Many thanks to Thomas and Sheila for their contributions.
AR'CHAZ
Slowly the sea comes
to life
along with the drowning sun.
And then will appear,
riding on the waves,
the fairies and
mermaids
who unchain the storms
over the sea.
P. Jakez Heliaz
Sitting on the old
bench in front of his cottage
Yvon Le Guennec was
smoking his early morning cigarette
watching dawn rising
in the distance nearby Trebeurden.
Another fine day was
coming.
Beside him The Cat was
dreaming with half closed eyes.
Yvon made his first
cigarette last a long time,
the best of the day, with
the burning hot coffee he would leave all day
to caramelize on the
corner of the kitchen range,
as his mother had done before him.
His life came back to
him in puffs of smoke,
and he chewed on it
like a horse on tasty, yet bitter hay.
In his eyes, once
green, now bleached by the salt and the brine of the sea,
the dawn of long gone
days was rising.
He had been that young
sailor whom life didn’t seem to deny a thing.
Yes, he had been a
handsome guy at the age of twenty,
even if nothing of
those good looks had remained in his face, wasted by the brine
and lined with
wrinkles and scars, where time had left its tracks.
His life had been
fishing and the deep blue sea – nearly all of his pals gone,
sailors lost at sea or
simply disappeared from his life.
Life had also been going on pub crawls in the
fishing-ports
when fishing had been
good, and pockets were full of money.
As for the girls,
there would be no need to pay for them ;
they would be
fascinated by the lustre of his green eyes
and press their keen
bodies to his narrow hips,
enjoying the flavour
of the open sea.
Yeah, sirens, he had
known quite a number,
and then it wasn’t them
who would get a hold on him
with their voices and
their fair hair –
no, it was him ending
up abandoning them in their luminous caves,
to return to his one
and only love, the sea with its tide,
the troughs and crests
of the waves, the storms, its madness.
Yet, yes, once there
had been one siren who had caught him in her nets,
securely moored
between her silky eager thighs, and he really did believe
that he would stay
there for ever.
It was for her sake
that he had named his cottage KER EDEN,
for she used to say in
those days that the cottage facing the ocean
was their little
paradise, ‘Ker Eden’.
How superstitious she
was, about everything !
Whenever he put out to
sea in stormy weather, she was trembling with the fear
that he should disappear
for ever between the silky sheets of the waves,
so she had painted a
number 13 on his boat to keep bad luck at bay.
When his trawler had
been dismantled in the harbour of
Nantes,
he had retrieved from
the hull the plank of wood with the painted 13,
and had it nailed onto
the cottage beside the entrance door.
Now he only put out to
sea in his boat AR’ CHAZ, for the mere pleasure
of catching a few
sardines or a sea-bass
and licking from his
lips the salt of the brine.
But at that time,
yeah, it had also been for her sake, his siren,
when he had painted
his cottage blue and ochre.
Ochre, to remind him
of the serpentine locks of his siren’s red hair.
Red and ochre, the,
now peeled off, colours of his happiness.
MYRIAM, she was called
MYRIAM,
not a common name
here, where the women are called Anne, or Marie, or Yveline.
But her, she was
called Myriam.
A buxom girl with rosy
flesh and the sort of appetite he liked so much.
Yes indeed, she was
ravenous, greedy and not only at table.
She wouldn’t have left
a bit for the cat.
Voracious, oh yes, but
apart from that, she didn’t have many housekeeping skills.
Unable to fry a
sardine properly, to prepare a fish soup,
or even to mend his
fishing-nets.
She even botched the
coffee.
You should have seen
how pleased she looked on the days of the
big fair at Auray when they went there to see his
relatives !
Excited with
impatience, she got up at the crack of dawn,
so as not to be late
for the baked custards and the crepes.
As a matter of fact,
those were the only days she would get up early,
for the gorgeous vixen
was lazier than a cat and spent far more time in bed
than at the kitchen
sink.
As for cleaning the
house, their Ker Eden wasn’t large for sure,
but certainly he
hadn’t to spend much money on brooms.
She was messy into the
bargain, picking up anything
if she thought it was
pretty – useless things such as pebbles on the beach,
washed up starfish she
let dry, seashells, driftwood,
old papers...
Her accumulation
covered everywhere, and there was room left only on the dining-table.
Every time she got out
of bed (and he must confess to not complaining
when he was in bed
with her), she would spend all day cutting out old papers,
glueing them together,
writing and painting on them.
In the end some kind
of pictures came of it,
scattered all over the
place or hung on the walls of Ker Eden.
Or else she would sell
them on the beach in summertime
or on the market in
the winter.
That earned her some
pennies she spent at once on drawing paper, pencils, paintbrushes,
or some trinkets to
smarten herself up for the Fest Noz.
Whenever she asked him
to catch a cuttlefish, she had no intention to prepare
a nice meal, no, she
merely wanted the ink for her drawings.
It was the same with
the coffee.
Because, as long as
she wasn’t cutting out papers, she would draw in every weather,
everything she was
seeing: the sea, the sky, the blooming broom,
the boats, the fishermen,
the return from the sea, and himself.
Yes, even him, she
would draw him at that time, and she used to say to him, laughing,
that she was in love
with him and wanted to sketch him and to
nibble at him.
When she was gone, her
drawings, well, in anger he had thrown them into the kitchen stove
regretting it on the spot.
He had succeeded in
saving two of them from the flames. He had smoothed them
with his mother’s iron
and fixed them to the wall above his bed.
In the evening he
would gaze at them till his eyes began to drown.
They were all of her
he had kept,
a self-portrait with
her bitch, a mongrel with red fur and blue eyes
like her own.
She had found her
injured and abandoned on the beach.
The other drawing
showed a fisherman sitting on the rocks.
A few years, two
drawings,
and the cat !
Yes, because she had
brought him the cat too.
She had found him in a
dustbin one evening in Lorient,
Skinny, dirty,
spitting like a devil, on the verge of dying, a tiny little thing.
He didn’t want him at
first because of a sentence his mother used to pronounce
about cats, but she,
his siren, had insisted so much.
She said he would hunt
the rats which nibbled at his fishing-nets,
that he would keep her
company while he was at sea again,
that he would keep her
warm in bed on lonely nights and in wintertime.
He had told himself,
yes, for goodness’ sake, better a cat than a man.
The cat had stayed,
she had given him an odd name, a name from her country,
he had never
pronounced it properly:
Peilharot, because she
said
he had looked like a
wet rag when she got him out of the dustbin,
and that at home rags
were called PEILHES.
Ok with the cat, he
had always called him AR’CHAZ, ‘the cat’ in Breton.
When she ran away, she
had taken her dog with her. She had left the cat behind
because he was useful,
and thus he wouldn’t be all alone,
that’s what she had
said.
He had wanted to drown
him at first, to take his revenge, but he hadn’t done it.
They had ended up
getting used one to another, he and AR’ CHAZ,
and even became alike,
always at a distance though.
But on stormy
evenings, or when he was feeling blue,
the cat happened to
snuggle up to his legs, curled up in the warm recess of his bed,
He would let him stay,
almost happy, feeling on him the memories of
and scent of her.
She had left him at
the end of summer.
She had run away with
a guy from the south, dark-skinned and dark-eyed,
an artist, one of
those painters, going into rapture about the special quality
of the changing light
in the sky of Brittany, who paint the boats and the bonnets
of the old women, but
who he’d like to see in October aboard a
trawler
in the troughs of
twenty feet high waves !
Since the time of
Gauguin the place was swarming with them,
like mussel pilings on
the shore.
They would arrive in every
summer.
That particular
summer, there was that guy with his drooping moustache
and his pony-tail
(yes, a pony-tail hairdo like a little girl,
it seems that makes
you an artist).
Some people say he was
really talented, but what does that mean ?
What do they mean by
that ?
Anyway, he must have
had her pose for him, he must have sketched her
and a lot more...
She blushing with
pride.
Then she began roaming
with him, all the beaches from Quimper to Lorient,
a wide-brimmed hat on
her head and a large bag hanging from her shoulder,
a bag she had sneaked
from him on which she had painted a boat
and sewn on some
shells,buttons, pearls, bits of lace;
a bag full of
colours, paintbrushes and sketchbooks.
At the end of summer
she went away with him, heading for the south,
where the sea doesn’t
move, flat under the blue sky.
A place where the sun
makes the colours fade.
She left him here
without looking back, leaving AR’ CHAZ,
her drawings,
and a scrap of paper
on which she had noted a recipe ,
the only one she knew.
Sometimes he read it
aloud, like an incantation, a prayer to make her come back :
“15 ounces of sweet
butter
to melt gently in a frying pan
with a lot of sugar...
hmm !”
It was a poet she had
met on the beach of Ploermeur, who had given it to her,
A nice chap called
Patrick, with eyes the colour of a misty day.
He could have been
from Brittany, but he had come from Italy.
The Italians aren’t
taciturn like the Bretons,
they ‘ve always been
clever at handling words.
That one wrote,
sometimes very short poems, “in the Japanese manner”, as he said.
He was fond of the
sea, knew how to sail and had gone fishing with him, Yvon, a few times.
He said it inspired
him.
Sometimes he
remembered some of them
and recited them, the
cat by his side.
“A boat, a territory
Out of the ordinary
The smallest bit of the world
And a whole world”
This poem, Patrick had
written it for him.
If only she had left
him for this man, his siren, he would have been able to understand.
But the other man,
that painter !
That one, he had
detested him at first sight, with his strange southern accent
adding an ‘e’ to every
word, and the way he used to look at her,
she wriggling before his eyes like a queen cat tantalizing
the male,
and that way of
sticking together like oysters on the
rocks,
painting three boats,
and of talking about people he had never heard of, Matisse, Monet...
For a long time he had
harboured murderous thoughts, but had resigned himself to his fate
eventually, telling himself
that one day she would get tired of her new love ,
as she had got tired
of him, and that she would perhaps come back.
What more could he
offer her, that artist, than he, Yvon, had given her.
Certainly not the art
of rolling in a bed – nobody was a match for him getting a bed
rocking like a boat !
Well then, what was
his trick ?
She had got tired of
the light, of Brittany, tired of the crepes, and of his eyes.
The other man had
talked to her with the sun in his voice, he had talked about
olive trees full of
chirping cicadas in a little garden in front of his workshop
where he kept lots of
paintings,
about mountains
turning blue when the night was falling,
and about bathing in
the clear fresh waters of the mountain streams.
He had talked to her
about a little stone house crowded with cats ,
about a terrace where
at nightfall one could watch the valley falling asleep
the evening star
rising in the sky, and the crickets beginning to chirp in their secret places.
And he had cooked for
her some tasty meal after having painted.
Damned painter, damned
paintbrushes !
Life ‘s a bitch, and
yet so sweet sometimes !
No, he had no regrets,
after all he had had some good years with her, the best of all,
and the cat to
remember them.
Yvon shook himself.
‘Come on, AR’ CHAZ, we
have some work to do. The sea is good,
come on, we’re going
to cast the fishing nets !’
AR’ CHAZ sprawled a
long moment and followed him thoughtfully, whilst Yvon was still
thinking of his siren,
then an old Breton saying came to his
mind which his mother
would repeat quite
often :
‘Ouz koumsou flour Mistrust mellifluent words,
diwall ervad
The cat hides his claws
Ar’ Chaz a guz
ivin e droad’
‘That sounds like a
haiku’,
said Yvon to himself
and smiled.
La
Treille Muscate
August 2007
Le Nonchaloir
March 2011
MJW
This english version is particularly dedicated to my english friends Geoffrey, Patricia, John, Barbara, Sheila and others.
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