To the Sea, The Sea - 5 April 2011
Tuesday, 5th April, 2011
We’ve come home again, To the House of Remembrance in Happy Valley. This morning we were in happy Sanary having arrived there yesterday evening via Cannes, Antibes, Juan Les Pin, St. Tropez and Presqu”ile de Giens.
We left TSL on Sunday after lunch having decided to take a 3 day jaunt along the coast from Nice to wherever, possibly Cassis. It’s a hot day and the roads and towns are crowded with weekenders and day-trippers – a hint of what’s to come in high season. The towns and beaches vary from high end to not so much. Cannes, famous now for its celebrity, could be Florida or California its seafront one long mall of hotels, restaurants and designer shops. Even from a moving car you can feel its slightly desperate energy – the see and be seen type of energy that we find unsettling. Antibes is more of the same, if smaller and then we come to Juan Les Pins, a tacky beach running next to the road and the railway line. The beach resembles the grayish mixture of sandy debris to be found on an abandoned construction site. It does not invite bare feet and seems to be populated with untended children and hung-over men. We flee, wondering if the Riviera is done for.
But then the coast road begins to take us through rugged red rocks and small villages that seem to have no centers. We begin a futile search for an ice-cream sundae which we envision eating while overlooking the sea. Equally futile is the search for an inn or hotel for the night. We follow signs up side roads and find several places that look promising only to discover they’re not yet open for the season. St. Tropez looms as the next stop and we are feeling a little panicky, both of us assuming that it will be a slightly smaller version of Cannes.
How wrong we were.
St. Tropez is truly a jewel. It’s tiny streets tumbling down the hillside to the sea in well-kept disarray.
Certainly there are indications of its ritzy reputation, from the classy boutiques and restaurants to the cheek-by-jowl yachts along the harbor front, each jostling for position on the evening tide. But what’s really a surprise – and fills us with admiration for the town board – is its respect for the ancient buildings whose facades are not a façade. They are the real thing: well kept without being “fixed-up”. It’s a pleasure to be here. Now all we have to do is find a bed.
We ask a shopkeeper for a recommendation for a good hotel. It’s good all right: the suite is divine, elegant, soothing, with a luxurious bathroom and costs a mere 700 euros a night which at the current rate is approximately $1100. Joel immediately returns to his Bronx roots, charming the concierge and explaining why we should have the room for next to nothing: it’s Sunday night, off season. The weekenders have returned to Paris. None of the 12 rooms is occupied. Why let a room go empty? We get the room for a rate we can afford without too much justification and settle in. I should point out that this hotel, Pan Dei, has rooms that are far less expensive.
Evening calls us out to the streets. The light is so soft it’s almost like looking through muslin. In the ubiquitous boules square a few men practice their shots below enormous plane trees whose leaves are just greening. We wander side streets and alleys. Wisteria, dripping over walls and arches drenches us with its perfume. We feel blessed to be here while it’s still only inhabited by locals. Come July and August the streets will be choked with shoulder-to-shoulder pedestrians.
Although we’ve only traveled about 75 miles today, it took us four hours - we are famished and choose to eat in the hotel’s restaurant. A simple and elegantly prepared dinner of shrimp and wok sautéed vegetables for me and for Joel a confit of lamb Tandori with yogurt sauce and basmati rice.
I’d like to take a moment here to honor the unique style of French women. Unlike the majority of the animal and bird kingdom where the male gets to wear the fancy plumage, here in France it is les femmes who are unabashedly adorned. Age has nothing to do with defining what is or is not appropriate in terms of clothing. French women wear what they want, when they want, where they want and they do so with absolute confidence of ownership, by which I mean they own their femininity and parade it at every opportunity.
And so it is that this evening, while we are dining, a couple in their early 70’s enter the room. I have no idea what he looked like as he is completely outstripped by his wife. She is slim, tall, with short grey hair and Sophia Loren-type glasses. She wears skinny jeans and six-inch stilettos with the ease of a teenager. But it is from the waist up that she truly astonishes. Her jacket is a frou-frou cloud of charcoal grey feathers that waft her into the room like Big Bird. It borders on ridiculous but stops just short, leaving this observer breath-taken by her unruffled audacity. With a well-practiced hand her husband deftly removes her jacket to reveal a cap-sleeved, silver angora sweater which almost disappoints until she sits in front of a mirrored wall that reflects the sweater’s buttoned nape, below which a cut-out bares most of her back.
We forego dessert, for some mad reason, and retiring to our suite, draw a bath before sinking into the first truly luxurious bed we’ve slept in since we left our own 6 weeks ago.
After a breakfast of far too many and too delicious breads, jams, croissant, pain chocolat and café, oh all right, and a jam donut, we set out to explore town some more. A short but steep walk up to the citadel gives us an enormous view of the coastline, including the stretch we traveled yesterday. On the way back down, a slant of light beckons Joel into a courtyard where we discover what surely must have been Rapunzel’s Tower.
It’s Monday. It’s warm. It’s gentle. The air is filled with the new green of spring. Birds compete with the sound of hammers striking nails into soon-to-be-opened shops. We find a hardware store that could be from the 50’s. I covet a dustpan and long-handled brush made only of wood, metal and bristles. Not a piece of plastic anywhere. We look at a few hotels that we might afford on our return in the summer and find one with its own little beach, all peach colored walls and awnings and slightly old-fashioned. We lunch there bathed in its light, ready to live out our days right here.
A woman in her 80’s arrives, someone who has obviously lived her days here. She and the place go together like notes on a music score. She plays with the staff and they with her. She is girlish and eccentric and here she is: Maggie's photo
I overdo it at dessert with two boules of café ice-cream smothered in burnt caramel and sit bloated and silent while Joel drives us to our destination.