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The widespread suspicion that he had visited Paris was finally substantiated. Each fall, foreigners from Paris and Bordeaux appeared in our village, dressed in crisp new hunting costumes and filling our cafe/bar with talk of their prowess as hunters of the palombe.The money these northern hunters spent was important to our narrowly balanced economy, and it was a source of some puzzlement and distress to us that many of them were so stupid as to allow themselves to be seduced away from simple, clean accommodations in our honest village by the tarted-up restaurants and overdecorated hotels of Licq.
These northerners sometimes mistook us for quaint rustics and amused themselves by imitating the chanting music of our speech, though they could never achieve the melody of our expression because they were crippled by the Parisian's inability to pronounce final e's. Naturally, we repaid their discourtesy by renting them only the worst bird blinds in the valley, while we ourselves shot and netted the palombefrom the best positions and always had a few extra to sell to them, so they could support their boasts of manful skill when they returned to whatever Paris or Bordeaux they came from.
One day several of these northerner 'hunters' were in the new cafe/bar that Monsieur Aramburu had made out of his father's old-fashioned wineshop by the simple expedient of changing its name and keeping a pot of filter coffee on the back of the stove. Aramburu was also our mayor, as he had the village's only telephone. Well, that Fox-of-a-Benat (though he had not yet earned that title) came shambling past the window in his ragged old clothes, gri
But it was not only because of his enigmatic wanderings as far as Saint Palais and Saint Jean Pied-de-Port (and now even to Paris!) that our village i
Benat didn't drink. Never. Not a drop.
It is true, of course, that our village priest (a man who had been educated both in Pau and in Bayo
When teased about his abstemiousness, old Benat used to grin and say that he didn't drink because he was too poor. And this always elicited guffaws as men tugged down the lower lid of their eyes with their forefingers and nudged one another, because it was universally understood that Benat was very, very rich. Not just rich as some miserly old piss-vinegar of a Licquois might be rich, but rich!As rich as an Amerloque!
The evidence of his wealth was overwhelming. For one thing, following the rule that everyone who is poor pretends to be comfortable and everyone who is rich pretends to be wretched, it was obvious that old Benat was wealthy beyond the dreams of a coin-biting merchant. Also, here was a man who was older than the church tower and had in all those years spent nothing on clothes and eaten nothing but bread and onions and the occasional blood-of-Christ apple 'borrowed' from the village's most famous apple tree. How could such a man fail to be rich? And what about all these mysterious voyages to Paris... and perhaps even beyond! Do poor men travel in search of poverty? No. Rich men travel in search of yet greater wealth. Poverty is something you can enjoy at home.
Oh, yes, the evidence of Benat's wealth was overwhelming. And it must be confessed that his hidden riches (in search of which the boys of my era spent many afternoons, digging in all the unlikely places a fox of an idiot might bury his gold) were a source of concern among the men of the village. You must not think that we envied him his good fortune. It is not within the Basque character to be envious-save for the grasping people of Licq, where it is understandable, as they have everything to be envious of. No, it was not envy that our people felt, it was a keen sense of the injustice of it all. We rankled at the knowledge that when poor old Benat died, his fortune would pass to his family, the Hastoys, those rich and haughty owners of an espadrille factory in Mauleon. It twisted a man's heart to think that all those good gold francs scraped together throughout a long life of eating onions and wearing tattered old clothes would end up in the pockets of people who were already too rich to pass, as some camels are said to do, through the eyes of needles, particularly as one of the Hastoys had recently lost a chance to marry a plain, honest girl from our village and had ended up marrying a dolled-up strumpet from Licq, and we all know the circumstances under which thatoccurs.
It was widely accepted that old Benat was a distant and maybe oblique member of the snooty Hastoy clan, their overweening pride being the reason they had cast him out and now denied him. After all, what family likes to admit being related to an idiot, even a rich one? To be sure, whenever anyone suggested to Benat that he was a Hastoy, he denied it with a grin. But what credence is to be given to the word of an idiot? And what significance must one give to that grin? Eh? Eh? And whenever a Hastoy was confronted with the question of relationship, he denied it with an angry vehemence that would make anyone suspicious. Obviously a sore point.
One afternoon, some men giving themselves a little rest from life's cares at Mayor Aramburu's cafe/bar saw old Benat pass the window with his jerky, uncoordinated stride.
"Eh-ho!" the witty and teasing Zabala-One-Leg called out. "Come join us for a drink, Benat!" And everybody laughed.