Today is Sunday and I’ve decided to make it a true day of rest: my favorite breakfast, fried eggs with a big round Lebanese flatbread sprinkled with za’atar, washed down with a cup of strong black coffee.
The flatbread, a za’atar manoushe, I buy at my outdoor market, prepared fresh for me by a Lebanese chef from the Beqaa Valley who has settled in France. He flips and throws his dough just like a pizzaiolo and then bakes it on what looks like an upside-down wok.
While it bakes, he brushes on some olive oil and then sprinkles the bread with a handful of za’atar, the Arabic word for thyme—though thyme is simply the base for an addictive mix of herbs and spices that includes, though is not limited to, sumac, sesame seeds, mint, oregano and hyssop.
Only on those days when I have the time to offer myself a real treat do I walk up the hill to the market to buy myself a warm za’atar manoushe, time to cook, to linger over breakfast, to let the minutes and hours pass without worrying about what to do next.
Today is one of those days, finally, because for weeks I’ve been spending Sundays at my house in the country, participating for the first time in years in the slow, luxuriant emergence of spring.
I’ve seen snowdrops come and go, watched the first primroses emerge and daffodils open to the sun. Hyacinths scent the air, violets peep out from among blades of new grass, and creeping myrtle (what the English call “periwinkle”) is climbing up the sides of the wood shed in my garden, its purple flowers nodding in the breeze, in approval perhaps of my industriousness…
Because I’m not in the country to admire nature. I am here to work. I have quotas to meet, long days where I hardly raise my head or take time to eat or drink. As for breaks to use the bathroom, well, my house doesn’t have one yet.
What am I doing? I’m working with hammer and chisel, I’m hammering and chiseling, scraping and tapping, cleaning one by one, with the utmost care, the terra cotta tiles that originally covered the floor in my living room.
In February, they were pulled up so a new cement slab could be poured to replace a clay and straw floor where any step could be your last. In the cider cellar below, the rotting supports, thick tree trunks complete with burls and knots, were replaced by steel beams—and no time too soon. The wood had turned to dust and that was what was holding up the house.
Now I am proud of my cellar! I would actually invite guests to climb down the steep stone steps and penetrate the darkness (no light in there yet), no longer afraid that a chunk of wood or a clump of earth might fall and hit them on the head. Nor do I worry they will return to the light enshrouded in cobwebs. My cellar is respectable now, a true storage space for cider or pretty much anything else.
But let’s get back to those tiles, beautiful marbled tiles, as old as the house itself. They are typical of the Perche region, a true collector’s item, sought after by homeowners striving for the authentic French touch as they decorate their country homes with a budget at least double my own—those tiles, my contractor was ready to get rid of them.
In my first act of womanly defiance, I stood up to him and said NON.
He said to me, Bah, qui va les nettoyer? Well, who’s going to clean them?
My answer to him was “Moi.”
These vintage tiles dating back to 1850 measure 20 cm by 20 cm, and it takes 25 to make one square meter. My living room floor has a surface of 25m². Do the math—that’s a whole lot of tiles, tiles that had not been disturbed in well over 150 years. When they were taken up, the earth came up with them, red clay, straw, rubble and mold, caked to the bottom of each one.
Sometimes it’s just a thin layer I can scrape off; sometimes, the caked matter, pretty much petrified, is two or three inches thick. I hammer against the blunt end of the chisel, hitting hard for the first few strikes. Then, in order to avoid breaking the tile, I have to tap gently, dozens, sometimes hundreds of times, before I can remove the dirt.
And the edges must be perfectly smooth, each and every one of them. Otherwise, the tiles cannot be re-laid. Chiseling, scraping, I feel like a sculptor working with loving care on what will finally become my “masterpiece.”
Monsieur Béatrix, my contractor, approves of my work. I would even say he is impressed and since I set to work cleaning the tiles, our relationship has changed. I too am on the job, and when he and his assistant “Papy,” a man who looks like a retired prizefighter, no longer hear the constant tap-tap-tap of my hammer, they come out to check on me in the garden where I’ve set up shop.
The only problem is I’m slow. On a good day, I can do about fifty tiles. That may sound like a lot, but it’s not. That’s 2 square meters and I’ve just hit the 10m² mark. There’s also the sticky problem of broken tiles. Once I’ve removed the dirt and then cleaned the unbroken ones with linseed oil, I’ll have to find a few more square meters of these beautiful—and expensive—vintage tiles.
For the moment, by necessity, I’m taking things one step at a time. As long as all the tiles aren’t cleaned, there’s no use in going out to look for more. Once the cleaning’s done, I’ll take inventory to determine exactly how many more I need.
But today, on the seventh day, I’m resting, in good company. Patient and determined, I know I’ll make it through the more than 600 tiles.
As for now, I have a new cement slab and a retiled roof with two new windows. Inside the house, clean new walls are going up. Who knows, in a couple of months, I may actually have a home, and Readers, when that happens, you’ll be the first to know.
