Oak trees stand like old sentinels above a wild symphony —
lavande, sauge, romarin, thym.
A tangled orchestra of scent.
Women still bend to the earth to gather wild thyme, tying small bundles for winter tisanes —
to warm the chest,
to heal what cannot be spoken.
In the height of summer, the cigales drown everything.
Even silence.
Even grief.
Limestone cliffs rise near Pic Saint-Loup like ancient bones — sharp, white, unmerciful.
They break necks.
They break dreams.
And the people here?
Loud. Blunt. Simple. Annoying.
Their southern accents rattle Parisians searching for something authentic.
This is not the Côte d'Azur.
No stars gather here.
No yachts.
This is the land of the disillusioned.
Descendants of those who fled — Spain, Italy, North Africa.
La Retirada — 500,000 Spanish Republicans crossed these lands.
La Guerre d'Algérie — a million pieds-noirs arrived, carrying fragments of another lost home.
They came with nothing.
They rebuilt under the burning sun du Midi.
Cartagène is their alcohol — not wine.
Earth-stained fingers for dust-covered grapes.
Artists and intellectuals? Rare.
This is not Paris.
The garrigue does not forgive softness. Neither did what came after.
·
Not far from there stood another kind of village.
Une fabrique royale.
Villeneuvette.
Founded in the 17th century under Louis XIV.
Everything had its place.
Work.
Housing.
Even leisure.
Planned.
Measured.
Contained.
Honneur du travail.
You worked.
You stayed.
You belonged.
Nothing overflowed.
It was not a village.
It was a system.
·
This is where my grandmother grew up.
Inside a life where nothing was missing —
except air.
Days repeated themselves with quiet precision.
The same stone streets.
The same courtyards.
The same expectations.
No space for desire.
Discipline.
Live without asking for more.
·
Later she moved to a small village perched on ancient volcanic rock,
150 metres above the valley.
Below, a river ran all the way to the Mediterranean sea.
A lifeline for the region.
An earlier premonition of fire and water.
·
Her husband — my grandfather — was a well-respected plumber.
A man of hands.
Of routine.
Of simple pride.
One morning, he climbed a ladder.
Just another repair.
Just another ordinary day.
There are accidents that end in a moment.
And there are those that continue.
This one continued.
His body survived.
But something else did not.
Pain settled in.
Not sharp.
Constant.
Like a presence that never leaves.
Work became difficult.
Then impossible.
Silence grew.
Pastis.
Table wine.
Apéritif.
Lingering too long, too often —
to dull the pain,
then to forget it,
then because there was nothing else left to do.
He spoke less.
But when he did, it came out wrong.
Too sharp.
Too heavy.
The house changed.
Not suddenly.
Slowly.
Like light fading at the end of the day.
A man who once stood
was now sitting.
A man who once provided
was now watching.
And in a place like that —
watching becomes unbearable.
Something entered the house then.
Invisible.
Heavy.
The first spark.
No one saw it.
But everyone would feel it.
·
My grandmother did not leave.
She endured.
She would rise before dawn to buy from the wholesaler —
negotiate, haggle, extract the best price
before the day began for everyone else.
Then carry the heavy cagettes back through the city.
Full of exotic dried fruits from all over the world,
at a time when supermarkets did not exist.
Dates were exotic then.
To this day I cherish dates like gold.
Back-breaking work for a woman with three children
and a disabled husband who would curse her
when she returned home.
The house. The chores. The children.
Never enough. Never done. Never.
When we were kids, we would go with her to the market.
While she worked, we played old video games
at the local café where men smoked
and time moved slowly.
We did not understand yet what she was carrying.
I did not like her and later hated her. Now I understand her.
·
But endurance has limits.
Even when no one speaks of them.
Something inside her did not learn.
It waited.
·
And when life finally offered her something that felt like more —
she took it.
A man.
A moment.
A breach in the order she had always known.
It was not just love.
It was oxygen.
·
But in a village that small, nothing remains hidden.
My mother saw them.
Not the love.
The exposure.
And the village followed.
Gossip did not spread.
It closed in.
The house was sold.
My mother cried.
Not because they wanted to.
Because the village had already decided.
Names were whispered.
Judgment was final.
·
The fire did not end there.
It moved.
Through the family.
A sister cast out after becoming pregnant by an older man.
The same fire. Different rooms.
The eldest son carried it loudest.
He drank the way his father had drunk —
first to dull something,
then to forget what he was dulling,
then because there was nothing left.
He lost his job.
He lost his marriage.
He brought his hands down on the people closest to him.
His wife.
His children.
The fire that had no outlet
became the fire that burned what it touched.
He died of cirrhosis.
—
Not suddenly.
Slowly.
The way the house had changed —
like light fading at the end of the day.
The same light.
A different room.
Then there was the other son.
He grew up with a name.
A father's name.
A father's hands to compare his own to.
A father's silence to inherit.
But the name was not his.
And the hands were not the ones that made him.
He did not know this.
Not when he was young.
Not when he built his restaurant.
Not when he married.
Not when he moved from one woman to the next,
searching for something he could not name
in someone else's eyes.
He would not know until there was no one left to ask.
My grandmother took it with her.
Her husband took it with her.
Two people who knew.
Two graves.
One silence.
He found out the way you find out things that were buried —
not all at once,
but in pieces,
each one worse than the last.
By then there was no one to be angry at.
There was only the fact.
And the life he had already built on top of it.
The restaurant.
The marriage.
The certainty of who he was.
The fire does not ask permission.
It does not wait for a good time.
It simply moves.
My mother watched everything.
She learned something no one ever taught her:
Fire is not dangerous because it burns.
It is dangerous because it spreads.
·
So she chose something else.
Control.
She learned to contain her fire
the way others learn to pray —
quietly, without question.
My mother grew up at a time when you wrote in cursive —
with encre de Chine, not a pencil.
Her handwriting was delicate and precise.
I thought she never left her classroom.
At school, they called her —
Pot de colle.
Always sticky. Always near.
She kept her girls close.
Never careless. Never a faux pas.
Always contained.
Her kitchen was well organised and clean.
Everything had its place.
Her recipe book was like an encyclopedia —
endless meals, lovingly prepared.
A record of everything she could control.
The kitchen was her kingdom and her cage.
Order was how she loved.
Order was how she survived.
In the house — endless paintings.
Aquarelles.
Always landscapes.
Never people.
"People are too complicated."
A fortress made of small gestures.
Safety did not save her.
Cancer came first.
Then Alzheimer's erased what remained.
·
Mr Water grew up inside that quiet.
A boy of few friends.
Too silent for the world around him.
He learned to fight —
not with violence,
but with the stubborn stillness of an old Camargue bull.
He learned to observe more than speak.
To feel more than act.
Words became fragile things.
In that still world, he found comfort.
And an invisible cage.
·
His dogs were his real family.
Not one. Many.
He never understood why he was so drawn to them —
dogs, cats, any animal that crossed his path.
Now he knows.
They were filling a space no one could reach.
Through them, he could feel without fear.
Through them, he could love without being seen.
Most of them were hunting dogs.
Raised for function, not affection.
Lièvres.
Perdrix.
Sanglier.
His father would take him hunting.
Early mornings.
Cold air.
Stillness before movement.
A lièvre breaking the silence.
A perdrix rising suddenly from the ground.
And sometimes, deeper in the hills — sangliers.
The most dangerous.
A dog could be torn apart in seconds
if it misjudged distance or fear.
He learned that early.
In this land, life and death were never far apart.
·
Once, he killed a lièvre.
A clean shot.
His father showed him how.
But something inside him refused it.
He never wanted to hunt again.
·
The dogs never judged him.
They stayed.
Until they didn't.
They disappeared the way everything else would later in his life.
Without warning.
Without explanation.
And yet, through them, he had touched something real.
·
But one stayed.
Vagabond.
A black Belgian shepherd with a torn ear,
rescued from wild land his father had bought.
He ran like he had fire in his lungs
and shadows on his heels.
He belonged to no one.
That was why he was loved.
One day, they found him.
Bloodied. Broken.
A bullet had taken his hind legs.
Mr Water held him.
Still warm. Still breathing.
It was his first loss.
His first disappearance.
His first fire.