Merde alors

You may remember, some time back, I wrote of an incident in the rue Sade, where a lady was liberally annointed with excremental chrism. The offending engine had been one of those specialist lorries which deal with sewage, a kind of enormous vacuum cleaner and fire-engine all in one. That time, I had been a distant witness: this time, though, it was first-hand experience.

Yesterday evening, I noticed some water bubbling through what I took to be a cast iron stopcock inspection hatch in our impasse. I thought nothing of it, as our neighbour often uses his hose to clean out the litter. A little later, however, whilst plastering, I heard the sound of really heavy ironwork being moved, and I looked down into the impasse. René, the neighbour, along with his pal from the printing works opposite, was grappling with the bigger inspection hatches, which by now were embarrassingly generous with outpourings of cuvée Kabinett WC. I have never seen so much welling up, it was the primal ooze, and it was rising fast. I thought of the sorcerer's apprentice, goodness knows why...

I went down to the impasse to give moral support to René: he had been sent down to do the business by his partner, whose entirely laudable attempt to wash his shirts had ended with a faecal back-up right into her washing machine. Clearly SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. And quickly.

The trouble is, in Antibes, not much happens quickly, unless you know the right people and preferably have an Italian surname. But I was reckoning without the fantastic luck of having two neighbours who work for the council. They summoned the town vidangeurs (no question that they were going to have to go private like everybody else). The said operatives arrived in a gleaming, one might almost say pampered truck, parked blocking the traffic, had a chat, then a fag, then came into the impasse.

They were quite the most elegantly dressed sewage workers I have ever seen. Immaculate Pringle style sweaters in a chic navy blue, emblazoned with the city's coat of arms and a proud motto (service des égouts), adorned their torsos, whilst designer waterproof trousers (blue with yellow piping) and enviable waterproof boots graced their lower bodies. They knew their stuff, when it came to crap capture, though.

Out came the gigantic hoover pipe, and just like starched and prim housewives in early television ads discussing Daz or Omo, the operatives debated which of the panoply of attachments to fit to the pipe. Finally an accord was reached, commented on by the onlookers and dog from the Clos Pierre Angelini, home of the Pétanquiers du Port d'Antibes, who seemed to be expert critics, with years of viewing experience, of this kind of event.

My god, that pump was effective. What is more, it could be seen to be effective, because their choice had fallen on a transparent nozzle, which revealed all that came to pass through the tubing. It was defecatory history, going back months, probably, and these were the Lord Caernarvons, patiently excavating, layer by layer, the underground treasure of Tutalegou.