Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
W
inters at Les Genévriers were often harsh, for all the luminous skies.
When the snows came, they were heavy. In the severest winters, the path up to the village and the school was impassable for weeks on end and the violet ink in the wells set into the wooden desks would freeze solid.
Then, more than ever, the farm was a community apart, with a sense of isolation even from a village only ten minutes’ walk up the hill.
The start of the hard months was marked for us by a change in our footwear. At the end of September, we swapped the rope-soled shoes we wore in summer for winter socks and leather boots. The wind began to bring cold air from the mountains, and carried chilly spots of rain.
There are only three days in the year when one or the other of the Provençal winds does not rake across this land. But the old ways are going—are long gone, in many cases—and soon the millers and shepherds, and farmers and fishermen whose lives depended on reading the winds will have died out, too.
At Les Genévriers, the winds sent word from the north and northwest that September was turning to October, and it was time to taste the
vin de noix
. It was a rite of early autumn, like the preserving of fruit and vegetables in bottles and earthenware jars in summer.
The green walnuts were gathered in June, and distilled with red wine, eau-de-vie, sugar, and oranges. In many ways, this was our most vital crop, as it was our famed walnut liqueur that brought the neighboring families to the farm to buy, some with their own bottles to fill from the barrels for a few sous less.
Papa would go down to the cellar beneath the barn. In this room was the still; then, along a short passageway, was the vaulted, gravel-lined wine cave under the courtyard. From the first barrel, he would draw a glass of sweet tawny wine.
Marthe could smell essences in the
vin de noix
that no one else could.
M
arthe, swirling the glass of walnut wine and sniffing. The first time she said, to universal fascination, “I can make out warm caramel, that’s the top note. But then, the liqueur stays on the tongue and gives the honey of the tobacco plant, and overripe plums, and heliotrope and cocoa.”
Then, as no one broke the silence, she added, “If I really concentrate, there’s a hint of the scent of split figs cooked with honey, you know, at the moment they turn jammy under the heat. Only then, at the end, the mellow bitterness of the nut.”
Bitterness? Top note? What were top notes? I could see I wasn’t the only one wondering.
“Hmmn,” said Papa, deciding to play the game. “But what does it taste of? Does it taste good?”
“It tastes all right, perhaps a little too sweet and sticky.”
She couldn’t have seen the expression of hurt and disappointment on his face, but she went on in the nick of time, “But the aroma! It’s so very special, so absolutely right, the scent of these special nuts grown in this place. Just as it should be, quite wonderful.”
“Aah, that’s true,” he said, swilling it around under his nose before taking another great slurp. “A magnificent wine.”
“May I be honest, Papa? To be truly magnificent, it should have some bite, some sharp contrast. Perhaps an herbal note that would anchor it, make it a little less fluffy.”
“Fluffy?”
“Flabby, fat with too much sweetness.”
That made him bellow. “Fluffy? Flabby? Bite? What kind of insolence are they teaching you at this school of yours? Be gone with you and your fancy ideas!” But it was a false bellow that could not conceal his joy at an unexpected source of pride in addition to the wine. He waved us away and settled down with the bottle and a rich satisfaction.
B
y that stage, Marthe was at a special school in Manosque: a school for the blind. I’d finally become aware that she couldn’t see very well when I had started at the village school, which at that point she still attended. Every morning at half-past seven we walked up through the woods and she would take my arm, although I was younger than her.
Sometimes a cloud sat on the top of the mountain range like icing on a cake and I would point it out, but, though I realize this only in retrospect, she was always happier noticing the smells and the changes in the springiness of the mud and stone path and the flap of birds’ wings above.
This can only have been our routine for a term or two (though, in my mind, it went on for years and years), because Marthe was sent to the special school for the blind when she was ten or eleven.
Strangely, I don’t recall being shocked by the discovery of her condition, despite the fact that I had not known of it before. She had not complained. She was a calm, gentle girl, who was happy to sit and study nature in close-up, and we had all accepted this without asking why this should be. If anyone was shocked, it was Pierre, and that was neither for long nor with any sense of remorse. Though, naturally, we did not learn of his involvement until quite some time later.
Even now, I am not sure exactly how or when our parents found out the extent of her loss of sight, how long they had been aware there was a problem. The first I knew of it was when they told us calmly, one evening at supper, that Marthe would be going away.
I was surprised, obviously, but young enough to accept the news without question, as I did so many other new experiences. Later on, I did ask her once or twice whether the onset had been sudden and frightening, but she fudged the answer. Perhaps she thought I was curious for all the wrong reasons and my asking was just prurient. So I was left none the wiser. All I had were my impressions, which may or may not have provided an accurate picture of what really happened. And when the time comes that you really want to find out the truth, there is no one left to ask.
O
ne morning, the air changed. A light dusting of frost iced the garden. The topiary stood stark-white and petrified. Winter was upon us. Under mercury clouds, the bare bones of nature were being picked clean by bitter winds.
Outside, the atmosphere thickened. Snow was threatening. Static electricity crackled when our fingers touched. We walked through the transformed woods, down to the ruined chapel.
Light changes the scenery. The same place, a different season: the difference is brightness. When the late-afternoon light was low but bright, the tussocks of grass on the fields were backlit into a strange moon surface as we walked. But later, returning to the house with the sun at our backs, we moved into our own shadow, like going forward into the past, back into the fabric of our self-imposed solitude.
The next morning, flurrying and fluttering at the windows, the snow was mesmerizing. Flakes were fat clumps now, the ground so cold that the white was building up into a fleece, sticking to the leaves of the ivy. Wind whipping it in all directions, pulling the gaze from one zigzag fall to another, distorting the perspective.
Outside, the stone pineapple was losing definition, and the hand had accepted a palmful of whiteness. I had said nothing to Dom about their provenance. The stone cornucopia acquired a powdering of sugar: plump, dredged grapes; peaches topped with alien cream. White cushions formed on the wooden benches and chairs, set for conversations that would not take place until the spring.
Snow took hold of the skeletal structures of the garden, coating the seed heads and stalks. Soon the alliums and globe artichoke were extravagantly plumed in winter’s coat. Life slowed into a strange calm as disarray and decay were covered over, more thickly smothered hour by hour.
I
set up one of the summer garden chairs in the stark room I’d appropriated as a study. It looked out on the courtyard with the blanketed olive tree and the fig, but I put my back to the window to catch the light, writing now as well as reading, with a traveling rug over my knees and the electric fire ticking away.
There was a faint smell of lavender from the dried-out bunch that I’d stuffed in a glass carafe during the summer. At one point, I thought I heard some music from Dom’s piano, but it was only a brief, experimental run of notes and ended almost as soon as it had begun.
Finally, my ideas were beginning to crystallize. Everywhere I turned, there were the raw materials of narrative: stories passed on by everyone we met; snippets of information that seemed to resonate. And my own observations: the old keys that didn’t fit any lock; the empty wells; the hunters who trespassed in our wood; the discovery of more rooms in the house, secrets that were there all along, only needing to be unlocked; the blind girl who created perfumes.
It was going to be an experiment, but I decided to try writing my own book about the sensuous dimensions of the countryside surrounding us, drawing on the old Provençal tales and setting the story of Marthe Lincel at its heart.
B
ut however much I immersed myself in the past and our enclave, it was hard not to be aware of what was happening in the here and now. Dom spent more and more time in his music room, away from me.
Neither did he seem to have much contact with his family or friends. Nor did I, for that matter. We had received a total of six personal letters, all for me, since we’d been at Les Genévriers. It wasn’t healthy being so isolated.
“Do you want to invite your parents down here for Christmas?” I suggested. “Surely they’d love to see the place.”
“I can’t think of anything worse. Not at Christmas.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Too many masses, confessions. Too much guilt. I’ve never been as good a Catholic as I was brought up to be.”
“Ah.”
“What about you?”
“Well, my mother might like to be asked, though she’d make her excuses,” I said. “She likes going to my brother’s—being with the grandchildren.”
“Just the two of us, then.”
Did he say it too quickly?
“Just the two of us,” I agreed.
M
arthe did well at Manosque, learning Braille in addition to all the normal lessons. Then, one day, her class was taken on a field trip that changed the course of her life.
The school was tentatively (and perceptively) forming an association with a small local perfume factory. From the second she walked into the blending room, Marthe told me, she knew she was in the place where she was meant to be. Several of the girls showed an aptitude for the work, but it was Marthe who was the most enthusiastic, the one who asked if she could come back soon.
She knew straightaway that she had found her métier. That evening, she sent us a letter, dictated to one of the teachers, which said: “Smell these together. I think it’s beautiful. All best wishes to you all from Marthe.” The envelope contained a white rose petal and a twist of dried orange peel.
We were mystified at first, but when we did take her message between our fingers and smelled how the delicate petal and the deep, sharp pungency of the peel did mingle in a delightful way, we began to understand what she was saying. It would have helped to know about the visit to the perfume factory, but that was explained in subsequent letters, when she was less excited.
She made me think, though. How do you describe a scent? The scent of lavender, for example? Apparently, our sense of smell is ten thousand times more powerful than our sense of taste. But that’s still not enough for most of us to pin down the scent of lavender in words. Sweet, pungent, woody, spicy, musky, astringent; none of these alone is capable of evoking the unique smell we all know so well. Ask anyone about lavender, and the chances are they won’t be able to give you a description of its aroma. But more often than not, they can give you some visual reference. Lavender is color, waving fields of purple, rich blues, and faded mauve. It is the essence of blue and of the warm winds of summer, opulent against the yellow of the cornfield, mysteriously shadowed under the olives that are sometimes planted as its companion.
Even I see lavender like this, in my head. It glows as a memory that grows more vibrant with the passing years. But perhaps the memory is of pictures in books I once saw, or the pictures that other people make for me in words. I’m not sure. All I meant to say was that it was fitting that post from Marthe contained more scents than words.
You could open an envelope from Manosque and find it contained no words at all, just a handful of lavender with a ribbon of dried grapefruit skin, or a sprinkling of vanilla seeds. When we went to see her on a Sunday—though it was not every week, by any means, maybe only twice a term—she would talk about scents in ways we could barely comprehend.
Her favorite flower was the heliotrope. It was all about the sun, she explained once when she came back to us for the long summer holidays. The name means “to turn with the sun.” On the southwest-facing bank by the barn and the wine cellar, we’d lie on our stomachs by the clumps of these tiny purple flowers massed in tightly packed clouds as they turned their petals to the light, and to the east at night in readiness for sunrise; I staring deep into the white holes at the center of the flower; Marthe lost in new worlds.
“It smells of cherry and almond and chocolate and vanilla. How can so many aromas be produced in the glands of one tiny flower?” she wondered, rubbing a fleshy, deep-veined leaf between her fingers. “What is the proportion of one to the other? If we could work that out, how much we could learn from it.”
She was fascinated by those heady little blooms, and she did learn. She came to understand that scent and tell others in a way that was uniquely hers, but that was all to come.
As her sight deteriorated, her sense of smell became even more acute, until you felt she could read the world through her nose and her instincts. Later, she also seemed to know when I was uncomfortable, and when I was holding back on her, or about to tell her what she had no wish to hear.
But it was good to see that she had found a true calling, and that she was regaining her lost confidence.