4th August 2010 – She Waits

I slept badly, perhaps knowing that I would have to wake up early to go to market. Wrapping up warm, I went down to the kitchen where I found Abelard and Marta already installed with their coffee and fags. I didn’t feel like bread and jam at such an early hour, but I took a couple of apricots and snaffled a biscuit from Theotim. We bundled into the front of the van, Abelard in the driver’s seat, with me on the far passenger side and Theotim squashed on the little seat in between. The window on my side was broken and refused to be closed, so the drive was fresh and cold, blowing away any residual cigarette smell. Cloud had settled in the valley overnight, and as we drove up, away from the farm and into the hills, and the sun was beginning to burn through. It was an eerie sight, and I wished I had had my camera to capture its momentary beauty. Not that I would have dared to use a camera if I had had one; I feared Abelard’s derision.

The journey though the sleeping Haute Loire villages was almost silent, except for the sounds of the engine and the radio. I smiled as a song came on that I recognised. I had been brought up listening to the French singer in question, and it reminded me of home. The song was called Elle Attend: she waits. I thought about the lyrics. They translated to she’s waiting for the world to change, she’s waiting for a change of weather, she’s waiting for this mad world to lose itself, and for the winds to turn, relentlessly she waits. I felt at that moment that was what I was doing at this farm: waiting for things to get better. Soon after this brief soulful moment, Theotim discovered the pocket in the front of my hoody. I didn’t mind him prodding his hands into the depths, where he could warm his freezing little fingers, but Abelard chastised him for being a pain. I wondered if the poor boy ever managed to have fun without being caught. 

I was surprised by how small the market was when we arrived in Le Puy en Velay. We parked up in a tiny square lined with shops and cafes. Even once the market was in full swing, we were one of only three fruit and vegetable sellers. Before setting up, Abelard needed his second coffee fix of the morning. He offered me one, and although I declined, I accepted a hot chocolate. Imagine my

surprise when my beverage arrived in an espresso cup! It was the tiniest hot chocolate I had ever drunk. Abelard downed his strong coffee like a shot of tequilla, and we began to set up. He did, anyway. I hovered. I offered to help, but there was nothing for me to do: Abelard knew how he wanted things to be, and so it was quickest if he did it. He built himself a fortress of three tables, flung out wicker baskets and plastic crates with brusque carelessness, and laid out his produce. I set the carrots out gently on one of the crates, and set to putting price labels by the different foods.

The first few customers came and went. I watched their transactions idly, and stared at the buildings surrounding us. Each was painted a different shade of orange or pink or cream or white, and the shutters were every colour under the sun. Abelard said nothing to me. It came as a shock, then, that he left me in charge of the stall while he moved his van. Two customers came and went and I fumbled my way through the sale of two bunches of carrots and 700g of green beans, craning over the stall to read the upside-down price labels, conscious of my ungrammatical French and blushes. I only hoped that they were faithful customers and that they were used to being served by incompetent WWOOFers. Disaster struck with the demands of a slightly overweight lady, greying in streaks of her straggling hair, huffing and hassled and a little out of breath. All she wanted was two lettuces, but it meant that I had to use the scales and the till, and I didn’t know how because I hadn’t been shown, and her stress was rubbing off on me, and half of the numbers on the till had been similarly rubbed off through years of use, and there was a 0 button and a 00 button but I only saw the latter which looked like a 0, and my brain wasn’t working and I charged her €16.70 for the salad. She was clearly exasperated by my difficulties, sighing and making a scene and threatening to take her custom elsewhere. But then, for some unknown reason, empathy made an appeal to her better nature and she mellowed. She came around the back of the stall and together we sorted out my problems. She even saw the funny side, although I was still mortified. 

Abelard returned and told me that I could go. There was no friendly preamble, asking me how my stall-holding experience had gone, nor were there words of thanks. I wandered the streets, crunching into a still-warm swirl of slightly sugared puff pastry, golden brown flakes falling to rest undignified on my chest. I savoured in particular the caramelised raisins cooked on the top of the pain aux raisins, slightly bitter from spending too long in the oven. My feet took me up steep, narrow, cobbled streets between tall cream buildings giving way to public gardens, towards Notre Dame de France, an imposing statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus standing on the hill above the town: France’s answer to Rio di Janero. It had been created from melted down Russian canons that had been captured during the Crimean war. The views were terrific, and I stood for a while, my eyes drinking the terracotta sea of the tiled roofs below me and the gentle waves caused by the alleys between them. Swifts darted around the chimneys, and people and cars moved almost imperceptibly below them like spider-mites on a complex circuit board. I allowed my mind to wander into escapism and daydreams, out into the verdant volcanic countryside surrounding the city.

Making my way back down the path, my fingers noticed the warmth and the coolness of the metal handrail in the sun of the morning and the shade of the trees. The scent of roses caught me off-guard, and once again I dreamed myself back to the jammy idyll of the Ardèche. I couldn’t see the flowers, but I didn’t need to. Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turning and wandered aimlessly along streets that led anywhere, discovering that Le Puy was larger than its market suggested. 

I passed a shop which caught my eye, and I stood at the window, staring in. It was a children’s bookshop and its display held promises of magic and adventure, bright colours and fantastical characters. I was drawn in, hungry for fiction to take me away from where I was. Postcards with excerpts from stories for children span around lazily on wire racks that squeaked, books tumbled at the slightest draught from over-stacked shelves lining the walls, and stationery that made my fingers itch with excitement lay on cabinets in the middle of the room --  and I didn’t know where to look first. I walked around in a daze of infantile delight, and the shop worked its magic. I walked out with a book of French poetry and a notebook, deciding not to look at them again until the weekend. Sunday was my 21^st birthday, and I was trying to forget about it. I couldn’t help but think that it was going to be an awful let-down. At least with the poetry of Jaques Prévert, a notebook, and the further indulgence of a big bar of crème brûlée chocolate, I would have a present to open. 

I was just as useless when it came to packing up the stall as I had been at setting it out. On the way back, I played with Theotim again. We poked each other gently and played thumb wars and when that grew boring we just held hands through the pocket of my hoody, his hands tiny, delicate and vulnerable in mine. Predictably, his father told him off for being a nuisance. I felt like a naughty child too. It frustrated me. Theotim had been doing no harm. Besides, I felt some kind of affection from him, some real interest in me, if only as a partner-in-crime. I wanted him to play. I wanted a friend.