I keep it on my desk, and the first thing you might think if you saw it there was: Why has Billy left a baking potato here? It is brown, and finely pocked on the surface. To this day Aldo says he’s tempted to wrap it in foil and pop it into the oven. But to the touch it is solid and
heatless, and in the palm of your hand it has heft. This is my pudding stone, my galet, that I slipped into the pocket of my coat as a memento of our trip to Provence.
We were heading back to our hotel in Avignon after an afternoon’s drive up and around and around and down Mont Ventoux and in and out of some neighboring towns. This was in mid-March. The day before had been rain-soaked, which made for a rather pleasantly melancholy stroll through the ancient cemetery, Les Alyscamps—there’s a Van Gogh painting that captures the romantic moldiness of it all—but today the air had cleared and was crisp and giving way to spring. We had come down off Mont Ventoux, as I say, and were driving through the vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape with perhaps only half an hour or so to sundown: The road, the trees, the vineyards, the gentle hills were saturated with long bands of deep yellow light striated by blue shadow.
“Aldo, take a picture!”
I think I may have said this as a command when it should have instead come across as a polite request made urgent by the thrill of the moment. At any rate, Aldo tends to dig in his heels at command-requests, and he answered firmly that there was no point, the light had gone. But here I was in a beautiful stretch of wine country, and even if I remembered it afterward—as I do now—it seemed terrible that I couldn’t hold onto something more
concrete than a memory. I pulled the car to the side of the road, and this time I did command:
“Aldo, go get me one of those pudding stones from the vineyard.”
If you are wondering what a pudding stone is, I will tell you now. The French call it a galet. It’s simply a stone, a rock, an aggrandized pebble with a sense of its worth in the scheme of vinification, that holds down the soil in a vineyard and protects the dirt and the vines. It warms the earth with stored heat from the sun, and shields the earth from the cool of night. No big deal, I guess: a rock. It’s not as if the vineyards were covered with gorgeous glass marbles, or protected by some exotic kind of ferret trained to stretch itself out and wrap its fur around the stems of the vines. Just a rock that’s older than any one of us and deployed by a French winemaker following a tradition that dates back centuries. But it has its role in things, and to be able to claim you have a role in Chateauneuf-du-Pape – well, you are a very significant stone, c’est tout.
And so I told Aldo to go get me a pudding stone, and Aldo once again dug in his heals and informed me that, no, he was not about to steal.
“But it’s just a rock. A small rock.”
“I take the Ten Commandments very seriously. Or at least that one, because it’s morally uncomplicated. Don’t steal stones, don’t steal diamonds, don’t rob banks, don’t rob landscapes. It’s what I believe is called a blanket commandment. You’ll note that isn’t the Commandment the Israelites disobeyed, either. They built a golden calf. They didn’t sneak rocks off French farmland.”
“What about when you fibbed on your expense account?”
“I don’t think I fibbed, and a fib isn’t the same as a theft, and besides I think I sufficiently explained to my office why I needed those carp.”
Aldo would not do my bidding, in short, and I ended up hopping out of the car myself and bounding a few steps into the field. There were rabbits, and they hopped away in a panic, as if aware of a thief in their midst. I picked up one stone, then another, and another before I found one that had the right size—the baking potato.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” said Aldo, looking around as if worried that an alarm might go off and the grapes blink bright red to signal a breach in security. “Allons!”
And that was how the stone came to be in my house, on my desk, and if you mistake it for a potato, I tell you it is Chateauneuf-du-Pape, it is a vineyard, it is Provence: and if you touch it, pick it up, you are part of all that too.
