Four Small Paragraphs

THIS IS THE landscape where he came to rest: the earth, ochre and rust, that has been used and re-used, passed through mouth and stomach and gut and bone, and out again into earth and then into stem and bud and ripe fruit, then harvested and bruised and fermented for a moment of warmth; the pruned vines like twisted fists, the unclipped ones with their long yellowish intertwined fingernails, like those of potatoes in the dark; and the light inside everything, oozing up from the furrows like juice from a cut peach, glistening along the leaves like the slippery backs of snails, like licked lips. When it rains, the dust of the Sahara falls from the south wind, spotting the white plastic patio chairs at the tabac with dried blood. Higher up are the limestone mountains, dry and covered with tough and pungent shrubs, the maquis they’re called, and gullied by time and sparse as aphorism. He liked the harshness of the sun here, or so he said.

In the restaurant he was known as Monsieur Terrasse, an alias to deceive the tourists while he ate his dinner. I almost said terrorists. Famous people don’t wish to be interrupted while chewing, or watched closely while they do it. Neither does anyone else, but there’s less likelihood. In English he was Mr. Patio. Many things are more romantic in French, the word odour for instance. Camus translates as plain flat, but he wouldn’t have minded.

The books in the brick-and-board bookshelves, dismantled, reconstructed, dispersed, it must be thirty years ago, are turning yellow and then brown, crumbling at the edges like fallen leaves, consuming themselves from within. There’s the same odour, a slow acrid burning. Uncompromising, he wished to be; and clear, like the desert light.

On All Souls’ Day the dead are tended. Here it’s a duty. The graves are weeded, and huge bubbles of bright paint bloom beside them: chrysanthemums, purple and orange, yellow and red; and china dahlias too, the colour of last year’s lipstick, and brittle pansies chipped by hail. What he himself has been given is not ornate. Squareness and greyness, the elegance of plainsong, no mottoes. No gilded mementoes, no picture of him in a glassy oval, that quizzical face with its simian postwar brush-cut. What do I remember most clearly, from all those acrid pages? The scene in which a man spits on a woman’s naked body, because she has been unfaithful. What did he mean to convey, to me? Something about betrayal, or else about women’s bodies? He isn’t telling. An abrupt bush is what he has, with dark cryptic foliage, one of the mountain shrubs. No hope, no armfuls of petals. This is what there is, he says, or fails to say. You are what you do. Don’t expect mercy. Later, when I went back, someone had left six withering real roses in a kitchen jar.