Vaucluse, Monday 23rd March

The bookworm in me is happy to be locked in the house with nothing to do but read. My mother would shoo me outside ‘to play,’ or, as a teenager, ‘to have fun’. But my idea of fun was reading, with my feet up (essential, says Calvino—in, I believe, the first or last chapter of If on a winter’s night a traveler). Caught reading after lights out, under the covers with a flashlight, too engrossed to hear footsteps on the stairs? Me again.

But our next door neighbour, who turned 90 last year, who is a farmer, a paysan, doesn’t agree. Hearing him down below, returning from his olive field at the end of the afternoon, I put my head out (a safe distance from the attic window to the street. ‘C’est triste,’ he said, with a look of dejection I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on his face before.

The Vaucluse, Friday 20th March

We rented a car and left Paris on Wednesday, driving, easily, to Orange, then Malaucène, where we did some shopping and checked our email. The smallish supermarket was only mildly unstocked (fewer varieties of  yogurt available, for example) and fairly empty of customers. Then we came here, settled in, called family and neighbours to say we had arrived safely. There were gendarmes stopping cars driving north, from the toll booths at Fontainebleau, and spot-checking cars driving south, at the toll booths south of Lyon. Autoroute gas stations were open, including washrooms (those on the picnic areas are closed), but their mini-marts closed. Traffic was light, and mostly big trucks from across Europe, heavier traffic (still mostlytrucks) south of Lyon. The Rhone corridor heavily polluted, from ?truck traffic. This is the route from Spain and Portugal to the north. Some of it eventually heads east towards Italy and eastern Europe.

The village (which my husband’s great grandfather came from) feels empty; people seem to be holed up. The café is open, but only its grocery and post office parts. None of the usual café customers having a morning coffee or a pre-supper glass of wine. The manager wears a mask and gloves, and keeps gloves for his customers to punch in their codes on his machine. He will keep Le Monde for us each day. “So you are here for the duration?” he asked my husband. Whatever that turns out to mean.

We are not socializing, except, by phone, with our 90-year-old nextdoor neighbour, or my husband’s brother Pierre, and his wife, who live uphill in the centre of the village. Yesterday we went biking: individual exercise, close to home, is allowed, and we did a small loop, me as usual trailing Michel by 10 or so minutes. The weather is beautiful, the countruside too, except for the pollution haze; farmers are burning olive tree trimmings in their olive groves. They are resistant to stopping burning and taking their green trash to the proper place. They have been burning for hundreds of years.

The cherry trees are in bloom. The present heat promises too-high temperatures too soon.

Paris, Wednesday 17 March

Birds singing at 5? 6 am this morning, but where are they? The only green around here is two long blocks away, and the only birds I ever see are pigeons sheltering in place on the knobs and ledges of the church across the street, and now and then a few seagulls up in the sky, keeping an eye on the garbage situation. All work has stopped on the church stonework, but the dust is still there. The gauzing veil they strung over the scaffolding never did much to keep it down, especially when they were sanding the stone. I have to think it was merely cosmetic.

The sun just rose: jagged shadows on stones and rooftops…and I am reading the headlines in 4 newspapers, French, UK, US. By now I can write the stories myself: the narrative has stalled (Le Carré, whose new spy novel I’m reading, would never let this happen).

One thing is new. How to wear a mask without ruining your hairdo? It should be easier to figure this out than the insurmountable disaster of the bicycle helmet. So I’m perusing newspaper photos of women in the US, the UK, Italy and France (my hair is frizzy and the Asian fashions don’t help much). I think Italian women have figured this out (they had a head start, but no Italian woman--at least the ones who make it into newspapers, and are photographed against worldclass fountains—would leave her house without proper footwear and makeup, her mask adjusted so the elastic is under her hair, not on top. I’ll try that later. But I’ll be wearing my Nikes, which are actually New Balance.

Paris, Tuesday 17th March

Busy day. The government has closed everything down and insisted (or a fine) people stay inside except for brief grocery shopping trips, doctors’ visits, pharmacy visits (we are so lucky to have corner pharmacies still, with kindly advice-giving pharmacists who know you by name; also good small grocery shops and fruit and vegetable markets). We had decided to return to the Vaucluse where, at least, we can go outside and even biking and hiking. My husband booked a car for this evening, but something he read made him think he should try to pick it up this morning. Lucky for us he did. They were shutting down at lunch, but had no cars, even though we had reserved and paid. After a lot of palaver (and they were helpful) they found a car that had been turned in but not yet cleaned and my husband drove it home and cleaned it. Tomorrow we leave and hopefully won’t be stopped, because we have heard there were guards at the autoroute toll booths. Of course, we’ll quarantine when we arrive and won’t go into any shops on the way down. Fingers crossed.

This morning there were some people in the streets, some of them wearing masks. This afternoon when I went out to buy some food and pick up a prescription there was no one. The shopkeepers I saw said people had shopping in the morning but not in the afternoon and the indoor market will be closing at 3 pm for the next couple of weeks. I went by the soup kitchen, where I volunteer; they too are closing, but giving out packed lunches in the morning to anyone who needs one. Two small kids were playing soccer with their dad on the square in front of the church; a student-age young woman was running up and down the church steps.

Our group of buildings too has emptied out but one resident had organized a little gathering (4 people) of those who remain, with chocolates and freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice. We chatted at a distance from one another in the courtyard, and then headed up our stairs to our suppers.

Paris, Monday 16th March

Terrible article in the NYTimes yesterday about Europe by Steve Erlanger. I didn’t read the whole thing though, the part where he gets into the Black Death. But what an accumulation of clichés and banalities in the opening paragraphs.

We voted around lunchtime, came home, stayed inside until late afternoon, then went to the park, which was unusually crowded—nowhere else to go, I guess, all the places people might usually go on a Sunday (most stores aren’t open anyway on Sunday in Paris) being closed. The cherry trees were beautiful and it has been many years since we were here to see them. When the sun started to go down, we moved to the east side of the park where there were even more people, so many there wasn’t an empty chair. We hovered, at a safe distance, until some people got up and commandeered theirs, and read for a while at a safe distance from others, until my husband, who is a virologist, said he could smell virus wafting over the flower beds and we went home.

This morning we are thinking we should leave the city while we still can.

Paris, Sunday March 15th

Municipal election day. Stayed home yesterday like a good girl, but went out with my shopping cart around 6pm to do some grocery shopping before the shops closed: to the covered food market a block away, where we (my husband and I) bought fruit and vegetables and the makings of an osso bucco to tide us over the weekend and Monday morning when food shops are mostly closed. True, the supermarket towards the Seine would be open but has narrow aisles and lots of customers, including (usually) tourists, so we have been avoiding it, in favour of the small bio shop behind the 6e city hall, where the three employees wear masks and gloves and take their jobs personally. But, last night, a longish line there too, customers who normally shop day by day filling large bags, stocking up. Even the unbleached toilet paper was gone… . In the streets between St Sulpice and the Bd St Germain the cafes were full. We hadn’t, at that point, realised they’d be closing at midnight.

This morning the street is empty, lots of parking spots. Sun, for the moment. Will go out later to vote, but for now quite happy to stay home with my books. I’m reading James Merrill, also Le Carré’s latest spy story on audio, from Libby…and a lot of newspapers.

Paris, Saturday 14 March

When we looked down into the street from our 4th floor windows this morning, most of the parking spaces, usually filled, often with someone cruising around looking for a place, are empty, which feels eery. The streets are also emptier than usual in this central Paris neighbourhood. Yesterday, to avoid public transportation (excellent in Paris) I took a cab to a doctor’s appointment, and the driver said the situation was a disaster for him; I was his first fare of the day at 2 in the afternoon, and there was a long line of cabs behind him at the taxi stand hoping for fares. My daughter in London says their supermarket shelves are cleaned out, though the corner grocery she mostly uses still has food. But he says his customers are buying more than usual, and he feels his stocks will soon be depleted too. Our corner pharmacy (no big pharmacies in France) is very busy, and the two pharmacists look exhausted, though they are as helpful as always. We’ve abandoned the supermarket, where it’s difficult to avoid other customers, and are using the small bio shop, which has most things we need. Our Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller in the covered market says he has fewer customers, and the little Chinese take-away at the other end of the market, where we buy ‘raviolis’ (pot stickers) has closed, no one knows why.

Saint Andrews and StAnza

Sorry to be leaving this quaint town with its stone houses and lovely shoreline. Yesterday the sun was out, the sky blue, and walking along the harbour, I met a woman walking the other way with a dog, We nodded to one another. ‘Beautiful day,’ we agreed, and I ‘Is is always so beautiful here?’ ‘No,’ she responded, as we went our ways. A few fishing boats, a couple yachts, traps for crabs or lobsters, stack on the quay. People on the wide, wide strand, a little like Scheveningen, near The Hague in Holland, on the North Sea. But also something of Vancouver to make me feel at home. Lush nature, but at the same time, something austere in the air.

The reading went well. The real treat was to hear Michael Longley read yesterday evening. I’ve long had most of his books, but I’ve never seen or heard him, and it was certainly one of the outstanding readings I’ve been to, ever. No space between the poet and poems, and one felt, the man. Of course, this could just be the perfection of the persona, but if so, it wasn’t obvious. He ended before his time was up and came and sat in the audience for the second reading. He says he is publishing a new book soon, ‘about grandchildren,’ and ‘it may be my last.’

StAnza is, I believe, Scotland’s most important poetry festival. I was glad I was here.