A Pig in Provence Read online

  We gave up on the tires and attached each goat to a metal stake we sunk deep into the ground. This was marginally more successful. Fortunately the cold weather and their advancing pregnancies made the goats increasingly content to snuggle in the warm barn and eat the alfalfa and barley we fed them.

  We needed more goats, however, and someone told us that two shepherding brothers at La Motte, about forty minutes away, had some goats to sell. The Audibert brothers, legends in the area, could be seen during the winter months driving through the villages in their ancient black Citroën, the kind in old French gangster movies, berets pulled low on their heads, accompanied by their “housekeeper,” a flashily dressed, dark-haired woman who lived with them.

  They still practiced la grande transhumance, driving their sheep and goats on foot from the hot plateaus and valleys of southern Provence to the alpine pastures in the north for the summer, then returning to the valleys in late fall to overwinter the animals and let them lamb in the milder south. In the winter they installed themselves in La Motte, in a huge stone farmhouse with a bergerie large enough to hold the thousand head of sheep that made up their troupeau, or herd.

  As we pulled up in front of the farmhouse, we saw the Citroën parked under the single, unpruned mulberry tree, with a sheepdog tied to it, and we knew we were in the right place. We went up the uneven stone steps to the partially open front door. The response to our knocking was a deep “Entrez.”

  The room was lit only by the open door, a small window to the east, and the glowing embers of a fire on the hearth. As we stepped in, I was assailed by the odor of garlic and damp wool. One of the brothers sat at a bare wooden table, a bottle of wine, some bread, and dry sausage in front of him.

  “Sit down,” he said, waving his knife. “Some wine?” He got up and took three glasses off a wooden shelf above the sink. He was tall but not heavy, dark skinned and movie-star handsome, the kind of handsome where the dark shadow of a beard is omnipresent and the deep-set eyes are both vulnerable and arrogant. He was wearing a vintage black pin-striped vest and a wrinkled white shirt loosely tucked into black woolen pants, the style that men wore in the 1920s and 1930s, with buttons and flap. I could see a heavy, dark brown, wool shepherd’s cape hanging on the rear wall where it faded into the soot.

  I was transfixed by the presence of a power that came from the man’s place in the transhumance, making the same treks over the same drailles, or trails, that the Roman shepherds had made two thousand years before. To me, the Audibert brothers and others like them were part of the living history of Europe.

  After a glass of the rough red wine and a few pieces of sausage plucked from the tip of the proffered knife, and after answering some casual questions about being Americans, we asked him about the goats.

  “We’re not going to do the transhumance anymore, so we don’t need all our goats. Stay here all year. Settle down. Lots of people are doing that. Get tired of being up in those mountains. Good to be here. Got villages, music, cèpes. Besides, people want lambs and sheep all year now. Used to be just spring.” He sunk back in his chair, as if exhausted by such a long speech.

  “Well, we’re interested in buying some goats. We have seven, but need about a dozen or so more,” Donald said.

  “Come on, then. Let’s go see them.” He pushed up from the chair and grabbed the parka hanging behind it, leaving the shepherd’s cape behind.

  Donald, Ethel, and I followed him to the barn. It was built of stones, long, low, and sloping with a red tile roof, the kind you could still see then in the depths of inner Provence, where little had changed over the centuries and where people eked a subsistence living off the scrappy land. When we walked into the barn, the sheep, hundreds of them, fat with their winter coats, stayed bunched together, their bleating newborn lambs close to them, but the goats immediately came up to investigate us.

  “Mommy, Daddy, look at all those lambs! Aren’t they cute? Do you think we could get one? Do you? To keep the chickens we’re going to get company.”

  “Shh. Not now. Maybe later. We have to get our goats first. Look at all these goats. Do you think they are as pretty as ours?” I had become quite attached to our goats once I had come to know their personalities.

  Like our own goats, the Audibert goats were a mixture of colors and profiles. Some had horns, others not. Some had beards and wattles, others not. In our research on goats and cheese making, we had learned about the main breeds of good milkers: Saanen, Alpine, Nubian. But none of these goats we were seeing, or the ones we already had, looked like those, and when we asked about the specific breed, we just got a shrug. “Ils sont des chèvres du pays.” They’re just goats from around here. I asked myself if these scruffy-looking animals would really produce enough milk for us to make cheese. It was clear that the first goats we purchased had lived a life of casual luxury compared to these goats.

  Suddenly, M. Audibert walked away from the goats and went over to the huddled sheep and picked up something. “Here, this is for the little girl.” He put a tiny black lamb into Ethel’s arms.

  “Feed it with a bottle. Warm milk. Its mother died.”

  “Merci.” Ethel beamed, saying thank-you in French as we had taught her to do, and cradled the lamb close to her, its gawky legs dangling beneath her arms as she stroked its silky coat.

  “Look, Mommy, isn’t it cute? He’s soft too. Feel.” She held him toward me to stroke. It was true. His coat was soft and smooth, but he was so tiny. I could feel his ribs and his little heart thumping beneath them. Ethel cuddled and talked to her lamb while we looked at the goats M. Audibert was willing to sell. We took all twelve of them, agreeing to his asking price of 250 francs each, 100 francs less than the first goats. I hoped we were getting a good deal. He said he and his brother would deliver them to us within a day or two. We shook hands and walked to our car, thanking him again for the lamb.

  “Ethel, it’s hard to raise orphan lambs. They get sick easily.” Donald said as we were driving home.

  “I can take care of him,” she said, holding him tightly.

  “It isn’t just that. I know you’ll take good care of him, and we’ll help you. It’s that their digestive systems are delicate, and they get diarrhea. They get it so bad that they—that it’s almost impossible to save them.”

  Donald had seen this happen time and again when he worked in the sheep barns at the University of California. I felt that I was the one being forewarned.

  We discussed names and finally decided on Demetrius at my urging. I explained it was a Roman name and that the Romans had come to Provence a long, long time ago. We even had Roman ruins near our farmhouse, or so we had been told, and an ancient road from the Roman port of Fréjus to Arles ran through our valley, but we hadn’t yet had time to explore it or the ruins.

  As soon as we got home, Ethel took Demetrius to the barn and made him a special bed in an old wooden grape-picking box. She lined it with hay, then put a towel in it along with one of her stuffed animals.

  “To keep him company,” she told us.

  We heated some milk and poured it into one of the tiny baby bottles Ethel had for her dolls. She cradled the lamb in her lap while she fed him. His soft mouth sucked on the rubber nipple until the bottle was empty.

  “Look, Daddy! He took it all. Can we give him more?”

  She was delighted with her success and enjoying the whole enterprise. Demetrius would be the first of many animals she would succor, from baby birds to pet rats and aging cats.

  “No. We can’t give him too much. Too much milk can bring on diarrhea. You can feed him again in the morning, OK?”

  Demetrius never thrived. His legs remained too wobbly to stand on, and after three days he died. Ethel was devastated, and so was I. Donald felt bad for both of us, but I don’t think he had ever thought the lamb would survive. The orphan lamb was our first loss in our new life as animal husbanders, and we buried him in a grave with an appropriate ceremony, Ethel presiding. She made a wooden cross for the grave from some sticks, tying them together with a red ribbon. Lassie died not long after, the victim of internal injuries sustained from Café au Lait’s incessant butting. We buried her as well, but with less ceremony.

  In retrospect, I’ve realized that we were living life much as it had been lived in the area since the turn of the century, when people depended upon the animals they raised, their gardens, and what they collected seasonally from the forests for their daily sustenance. It was astonishing to me, and remains so, that all the food I’ve had in Provence, from a wild dandelion salad to cabbage gratin, from rôti de porc to braised rabbit, always tastes so good, no matter how simple or how complex the dish.

  The cooking and care given to food and its role in daily life stem from a not-yet-forgotten cultural understanding of the origins of the ingredients and an appreciation of what it takes to raise animals and crops and to hunt and to gather food, something I was just beginning to discover as Donald, Ethel, and I set about becoming goat farmers and cheese makers.

  As the bellies of our goats swelled with their babies, we set about the now-urgent task of trying to figure out how to make cheese. When the Audibert brothers delivered the goats, I asked them how they made their cheese. They looked at me as if I were simpleminded.

  “On trait les chèvres, mon un peu de présure dans le lait. Le prochain jour c’est caillé, et on mon le caillé dans les moules. On les tourne le lendemain. Le troisième jour on les tourne encore et met du sel. Le quatrième jour ils sont faits.”

  In other words, milk the goats, add some rennet, let it curdle overnight, ladle the curds into molds. The next day, turn the cheeses, and the day after, turn them again and salt them. On the fourth day, they’re ready. This seemed a little vague to me, especially compared with the techni
cal material I had been reading from the United States, which presented cheese making as a very precise endeavor.

  All that literature focused on the necessity of hygiene, pasteurization, and temperature control, and on the mechanization of the milking and cheese-making processes. Not even in Mother Earth News, the back-to-the-land counterculture magazine I always read from cover to cover, could I find any information about homestead goat’s-milk cheese production.

  There must be practical information available from local cheese makers, I thought. At that time, however, the young people who would form the basis of today’s revived and flourishing goat cheese industry in inner Provence had not yet established themselves. I couldn’t find anyone locally who made goat cheese to sell. As far as I could tell, most of the goat cheese came not from our region, but from other parts of France.

  The charcoal-covered, truncated pyramids of Valençay cheese and the semihard rounds called Crottins de Chavignol were from the region of the Loire, and the Cabécou from Rocamadour in the southwest. Other goat cheeses came from Poitou, one of the largest goat-cheese-producing regions in France. None resembled the small, fresh, round cheeses that our friends had told us about, the simple-to-make farmhouse cheeses that we were going to attempt to earn our living with.

  One day, as I was leaving the tiny épicerie, or grocery store, where I had gone to buy some rice, a woman spoke to me.

  “I hear you have goats,” she said.

  She introduced herself as Mme. Lacroste. She was just a little older than I was, with shoulder-length, dark curly hair, a bright smile, and the work-roughened hands of a paysanne. I knew she was the wife of the man who owned one of the larger farms. They lived in a hamlet next to their vineyards.

  “I remember when my parents had goats, and my mother made us fresh cheese. After the war she got rid of them. No one has goats anymore. I hear you are going to make cheese.”

  “Yes, but I’m having trouble finding out exactly how to make the cheese,” I laughed.

  “Do you want to meet my mother and ask her? I don’t remember myself. I never made it, she did.”

  I accepted this very kind offer, and we arranged that I would come by her house that afternoon about four o’clock and go together to her mother’s house.

  Mme. Lacroste was sitting on her porch, knitting, when I arrived. She got up immediately to greet me, putting her knitting on the chair. “Bonjour, Madame,” she said, and shook my hand.

  “Shall we go?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m ready.” She was friendly, but seemed more abrupt than other people I had dealt with thus far, brusquely buttoning up her rust red sweater over a blue printed dress and picking up a willow basket lined with newspaper next to her chair.

  “This way. My mother lives just down that road,” she said, pointing, “at the edge of the hamlet. In the house I grew up in. And my grandmother too. I was an only child. Good thing I married a farmer. Those are our vineyards.” She swept her arm in gesture that brought in all the vineyards in view, now shorn of their grapes and their leaves mottled with red and yellow. It was a large vineyard for the area, maybe four or five hectares.

  The sky was a brilliant blue, as it often is in Provence during November and December, and a recent rain had washed everything, rendering the colors sharp and clear. It was strange to be walking down a dirt road with the wife of a Provençal farmer to learn about goat cheese. Not so long ago I was walking with other graduate students at UC San Diego, heading for lectures or classes across a new campus with modernist buildings of concrete and glass. Eucalyptus, bougainvillea, and long green lawns were the backdrop of conversation, not vineyards, olive trees, and forest.

  As if she reading my thoughts, Mme. Lacroste said, “It must be very different here than in California. Is your family there? Your parents, I mean, and grandparents?”

  My French was good enough for general conversation, but I lacked the vocabulary and nuances of the language to talk about personal experiences or abstract ideas. I haltingly explained that my father was dead, as were all my grandparents, three of whom I had never known, and that I didn’t see my brother very often.

  “My mother married again and she lives in Texas now,” I concluded.

  “How sad for you to have no family. Or almost none. I’m so happy to have my mother right here, so close, and my grandmother too, although she’s blind now. Look, there she is.”

  Standing next to a sprawling two-story stone house was a woman in a bright blue scarf, holding her weathered face to the sun. Her black dress was indistinguishable from those worn by all the older women, remnants of a period when widow’s weeds were required, I suppose, but her sweater was deep pink and her heavy gold necklace reflected the sunlight against her thinning skin.

  “Mémé!” Mme. Lacroste called out, “I’ve brought a visitor to see Maman. An American. Remember the Americans? They came during the war.”

  Both hands were resting on the top of her cane. As we drew closer, I could see the gold bracelet on her wrist and a thick, worn gold wedding ring. Her eyes, covered with a bluish film, were set deep in her wrinkled face. Her thin cheeks rounded as she smiled.

  “Ah, ma petite! Comment vas-tu?” She leaned her face slightly toward what she must have sensed was our direction, and my companion kissed her grandmother on both cheeks, and then introduced me.

  “C’est Madame l’Américaine. She’s keeping goats and is going to make goat’s-milk cheese.”

  The old woman let go of her cane with one hand and stretched it out in my direction. I took it. Her handshake was firm, her hand warm and smooth.

  “Yes, yes, I remember the Americans. One in particular.” She laughed. “Very big and handsome, those American boys. Much better than the filthy Germans. The Germans took our house, you know. That’s right. They were here almost six months, four of them. Ate our chickens, our food, everything. You can still see the bullet holes on the barn where they tried to shoot our pigeons.”

  The German soldiers had been right here, at this farm. What stories could be told, I thought. I wanted to ask her when they came and how they looked and what happened to them, and many more questions, but my language skills were not quite up to it. I also wasn’t sure that questioning her on the subject at our first meeting, or ever, would be the correct thing to do, so I simply made some sympathetic sounds.

  Many years later, when I was helping to serve lunch at a reunion of local Résistance fighters at the village café, I thought of Mme. Lacroste’s grandmother, who died soon after our meeting, and wondered if the Germans who had occupied her farm had been killed by one of the men reminiscing over the roast lamb and potato gratin.

  Provence is like that. Whenever I am there, I bump into living history, all of it connected. I suppose I’m now part of that history too, the American who kept goats.

  “Maman,” Mme. Lacroste called as she headed toward the huge potager, the vegetable garden behind the house. There, her mother stood bent over a shovel, digging up what looked like onions. Rows of cabbages, greens, and beets stretched out around her in perfect symmetry. Every bit of the huge garden was filled with something growing. Like her mother, she was wearing a black dress, but her sweater was a somber, serviceable dark blue.

  “I’ve come with the American, for you to tell her about cheese.”

  Mme. Lacroste turned to me and said, “My grandmother made cheese too, of course, but now, no matter what question you ask her, she only talks about certain things, like the Germans, her dead husband, her wedding trip to Nice.”

  “Bonjour, Madame Rillier,” I said to my companion’s mother. She gave me a no-nonsense handshake, and I understood where Mme. Lacroste had acquired her manner.

  “So. You want to make cheese our way. No cheese in America?” She put her hands on her hips and looked me up and down.

  “Yes, there’s cheese, but not goat cheese. Not like the French homemade goat cheese.” The term artisanal was not yet in my vocabulary. That would come twenty years later, with the beginning of the boom of artisanal foods in the United States.