L'Americaine

I get wind burn on my face. I wish I were kidding. This is the kind of wind I’m talking about. Enough wind to make me pink-cheeked and flush. Wind that comes in actual gusts, strong enough to alter a walking path, to make us nervous about getting nudged into oncoming traffic. Wind like a constant hiss out the window, like the sound of rain but not.

*

Vacation is not all vacation. In both Aix and Avignon, we try on bathing suits. Horror of horrors. The Absolute Worst Thing. Not because we look terrible. We don’t. But because finding the right bathing suit usually requires the trying on and off of about 100 different suits, because ultimately. Let’s face it. It chooses you.

We go to Etam and H&M and I try three. The first is Wannabe Riviera in fake Hermes yellow and in it I look like a dumpling. The second is a pale blue bikini with silver polka dots and its effect on my body is more or less Mariah-Carey-two-years-ago-without-the-ice-cream-cone , which is not altogether unsexy but not altogether me either, seeing as I am not altogether 16-years-old or altogether losing my mind. Plus, I have no roller skates to match. The third involves a ruffle on the ass and looks like a Van Halen video. And. No.

I decide to stick with last year’s suit.

*

We take a tour.

Shoot me in the face, I know.

But when you travel without a car in a place like Provence, you are often left with a choice: See it on a tour, baby, or don’t see it at all.

So we see it on a tour.

Tours are interesting because the people who take them are always crazy or old or both. (When my sister and I took a bus tour to Mont Saint-Michel a month ago, we overheard a woman two seats away saying something about a place where she’d recently traveled, and she said, “It was horrible. There were huge piles of garbage in the street, just like New York City.”)

On this tour, our guide is squat and English and a little nuts and his French accent makes me feel fantastically good about my own flat-voweled Americaine way of speaking, but he’s fearless about it — speaking French, that is — and we can actually understand most of what he’s saying, if we listen hard.

And he takes us places in his little silver van.

Past vineyards and cherry orchards and away, away, away, thank God, from Avignon and its windy, empty streets. Into the mountains to little villages perched on the tiptops of mountains, one so different from the other. Past lavender fields that aren’t blooming yet but the shape and the smell are there, the deep purple buds swinging in the breeze, promising bonanza in a few weeks. Past truffle trees and apple orchards and olive groves with their twisty-limbed trees, some of them older than the oldest person on Earth.

We see a village of pale stone and blue doors, one built on a rock so that the streets all end in a cliff, in a dropoff to the sky, the vineyards below, to nothing but open air. In the countryside around it, there are little stone huts stacked together without mortar, built by farmers and shepherds, their pointy roofs sticking out of the grass, as old and silent as the pyramids. In the village center, the insides of a church are stenciled yellow and lavender . Above the altar, white stars dot a pale blue sky. Earthquakes have crumbled the city twice. Religious wars. La Revolution. And still it stands, gleaming in the sun, a pile of little pebbles that didn’t budge, bright enough to hurt your eyes.

We see a red village built on a vein of ochre that has stained everything but the sky. It seems as though it could color your fingers, the soles of your shoes, just passing through. I don’t know who lives here, because everyone around seems to be just snapping photos and gawking and shading their eyes and touching the stone walls of the church or the pharmacy or the prefecture, just to see if they’re real. The cliffs around the town slide in rainbows, from pink to scarlet to vermillion; it’s illegal to take any of the pigment home with you. They sell it in the shops in dusty little bags. Driving away, it’s as though you can’t see color quite right, as though the ochre has reached everywhere, into the backs of your eyes. I wondered if that’s illegal too.

We see the Marquis de Sade’s crumbling castle where he lived only until he went to jail, its white stone walls clinging to the side of a mountain, the poppies, blood red, sprouting in heaps, little explosions, around the foundation. It is lonely on that mountain, that one decrepit castle. Pierre Cardin bought it ten years ago and turned it into a theater. Now he’s trying to sell it.

We see a rainbow village of blue shutters, yes, but green too. Azure. Pink. With ivy crawling over the walls. I will remember nothing of this village in five years or even five days, I know, because this is the village that looks like every village. Café. Gift shop. Old man painting with an easel on a street corner, a scene of lavender plants in neat rows, the blossoms that don’t exist yet. A painting only from memory.

There is a wedding. On the cobblestones in the square, pink vellum hearts woosh in a circle caught in a little tornado of wind, mixing with piles of leaves and dry grass. Little girls in white patent leather shoes hobble by with bouquets of peonies wobbling in their hands. Someone escorts an old woman in a blue flowered dress. She is bent in two over a cane, moving slow and deliberate, careful with the cobbles. Later, there is a family photo under a stone clock tower, a white chiffon shawl, the smell of the flowers. I won’t remember the town, but that I’ll remember.