The French mushroom front at the Calder Foundation

The Cubans remained living in the north of the French countryside long into the winter after I had retreated to Rome. But I had left them with an addiction to remember me by, and they, like good scout boys who had helped a granny across the road, sent proud updates. "Sunci, I cooked the champignons avec du canard, it was delicious! Francisco ate a lot. After lunch, we decided to check up the mushrooms on the internet. He realized for the first time that some are lethal, in particular, one similar to the kind we just ate. He made himself vomit, had a crazy panic face on—it was really funny. On the other hand, I think the mushrooms were delicious, and I'm still alive." Mushroom hunting is a French countryside sport. They race before sunrise to gather the delicious brown and yellow porcini mushrooms and scatter home just as we were waking up. Part of the Calder estate is a forest that begins just behind the house and studios. Some mornings, we walked through the dew-soaked bushes. Every time we woke up early, we would see the French walking home with baskets full of shrooms. However, the competitive spirit of this anti-social foraging sport had gotten to us. The more country dwellers we met creeping out of our woods, having robbed us of our shrooms, the more determined we became to find some and stuff our faces. My suggestion was that we shoot at poachers who entered our woods, assuring the Cubans that this was normal procedure in England. But they were Cuban, after all, and the hardest fight they would put up was using their hips on a dance floor. So instead, we engaged in a night of vendetta—grape robbery at our neighbor’s vineyard. A morning did not go by without us seeing dozens of French creeping out of the woods with baskets full. This, of course, meant that there were no big, fat porcini left by the time we tried hunting for them. Determined not to be beaten, we set out to pick every mushroom we spotted—white, yellow, red, greenish-blue. They were all so pretty... "There are no champignons growing in Cuba," you see, and for Marco, this growling for fungus became a proper treasure hunt. Eventually, he even invented a way of planting them in the garden. "If one breaks up pieces of edible mushrooms onto the earth, covers them with a metal pot to give them darkness and moisture, within two days, fully grown pot-shaped mushrooms can be harvested." I, on the other hand, started painting everything using the colors of mushrooms, and my white All-Star shoes had turned mushroom-colored after a mushroom fight. We had become just like the French—completely out of control on the mushroom front.