12.
SomePlace Pyrenean Journal. Bertrand and Sylvie



My neighbours on the east side are two siblings. Bertrand and Sylvie potter with ancient tractors, creaking wheelbarrows, geriatric goats and are nearly always in tweed and wool, impregnated with oil and god knows what stains. Sylvie adds a pinafore that sits like a ledge cloth over her precise stomach. She is not so much fat as well fed and protuberant in various places. Friendly would not be sufficient description for these two. They have welcomed me with uncanny warmth; they, who have rarely seen a stranger, let alone an English woman. They learn all that they know from the village and from their television. There are no books. The only printed paper they glance at, they assure me, is the junk that comes into their letter box , and a calendar left by the paramedic/fire service, Les Pompiers.

Their land runs alongside mine, as Emile and Marie’s does, on the other side. Strange really, that we have these long strips of fields, like allotments, all facing south to the mountains, with nothing beyond except prairie and forest. In Britain I would pay a million or more for these views. And here are layers of lives, laid down over the generations. The ruined walls, the roofless barns, the collapsing wells; echoes of rural histories and industriousness; not quite a palimpsest, the landscape is more a quilting and a layering of lives. No one here, one feels, starts with a new beginning, so much as turns and goes over again; meeting the necessities of a hand to mouth existence. My arrival has inserted a different way of living. I dig in the field and discover pottery, old tool bits, and leather scraps. But it is not my history. However long I stay here, I suspect, the etrangere status will stick. Perhaps rightly so.

Sunshine eases into my joints; there are changes in birdsong and the sward. 3 bluetits are shinning up and across the walnut trees, their courtship rivalries voiced in metallic ‘tsiiits-chinks’

The plums and cherries are all in exuberant mode; pale sweeps of flowering creep up the mountain sides and the red kites are cheeky in their display flights and courtship dances.

My ownership of this small piece of land has intensified my attention to the details of the microcosm. I notice the smallest alteration: the creeping potentilla, the speedwell, the blue flax are pushing their frontiers. The daffodils, free of snow and wind, stand upright and bright. The first spotted orchid leaves are there, in the low grass. Emile is out too, raking out the old tomato haulm from last year but I’m too far out of earshot to catch any complaint.