Amour Provence by Constance Leisure

Author:Constance Leisure
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

6

The Names of Trees

The mistral swirled up the mountainside, shaking the cypress trees so their tops crooked like the backs of old men. Aurélien Pierrefeu watched from within the high garden walls that sheltered him from the wind’s buffeting force. The iron-gated portal was open to the south, giving a view over the yellowed vineyards and a stunted but hardy peach tree that marked the edge of their two hectares. Beyond, low hills rolled down to the river valley. On the opposite side, a thin, tarred track mounted to the village of Serret, encircled with stone ramparts that had once served as a barricade against marauding hordes. Auri had been born in Serret and at the age of three months had been chosen to portray the infant Jesus in the Christmas pageant sung in Provençal, the language of the southern poets that his grandparents still spoke between themselves. Like most French people, Auri was not even faintly religious, yet he’d always been pleased whenever his parents described that winter day when he had been such an integral part of the town’s festivities, swaddled in the straw-lined manger where he’d been surrounded by admiring shepherds and angels played by village boys and girls just a few years older than him.

That afternoon, sitting at the plank table his father, Jeannot, had built, Auri flipped desultorily through his history book. In November, it was too cold to eat meals outside in the garden anymore, so they ate in the kitchen, where his mother’s peach, apricot, and blackberry jams decorated the open shelves like jeweled mosaics. But spending time with his family had recently ceased to be a pleasure. In fact, it was getting so that Auri was having trouble even being in the same room as his father.

That year, just after school had started, his friend Marcel had said, “My parents say your father is a marginal. Somebody who lives on the fringe.”

Auri had squeezed his fingers into fists even though Marcel was a pal.

“My dad works,” Auri had retorted. “He works all the time.”

“I know, but always at different jobs. That’s what they meant.”

And it was true. His father wasn’t out working that day, but instead was inside the house putting the final touches on a room with a separate bath that Auri would soon have to himself. For the present, the family was all lumped together upstairs, Auri in a tiny room at the end of the corridor, his younger sister and parents on the other side. But Auri didn’t give a damn about the new bedroom downstairs, nor did he care that he would no longer have to share the single bathroom with the rest of them. He just wished to be lifted up and spirited somewhere far, far away. The best he could do at the moment was escape to the enclosed garden, where the clematis that crept atop the iron gate rattled its dried-up tendrils, the glowing magenta blooms that had graced it that summer withered and forgotten.

His father, Jeannot, always said the mistral could drive anyone crazy.

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