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“Of course these are your clothes, Papi! I ironed them and hung them up only yesterday.”
I spoke in a reassuring tone, though each morning he queried it my anxiety notched a little higher and my heart cracked a little further. He plucked at the front of his trousers; mistrust stamped all over his face.
“They’re definitely yours!” I repeated briskly. “As if you’d catch me owning a shirt like that.”
Papi chuckled, the tension gone. “Don’t be cheeky, Florian.” He ruffled my hair then sat down and attacked his bowl of coffee. “Good salt weather.”
“Oui,” I agreed. “Still a north-easterly.”
The pair of goldfinches in the garden were becoming bolder. One, the female, fluttered near to the open kitchen window before skittering back to the pines. I’d scatter some breadcrumbs before I left for work.
Groundhog Day. Except it wasn’t, because in between the day job and keeping an eye on the old man, I had saddled myself with leading the troops into battle against a national conglomerate (because of course that was within my skillset) and asking a very handsome, very sad, very likely straight man to join me for dinner. As if overnight I’d transformed into Elon Musk and Michel Roux, rolled into one.
Papi slurped his coffee, belched, then reached across me for a hunk of bread. I hoped his table manners would miraculously improve by this evening. If he was nosy about the official sheaf of papers propped up against the vase of dried lavender in the middle of the table, he hid it well. It had been staring at us both for days. Or maybe at his stage of life one stopped feeling threatened by unsolicited brown envelopes. I dragged my eyes away from it.
“When you started up the cooperative, was it a straightforward process?”
I accompanied my question with a slurp of my own. We’d both become a little too comfortable and set in our ways of late. “I mean, did you all agree on everything?”
Dunking the bread in his coffee, he gave a derisive snort. “Mon dieu, non. When the six of us first presented the idea, they all thought we were lunatics. Right here, we suggested it, here in Loix, all squeezed into L’Escale. Beatrice thought we must have been drinking all afternoon.”
He smiled fondly, his recollection of this distant event as sharp as ever. I’d heard the beginning of this story many times and suspected my grandmother’s version also held a grain of truth. “Even though no one else agreed to join us, we went ahead and did it anyway. Pooled our resources. And then, a few months later, Jacques, who farmed the flats out near La Couarde, had a house fire. He lost everything, and so he joined us, because we said we’d lend him some money until he got back on his feet. His brother joined us too. You remember old Jacques?”
To be fair, the wrinkly men of my youth who loitered around the cooperative building or drank pastis in L’Escale, chinwagging long after they’d hung up their rakes, merged into one another, but I nodded anyhow.
“He’s dead now. From a big heart attack. Like his brother.”
Another slurp of coffee. “And his cousin, Samuel, had a bad one that nearly saw him off too. It must run in the family. Remember him? Bald, with glasses. He joined us next, after his wife left him. He’s dead now as well, passed away last Christmas. Didn’t even make eighty. Cancer got him in the end, not his heart.”
I liked to believe my Papi didn’t gain small personal triumph from outliving his contemporaries, but from the way he held out his hand and counted them off on his fingers, I couldn’t be too sure.
“Then Bruno’s uncle joined us. He was a nice fellow. Now he’s stuck in a nursing home over in Fouras. Horrible place; you’d have to kill me before you locked me in one of those.”
If we were going to have a running order of all seventy-five members of the original cooperative and their current state of ill-health or demise, we could be here a while. On the other hand, if I needed reassurance Papi’s long-term memory was still intact, I was getting it. Comprehensively.
“And do you remember Hervé—he only had one eye? He joined us next, made us good money, too, because he had two flats, both a decent size. But then he got ill with…”
“How did you manage to run it?” I persisted. “What I mean is, how did you ever get everyone to agree on anything? Did you just elect one man to be in charge and let him have the final word, or did you put issues to the vote and fall out all the time?”
Silly question really. Invite a group of Frenchmen to share a room together and of course they would argue. “Dieu, yes. We fell out. Everyone had something to say. As more and more people signed up, some of the ones who refused tried to sway everyone else against the idea. Your friend Jerome’s papi was the worst. God rest his soul. Went to bed and never got up again. Massive stroke.”
Jerome’s grandfather. That figured. My own papi made the sign of the cross with unbridled satisfaction and nodded to himself.
“Why did the naysayers think a cooperative was a bad idea?”
He shrugged. “I think they were worried they’d be carrying men who didn’t pull their weight. And maybe some didn’t, not all the time. But when I tripped over a boule, broke my ankle, and couldn’t work for a few weeks, having the others helping was one less thing to worry about.”
“Why did they all join in the end? How did you persuade them?”
“The storms of 1972,” he answered emphatically. “Poor harvest all summer followed by floods. Destroyed a lot of salt flats. People were scared they would lose everything. Some did.”
He paused, wrenching off another chunk of bread. I should make an effort to quiz him about the past more often, I decided. It animated him. “Those of us in the cooperative had money put by, so we were okay. We became very popular all of a sudden.” He threw me a mischievous grin, his eyes, like mine according to everyone who knew us, although I hoped mine were surrounded by fewer wrinkles, lighting up. “Not such lunatics now, were we?
“We had a meeting. Not in L’Escale this time, but in the shed we had before we built the new cooperative building. And everyone came. And this time, they listened. Beatrice told me what to say to persuade them to join. She was a clever lady, your mami.”
I was intrigued. “What did she say?”
“She said we had to make all the men believe in a common goal. A vision of something far in the future that would make them proud.”
