Sunday, December 30, 2012

El Rocio



















In a restaurant near Granada, at the other end of Andalusia from El Rocio, the waitress told me about how she and her family and friends all make a pilgrimage to El Rocio in May.  She pointed out the photos that lined the walls, images of the virgin statue, shots of oxen-drawn conestoga wagons, people riding horseback in the streets.  The Romeria, they call it.  We were told a lot of Spaniards from El Rocio migrated to the US West.

There seems to be a lot of competition among Andalusian towns and cities but danged if I know over what.  The Pallio in Siena, Italy is a horse race and I understand horse races.  The competition here seems to be over which town team gets to carry this big image of the Virgin Mary around town.  There are supposedly lots of fist fights over this.  I don't get it either.
     

The town has a half dozen streets but all of them are gigantically wide.  We saw pictures that confirm that as many as a million people come for the Romaria.  Oh, and I should say we were told there is a lot of hanky panky of all types during the week or so celebrations.  Lots of fighting, drinking, and lovemaking.

These streets after a couple days of rain really looked like Vermont roads at mud season but scaled up 20X.

Some of the streets had been graded to confine the water to a center strip.
   




El Rocio is pronounced "rothio"  I loved all the contagious lisping in Spanish and spent the whole visit lisping in English too.   


The pilgrims are not just devoted to the statue, they are as loyal to their "hermandad", the "confrerie" as my father was to his bowling team.  The lots of Andalusian towns sponsor a hermandad which means, in most cases, they have a sort of clubhouse in El Rocio.  I dont think these clubhouses are lodging but I'm not sure.  I couldn't find an open real estate office during my off season visit, but we heard that ordinary houses sell for in the neighborhood of a million euros.  You have to book a house or hotel room a year or more in advance.   









Here's the layout of the town.




Malaga is one of the biggest cities in Andalusia but its "clubhouse" was not even the fanciest.



Pilas is the oldest Romaria towns and the smallest.







Here's the gorgeous saltwater marsh that El Rocio is built along.     





Tuesday, December 11, 2012

the blitz garden

 We've been calling it a garden all these years, the space between the house and the toll-taker's cabin, between the rail bed retaining wall and rue St Roch.  For years it's been the most disgraceful yard in all of metropolitan Castelfranc,  where I stored lots of old floorboards that never came in handy,  rocks, boulders, bricks, useless mirrors I couldn't throw away, one or two cement mixers.

This compounded by the amazing amounts of rotting leaves that the huge weeping willow, itself dangerously rotten, constantly dropped.  There was a small shed at the rail bed end with a particularly unappetizing roof of corrugated fiberglass originally erected to protect a heating oil tank from the elements.  The ground everywhere was soiled with tinted plaster, dead mortar, dead sand, putrefying sawdust.  A sad heap of sand gradually experienced a continuing rise in catshit content.

Years ago Robert siphoned out the filthy fuel oil and took the tank to Mas Maury for scrap.   Last year I finally demolished the horrid shed and built a wooden one on the opposite corner of the yard.  Step two was the massive pruning of the willow, so severe it momentarily left Mrs Snoutworthy in tears.  This filled the whole yard shoulder deep in willow waste until Passedat's guys carted it away.  The whole of our next sojourn, earlier this year, I looked out my window at the now-elegant willow which had grown out beautifully wondering what to do with all the rest of the junk.  Some I carted off to the dump in the Kangoo  

The idea had been to save money by building the little wall myself.  But so out of shape have I become that I strained my shoulder just rooting around for the first layer of stone from among the piles of rubble left over from construction. 


In the end, it proved a lot easier to watch from a safe distance.  The Passadat crew ripped through the the project, getting rid of the piles of waste, building the wall, laying irrigation tubing, installing anti-weed fabric, planting and laying cobblestones in 4 days.





I still rub my eyes in disbelief looking at Passadat's great work through the beautiful gate that Didier, Karim, and Philippe collaborated on.  What happened to the junk pile?  How did it all go so fast?  What will I do when the bills come in?




Monday, October 22, 2012

satanic bolete

Here are some of the things I'm enjoying about my first time here in Autumn.

At the marché last Friday a woman was selling boletus edulcis, the king bolete, the cepe, by the pound.  Big monster boletes 10 inches across and several inches thick.  Why didn't I buy one?  At 20€ a kilo, they weren't expensive.  $11.86 per pound.  She must have had at least 200 lbs.  It's a good year for boletes and a lot of other mushrooms. 

This afternoon, riding up through Belaye and on to Floressas, I came across a relative, Satan's Bolete.  The jury is out on whether or not this one is even edible but it was the better part of 8 inches across.     


I tore it open to see the inside and discovered the blood red veins and the blue staining where I bruised it.  They are supposed to smell like "carrion" when ripe which is why so few people are poisoned by them.  Cooking them reduces toxicity but what sane person who wasn't starving would volunteer for its stomach flu symptoms. 


The possibility of finding a cepe glues my eyes to the roadside as when I have lost a tool or some other possession on a ride. It's mesmerizing after miles and miles of never losing track of the roadside.  At 12 mph you surely miss lots of mushrooms half-buried in leaf litter, disguised as leaves or stones.  Are mushrooms generally hiding like  prey animals or advertising themselves?  


Wednesday, October 17, 2012

rentrée

A friend who was to stay here in this house over the summer had to leave.  He said that the house "didn't like him;  it was like wearing someone else's clothes."  The rest of his family didn't feel anything of the sort apparently,  just him.  I keep looking around wondering what went into giving him this sensation.  For the sake of argument, let's assume--perhaps correctly, who knows?-- that it has nothing to do with me.  Then what is it about the place that produced this hostile vibe?  I look around me and see the tinted rough plaster with all its blotches, the happy friendly band of tile above the cherry cabinets, all welcoming and warm.

I would have said that we completely transformed this house, almost literally turning it upside down.  We even moved the stair and aimed it the opposite direction.  Couldn't be the kitchen, could it?  With it's view of the river and big round table.  The living room with its African hangings from the nice ecological lady's shop in Cazals, the silly elephant table, the simple chestnut staircase.  Living room, ok.

The spare bedroom?  A hard space to get your head around:  it's where, for the time being, you enter the house.  For some time it was the shop and even now harbors the old hollow piano case into which I intend to use to insert the electronic piano I bought from Karl.  Otherwise it has a huge bookcase with giant curtains that conceal our stock of toilet paper, wine, the peanut butter stash,  kitchen overflow.  The ancient oak ceiling joists are painted a possibly gruesome brown that sometimes reminds me of an Elks Club bar room minus the mounted, moth-eaten 6-pointer.   The floor here and in the main bedroom is click clack and the furnishings pretty much pure Ikea.  You must pass through the laundry room with its odd slanted ceiling of frosted glass.  Behold the bathroom, a bright but low-ceilinged, roomy room.

By the time you reach the main bedroom from the entrance you have made no fewer than five 90° turns.  An amateurish design if there ever was one, but hostile?  The main bedroom has light from three directions and the dark brown click clack plasticky flooring gets lost beneath the beautiful cherry armoire and oak chest and the veneer drawers on loan from Kim's house.  The rose tinted plaster has lots of splotches.

Did the tinted plaster suggest a Rorshach test to my friend?  It's occurred to me that it would have been terrific grist for an acid trip in 1968.

So if we're assuming it's not me and we've absolved the decor, then that leaves the psychic remnants of previous inhabitants.  The house for a long time belonged to the Miran family, skilled woodworkers who made fancy Louis XIV furniture.  There's a hamlet called Miran over by Fages and Mirans buried in the Castelfranc graveyard.  One of them committed suicide in this house.

Or it could be previous inhabitants.  God knows how old this place is.  I wonder how far back tax records go?  Did they survive the Revolution?  The town itself seems to go back to around 1250.  Opinions vary on when this house was built, whether before or after the Revolution.  And Rue St Roch lies along the long Roman road that ran from Lyon to Bordeaux.    











     

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Chavez re-elected

Pas encore parti pour Castelfranc, je suis sur l'influence ce soir de l'entolome avorté, un champignon cuielli dans dans le forêt qui entoure la maison, champignon supérieur au cèpe, à la morille, même au truffe.  Sur l'émission de Là-bas si j'y suis j'écoutais la liesse à Venezula après que Chavez s'est emparé.   Cette victoire me rappele un après-midi en Barcelone il y a dix ans.  Il etait vers 16h et la pluie tombait drue.  Nous nous decidions à prendre un bus touristique, aller voir le monuments, l'architecture de Gaudi.  Nous nous sommes assis en face d'un jeune couple venezuelien.  On en est venu à parler de Chavez.  "Tu sais, il est fou à lier.  Et je te dirai une autre chose:  il y aura un coup d'état dans un mois, puis plus de Chavez.  Mon père m'a envoyé étudier en Espagne pour ma securité."  Il était étouffant dans le bus, les fenêtres embuées.  Le jeune oligarch s'endormait sur l'épaule de sa copine, la bouche entrouverte, un fil de salive au menton.   Quelque mois après il y avait effectivement un coup plus avorté que l'entolome.  Que devenaient du jeune homme et son père?
Chavez donne à Obama un bouquin d'Eduardo Galeano qui a pour titre  "Le veines ouvertes d'Amerique Latine"
(2009)






Thursday, June 14, 2012

le portail

The new gate arrived today.  Didier, who made the terrasse railing, put together the gate itself while Karim and his partner Philippe forged the vines.  Philippe Fargal, as usual, occupied the position of Greek chorus, his head popping up over the restaurant wall like a parrot who only learned to make wry comments.    


Too bad about the tarp, mixer, and wheelbarrow, but, honest, despite what Philippe is always saying, we will work hard on finishing the garden....next year.



Here's the crew:  Didier, Karim and Philippe (l to r)



view from inside the garden





Hand forged leaves and vines


The all important resine gun:  this whole gate depends on 3 hinges on either side secured with 2 part resine from separate tubes mixed inside the nozzle.  







Wednesday, June 13, 2012

George


I met George through Pierrette, a Castelfranc woman of very ripe years, who found herself in the hospital a few years ago, gravely ill, without any friends or family to visit.  Once recovered, she made a vow to take a little time each week to visit with a few people in Les Floralies, a "senior residence" home in Prayssac,   She took Mrs Snoutsworthy along one week and she suggested I go talk with George, one of those on Pierrette's list, about the war. 

George though almost 90 is completely cogent and has a formidable memory.  I'm a complete sucker for war stories but George's seemed the more credible for their lack of gripping drama.  They seemed to be mostly about carrying messages around and blowing up bridges here and there.  He knows the precise date of every incident, the names of comrades and officers.  He is modestly proud--can you say that?--of his role which was without any heroics that he has cared to mention.

When I returned this year, George had been moved from Floralies to the local nursing home, Les Balcons du Lot.  It really is a balcony, hanging over the 911, visible for miles around especially the construction cranes as they enlarge the place for the next round of geezers.    

George got moved because he had bad bronchial congestion all winter and is still overwhelmed from time to time with horrible profoundd phlegm-seeking fits of coughing, like the roaring of a bear.  He continues whatever sentence was interrupted as if there had been no roaring, no bear. 

I asked him about the photos up on his wall.  Here is his first wife.  

Between George's mumbling, my increasing deafness, and my parlous French, I'm sure to get a lot of details wrong but in my version, it is one of the saddest stories I know.  This beautiful young woman, Ingrid, was a Jew brought up in Berlin by her grandmother after her parents were taken away by the Nazis.  The grandmother's house was blown up by Allied bombing, so the grandmother, a non-Jew, obliged to apply for new identity papers, gave Ingrid her family name.  George met and married Ingrid just after the end of the war in Germany where he found himself working for a lumber importer in the Black Forest.  From dealing with tropical wood, he came down with malaria, a bad enough case that he was evacuated to Prayssac where a pharmacist uncle was able to get the latest medicine amidst postwar medical shortages.  When George returned to consciousness months later, there was no word from Ingrid answering his many letters to her.  I imagine people lost touch with one another in the wake of that cataclysmic war but there was something more:  a woman who worked in the Prayssac post office happened to be in love with George and she intercepted his letters to Ingrid and her letters back to him.  He later discovered that Ingrid had been pregnant and had died in childbirth along with the baby.   

George remarried much later and had three or four children with this second wife before divorcing her.  He doesn't care to speak about her and there are large holes in his photo album where he has torn out pictures of her.  Nor does he have much to say about their children who he says have not been in touch with him for decades.  Trying to get him to say more about the brouille I once asked him to describe the children:  "They each had one head, two arms, two legs."  

He had other women in his life and was close with an aunt who is still alive and kicking.  But his greatest love seems to have been for his mother, pictured below in her role as Carmen.


He lived with her for the last 8 years of her life up in Limoges.  













Sunday, April 22, 2012

the election




This is the tally in Castelfranc for the first round of the presidential elections.  It was only around 7:15, just after closing and lovely Virginie, the postmistress and election worker, had just posted it on the Salle des Fêtes where people put their voix in the urnes.  It looks like Sarkozy's goose is cooked and that he was unable to suck support away from Marine Le Pen the extreme-right winger.  They both competed for who could be more anti-Muslim.  Sarko spent a lot of his 5 year term expelling illegal immigrants à l'américaine.  Le Pen, on the other hand, made much of her distaste for the EU, big government, and big business.  Melanchon was my favorite. He made no bones about calling for a new constitution largely to do away with the monarchical presidency and the Senate.  He spoke out strongly against austerity and the stranglehold the oligarchs and their tools in the European Central Bank.

He is right of course.  I believe those who predict that the pseudo-socialist Hollande will win and will be more rightwing than Sarko in terms of giving the 1% the austerity and destruction of the social welfare system or what's left of this stunning achievement of the post-War left.  If he causes the same Great Depression levels of unemployment here as in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and many other countries, there could be serious riots and something like civil war.  The only way he will be able to avoid it may be to leave the euro but that may require an awareness and sense of purpose that he probably lacks.

They sure do know how to run an election in this country.  The campaigns only went on for a month or so.  The national networks are stringently controlled on the number of minutes each candidate is allowed for campaigning.  Le Monde the newspaper of record circulated an extensive poll to each of the 10 or so candidates and then put up an interactive page where you could line up any single candidates positions against one or more other candidates.  Posters must be likewise tightly regulated.  The only candidate posters you see are the ones pasted over shreds of other posters from other elections, put up on identical stands in front of the polling places and only for about one week before voting.  Campaigning is illegal during the last day before the election.  The results are tabulated fast and accurately.  I haven't heard of attack ads.

The balding Hollande, the likely winner in the second round,  is utterly without glamour or even great hair.  He was photographed picking his nose.

the hoopoe


The other day we drove over to Caix where the Prince of Denmark has a nice little castle that we always ride past when biking up to Crayssac.  Today we turned off right before the castle to look at an example of a masonry gatepost at a very ordinary modern house.   Our gatepost contractor had told us this house belonged to a friend and he would call them to say we were going to be looking it over.

   

Ever since going on a bird walk in Gourdon a couple weeks ago, I've been carting along my excellent old Leitz binoculars with me everywhere I go and it really paid off this day.  The reddish bird that landed just at the gate turned out to be a HOOPOE!  The crappy photos we took aren't half as dreamlike as what I saw through the binox:  the long crest and the long beak joined into an impossible surreal headdress with two azure balls at the tips of the crest when it was folded up.   






I knew the name of this creature from the Aristophanes play, The Birds where a king, Tereus, has been turned into a hoopoe, a king of birds even though he is presented with his body feathers all molted off and ridiculed for his pretentiousness.  

Could this one have been the King of Denmark touring his royaume in disguise?  As if a bird he just flew off wordlessly so I guess I'll never know.

fixing the Juillac bridge

A couple weeks ago they closed the suspension bridge between Prayssac and Juillac for a few days for repairs.  La Depîche, the regional rag, duly wrote up everything the bridge guys said, how it wasn't really serious, no danger to the public at this time, can't be too safe.  "A slight anomalie" at the base of a cable.  I was out on a ride above Prayssac but detoured through over the Juillac bridge just to see the repair.

Leaving Prayssac, you coast down a hill past a landscape of beautifully organized cultivation:  walnut and fruit orchards aligned in rows and columns so perfect that the diagonals line up too.   The bridge crosses a stretch of strong, flat water about midway between the dam at Castelfranc upstream and Belaye downstream, free of the turbulence from above but not yet rendered comatose by the ecluse to come.  This gorgeous valley must have amazed each of the successive plunderers, Gauls, Celts, Romans, then the Vandals and the Wisigoths and eventually the English.  




The mathematical perfection of this bridge brings you right back up to maybe 1880.  There was probably a ferry here at first.  To build the bridge, they must have first set up the four columns, then established the  four heavy deep-set concrete stays, then run the cables from stay to column to column to stay.  Big spool of wire, the first strand carried by a boat from one shore to the other.  Back and forth until the formula was satisfied, then the whole mess of cable jammed together with a final, spiral sheath of wire.      






The repair seemed to consist in taking the strain off of the first part of one cable.  First 12 massive clamps were bolted around the cable to resist the top part of the huge steel splint.  The splint was tensioned like the old fashioned traction machines to make broken bones heal correctly.  Once tensioned, the compromised part of the cable can just relax.


Sunday, April 8, 2012

field barns

Out in the vineyards and fields, here and there, stand small structures built of stone and seemingly used to store machinery or livestock.  I’m not talking about the rarer and more imaginative  gariotes, the stone igloos that perhaps often start out as just a pile of the bigger rocks farmers had to lug out of their fields if there was going to be any space to plant.  

The structures I’m talking about are didn’t just happen.  Maybe the field was far enough from home that the farmer stored tools and supplies.  Maybe he or laborers slept there at harvest time when they worked until dark.  Maybe it was a place to take shelter during these fierce, quick thundershowers they call giboulées.  Quite a few have an upper and lower story so perhaps they kept sheep or cows or horses.


They are often lost in the middle of a big field or else built right on a lane, to the left and the right, here and there like little hamlets. 

After the 1939-45 war,  most seem to be falling into disuse.  With a car or a truck, the distance between house and field no longer mattered.   You see these little barns in all states of decomposition.
  It starts with a little vine that soon becomes a full face beard.  Eventually you can almost hear nature chewing and actually digesting these barns.  
  






























Thursday, March 29, 2012

weeping willow tears



 before, from the bridge side





 before from the Rue St Roch side


Something had to give with the huge old willow that filled the garden space next to the house.  At its first crotch,  the rot was elbow deep and a big hole had been eaten out of one of the trunk-sized branches.  It made me nervous to see anybody stand under it for very long.  The other side of the tree reached up higher than the house and fountained down a wonderful shower of whips with little leaves and fresh yellow catkins.  Wolfgang, who is after all a forester with a PhD,  looked it over years ago and advised us to watch and wait.   

So we got Denis Passedat over and let him convince us to subject it to major surgery.  That was a few weeks ago, longer than the delai promised so we were both waiting but with dread as the profligacy antics of this tree won our hearts again. 

The call came, M. Passedat had a job cancelled, was it ok to come over.   Franck Rondelé showed up first, Passedat’s subcontract tree surgeon (elagueur).   What a demanding metier;  you need to a. climb b. not fall c. not cut off your own limbs or the limb you are sitting on.  I wanted to make this little joke but couldn’t overcome my laryngitis to make myself heard.  Just as well, M. Rondelé was on his third major project of the day and looked tired.   He wore no ear protection from his Jonsereds. 




You also have to keep the idealized picture of the pruned tree in mind even while you are too close to keep it in perspective plus there are various twigs and limbs hung up on the way down and obscuring your Euclidean vision.
















after, back side





after, Rue St Roch side

Mrs Snoutsworthy is far from reconciled to the devastation much as I try to console her the rot can now possibly be arrested.  There's suddenly so much more light and the little garden shed no longer hides shyly in the corner.  We have pretty much the messiest garden in the village, like an adolescent with long hair  arranged to conceal pimples.