or Triennes on the mind…

He could be somewhere north of Bandol around the summer of 1907, traipsing through sloped vineyards, probably stumbling on loose ancient limestone rocks and then cutting across cereal crop fields and skipping over accessible dirt roads all basically left in the same configuration as 2600 years earlier when the Romans planted their first vineyards there. How the Romans loved to colonize and why wouldn’t they want to if the vines stuck? Where would be the imperialist jest without that?

He could be Thomas Mann in disguise, wandering about the region with a perceived need for anonymity beyond where the poets accumulated, bantering while posturing their intellectual hard-ons and him being all political and psychological in an artsy novelistic way, maybe with Katherine Mansfield. Could they have been incidental lovers? Probably not. And it would be a disguise, as Thomas Mann probably did not do all that much wandering when he was there. And she could have been a village girl instead and recognized him only as someone passing by with too little of a care for her approval. She had been wooed and seduced by many of the like before him and now knew better.

He wonders if Thomas Mann sipped Rose’ in the heat of the day under the shade of a canopy, a truly dry one that smelled of strawberries and peaches and maybe pineapple and tasted of all that minerality brought forth by those ancient limestone and clay formations. Would it be born of Cinsault or Grenache—surely not Syrah with so much weight that grape pushes around; not in a glass so delicate? He could have sipped the Rose’ in sidewalk cafes near or in the seaside resorts while nibbling on bits of fish and maybe even Katherine, but those places are really not that much to his liking, Rose’ or Katherine Mansfield or not. The tourists in the summer are fun to watch, but not for very long as their predictability becomes annoying. How could so much predictability coincide with all of the subtle complexity within the glass in front of him?

It could be as hot here as in Provence in the summer, even more so but minus the stifling humidity one finds draped within and about these cornfields. There are no cool night breezes off the sea. There is no sea. There are no slopes to accelerate a breeze even if there was one, but there are bars in town pouring frosted pitchers of a watered down domestic Lager and there’s a woman with former sharp edges now worn round seductively bent over the jukebox in the corner and just maybe that is as good as it’s going to get.

R