Brittany Observed From a Rural Hamlet -- Part I

• Brittany Observed Part II
• Brittany Observed Part III

On the map of France, Brittany is the nose. Rosmarian, a tiny hamlet in the southern Breton département of Morbihan, holds the position and significance of a nostril hair. The European Community may claim more than 350 million people in fifteen member states, but the community of Rosmarian, whose name in Breton means "hill by the sea," is home only to two working farms and a half dozen resident families. On the global economic highway, Rosmarian resembles a horse-drawn cart. The world is overtaking it without a second thought.

Visiting Rosmarian several years ago was this American newspaper writer on a dilettante's sojourn with his Belgian-born wife at her family's country house. We lived in a simple three-room stone cottage: full kitchen with modern conveniences (electric range, dishwasher); living room with fireplace; and above the kitchen, a cozy loft bedroom with low ceiling and handsome antique armoire. Built sometime in the last century of red granite blocks and thick timber beams, the cottage was formerly a farm outbuilding, a storehouse for hay and feed.

Ten years ago, the structure was dilapidated, its roof sunken. Monsieur Mourlon, manager of a drugstore chain in Brussels and its present owner, discovered in its neglected corners hundreds of discarded cider bottles and beer bottles. He supposed that in years past the local men would come out to the storehouse for a drink and leave behind any incriminating evidence.

An industrious and handy man, Alain Mourlon is as tall and lanky as the rail-splitting Abraham Lincoln and supremely confident in his self-taught ability to mix concrete, lay tiles and hammer nails in planks. He is well-regarded in Rosmarian for thoughtfully transforming the eyesore of an abandoned storehouse into a handsome summer home. Local residents have always called him, "chef"--in English, "boss"--as a term of endearment rather than deference.

Les petits paysans Bretons was how the farmer woman living beside our cottage called herself and her husband. Léontine and Marc Guyonvarch were both in their early sixties, their grown children away at school in Paris or dispersed throughout the countryside in neighboring hamlets.

Léontine Guyonvarch was five feet tall, with thick red hair cut high above her fox-like ears. Protruding from the half sleeves of a frayed housecoat, her lower arms were muscular and ruddy. When the sun in the fields was strong, Léontine wore a wide-brimmed straw hat tied to her head by a knotted blue kerchief. The hat helped to soften her appearance, which was otherwise sharp and hard, even fierce.

Marc Guyonvarch had a more mild appearance. He wore a pleasant grin as regularly as his trademark plaid casquette. At six o'clock in the morning, Marc would enter the shed below our bedroom window and begin shouting at his herd of twenty cows to get them moving into the milking room. This proved a reliable way to wake each day. When Léontine yelled, it was at her husband not the cows.

Rosmarian's other farmers, the LeGrohec family, tended fewer cows and smaller fields than the prosperous Guyonvarchs. The stone farm buildings they were worked out of were never tidy. A pack of black geese and several small dogs had the run of the main house where the door was always left open. Mornings and evenings, two sullen teenage daughters walked their family's animals to and from pasture grounds along the hamlet's only road. Any dilatory cows they swatted sharply on the behind with switches.

Traffic in Rosmarian was heaviest at noon when a beige Renault van, rumbled into the hamlet ahead of a churning cloud of red dust. Paul, a young Breton with unruly blonde hair and toothy grin, was home from his house painting chores for lunch with his wife, Clothilde, and their three young girls.

For distraction on Sunday afternoons and at night, Paul played the biniou, a short, slender black pipe resembling a piccolo or recorder with a similarly high, thin sound. He was a member of the reigning bagad champions of Brittany, Ronsed-Mor, whose name means "sea horse."

In a bagad, the Breton version of a Scottish bagpipe band, the biniou section can number two dozen players who accompany a smaller group of bagpipers and several drummers. Ronsed-Mor travels in the summer months on the Celtic festival circuit and has played as far away as Kinvara on the west coast of Ireland. When Paul was practicing his instrument, he trilled long series of notes like a bird calling its mate. The biniou made a ghostly music which seemed to stir forth ancient spirits residing in Rosmarian's fields and pastures and wells.

At a card table arranged in an out-of-the-way corner of our cottage, I wrote every morning from eight until noon on a manual Smith Corona typewriter. The keys for "e" and "o" and "p" consistently knocked confetti holes clean through double sheets of thin French typing paper. According to my wife, the typewriter's clatter was loud enough to be heard at the hamlet's stand of mailboxes 100 meters away from the house.

All through the spring, I cheerfully maintained a daily correspondence with friends and family, though it soon became clear there would be little response. Writing letters became an important part of my writerly routine despite the silence, and those letters I finished were carefully folded and tucked inside pale blue par avion envelopes edged with red and navy blue stripes. Communicating by post was not merely a writer's mannerism, incidentally; the Rosmarian cottage did not have a telephone.

At noon, I left this pleasant work, and jogged a three kilometer circuit entirely around the limits Rosmarian. In blue and yellow sweats (the colors of the EC flag emblazoned on a running suit purchased in a Brussels Eurosouvenir shop), I surely provided a humorous spectacle for the hamlet's residents and a healthy diversion for its dogs.

The daily run took me through an invigorating and varied landscape. To the north lay a wild, ragged copse which was home to a bellowing cuckoo. At the western and southern corners were rolling fields of pasture and plots of fertile earth. A hill at the east descended to sweeping tidal marsh and the silvery river beyond.

On a cool spring evening at a table by a fireplace, the Guyonvarchs talked with us about their farm while we passed around a tin of English hard candies. The two of them were getting old, Léontine said, and they were giving thought to retiring from working the land. Marc listened quietly to his effusive wife. I watched him roll his thumbs nervously together as if they were on wheels. The shapely muscles in the farmer's upper arms bulged like rubber balls.

When she rose to gather wood for the fire, Marc's pale blue eyes followed Léontine closely, then again as she went to an enormous armoire and drew out a heavy glass jar filled with cherries macerating in a colorless eau de vie. Léontine had raised the cherries in Rosmarian and Marc had brewed the liquor from native Rosmarian potatoes. Digging further inside the armoire, Léontine brought out sherbert glasses and spoons. She served us each four soft, brown cherries in a shot of Breton fire water so strong it brought tears to the eyes.

Among farmers everywhere there is rarely any good news. Find a farmer, in fact, and you will usually find someone ready to tell you they are giving up farming. Marc and Léontine were no different. Léontine told us that production limits imposed on French farmers by the European Community, when taken together with incentives from the national government, would make not farming the land more profitable than bothering to work it.

Léontine was clearly the one who wished to quit the farm. For his part, Marc said very little about anything. That night around the dining room table, he was occupied with his spoon, digging in his glass for every drop of liquor. The seemingly tireless Léontine jumped away once more from her chair. She took from a bureau drawer a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings, each one neatly folded in a square. At last, she read to us about another farming couple who had retired and opened a petting zoo for children. This is what Léontine will do when there is no more farm work to distract her. She will have chicken and rabbits and goats and ducks. For the American at the table, whose French came haltingly, she imitated the animal's sounds with a "cluck-cluck" and a "quack-quack."

The Daily Routine

My daily routine took me by bicycle two kilometers to Mendon, the nearest town from Rosmarian, where I visited the post office and the bakery. From the bike's wicker basket, I withdrew a quanity of post cards and letters to make room for a return load of baguettes and bags of buttery croissants. Addresses on the envelopes were neatly typed, the final line in heavy block letters as if chiseled in stone: ETATS UNIS. The act of writing my country's name in another language reminded this American more powerfully than anything else of my temporary estrangement from home.

The Mendon post office, situated at the town crossroads, had the air of a simple, bureaucratic chapel with an ancient wooden public telephone cabine for confessional and elbow-high counter for an altar. Most ecclesiastical was a pervasive odor like rosewater mingled with mild furniture polish. Officiating daily was a reserved woman of indeterminate middle age, as round as a pumpkin and so short that when she hunched over an account book at her desk, she could not be seen from the opposite side of the counter. This priestess dispensed three-franc stamps as if they were holy sacraments. When she hand canceled any correspondence, the post office window panes shivered and small children muffled their ears.

One morning, the post office manger surprisingly demanded a franc supplement for a post card I had brought. The surcharge was for having written too much, she said. The post office manager held up the post card by a corner. It was nearly dripping with ink and I was glad to have the tariff to counsel me to be concise. In card and after card thereafter, I employed only a simple, cheerful refrain: "Food is great. Wine is cheap. We're not coming home."

For a fresh supply of the town's own post card with views of the Mendon village church, the town crossroads and an Etel River scene, I pedaled 50 meters from the post office to the town's one hardware store. Jean Rio's place was at the eastern edge of the village square behind the most prominent bar-café. Brooms and shovels in a range of colors, sizes and handle lengths; blue butane gas containers stacked on their sides like small torpedoes; and sagging sacks of peat moss and manure were displayed outside the store's corner door. An ancient well decorated with geraniums dominated the narrow courtyard that passed for a parking lot.

Madame Rio, whose face was wrinkled like a dried apple, edged out tentatively from her kitchen to greet her customer. Her husband, Jean Rio was rarely to be found at his place of business. In addition to owning the village hardware store, he was also the village plumber and electrician. Accordingly, Jean Rio was usually avoiding someone. Asked when he might return to complete a job abandoned in media res, Rio invariably answered, "Saturday." Understood was that he might arrive on any Saturday from now until kingdom come.

In the store, an ancient stock lay about in great disorder: light bulbs in puzzling shapes, apparently from the early days of electricity; round washing machines on swollen cast iron legs standing like old women in armored support hose; kitchen knives and hunting knives growing dull on cardboard display panels. Just beside the front door on an unsteady wire rack waited the curled and faded Mendon post cards. Rio sold these for a modest one franc each.

An American accent prompted Madame Rio to tell stories about the war. When they came to liberate Brittany, she recalled, the GIs handed out chocolate to all the children who went to watch them march by.

In the Persian Gulf conflict, she added, their only son had served in a French Army medical corps with a company of American soldiers. Did I know that Gen. Schwarzkopf's men had no good food to eat, she asked me, only dried dinners you would not serve to a dog? The French medics, Madame announced proudly, had generously given their rations to Americans hungry for a real meal. These gourmet meals must have seemed an appropriate repayment for the Hershey bars of a generation earlier.

As we spoke by the hardware store's door, Madame Rio pointed to a cat prowling in her courtyard. The animal came to give birth to kittens in her garage just after the Gulf War ended, she said. The cat was not really her own, she insisted, though because she'd taken care of it for so long, she considered it necessary to name the animal. Of all things, she had decided to call the homeless cat, "Amérique."

Be Sure to Also Read:

• Brittany Observed Part II
• Brittany Part Observed III