Our village is a quiet place surrounded by hectares of hushed vineyards. The only sounds that disturb the peace are from the morning boulangerie traffic, the children playing in the schoolyard and the occasional karaoke night at the café. Two thousand years ago, Tourbes was settled by Romans who built houses and roads, planted olive trees and grapevines and prayed to the god Bacchus.
We moved here in January and over time learned about the various village festivals and in particular the big “fête locale” in late July. At first I thought it would be like a “Renaissance Faire” with villagers dressed as quaint peasants and whole lambs roasting on spits over smoky open fire-pits. These images were quickly dispelled by one of our English friends.
“Actually, mate, it's four nights of show bands with strobe lights playing until two every morning. And here’s the part you’ll like best,” he added with a gleam in his eye. “the show's right under your front windows.”
With these words, our storybook French village of good-natured eccentrics and happy-go-lucky locals turned upside down. At the end of July, we were going to have ringside seats for four nights of Las Vegas, baby.
“Don’t worry, mate,” my pal went on, “this too shall pass.”
July arrived hot and damp. By late in the month, the autoroutes were bumper to bumper with vacationers heading to already crowded, Mediterranean beaches. Several days before the fête, metal barriers sprouted on our streets, closing the village center to traffic and in front of our house, village workers erected a stage. Large white vans slipped silently into town like a caravan of circus elephants and camped around our 13th century church.
The fête was to begin Friday night and that morning, the vans disgorged an entire amusement park, complete with carousels, bumper cars, games of chance and a stand that sold “Barbe de Pape,” cotton candy. In the center of this newly planted forest of fun, on a high pillar, was our statue of the Virgin Mary, hands raised in supplication to God, and now staring down in wonder at the chaos below. However, I’m sure she was pleased because each night, kids and parents would ride the rides, play the games and enjoy themselves a lot.
In the late afternoon, the women of the “Comité des fêtes” set up huge paella pans on a long table near our front door. They filled them with sausage and chicken, and, humming merrily, crushed huge cloves of garlic into the simmering platters. They were making “macarrronade,” a paella like dish with pasta instead of rice. It would be the base of the village meal, the repas, that kicks off the fête. The Comité is group of hard working volunteers who labor year round to produce events and this was their biggest weekend.
A "fête locale' is a big happening in a small village. Each night the population triples or quadruples with foreign tourists and visitors from nearby villages. They come to drink and dance and drink.
And, let me be frank. There was a lot of drinking at the fête. We are a vigneron village, grape growing and winemaking is our business. Our vignerons produce a superb rosé from cinsault grapes grown in our vineyards. It is a civic duty to drink this rosé, and, of course, to help others enjoy it too. The fête is paid, for in part, through the sale of rosé, beer and pastis. However, in the whole weekend of fête, there was no public drunkenness or fistfights and surprisingly, the peace was kept without a single cop or security guard. Everyone just behaved well and watched out for each other.
Around seven, people drifted into the square. They bought their first drinks, and milled about saying hello to each other. By 8:30, they began to line up at the big paella pans, and the repas commenced. Everyone got a large portion of macarrronade, and in no time at all three hundred people were having dinner on our doorstep.
The stage lights came on at ten and two singers began singing. Several showgirls joined them and soon everyone on stage was dancing and singing energetically.
The Herault makes its money in the summertime and there are dozens of show bands, karaoke singers and DJs working the region. They play endless one-night stands at restaurants and hotels entertaining vacationers. The bands usually consist of a few singers and dancers, and half a dozen musicians. They all play “Nonstop,” that is without a break, intermission, or change of key or tempo for four hours straight.
The opening band for our fête was typical with several large banks of powerful amplifiers and a spider web structure packed with lights. There were even huge klieg lights like the kind normally used against enemy aircraft or to light up the Empire State building. For four hours, the band turned our cozy French town into Studio 54 and consumed more electricity in a night than the entire village in a month.
And what they played was disco. Remember disco? ABBA, the BeeGees, the Village People, mirrored balls, bell-bottom pants, and John Travolta’s white suit? Well, it may be 2011, but show bands play forty year old, American disco.
Worse yet, most of the songs were sung in English, a language that neither the performers nor the audience, understood. It made for some bizarre moments, as when one singer shouted to the crowd, “Shakes you booties” and in bewilderment, people raised their hands and clapped.
On the stage, the singers every song rapidly and at maximum volume. The dancers repeated the few routines they had learned watching MTV, and they had changed costume for every song. The band played nonstop and then abruptly at two, like sleepwalkers awakening from a dream, they stopped, packed up, and moved on. People began to go home. I envied them going home. We couldn’t go home, we were home, put under some kind of disco house arrest by our own village.
Saturday morning the village workers hosed down the quai and the streets. The mayor and some of the Comité sat at a table eating bread and cheese and drinking rosé before they got up and put on plastic gloves to clean the public bathrooms.
The events for Saturday included a decorated bike and scooter competition and the election of the best “Mamies” or grandmothers in the village. Low keyed and sweet, they felt oddly out of place in our neon Las Vegas. In the evening, the village filled with several hundred ados, what the French call teenagers. It was Saturday night and the kids needed to get out of their historic, old villages and party. At ten, the show began. A singer started a song and half a dozen “showgirls” began to dance. I stared in disbelief. I had seen this all before, the night before. It was the same disco show. The ados seemed oblivious to this, they were there to dance and did their version of moshing and, dare I call it, break dancing. Mostly they stood in place, shaking their shoulders, hopping up and down and occasionally lifting one of their own into the air amidst a lot of laughter.
I watched the ados from the café bar with a friend. Shaking his head in amazement he said. “It’s really weird, these kids aren’t pissed.” Yup, these kids weren’t pissed. They had come for a good time, to dance and have fun. In spite of drinking a good deal of beer and wine, they remained polite and mostly sober.
Around midnight, the tech guys set off “snow” cannons. You couldn’t hear them because of the music, you’d just see them belch little puffs of “snow.” The kids laughed at the snow and at 2 AM, the band stopped and went home. The ados began to disperse and we walked the few meters to our house. As we were crawling into bed, Diane heard a noise and we went downstairs to investigate. We found a couple of ados sitting on our doorstep. The girl jumped up in embarrassment but her boyfriend looked up at us and said in awkward English, “Excuse us, we meant nothing bad. We were just romancing.”
We smiled at that, the “romancing” on our doorstep and wished them a good night. We closed the door and went upstairs to try to get some sleep.
To Be Continued in Le Sud de France 6.3: The Dance of the Vignerons, Part 2, below, scroll down to read more.
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