Sunday, June 16, 2013
Mèze to Caunes:
The GPS is not my friend.

          I have made arrangements to return to Caunes shortly after the 11 o'clock Sunday Mass at St. Hilaire, the church in Mèze.  Francine supplies me with a map of the town and I walk from her house to the fishing port and up along the rue du Port, then to City Hall and the covered market, which are next to St. Hilaire.  Along the way I pass the stands of the Sunday market vendors, selling similar items to those I saw in Pézenas yesterday, although the Mèze market is much smaller.

          St. Hilaire is more a chapel than a church, one room with an apse whose bottom half is formed of stained glass panels of Jesus, Mary, St. Hilaire, of course, and other saints, all rendered life-sized.  Above the stained glass panels, Gothic arches rise, making the church seem older than its XIV-century building date.  The bells are actually rung, in the morning and evening every day, and again just before the eleven o'clock Mass.

          The parishoners are mostly of retirement age.  Neatly turned out in clothes that have been carefully washed and ironed, the Mèzois all share a certain way of holding themselves, which could not be farther from the elegant Parisian stance of having one or both arms akimbo.  These elderly men and women's shoulders are curved slightly forward, backs rounded a bit in the posture of people who have spent their lives putting their backs into their work.  The arms and back slightly forward suggest a willingness to throw oneself into a task, and no fear of hard work.   It is a way of holding oneself that suggests a life spent in manual labor and a resulting hardiness.

          The priests who celebrate the Mass are outwardly dissimilar to their parishoners, although they seem of about the same age.  The principal celebrant, dressed in a white alb, and a bright green Kente cloth stole, looks like an old hippie: tall, his long face, prominent nose, shoulder-length hair and long moustache, suggest a man who had a conversion experience, but did not want to throw off all the remnants of his old life.  His co-celebrant is shorter, with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, his alb garnished with a stole woven of cotton in a plaid, draped and pinned diagonally across the alb, the way a Scottish highlander would wear it.  The name of the parish is Notre Dame de la Sourire --Our Lady of the Smile-- a name that seems to fit the place and the parishoners well, as they seem content and at ease with themselves.

          After a trip through the market for purposes of buying a few of the famous melons from Cavaihlon --they are one of the main ingredients in the production of Calissons d'Aix, a French confection similar to marzipan, made under the A.O.C. system by six producers in the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence-- I make it back to Francine's.  After confirming my return next Sunday, if not before, we program the GPS to avoid the toll roads and the highways, sticking to the routes nationales and local roads.  It is one o'clock when I leave, and Francine figures that, as it takes her one hour and twenty minutes to make it to Caunes, I ought to be there in ninety minutes.

          As it turns out, it takes another three hours, although the trip is, for the most part, less fraught than Friday's.  All goes well until I reach the outskirts of Bèziers.  The GPS has me enter Bèziers and make the circuit of Place Jean Jaurès.  There is always a principal square in every city in France named after Jean Jaurès, a father of the French Socialist Party, assassinated in 1914.  Beziers' is undistinguished.  I see that the cafés around the square have Arabic names, and only men sitting at them. Simultaneously, I see the first woman I have seen in a "hijab" and "chador" since arriving in the Midi of France, crossing the square.

         The GPS sends me down a slim hill cobbled with squarish tiles: walking in front of me are two skinny adolescent boys naked from the waist up and dressed in bright bermudas and basketball sneakers.  The street is narrow and I do not want to interfere with them, but they continue to walk down the hill in front of my car, rather than moving to the narrow sidewalk --although they must hear the sound of my car, the only other thing on the street, slowly navigating the rough paving.

        I beep lightly and as I approach, they get up on the sidewalk, looking right into the car and at me as I pass.  I raise my left hand in a gesture of greeting and mouth "Merci!" and am well-away a few seconds later.  Their skins are caramel-colored and their eyes golden, their razored hair black: their families' origins are certainly somewhere in North Africa.  They could care less about my "Merci" --I am treading on their territory, driving through the banlieue, or ghetto of Bèziers.

          I leave Béziers and pass the enormous prison on Bèziers' outskirts, continuing on past a part of the Canal du Midi.  I glimpse the giant water tower by the road towards Mazamet and Carcassonne, a major landmark.  I see a sign for "Capestang" and take it.  Before too long, I am coming towards a gigantic Gothic church dominating the landscape in every direction, massive, unadorned and severe: I might be heading towards Oz.  As  matter of fact, though, Capestang's church, built from the 12th to the 15th centuries, was the summer residence of the archbishops of Narbonne.  As it housed a college of archbishops, it is called a "collegiate" church.

          I have been driving during the lunch hour to avoid traffic, but once I turn onto the Capestang road, the Black Mountains spread out on my right, and it is almost like having the road all to myself  .  I drive under giant allées that stretch a good quarter of a mile, the trees a good thirty feet high, their leaves growing towards each other, a canopy of cool green.    If there is one aspect of the landscape that could not be more quintessentially French to me, it is the allées.  They are everywhere in the landscape because they were planted to give the farmers a place to get into the shade and out of the sun, practicality and beauty united.  I am beginning to feel not far from home, and more relaxed, after my adventure in Béziers.

        The GPS now sends me onto roads farmers use: indeed, I see a pair of them working in the broiling sun in the middle of the afternoon, baling hay.  Most of the time, though, I am riding along an empty landscape, open fields of vineyards on both sides of me.   The GPS is a mystifying device: I cannot get the machine to produce an overview of my route, and sometimes it misleads me, as when it fails to register a cut in a rotary that is not paved, but could be taken for an exit.  I have to turn back a number of times, because I have counted the cuts as exits and thrown myself off-course.  I watch the map on the screen to try to get my bearings, but when the Englishwoman's voice tells me "Enter the roundabout and take the third exit"; or, " Take the first right in 800 meters, then left,  I am too often undone.  Tomorrow, when I have to go to Toulouse in the morning, I had better program the device to speak American English and use feet instead of metros, to see if there is any improvement, even if I like the plummy English.

          I inadvertently extend my trip by driving towards Olonzac, rather than La Redorte.  Now in the area of the Minervois, the little towns I pass --Pepieux and Trausse-- are dead quiet, as is Caunes, when  I finally get there.  The sun is so strong, no one goes out.  At seven o'clock the abbey bells ring, although I think they are electronically sounded.  It is still very light outside, but the wind is so strong it shakes the wooden shutters.  I wonder whether high winds are a normal feature of the landscape in the Minervois.