High on the Hog

In matters of village morale: do put the wine out ASAP; don't provide pamphlets.

The end of June had come to Saint-Maxime, and so it was time once again for the cochon grillé. I’m not sure if this is a tradition all over rural France, but here in Normandy, land of livestock, if you want to celebrate something with a splash, you get a bunch of people together and spit roast a pig.

This isn’t a skill set that everyone has. There are guys for it. They come in a van with the setup, which includes the spit, the pit, the charcoal and of course the animal. Depending on the size of the party, this could be anything from a suckling pig to a teenager to a big daddy.

The first time I attended one of these village pig roasts was last summer, when the Comité des Fêtes joined forces with the Club de Pétanque and put out the call. This was an interesting convergence. Where the Comité des Fêtes is full of pick-mes one-upping each other’s adherence to tradition and sharpened pencils, the pétanque guys are day drunks who squat the gravel-covered lot where Saint-Maxime throws out its trash. You run into them there, rain or shine, weekday and weekend, half of them retired, the other half with nothing better to do all day, all of them men. Whenever I see them in the lot, I give them a giant fake smile and am the first to say hello, hoping they can’t hear the sound of my gritting teeth. I make nice because I have a strong self-preservation instinct.

I went with Michel, Simon and Béatrice, their close pal who was becoming mine too, and we snowballed in with some of the other village gays until our group was big enough to have taken over half of a giant picnic table.

Upon arriving at the communal hall that sits next to the gravel lot, everyone sunkissed and in their crisp summer attire, we ran into a scowling Jeannette. She was exiting the scene with her dog and her trash caddy, dressed in her sweats, not the pink capri pants and espadrilles she had worn to my birthday party the year before.

“Why the long face?” I asked her. “You’re not coming?”

“Non non non non,” she said. “I just came to throw out the trash. I can’t stand the sight of a beast on a stick.” Jeannette also makes a lot of homemade paté from scratch, but we are all entitled to some moral inconsistency around food. We’d better be.

As we waited to give our names and hand over our €18, for those of us who hadn’t prepaid, the beast creaked on its rod a few feet away. It was a giant, encased in wire mesh to keep the dry rub of herbs and salt stuck to its skin while its fat slowly rendered. I told myself not to think about how smart and loyal and friendly pigs are said to be. I have no first hand experience with them when they are still pigs, before they become pork, but I have no reason to doubt their reputation.

There was a selection of drinkable supermarket wines on sale for €6 a bottle, and a homemade hors d’oeuvre moment that featured tuna salad on endive leaves, Camembert and puff pastry tarts, and slices of grilled blood sausage, because Le Perche claims to have invented it. This is debatable; people have been eating cooked blood since the discovery of fire.

The main course finally came around 10 pm, and it was worth the wait. The meat was succulent, and the skin crisp. It was served with jacket potatoes and a watery attempt at ratatouille that we appreciated if only for the fiber. There was enough for everyone to have seconds, which we all did, before the volunteers from the Comité des fêtes circulated with small paper cups with a tiny scoop of sugary apple sorbet covered with shots of somebody’s homemade Calvados. The dish is called a trou normand, and it serves as a palate cleanser that reminds you where you are.

By the end of the night, the detestable Benoît, whom we all assume will eventually become the new mayor, had set up a karaoke projector so the whole village could sing along to his hand-picked selection of French wedding music. We drank too much, laughed until we screamed, and blessed our good fortune, united in fellowship and disdain for Benoît, as the Lord intended.

This year—last weekend to be exact—the magic was dimmed by comparison. Our group was smaller, the wine came out later, and this time Benoît’s imposed entertainment was bar trivia targeted to children and other simpletons. We had two smaller animals as opposed to one, no herbs. It was still delicious.

It was just as well that we called it a night at a decent hour, because the next day we were due at the mayor’s office to receive our trash badges. It was a tense enough vibe there already; a hangover just would have made things worse.

Apparently the administration of our multi-village agglomeration has had it with free range trash disposal, and they’ve put us on lockdown. No longer can we pack our domestic refuse in our car, forget to toss it in the Saint-Maxime lot out of an unconscious wish to avoid the pétanque guys, and hit the next village on the way to Saint-Jouin to restock the Campari and burrata with summer truffles before the car stinks up too much. Now our waste will be tracked village by village. My fellow maximiens were pissed.

I had never thought that neighboring burgs were rivals, but then I remembered a story Cassandre had told me about a funeral in Saint-Maxime some years ago. At the reception afterwards, an elderly man sat in his car outside the house where the mourners were gathering.

“Is he OK?” Cassandre asked one of the attendees.

“Oh yeah, he’s fine,” the person said. “He’s just not from here.”

It turned out he was from one village over.

I find this wild, but maybe it’s the remaining vestiges of my free-electron white American mentality talking, the last scrapings that haven’t yet been completely deglazed by my present circumstances. We Americans move around a lot, and we tend to think that we can go anywhere and belong. But I have been from somewhere else for almost 20 years now, and in Saint-Maxime it’s further compounded: I’m from another country, my native language is not French, I am an urbanite, and a former Parisian. I own the centralmost house in the village but still feel often like a guest.

They put the chops on the grill last. Try not to think about it.

I got to our dinky Town Hall bang on the appointed hour, and found there was already a line of people waiting to sit down, one by one, with the reps from the public-private waste management outfit, called SMIRTOM. As still more maximiens trickled in, they all did the requisite bonjours, but the air rumbled with complaints.

Gérard, the patriarch of the village gays, and the only one with ancestral roots in Saint-Maxime, was already up to bat. Where he was twinkly-eyed and festive the night before, now I overheard him saying to the perfectly nice waste management representative that this was “autoritarisme.” Once duly equipped with his fob, he got up and spotted me on the way out.

“It smells like Trump,” he said.

I assured him that the reinforcement of sanitation and local infrastructure was the opposite of MAGA. Then Baptiste, a retired operator of horse-drawn carriages who lives a few doors down from me, shouted, “So, what, now we’re going to have to pay to throw out our trash? What’s next?” He was half-kidding, or maybe a third. He spent a long time excitedly jawboning with the SMIRTOM lady. She was doing her best to smooth things over.

He got up to leave and winked at me on his way out. My turn was next. The lady asked me for my ID, my homeowner’s number (who knew there was one? Apparently it’s on my property tax form) and the number of people living in my home. Just me, I told her.

I wondered if my neighbors’ paranoia was justified, so I asked, “Is it true? You’re tracking our waste? Will we have to pay more for this?” May as well go straight to the source.

“No no no,” she said, gently rolling her eyes. They just needed to make rough estimates for the load. She handed me a pamphlet with way too much information about which communities were involved in the initiative and the latest recycling changes. My fob was good for some of them, but not all of them. This was the Frenchest thing ever: administrative minutiae delivered right up front with no clever branding or slogan or other feeble attempt to lighten the mood. My eyes glazed over. When I got home, I threw the pamphlet onto the heap of unopened mail that sits in a giant antique Moroccan serving dish on an Art Nouveau sideboard in my foyer. I will never look at it again.

The other day I saw a statistic from the political polling firm France Elects. “How much trust do you place in the political figures holding the following positions?” it asked. The answers went in descending favorability, like an organigram of resentment. The most trusted was the mayor, at 69%. Then came the intermunicipal president, and departmental councilor. As the mandates got larger, trust plummeted. The President, at 23% trustworthiness, was only topped by the Prime Minister and governmental ministers at 22%.

We are in big trouble, folks.