Lunch in Southern France

She set the massive seafood plateau in the center of a tiny table, her wisps of arms revealing a sinewy musculature acquired from long years of carrying plates to and from the kitchen. Her gauzy blue tee-shirt announced the restaurant’s name, Chez Francois, in blocky white lettering. The tower of seafood was balanced precariously on a metal stand on a lopsided table set on an ancient stone street next to a bustling harbor, the slick streets luminous and littered with port rot and cigarette butts. The tray was weighty with crushed ice and layered with clams and oysters, whelks and mussels, periwinkles, langoustine and lobster, and as requested, an equal number of chunky lemon slices. In clipped English, she warned us not to eat from just one side, lest the entire tray and all its contents slip back into the sea.

-

Young and old, man and woman, accountant and farmer, married and lover sat elbow to elbow slurping oysters, peeling mussels and shrimp from their shells, and forking into plates of grilled dorado fished from Sete’s waters. Bottles of inexpensive Provençal wine protruding from dripping ice buckets sat on tables clothed in a tear of butcher paper. A handsome Frenchmen, in that way that all Frenchmen are handsome, shucked oysters and clams without pause, a cigarette dangling from pouted lips. We ate in silence, only occasionally groaning with pleasure as the cold, salty ocean depths lingered on our tongues, overturning the emptied shells onto the melting ice, an internationally recognized symbol of triumphal bivalve bliss.