It’s been delightfully strange receiving emails from some of you asking where my report on Collioure is … I guess you are reading this blog! (You’ve made me feel like Sally Field.) The real world intervened this week in the form of work from The Old Life, including some Brick work, as the magazine is about to go to press, and some old-fashioned “real” writing, which I am behind on. (I may be in France, but my deadlines followed me.)
I write this from within the clutches of une vraie gueule de bois française: a wooden mouth, or a proper hangover. We had our first dinner party here last night, albeit with the only people in Narbonne we could possibly have a dinner party with, to wit Bernard and Françoise, and Jacques and Christiane. One could be stuck with considerably less convivial dinner partners by the same kind of chance we have these marvelous people in our lives. For lack of company we would have invited the meter-reader to dinner by now, but these four make up a fascinating and delightful cross-section of French society and we’re lucky to have them. The menu and a report of the proceedings will follow shortly.
But first, the report I owe you from Collioure.
We’d agreed it was time for a weekend away last weekend and Collioure, of which you already know a little, was our first choice because it’s so frikking gorgeous. On our way there, we stopped north of Perpignan to look at Le Chateau de Salses, a 700-year-old fort built as one of the last Spanish strongholds when this part of France was part of the much-warred-over Franco-Iberian frontier.
It’s a rather imposing, extraordinarily imposing structure, with an inner garrison courtyard that looks a lot like a remote nunnery, stables beneath, and various living and defensive structures within.
The inner courtyard of Chateau Salses
In some places, the walls are fifty feet thick. The kids were impressed by the dungeon, and of course, it’s always useful to have another speculative punishment in one’s arsenal, so “How’s you like to spend a night in the Chateau de Salses dungeon, buddy?” is a good one to have in the quiver. The guidebooks rattle on how the fort is a fascinating example of the architectural transition between medieval fortified castles, and more modern fortified bastions, but frankly, the thing that took my breath away was the view, from the highway, of the giant quarry on one side and the fort on the other: a perfect concordance of cause and effect. You could have picked up the chateau, turned it upside down, and just about perfectly plugged the quarry with it. There was no way to get a picture of both the fortress and the quarry in the frame, but here's the imposing doorway with some nice people standing in it.
We got to Collioure at about 3 in the afternoon, ready for some seaside zoning-out,
and it was a perfect day for it, with the winds pretty low and the temperature getting up close to 40. This couple was taking it to an extreme, but we just went to the beach. We spent the entire afternoon there, the highlight of which was discovering that the local fish population adores cookies. I apologize in advance to those of you who don’t like these kinds of shananigans (I promise you we don’t toss popcorn to the polar bears at the zoo), but I have to say this little discovery provided the three easily entertained Redhill-Simard boys with some serious diversion.First off, about six feet out from the shoreline, you encounter three varieties of fish. There are the silver ones, with the black strip down their side, anywhere from three inches long to seven. There are the agean-blue fish, long and meaty-looking, and then below them, trolling like sharks, are what I’m pretty sure were red snappers, some of which got up to fifteen inches in length. They all swim around you, staying a safe distance away. That is, until you have cookies. Benjamin discovered that if you crumble a LU shortbread cookie into the water, they pretty much go wild.
I, being scientifically minded, took a cookie to a remote part of the beach, went into the water where there were no fish, and crumbled a bit of the cookie into the water. For five seconds, there was no activity. Then about five or six of the little silver ones appeared. Five seconds later, there were twenty or so different fish feeding off the surface. And when I looked up, beyond the little gathering, I saw, streaming in from the deeper water, no fewer than 200 hundred fish, rocketing toward the feed. Ten seconds later, there were more than 500 fish of all sizes and descriptions swimming circles around me, swimming under me, nipping my leghair, and generally very excited by shortbread. When the cookie was gone, the frenzy declined, but about half of them stuck around for another minute, and then, as if received word of something more interesting elsewhere, they dispersed. The Great Barrier Reef it wasn’t, but it was pretty cool. This is Ben feeding his pack. Not a great picture, but you get the idea.
Feeding frenzy, watch your zizi
In the evening, we got one of the last tables at Les Templiers, the quayside restaurant that used to be
frequented by the likes of Picasso and is full of Fauvist paintings (although the ones Picasso painted to pay for his pastisses are in a safe after a guest stole a couple off the stairwell walls.) France was playing Italy in the soccer and the boys ended up in the bar while Anne and I ate our meals and polished off a bottle of wine.To the left, there they are hanging with the locals. And below is Anne after at least half a bottle of wine. (The expression is compounded by the fact that
drunken strangers in a bar fifteen feet away were sort of babysitting our kids.)The next day, it was marketday. It was there I met the nice lady with the truck full of goat’s cheese (cf: this post). Maxime also finally got his wish and we took the train touristique around Collioure. We had thought this was a little choo-choo that slowly drove up and down mainstreet, but it wasn’t. I suspect if Anne had known that it went straight up the hillside on a tiny cliffedge road made specifically for the train, and that it twisted like a piece of fusilli, she might have stayed at home.
Despite the stomach-churning climb, it did allow us to see some incredible views of Collioure and the ocean. As well as these gentlemen picking grapes – the recolter (harvest) has just begun.
Come to France for the culture.
Well, okay, apart from the dancing, it was a really gorgeous weekend in Collioure. Here's a couple more happy pics ...
Max and me looking way handsome at lunch in Collioure
Max and Ben with a car that runs on smoothies
One of the three gorgeous beaches at Collioure. And yes, that is a castle right on the beach
An etymological moment
Living in another language gives you some strange insights into your own. For instance, I never thought of the word “restaurant” as having, as its root, the verb “to restore”. But in France, the word for serving food (or, I think more precisely, making food available) is restauration (as in "restauration non-stop"), in which form the root is utterly clear.
Another word, that for obvious reasons has been attracting my attention of late, is patisserie. That’s a very attractive word, but I’ve been thinking about it, and its root is kind of off-puttingly banal or even gross. Its root is “pâte,” and as with almost every word in French that features a circumflex, it’s missing a letter that’s been elided by use over time. The letter is ‘s” (replace it in words that have a circumflex to see what I mean: forêt, arrêt, hôtel, etc), and so the root that informs all of our beloved treats is “paste.” Hence, of course, "pastry," which doesn’t sound at all nasty, but its root—"paste"—is the basic ingredient in all those incredible baguettes, pains chocolates, beignes, tartes, and brioches: water and flour. (The word “pasta,” by the way, comes from the same root and in French is called pâtes. And pâté, as in pâté de fois gras is liver paste. I’ll stop now.)
***
Some more sundries
I’d promised a few more idiotic observations of French life, so here they are.
Driving
Want to go to Perpignan from Narbonne? Well, you can take the péage, the toll highway; or the provincial, two-lane highway; or the rural highways, of which there are a few to choose from; or the farm roads; and if you really seek them out, you can probably drive on the sidewalks, too, all the way there. Each of these routes will get you to Perpignan relatively quickly, it just depends what kind of scenery you want. However, you don’t have to worry that any of these routes will lack one of the prerequisites of French driving: the nutcases. Most of them are on motorcycle, weaving in and out of traffic at 140km/hr, but there are also the ones who honk at you and flash their highbeams from one kilometre back to warn you that they’re coming and you better reconsider being on the road at all. As this dude passes you, he’ll come up on your bumper with his lane-change ticker on and when he changes lanes, he’ll be so close to the back and side of your car that you could hand his passenger a beer. And after he passes you, he’ll cut in front of you exactly the same way. It’s frankly terrifying, but we’ve gotten used to it. It’s aggressive driving, but it’s not antagonistic: it’s just the way they do it.
The speed limit on the péage is 130. At home it’s 100 on the major routes and you know how fast you go on those. Most people on major French highways are driving between 125 and 140, but there’s a serious contingent of them that go 160 or higher. Once, alone in the car between Montpellier and Narbonne, when there was almost no traffic on a straightaway, I took our little Yaris up to 150. I couldn’t bring myself to go faster: I felt like my life was on the line at 150km/hr. Those death-courters who go faster are clearly insane.
Toplessness
We’d warned Max and Ben that the greatest hazard to their eyes on French beaches was not the sun but the preponderance of, well, boobies. They’ve become rather inured to it, and good for them, but for the adult North American male, the ubiquitous topless beach in France presents an ocular hazard: where do you look? I suppose you could just not look, but let’s be honest, that’s not really going to happen. So, er, “one” looks. And once the obvious erotic pleasures are dispensed with (I will say they are not completely dispensed with: the blood yet flows in my veins, so they will not be entirely dispensed with), one’s awareness of partial nudity is replaced with an awareness that this bodily comfort is part of a larger adaptation to pleasure and to being present among others. (To my mind, women’s toplessness on these beaches has its corollory in men’s Speedos, which is to say, as much skin as can drink in this light and this air is the goal.)
In thinking about the tradition of partial or total nudity at the European seaside, one has to consider the traditions of public bathing in these countries. The bathhouse has for centuries been a place of communal activity: people bathe for their health, for their hygiene, and for their comfort, and in doing so, they are brought together in an act of social levelling: people without their clothes are no longer classable. The naked politician looks very much like the man who collects his garbage; the elderly lady who looks like she might sell radishes for a living might well be the best otolaryngologist in Tobolsk.
Some of this levelling has been imported to the European beach, and it has the effect of conferring equality on everyone and fostering tolerance. After it stops being shocking, upsetting, titillating, or unfamiliar, it begins to feel like life the way it should be. (Hell, Anne— who would never have even used the word “bikini” before 2007—has bought the first bikini in her life. And for Anne, that is the equivalent of running naked out onto a baseball field.)
Another thing that is quite odd and lovely is the presence of a great deal of elderly flesh. And I have to say, once you get over the sight of a 300-pound, half-naked octogenarian, you start to feel warm about it: she can do this here! She’s accepted! And, let me tell you, more often than not, her octogenarian husband is lying beside her in his Speedo with his arm around her. So there is that, too.
One final thought and an attempt at myth-busting. It’s often said that Europeans are just more comfortable with their bodies, and perhaps this is true, but I’ve begun to think that it has more to do with how they relate to one another than it does with self-image. They touch, they kiss, they gesture wildly with their bodyparts. The mouths on French men and women are the most muscular mouths I’ve ever seen: they erupt from their faces, pursing, pouting, laughing, emphasizing, always emphasizing. And I’ve come to see all those other body parts as an extension of this: it’s how they situate themselves with each other. It’s cognate with intimacy, however public this intimacy may seem to outsiders, and so it’s not a lack of shame, it’s a kind of utterance. It’s I’m here and this is what I am. It’s also, no denying it, Look at my incredible tanned tits and check out, will you, every contour of my enormous beSpeedoed package, but hey, on top of being complex social creatures, like the rest of us the French are also vain. In all, it’s a hell of an education.
(Sorry, Ted, no pictures for this section.)
The end of the market day
Yesterday, I went to the market to buy the massive quantities of food that would become our drunken feast of last night, and witnessed a very amusing ritual I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t gone to do my shopping right at the end of the market day. The market closes at 1pm, but the stalls begin closing up at about 12:30. Apart from the myriad vegetable and fish and meat and boulangerie and roast chicken and olive stalls, Les Halles also has three coffee bars. There are always men sitting at them, smoking and drinking little glasses of liquor, but at 12:30, something else starts to happen. Market workers, as well as locals in the know, visit the meat or fish stalls and get slices of steak or little fish filets, and then they visit a vegetable stall and buy a couple of potatoes, and they bring these items to one of the bars and the proprietor, after pouring them a drink, quickly fries up their meat for them in a little electric pan and makes them frites from their potatoes and little 45-minute lunch party ensues. I didn’t have the camera, so I can’t show you all these robust old men, their wives, and the rough-looking dude from across the way, all tippling happily at the end of a long morning and eating their steaks and filets, but you can trust me that it was one of the most charming impromptu acts of localness I’ve yet come across. When I mentioned it to Bernard, he told me he sometimes goes and anyone can show up with a steak and a couple euros and join in. We’ll see .. my courage extends to conjugating the subjunctive tense these days, but it does sound like a nice way to spend lunch …
