Nine Summers Page 4

  Finally, Galatea took matters into her own hands and slipped into the Mediterranean right side up. What a relief to step on board, switch on the engine and motor through the canals to the marina of the Société Nautique, Sète.

  We were tied up at the local yacht club, which adjoins the Mole Saint Louis in this ancient fishing harbour. Although originally we’d hoped to start our journey in Marseilles or Genoa, we were pleased to be here. The locals were friendly and, because only a few tourists came there, they treated us as a curiosity. It took only minutes to walk from the marina to the supermarket, the bank and the post office, or to drive to the laundromat, the ship chandler and hardware stores.

  All around us, working boats creaked and swayed. A formation of shrieking gulls circled and squabbled over fetid bits as they escorted fishing vessels into the old port. On the decks, fishermen worked furiously, gutting fish. Whenever they motored past, the pungent smell overwhelmed us.

  On the quay, a hunched man and a rotund woman in a bright headscarf stood under a yellow and red sun umbrella, arranging buckets of daffodils, jonquils, anemones, poppies and daisies. Across the road in the restaurants, waiters in black trousers and white shirts unfolded tables and chairs for the morning trade, which had already begun. Men dipped croissants into magnum breakfast cups. Whiffs of coffee drifted towards us, and loud French chansons filled the air.

  ‘Hey, Puss!’ I shouted. ‘Stop unpacking, come and take a look. This is us in France. Our first day on Galatea. We’re in the Med!’

  Our neighbour popped her head into our cockpit. ‘I am going to the baker, perhaps I can get you une baguette?’

  ‘Ah merci, that’s very kind, but we still, eh, encore have a baguette from yesterday.’ She looked horrified. Must have been my French. ‘From hier, yesterday? You eat une baguette from yesterday?’ she repeated.

  ‘Oui…’ I hesitated.

  ‘But c’est impossible to eat a baguette from hier.’

  ‘Ah, non?’

  ‘Bien sûr, non.’

  ‘Alors, well then oui, yes, thank you.’

  Our first morning, and already we’d done the unforgivable. I ducked downstairs. Felix was munching on a hunk of cheese and yesterday’s baguette. I grabbed the baguette.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You can’t eat yesterday’s baguette!’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s yesterday’s. She said you can’t eat yesterday’s baguette today!’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘Our neighbour. You should have seen her face when I told her we’re eating yesterday’s baguette today. Don’t let her see you.’

  ‘I won’t. God forbid.’

  ‘She’s trying to be helpful. Probably thinks we’re lost.’

  ‘Do you think we should tie a kangaroo to the mast?’

  ‘Don’t need to. They know already. For God’s sake, stop eating. She’s bringing us a fresh baguette!’

  Our masts and boom lay strapped on deck. The saloon was crowded with boxes and unpacked equipment. Felix stopped chewing, looked around and scratched his head.

  ‘Where do we begin?’ I asked.

  We felt almost at home when a parking ticket appeared on the Renault’s windscreen. ‘Damn, some things you can’t escape!’ I said as I freed it from the windscreen wiper. The French instructions on the back read: ‘Get stamps from the bureau de tabac, stick them on the parking ticket and send the completed note to the Office of the Traffic Police.’

  ‘C’est la vie. What better way to make us feel accepted.’ Felix was philosophical. ‘You go and fix this,’ he suggested. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll get an adaptor for the TV, and let’s meet here in an hour.’

  Bureaux de tabac are small shops that sell cigarettes, tobacco, newspapers and stamps. I set off to the market square, where I’d noticed one some days earlier. Practising my French on the way, I greeted the mother-earth figure sweeping the footpath in front of her shop. With her floral scarf and long skirt she reminded me of Russian matrioshka dolls that fit inside one another.

  ‘Bonjour, madame,’ I said. ‘Je voudrais des timbres pour cela.’

  She looked astonished, stopped sweeping and studied me, grim faced, as I stammered and pointed to the parking ticket clutched in my hand.

  ‘Mais, non, non!’ she responded.

  ‘Pourquoi non? Why not?’ I asked.

  She beckoned a formally dressed elderly gentleman who was perusing the day’s papers. ‘Ah, bonjour, monsieur,’ she addressed him. Then she ventured into the local patois. When she had finished, he turned to me. ‘Madame, this you must not pay!’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Because nobody pay this, it is local French custom.’

  ‘Well, then, who does pay?’

  ‘I think only English and German people. The Italians and Spanish are like us. What you must do is what everybody in France does. That is, you must tell your facteur, I think this is postman in English. That when a letter comes from the police, he must write on the letter “adresse inconnue”, address not known.’

  ‘But I have no address, no postman, I live on a boat.’

  ‘Ah, in that case you just tear up, like so,’ he said indicating how one tears up a letter, ‘and put it in this rubbish bin.’

  ‘Where I come from, I’d be in real trouble if I didn’t pay.’

  ‘Ah, the English, funny people.’

  ‘I am not English, I’m Australian.’

  ‘Madame, you must remember this is France, not Australia.’ I looked incredulous. He dismissed me with disdain, shrugged his shoulders, handed me the ticket and turned back to the newspapers.

  ‘Merci beaucoup, madame et monsieur, bonjour.’ Admonished and confused, I rushed out of the square.

  Then I had an idea. The obvious person to check with was the manager of the hotel where we’d stayed for several days before Galatea’s arrival. He spoke good English but was unfriendly. (I realised later that, by French standards, we were far too casually dressed for an establishment such as his.) Attired in a sombre suit, he was a grim, unsmiling man with a handlebar moustache and a slip of dark hair glued to one side of his bald pate. As usual, he was standing at his desk in the foyer, overseeing his domain. I approached him, parking ticket in hand, and explained my dilemma.

  ‘Madame,’ he said gravely, without stirring a muscle in his face, ‘you have two options. One: you can pay.’ He paused to note my reaction. ‘And two: you can do what I do,’ and with a flurry of hands and arms, he gave a graphic demonstration: ‘You can just tear it up.’

  ‘Thank you, monsieur,’ I said and ran down the steps to Felix, who was waiting for me in the car. I stopped in front of the bonnet, and emulating the flurry of arms and hands I’d just witnessed, tore up the parking notice.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Felix looked dumbfounded. ‘No, I’m just learning to be French!’ I announced as I hopped into the car.

  ‘And how did you get on about adapting our TV?’ I asked. ‘No good. The French and the Russians use the Secom system. Everyone else uses PAL, and when I asked him why, he just said, “Ah, monsieur, you must understand, we had President de Gaulle.”’

  Felix’s daily routine started with a visit to Monsieur Bricolage, the ubiquitous French hardware giant. He was there on the dot of 8.30 every morning in search of gas, water, plumbing, electric and other assorted fittings. Each day his French became more daring. Unencumbered by French grammar, and with a remarkable memory for vocabulary, Felix’s formula was simple — shed inhibitions and string words together.

  People’s patience amazed us. At the hardware store they greeted Felix, now their most valued and interesting customer, with exuberance, and looked upon each of our problems as a personal challenge. Every day they found treasures for us. ‘Ah, Monsieur Felix, nous avons trouvé…’ — varieties of plugs, switches, adaptors, pipes, hoses, elbows — all the items he needed to adapt, adjust, connect and replace.

  As first assistant, my job enta
iled fetching instruments, holding, turning, pushing, pulling and shining torches as Felix crawled into the interstices of the engine, bilge and lockers to thread pipes and wires from one end of the boat to the other.

  ‘Pliers! Shifting spanner! Phillips screwdriver! Not this size, next size down! Bigger torch…try to hold it steady!’

  ‘I don’t know how you can see what you’re doing.’

  ‘This is no different from abdominal surgery. You gotta feel kid, you just gotta feel.’

  ‘What are we going to do about stepping the masts?’

  ‘We’ll need a really big crane. I’ll have to ask Michel, the foreman. It may be possible to do it right here.’

  But when Felix spoke to Michel, he said we could use the yard crane to put in the small mast, but not the main mast. For that, Michel said, he’d ask Louis, who had a big crane. A week later Michel reported triumphantly that Louis could bring the mobile crane to the naval shipyard and that the commander-in-charge had given permission for Galatea to use their dock for two hours.

  By this time we had learnt that the French soul, unlike the sanguine Australian philosophy of ‘She’ll be right, mate’, is one steeped in deep pessimistic foreboding. So to begin with, most things are ‘pas possible’. With patience, this is eventually replaced with ‘peut-être, perhaps’. When this happened we knew that progress had been made, and we were well on the way.

  And so Michel, Felix and I motored out of the marina to the nearby naval dockyard, where Louis was waiting with his big crane. He manoeuvred it down a ramp to Galatea, where Michel and Felix had secured the straps under the mast, which lay horizontally on deck, and started to raise it slowly. Then the nervous shouting started.

  ‘Ooh! Non, non, un peu à droite, a little to the right, plus haut, haut, higher!’

  ‘Hold it, hold it!’

  Finally, in a joint effort, Felix and Michel led the foot of the mast through the deck and lowered it gently into place onto the keel. At last it was done. Then, we raised glasses filled with Australian wine, and toasted Galatea yet again. ‘May God protect her and all who sail on her. Amen!’ Although I didn’t smash the bottle onto her bow, in my large straw hat I nevertheless felt like the Queen.

  We motored back to the club in great cheer. The following day the short mizzen mast was lifted into place with the small crane at the club marina.

  ‘This calls for celebrations.’

  There were many things we had to learn about living in our new environment — for instance, that shopping had to be done before midday or after 2.30, for during those two and a half hours the world stopped for siesta. At first we found it difficult to adjust. Whenever I found myself in a supermarket at 11.45, mere whispers turned into a chorus of ‘bon appétit, bon appétit’, and before the church bells finished tolling midday, tout été fermé, everything was closed, and there I stood with only half my shopping done, looking on as the baguette-bearing masses fled home for lunch and siesta. The chances of being served decreased as the hands of the clock approached the hour. By 11.50 I was the only customer eager for attention. If I looked sufficiently lost, someone took pity on me and served me as quickly as possible, lest they be caught in the middle of a transaction when the clock struck midi.

  Back at the yacht club, we carried on with our work without taking a break, while the winers and diners at the marina restaurant above us looked down with disdain. Presumably our Australian ensign fluttering at Galatea’s stern explained it all.

  ‘How does anything ever get done around here? Can you imagine if everyone in Australia trotted off to eat and drink for two or three hours in the middle of a working day?’

  Each day, however, we were less enthusiastic about working through the middle of the day, while everyone else enjoyed their siesta. After a week or so, we started to wonder.

  ‘Maybe it really is true that in this climate one actually needs to have a midday rest. Perhaps they’re not so stupid after all.’

  And before we were consciously aware of what we were doing, we found ourselves rushing off to the baker for fresh baguettes three times a day, and followed lunch with a siesta. Sometimes we had lunch at the marina restaurant, looked down at Galatea and decided it really was crazy to work through the lunch hour.

  The first time we wandered into the square where farmers brought their produce to market, we were bewildered by the sounds, the smells, the colours. Stalls laden with an endless variety of fruits, vegetables, cheeses, breads, sausages and pastries stood under bright umbrellas. We stood and stared, then took deep breaths and rushed from stall to stall. So many varieties of produce we’d never seen before. After we’d slowed down sufficiently to get into conversation, sellers realised we were ingenues, took us under their wing and proceeded to enlighten us. They gave us recipes and graphic instructions on how to prepare, cook and eat these culinary gems.

  One rotund, jolly fellow, in crumpled brown trousers, braces and an old felt hat, beckoned us over to his pâtés and saucissons.

  ‘Ces saucisses à la languedocienne sont très très fraîches, exquisite,’ he declared, extolling the freshness of his Languedoc sausages.

  ‘Comment cuire? How do you cook them?’

  ‘Ah, madame,’ he said, and in an evocation of a loud kiss, brought his thumb and fingers to his lips. ‘C’est un rève, a dream. You must sauté the saucisses in pork or goose fat, then cook with garlic and herbs in a covered dish, et finalement servir with a tomato and caper sauce and lots of parsley.’ It took a long time to convey all this with the dictionary and the help of people at adjoining stalls. We bought three pâtés and promised to return for sausages the following week as soon as our galley was usable.

  At the mushroom stall, a cheerful, smooth-faced young woman, whose coarse hands resembled a 60-year-old’s, explained that this was not the best time of the year for mushrooms. Nevertheless, she suggested we buy the wild variety and cook them in a fry pan with a lot of butter, some garlic and large-leafed parsley from the adjoining stall. She then demonstrated how this delicious dish should be mopped up with fresh baguette. At a cheese stall, we wondered how we had managed to live for so long and know so little of these gastronomic wonders.

  We sneaked back on board, hoping our neighbour wouldn’t see us.

  ‘Imagine what she’d think if she saw us coming with this load? The next thing I must get is a straw shopping bag to make me feel more…you know, française. I can’t walk around with a plastic supermarket bag from Sydney.’

  As the chaos on board cleared, and my embarrassment whenever I saw our neighbours eased, we started to chat with them. Francis and Giselle spoke slowly enough for us to understand, and we struggled with our school French. The boat was their permanent home and they moved around to wherever Francis, a mechanic, found work. He was a quiet young man with intelligent dark eyes.

  They gave us insights into French life as well as their former life in Algeria. We enjoyed their company and they enjoyed our Australian wine. They visited us often, but were never casually dressed.

  ‘…you know, we are pieds-noirs, Algerian of French parents. Colonials. Our families went there with the first colons. We came here to France when we got married three years ago. We miss our family, but there’s no future for us in Algeria. My brothers want to stay there, so does Giselle’s married sister, but we didn’t.’

  ‘Have you always lived on your boat?’

  ‘We bought a boat because we couldn’t afford a house, and also this way we can move around to wherever I can find a job. The only trouble is that Giselle can’t get work. Jobs are hard to get. She was a secretary in Oran but she can’t get that sort of job here. The only other thing she could do is work in a shop, but they prefer locals. And also, because I have to move around and we live on a boat, people don’t want to employ her.’ He turned to Giselle and smiled, ‘It means she has time to keep the boat very clean, and she’s a very good cook. Especially Algerian food, n’est-ce pas, cherie?’

  After drinks with us, Gisell
e and Francis always joined the promenade along the canal before returning to the boat for their evening meal.

  La promenade brought Setoise and their chiens, primarily poodles, known as caniches, onto the quay for a stroll or an aperitif. As they promenaded, they checked out menus displayed in front of the restaurants that lined the canal. People stopped and chatted. ‘Et comment va le petit bébé? How is the little baby?’ one woman asked another. A sad-eyed white poodle peeped from his owner’s jacket to demonstrate just how ill he was.

  ‘Have you noticed how some people sport a big white poodle, others a tiny black one?’ I commented. ‘I think poodles are markers of the local class structure. Those who have enough space and wealth to sport a large white poodle are higher up the class structure than those with a tiny black one.’ Felix wasn’t convinced.

  Around 8 o’clock, people retired home or into restaurants, and the serious part of the evening commenced. The first time we walked into a restaurant in Sète, there wasn’t a tourist in sight, and everyone was eating seafood, for which the area is famous.

  ‘Can I help you?’ The proprietor took us under his wing. ‘You are from the Australian boat, oui?’ News travelled fast here. We sipped vin de la maison, nibbled wrinkled black olives and dipped bread into olive oil. We started with fish soup into which one stirred rouille (mayonnaise, garlic and saffron, with the emphasis on garlic) and small pieces of bread. Louis, the proprietor, noted our appreciation. He then ministered over sea bass, the freshest grilled fish we’d ever tasted, new potatoes and a tomato, basil and eggplant dish. And for dessert, we had Felix’s favourite — wild strawberries with a vanilla crème. We had a little too much vin de la maison, and slept well that night.

  After almost four weeks’ work, most jobs were done, and when we were downstairs in the saloon, it was almost as if we were on the marina in Sydney, or anchored in Broken Bay.