ARTICHOKE FIELDS
It
is a hot day in the early seventies, and we children are fighting in
the back of the car. Dad is driving steadily, smoothly, as he
always does, driving as if he is anticipating all kinds of possible
dangers, as if twenty-five years or so of driving have not inured
him to the myriad possibilities of change. When I am older, it comes
to me that this is how he has lived his whole life, on the brink,
never taking it for granted, trying hard to keep control of it yet
painfully aware of the knife-edge of life, of the way in which, in
a second, things can change forever. When I am older, it comes to
me that I am similar, driven to achieve, pursued by the awareness
of life's fragility, the swiftness of time passing. But at the time,
his careful driving is merely another of the traits, the shorthand
of experience, which, together, make up "Dad"-- a person
you accept unthinkingly, as you accept your mother, or your
brothers and sisters. Dad is careful yet can also be awesomely
impulsive; Maman is impulsive yet can also be icily logical. You
don't think too much about those uneasy conjunctions; as a child,
you rely on signs, on the known, and somehow accomodate those
things, together.
But
here we are, driving. The vinyl of the seats sticks to our thighs,
and the warm closeness of a brotherly or sisterly leg leads to sotto
voce quarrels about the most ridiculous things possible. It's summer,
and we are driving for what seems like hours, to the other side of
Sydney, into the wildness of Blacktown. As we approach its rural
outskirts, Dad sits up more in his seat. Even though--or maybe
because--he is city born and bred, he loves the country with a
fervour born of happy memories of his great-grandparents' place in
the Aveyron. When he was a small child, he would go there for
holidays, and he has told us many stories of it, his eyes misting
with a regret which I didn't quite understand. Later, I see it is
not only nostalgia, but something more powerful--a need to hold on
to a good, simple memory within a wartime childhood booby-trapped
with pain, betrayal and ambivalence. Maman does not seem to have
those needs; or at least, if she does, they have long been dealt
with, subsumed to what, even then, we knew to be my father's
greater ones. Greater in the sense of more ravaging , by the year,
so that even as children we stepped carefully around them.
But
the good memories connected with this kind of place have transformed
Dad, at the moment. He does not look anxious, or harried; his even,
smoothly pale olive skin is unmarked by frowns. He says, "It's
astonishing, isn't it, to see how hard these people work, "
and his tone is gentle, wondering, filled with the pleasure of its
simplicity. It is traditional for him to say this, here; yet always
Maman nods, always we hear him without wondering at its repetition.
We
stop in front of the house. It is a very simple house, fibro
(asbestos sheet), and we have only been further than the kitchen
once or twice. But the house is unimportant. What is important is
beyond it, in the flat fertile acres that surround the house,
making it an island out of time, its Australianess an incongruity in
the Europeaness of cultivated fields. For here are not acres of
wheat, or of the other large, fullscale crops we associate with
this vast land; but the smaller, denser patches of vegetables:
lettuce in serried rows, tomatoes, ripening in sunrise colours,
spinach and leeks and, especially, most especially, the artichoke
fields. There they stand, tall and fierce in their greens and
purples, acres of them, their tightly-packed heads swaying on their
strong stems. Some of them are already going to flower; and their
perfume--a strong, sweet smell, like wild honey--fills the air.
They are beautiful, beautiful and wild as a Van Gogh painting. The
sight of them always catches at my throat, so that even now, years
later, I can see them, smell them, and wonder at the selectiveness
of memory that will keep such pictures and not others. And, like a
Van Gogh painting, if you don't simply stand on the sidelines,
admiring, but venture inside them, the artichoke fields will reveal
all kinds of unexpectedly painful things.
The
farmers come to greet us, their very brown, very wrinkled faces
split by their smiles into a thousand more tiny rivulets. I never
learnt their names, and to me, at that age, they look immensely
old, agelessly old, like peasants in an old picture. They are
small, both of them, both dressed in black: but he is lean and
wiry, with wild grey hair and sharp pale eyes, while she is round
as she is high, her breasts like enormous soft pillows under her
dress, her hair done up in a floppy bun, her eyes like lively brown
birds in their nest of wrinkles. She is Maltese, he is a Yugoslav.
Dad, accustomed, at the building sites he supervises, to working
with men insisting on their Croatianess, or Serbianess, or
Bosnianness, wonders at the farmer's calm avowal of being
'Yugoslav'--what does this show about his politics?--but does not
press the point. But on the way home, he will say, "Hmm, say
what you like, I've always found Yugoslavs difficult people to
fathom. It's really the extremity of Europe, you know. . " And
I wonder at the need of adults, too, for shorthand, for second
hand wisdoms.
But
Dad finds the woman farmer, the Maltese, very sympathetic. "Eh,
paysan!" she says, or that's what it sounds like, in her
shrill voice. Her voice, too, is ageless; we have heard, on a
record at home, Portuguese peasant girls singing in exactly the same
kind of shrill voices, voices you never hear, otherwise, in
Australia. I think that her version of 'paysan' means something akin
to friend, or compatriot, fellow-spirit, perhaps. Whatever it
means, Dad is immensely proud of it. He preens under the accolade
which she shrewdly--but not insincerely--gives him. Maman is more
circumspect; she is closer--only one generation removed--from a
peasant origin, and she has few illusions about it. "She's a
good saleswoman, " is all she will say, later, when Dad,
talking nineteen to the dozen, drives us back to our somnolent,
rich suburb where ennui attacks his restless and troubled spirit like
a physical pain.
They
talk in a mixture of languages; some English, mixed with Italian,
Portuguese, Spanish and even a bit of patois, the Occitan-derived
dialect of the Toulouse area. Dad is always thrilled when the two
farmers prove to understand some of the patois; he sees a connection
between all kinds of European languages (or at least the Latin
ones)and to hear this confirmed, especially here, the patois under
the alien sky, is a source of joy.
We
walk with them down the paths that lead away from the incongruous
Australian house(where their only child, a daughter, sits eating
biscuits in front of the television) and into the European preserves
of the farm. Here, before you reach the hand-cultivated fields of
vegetables, are neatly-arranged poultry runs, with chickens running
about, and rows of rabbit hutches, where blink fat rabbits. There
are no pets or superfluous things; in this setting, away from the
house which diminishes them, the farmers are tough, witty, their
tenacity written in their faces, with none of the bewilderment which
must seize them, more than once, in this country. I look at them
and think of their daughter and how it must be for them all when they
have to come up to the school. When my parents come, I am in agony
of fear, hoping they won't say the 'wrong' thing in the 'wrong' sort
of accent. There are other people we know, Italians, whose attitude
towards their educated children is humble, frighteningly so. My
parents aren't like that, at all; yet I wonder how these two, these
farmers, and their daughter, must feel like, when they have to
leave the artichoke fields and go to the school, or the supermarket,
or the myriad things one must do in such a society. It makes me
squirm, this thought, and so I turn away from it, and towards the
fields. It never occurs to me , of course, that maybe it did not
touch them, that the shame may only be in the minds of
self-conscious children.
At
first, we look in the hutches, say, "Isn't that one sweet?"
and the farmer smiles, showing bad teeth, and says, in her
appallingly accented English, "Good eating, that one!" We
are at the age, in the place and time where such statements appear
callous; so we are silent, and ignore Dad's I-told-you-so-grin. He
has often said we are becoming too soft, sentimental, Australian;
Europeans are tough people who look reality in the face. You like
lapin a la moutarde? Right, well then you must be ready to first
catch your rabbit and kill it. . Or to plunge your hands without
disgust into the freshly-killed carcase of a chicken and make it into
an objet de table, a dish, rather than a once-living thing. We are
tenderhearted; but our feelings never extend to the nicely trussed,
carefully jointed meat dish that appears on the table. . .
Now
she is walking in the artichoke fields, talking shrilly, a mixture
of salty comment on current events, and wild praise of her
vegetables. He is silent ("Taciturn, like all Yugoslavs, "
Dad is delighted to say, and I wonder a little at how adults seem to
need the shorthand of second-hand wisdoms, too). But he smiles quite
a bit, and touches the plants, gently, as if he is greeting each.
That, surely, is folly. He and his wife are unsentimental, without
fancy or falsity, honest, as the French saying has it, as ‘du
bon pain’. But that, surely, is a sentimentality, too; for I
have heard Maman saying that these two never lose ‘le nord’,
always stick to what they know they want, and are not above using
cajoling or even a judiciously-placed marketing ploy to sell their
vegetables. They are not doing this for fun, for ‘du folklore’:
that is the mistake of urban people, throughout the ages. Simplicity
is in the eye of the beholder.
Every
so often, the farmer stops. She throws an arm out to her husband:
this one. She stoops, cuts the stem, throws the vegetable into the
basket he is carrying. Dad trots just behind her, asking her all
kinds of questions. She answers with aplomb and humour, in her
shrill voice, while her husband fills the basket and smiles what my
mother would call a 'corner' smile; half-sceret, enigmatic. We
children and Maman follow behind desultorily; the smell of the big
vegetables fills our nostrils with a heady odour, their sharp thorns
prick the unwary child who leaves the narrow paths between the rows.
We all love artichokes; some Sunday nights, that's all we've eaten,
an enormous tureen filled to the top with the boiled vegetables,
served with vinaigrette on each person's plate. The table would fill
up with mountains of discarded leaves, plundered for their bit of
sweet flesh, then put aside for the next one. There is something
addictively wonderful about artichokes; the more and more frenetic
peeling-back of leaves, till you get to the 'straw' inside, and
peel that off as cleanly as a bandage, to reveal the succulent flesh
of the heart. We ate the stems, too; the Blacktown farmers always
sold us young, fresh artichokes, so that their stems were as tender
as asparagus. Occasionally, we'd eat them with butter and garlic,
or tomatoes. But the simple one, the boiled-and-vinaigrette ones was
what we preferred.
We
always lingered in those fields, dodging thorns, and in areas where
the purple flowers were really out, the bees as well, maddened, as
we were, by the heavy smell of the artichokes. Once, I remember,
the farmer picked one of the flowers and gave it to me. The
unexpectedness of the gesture made me blush, and for the rest of our
time there, I couldn't resist putting my nose as close as possible
to the flower. I've always been sensitive to smells, finding them
powerful evokers of emotion and place, and now, I try to think what
it was that made this smell so heady. Roses smelt sweeter, muskier,
richer; vanilla smelt more homely and tender; the thick brown smell
of meat made me feel hungrier. This was a smell of almost-wildness,
of something only just tamed, and only dimly understood, something
whose discovery was concealed under layers of half-meanings. It was
not the smell of careful, cultivated Europe, neatly arranged,
tamed and civilised, the Europe of the mythologisers or the
nostalgic. Rather, it was the smell of the Europe whose inheritance
was mine, which seeped into me like instinct, but was submerged,
like instinct, for a long time. A Europe--a France-- not only of the
mind or of the comfortable senses; but also one of the blood's leap,
of the pain of rejection. The France my father felt in exile from,
the France my mother followed him from, despite her own rather less
ambivalent feelings. A corner of Europe forever elusive, never
pinned down, half-wild, half-tame, of heady, unforgotten smell,
uncomfortable at times, maybe never to be fully understood.
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