As they forsake their heritage, they seek a substitute culture from America. Blue jeans (preferably American-made, even at $40 a pair) grace the derriere of virtually every French tennager. Far more American university t-shirts are seen in French villages than in American towns. American TV shows, very popular in France, give French teenagers new ideas about how to act and what to think. One day as I walked down the village's main street, a 10-year-old boy flashed me the thumbs-up sign and groaned, "Ayyyyyyyyy," a perfect imitation of his new hero, "the Fonz." American culture has also intruded its way into the French language, producing French-accented words like week-end, hold-up, stop, gas-oil, and blue-jeans.
The village still retains a few bastions of tradition. A French village wedding, for example, is nothing to trifle with. It begins in the afternoon with a civil service, immediately followed by a church wedding. After that comes a huge dance party, held either inside or outside, with dancing, drinking, and laughter continuing all night long.
Everybody dances together, young and old alike, and every now and then the whole party forms a giant human chain which cavorts about before ending in a hopeless jumble of arms and legs. The music and dancing vary from French folk to American rock. Even my patron, M. Vallet, tried boogeying to the strains of Saturday Night Fever.
According to tradition, the newlyweds sneak away at midnight, but the dancing and partying continues unabated. Finally at about 7 a.m. all the young people pay a visit to the new home of the Bride and groom, bursting into their bedroom and making them drink a vile concoction of hot chocolate, champagne, wedding cake, and toilet paper, all neatly contained in a chamber pot.
Besides invading nuptial bedrooms, one source of village thrills is driving. For thrills, European driving beats roller coasters hands down. Driving full speed is the manly thing to do, and everyone delights in weaving their small cars around other small cars, usually at the most dangerous intersections. European drivers have discovered that three cars will just fit on a two-lane road, so they often pass even when another car is coming, knowing that they can probably still squeeze by. White-haired French grandmothers drive like American teenagers, and as for the French teenagers--their driving makes the Grand Prix look like a drivers' safety course.
This reckless tendency manifests itself in more mundane affairs, like farmwork. Not only did the Vallets let me drive the tractor on the road--reckless in itself--but they generally acted rather casually about farm safety. One day, for instance, we needed to refill the gas tank of a steaming-hot diesel engine. We were irrigating a cornfield and the engine had been continuously pumping for several hours. The engine was incredibly hot, so hot that I expected it to explode at any moment. Several hundred people had just recently been killed in a liquid propane truck explosion in Spain, and I vividly recalled the newspaper photos of bodies turned to charcoal. So when Gilles Vallet suggested refilling the fuel tank, I discreetly walked off to examine the corn at the other end of the field.
Nicholas, viens ici," he called; so with pounding heart and sweating hands, I joined him near the engine. To my horror he didn't even shut off the motor, much less allow it to cool off. Impatiently, he told me to hold the funnel as he poured the diesel into the tank. I did so with much trepidation, half-expecting the diesel to splash onto the red hot exhaust pipe six inches away, blowing up all to kingdom come at any moment. I really grew panicky when Gilles switched his lit cigarette from his right hand to his mouth. Even that I could live with until he leaned over to peer down into the tank to see if it was full. All I could see was that huge, red ash, growing longer by the moment, poised directly above the diesel, ready to fall. Just when I was sure the ash would drop into the tank, he stepped back and tossed the cigarette to the ground. He probably never knew why I was so shaken that afternoon. I could not, of course, have pointed the danger out to him. If I had, he would have shaken his head furiously to deny the charge, sending the sturdiest of ashes into the cauldron below.
Most of the summer was not nearly that interesting, however. Most of my time was spent picking fruit to the ever-so-slow ticking of my watch. The peasant lifestyle was very different from anything found in America, and especially different from life at Harvard. Intellectualism was worthless in Moras En Valloire--nothing counted except how quickly a person could pick the peaches. It was a hard life, one in which a person spent most of his waking hours working, with few diversions and only the simplest of pleasures.
Yet it is the memory of the Garcias that I recall most vividly. Although they will probably spend their entire lives only working for others at the most menial of tasks, never quite getting ahead, they are cheerful. At the end of their lives, all that they will have to look back on will be a life of toil and a lot of warmth and friendship. But in their own way, the Garcias taught me a lot that Harvard never could.
First, they taught me that life as a French peasant is just as honorable as life as a Wall Street banker. Second, with their cheerfulness and optimism, they taught me that happiness is more a product of a person's mind than of his circumstances.
This time of year, the peasants in Moras En Valloire are busy pruning the fruit trees. The Garcias are probably doing the same. If it is daylight now in France, the family is out in the fields, working hard, just as they did yesterday and just as they will do for all the tomorrows left in them. But while they work, the Garcias smile, laugh, and sing, defying their poverty and sharing with each other the joys of the simple life that is the lot of the peasant.