Encore Provence
by Peter Mayle
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679762698
Publisher: Vintage
From Chapter One
I think it was the sight of a man power-washing his underpants that really
brought home the differences, cultural and otherwise, between the old
world and the new.
It was a cold, still morning
in early winter, and the pulsing thumpthump, thumpthump of a high-pressure
hose echoed through the village. Getting closer to the sound, it was possible
to see, over a garden wall, a laundry line totally devoted to gentlemen's
underwear in a stimulating assortment of colors. The garments were under
attack, jerking and flapping under the force of the water jet like hanging
targets in a shooting gallery. Standing some distance away, out of ricochet
range, was the aggressor, in cap and muffler and ankle-high zippered carpet
slippers. He had adopted the classic stance of a soldier in combat, feet
spread apart, shooting from the hip, a merciless hail of droplets raking
back and forth. The underpants didn't stand a chance.
Only a few days before,
my wife and I and the dogs had arrived back in Provence after an absence
of four years. Much of that time had been spent in America, where we were
able to slip back into the comfortable familiarity of a language that
was relatively free--although not entirely--from the problems of being
socially appropriate or sexually accurate. No longer did we have to ponder
the niceties of addressing people as vous or tu, or to rush
to the dictionary to check on the gender of everything from a peach to
an aspirin. English was spoken, even if our ears were rusty and some of
the fashionable linguistic flourishes took a little getting used to.
A friend of below-average
height told us he was not considered short any more but "vertically challenged";
the hour, previously a plain old sixty minutes, had sprouted a "top" and
a "bottom"; you were not seen leaving a room, but "exiting" it; the economy
was regularly being "impacted," as though it were a rogue wisdom tooth;
great minds "intuited" where once they had merely guessed; "hopefully,"
an agreeable word that never harmed a soul, was persistently abused. Important
people didn't change their opinions, but underwent a significant "tactical
recalibration."
There were many and hideous
outbreaks of legalese in everyday speech, reflecting the rise of litigation
as a national spectator sport. "Surplusage" was one of a hundred of these
horrors. I noticed also that sophisticated and influential Americans--those
whose comments are sought by the media--were not content to finish anything
but preferred to "reach closure," and I have a nasty feeling that it won't
be long before this affectation is picked up by waiters in pretentious
restaurants. I can hear it already: "Have you reached closure on your
salad?" (This, of course, would only be after you had spent some time
bending your "learning curve" around the menu.)
We met, for the first
time, the "outster," although we never saw a trace of his more fortunate
relative, the inster. We were taught to give up our hopelessly old-fashioned
habit of concentrating and instead try "focusing." Every day seemed to
bring new and exciting vocabulary options. But these minor curiosities
didn't alter the fact that we were surrounded by at least some version
of the mother tongue and therefore should have felt quite at home.
Somehow we didn't, although
it certainly wasn't for lack of a welcome. Almost everyone we met lived
up to the American reputation for friendliness and generosity. We had
settled in a house outside East Hampton, on the far end of Long Island,
a part of the world that, for nine months a year, is quiet and extremely
beautiful.
We wallowed in the convenience of America, in the efficiency and the extraordinary
variety of choice, and we practiced native customs. We came to know California
wines. We shopped by phone. We drove sedately. We took vitamins and occasionally
remembered to worry about cholesterol. We tried to watch television. I
gave up taking cigars to restaurants, but smoked them furtively in private.
There was even a period when we drank eight glasses of water a day. In
other words, we did our best to adapt.
And yet there was something
missing. Or rather, an entire spectrum of sights and sounds and smells
and sensations that we had taken for granted in Provence, from the smell
of thyme in the fields to the swirl and jostle of Sunday-morning markets.
Very few weeks went by without a twinge of what I can best describe as
homesickness.
Returning to a place where
you have been happy is generally regarded as a mistake. Memory is a notoriously
biased and sentimental editor, selecting what it wants to keep and invariably
making a few cosmetic changes to past events. With rose-colored hindsight,
the good times become magical; the bad times fade and eventually disappear,
leaving only a seductive blur of sunlit days and the laughter of friends.
Was it really like that? Would it be like that again?
There was, of course,
only one way to find out.
Excerpted from ENCORE PROVENCE by Peter Mayle
Copyright© 1999 by Peter Mayle. Excerpted by permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
Excerpted from Encore Provence © Copyright 2012 by Peter Mayle. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.
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