THE THIRD MONK X
A story in more or less weekly instalments - the rest is here.
I returned from the perilous school run one day to find a Citroën van, the one with the corrugated body like a garden shed on wheels, parked in my space on the square with its back doors open. I braked rather too close behind it and jumped out right into the path of a short barrel of a man with a red checked belly hanging over his baggy cords and cheeks of the same red, carrying a wooden crate full of vegetables. I didn't know we had a greengrocer who delivered. 'La fameuse Kattee?'. He put down the crate and extended a hand. 'Antoine Polizzi'. Jean-Paul's father. My eyes followed the brown cigarette that stayed between his lips as he spoke. He removed it, puffed on it and looked me up and down, then, since I found nothing to say, picked up the crate again with a grin and followed me into the house.
Louise and Antoine had returned, sooner than they'd hoped, for more visits to the hospital, and would be staying for a week or two. She looked paler, sitting quietly on the sofa, recovering from the early morning hours of jolting over narrow mountain roads in the tin-can van.
Antoine took over the kitchen, puffing on his Gitanes, a tumbler of red wine to hand, selecting delectable leeks and carrots from his garden for our meal. They took turns to cook, vying to make us swoon with ecstasy at perfect peasant feasts. Amidst smiles and anecdotes and bursts of song, the fresh root vegetables and salad greens, the saucisson artisanal and wheels of dense rye bread came out of boxes and sacks, filled up the kitchen cupboards and arrayed themselves beamingly, temptingly, on the table.
Louise and Antoine. Long, long dead, their warmth and verbosity and joie de vivre live in my heart. They were unprepossessing, dirt-poor and prematurely aged, and king and queen of food and drink and laughter and each other. On a shelf in the sitting room was a framed photo of them, sitting on a bench outside their dilapidated house, laughing and talking to the photographer, bathed in evening sunlight, the stones of the house, their hair, their clothes all the same golden grey, and in my mind they always have that aura.
For forty years they'd been newspaper vendors on the poorest streets of Marseille, out in all weathers and barely scraping a living. They'd retired at sixty, not long before. Louise elbowed me: 'We got married last year - to qualify for the pension, you know!'. I gaped. of course, Jean-Paul was not called Polizzi, thought no doubt at all, seeing them together, that he was Antoine's son. It was after just a few months back in the Alpine village of Louise's childhood, happily gardening, cooking and starting to repair the house that had long stood empty, that she found the lump. Bitter luck, and yet they did not seem bitter - just... themselves and here, embracing life to the last breath.
Lunch that day became a ceremony, the first of many, with all of us interacting around the table. Hands stretched, mouths filled, talk bounced back and forth. Louise perked up enough to sharply critique the mustard in her husband's salad dressing. Even in the face of Marianne's fluctuating and sometimes frail energy, we always had formal, well cooked meals with courses and conversation. That was still then the French way. But, with Louise and Antoine, meals moved up a key, becoming delicious, riotous rituals which framed the days. The main course would arrive in a massive, two-handled enamel pot, with ladle, placed with ceremony in the centre of the long kitchen table. With every meal I discovered some dish that was new to me, and some story. Here was a culture of gourmet sensuality, a great tradition transcending wealth and class - a culture which has since begun to disappear, with Louise and Antoine's generation, but is not yet forgotten.
Food and cooking had been a deep, abiding pleasure of their life together and of Jean-Paul's childhood and still was, for all of them, an obsession. They tasted, murmured, mused over each dish, discussed the tried and true like favourite paintings and each new venture like a newly discovered work whose attribution demanded slow deliberation and debate.
'And is it true, my dear young lady', Antoine asked, twinkling, 'that in England, when you roast a joint of meat, you throw away the juices and make a sauce from a packet, from cornflour and brown dye?!' 'Ssh, Papa, yes, it's true; it's called Bisto.' (Jean-Paul pronounced it 'Beast-oh'). And so I learned, before I'd had a kitchen of my own and really been corrupted by the base cuisine of my own nation, about food as art, as a ritual of long, varied, moderated pleasures; that a meal was at least three courses, that vegetables were cooked to keep their shape and glowing colours and set on a separate plate, that a starter could be just two perfect radishes with a knob of unsalted butter or a spoonful of grated celeriac in strong-tasting mayonnaise, that cheese came in fine, pungent, nutty or creamy slivers, and fruit was sliced too and eaten slowly with a knife and fork - a refinement that didn't need lots of money, a way of passing long, cold evenings inside and long, hot evenings outside when going out was beyond the budget.
I learned too that none of this was innate, for Marielle and Laura had not yet embraced it. Their taste - indulged, but 'try a little of this too, dear, for Mémé', Louise would murmur - ran to fish fingers and alphabetti spaghetti and those little, bright-red, mass-produced globes of mild Edam cheese. 'Plastic cheese', said Jean-Paul disgustedly. Marielle beamed. 'My Daddy calls this plastic cheese', she proudly told the village grocer next day. 'It's my favourite!'.
