Bonne Année, Bon Antidote?
Bernard Nicolleau
contemplates the New Year coucher de soleil.
5.13 pm on 1st of January 2018. The second storm of the
winter blew through during the night, and had been christened « Tempête Eleanor » by France Météo.
Bernard looks at the broken tuiles tige de botte on the grey gravel in
front of his farmhouse, and experiences the uncomfortable feeling all
climate-change deniers have when directly confronted with the evidence.
The Experts call this feeling "Cognitive Dissonance".
Nanard does not care much for "La Dissonance Cognitive".
Instead he
mutters a soothingly simple explanation to himself in his Vendée patois inner
voice, which translates roughly as :
« It’s all been a bloody sight worse since those
smart-arse city-folk weather experts started giving women’s names-especially bloody Anglo-Saxon ones; what was wrong with Aliénor?- to the bloody
storms »
Like storm Eleanor, the
hangover from yesterday’s réveillon is receding, and Bernard,
known as Nanard to his long-suffering wife Célestine « Titine »
Nicolleau , his seven offspring, their eighteen grandchildren and two
great-grandchildren, as well as to everyone else in La Commune, has L’Antidote in the ample right-hand pocket of his sheep-stained bleu de travail.
It is Nanard’s eighty-sixth premier de l’an.
He leans on his walking-stick. The last rays of the setting Western France
sun glint through L’ Antidote, sending purple hues upwards to underlight a ruddy, weather-beaten face.
He hears the unmistakeable sound of a Deux-Chevaux
engine ; two cylinders whine-roaring
their way up the lane from the village below, then pauses to glance backwards.
From behind the Citroën’s flat, narrow windscreen, its driver squints against
the blood-orange sky, seeing Nanard starkly
in silhouette, outlined black against the asbestos cladding of his son's agro-industrial foie-gras shed.
L’ Antidote projects
one last glint of sunshine, a fuchsian laser beam, towards La Deuche and through the wiper-scratched windscreen glass. Through some
prismatic miracle of God or physics, or conceivably both, the beam becomes an array of colours unseen
since the Star Gate scene of Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001, A Space Odyssey.
The little car pulls up alongside Nanard, who looks at the
driver, winks, opens the passenger door and pulls The Antidote from its pocket.
« Tu prends un
verre ? »
 |
| Grape harvest, Sainte-Cécile 2016... |
Comes the inevitable invitation, as a one-litre plastic
bottle marked « Freeway Cola », salvaged from Titine’s monthly
excursion to LIDL and containing the
venerable vigneron’s home-produced wine, is brandished through the open door.
The driver laughs aloud with amicable resignation, and nods.
Nanard lowers himself into the passenger seat, leans his
stick against the dashboard billiard ball gearknob, and holds out a calloused hand the size
of a small pumpkin.
« Bonne Année
cher voisin »
The two shake hands .
Nanard pushes his scratched, steel-rimmed specs onto his forehead, and smiles.
He leans towards the door , and farts loudly.
The sound is not unlike the mating call of a mallard.
He shrugs and then employs the usual excuse of blaming
the white butter beans, known locally as
« mogettes ». (1)
Nanard knows that the ivory-coloured Deux-Chevaux in which he is presently seated is also known in the locality, couleur oblige, as...
"Mogette La Coquette".
"Elle est belle, ta Deudeuche"
Remarks Nanard, before reminiscing:
« Titine always serves mogettes on new year’s day. For sixty-five years I’ve been
greeting the new year like this !
Only for two years did I miss out, when I was au régiment in Algérie. Scared? You bloody bet I was. My sphincter used to twitch like this when the Fellujah were about"
He shapes his pumpkin fingers and thumb into a pulsating pucker,
"Know what I mean?"
The driver raises one eyebrow.
Nanard pursues.
"In our régiment we had a bloke who could fart the first line of La Marseillaise. Pitch bloody perfect, the bugger. His nickname was Le Pétomane. All I ever managed was the Donald Duck
impersonation. Must have been the twitch. They called me Nanard
le Canard, naturellement. »
The Antidote is pulled from its pocket, and wedged
horizontally into the capacious parcel shelf.
The driver lifts the upward-opening window, and clips it into the fart-evacuation position. (2)
He twists and pulls the gearshift into synchro second, then into non-synchro first. The centrifugal clutch gives its charcteristic screech, and
the car bounces away towards Nanard’s sheep shed.
There, the driver suspects, they will discuss President Macron’s first end-of-year address
to his compatriotes, the falling price of foie-gras, Le Brexit, the latent madness of Donald Trump and other challenges lining up for
2018.
The driver knows that Nanard will have suggested solutions to all of
the above défis socio-politiques before the level of wine falls below the Freeway Cola label.
And with luck, there’d be no more quacking from
Nanard le Canard.
As the Deuche parks itself next to the rusty sheep shed
door, neither Nanard or the driver suspect that their Bonne Année Antidote will
be interrupted when neighbour Marie-Joseph
turns up…With happy news about Nanard’s motoculteur,
bad news about two of the sheep, and a very French solution to a very American
problem…
Stay tuned...
(1)
Experts
believe that the name « Mogettes » could be a lexical import from the
Spanish/Catalonian Monjetta. This would be logical as these beans came from South
America, crossing the Atlantic with maize, plundered gold, potatoes, coca leaves, tomatoes and tobacco in the 16th
century. In the Western France
département of Vendée, where our story is set, mogettes remain a traditional staple food, the most well-known dish being « jambon mogettes ». One variety,
Lingot de Vendée, now enjoys
« Origine Contrôlée » protection. When Nanard was a child, a favourite snack
was « grillés de mogettes » : beans on toast with local salty butter. Some older
consumers still maintain that by mashing the cooked haricots blancs prior to consumption,
they are de-fused, and the flatulent after-effects are diminished. Nanard
insists (with appropriate respect for his spouse Titine) that this is an Old
Wive’s Tale.
(2) Upwardly-opening front-door-only windows were one of the peasant-friendly design features etched into Deux-Chevaux DNA back in the 1930's...As with many of the 2CV's seemingly-simplistic-but less-truly-is-more solutions, these windows were a mouth-watering example of "original thinking" for any techno-nerd: ease of hand-signalling; increased elbow-room; fresh air for lower face whilst avoiding béret blow-away; flick-away facility for Gauloise ash; rapid fart removal.
AB January 2018
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