The village idiot (France)

The village idiot, as he is commonly referred to behind his back, comes round to the farmhouse twice a day for coffee — morning and afternoon, rain or shine.  

If no-one’s home, he'll help himself, drink his coffee in solitude and leave.  

With someone around, he’ll try to conduct a conversation.  I’ve heard the mistress of the house utter, at regular intervals, monosyllables such as “qui?” (who?) and “où?” (where?), which are really just to keep the conversation going, since neither she nor anyone else understands most of his utterances, as they don’t make sense, I’m told.

Such has been his routine for nobody knows how long, perhaps as a welcome escape from his Cinderella existence at his brother’s up the road where neither the brother nor sister-in-law speaks to him.  They don’t even leave him food when they go away, I heard.  They claim state benefits for his condition but he’s somehow not considered too stupid to work in their kitchen garden as unpaid (and sometimes unfed) labour.

The seven-year-old grandson on our farm, who visits during school holidays, openly dodged him one day, when the village idiot went up to him to shake his hand in greeting, dismissing him with a loud “AU REVOIR, MONSIEUR!”  I delivered a lecture afterwards, translated by his mother, about needing to be extra nice to people like that — even more so given that he’s in his mid-seventies — as they need as much love as they can get, if not more than most people, and this one has not been getting any, it seems.  I asked the boy how he would feel if his grandfather (a year younger) were treated in that way by some other boy.  The next day, the boy’s mother proudly announced that my admonition had taken effect, as he’d been polite to the village idiot on his morning visit.

To go with his coffee, I try and give the village idiot whatever titbits I have bought for the house, as it must be a rare commodity in his life.

Summer last year, he turned up around lunchtime when we had company, so we put another plate on the table and invited him to join the party.  He thoroughly enjoyed himself, beaming from ear to ear, with all these people to sit, eat and talk with.

Village idiot he might be, he still has enough social manners to bring with him for his coffee visits a little present from his vegetable patch: often a freshly dug-up lettuce or, in the autumn, some apples (which are often not particularly edible).  Occasionally, it’s something incomprehensible like a plum tree cutting, which was what he brought last week.

The dogs on the farm have the routine practice of barking at cars and people not from the family, so one always knows whether it’s a visitor approaching the farmhouse or a family member.  (I’m accepted as family, for they don’t bark at me.)  For some reason, whichever generation the dogs might be (and I have outlived three generations of them since my first visit in 1996), although the village idiot has been coming every single day, rain or shine, twice a day, the dogs still bark at him every time, without fail.  The daughter says maybe even the dogs sense that something’s not quite right about him.

On one of my visits a couple of years back, my attention was drawn to a photo opportunity with the mother going round the farm, trailed by Dino the scruffy dog (featured in a couple of my other blogs: Dino the dirty dog, Aptly-named dog) and the runaway hen (featured in The loner hen) behind him.  I got my camera ready, the daughter whipped open the rear kitchen door, and there was the village idiot who happened to be passing by just as I was about to press the shutter.  As soon as he spotted the camera, he spread out his arms in a “ta-ra” Broadway-musical pose and a big grin.  As if that instantaneous and instinctive response wasn’t remarkable enough, he then said, with one hand placed on his hip in a cocky fashion, “Now show that photo to your boyfriend!”  With such a sense of humour and wit, I’m not so sure he's that much of an idiot after all.

PS:  I’m told by my French student, Hélène Cassaigne, that there’s a village idiot in every place around France.

(France, May 2012)