Jean

It's a good day when the urinary effects of morning exercise do not manifest too soon, when the one-hour bout with the exercycle ends without incident...and this was such a day.  One learns to be grateful.  By contrast, one remembers yesterday.  How approximately 55 minutes into the ordeal, the bladder made its presence known, and hasty efforts at snapping the foot from its position locked into the right foot pedal proved frustrating, then difficult, then impossible.  Which resulted in desperate maneuvers, pushing one pedal against the other, during which the entire left foot pulled itself out of my bike shoe.  The latter dangled clipped to the pedal as though in mockery, eroding the quadriplegic's sense of safety and increasingly religious belief in the general philosophy manifest in Monty Python.  

Not that there was much time for laughs, racing as one was against urinary time.  One foot locked in place, the other shoeless and useless, and me all alone in the carport.  Making one grateful for, in this particular circumstance, shorts.  Not hard to maneuver the shorts up a critical inch or two, maneuver the personal equipment down, and pee off to the side.  Well, not exactly the side, more the front.  But not my front.  The exercycle's front.  Shameful, disgusting, but personally dry.  And, still, of course, trapped.

'Hello.'  I called out to the landlord across the way, a 75-ish woman, fit in that California way, just parking her Mercedes for some quick business with the tenants.  We have always been on good terms, passing acquaintances, me waving, she smiling.  And doing this for about 15 years.  She heard my call, wandered over and kicked my foot free.  I was most grateful, assured her I could take it from there.  And that was that.  Not a big deal.  Maneuvering the left non-paralyzed foot into the shoe, then standing...and despite the perilous moment when I drag the foot across the exercycle's center strut...over soon enough.  I was free.

As for the puddle of pee under the exercycle, well....  Quick dash inside for a little water, brief rinse down of the bike.  And the newspaper recycling bin being close at hand, what better to soak up the evidence?

'Can I help you?'  This from the landlord getting back in her Mercedes.

'No, thank you.  I'm fine.'

'It doesn't look like you're fine.'

Oy.  I was at the worst possible juncture in the pee mopping up operation.  There were all these newspapers, sodden.  And there was she, what's her name...I don't even know...grabbing them and stuffing the urine-soaked newsprint into the recycle bin.  What could I do?  Humiliating?  Of course, but this all represented great progress.  I had peed on the machine, not myself, embarrassment be damned.  And then I had asked a stranger for help.  Too much help, it turned out, or maybe not.  Humiliation does, after all, lead to humility.

Which brought me inevitably and fatefully to Jean de Florette.  The Netflix DVD had been sitting about since May, it is embarrassing to report.  And having paid two months' rent on the thing, it was long overdue to finally shove it in the player.  It did not take long to feel something like a thrill.  The Pagnol story springs from the same honest roots as his other stuff.  And, yes, it's all about springs and roots.  The heat and aridity of Provence feel tangible, the protagonist's struggle to scratch a living from the parched earth grueling....  And he is a disabled guy, a hunchback.  More specifically, he is a dreamy disabled guy, which puts us in similar territory.

Gérard Depardieu's Jean, the crippled hero, never mentions his disability until desperate conditions mount, his family faces starvation and ruin.  And then he is outside, raising his fists at the sun, reminding God that it's very difficult being a hunchback.  And wouldn't it be just to cut him a little slack?  And in the sun-baked Provençal silence, Jean de Florette complains there is no one there.  And all of this is utterly familiar to me, the desperate bargaining, shoving the disability aside until moments of extremis.  Even the disabled urbanite, now faux farmer, desperately schlepping water via mule day after day in the merciless sun...for anyone with sympathetic nerve damage and poor temperature regulation, this is powerful drama.

And yet, there is the other thing about Jean de Florette.  He never gives up.  Or to put a finer point on it, he never loses a sense of possibilities.  Hope may vanish, but not options.  A curious distinction, perhaps a false one to many people.  But I have no doubt that Jean is past hoping.  There is no God.  At least, there is no God for hunchbacks.

Jean's tormentors run afoul of his endless optimism.  The evil neighbors hatch plot after plot.  Jean keeps turning every nefarious scheme into a positive way forward.  Despite his ultimately fatal naïveté, one can only admire his stumbling on.  I identified with this too, a quality people tell me about in myself, but something I tend to shrug off.  The dreamy survivor.

As for the film's evil...well, it felt unpleasantly realistic and true to life.  Jean is overly trusting.  It's the intuitive daughter Manon who knows what's going on, but at eight years old she is powerless to intervene, of course.  Meanwhile, Jean's wicked neighbors are forced to come face-to-face with his goodness, perseverance and decency.  In certain moments, one of the tormentors wavers in his endless lust for land, admitting that Jean has become a friend.  They get too close to him, I believe.  And what happens next in the decades-later sequel Manon of the Spring?  I'm already enjoying some speculation.

The casual rustic brutality of the Provençal locals must give way to something else.  Surely certain essential, primal taboos have been violated here.  Getting so close to Jean and seeing the workings out of their plots upon his family must undermine the evil duo.  

I wonder if Pagnol believes in karma or something like it.  I wonder if I do.  Actually, having seen a few serious films by Woody Allen in which people seem to get away with crime...the plots don't quite seem credible.  Maybe it's the human sense of guilt, or maybe it's something collective, or maybe it's something bigger.  I have always assumed, and perhaps deluded myself, that the three young men who shot me in 1968 paid some sort of price, that in the sum of their lives, they did not get away with anything.  I can offer no logical reason for this belief.

In any case, I wonder if Manon will simply get her revenge decades later.  I doubt that anything will happen 'simply.'  And I predict that the neighborly intimacy with Jean will somehow lead to the undoing of his evil tormentors.  With Pagnol, so grounded in his storytelling, whatever happens in the next film is bound to be both interesting and credible.  Maybe even illuminating.  Actually, I can't wait.