Snow, dust and cinnamon.Leonora Carrington, “The Stone Door” (1976).
“Ch’est à cauje d’a guerre, m’chieu’.”
It’s because of the war — it seemed to be the excuse for every failure and shortcoming in the village, from the lack of sheets at the inn to the erratic water-supply in the cottage he had rented for the summer. Sometimes, when he turned a tap, there was nothing at first but a long, almost bat-like squeak, followed by a series of staccato thumps in the pipes, now fading, now strengthening, till at last the tap condescended to release a thread of discolored water, which might begin flowing normally thereafter or cease completely while the pipes played their tune again.
“Ch’est à cauje d’a guerre, m’chieu’.”
Each time he heard the words, spoken in that odd, unclassifiable accent, peculiar even for Averoigne, the desire strengthened in him to seize whatever greybeard had uttered them by the throat and shake him till his teeth rattled, shouting at him the while that the war had been eight years over, had been fought away far up north, and had, besides, little obvious bearing on the water-pipes or the giant guêpier in the garden. In the end he had decided to smoke out the wasps himself, welcoming the exercise after a morning of concentrated writing. But when he approached the nest, hugging the instruments of destruction to his chest, he saw with a certain relief that his assault would be redundant: the wasps that flew in and out, far fewer than on his brief survey at the beginning of the week, wore miniature pelisses of some pale fungus and the long grass beneath the nest was littered with vespine corpses.
The zoom of departure-and-arrival had a puzzled or despondent note in it, too, quite unlike the aggressive vigor he had noted previously, and the nest itself, buzzing on a greatly reduced chord, seemed to release a spice of dissolution, dry and funerary, as though it were ready to fall apart at any moment. “Infecté,” he thought with satisfaction, turning away to return the newspaper, canister of oil, and matches to the cottage. But the garden-hut caught his eye as he turned, and when he had replaced his materia vespicidæ he came out again in his oldest pair of gloves. He had wanted exercise to clear his brain for the afternoon and the weeds around the hut would do even better than the wasps’-nest. He had not even seen inside it yet, for heaven’s sake: the weeds grew especially thick in front of the door, sealing it almost as effectively as a lock.
When he set to work on them he found some too tough, too firm-rooted, to yield easily to tugging and tearing, and went to fetch a knife from the cottage. After that he had little trouble, whistling as he cut them away, till shortly after one o’clock he was loosening the soil beneath the foot of the door, jabbing and turning it with the tip of the knife, then taking the loop of old rope that formed the handle. He tugged cautiously and though the door would only come part-way open, he was able to thrust his head through the gap and survey the interior of the hut, dimly lit through a stained, weed-obscured, oddly low window. The hut was empty, he thought for a moment, feeling the sweat on his forehead peel off into its dry, dusty air, but then he saw, with great surprise, that there was a bicycle leaning upright against the wall opposite the window, black-enameled and of curiously slender, almost skeletal, appearance, so that he had mistaken it, at first glance, for a patterning of shadows projected by the weeds that crowded the window.
He seized the edge of the door and tugged at it, trying to open the thing further, but it had jammed and he had to spend a further five minutes loosening the soil and slicing through weed-roots before he tug it further open and slip his body through the gap to examine the bicycle. He grunted softly to himself as he stooped over it. It really was a beauty, but he had never heard of the manufacturer whose name flowed in elegant silver script up the cross-fork: Méphisto de Vyones. He stroked its warm black enamel for a moment, then pulled the bike from the wall to test the pedals and chain. They turned sweetly, smoothly, releasing a sweet, almost dizzying, scent of oil, and everything, even the tyres, seemed in perfect working order, though heaven knew how long it had been sitting in the hut. His right leg twitched with the desire to mount and ride, and though he told himself not to be foolish — there was a chapter of his book to complete and he had intended to devote the afternoon and early part of the evening to it — he found himself sliding the bicycle through the door and half-wheeling, half-carrying it across the weed-choked garden to the path, wherealong he wheeled it to the thick white dust of the road.
Just a brief spin, he promised himself. It would clear his head and return him with renewed vigor to his work. Over his right leg went and with a sigh of pleasure he was off. How well the bike handled, and how quickly he picked up speed! But something had not lasted well in the hut: when he tested the bell, working it vigorously one, twice, thrice, he heard nothing.
“Ch’est à cauje d’a guerre, m’chieu’,” he muttered to himself, then laughed. He was already five hundred mètres from the cottage, he saw with a glance over his shoulder, but he decided to ride as far as the river before he returned. The bike was really was a delight to ride, making nothing of the dust that choked the road and the irregular tarmac beneath it. Swirling grey shadows suddenly patterned the dust and looking up, lifting himself from the seat to really work at the pedals, he saw a skein of crows circling overhead.
“Bonjour, mes frères!” he called up to them. “You will have to fly hard and fast to keep up with me today!”
Yes, he felt fifteen again, thirteen even, with a whole golden day of riding ahead of him, while the guns muttered and mumbled on the horizon, like toothless, blind old women, preoccupied with some old feud, some forgotten scandal. Reines-des-prés, white-gold and fleecy, lined both sides of the road down to the river, filling the air with sweetness. He tilted his head back, fully confident in the bike (in his bike), and allowed the scent to pour directly into his nostrils, filling his lungs with its nectar. Through half-closed eyes he saw that the crows were gone and in response, though he was unsure why, his hand worked the bell again. Feeling a little drunk on flower-scent, he brought his head forward. Imagine some race of air-ghosts, he thought to himself, feeding on odors, half-visible in certain lights, at certain hours. An idea for a short story, peut-être?
Here was the bridge, humpbacked over a shrunken tributary of the Isoile whose name he had forgotten, and here he would stop and turn back. Yes, here he would stop, here turn back, certainly he would, but in truth it was not until late evening that he returned over the bridge and down the road to his cottage, pedaling wearily between the low, palely-glimmering walls of meadow-sweet as stars throbbed like jewel-hearts through rents in the clouds above. There was no mountain of such size in Averoigne, he was sure of it, but his thighs and hands and buttocks assured him equally well that the bicycle had brought him to one nonetheless and that he had climbed it almost to the snowline, riding less a road than a track, then less a track than a trail, then not even a trail. The bike had asked of him only propulsion: it, not he, had chosen the route, and he thought that the two of them would be climbing the mountain still, riding up as smoothly over snow and ice as previously they had over scree and bog, had he not leant forward and whispered urgently to it, pleading that he was almost at the end of his tether.
So the bike had relented, temporarily, and allowed him to return. He worked the bell as he rode between the meadow-sweet, yawning, almost dizzy with fatigue. But the bell was not silent, it merely rang on a note too high for human ears. The crows had been summoned by it, and so had other birds on the mountain. If they had been birds. Tomorrow, or the day after, if the bike allowed him a full day to recover, he would see them again. Ici, his cottage at last, et là, he was allowed to dismount at last. He wheeled the bike up the path, but turned it back to face the road before he leant against the wall of the cottage, ready for tomorrow morning or the day after’s. It would want to watch the road during the night, he knew, gazing thereon with a lamp-eye that was no more blind than the bell was dumb.