~This essay first appeared in Seneca Review (2005).
1.
Meat
The white truck stops in the middle of the empty street. Its
driver, dressed in a white plastic rain suit, leaves the engine running on the
cobblestones of the rue Cler. He nods
to the owner of the boucherie who has
also just arrived. No words this early. The sky is still black, the lights of
the Eiffel Tower
2.
Madness
The street sweeper opens the valve of the fire hydrant on
the rue de la Santé beside the
insane asylum. He takes a dirty bundle of bound blankets from his wheelbarrow
and pushes it into the sewer grate so the water runs down the cobbles like an
oil slick in the street lamp light. The fog of his breath glows before
dissipating into black morning air. His
broom scratches across the street, pushing debris and crottes de chien into a pile.
Beyond the barbed wire fence, on the second floor of the
white stone building with the windows that open only so far, a white hand
emerges. It feels the air. The fingers stretch and clench, caress the wall and
the edge of the window. Then the pounding begins. The window will open no
further. The hand retreats and in its place a faint halo of breath escapes into
the cold air. The madwoman moans and it sounds like some kind of music. The
street sweeper pauses, resting his wrists on his broomstick.
“On me tue! On me tue!”
she wails. They are killing me. Each sentence’s inflection exactly the same. In
that moment there are no cars, no trash trucks, no rumbling of the métro below. Only the sound of the
rushing water and her desperate soprano. The street sweeper begins sweeping
again.
3.
Breasts
The cobblestone alley is empty save for the old man. The
tall blonde appears from around the corner, hips swaying for an imaginary catwalk.
The stooped man in his cardigan and slippers stops to watch her as she strides,
arms swinging, into a flood of morning sunlight. Her hair is a Farah Fawcett
halo. Her tweed pants hug every curve. The white angora sweater slips off both
shoulders to reveal a perfect neck, perfect collarbones. In the pureness of
this light he can see so much. He hasn’t seen so clearly in years. Her sweater
is nearly transparent. She looks through him as he stares at her and takes in
every bounce, every jiggle. He turns as she passes and watches until she is
gone.
South
of Paris
4.
Music
It is Easter Sunday. Walking home
from church she comes upon a field of sheep. Thirty-three ecru ewes on a green
slope. And thirteen lambs. Each wears a sonnaille
with a different tone. The sun catches on one, the B flat. The sheep looks up,
its note pausing in the carillon, while she takes out her tape recorder. She
thinks she can capture this moment, lock it in time on a thin band of plastic
in a miniature machine. The sheep, unimpressed, lowers its head and walks away
ringing.
5.
Du vin
Agnès is sixty-nine, round, a former
nun. She and Roger lived through the war.
“My father had a cave,”
Agnès says. Her eyes magnified big as an owl’s through thick lenses. “He had
inherited some very old bottles from his father and was saving them for special
occasions. Weddings or birthdays or anniversaries. When we heard the Germans
were coming he made us bring everything up. He invited the whole village.
You’ve never seen such a party. Everything we couldn’t drink went down the
gutter. My father said, ‘The Germans may take everything else, but they won’t
have my wine.’”
Roger lifts his empty glass, tipping
it a little toward Agnès.
“Ah, no,” she says, “No more for
you. That’s enough.”
“Mais
non!” Roger replies in mock indignation. He sets his glass down and
struggles to his feet to go fetch the wine bottle from the kitchen where it is
kept out of easy reach. She turns her head now, looks away but does not try to
stop him because it is just one more glass, because it is just a little
pleasure. Sweat beads on Roger’s forehead as he sits back down with the bottle.
“There now,” he says, topping off his glass until it shines like one round
ruby. “There now.”
Agnès begins to clear the dishes.
6.
The bellmaker
They bring them forth steaming and
spewing from the furnace once a month. Daban is the last in his family to do
this. He is the seventh generation. He has a son, but his son will be a banker.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Daban says
as he pulls on the flameproof gloves and wraps his arms in wet towels. He puts
the soldering mask on over his beret. “I wanted to study history.”
The other three workers prepare in
the same way – masks, gloves, towels. Everyone sweats in the low ceilinged
room.
“Stand back,” he says. “On y va!”
The oven door swings out, pulled by
a man with a long iron pole. There is Daban, a silhouette against the white
fire of the small opening. He walks toward the light, plunges his shovel in
once, twice, until he finds the one he is looking for. It is a question of
balance now. And strength. The heat is unbearable. He brings the glowing bundle
forth from the flames. A steaming mass of mud and straw and metal in the
center, hidden and transforming. Like a crab he steps the awkward weight to the
trough in the courtyard. It hits the water with the force of volcanoes. A
wreath of steam and sodden smells. Later the cocoon will crack and split, expelling
the newly minted bell. Daban points to the sodden discarded shells. “Look,” he
says. “Ink burns at a higher temperature than paper.” The newsprint that lined
the mold is still legible even now that it has turned to ash: corn selling
high, concert tonight.
7.
Entre chien et loup
She has chosen a back alley – a
quicker way home before dark. Her walking stick taps in even rhythm. There is a
sound to her right like something great and powerful breathing. A woof of air
and a smell of stale saliva. The walker starts, glances to the low garden wall,
sees red eyes and paws the size of human hands, sees a creature taller than a
grown man, feels a twist in the gut, runs.
8.
The view from this bedroom window
Roger does a good impression of a
hard-boiled egg on matchsticks. He is out of proportion from wine and sugar and
diabetes. His pate is smooth. Down there, in the small park, he toddles next to
Java, his small, white and very loud dog. Roger wears his bedroom slippers.
Sometimes he stops and cries out, swaying upright but painfully akilter, a
phenomenon of either his advanced sciatica or a femur that snaps in and out of
place. Pop. The egg wobbles.
9.
Oracle of the rue Cler
The Spanish woman has found two
lovers sharing a chocolate and coconut crêpe on the bench.
“Ah hah!” she says with a thickly
accented French. She holds six shopping bags in her hands. Her neck rattles
with gold jewelry. The young lovers try to ignore her even when she sits down.
“You are in love!” she exclaims.
They turn to her.
“I can see this. You are in love!”
The lovers look at each other. The young woman speaks French. The young man
does not.
“You will be very happy in life,”
she tells them. “I can see it in your eyes. I have seen love before. Good love
and not so good love.”
“Merci,”
the young woman says. But the seer cranes past her, to the young man who does
not speak French.
“You must guard this,” she tells
him. “This is precious, what the two of you share. Oh, such happy people!” She
stands up and walks away with her shopping bags.
10.
Métro
When the homeless man steps in everyone ignores him. He
shouts that he has no job, that his wife has left him, that he doesn’t know his
kids. He shouts that they are all swine, all of them. He is drunk. Everyone
knows the drill but the tourist. They ignore him. He doesn’t exist. The
commuter standing right beside the homeless man does not even wipe the frothy
spittle that lands on his sleeve. This man is not his problem. But the tourist
hasn’t learned this yet. She looks at the homeless man for a split second.
Maybe less. And then he roars toward her like a force of nature, eyes swimming,
chin stubbling, hurling a clot of obscenities. No one else speaks in the car,
but they all listen. The pole is shiny and feels oily in her hand. She wonders
how many people sneeze on the pole in a given day as the homeless man’s phlegm
explodes on her face. She thinks he will strike her soon. Because she is scared
she wonders which is worse: the fact that no one will help her, or the fact
that no one will help him.
The train screams into the next station and the man stumbles
off in a rush of wind bearing the undersmells of the city.
South
of Paris
11.
Fire on the mountains
Somewhere someone speaks the language
of these mountains. They are alive tonight, burning with runes and first
speech. This is the season of the écobuage,
the time of avalanche prevention. All the slick grasses on steep hillsides must
go up in smoke like sacrifice. The fires burn in odd patterns – lines, swirls,
arcs. From the plain they look like writing.
Every year hikers die in the fires. They ignore the signs or
they get lost and the flames extinguish them. On the plain, because it is a
warm evening, people eat out of doors. Late in the night they sit and smoke,
their cigarettes glowing red in the dark, and discuss the patterns of the fire.
For several hours three of the mountains in a line spell “L,” “U,” “V.” Look at
it, they say to one another. Even the mountains want to be American.
12.
Arrival of the Tzigane
This is the name they call
themselves, the gypsies. The French use it mostly in anger when the Tzigane arrive at the end of May. They
stop for a few days on their way to the Mediterranean ,
to the shrine of the Black Madonna to sing and dance and matchmake. They drive
all manner of caravan, dress in outdated clothes, speak a language of harsh
consonants and dissonant vowels. The south of France
No one speaks much about their
arrival, but there is a current in the air, a general frisson. “Robberies in the quartier.
They use an unmarked white van. They work in pairs, you know. Always in pairs.”
Whispers at the Tuesday and Saturday market. “Don’t forget to lock up.” Women
raise eyebrows to each other over heads of lettuce while the gypsy girl who is
much too young to be pregnant buys bread at the next stall.
13.
La Psalette
Here is the choir director. He is
also the Protestant pastor. His mother took one of those medications that
causes birth defects. His arms are half the length of normal arms. They only
just reach his mouth when he blows the pitch pipe. Sometimes it looks like he
is drowning when he conducts. He waves and waves at the choir. “Allez! Allez!” he shouts. “More!”
14-16.
à table
“Isn’t Agnès a good cook?” Roger asks. “That’s why I married
her, you know.”
Agnès smiles, wiping her plate with a piece of baguette.
“You know what the hardest part was?” she asks. “The hardest part was when we
had a Black girl rent our spare room – from, where was it?”
“Géorgie,” says Roger.
“Non.
‘Géorje-ee-ah’ –”
“Is that
in the north of the United
States
“It’s in the southeast,” she says.
“Anyway, she was from Géorgie and she hated to eat. I swear
she did. I made all the best things for her,” Agnès says.
“We ate like kings when she was
here,” adds Roger.
“I made quiches. I made couscous
because that’s an African dish and I thought she would like it. Do you know how
long it takes to make couscous? You have to roll the semoule in olive oil three times. By hand!”
“Agnès was in the kitchen all day
long. It’s upsetting when someone won’t eat.”
“Of course.”
“I made everything I know how to
make. Everything. I even called my daughter, the one who lives in Romania
“She was too skinny. It was painful
to look at.” Roger holds up his pinkie finger to indicate how thin she was. He
is smiling for the camera in this one.
“I would serve her and before I had
put even a spoonful on the plate she would say, ‘Oh no more, merci. No more. I couldn’t possibly eat
any more.’ And I hadn’t even given her half a spoonful!” Agnès picks up her
spoon and indicates half with her index finger.
“And she never took seconds. Not
even of dessert,” Roger winks. “Speaking of desert…” He turns to Agnès. She pretends not to hear him, upset as she is
by the memory of the American Who Would Not Eat.
“We eat well in this house,” she
says, looking this new American level in the eye. “There are others who don’t
go to such trouble. Others who have pasta every night. But not here, no.”
“No,” Roger adds, teetering up from
his chair.
“No,” Agnès repeats with finality.
“This is where people come when they want to learn true cuisine à la française. I have never been so insulted in my life.”
Agnès slaps her napkin on the table with her wide hand. “Roger!” she calls to
her husband who is now in the kitchen. “Bring the cheese and fruit!” In the
fraction of a second while her head is turned the guest scoops the gristle from
her second serving of the pork roast into her napkin where it joins the remains
of the first serving and twenty or so French fries Agnès heaped on her plate
for thirds. This picture is a mix. Part shame and waste. Part liberation.
When Agnès turns back to her she
smiles. “Everything was wonderful, as always.”
Agnès looks at the empty plate and
radiates contentment. “You see, I told you you could finish it all.”
At this very moment Roger returns
bearing the cheese tray with the handle made from a goat’s foreleg and hoof.
Agnès cuts cheese for the guest. Roger pours another glass of wine for the
guest and another for himself.
“Save room. There’s still desert,”
he whispers to her and winks.
17.
Other endings
The bouquet is bigger than the
kitchen table. She is holding it like a beauty queen or a bride, balancing it
carefully on her arm at the same angle as her burgundy beret with the jaunty
bow. She is smiling here, backlit by the yellow walls. It is a cautious smile.
There is reserve, self-preservation in her eyes. After all the other words they
have said, these two who once shared a crêpe on rue Cler, she is uncertain of these buds and stems. She does not
know if they speak of new beginnings or an end. She is afraid the answer is her
own to choose.
18.
Proposal
There is a shepherd on the path just
ahead. His sheep are in the cornfield that has just been harvested. They eat
anything, these sheep. His dog weaves among them and nips at their heels.
“Bonjour,
mademoiselle.”
“Bonjour,
monsieur. And how are your sheep?”
“The same. Always the same, these
sheep. Always eating. Do you walk fast!” His black beret, the size of a dinner
plate, shades his eyes from the midday
sun.
“I’ve just come back from St. Vincent .”
“Alors! More young people should be
like you!” His face is smile worn and his teeth brown from coffee and
tobacco. He talks about McDonalds. About
China “the next superpower!” He talks like a man who spends a great deal of
time with his sheep and his dog. His hands are thick, the skin tough and each
fingernail opaquely strong. They must never get cold. He rests them on his
staff. It’s his next line that’s caught in this picture – the way his mouth
curls up with his own daring, the way the sheep ring in the background.
“And would you be offended,
Mademoiselle, if I asked your age?”
“Not if you told me yours too.”
“Eh!” he laughs. “I’m
seventy-eight.”
“I’m twenty-four.”
He is on a roll now. “Then you’ll
not consider me rude if I ask if you are married?” he ventures.
“Are you married, Monsieur?”
“Oh
là là! Who has time for marriage with all these sheep?” He laughs. “But I
do have a nice house and all the milk and cheese you could ever want. Not to
mention I’m away half the year…” Behind the joking exterior there’s the hint of
a boy of eighteen boasting for the girls at the village dance, hoping, if only
for this moment, that one of them will say yes. If only for tonight.
19.
Neither here nor there
It’s just a dirt track. This path
through the woods on the crests of the hills is as old as the earliest animals.
Men widened it and rode their horses here from Pau Lourdes
20.
La piscine
Because of the new pool, the
neighbors are used to seeing trucks of every color come and go from the house
next door. The workers arrive most days to smoke and inspect the hole in the
ground which doesn’t seem to change much from week to week. Every now and again
the husband, Nordine, comes through the gate that connects the two back yards
and gives a report.
“They’re really busy,” he explains waving his hand in the
general direction of his pool-in-progress. The laundry dries stiff and hot on
the line on the west side of the house. The neighbors nod to Nordine and sip
their drinks.
“They have so many orders this year,
and then April was all rain…” He trails off. He has a habit of trailing off.
The neighbors have gotten used to it.
“Will it be finished in time to use
it this summer?” one asks, exhaling and tapping away ash.
“Well…” sighs Nordine. “They don’t
know…I never signed anything, you know.”
“No contract?”
Nordine shakes his head. “I wanted
to tell you that we’re going away this weekend to the beach, but we’ll be back
on Tuesday…”
“Ok, Nordine.”
He walks back to his house, deliberately, as if he has all
the time in the world. He is, at last, out of the frame.
21.
One last cigarette
It is almost midnight .
Tomorrow the week begins again. Nordine’s neighbor steps outside to smoke in
peace before going to bed. Across the fence a white truck with no markings
backs up to the front door of Nordine’s house. One man climbs out of the truck
and inspects the front door. A second man waits in the cab. She squints but it
is impossible to see the license plate from here.
In the stillness the hannetons
of early summer, large beetles with feathered antennae, loose themselves in the
ivy of the trellis and buzz. She drops her half-smoked cigarette and crushes it
out before going inside to call the gendarmes.
22. Baptême
de l’air
Today Agnès turns seventy. She has never been in an
airplane. Her children, even the daughter who lives in Romania Loire Valley
“Look – Chambord !
Chenonceau!” Agnès shouts. “Azay-le-Rideau!” She names every one. Roger jokes
with the pilot, pretending he knows how to fly. Pretending his expertise
extends even to this.
“Smooth air today!” he says. “A good
day for flying! Piece of cake!”
Here they all are. Even the rainbow
out the window is real.
23. Market day
Grievances run deep at the market. Almost everyone knows
that the fishmonger from Marseille, the one who drives eight hours each way
twice a week to be here, had an affair with the wife of the history teacher ten
years ago. He keeps coming. He needs the money.
This morning two women walk past while he stacks morue fillets on the ice. The older one
puts an arm around her friend and says, loud enough for him to hear, “Don’t
fall for that fishmonger’s yellow paella
over there in the big steel vat. Everyone here knows that paella will make you sick. He sets it out like that day after day,
market after market – no ice to keep it cold. That’s paella for show, for the tourists. Anyway, he’s from Marseille. You
know what they say about fishmongers from Marseille, don’t you?”
Just before the women are out of earshot he shouts, “And you
know what they say about women from Nay, don’t you?” and then calmly lays out
the shrimp with their antennae facing in the same direction.
24.
Odds and evens
“Hi,” she says when he answers. “The
flowers came.”
“Oh good,” he says.
They wait on opposite sides of the Atlantic for what comes next.
“Are they okay?” he asks finally.
“They’re amazing,” she says.
“How are you?” he asks.
“Can we just be still for now, and
not talk?” she says. “Can we just listen to each other for right now?”
25.
Panorama
If she were to send him a postcard from here, she would have
to walk a distance to take the right picture. She would hike to the clearing in
the wooded hills just east of town. Each season here is beautiful, but she will
choose a spring day. The trail will be muddy from yesterday’s storm and will
smell of rot and growth. The purple columbines will be blooming. The church
bells will chime but the church will be hidden by the trees.
She would want him to see the mountains. They run the
southern horizon from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean , separating lands but not peoples. The
largest interconnected ant colony in the world lives at the base of them, its
network of minuscule tunnels and egg chambers lacing from salt water to salt
water. The ants will be too small to show up in the photo. But the postcard
picture would show how the farmland starts to ripple as it rolls away toward
the mountains, the hills a darker green than the plain and dotted with sheep,
the mountains many colors, but always somehow purple.
She would think about how pilgrims have tracked this ground
for millennia, moving south and west over the mountains toward Santiago de
Compostela in Spain, where James the Greater, Son of Thunder, is said to rest
in a silver sepulcher in the belly of the cathedral. She has heard the stories
of how the Virgin Mary sometimes steps lightly in these parts and appears to
shepherds and small girls. They say that sacred springs fill her footsteps and
to drink from one is to be healed, body and soul. Further along this path where
she would take the picture, if she walked long enough and could find it, is an
ancient place called Gleize Pause. No
one recognizes the language anymore, nor the meaning of these words. They name
a simple crumbling circle of mossy rock among the trees.
She would choose a clear day. She
would take one perfect color picture of all of this for him and would write on
the back: “Here’s the best I could do.” And then she would walk back to town.
*****
THE
STORY BEHIND THE ESSAY
This is the first piece I ever published. I have lived
abroad in France three times, each time for a year, and this essay is the
product of two of those years. Each “exposure” is something that happened in
Paris or Tours where I studied for a time, or in the southwest, in the Béarn,
where I lived and taught high school English for a year. I used to marvel that
the children at the school could concentrate at all with the Pyrenees right outside
the window on the southern horizon. While I was abroad I took notes and tried
to write, but when I came back and began an MFA program, all I seemed to have
was a bunch of fragments. I printed them out and played with their order on the
floor of my apartment. I didn’t know a lot about lyric essays at the time, but
have since come to embrace the form. There is so much implied, so much elided,
in white space, and this space is not unlike the space between cultures and
languages. The white spaces in lyric essays are sites of graceful slippage from
one thought to another, one moment to another, the pieces connected sometimes
only by juxtaposition. In the end I found that there were strands in the images,
characters and themes that repeated, and these strands could be braided to give
a sense both of place and of story and of a whole. The title came later, only
after I had whittled the images down to twenty-five. I liked the idea of a roll
of film (there still was film then), of a roll of twenty-four that somehow,
magically, allowed one extra shot, an unexpected gift of an image.
Deborah Tall accepted this piece for the Seneca Review, and not very long after
she passed away. I spent that summer reading everything of hers I could get my
hands on, partly to learn about the person who had given me my first break,
partly to thank her by honoring the work she left behind. I like to think this
essay is for her and also for the man who shared the crêpe and sent those flowers.
*****
ABOUT
CHRISTIANE BUUCK
Christiane Buuck’s
fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The
Seneca Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, Cutthroat and The Sun, among others. She earned an MFA
from the University of Arizona, and completed a creative writing Fulbright to
France. She teaches writing at Ohio State University, and is at work on her
first novel.
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