Libations and Comestibles

Saorge is a water-friendly town. Cold, clear water flows from the mountains and supplies the town — and we’re told it’s pure. I sure hope so, because I often see people drinking from one of the many spigots that flow ‘round the clock into basins and troughs. Said troughs look ancient, like most things around here.

In Kansas City, our water bill is by far the biggest of the utility bills we receive. Here, we pay €20 a month for water and trash service. Just a flat fee. But the standard monthly electric bill is about $90, which does not include any air-conditioning, and it costs us $70 to fill up  the tank of our small car. 

While bread and wine are dirt cheap on French soil, fruits and vegetables are quite pricey for those of us used to American prices. I suspect the prices here in France more accurately reflect the labor and the value thereof. Meat, too, is expensive. Beef seems popular,  but I am here to tell you that it is not nearly as tasty as American beef and costs at least twice as much. The most common meat found in any restaurant seems to be pork. Especially ham. Veal seems to be quite prevalent as well, although it is not something we order. Our murderous tendencies don’t extend to baby cows, it appears.

In Saorge and in the nearby towns, you can get a sandwich or a Panini (usually ham and cheese ) for €5 or less. But the standard price for a Caesar salad is €12.50. Wine can be had for about three dollars a glass or six dollars for a half carafe, which is about 17 ounces, or more than half a bottle of wine. I have no idea what sort of wine I have been drinking here. So far we haven’t been to any place fancy enough to specify anything other than red or white. It is all fine, quite unlike the cheap American plonk I avoid at all costs.  

Saorge is a stone’s throw from the Italian border, which makes it even stranger to me that regular coffee is so mediocre in France. Everyone seems to buy the already ground coffee, which any true coffee lover could tell you is a few steps down from optimal. I have found two stores with beans but so far the beans are only average. Italy, of course, is home to the best coffee machines on the planet, so there is no excuse for this pre-ground shit in France, in my opinion. So far, we simply order cappuccinos, although I have also had one really good macchiato. I might order it more but it is such a tiny pour it makes my wallet flinch.

Jonah orders hot chocolate everywhere we go, chocolat chaud. It doesn’t come with a huge dollop of whipped cream as he prefers, but it often has a head of frothy milk. A note of caution here: if you are in Italy and order a hot chocolate, you may literally get a hot chocolate. A steaming glass of what appears to be chocolate pudding. We have figured out a workaround by asking, in our butchered Italian, for  hot chocolate with a lot of milk added. 

And now a last word on liquid refreshment in France. I am relatively sure I have the best three bottles of whiskey in Europe. To whit, Blackened, High West Double Rye and Pikesville Rye. Our shoulders are still sore from our very heavy suitcases, but by God I needed my whiskey. I am only sorry I don’t have someone who appreciates whiskey to share them with. I warned Andie that probably all we would be able to get over here would be Scotch (yuck) and Irish whiskey. I was right about the Jameson and the Scotch, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t spot a bottle of Four Roses in a store one evening. Mind you, I don’t care for the regular Four Roses. 

There is no rye anywhere. But every bar and every grocery store has one example of American whiskey on its shelves: Jack Friggin’ Daniels. How in the love of Christ did this happen, America? And can I have some sympathy for my wife, because that is her new mixer for her freshly made whiskey sours?

 A few of the Saorge waterworks

Les portes de Saorge

No need for words. Here are a few samples up the road from our apartment.

How Gray the Batiments

 I am walking down an alleyway. Actually it is a street, or what passes for a street in Saorge. All the streets look like cobbled alleys, narrow and mysterious and full of surprises. Beguiling architectural details catch the eye, as do sporadic signs of human habitation: a  water bottle tucked on a step by a door that is so battered and rotted it is hard to believe it has been used in a hundred years, A steep staircase lined with potted plants, a cat — there is almost always a cat, a different cat every time. Tabby cats, golden cats, black cats, gray cats. One sees almost as many cats in Saorge as one does people. (There are no cars and all the dogs are on leashes, so the cats can slink and strut without fear.) A plaza holds temporarily abandoned scooters and bikes — my presumption thusfar is that there is little petty theft in this town — it is so small and bounded that what would be the point? Your neighbor would notice you playing with his bike, or saw, or whatever it is that you left lying in the plaza last evening. 

>>>>> 

> This town does not seem remotely haunted, at least by anything evil or frightening, but I swear I would not be surprised if I saw a gray figure emerge from the gray stone to drift up the rue, queer clothing and all. Saorge seems outside of time somehow. This citadel town is simply steeped in visuals and atmosphere.

>

 Every time I look around, every time I look up at these massive, soaring stone structures, all sorts of medieval words start popping into my head. Ramparts, merlons, embrasures, turrets, crenellations. Okay, maybe not turrets, as there aren’t so many turrets, but ramparts and crenellations and whatever those narrow arrow slits cut into the massively thick walls are called. (They are called loopholes, Mala explains: fentes de flèche. Mala is an expatriate from New York who speaks six or eight languages and apologizes for her poor French even as she helps me communicate with the locals. She and her husband Jim escaped the heat and the crowds of Monaco several years ago and went looking for cooler vistas. They found themselves in Saorge. They were bedazzled, and now own the house they stayed in for those first two nights.)

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Gazing upward, it is not hard to imagine Saorge defenders dropping stones through murder holes or firing from embrasures. I have never felt safer in a town, but the atmospherics of so many shades-of-grey, painstakingly quarried-by-hand batiments make me want to pen some murder mystery set years in the past. Like those Ellis Peters chronicles of brother Cadfael, the Crusader turned monk turned medieval detective who labors in the 1130s-40s during the English Civil War between Empress Matilda and King Stephen. Only perhaps I should update the era to the present day, with a Saorge summer resident brutally struck down in one of the village  narrow byways, his blood spilling darkly against the smooth cobblestones. Was he killed by a resentful local, a day hiker, or another summer inhabitant like himself? Somebody take this and run with it.  But don’t take it to heart, because an actual murder in this idyllic village might ruin it for me.

>>>> 

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>>>>> My friend Cara is right: some of these passageways look like the entrance to Diagon Alley, Or at least what I imagine the entrance to Diagon Alley looks like. If that reference eludes you, it is only because you are one of the 12 people on the planet who has not delved into the Harry Potter books. We don’t judge here in Saorge.

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The Knees of Saorge

July 2019

This village is going to kill me before it cures me. I’m dying as I struggle up the steep cobblestones, trying to take in the medieval ramparts all around me but more conscious of my breath rasping in my lungs, wondering what the French word for ‘rasp’ is, wondering how to say ‘lungs,’ my steps very un-brisk, my knees whimpering a bit. The murderous part of Saorge relates to those knees, which last year developed some very unpleasant sharp pains following some days of intense interval training on the treadmill, which seems  VERY unfair to me, my body punishing me for attempting to push it to the next level, and here I am in a village comprised of nothing BUT hills, and stairs, and cobblestones, and why SHOULD these aging American knees do anything but complain when faced with the 900-year-old cobblestones of this citadel town, but BUT I have a vague optimism (huff, huff, step groan step) that if Saorge doesn’t beat me into the picturesque pavement that it will, if nothing else, give me some impressive calf muscles, if . . . if only I can keep at it, stay moving, practice my French, keep hoofing it to Heinz (the local bar), La Petite Epicerie (the local restaurant), the parking spaces bookending the town, Vitale, the tiny local grocery shop, the even tinier Saturday market, keep moving, seduce my meniscus or whatever treasonous muscles have been  panging at me on the stairs, keep going steadily, up the stones, down the stones, carefully on the stones, just keep at it, there’s a girl, hear the music? You’re almost at a relief station, a place to sit down, take a load off, have a cappuccino or a vin blanc, very uncharacteristic that, and I blame climate change, me a red wine woman all the way, but it’s so very HOT in Europe right now, and the white wine is cold, and at Heinz, as at most of the eateries in hailing distance, the wine is good, and cheap, and plentiful, and there’s music wafting (okay, it’s a bit louder than ‘wafting,’ but not unpleasant) from inside, and it’s so amusing to me that it’s so often AMERICAN music, that’s on Marc, the quasi-American owner of Heinz, apparently a huge fan of the ‘60s, but also Frank Sinatra – is that FRANK SINATRA serenading me and my knees right now?  Saying something stupid like ‘I love you’? And now it’s Dusty Springfield, Son of a Preacher Man, and I can’t sing a word of most French songs but several of the Saorgians around me, tout francais, are singing lustily along, in ENGLISH and omigosh it’s the Jackson Five! And Easy Like Sunday Morning, and of course You Give me Fever, and now the knees are willing again, and on we go, why am I surprised an ancient town would favor ancient music and oi my  legs are aching a bit, I thought I was in shape, that nice old man called me ‘buff,’ or at least I think that’s what he said, but he’s springing along those cobblestones like it’s flat astroturf and I’m stepping out somewhat gingerly, but thinking maybe in a few weeks? Months? I’ll be ignoring the hills and hiking along like all the old men, young men, everyone in Saorge, my poor old knees cured by a daily dose of gradual climbing and descending, cured not killed, and it’s all good, so beautiful and so good, high up here in a medieval mecca, where you can wear anything, be anything, and nobody cares, but everybody seems to care, an open secret that tourists are discovering, but also deliciously steep and thereby offputting to casual (out-of-shape) tourists, and we aren’t even tourists this time around, but  visitors, more than visitors, inhabitants for a year, take that knees, and everyone seems to know who we are, these slightly lost-looking tired travelers fumbling in French but friendly, because that is what we bring from the Midwest, we too are friendly, we will conquer you by virtue of our unthreatening friendly Americanness, reclaiming a bit of the national reputation so sullied by the cult of Trump, who by the way could NEVER make it through the town from the parking lot, too steep by far for the oafs of the world, but maybe, perhaps, peut-etre not too steep for my curmudgeonly knees that perk up at the music, Starry Starry Night, a song nearly as old as these knees, and oh my god does that mean one day I’ll be strolling strongly up the stones to American PIE? Cured, not killed, made whole by the wholesomeness of this ludicrously charming village? Tout est possible. Today at least.