October 13, 2014
Nicole Leveling, my new cleaner, arrived just before 9:00 a.m., minutes after Beau and I returned from our regular morning walk through Caunes. I think she is a keeper, which is a relief. She will help me organize my closets in addition to cleaning, so that all the linens along with my clothes are easily accessible. I have bought additional storage units at the local shopping center and begun reorganizing in advance of her return Thursday, so I am feeling ahead of the game.
A chance encounter with a water meter reader from Carcassonne Agglo means that I have dealt with one of the more problematic tasks associated with my departure --reading the water and electric meters. I saw the man in his truck coming slowly down my street and stopped him, asking whether he had anything to do with meter reading. If it were New York City, he would not have given me the time of day --instead the man stopped his car in front of the house, came inside and searched for the meter, which I had not been able to find. (It was located underneath the kitchen sink, not the likeliest place.) He gave me the address where to send the reading before I left, although he thought I ought to check with the mairie to make sure I had the zip code right. I happened to be on my way there on precisely that errand, when I stopped him.
Imagine my joy when Madame Davila, the mairie secretary not only found the address I needed, but gave me a printed form I could easily fill out and mail to the address given to satisfy the meter reading requirement. I know how to read the compteur for the electricity and I already have a bill Electricité de France reading, so I can send it to the address on the bill and be done with that, too.
I repacked my bags and left behind much I thought I'd bring back to New York. After checking with DHL, it became obvious that even if I could get the courier service to pick up the two suitcases I filled (largely with French language books), I would have to fill out several customs declarations and print them out before. After shipping a twenty foot container to Caunes, I never want to see a French customs form again: the books will have to wait to be read next year.
Beau visits Dr. Mougin next Monday and will be vaccinated against rabies again, so that he can return with me using his Pet Passport and I mine, without my having to ever see the U.S. Department of Agriculture office at Kennedy Airport again. He still does not like being left alone and it doesn't take much to get him barking if he is alone --the hammering from the next-door-neighbors' home repair project, for instance-- but he is much better.
The house is secure, although I still find unsettling the news of the recent robberies. I had a long talk about them --and the car burnings last week-- with Roseline Amen, a retired emergency room nurse I have gotten to know through my participation in the church fair at Notre Dame du Cros.
I do not worry about my personal safety, she told me. I leave my shutters open --I don't want to lock myself in, although some people think I should.
Vis-a-vis the latest incidents, the village has changed. It used to be just wine-growers, --and abstemious ones, by the way. My family were typical, the value all held was the value of work. Today, as a psychologist explained to me, the most important thing is leisure. People work without thinking they will stay at any one job. In the village there are now families --one in particular-- where no one works. Whenever something happens, they are the usual suspects.
It turns out that that family is the family that lives on the rue de Notre Dame, not far from me.
They are very correct, though. If you meet them on the street, they will always greet you politely. However, I did hear one of them --he now lives across the street from me-- call his girlfriend a "dirty whore". If you meet him on the street, however, he will greet you as anyone else in the village would. Do they do a little "dealing"? --they probably do, to make ends meet, as even with the subsidies they receive, they need a bit more to live as they do.
Then, too, perhaps some of them burglarize houses in the village. There's a couple --two women-- who live down the street. They left the village after spending the summer here and a few weeks later, their car disappeared. The neighbors who keep an eye on their house saw it was missing. Now this part of the village is not one that anyone not intimately familiar with the village would know --only someone from the village, someone who knew that the two women had closed up the house could have successfully stolen their car.
It also turns out that the name of the family, Saoudi-- is the same as that of my very first cleaner, the tiny young woman who spent four hours doing nothing when she was here. In Rosline's opinion, she is not necessarily one of the relatives of the family of Fagins, though:
I would not be in the least worried, Marta, either about your personal safety, or the house, if you've fortified it as you have. The problems in the village are more than crimes, they are symptoms of a social pathology that is, unfortunately, now common in France. In my brother's village a vigneron filled his barrels with grapes only to find that local teenagers had defiled them with refuse. If there is even one fragment of glass inside, he's lost the value of the entire barrel.
I talked with the head of the local gendarmerie group this afternoon about the car burnings and the open consumption of marijuana. This is his perspective:
Today, in France, 60 to 80 percent of teenagers consume cannabis regularly. Many start using it as early as twelve --I know of one case where a promising student ruined his chances of a better life, by becoming dependent on cannabis. I know there is open consumption in front of the bank branch, but the problem for the gendarmerie is that if we approach, the users throw away the goods. Also, under French law, use is not a crime, it is a violation of the health code. The sanction is to be sent to a health service to address the dependency.
I asked about the torching of the cars last week:
The investigation is, unfortunately, continuing. The suspects are teenagers from Rieux, all with a dossier as long as my arm. However, as they are minors, even if they are brought before the judge, he will just tell them not to do it again. The burning of the car is an attempt to destroy the fingerprints that would inculpate the joyriders: "CSI" --the American TV program has taught them that. If arrested the suspects face two charges --stealing the car and burning it-- not minor offenses. However, proving the suspects are the perpetrators and as minors, bringing them to account --that's not easily done.
Rosline Amen has the last word, which concerns a story I heard last year about an American woman beaten within an inch of her life by an intruder, a workman she had engaged:
That was a "settling of scores". Something happened between them during his work for her --she had one understanding, he had another-- it can happen. What he did was personally directed towards her. I understand that she returned to the United States to have the necessary surgery.
Whereas in the case of the burning of the car in the Place d'Europe, that was mere vandalism. I happened to run into the elderly woman who owns the car incinerated. She is terribly upset --she thinks it was done against her personally. I tried to convince her that it wasn't, but she's unable to see it that way.
It would be a cliché --but an apt one-- to say that as beautiful as Caunes is, it's not paradise, that it has problems just like anywhere else. As Patrice Cartier said to me a few days ago, in response to my curiosity about these incidents,
You've lived here long enough now to know what the life of the village is and not be surprised.
Which, in its way, is a great compliment.
No comments:
Post a Comment