Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Geraldine Brooks (top 10 novels of all time TXT) 📖

Janine’s villa was the last on the curve of terrace, before the pines and scrub oak reclaimed the mountainside. Patches of raw concrete, a cement mixer parked by the entrance and churned-up mud in the driveway gave the house that unfinished look so common to the homes of architects and builders too busy working on others’ projects to get the last touches done on their own. But tucked away on adjoining terraces were a big swimming pool, drained for winter, and a separate clubhouse-cum-games room complete with pizza oven and pinball machine.

Janine greeted me at the door and ushered me into a large room that overlooked the valley below. From this terraced hillside the valley stretched away in a long misty view of vineyards and orchards. From here, it was easy to understand why someone born in this place might never leave it.

A fire blazed in the hearth, its fuel the wood from those same vineyards. At first I mistook the wood for prunings, but then I noticed that the pieces of vine stacked to dry by the hearth had roots attached.

“They are pulling up many vineyards these days,” Janine explained. “It is my father’s work now.” The Lubéron had never been one of France’s great wine regions. What it supplied was vin ordinaire, and these days other wine regions—including Australia’s—were filling that market more cheaply. The vintners no longer had a market for so many grapes, so Janine’s father was spending the last few years of his working life grubbing up the vineyards he had spent years nurturing into productivity. “Then he sells them for firewood,” Janine explained.

I realized that I had seen her father on the terrace by her mother’s house. A big, bereted man with a weathered face, he was maneuvering a tractor loaded high with vines. I had thought the scene picturesque. Now it seemed melancholy.

The table decoration spoke to another link with the land. Instead of a vase of flowers, a large dish of sprouting wheat grains occupied the center of the table. “Is it your son’s science project?” I asked. Janine laughed. “No. It is a tradition for the time of year. You start the grains at the beginning of December, and if they are high and green by Christmas it means you will have a rich harvest in the coming year.”

Since our brief meeting the day before, Janine had found a photo I had sent her of myself. She had placed it on the mantel. It was the picture I had sent in 1969—the one that I’d thought made me look angry and radical. What I really looked like was a kid who’d forgotten to brush her hair.

I’d hoped Janine would speak English as well as she wrote it as a sixteen-year-old. But she had forgotten everything. As she glanced at her own letters, she said she now couldn’t decipher the English sections she had written so flawlessly.

My French had improved a bit since I left school, because I had been forced to use it while reporting in North Africa and when visiting my sister in the nearby Alpes Maritimes. I also had assistance from Tony, who didn’t share my tin ear for pronunciation. But Janine’s accent gave us both some trouble. It was heavily Provençal, with words like bien becoming “bang” and main becoming “meng.” The conversation proceeded in a choppy relay, with Janine often repeating herself, me kibbitzing with Tony on what she’d said, the two of us figuring out a response and Tony saying it in an accent she could comprehend.

Janine hadn’t had any reason to use English since she left school. The ruthless selectivity of the French educational system had directed her to a secretarial course. She was twenty when she met and married Juan, a Spanish immigrant whose family had come to the nearby town of Pertuis when he was nine.

“We came because we wanted to eat,” said Juan, who had wandered in with a large hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. He was a tall, handsome man with curly blond hair and a tanned face etched deeply by laughter lines. There had been no work in his parents’ home town of Valencia. “There was a lot of racism when we came, but now we are French,” he said with a convincingly Gallic shrug. These days, it was the more recently arrived Algerian and Moroccan immigrants who bore the stigma of foreignness.

This corner of provincial, rural, France had been all Juan and Janine had ever needed. At the age of forty, Janine had never visited Paris. I’d longed to see Paris, even though I’d had to travel halfway around the world to do it. For Janine, it was a day’s drive that she’d never bothered to take.

There was a wedding picture of Juan and Janine hanging on the wall. “Actually, it is a picture of one of our weddings,” Janine explained. France’s Napoleonic laws are even stricter in their separation of church and state than those of the United States. Religious wedding ceremonies aren’t legally recognized and have to be preceded by a civil marriage. In 1984, Tony and I had two French weddings, the first presided over by a mayor whose tricolor sash sat majestically across his impressive embonpoint. The next day a rabbi married us again, under a chuppa rigged from Tony’s grandmother’s shawl and some pieces of wood bought at the last minute from the local bricolage.

Janine’s situation was even more complicated. Her family was Protestant, a remnant of the Vaudois—a medieval movement considered heretical by the Catholic Church. In the sixteenth century brutal religious wars between Catholics and Protestants decimated Lubéron towns, including St. Martin. Juan was Roman Catholic. So they had to be married at the mayor’s in St. Martin, then at the Protestant church in Lourmarin, then at the Catholic church in Pertuis. Since then, they had raised three boys—now seventeen, fourteen and nine—“all of them,” laughed Janine, “with no religion!”

Juan had taken his rifle out of its canvas