Solitary was the moment. There was no breeze. There was no movement. The air was musty and thick as it absorbed the yellow light that snuck around the thin wooden slats of the ramshackle wall. There was only calm and peace, tranquility itself distilled to a substance that overwhelmed and protected. Marie was, she supposed, the only one to feel it. She was, to be sure, alone there to know it.
Lying still, Marie heard a grasshopper move. She recognized the clumsy, yet gentle, movements below. The sound was delicate, not a rustle precisely, more like a finger ticking, pricking, clicking the bristles of a broom, a gentle snapping of straw, a scratch of pebbles shifting. Birds called from outside. The farmer’s door opened. Water dripped gently from the wall of the barn. Two cows lowed. A child called from far off.
Marie welcomed the sounds. They added to her calm and completed the sensation of place. They were familiar, comfortable, confirming. She did not know if other movements came from inside or out; she only cared that she felt safe and hidden, her head loosely swaddled within a blanket of feathers. Her breath, in smooth rhythm, spread the cloak of a warmth that came from her body and with each shallow exhale, the dampness and sweetness built, then dissipated, around her.
The sensation at that moment was not the absence of something; there was indeed an unexpected presence of nothing. Tangible and oppressive but like an unwanted friend, it insisted to be welcomed as a surprise companion. And still the warm solitude hung, hung there inside her, and when she reached to hold tight, it refused to last longer than that ungrabbable instant when the cushion of sleep yields silently and heavily to the weight of awake. Her mind reached out with a grasp, yet the dreams slipped and withdrew, as all our dreams will, faster than thoughts race, farther than wings reach. Indeed, as we all know too well, the more insistent our attempt, the more urgent do dreams ever strive to depart.
Except for the faint sound of the bell from a small village church, there was no rhythm to be marked on this early spring day, no succession of minutes to be counted out like the rows in a field of well-sown wheat. In southwestern France, on this farm, on this morning, it was but two stretches of arms and one blurry blink after an uninterrupted sleep. It was that extended span of time between the lowing of cows and a begrudged ruffle of feathers. It was, more precisely, the moment when the sun begins renewing the soft dry warmth of the rock-speckled earth.
Marie refused to move. Enrapt and alone, in her solitude she was the whole world. She was everyone. The only one. In the single place that existed. And she loved this feeling. She curled in her bed, pulled her feet in more firmly, and turned her head gently to rest her neck. Aware of her body, she ignored it, focusing instead on the pictures that remained in her head. Although her dreams were now gone, random impressions remained, echoes of lost sounds, floating memories of friends, swaths of vague colors, undulations of clouds, affirming smiles of loved family, chirpy shrieks of quick laughter – each warm image overlapping the next, yet set on a vague landscape of a melancholy darkness that permeated all. Without consciousness’ grasp, these emotions and sights flowed, wildly mingled into a swirling knot that twisted and reshaped themselves by tumbling about and melding together.
But it did not last long. It would never last long.
Is it fair to curse interruption when it shatters our solitude from the world outside? When it rudely intrudes on the stillness within? When it sends our calm fleeing? Or does solitude surrender when the mind wanders too far, and the outside world is beckoned? Whether it was the soft movements of creatures awakening, or the snaps and popping of wooden slats expanding in the light and the warmth of a rising new sun, Marie’s meandering journey abruptly reached an end, her distant thoughts broken as she was returned to the present. Why, she wondered, could she not make these moments last longer? Why, she lamented, must they end always too soon? Yes, that’s the sneaky thing about interruptions, she decided. They never exist until we notice them.
With eyes still ablurry and a mind still awander, Marie saw a distorted, faint shadow across the far wall suddenly move. It caught her, startled. She stared at it. She lifted her head. “Oh,” she thought, and she shrank deeper in her nest. Somehow the light grey form seemed more real than the body lying with her. She raised her head slightly and saw the patch of blocked light again move. “I’m over there,” she reflected. “Yet, here I am still.”
Marie felt cheated that her day on the farm had returned. It was not welcome. It was not flowing. It did not have the colors she wanted. She tried to recapture her slumber and demand the return of her dreams, at once so shuddersome yet so sweetly alluring. But dreams cannot be ordered to return after they tuck themselves away. They must come on their own and in their own way.
She again heard the church bell ring from somewhere down the hill and she wondered how long she had been lying there, living in her head, in her “thinking box,” as she called it. She was thankful for that box – to whomever, to whatever – as it was the only vibrant path she traversed in her day.
Marie raised her head fully, arched her back, and leaned to her side. It was time to rise, to flutter, to give a little stretch, and to leap from her bed. Yet her weariness was awake and, as occurred every morning, it turned her weightless drifting heavy from the feathery floating of memories to the familiar burden of now. But the farmer had come out, so she must hurry to the yard before the other birds swooped from the sky or flitted from rafters to peck at her food.
Challenged with direction, thoughts tend to flow straight. But define a path well and the more a mind wanders. So it was that on this morning the farmer strolled at a steady pace and followed the path that wound around the edge of the neatly sown field and separated the ordered rows from the irredeemable rocks, spiky bushes, dead trees, and a ditch.
The timeless path was plotted as most paths are plotted, without forethought, through nature, created by man circumventing the fertile while avoiding the thorns. Shorn from wilderness by centuries of feet, hooves and carts, it maintained its presence by maintaining utility. There had been no plan for its creation; it was necessarily there. A few hundred yards on, the trail led to the right, all the way snaking between the now ankle-high corn and a gaping wall of trees down the hill to the left. Soft green tops of the new spring grass bounced from his shins and hindered the glide of his steps. It already needed cutting. He must tell his son it was a chore worth completing.
The old farmer’s goal was that of most days. The destination did not matter. There was no true aim, just the pursuit to go someplace, anyplace, as something to do. He had chosen today to inspect if sanglier trampled through the southern field overnight. Sometime earlier, between his breakfast and his boots, this question was important. There was little, if anything, he might do in response. They could destroy the whole field overnight or carve out giant boar silhouettes. They were too difficult to find when searched for during day and he had no intention of hunting by night. But the walk awarded the morning a goal until lunch.
Following the southern edge of the field, he continued his clockwise walk along the bordering trees. The thick, pleasant smell of rotting old pine and decaying, fallen leaves mingled with the sweet, heavy scent of a vigorous new grass and damp, warm buds. Explain it as geosmin, petrichor, low molecular weight volatile compounds, the name is unimportant. It’s the result that’s unmistakable. It is grass, earth, flowers, rain. It is life, death, decay, birth. It is the world. And it is the aroma of time. Along this path, the fragrance to the left and the scent to the right let one indulge alternately in the luscious interplay between the neglected and the wild and the cultivation of the fresh. It changed every day and had been the same forever.
Halfway around the field and two steps to his right, there were the tracks: foot-wide paths where the nocturnal boars had romped through the night and entered the forest. He kneeled to inspect. There were about nine of them, he concluded, most of them small. He wondered if the brood’s father remained with them. It was early in the year, about the time when the male leaves the group and heads out alone. That is the way nature works, with some, he knew, if nature’s whispers and sighs were overly strong.
The farmer shrugged, whether or not the boar father was there was information that had little use, the answer to a question that sprouts from nothing and withers, once answered, back to its home. He took in a deep breath and looked to his left, his eyes following the trampled path deep into the forest. He had played there as a boy, not often as there were too many chores, but enough to have had dreams of forested adventure. Forging new paths among the juniper, walnut, wild cherry and beech. Aiming sticks at invisible invaders. Hunting girolles as if mining for gold.
The farmer paused for a moment. It all had happened faster than expected. He had found the tracks with no trouble and with that hollow twinge of success that accompanies achievements with no second purpose, he began walking again. Everywhere he looked was the oppressive, but welcome, presence of all that he was. The land. His land. And more important always, the land of his parents, and the many parents before. So many parents. There was no record of the land before their arrival. For all that was known, they had been there forever. And in that presence, they forged an alloy of flesh and of soil, a mixture that lived in a slow state of decay yet embraced the renewing and dying each year. To move is illusion, all the years seemed to say. Yet the moments this day, with its green buds showing and spring flowers abloom, again gave hope and shouted how nothing stays firm.
The old farmer reached the far turn at the end of this field and looked up to his right, onto a small rocky rise. An expanse with small trees and flat, hardscrabble land. It was his daughter’s field, the one he bequeathed her after she left. It was but a small piece of farm, with too many rocks and not enough soil. It could not be tilled, but like land anywhere, it too had its value. While it did not seek to give birth, life sought to find it. Breaking through were persimmon and fig. Watercress in spring. Dandelions. Purslain. The occasional black truffle. Wild asparagus at the edges where it twirled around bushes. The land existed, and like all land, he thought, that was enough to be precious. The invisible steps of uncountable forefathers were what then, for him, raised it up near the sacred.
This joy he felt for the land that he owned could not, however, overcome the fact that his daughter’s land was a field of silent sadness. The old farmer stood and again saw her before him, standing in the field, rising like a stray sunflower whose seed was delivered by a purposeful wind. He saw his girl as a child. Her saw her fully grown, standing and smiling, the sun’s yellow glow surrounding her delicate straight frame. His vision of her fluctuated between the small girl she was and the grown girl of now. She had moved years ago, overcome, he knew, by the incessant pace of too-static days and the singular horizon of its slow-motion life. She left to absolve herself of what the haunting needs of unhappiness told her would disappear if only she left. Whether it’s borne of the rolling fields around us or the waves of discontent within us, we are enticed from hollow boredom by the alluring narcotic of escape. How easy it would be if only we could travel without ourselves as companion.
Caged and cramped in a small wooden crate, placed high in the back of a dilapidated, black truck, Aramis huddled low to shield himself from the threatening wind. Tired from a long day of travel, he was unable to sleep, made anxious by the journey and what promised to come. Now, when sleep would normally take over, the ceaseless blowing and violent bangs made it impossible to rest.
The fierce wind, rising over the valley and up the abrupt hills of the town, concentrated its way through the narrow, curving streets. Its anger, increased by the obstructions it found in this ancient Roman French town, tore at ill-fitted wooden shutters, dangling striped awnings, and hanging painted placards. Road signs twisted and bent before returning upright like small metal catapults. Sheets of used paper and curled wads of dirty plastic leapt from trash cans and were hurled through the air with an erratic arching and diving like the flight of adolescent bats. The clanging and rattling of lampposts and chains could be heard from all corners. Angry howling and hooing sang the dominant message and whistling and hissing provided harmony strains.
Aramis sat tense. His black feathers twisted and pulled by the penetrating wind, he fought hard not to move. His crate perched high, on top of the boxes of fat, glossy aubergines and light green courgettes from the greenhouse of the driver’s small farm. Arriving early for the next morning’s market, the farmer had parked near his stand and retired for the night after a bottle of wine in a small hotellerie that was resided down the street. He did this each week. The market was small but so were his dreams. The little money he made selling whatever ripened that week gave him enough for the trip – and perhaps a bit more.
But this week was unusual because an old priest had died. Now, his dying was not unusual; even old priests don’t stay long. What was different for the farmer was that the pastor, a now-deceased neighbor, had offered him his chickens as they would need someplace to stay. The farmer solemnly obliged – and now had too many roosters. “Thank god,” he thought later, “I know just how to put him to good use.” He brought him to market to find him a probably short-term new home.
And there crouched Aramis, covered in his cage by a blue plastic tarp that was thick and heavy with rips at its edges. All he could see was a dim night hue as the streetlights shone through. He could not seek the sky. That bothered him the most. What light shone through would brighten and darken as the tarp flapped up in waves.
Another day starting, Marie and Aramis walked past the barn. The sun shone fiercely and was drying the yard. Light clouds had sprinkled their rain overnight. The sound had been pleasant, like small bird footsteps on the roof. Now, the ground glistened early and was happy to be clean.
Aramis stopped and peered in at the shackled cows. There were nine being fed. Two lay on their sides while a younger one, who was closest, pulled at her chain as she tried to reach the threads of scattered loose hay that her nose had pushed away. The sound of the conveyor, behind where they stood, filled the barn with a low-pitched rumble.
Aramis looked at the cows. Marie looked the other way.
“Do you like living here?” he asked.
“Why?” Marie replied.
“Well,” he said, “you seem to find comfort in it. But sometimes I see you don’t like it.”
“It’s pleasant enough,” she said. “It has all I need.”
“But do you like it?”
“There are things I don’t like. These cows,” she said, glancing inside the barn. “They’re sad. They can’t move. The chains and shackles they did nothing to deserve.”
Aramis noticed a strange look in her eyes.
“But out here,” Marie said more brightly and with some cheer, “the yard’s not large but it’s big enough. The ducks can be mean. The cat’s a bit strange. The dog limps. But the food is good. And there are plants and bugs and rocks that keep me company.”
“That’s good,” he said, “but that’s not much.”
“Maybe not. But it’s home.”
“But that doesn’t mean you are forced to enjoy it.”
“It’s all that I know,” Marie said in defense not so much of the yard but of her position in it. “And if I don’t like that, there is nothing left to do.”
“You like it because it’s all you know?” Aramis asked. “That’s not a good reason.”
“Maybe it’s not, but it is a good answer,” Marie said smiling and she began to walk to her right with Aramis at her side.
“What if you had a choice? Haven’t you ever wanted to go someplace else?” Aramis asked.
“Aramis, you asked me that before. And what I told you remains true. There is no place I want to go.”
“I remember. But all this time sitting here. You must imagine things you would someday like to see.”
“No, I think that’s you,” Marie said. “You’re the one who does that. Besides, what other things would I see? Another yard? Another farm?”
“No,” Aramis said. “Those are pretty much the same. Someplace different. Someplace new.
Someplace, maybe, you’ve never imagined.”
“How can I want to go someplace I’ve never imagined?”
“To see what’s there.”
“But if I don’t know what’s there, why would I want to go?”
“You would want to go to see what’s there.”
“Yes, but if I don’t know what’s there, why would I want to go?”
“To see what’s there,” Aramis laughed. “Are you trying to confuse me?”
Marie smiled. “Don’t be silly. You do that on your own without any help.”
Aramis laughed. This was his delight in talking with Marie. His serious questions met with play, with challenge, and with unexpected diversion. He increasingly laughed now in a way he had long since forgotten, an unconscious laugh we all have as children when playing with our friends a spontaneous game.
“You think so?” he said smiling. “If I’m that confused then why are you the one not answering the question?”
“You want to know where I would imagine I want to go if I didn’t want to go anywhere I cannot imagine? That’s what you want me to imagine?”
Aramis smiled. “Not exactly, but yes.”
“I don’t know,” Marie said. “What do you imagine? I’ll go there with you.”
“No, that’s not fun.”
“Ok, I actually do have an answer for you this time. I’ve been thinking of this since you asked me before."
“And what did you think?”
“The Cape of Good Hope,” Marie said firmly. “Yes, the Cape of Good Hope.”
“The Cape of . . . ” Aramis started to say.
“Not the Canary Islands!” Marie said, interrupting. “No! Not there. Canaries are too annoying. And messy. And loud! Not the Canary Islands. Definitely not the Canary Islands.”
“Ok,” Aramis laughed. “Why the Cape of Good Hope?”
“I don’t know. I heard the name once and I decided I liked it. Does there have to be a reason?”
“No,” Aramis said. “Do you know where it is?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know where the Canary Islands are either. Come to think of it, I hope I don’t go to the wrong place by mistake.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”
“Why, do you know where they are?”
“No. But I’m sure they’re too far. And since we don’t fly, and I don’t think we can walk there, we don’t have to worry about going to the wrong one.”
“That’s a shame,” Marie said.
“Why?”
“Well, it must be very beautiful, the Cape of Good Hope. Like here in the spring after a rain. All the flowers. All the grass. Plenty of food. Everyone happy. Everyone smiling, cheerful every day. It must be something like that. A place filled with good hope. I would like to go.”
“Yes,” Aramis said.
“Or maybe it’s not,” Marie said, suddenly changing character. “Maybe it’s cold and raining and terrible all the time with nothing but spiky bushes, wind, mud, and rocks and . . . and . . . wild hungry animals and awful people.”
“And loud and annoying giant canaries,” Aramis added, his eyes widening.
Marie looked at him. She liked the joke, especially that he was playing along, but she was too intent in her thoughts and imagination to smile.
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe they have nothing to enjoy and life is miserable and it’s hard to stay alive and no one smiles even just once a week. So, everyone can only exist by relying on nothing but hope. That’s why they call it the Cape of Good Hope because that’s all they have.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Aramis said in mock seriousness. “Perhaps we should go somewhere else.”
“Yes, perhaps someplace else I can’t imagine. Wait, let me picture it,” Marie said. This time she was laughing.
“Very funny,” he said.
Throughout the conversation, the two continued walking, stopping intermittently as they playfully answered, and starting again as new questions arose. Now, though, Marie made a point to stop. She looked at Aramis. Her eyes wide, her head slightly tilted, she nodded her head with each word in that manner one adopts when making a definitive, undeniable, and absolutely final, concluding statement.
“Aramis, what difference would it make where I went?” Marie asked. “I could go a million places out there. And then, one day, when I’m not looking, I’d find myself right back here in this yard. All that effort. All that struggle. All that time. And when I got back here and I looked in a mirror, I’d still be myself. All that travel. All those places. All that thinking. And none of those things would change who I am. Marie. A small, farmyard hen.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But new experience is like food. Whether or not we can feel it, it becomes part of us. We don’t notice at first, but after a while, we realize we’re different. The experiences shape us. Maybe not now, but it changes who we become.”
“Who I become? I am already who I became.”
“I mean who you become in the future.”
“Oh that,” Marie said.
“Yes, that.”
“The future will come whether I stay here or not.”
Marie’s day had been blank – a brutal dark screen of agonizing questions, of sudden tears, of surging anger, of convulsing sobs, of desperate periods of empty sadness, each sweeping over her in random repetition, ending, finally, with a biting cold exhaustion. Her day was, in short, a long single moment in a hollow of deadly stillness.
Marie returned to her nest after the farmer’s light touch and she did not move, holding her wings to her chest and gripping what hopes might arrive against her permanent fears.
With each noise outside, she anxiously listened for a sound Aramis might make – a flutter of feathers, light footsteps on the driveway, a husky cough, a simple word, a knock on her door, or, of course, a strong, defiant crow. She sat, trying to breathe as silently as possible. She had never heard so many sounds during long hours of no noise. She sat and she listened. The sounds kept coming: the dog limped in the driveway, the cat stretched with a yawn, ducks quacked over nothing, sparrows played in the eaves, cows shifted their weight, grasshoppers jumped willy-nilly, flies struck the top window, crickets rubbed their front legs, boards crackled in the heat, a horn honked far away, a crow cawed in a field.
Each sound heightened the loneliness inside her, as if each passing noise purposefully mocked her waiting, calling out with disdain “That’s not him!” in a tone from her childhood, with the teasing and ridicule she had felt many times. She remembered now why she hated her days as a child, why she had wanted to run away, why she had retreated into herself, growing the world inside her, expanding her internal universe of reality and conversation in an attempt to need the world no longer and to convince herself that the world no longer needed her.
She believed she succeeded after her mother had died, wanting nothing and seeking nothing but small episodes of self-inflicted smiles or random diversions to persevere through her present. She wondered what life would become, now that she experienced the interruption from a companion, the fleeting linden fragrance of joy, an unreal dream of living in love.
Marie sat through the day, watching the shadows of the tree’s arms lengthen and slide over the yard until they passed from the top of the coop to the side of the house. To Marie, the shadow’s spikes of darkness were like the hands of a clock, a clock counting zeros, a clock that meant nothing. Once, in late afternoon, Marie started and raised her head quickly. She was inside her coop and heard the stones of the driveway. But she knew it was not Aramis. Just the farmer returning. His heavy rhythmic boots crunched the pebbles as he walked. His footsteps ended after the first three steps, and Marie heard the smokehouse door open. There was a silent pause, and then the farmer crossed the driveway, walked up the stairs and into his house.
Although the shadows foretold the coming of night, it seemed sudden to Marie when the sun began to set. It had been a bright day, light all around, shining strongly on the yard, reflecting, permeating, and warming all. The glow had lessened, imperceptibly to Marie, who from her nest could not see an orange and crimson glow at the horizon in the west covered by the ripple of dying yellow under a light and cheerful blue that led to a deepening peaceful darkness. She noticed only the coop grew more grey with everything inside sliding in the spectrum to the flattest color of uniform shadow.
Indeed, the darkening abyss that grew in her coop matched the deepening emptiness of her spiteful resignation. The obvious question, the question of why, crushed down upon her. Why did he leave? Why was he happy? Why was he gone? Why was he here? And just as we do when we don’t know the answer, we pick several to joust until one of them wins. Aramis lied about staying. He was captured and taken. He lived a deception. He’ll come back and explain. He planned this forever. He’ll be back any minute. He left here for good. He’ll be back any minute. He will never come back. He’ll be back any minute!
With a numbness of present and her emotions played out, Marie slowly climbed down from her nest and sat by the door. She considered waiting in the yard, but she liked the closeness of her room, the familiarity of its walls, and its distance from the field. She found comfort in knowing there was but one direction to watch. From her seat near the door, there could be no surprises, no sudden appearance – just in case she was right. Or maybe she was wrong. Because he will come back. Or he’ll never come back. No, soon he’ll be back. Yes, he will never come back.