Lisette's List Read Online Free PDF Page B

wanted, something that would never happen in Paris.
    At home we found Pascal sitting at the table in the salle , which served as living room, dining room, and kitchen, his elbows on the oilcloth in a posture of despair. He apologized again and said for the sixth time how happy he was that we had come.
    André merely said, “We know” and left to go to the sawmill.
    I looked for a place to sit and realized that there were no cushioned armchairs, only a bare wooden settee that demanded erect posture, a backless bench pushed against a wall, and four ladderback chairs at the table. It would be a long time before I could make cushions if I had to wait for every duck in the countryside to be caught by Maurice and plucked for its feathers.
    “All the years that you grew up here, no one thought to put cushions on the chairs?” I asked.
    He shook his head in the most dejected manner. “We Roussillonnais do not care much about comfort of the buttocks.”
    “Where do people go to buy things?” I asked to distract him from my rudeness.
    “There’s a big Saturday market in Apt, eleven kilometers from here, and we have our own smaller one on Thursdays.”
    He pointed to a pine cabinet fastened to the wall near the sink, which had a drain but no water faucet. The cabinet had ornamental openwork to allow air passage and elaborately carved double doors.
    “It’s a panetière , for bread, one of our traditional crafts in Provence. My uncle and I made it for my mother. I remember she said, ‘Poésie bien provençale,’ which I took to mean poetry in wood, a high compliment. I must have been fifteen, but that made me feel like a man. I’ve made others too.”
    “It’s lovely.” I opened the doors and put the second baguette inside.
    “We made that piece of furniture under it, too. It’s a pétrin , for kneading the dough.”
    I stroked the rough wood marred by years of use as a cutting board as well. How long would it take for him to realize that I would never use it for kneading dough when there was a bakery here?
    “I hope you will like living with the paintings.”
    “ That I definitely will.”
    I walked from one to another hanging in a row on the north wall and stopped at each one, pretending I was in a gallery. Maxime had only just begun to instruct me in how to look at a painting. I had been overwhelmed by what there was to learn. Nevertheless, in front of a broad panorama of tilled fields with a distant mountain, I gathered the courage to ask, “Cézanne?”
    Pascal grinned and nodded.
    I was elated. In front of a soft-colored country scene with a girl in blue and a goat, I ventured, “Monet?”
    “Pissarro,” he corrected.
    I sank into inadequacy.
    Before a grouping of red-roofed houses seen through autumn trees, I guessed, “Either Monet or Sisley or Pissarro again.”
    “Pissarro.”
    Standing before the next one, I had no idea what painter would paint flat slabs of rock. “Who?” I had to ask.
    “Cézanne. It’s a quarry.”
    Beside the stairway hung a still life of fruit. “Oh, this could be anyone. Manet?”
    He shook his head.
    “Gauguin?”
    He shook his head again.
    “Fantin-Latour?” I felt proud to name a lesser-known artist.
    “Non.”
    “Renoir.”
    “Non encore.”
    “Then it must be Cézanne.”
    “You’re right! It can’t be anybody else.”
    “But that awful one. Who would paint faces without bodies?”
    He shrugged and held out his arm for me to come to him. In a plaintive voice he asked, “Do you want to know the real reason I wrote that desperate letter to André?”
    “Yes, I most certainly do.”
    “I want to tell you and André everything about these paintings and the men who created them while I still have time, while I can still remember. I’ve been afraid I would forget if I waited”—he broke off for a few moments before he added—“until the end. I want you to understand how important they are so you will care for them. Those painters used the ochres we mine