Butterflies in November

FORTY-THREE

The mountain road is normally impassable at this time of year because of the snow, but nothing is as it should be any more.

As soon as I reach the outskirts of the town, I see that the summer bungalow has been delivered to its destination. Even though I haven’t set foot here for seventeen years, it all looks familiar to me. The town is a tidy cluster of houses, with no actual centre or square, but a series of four or five parallel roads, one on top of the other, stretching out to the coastline, a bit like the grooves left by a gardening fork across the freshly turned soil of a virgin potato patch. In the furthest groove, closest to the shore, one can make out the colourful rooftops of the oldest corrugated iron houses, as well as the mini-market, co-op and savings bank, behind which are two streets of bungalows, and beyond which again are patches of brown gravel, with a little bit of heather in the summer, and the ravine, as well as the reservoir on top of the mountain road. Most of the inhabitants have tried to build sheltering garden walls to shield themselves from the blasts of the sea on their windows. Nothing grows in the vicinity of the open ocean, no shrubs or flowers, not outdoors at any rate. Indoors, on the other hand, the window views of the menacing blackness of the sea have been obscured by forests of window-sill plants. At this time of the year, every window also carries a shining Christmas star and seven-armed candlestick.

I can see the house from the chalet. It was built in the forties, maybe earlier. It all comes back to me. A group of people has gathered inside. It’s as if everything were filtered through a veil of white silk or film, giving it a soft and blurred appearance, like the fading pages of an old psalm book or an over-exposed photograph. I think I’m in a white knitted woollen sweater. My cousins are also dressed in white, strange as it may sound, white tuxedos, so removed from reality, so close to the memory. Granny is enveloped in light, Granny is actually the sun. There is a large crowd at the funeral reception and everyone is in white, different shades of white, some fabrics are thinner and finer than others, others thicker: wool, cotton, silk, cloth, linen, tweed, polyester, polyviscose, crepe, chiffon, organza, veil, khakis — everything white.

I can only see blurred, slowly moving outlines. Granny is the most out of focus of them all. I watch her fade.

They’ve placed the mobile chalet on the outskirts of the village, just as I’d requested, on a plot of barren land on the edge of the ravine. It stands there aloofly in the dark, segregated from all town planning. Some people may not see it as the ideal setting for a sunny summer holiday, up there on the rocks, and even I wouldn’t walk up there in high heels or in my bare feet after a Christmas ball; but still, it’s better than living down there on the shore, where there was a constant flow of visitors and the constant risk of a knock on the door, at any time of day or night, from one of those strangers who had vanished at sea and left a puddle of water in the hall. The chalet stands solitarily on the western edge of the village, and the church stands equally solitarily to the east, on the other side of the valley, with a Securitas sign on its door.

The village seems deserted at this hour of night. Apart from the screeching of seabirds, everything is steeped in a deadly silence, like the siesta hour of a Mediterranean village. There is no sound of footsteps behind me and yet I know I’m not alone. Here and there, inquisitive eyes peep at me through seven-armed candelabra in the salt-beaten windows. One shouldn’t be fooled by appearances. Even though the streets may be deserted, most of the life of this village takes place behind these walls, where people come to the door just as they are, dressed in soft, baggy garments.

It’s the 25th of November and, as we approach the village from over the mountain road, out of the darkness and rain, it shines like a celestial jewel adorned with precious stones in the middle of the sandy desert. It wouldn’t surprise me if this village were visible from outer space. Every window is decked with multi-coloured Christmas lights, as are the railings of the balconies, porches and steps, even the anchors in the gardens. The boy wakes up when I kill the engine.

“We brighten these dark winter days,” says the man in the mini-market, who sells me milk, bread, cheese and candles, just before closing for the night. Most people add a new set of lights every year, so you can normally tell how long people have been married by the number of sets they have. Just like you can determine the age of a reindeer according to the number of its horns. I ask him if he has any Christmas lights that run on batteries.

“Afraid not, but you can get them at the co-op tomorrow.”

He then asks me if I’m the owner of the summer chalet.

“And you intend to spend your Christmas there alone with a child and no electricity, is that right? We heard rumours that you’d done a runner on some bankrupt company and left your husband to pick up the pieces, that kind of thing. It’ll be a little bit dark and spooky up there on the ravine. We were expecting you three days ago.”

I tell him we took our time to do some sightseeing around the country. “We’re on holiday,” I say, and then add:

“My grandmother and grandfather used to live here.”

Their names don’t ring a bell with him.

“There was no need to bring a house with you,” says the man, “there are plenty of houses for sale in this village. I could have found at least four for you, you could have had a bungalow with a newly tiled bathroom.”

“I wanted to be slightly on the outskirts. I’m not going to settle here.”

The boy points at a handwritten notice, advertising the sale of wooden toys at the old people’s home, which includes an amateurish drawing of a blue van with rubber wheels. I ask the man where I can find them.

“This might not look like the most eventful of towns to an outsider,” says the man, leaning on the counter with both elbows, “but that doesn’t mean that nothing ever happens. Couples split up, have their affairs and make a mess of their lives just as much here as anywhere else, no matter how stunning the nature may be. And occasionally, there are family tragedies that can never be fully explained. Those two brothers who lived on their own, for example. The one who survived was released on parole because the circumstances of the case were unclear, according to the police report. They said it was a case of accidental manslaughter, but the neighbours, who saw the scene of the crime, said it wasn’t a pretty sight and that they’d heard at least seven shots being fired. Those wooden toys are made by the brother who survived, at the old people’s home, or the Geriatric Health Centre, as they call it. That’s where he lives. You can buy one of those vans from him there.”

The man escorts me to the door as I slip on my hood and step out into the rain. I see through the rear-view mirror that he is standing in the yard by the petrol pumps, watching the jeep on its ascent towards the chalet. I think he’s talking into a mobile phone.

I carry the boy in my arms into the chalet. Before going to bed, we clamber down the ravine to brush our teeth in the stream. We stand there in the ice-cold water with our mouths full of foam and then spit it out and watch the white trail as it floats away.