Image from Shutterstock
Synopsis
Vagabond ex-soldier Edouard walks the countryside of 18th century France believing his journey will be complete when his life adds up to a meaningful and entertaining story. When he meets the last survivor of a terrible famine, a priest alone in an empty cathedral, their unusual friendship will force Edouard to ask what we gain – and lose – by seeking the story of our lives.
Chapter 10
They eye me as I walk towards them. But I must be so worn in appearance that all see I pose no threat, I am no bandit. And that appearance of mine must be very sorry indeed, for I have known bandits, and they are most ragged in face, tattered in clothing, and thin in frame. It helps that I come along an open road and alone. But degradation works in one’s favor at times.
One stands near the road, attempting to press an old rusty hoop onto a dilapidated and splaying barrel. Beside him a young girl, perhaps seven years of age, carrying her baby sister on her hip. When I greet them, a few others come around.
They have seen the smoke rising from the town, now far behind me in the distance, and no one but me has come along the road from there this day. I clear my throat and explain to them what I saw. They do not ask who the murdered gentleman and the lady were, they already seem to know. And they show no horror or other excitement, they make no comment, or even change their faces. They will perhaps talk quietly about it later amongst themselves.
I remark upon the curiosity of so recently having seen another carriage not attacked but held in reverence in a different town, though in a place somewhat more remote. To this they also have little response. All events to them seem to be part of a whole. It is the hardy peasant response I expected, though I am disappointed when my tales are not better enjoyed.
Upon my leaving, they give me buckwheat cakes.
Back again into deep countryside. There is nothing perturbed here among trees and sky and grasses. Nature carries on its celestial brooding.
It is curious how, when we look at the earth, at Nature, we are somehow proud.
Great hunger suddenly comes upon me. My stomach knows I carry food.
Alette – the sheep’s leg. How amusing I find it now!
I was very young – after father died, but before Pons came? Was it? –
Now, we – my mother, my brother, and I – had gone an especially long time without eating much more than bean soup. Our cousins had slaughtered a sheep, and through some kind of miraculous negotiation to tease out their reluctant empathy by promising a barter in some far distant future, mother came home with a leg of it. This thin leg from an undernourished beast which died young was nevertheless more meat than we had seen in at least a year. My eyes still widen just thinking on the image of that raw leg lying upon the table. There it sat, next to Edouard’s billhook, in the light of late evening coming through the open door. We’d have eaten the leg uncooked. We tried to ignore it as we went about the last chores of the evening, coming and going, snatching glances of it now and again, thinking of the feast to come. How silent with expectation we were.
And then it was gone.
Gone. Not on the table where it had been. The billhook in the same place. Nothing else there. The three of us stood facing each other in bewilderment, too weak to show outward signs of the panic we felt. The only sound was the crackling of the fire we had prepared to cook the thing.
There were few places to look for the leg. It was inexplicable. “It was here, wasn’t it?” “Did you move it?” “No. Where would I move it to?” Had our starved minds dreamed its presence? It was an unlikely thing – would our cousins ever have given us a sheep’s leg, even under the condition that one day we would have to repay them an entire sheep? How would that ever happen? Had it all been a fantasy?
No. There was a better explanation which came over us in a feeling of lowliness, of shame, of believing that this event was true to us, to our family, it was what creatures like ourselves deserved – disgraces of this kind. That was the answer to the mystery. We were the miserable – not in a temporary state, but one of God’s races. And when you are a member of that race, there is no asking, “Why us?” It is given, it is done.
Then Alette came in with a lively trot, her head low, avoiding our faces, shifting her black eyes from side to side. And she most obscenely ran her tongue back and forth from one side of her mouth to the other. The sheep’s leg must have been delicious, because the lingering taste made it completely impossible for her to behave normally, though she clearly knew that she must try. In my weariness I was absorbed by the idea that even dogs know it when they do evil, though their dissembling be comically weak. Like Pons, altogether.
She had come back too soon. She tried to make it to the corner to lie down inconspicuously, walking quietly between us – but we set upon her, screaming and beating her across the back, Edouard grabbing his billhook as she ran wildly about the place trying to reach the door. Once out, Edouard and I pursued her down the hill, hoping she would lead us to the remains of the leg in whatever burrow she had hastened to for her meal, even if all we found was the chewed bare bone. We would have eaten the hoof. Perhaps she already did. She was hungry too.
How I laugh at it today, Alette slinking in like a comic street actor performing at carnival, our raving pursuit of her. Of course, the natural conclusion would have been to eat the dog, but we didn’t. We got by, I don’t remember how, but things improved for a time, and before they worsened again, Alette had wisely taken her leave of us. She knew it wasn’t going to get any better than that leg.
It's warmer today. A well-travelled road, cart tracks in the patches of loose soil. Foot prints heading both directions.
That gentleman, speaking to his lady while on the brink of annihilation beside their upturned carriage. I have seen others on that thin edge of the very world, and yet still wonder how true their apprehension of their state can be, when forced there so suddenly, and early in life. Does a man ever truly give up hope? Truly know he will die soon, really believe it? I think I would feel the executioner’s blade shaving the back of my neck and still think, “Perhaps it will slip and cut the rope binding my hands behind my back . . . ” Belief is the hardest fighter, resisting the siege until the true and utter end. I used to wonder if something of the beyond did not leak into the near-dead, tincturing one’s disbelief with a measure of true faith, and succor. But I have seen enough of these scenes now to say only. Sometimes.
Martyrs – I expect it would be a relief, martyrdom. The paintings on the walls of churches with their bright colors: A man hanging on an upside-down crucifixion, or with arrows shot into the side, or the two-handled serrated blade splitting the chest, the persecutors sawing from either end, rocking back and forth. In martyrdom a point is made. A life is brought to a point. And that would be a satisfaction. In other deaths, life just lets you go quietly, as if it didn’t matter, as if it doesn’t want to be disturbed.
A thief in a tumbrel, hands bound behind his back, being driven to the gallows. Along the way he is celebrated, he is cursed, he is spat upon, then they hand him fruit, tankards of beer for the executioner to pour down his throat, as others pelt him with stones. He makes speeches angry then kind, commends his soul to God, rails against the law, asks for paternosters to be said for him, damns the people as useless witnesses, screaming, You will be doomed to lead apes in hell. And then, forced to climb the double-breadth ladder alongside the executioner up to the crossbar to be hanged.
Another man, a killer, tied to the ground, his limbs broken with the wheel. The wagon wheel gripped by the spokes and held high by the executioner and then smashed down onto bones, section by section, feet then legs then arms then finally, the head.
A bandit, kneeling, neck exposed, the executioner raising his broadsword behind him.
Perhaps in their last moments they are resigned. The hanged man released below the crossbar finally feeling the hairy rope cinch around the windpipe.
The dead are our kin. We know them all through life. In the village a new death is never far from today. So much transit between us. As we walk, the dead and their world keep abreast of us on the towpath on the opposite side of the canal. Death is ever fresh, the way to the beyond ever busy. Ghosts.
A curve ahead, around a dense stand of trees.
Ghosts.
Another memory, quite a tableau.
After the battle, the wounded man, his shirt pasted to his chest with blood, his sleeve torn and muddied, its contents, if any, uncertain; all living left in him seemingly squeezed up into his beseeching eyes, now having to turn himself over to his fellow men, barely able to speak, his disbelief watched by the calm soldiers standing around him offering him nothing, unmoving, unspeaking, only observing as if studying their own limit, utterly used to death taunting us by dithering; the standing soldiers acting as if this is the only way to give full due to the way things are, to be at all in alignment with them. The only way is to deny to this shocked victim even the slight attention afforded the less wounded.
“You have to adopt some of death to get along in life,” the captain once told me. “The more the better.”
And now, around the bend in the road, I find another wide arc of unbroken highway along the edge of a wood. Another great open stretch to cover, with nothing resembling a destination in it. A slight tremble of disheartenment, but again you have to cross the terrain, so you simply do it, with your steps, putting yourself into it, accepting the incremental, and letting that take half the burden.
Now many who have died and then returned to life report the existence of a tunnel, which would convey them to the afterlife. This is a commonplace; few doubt the existence of this tunnel; it seems reasonable enough to us. But I have wondered why we, people, that is, would be forced to pass through a tunnel, as if illegally crossing a border, as if moving the soul to Heaven is the same as smuggling, like bringing in a small parcel of salt without paying the tax. If each soul has its own tunnel to get to the Beyond, then indeed, the Creator’s angels would be hard put to stop us from getting through. Perhaps there is but one tunnel, though no one ever speaks of seeing anyone else in their tunnel, while at any given moment you would think there would be a goodly amount of traffic.
Arriving in Eternity by popping one’s head up from a hole, emerging into the walled city from a grimy siege tunnel. And how long is this tunnel? Is it free of obstacles? I dislike the idea, my experience of tunnels has not been pleasant.
Alas, no one has traversed the tunnel in its entirety and then returned to provide us a full reconnaissance.
Perhaps it is in harmony with other tunnels we know, the umbilical, the birth route. If birth has a decidedly feminine element, perhaps death does, too.
Men! It is said that ours is the key role in the endless cycle of life. We have our cocks, shaped to fill the womb, and the seed to give spark to life; women provide the fertile ground. And yet, I must admit, I feel no rich magic in my role in creation. I don’t know why. No men I have known feel it, either. It is too burdenless. And it’s a shame because it forces us men to seek our meaning elsewhere, in invented games of dire severity. Good Lord don’t abandon men to devise their own meaning – they’ll do it with fiendish ingenuity, and sensing the need for magnitude, they’ll spare no blood in it.
But I rove.
Up ahead there.
Out of the woods they come, two other wanderers, they seem to have been walking through the trees and not along any path I can see. Onto the road, now they come in my direction. Others like me, vagabonds. One barefoot, one in wooden shoes. I am on my guard, but they will soon see there is nothing to be gained from robbing me. I have nothing. Old boots, I suppose. Buckwheat cakes. These might be worthy of some violence.
But as they draw nearer some realization comes to each of us, that we are safe with each other.
After some grappling with dialect and accent, we are able to speak with one another. One of them gives off a tremendous smell of shit; at first, I can’t tell which of them it is. I examine them, first the hatless, sandy-haired one, quite a bit younger than the other, a pale bulge under his left eye. He wears the shoes. The older one is mostly bald and has a head that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, like a horse collar hung upside-down. His cheeks are sallow, he has missing teeth, his eyes are deeply lined, and his voice is hoarse, but one can see he is not actually an old man. It takes a moment, then it becomes clear: It’s the young one who stinks. Had I not seen them coming I would have smelled them. He may well know the use of leaves to clean himself after shitting, but he clearly shat in his trousers at some point in the recent past. These trousers were so meshed with shit and other soils that it would be impossible to discern their original color, and less possible to clean them. But it is fascinating how this odor fills the space around him and hangs so obstinately there, as if it were angry at us – like a city guardsman with cruel eyes waiting for you to leave, threatening the use of force.
Still, it feels good to use my voice. I tell them there are some generous people in the direction they are heading. They might give them food. The two men nod wearily. We move to where the ground rises upwards sharply beside the road and sit against the slope.
I ask, “What’s down the road?” I nod in the direction I am heading.
“More,” the older walker says.
“More?” I say.
“More of the world.”
“Well, that’s just what I was looking for!” I say, but they don’t laugh. “Otherwise, I suppose I would have to turn around.” A pause. “Though first I’d have to keep going and have a peek at the spot where it ends.” They look away from me, review the countryside.
I tell them, “You’ll find more of the world in this direction, too,” pointing along the stretch of road I’ve just travelled. I tell them about the town back there, which they will reach soon enough, about the carriage attacked.
“These are terrible times,” the older one says blandly.
It pains me to agree with him. These are the only times I’ve been given, and I am reluctant to give up on them. And in so doing, on myself.
“Not long ago, in a smaller town, I saw a carriage of a similar kind surrounded by the townspeople, who reverenced it.”
“These are terrible times,” he says again.
With that, there doesn’t seem much to discuss. But then he goes on. “I had a small piece of land, rented others. For a while I saved. I planned to buy another parcel I could rent out. I knew which one, too. Good harvests then. But the price of grain was each time a little lower. The rents stayed high. I always had to sell my grain early, cheap. Then it pleased the Lord to take my wife and my two children. My neighbors helped with the work, but I only sank deeper. I had to leave.”
Then he says, pointing to his companion, “This one is an orphan. Could not stop thieving. They flogged him, banished him, but always he returned. How many times? How many times were you banished?”
“Four,” the shit-smelling youth says.
“But he always came back. Where else would he go? And what else would he do there but thieve again? It’s mainly clothes you thieved, isn’t it? Tried to sell them. Shirts. Trousers. The last time he was caught, they said it would be the gallows if he came back again, they’d hang him if he just showed his face, stealing or not.”
Would that he would steal some trousers now. And they could flog and banish the old pair. Demand they repent before burning them at the stake. Skip the repentance, hurry up the burning.
It is my turn, and I tell them how I came to this life on the road. Then I feel the urge to un-bosom myself to them, peasant walkers like myself. Do they perhaps feel as I do? Isn’t it rising up in everyone as it is in me, like sap in trees?
I say to them, “Maybe now something can become of us.”
They don’t understand. Silence.
“Now that we have nothing.”
They look at me.
I say, “Not very long ago, I stayed at an inn – ”
“– an inn!” They look at each other.
“Yes, I arrived along the road late in the night, with one final coin in my pocket, the last remaining from my soldiering – ”
“– and what was it like?”
“Soldiering?”
“The inn.”
“The inn? Not much better than sleeping on the forest floor – equally clean, I’d say, and more crowded – but an amusing thing did occur – ”
“– You went to an inn. And they let you stay.”
“Yes, I had money, but just one copper coin. And there I spent it. And this I did on purpose, to rid myself of the thing.”
“It would have happened anyway.”
“What?”
“You would have lost that last coin.”
“Well – yes. But I made it happen sooner.” There was a still moment. “I did it on purpose. So I could truly wander free. To see what would become of me.” I think they understand me now. They are walkers, too. The desperation which leads to walking makes a man reflect on his destiny, perhaps imagining for the first time that he has one.
“It’s madness,” the older one finally says.
The young one says, “We want to stay alive. We want to eat.” He makes a gesture with his right hand, the finger tips brought together into a point and aims it towards his mouth. For emphasis, he moves the hand closer to his mouth, acting it out like a wobbly marionette.
“This is what becomes of you,” the older one says, gesturing at the three of us, at the state of us.
I say, “In my village, I faced only death, coming sooner or later. Like the two of you. I never felt my flesh fully on me, it was like a borrowed jacket. But now something else can happen.”
“What can happen?”
“I’m not sure.” It crosses my mind that, if I knew, it wouldn’t be true. It’s uncertainty that seems to count in the matter.
The older one says, “I’m not sure either.” He turns to the younger one. “Are you sure?”
The young one says, “I’m not sure.”
I say, “Things happen.”
“You starve,” the older one says.
I say, “Fortunes change for some. You have seen how some even leave the land, the towns grow.”
He says, “And the devil can run and shit at the same time.”
I say, “You once wanted to buy land.”
“The Lord found it convenient to take my family and what land I had.”
“But you wanted to try.”
“Only to get what I could, under God, the law and the King, long may he live.”
He thinks for a moment. He says, “There is only so much money in the world, and for me to get some of it someone else must lose theirs, and I never claimed anything not mine. We only deserve what has always by rights been ours.”
I say, “Yes. Many say these things. I don’t know where wealth comes from. But it seems like there is more of it than when we were boys.”
He shakes his head. “God forbid it. More money is more wickedness. A world of endless wealth is a world of endless evil. Greed would be freed and grow to take over the world. I can rest better in a world of few rich, and many poor.”
The young one nods agreement, but mechanically, the way one reacts to a thing he’s heard many times before, from someone he doesn’t any longer bother to disagree with. I still think they know of what I speak but don’t admit it.
I say, “Hold, there – I also do not seek riches. I had to leave my home or starve. A peasant soldier, I could not rise in the army. People look upon me now with suspicion, a dirty unknown foreigner with no useful trade. And yet, I can obtain something.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can obtain my own true tale, one belonging only to me. And this I could not do before, in my village.”
“This one breaks three kinds of wind,” the older one says to the younger. “Harebrained,” that one says.
Here I am distracted by his misuse of the term harebrained, as I hear many doing nowadays, employing it to mean stupid, presumably because the hare's brain is very small. And no hare was ever known to do anything especially guileful. How easy is the slippage from a fine meaning to a lesser one, as here, where we lose the better use of calling someone harebrained, that they are anxious, skittish, and not much given to prolonged consideration of a possible course of action. As is a hare. For instance, I may be mistaken in my ideas, even stupid, but I think all would agree I am not harebrained.
I say, “I’m saying that I can find a life which will have a shape. This will be my tale, the story of my life.” A new thought comes to mind, too quickly for me to mention: The story will tell me who I am.
The older one turns back to me. “A tale? You want a tale? Go to a fair!”
“You won’t be able to eat this tale,” ventures the younger.
The elder man says, “It will be a very short tale. You’ll be dead before it is spun. All of us will.”
And then, upon careful thought, the young one helpfully adds, “Perhaps you should become a bandit. The people tell tales of them.”
His companion laughs – “Listen to him for advice on the lawless life! A rag-thief! Caught and flogged four times!”
He turns to me. “Here’s a story for you – you sleep in the woods, and a forest spirit turns you into a goat.” Now the young one laughs, and I am forced to laugh along.
“Here’s another,” the young one says. “An angel in a cave grants you a wish, anything you desire. What will it be? A bag of gold? A great feast?”
“ – He’d wish for a tale to tell!” the older one says. “And the angel would tell him one – about meeting an angel in a cave!” It’s witty, I have to admit. And, come to think of it, true. I would ask for my tale.
It’s clear I am ridiculous to them. They will talk about me for days. I give it another try.
“That’s good, but I’m only saying – ”
“ – Keep looking!” the older one says. “Perhaps you’ll find a giant to slay! We passed one a ways back, and he was sleeping!”
I suddenly realize that I am tired. The day begins to wane, but the smell of shit from the young one somehow does not. It has a strange thickness which doesn’t thin, it blocks the wind. It will remain long after he is dead. He may have inherited it, passed down through generations.
Still, I believe they must have sensed what I have sensed. I cannot tell them my whole mind, but when the laughter dies down, I say, “Very well, but I think you know what I mean.”
The young one looks at the other to see how he’ll react. The elder looks not at me but straight out in front of himself and hurls out the words, “You’re a fool!” He’s speaking to me but seems to be addressing everyone like me, everyone who could possibly be like me, as if looking at them out in the distance, all of dumb mankind. I make to speak but he roars me down – “We want to work. To eat. Not to talk with fools.”
Well. The desperation which leads to walking makes a man reflect on his destiny, and perhaps he imagines for the first time that he has one. Or that he doesn’t.
To this man my ideas are only excrements of curiosity. They make him angry. Why speak of becoming to someone who feels the future is being thrust upon him? I would say he is mad at the future, since it promises nothing, but it’s not so – he has no relationship whatsoever with the future. He is angry that the present isn’t preserving the past, when he had his family and could feed them through his toil. When he could stay on his land. I know the feeling of it, his meager rights have been subverted, what he sells is no longer enough to pay someone to plough the fields he works, or to buy tools, or to pay his rents.
His young companion looks away from both of us, but then he looks back at me briefly. As if to see what a person like me looks like. As if to confirm that we really exist. He studies the possibility, but only momentarily.
We pass a moment in silence, until the older one slaps his palms against his thighs, rubs his hands up and down his trousers. To regain their comradery, I tell them how, when staying at the inn I had mentioned earlier, I captured a cockroach and considered throwing him out the second-story window, but instead let him go. When I left, the innkeeper’s wife caught the same roach and threw it from the same window, and it struck me square on the back of the head as I was passing by below. It left her young daughter rocking with laughter.
The two smile in amusement, myself a fool, but now the usual kind.
The young one says, “That’ll send you on your way.”
“Perhaps she thought you forgot your roach,” the older one added. “That was very nice of her. You two obviously went together.”
The younger one says, “Yes, where is he now? Do you have him on you? Or will he be coming up the road soon?”
“He’s probably back inside the inn now, sleeping by the fire,” the older one says. “While you sleep in the woods.” Then more occurs to him. “You see – the cockroach bastard moved up in the world! Just like you said!”
They laugh, I along with them. The younger one says, “Don’t worry, you’ll get another one! Perhaps several!”
The elder now stands up straight, shaking his head, and is followed by the young one. The sun nears the horizon. I see it behind them, as if trying to get a word in. It is time to go.
“The roads here are much improved,” the older one says, looking down. “We’ll look for these people you spoke of, though we can’t approach in darkness.”
I wish them luck. They both say to me in their turn, “Good luck.”
They look at each other, and the older one nods at the younger one’s feet. The latter slips off the wooden shoes and the older one steps into them. They walk away.
As I start walking again, I consider how much farther I should go today, and firmly decide to accept any place amongst the trees I see which appears convenient for passing the night. It is some time before the stench of the young man’s trousers dies away. I need to get out of its range. I only hope it isn’t following me.
“It pleased the Lord,” the one said.
“The Lord found it convenient.”
What is convenient, fitting, I suppose is pleasing. At least to the Lord.
The couple from the carriage. Perhaps that is what the man said to his wife. It pleases the Lord.
The people always only want what is considered theirs, what was promised them – what was given to their forefathers is a promise to them also – and they want nothing else.
I feel this way also.
I too pursue my birthright: My self.