Mediterranean Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

midday break.”
    “Where is everything else going to come from?” I asked.
    “There are excellent shops in some of the towns, and just down the street from the apartment is a great
boulangerie,
” Jerome was quick to reply over his shoulder.
    “Unless of course when we go to the markets we get everything there,” Nathalie said from the passenger seat. She directed Jerome in French to turn left at the next intersection. She preferred to travel in the valley on the “D” routes as opposed to the “N” routes of the national system. “It might take a little longer, but there is much more to see on the
département
roads.”
    A short while later, Nathalie pointed to Bonnieux, a town that capped a lone hill ahead, our final destination. The winding two-lane road to town took us past fruit and nut orchards, grass fields, restored farmhouses, and old stone barns. The car’s diesel engine labored to make the final steep grade. Near the summit a clear vista of the valley of the Vaucluse opened up. I looked across to Lacoste, another hilltop town close by, and saw the jagged ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s castle, which dominated the vista from high above the village. Recalling the twisted madness chronicled in Peter Weiss’s modern play
Marat/Sade
that I read in college, I wondered how this exquisite environment could have produced such a tortured soul.
    It didn’t take long to adjust to the daily rhythm of living in Provence. Early each morning I’d walk down the street to the patisserie to get warm breakfast pastries or brioche to have with café au lait, which we drank out of bowls, a local custom. We would leave by eight o’clock to go to the markets, buy what we needed for lunch and dinner, and then return to the apartment with an occasional detour through one of the villages that dotted the hilltops of the valley.
    At the end of my first month, all seemed on track until one day Nathalie asked me, “Is there anything you want to make while here?”
    I replied, “No, I like your choices. I like what you’re doing.”
    “But didn’t you come here to learn the food of Provence?”
    “Of course,” I answered. “That’s why I try to follow your lead in the kitchen.”
    Nathalie dismissed my response with a somewhat chilly “okay” and went back to her work. That seemed to resolve the issue, but just what might have motivated her question continued to nag at me.
    I didn’t understand what her problem was. I was eager to go to the market each morning, help with the prep, even help with the clean-up, all the while trying to adhere to my mother’s warning not to be a pushy American.
    “Remember,” my mother had advised me, “you will be living in this woman’s home, working in her kitchen. Don’t come on like a know-it-all, telling her that this isn’t how they do it in San Francisco or New York. You are there to learn.”
    “What are you thinking about?” Nathalie asked me the next day as I chopped some mirepoix vegetables and tried my hand at making the “house” salad dressing.
    Maybe because her question took me by surprise, or because I didn’t know what answer she was looking for, I replied, “Nothing. I was just thinking about how different eating at home is.”
    “David, I didn’t invite you here to chop vegetables and season lamb. Cooking, you know, is not about recipes. It comes from my heart. You have never asked me why—why I do things, why I want it done this way and not that way. What’s in your heart, David? Did you leave it at home?”
    I didn’t know quite what to say. I must have searched too long for an answer, for Nathalie went on.
    “Maybe you might want to think about other things to do in Provence. But that is for you to decide.”
    With that, she left the kitchen.
    I quickly finished up the vegetables, wiped my hands, left the apartment, and briskly walked up the narrow cobblestoned road to the village peak. I perched myself on the top of a wall overlooking the entire