Where the squirrels and sangliers play

     At seven hundred and eighty metres altitude April is stomping off the snow against the doorstep of her old, stone house.  It has been a slow, warming trudge of a morning to the seam of the mountain and back down again.  Opening the tatty shutters this morning, a great joy had swung into her.  A virgin snow coldly protected every inch of the world outside her window. The still leafless trees held bundles of it in their forks, the ground was tucked up tight beneath it, and even the rabbits’ water bottles had their little crowns.  The birds still sang which pleased April.  After all, it was spring, the month before her month; this heap of snow was just a surprise.  She filled up the stove with logs and left the only other human in the house that morning sleeping.  Like a snowball gathering girth, she rolls through the house acquiring a jumper and a coat here, gloves and a scarf there until rotund and ready she throws herself into the crisp light of morning.

     She bleats past the sheep.  Most of them have taken refuge during the night in their cabin, but a few shelter by the exterior walls, licking at the blanket they find at their feet.  They raise their snouts and bleat back at her.  She follows the track that they have all made with their feet, paws and hooves, up through the chestnut grove.  April’s lungs are cold and strong.  They build up a rhythm with her feet – tight and hot – which sees her over and across the spiky broom.  The balm of snow has deftly done away with the sores scratched into the earth by the “sanglier-piggies”.  It was Christophe, her son, who had named the wild boar – perpetrators of such digging and delving – in his bi-lingual fashion.  Living on a mountain side with a mother and a father who didn’t speak the same language provided him with great silences to avoid.  He would absent himself frequently and explore the larger territory about him, full of un-sourced noises.  He would hunt for the piggies with sticks and good-will, chase squirrels up their trees and paddle in the Radha-Krishna stream.  This time it had been his mother who had given the stream its name from memories she hadn’t yet shared with him.  Dancing at the board of the trickling stream, she had reminded him of the rabbits he would watch, settled some distance away, foraying in and out of the higher grass, and on sunny days they would twist their little rumps and jump into the air.  They would be absorbed in their delirium of freedom and not notice him.  His mummy rabbit is alone by the board of her stream, she is twitching her hips and swirling her shoulders perhaps in a delirium of solitude.  He is not sure, but he feels like he is watching her from afar, forgotten, and she is beautiful; from her messy curls whose smell he is a part of, down to her square toes.

     Deep in the virgin cold of the morning mountain, her lungs and feet take her on up over the crop of rocks until the end is in sight.  Mirage-like, it shimmers; the rickety fence that someone laboured to put up years ago, so many candles on top of a cake, celebrating the boundary between this valley and the next. It is Christophe that she has been approaching.  April sits between two leaning candles, ablaze with the sunrise and looks down into the other valley.  She sees the electricity works, the service station, the twelve shrines to Marie nestled into the foothills; all spread out on the immense white napkin.  The cleared road curves; a grey ribbon becoming taut as it spans the river and then winds onto the small town where somewhere, safe, is Christophe, her blood, her love.  Feet cold, heart warm, she nestles down to contemplate the scenery and the flickering memories projecting themselves one after the other in the warm cinema of her mind.

     She misses Christophe each and every week.  Christophe, who lives for being outside, has become an inmate of the boarding school in the next valley.  Her wild Christophe gets on the bus each Monday morning, boards all week and returns the Friday evening to his solitary haven and his gleaming mum, who gets to feed him and tuck him up and keep him close. On their side of the valley, there is no human excavation on view.  From their window, simply the trees cross-stitching the mountain for miles and miles.  Christophe comes home, and it is the most beautiful world that April has ever been witness to. Since she made her home here everything had become ultra-vivid; with her cat’s eyes, the moon turned out to be a companion, and with the gecko’s, darting under stones, sprawling in the midday sun, she was entirely at one.  It hadn’t been a choice that came from within, nor had it been completely involuntary that she had flattened her belly to the ground and waited, her eyes rabbit-wide. She knew something was going to happen. Strangely enough, she had been wrestled into this position by a strand of prairie-grass.  Her ears close to the ground, she could hear the crickets choking with leg-rubbing glee and see them launching themselves into space as if it was normal, there above her awkwardly turned head.  Her nose tickled, her legs useless; but she took comfort and called it Love and began to worry about the things that would right themselves and stop being extraordinary if she got up.  No, she would stay here, laying low, a whole new angle from which to see the world.

But even more extraordinary than the fantastic fit into her April shaped den, and the first rush of heightened feelings on finding a perfect mate, had been the descent into something from which Christophe is taken every Monday and returned to every Friday.  With this thought and the morning fire spreading, April bobs down the mountain, feeling wonderfully small.  A descent of a few hundred metres finds her kicking the snow from off her boots against the doorstep. Even after all these years she never expects it to be hostile.  She can’t imagine this vast difference can really exist; the serene cold joy of the morning in her lungs, so full-up that her eyes are icy, and the heavy silence that begins its motor almost as soon as she crosses the threshold.

From this stifling hostility, it takes a long time to come up for air; she can feel the pressure on the back of her neck, the grip on her forehead hairline, and the fight in her coming from nowhere. Another extraordinary thing: there is never one bruise. He always turns her in such a fashion as to leave not one bruise.  Or was it that she turned convivially, after flattening her belly to the ground, her eyes rabbit wide, waiting?  Could she be at all to blame?

     They had asked her later, why didn’t you give him one?  She lost all ability to move her mouth. Didn’t they understand the vast serenity of the mountain or that she had become intrinsic to it? Intrinsic to this peace that sets in far from human intervention.  They had just been two souls trying out an angle.  Imagine her surprise when he had started chipping away at her as if she was as noble and resigned as a tree.  All she had to do was to understand and not move. Stay there where he had put her.  Not get up.  But all the time, unbeknownst to him, April was more the curve of a squirrel’s brush, more the tangle of sheep’s wool, the tenacity of ivy even after it is stripped down.

     They had even asked her, why didn’t you go to the police? Again, she is dumbfounded.  Feels again the shame at having once, long ago, tried to tell someone that all was not well in the cross channel union, could someone please help her please, because she didn’t know so many folk around here, her home was the mountain now, and her mother tongue a stranger. But she had done her best to express herself, standing in front of the counter, where a poster was pinned at the height of her crotch, so one was obliged to bend down to read it.  April had done so whilst she was waiting for the tense silence to subside and the moving about of paper to stop and the eyes to raise in her direction.  It had decreed in black and white - and colours filling in the cartoon scene of domestic violence - that a man may not abuse his wife, may not leave her in any way un-intact – be it via verbal abuse, psychological, physical.  Verbal, psychological, physical.

1. Verbal

2. Psychological

3. Physical

But the wolves had apparently not read their own posters and leering from behind the counter - or were they smiling the only way they knew how? – April had found herself cornered, wide-eyed, belly down.  It had been a long time ago, when Christophe was still small enough to be bundled into a car without knowing.  Okay, so fear did not get written down in the ledgers of law and order.  At least she knew. She had felt thoroughly ridiculous and scurried away with Christophe still sliding about in the unfastened car seat.  She had not been thinking straight, and was glad that when she got home Christophe’s father had not been there to see her so dishevelled.  She had had time to rub away the shame.

    

     Living out a forced position is not without effect; and on righting herself momentarily - for instance, to take part in the summer or welcome people to their home, or go down the mountain to the police station - there was always the tilt inside, the race of sand particles inside a timer that only counted the minutes before she resumed her customary position.

    

When at last she became an old beast that had lost all remembrance of the magic of its limbs, she shepherded herself before a large lady, camouflaged in a room growing around her.  All manner of crazy plants reached out along the limits of this space that boasted a porte-fenetre and a whole wall of windows that let the sun in to nourish this caged jungle. Not many people peered in at them, but April wouldn’t have been surprised.  The woman before her was her own exhibition.  She was made up exotically in perfect keeping with her environment.  Her coffee was brought to her by the people who worked here, it was obviously exactly the required nourishment for her eyes were bright and a pungent healthy scent exuded from her even in this moment of non-movement.  So, here April was, at the bee all and end all much like Dorothy found herself before the Wizard of Oz.  A new heart?  Courage? Even some brute rationality, please, to make some sense of this human quagmire she had sunk into, would be a treat, thank you.  She does not remember the finer details, just the general mess. He (the predator) had started to perform his uncouth behaviour in front of their son and had undone an understanding (a done-up-standing) that had erstwhile had them rooting for the same cause.  At least that.  At least Christophe between them, their cub, their joy. How could she explain to him, who had no ear for her language, that this couldn’t go on? How could she, who had begun to dream in his language now, dreams that made no sense, tell him that this had to end? Everything had unravelled, and with her useless tongue fatly lolling out of her mouth, she must have buried her head in the earth. Où est Christophe?  The creature emerges slowly from the background snarls of red, sprays of yellow, and reassures her. And despite diversa specie, April comes to have confidence in her. They meet regularly. And slowly, miraculously, like a snake responding to the charmer, she begins to uncurl.  From her slouched position, April begins to feel her spine.  The musky voice wafting out from between two glossy lips is enveloping her, deeming her to be lion strong.  “One fine morning, you get up…” she purrs.  Yes, April must go back to her mountain and rein in the threat. Protect her young.  She leaves the jungle room for the last time, swinging her arms, one fine morning, you get up; the guffaw of a mantra drumming out her steps back to the forest.

*

There are many ways to signal the end of the affair.  In the concrete world of her earliest years there had been postcards of poetry and remorse and then later, sometimes, a just not turning up; an all-encompassing emptiness rather than two pint glasses of Guinness, froth-stained, emptying and two hearts hovering.  This time, it would have to be different.  After all, there was blood involved, and a level of altitude that befitted them both.  There would be a fight for rights; parental, territorial.

  Perhaps he had found out about her weekly visits to a place way outside his jurisdiction.  Anyway, he had let her fall into thinking that he understood that even in this devilish game they were playing out in the middle of nowhere, there were still some rules that had to be adhered to.  He had let her think he understood, once again, tenderness.  He had let her kneel, half hoping, in the space between two pairs of foreign eyes that are seeing the same thing, but then, cunning as a human, he tore her down.  Such was his nature that he couldn’t help himself taking up his old habits. What he didn’t know was that April had become strong as a lion, quick as a squirrel, and staunch as a sanglier-piggy.

     As she approaches the doorstep, knowing exactly the noise her foot will make against it, the snow tumble, the feeling; and she also knows that her snake charmer had been right!  And that it had been this morning.  She had got up.  And left the only other person in the house sleeping.  Left him completely.  And suddenly, she cannot wait to extract herself deftly from this impossible life that someone from her own species had deemed suitable for her.  This time, there is to be no mistaking the perpetrator and the act.  She is ready to make her mark.  Into her arms he will go, for the last time, and she will administer her ointment for all those invisible bruises. The striking out of a beast used to being the prey is an ugly sight but she does it well.  We won’t go into the hairy details.  We’ll leave them to it, at seven hundred and eight two metres altitude, where the squirrels and sangliers play.  Suffice to say that April is hot-blooded and human and as taut as a naked branch unmistakably waiting for the buds to push through.