YOU WANT?

In all cities, you are familiar with the supermarkets and their well-designed aisles and the shopping centers and their galleries of designer boutiques. Customers jostle each other, their carts grazing everything in their path, at these purveyors of everything one can dream of. Leaving this whirlwind of activities to go on vacation in the south of France was going to be a real pleasure.

The opportunity had finally come to lose myself in the solitude of the rugged massif of the Montagne Noire, north of Carcassonne.

I was staying at Mas Cabardès, once a prosperous village of weavers and gold diggers, professions that have long since disappeared, just like the villagers. Indeed, the village today only has a population of just over two hundred inhabitants. Here, no supermarket. Only one small shop: the Mas grocery store.

It has two small rooms formerly occupied by a peasant family. I assumed that this trade could only satisfy the most rudimentary needs of the villagers. I had it all wrong! Inside, Denis serves his customers one by one, fetching each item and entering the price on his calculator.

New products today: potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce. It's summer, after all, but also: onions, red peppers, green peppers, carrots, cauliflower. Lawyer: what a surprise! And, inevitably, garlic. Some fruit ? Apples, bananas, peaches, pears, nectarines, oranges, grapes, melons or lemon. Dried fruits maybe? Apricots, prunes, grapes or figs. In the butcher's department: veal cutlet and steak. In cold cuts: hams, pâtés, sausage and three types of sausage. In the preserves section, you will find ham, corned beef, cassoulet, pâté, canned chicken gizzards.

He sells baguette. There is also the basket of pastries with, at 11am, the last unfortunate croissant. Grindstone cheeses: saint-nectaire, bethmale-vache, bethmale-chèvre, ewe, emmental, beausac, old cantal, cantal entre-deux and, in a country proud of more than three hundred cheeses, this grocery store stocks no less of three brands of Camembert: Cœur de Lion, Président, and Grand Coeur. But, maybe you just came to buy a packet of toastinettes and a few slices of cheese to make yourself a croque-monsieur?

If you need a drink, in the drinks section: red wine, white wine, rosé and pastis, of course, but also rum and scotch, gin and martini. In beers? Heineken, Desperados, Schloss and Fischer and, from a little further north, a beer from Alsace, Kingbrau, an economical beer at one euro per half-liter can; seven soft drinks and four flavors of fruit juice. For snacking as an aperitif: chips, salted cookies, cashews, croutons and peanuts.

A small pot, does that mean anything to you for dessert? Crème caramel, chocolate mousse and five flavors of yogurt. There's also UHT cream and milk, shelf-stable bread and sandwiches, just in case of depletion of perishables. Denis puts his magazine rack in order: there are automotive, fashion, women's and teen magazines, collections of puzzles, crosswords, sudoku, postcards from the hills and villages. neighboring dailies and dailies: La Dépêche du Midi, L'Indépendant, Today and Midi Libre. He used to store more.

If the rolls of fabric that we bought by the meter to make our own clothes have disappeared, there are still traces of that time. A wooden tape measure for measuring fabric, thimbles, needles, safety pins, tape measures, zippers, skeins of contrasting ribbons and countless spools of thread.

A woman is being served now. Her little boy walks over to the card display stand and presses one of them because he knows he's going to come out with a tune he knows: birthday cards, mass cards, condolence cards, but also a lonely Valentine's Day card, because yes, we are in July!

The boy devours the sweets with his eyes: chocolate, dark or milk, with nuts or raisins, boxes of individual candies, a veritable explosion of various shapes and colors. Her mother must hurry to do her shopping, there are so many things within reach: laces, bulbs, key rings, a nutcracker, disinfectant ... She calls him to order. Rolls of toilet paper, cookies, a boxed cake and honey from the nearby village. She takes money out of her wallet.

Strawberry, raspberry and fig jams. Denis counts the change. Laundry, washing-up liquid, freezer bags, birthday candles on plastic spikes, a packet of used stamps from Tanzania, for potential philatelists in the village. The little boy leaves the store with his mother.

Now it's my turn. I stand in front of the owner of the Mas grocery store, ready to place my order. "Do you want? "

By Mike Timms