A Nice Saturday - 2 April 2011
Saturday, 2 April, 2011
Today, after an early breakfast we take off for Nice. Saturday is triple-market day: books, flowers, food.
It’s a happy city today, full of that Saturday feeling that some cities do so well, and particularly so here.
There are still only a few toursists, the season hasn’t started yet, but the natives are as carefree as any vacationer. We amble through bookstalls, browsing here and there: old books on Provence, filled with un-filled nature; portraits of those who worked the land. At another stall Tin Tin rules while at another an antique book is held open to a page of water-colored figures naked from the waist down.
The French are already at the bistros with their coffee, croissants and cigarettes. I think of the first time I came to France, back in the 60’s when I was 18 and wore a denim mini skirt for weeks, hitching around Europe for 3 months with a friend, the two of us smoking Gauloise or Gitanes and ordering café au lait in grammar school French. Yes, it’s all changed a lot since then, like everywhere, and yet here, today, in the old town of Nice, much remains. The French are so beautifully French.
We wander on to the flower stalls, sunlight streaming through canvas illuminating peonies – some in a coral shade new to me – roses, tulips and something I call rinokios, lilies, iris and too many blossoms whose names I do not know. Oh, and the foodstalls! Glistening olives, plump sausages, melting cheeses, fruits, vegetables, nuts, pastries, breads - it’s just one long drool.
We return to the square of booksellers and lunch outside at a brasserie. We feel suspended as only travelers can: no plan; no need; no language, hardly a thought, just the being, right here, right now, in Provence. The day develops a kaleidoscopic slow-motion and we drift along in it.
I'm called by the quality of the light and the memory of DiChirico-like space and repetition, but the space is locked and looking through the grill forces me to make an image that includes the limitations, a reminder that reality is what we get to work with.
At the very end of the market sits the building that Matisse retreated to during the war years and where he had a studio overlooking the sea. From those rooms came the remarkable flow of works that have spoken to me through all the years, the open windows, the reclining Odalisques, the portraits....
I've always responded to the plaza/piazza spaces of Europe, that boxed in feeling, yet generous and spacious and offering a place to hang out and work the street life that flows through it.
Coming home we stop in TSL to visit the butcher and the grocer. We buy blood sausage and ham to go with our eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes – the Joel and Maggie Sunday Breakfast. We get lazy about dinner and buy one of the butcher’s cooked chickens and from the grocer, green beans and apple juice.
Back at the House Of Remembrance the lazy afternoon lingers in the sun and we with it, dozing on the terrace. The birds are atwitter in spring’s sweet song. Down the lane, children call out to each other. Further up the hill a crow has it’s say answered half-heartedly by a distant dog.
I look up through the olive trees to the bluest of skies. There is nowhere I’d rather be.
