Peruvian Yarn Spinner Eugene Casts His Spell

When I knew Eugene first, this Peruvian with poetically eloquent French delivered in a rat-tat-tat South American accent, was black-haired, warm and incredibly funny. And, as I would discover, hugely well read and briefed on music and matters cultural. A recently separated dad of a six-year old daughter back then, he was still reeling from it, yet so full of stories and always up for the craic and the occasional riotously drunken game of pool in our local — and sole — bar tabac. 

And now that full head of hair grey as chalkboard dust, he is as warm and funny as ever. And, as Joel would tell me, while finessing away in his antique restorations workshop, Eugene tunes into the eclectic mix of news, views and analysis on the France Inter radio station  —“Pour ceux qui ont quelque chose entre les oreilles” (“For those who have something between their ears”) as one of their old slogans put it. He is now a grandfather of two adorable little girls, whose picture he casually delights in sharing with us all now.

Sitting around the table, savouring each swill of beer, once the produce of a local abbey, his mischievous hooded grey eyes drawing in and playing the gallery, we get a hilarious tour de force on the recklessly unregulated alcohol content of such libations long ago, wild and lawless tales of the follies brought on by their consumption in far flung villages and mountain hamlets, which eventually led to limits on alcohol content before a whole world of merry monks, fluthered farmhands, loaded labourers and hammered herders went to hell in a well-stocked handcart.

We listen and we join in. Especially the wonderful, ever-calm and simultaneously worldly and otherworldly Francois — L’Homme Tranquil, as Joel once christened him — stone wall builder and restorer by day, uncompromisable artist by night and always, imbiber of alcohol and mystical ruminations, inhaler of heady French cigarettes and life’s overlooked beauties — and lover of psychedelic rock and the book classics. 

A brief conversational detour around Tolkien and his South African origins and the works of Sixties big name Carlos Castaneda, and his meditations on the arcane fuelled by copious intakes of peyote (riffing off Eugene’s spiel on the alcoholic travails of medieval Europe) Francois tells me later on he has identified the books he has finally discarded and the core works he will retain and revisit, and how he will resume his artistic oeuvre, on hiatus for 10 years or so, when he sorts out a gaff with adequate room for the larger works he has literally in mind.

The man is a true artist, self-thought and really, he so needs a manager to organise proper exhibitions of his spectacularly colourful, mostly pastel paintings, all intricate patterns and intriguing, symmetrically repeated shapes and motifs. Those colourful works I have used on the headings for each part of this series are done by Francois.

He has sold the occasional work, and there have indeed been exhibitions, but the same man lives so much in his head, and in his books and his music, as well as his friendships, that to get him to focus on the business side of things would, I imagine, be like trying to bottle smoke. But boy would it be worth the effort.

Joel has been sharing a few of Francois’s works on Facebook recently, in the wake of myself and Anne’s requested inspection of his meticulously curated portfolio — and purchase of one work which we have had framed and now graces the walls of our imaginations, as Joel deliciously put it  — and maybe it might inspire him to get cracking again. While he still can.

Cathou praises his work now, and Francois just shrugs his shoulders, declaring softly, “Mais, c’est come ca … je suis come ca” — “Yerra, It’s like that, it’s just the way I’m made” — and it is just how he is. 

Here’s a thing: visiting another country the differences between peoples and cultures are immediately obvious, of course, but the longer you stick around, maybe live there a while, the more you see the similarities between peoples. And the gobshites are everywhere! 

But how then do I explain the sheer number of French people I have met who don’t distinguish at all between what we Irish might call high-brow culture and so-called ordinary life? Certainly much more than here, where you’d gauge your audience before expanding on stuff that might set the snitterati snorting.

When I went to France first and soon got to know people, dinner parties seemed to be for everybody, and I just adored those long drawn out get-togethers, liberally doused with wine, husky coffees and the odd belt of cognac, a roll-up between each course as we slouched lower and lower in our chairs, and the chat just flowed as movies, music and modernity were as readily dissected as the week’s big match.

We’re well known in Ireland for the salty humour we bring to our own table, and our routine puncturing of pomposity — no bad thing to ward off affectations and delusions of superiority —  but the other side of this is a prevailing distrust of people with with ‘notions’, as we might put it, or ideas above their stations.

Oh yes, when the coast is clear and we feel we can let our guards down here (over pints, usually, or with those rare and true confidants) there are discussions on poetry, virtue and the intimacies of life, but not like these vivacious digressions and jovial discourses, the hundred visions and revisions, as T.S. Eliot put in, around a small country table in a rural French outpost of a warm September evening.

And boy was it warm, 36 degrees each day. Joel and Cathou had never seen the like of it, and he sent me this gorgeous picture of his house, with the roses blooming unseasonally, and the leaves of autumn refusing to fall. “Les roses fleurissent encore y a plus de saison,” he wrote (“The roses flower, the seasons are no more”).

All this struck me once again, as we sat around shooting the Verdelias breeze — and fair enough, Marine le Pen right-wingers and anti-vax conspiracy theorists, of which France has as many as anywhere else, were inconspicuous by their absence, so my sample numbers are indeed questionable.

But to hear Francois and Eugene discussing the Ukraine-Russia contretemps was something else: history, geography, cultural references, philosophy all thrown in like yeast to leaven the dough of a fascinating discussion.

And the visit we made later to a fabulous old vineyard in this, the famous Sauternes region, organised for us by Dou Dou (Georges, Cathou’s ex-husband) was another level marvellous altogether. 

TO BE CONTINUED …