10th July 2010 – Singing Frogs

I had no particular desire to leave Fontchouette. I had been happy there; I felt that I was just getting into the flow and wished that I could have spent my 3-week stint there as opposed to wherever I was going next.  And so it was that I went once again to market. To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. The nursery rhyme reverberated through my mind, although I had no consumerist intentions towards any porcine beings, corpulent or otherwise. I had a couple of hours of limbo but was reluctant to leave Anne-Marie and Pierre and make the transition over the road to the Hubert’s stall. I was clinging to what I knew, or at least to what I knew better, even though my sense of familiarity was as absurd as the song in my head was beginning to sound.

I sat on my rucksack, much as I had done when I had arrived, a limp lettuce once again. Juan sat nearby, hacking pieces off a saucisson with his pocket knife; it was he who had bought the fat pig, not I. All the men in the family owned a pocket knife with a wooden handle, and seemed to carry it with them at all times. I helped myself every now and then to an apricot from a brown paper bag on a stool, allowing the juice to coat my tongue. A tomboy teenager called Julie came up and chatted for a while, gangly legs akimbo as she squatted on a pile of empty crates. I was sent on missions to and from the café across the road to buy coffees and return the cups, decorated with caffeinated scum. It was on my final journey that the heavens opened, if only for five minutes, with a gratifying sense of pathetic fallacy. I said goodbye to the family who had taken me in for two weeks, and felt tears begin to well, although they didn’t spill over onto my rain-wet cheeks. The boys waved. I took a deep breath and walked the seven metres to my next venture.  

Michelle Hubert was standing at the stall. With my second deep breath in as many minutes and a slight stutter, I introduced myself. She came around the stall to give me the obligatory three kisses – right, left, right. She didn’t gush, but she seemed to exude kindness without trying. It struck me that her face resembled that of my Nana; they both had the same kind eyes. She told me to put my bag down by the large white van behind the stall, but not in it. I soon learned that loading the van was a near-military operation – which the presence of my bag would have thrown out of kilter – because I was put to work straight away. I was to take tatty cardboard boxes from the side door of the van, look for the description of the contents of each which would be scrawled somewhere on the side in faded marker pen, and fill them up with goods. The little wooden labels and miscellaneous pieces of paper explaining the health benefits of some of the products went in a small, disintegrating container which barely served to keep them in one place, and the beautiful pieces of glazed pottery were wrapped carefully before being packed. The full boxes needed to be put on the tarmac by the van’s back door, but not in the van itself; only Xavier could be trusted to load the van.

Xavier appeared at that moment. As much as Pierre had been a man of few words, I could tell immediately that Xavier was a man of even fewer. He kissed me – right, left, right – and said bonjour, but unlike anyone else whom I had met so far, he didn’t seem to be quite at ease with the intimacy of the greeting. I had little time to ponder this though, as Michelle began to talk to me, telling me that Xavier would finish off the loading and that he would bring my rucksack with him; she needed to do a quick bit of shopping, and she wanted me to help me. Wondering how on earth I could help this effortlessly elegant stranger with shopping-related decisions, I slid into the passenger seat of her battered old white car, waving to a wine-wielding Pierre as we passed him.

We stopped not far from the market, still in Lamastre, and Michelle beckoned me to follow her. Leaving the car unlocked, we walked through a shabby doorway into the most wonderful world where the smells of sweet pastry, crème pâtissière, sharp cooked fruits, nuttily toasted seeds and freshly baking bread all wafted around our faces on the warm breeze and our eyes were treated to the delights to which the aromas belonged. I was faintly aware that this wasn’t the bakery favoured by Pierre and Anne-Marie, but in my ambrosial reverie I lost all memory of why, and if I felt like a traitor to my previous pastry patronage, if only for the most fleeting of moments. 

I had arrived on Xavier’s birthday, and so I became involved in composing the extravagance of a large white and red gift box filled with the pâtissier’s creations. Clutching the box on my knee as if it were full of crystal glass, we drove up into the hills along the same road as I had come down that morning, turning off only two minutes before reaching our destination and taking me through dense, unfamiliar trees and past fields I no longer recognised. A tight U-turn under a chestnut tree took us up an ill-kept dust track, the surface of which betrayed the old car’s lack of suspension. We passed two white yurts in an open meadow, and suddenly in front of me was a fairy-tale house of stone, hidden behind trailing vines and flowers. We parked up underneath a balcony bedecked with leaves, which jutted out over the road. I had arrived.   

It was a strange occasion to descend into. Not only were Xavier and Michelle there, but also two of their three adult daughters – Marie and Yavannah, who I supposed to be in their mid-to-late twenties – and Marie’s little son Taom, who had outgrown the babe-in-arms stage of life, but was yet to reach the toddling one, and whose limbs were still charmingly chubby. Sitting around a table on the balcony, I was a touch overwhelmed by being at the centre of such an intimate family celebration, and I didn’t take much in. 

Conversations flowed around me, drifting from a confabulation on the flexibility of the relationship between age and maturity, into an analysis of various famous actors and a recent film, into the subject of eating with one’s fingers and the merits and disadvantages of cutlery, to the ethics of living in a yurt; Marie lived in one of the yurts we had passed while a friend lived in the other, and the family turned out to be friends with John and Carla of the yurt at Fontchouette. I contributed to the conversation when I could, but mostly I allowed myself to float through it, enjoying the evident intelligence around the table as much as the cakes, and feeling that I was probably going to be very happy there. 

Keen to make a good impression, once the dinner was over and the dishes cleared from the table, I applied myself to the task of washing up, noting happily that the sideboard was at a more comfortable height. I always enjoyed washing up after a good meal, standing with my hands in the warm water, floating in gentle sensation, and letting my dinner go down, and it was a relief to be able to do so without getting an ache in my shoulders. I also hoped to show Xavier and Michelle that I would be an easy and compliant WWOOFer to live with. They were surprised. They didn’t try to stop me, but made it clear that in this house, the chores were shared, whether it was washing up or cleaning or cooking, but that they weren’t in the habit of using their WWOOFers as servants. 

After Yavannah, Marie and Taom left, Xavier and Michelle retired to their bedroom for a siesta. Unaccustomed to sleeping during the day, this left me at my leisure to admire the house. The room I was in was truly fascinating. It was long and rectangular in shape, with the front door at one end of it and the door through to Xavier and Michelle’s bedroom at the other. It was next to this that I was sitting on a low, L-shaped sofa, upholstered in 80s chequered patterns. Half of the upholstery was covered in a large off-white cotton throw, polka- dotted with black flies, and half in ethnic-inspired deep reds, browns and embroidered bronzes, scattered with red-orange silk cushions. One well-loved acoustic guitar nestled in the corner. As I sat, the seat cushions periodically slid forwards and needed pushing back if I didn’t want to become completely recumbent. I discovered later that the cracks behind the cushions were where my misplaced camera and pens would disappear to when my eyes were turned.

On the floor around the sofa were a few large, round, leather floor cushions. The leather was lacquered red, worn and cracked in places so that the natural brown leather fuzz could be seen in veins across the surface, like a riverbed viewed from the air. They were sitting on a collection of mismatched rugs. Covering the area which served as a sitting room was a paisley-patterned rug which had once been cream but was now beige with swirling dark brown and faded terracotta patterns. On top of this, and not quite central, was a similarly once-cream-but-now-beige ragrug which could well have been homemade, and on that was a much smaller circular rug which bore the same pattern as the first, except slightly darker. Peeping out from underneath these tapestries were burnished red floor tiles, well trodden and enchanting in their own right. 

Behind me was a small niche in the wall, like the Virgin’s niche in a church, but instead of Christ’s mother there stood a statue of a roundly pregnant woman, proud in her naked fecundity. Beside this in the corner of the room, wooden shelving stretched to the ceiling. Closest to the statue were collections of ornaments, and video cassettes half-concealed behind a black speaker on which lay a metal plate holding half-burned candles. On the narrow central column of shelves were CDs and DVDs, and on the broadest outer shelf stood a sound system – an old deck with sliders and dials that I hadn’t a hope of understanding, having grown up on the cusp of the digital era. There was another deck for cassettes, and sitting on top in pride of place was an old Phillips CD player with a red display. One CD case – the Kora Jazz Trio – had been left open and empty, and a short investigation confirmed my suspicions that the CD was in the machine. Tentatively, I pressed play, my fingers hovering over the volume controls in case the sound was too loud. But it was gentle, and soon I was listening to the inspiration of a piano, a drum, and a 32-stringed African kora. Looking through the remaining CDs I found music by artists as varied as the Hungarian gypsy fiddler Bela Lakatos, Jamaican ska group The Skatalites and Mexican guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela, as well as Yiddish tangos, classical masterpieces and a hoard of traditional chants. I was going to enjoy broadening my musical horizons.

A door led to a stairwell downwards, the steps masked by a wooden wall covered in a bamboo blind and big faded terracotta-coloured curtain. At the other end of the curtain, steps led upwards. The stairways in the house were wooden and creaky, as were the upstairs floorboards; there would be no creeping around at night! 

I ascended the stairs, chose my bedroom –as I had been instructed to do – and unpacked my bag. I was the only WWOOFer there, but not for long. A Belgian girl with an unpronounceable name was going to be joining me the following day. There wasn’t much to choose between the two rooms upstairs, so I plumped for the one that let in more light. It only had a mattress on the floor to serve as a bed rather than a more civilised bed frame, but that really wasn’t an issue to me. Neither was the odd sound that night of frogs singing somewhere in the wilderness: a polyphony of gentle rasping. I slept well regardless.