes, the étangs. His uncle owned a farmhouse across the street, which is why he is pitched here. This was his uncle’s shack, he explains, until he died. While I am busy admiring his enticing stock display, a pretty, dark-haired, olive-skinned woman arrives in a weather-beaten car. She bears a basket full of provisions. Lunch. This is Renato’s lady. There is no electricity and no water in the shack. He slices her toto sausage and pours her a thimbleful of the rosé. Another car, sporting a Dutch number plate, pulls up and out climbs a skinny, worried-looking fellow with a map. Even as he is making his way towards Renato’s shack, its proprietor is cutting another saucisson and preparing more wine – how does he keep it chilled in here without electricity, I wonder? The conversation has turned to an American the couple are acquainted with, whose name they cannot recall, who owns a restaurant in Mougins. ‘That’s your side of Provence,’ says Renato. He refers to our region as though it were the far corner of the world. I pay for my shopping and leave him to the seduction of his next customer. The sun has broken through. My skin and hair are encrusted with breezes off the sea, off the marshlands. I lick my lips and taste fresh raw salt.

  The Camargue gives refuge to an extraordinary wealth of plumed fauna, a notice at the Pont de Gau Ornithological Park informs me. This bird sanctuary was founded by a naturalist, Jacques Lamouroux, in 1949. Since his death, it has been run by his son, René, who I ask if I might meet. Alas, he is absent.

  Reading one of the brochures I find on sale at the ticket office I see they have a care centre which rescues injured birds, tends them and then, if they are capable of surviving back out in the wild, releases and tags them. I sadly recall our little warbler, Orpheus, the debut to our summer. Apparently, in these parts almost 6 per cent of all injuries to birds are caused by lead shot in hunting ‘accidents’.

  I stride out purposefully. The paths are clearly signposted so I can choose my direction with ease. Rafts of ducks and the magnificent pink flamingos are everywhere. Their reflections rainbow the water. Roubines, narrow water courses, flow close to the paths’ perimeters, like old-fashioned drainage systems; they criss-cross the land all over the Camargue. This sudden parenthesis of heat is a treat and most unexpected. Still, I decide to be energetic and cover the entire circuit.

  I breathe deeply. I am growing to appreciate the stink of these swamps. Close to, they have a high, pikey smell, with midges and insects that look like water boatmen skimming their surface. As I march briskly, circling the marsh lakes, I hear gurglings and bubblings in the water. It could be a diving pond tortoise scared by my footfall, or an aquatic snake. The viperines in these wetlands are not dangerous – they prey on tadpoles and small fish – but I would much prefer not to encounter t
hem. The otters, though, les loutres, with their surprisingly long tails and shiny wet bodies, gobbling the grass at the bank’s edge and then cleaning themselves with precision, are enchanting. I tarry to watch them. Lifting their shiny otter heads, with impossibly extended whiskers, they groom themselves and, though constantly alert, take not a blind bit of notice of me. I love it when they cock their hind legs and diligently scrub their backsides and underbellies. They are really quite comical. I laugh yet I am downhearted that there is no Michel to share this with.

  It is too late in the year for mosquitos. Although it is dry and warmish, the wind, which even in summer would keep all but the most persistent at bay, has not entirely died down. Male mozzies are not harmful to us; they feed off plants. It is the females that suck our blood, I read on a sign at the entrance to the park. They need blood from mammals and fowl to succour the superabundance of eggs they lay in these stagnant waters. Grey herons and magnificent purple herons take flight before my eyes. The purple ones are a spectacular sight. There are eight heron species frequenting the Camargue marshlands. Scarlet darters are in evidence everywhere. In fact, there are several species of dragonfly landing on and taking off from my stepping feet, in and out of the bushes and the stubby tamarisk trees. Hundreds of them. I recognise the blue-tailed damselfly, for we have these on our land, but the marmalade-toned ones I have never encountered before. The sight of all these dragonflies brings back Michel again. I slow, remembering the dozens of waterlilies he bought for our pond at the farm, all of which the dogs ate. So much brings back Michel. I strike onwards, determined to stay in the present. Signs hammered into the earth at the waters’ banks clearly warn visitors: Chasse Interdite – hunting forbidden.

  I smile. I am not entirely alone.