after the grape-harvest

uuuuuun rayon de soleil

sur ton si beau visage

those words sung in the happiness-filled reggae cadence of william balde entered my ears through the mp3 player which virginie from montpellier had lent me one afternoon, and seemed to me to be the perfect soundtrack to the grape picking season - a ray of sun on your so beautiful face - the rolling cadence of the land strung with vibrant green rows of vines sometimes as far as the eye could see in southern champagne.   the eye could see.  the swollen song of solomon bunches of purple grapes - the bountry of nature, nature's harvest, her fruit at the end of a year's growing and energy transfer.  investing one's interest in those grapes, seeing nothing but those grapes, the secateurs going clip clip clip, working as a team of thirty, clipping in unison, giving each other bleak looks of back weariness towards the end of the week, but strength in our thirty-strong unity, exchanging back massages in the evening, i look for her eyes in the vineyard, the sun is warm and bathing, across the rows and rows of greenleaved vines everyone is crouching down, clip clip clip, she stands up and looks for my eyes and we instantly smile and lower our gazes, the grapes, stained with white powder from the sulphates, clipping, a bucket filling up with bunches of grapes.  adele, she called herself; belle adele i called her, i said: elle s'appelle adele et elle est belle.

thirty people all come together, and not all the time does each person know what to say to the other people.  benois was sitting across the table from me one evening.  until then all we had done was exchange wide probing smiles so after asking his name for the second or perhaps the third time i said: "benois - that must come from the latin blessed.  it is a good name.  it recognises the favourable general situation of being alive - being blessed - being favoured by god, god in his favour has said: be alive benois"
what i wanted was to say something positive to benois.  i often find myself commenting on a person's name when i learn it for the first time.   for example gery introduced me to solange a few nights ago and i said "hmmm solange, never heard that name before.  first of all it makes me think of the english expression so long, and then it makes me think of the french word louange, which comes from louer...to praise, doesn't it?"   she said yes and gery said "tu vois, carson est un peu...particulier"
it reminded me of how marie described herself once.  "je suis"
then lowering her voice, as if confiding a hushed tone "un peu differente"

un peu differente was the perfect description of marie.  in a hushed tone.  i had first met marie in a party in paris and had picked up on her use of the word mec, "doesn't mec have a masculine value, like guy or dude in english?" (marie spoke english like an american and so understood perfectly) she said yes, but you know i feel more male than female.   blonde-haired marie; once she crammed her bosom full of grapes and stuck bits of vine and leaves in her hair and crept along the vines to 8-year-old margot and there stood rigidly against the vines saying "shhhhh, je suis une vigne"
marie studied theatre in paris and loved to impersonate other people.   so much so that i strugged to form a good idea of who she really was.  it seemed to me that she really wasn't; she was but a vehicle for impersonating other people.    i can understand her being fascinated by other people, and wanting to try to impersonate them.  as we advanced along the rows of vines her voice could be heard moodily, sultrily, nonchantly impersonating some stereotypical blasé french attitude that has made an impression on her. 
"bah, franchement, je m'en fous, tu sais?"
je m'en fous.  one spends time in france, listening to the french and perceiving something of their attitude.  the je m'en fous attitude.  menefregismo.  i couldn't care less, i don't give tuppence, twit-twoo i don't give two hoots, i don't give a damn, i don't give a dickeybird.  i don't give

not give


give


after i said that benois gave me a little rundown of his life philosophy, unblinking, his eyes devoid of warmth, he said "bah, franchement, i really have no opinion about the fact that i am alive.  i could just as well not be alive, for all it concerns me.  of course, i am not going to go and commit suicide, but franchement the notion of death holds absolutely no fear or dismay for me"

it remended me of the indifference shown towards life by the main character of albert camus' l'etranger

but there was warmth and flickering happiness in benois' eyes when our eyes met at other times, and i know that his je m'en fous words were not completely sincere.

17-year-old hugo, at times displaying a wisdom far beyond his years, but at other times undeniably 17 years old, asked me what were the typical characteristics associated with the french.  i had commented on the rather widespread readiness to express irritation at little everyday contretemps, and hugo had responded "ah, but we are not really irritated you know.  we say putain merde often only in mock irritation"

the words ah, putain - merde - ca fait chier - ca m'enerve quoi entered my consciousness and i started to think like that too.  when learning a language you are essentially imitating the way the native speakers speak. however, within that group of native speakers one must discriminate.   griet taught me about discrimating between words when i swung past l'arche community on the way back.  a new volunteer - a lithuanian learning french - had exclaimed putain, reenacting the very common exclamation of surprise or irritation on the lips of the french, and griet responded "ah, j'aime pas ca, c'est pas la bonne usage de ce mot-la"
he had taken the putain's name in vain.

fabri and i were fond of filling the vineyard with vibrations of taize chants of praise, sometimes soft and tenderly intoned, other times extravagently low and solemn sounding:

Ostendi nobis domine
misericordium suam
amen, amen!
maranatha, maranatha!

other times a long rumbling rendition of jeff buckley's rendition of leonard cohen's alleluya, along to the clip clip clip of our secateurs.  little hugo would say aimlessly "they are church songs aren't they?" and then fabri would go off on a tangent and laugh like a hyena, or else we would send up dog howls, a mournful orchestra of howling dogs which other vendangeurs would join and it would end in a cacohpony of baying bleating barking neighing miaoing and cockadoodle-doing from across the animal kingdom. the best was the horse's neighing but the absoulte best was melanie's extraordinary imitation of a young goat bleat . everyone laughed then and she would distribute her bleats throughout the day, often at the table in the evening, at a moment when conversation had largely subsided, the goat would give her pathetic charming bleat and everybody would laugh.

petite and charming, with sparkling eyes, that is why it suprised me on the last day of the vendange to hear melanie exclaim "ah, j'ai marre de cette vigne de merde!"

apres les vendanges, after the grape-harvest gerard gave us all about three bottles of champagne each and we all headed off in various vehicles to jean-batiste's house fifty kilometres away in the countryside - a beautiful place to stay - a simple wooden chalet surrounded by pine woods and caravans for everybody to sleep.  we got a big fire roaring and roasted potatoes over the embers and grilled chops of pork and sat around the picnic table eating.  from somebody's van stereo toots and the maytals were playing.   copious bottles of champagne had been opened - pop pop pop! - and got us feeling fine.  i said:  that is another characteristic of the french - well, at least a characterisitc which one finds with a certain frequency among the french - a real appreciation of the good things in life.  good food, good wine, good music, a good fire.  an incredibly sexy language.  ah oui, i can really sympathise with that french national pride.  i think that if i was born french i would love that fact.

afterwards fabri and i didn't know what to do.  fabri had suggested we go to the alps and climb mont blanc and usually when we are together and one of us suggests that we climb a mountain the other one says "okay".  we got on the same train as adele and celine, going south, and when we stopped at macon i said "hey, lets go to taize!"   all the songs that fabri had heard me sing, but had never heard himself were sang in the church that evening, and next morning: Ostendi nobis...!

and

il signore ti ristora
dio non allontana
il signore viene ad incontrarti....viene ad incontrarti

and

tu sei sorgente viva tu sei fuoco sei carita
viene spirito santo, viene spirito santo

and in between we camped in the woods, opened a bottle of champagne by the fire and played chess until at one point droplets of water began to fall.  fabri suggested that we seek shelter in the church but instead i pitched my little tent, and we snuggled in.   then at one point it began to really lash.  my tent is not of the best quality, and largely lets lashing water in.  however, the one impermeable impenetrable part is the groundsheet and there a pool of water grew.  we stuck it out anyway and i lay with heart throbbing as everything outside the tent was illuminated by flashes of lightning, then the enormous cracking thunder split the atmoshpere in two and it seemed that even the earth beneath us was rumbling.  
the next day we got the bus back to macon and there i decided to head back to the uk and get cracking with applying for visas while fabri said he would return to southern italy.  before we parted, we opened the last bottle of champagne and sat drinking on the street, stretching out the tent and sleeping bags to dry in the sun and played a last game of chess, before the owner of a nearby carrefour addressed us and told us we had five minutes to clear off because, franchement, camped out on the street like that, (it didn't take her long to find the word) was dégueulasse.

fabri and i spent a while impersonating all the french people we had met before returning to our respective home nations.