Love in the Forest

 Love in the Forest

I , too, had loved someone. Love had fulfilled its function: all else had disappeared. She was a pale, warm girl who lives in the forests of Landes. We would take walks along the pathways in the evening. The pine trees planted 150 years earlier had colonized the marshland, flourished in the hinterland behind the dunes, and exuded a warm, acrid smell: the sweat of the earth. We walked effortlessly along the rubbery ribbons of the pathways. “People should live at the pace of the Sioux,” she would say. We surprised animals, a bird, a roe deer. A snake slithered away. The man of antiquity—muscles of chiseled marble and vacant eyes—saw such animal appearances as the apparition of a god.

“It’s injured and can’t run away, she’s spotted it, it’s going to die.” For months I heard phrases like this. That evening, it was a spider—“a wolf spider,” she informed me—had come upon a longhorn beetle behind a frond of fern. “She’s going to inject it with a lethal dose, she’s going to devour it.” Like Munier, she knew such things. Who had instilled these insights into her? It was the wisdom of the ancients. A knowledge of nature flourishes in certain creatures who have never studied it. They are seers, they perceive the intricate structure of things while scientists are focused on a single part of the edifice.

She would read the hedgerows. She understood birds and insects. When the beachgrass blossomed, she would say, “It is the orison of the flower to its god the sun.” She would save ants that got swept away by a stream, snails caught in brambles, birds with broken wings. Faced with a scarab beetle, she would say: “It is a heraldic element, it deserves our respect, it is at one with nature.” One day, in Paris, a sparrow landed on her head and I wondered whether I was worthy of this woman whom birds chose as a perch. She was a priestess; I followed her.

We lived in the forests at night. She had a stud farm in Landes that spanned a dozen hectares on the western slopes of a dirt track whose deep rut seemed to her the guarantee of a covert life. On the outskirts of the forest, she had built a pine cabin. A large pond was the principal axis of the property. There, mallard ducks rested, and horses came to drink. All around, dense grasses drilled through the sand trampled by the animals. All of the comforts of the cabin: a stove, some books, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, all the necessities for making coffee, and an awning under which to drink it, and a tack room that smelled of pine resin. This kingdom was guarded by a sharp-eared Beauceron sheepdog, twitchy as the trigger on a Beretta 92, but friendly to those who were polite. He would have ripped the throat out of an intruder. I managed to escape with my life.

Sometimes, we would sit on the dunes. The ocean raged and pounded, while the waves crashed, indefatigable. “There must be some ancient quarrel between the sea and the land.” I used to say such things, she did not listen.

Nose buried in her hair, which smelled of boxwood, I allowed her to spin out her theories. Man had appeared on earth some millions of years ago. He had arrived uninvited, after the table had been set, the forests unfurled, the beasts frolicking. The Neolithic revolution, like all revolutions, fomented the Terror. Man declared himself head of the politburo of all living things, hoisted himself to the top rung of the ladder and made up screeds of dogma to legitimize his dominion. All in defense of the same cause: himself. “Man is God’s hangover!” I would say. She did not like these pronouncements. She accused me of launching damp squibs.

•   •   •It was she who first introduced me to the idea I explained to Léo amid the sand dunes of Tibet. Animals, plants, single-cell life forms and the neocortex are all fractals of the same poem. She talked to me about the primordial soup: four and a half billion years ago, a principal matter had existed, churning in the waters. The whole antedated the parts. From this prebiotic broth, something emerged. A separation occurred, leading to a branching of organic forms of increasing complexity. She worshipped all living things as a shard of the mirror. She would pick up a fox’s tooth, a heron’s feather, a cuttlefish bone, and whisper as she contemplated each shard: “We proceed from the Same.”

Kneeling in the dunes, she would say: “She is going back to find the column, she was drawn to the sap of the stonecrop, the others missed it.”

This time it was an ant rejoining its column after a detour via a patch of stonecrop. Where did she get her infinite tenderness for the minutiae of animal life? “From their willingness to do things properly,” she would say, “their preciseness. Humans aren’t conscientious.”

In summer, the sky was clear. The wind churned the sea, a cloud appeared from the eddies. The air was warm, the sea wild, the sand soft. On the beach, human bodies lay supine. French people had grown fat. Too much screen time? Since the sixties, societies had spent their lives sitting. Since the cybernetic mutation, images flickered in front of motionless bodies.

An airplane would fly past trailing a banner advertising an online dating site. “Imagine the pilot flying over the beach and seeing his wife lying next to some guy she met on that site,” I would say.

She was staring at the gulls surfing the wind, riding the crest, framed by the sunlight.

We would walk back to the cabin along smooth paths. Her hair now smelled of candle wax. To her, the rustle of the trees was filled with meaning. The leaves were an alphabet. “Birds don’t sing out of vanity,” she would say. “They sing patriotic anthems or serenades: this is my home; I love you.” We would arrive back at the cabin and she would uncork a wine from the Loire, of sands and mists. I drank greedily, the red venom swelling my veins. I could feel night welling inside me. A barn owl screeched. “I know that owl, it lives around here, the spirit of night, the commander-in-chief of dead trees.” This was one of her obsessions: re-creating a classification of living creatures, not according to Linnaean taxonomy, but according to a transversal taxonomy bringing together plants and animals according to their disposition. Thus, there was the spirit of voracity (shared by sharks and the carnivorous plants), the spirit of cooperation (a quality shared by jumping spiders and kangaroos), the spirit of longevity (the hallmark of the tortoise or the sequoia), of concealment (exemplified by the chameleon and the stick insect). It did not matter that these creatures did not belong to the same biological phylum so long as they shared the same skills. Hence, she concluded, a cuckoo and a flukeworm, through their opportunism and their intimate knowledge of their victims, were more closely related to each other than to certain members of the same family. To her, the living world was a panoply of stratagems, for war, for love and for locomotion.

She would go out to stable the horses. Unhurried, clear and precise, she was a Pre-Raphaelite vision as she walked beneath the moon, followed by her cat, by a goose, by horses with no halters, by her dog. All that was missing beneath the starry vault was a leopard. They glided through the darkness, heads held high, without a rustle or a sound, without touching, perfectly aligned and perfectly distanced, knowing where they were headed. An orderly troop. The animals stirred like springs at the slightest movement by their mistress. She was a sister of Saint Francis of Assisi. If she believed in God, she would have joined an order of poverty and death, a mystical nocturnal sisterhood that communicated with God without clerical intercession. In fact, her communion with the animals was a prayer.

I lost her. She rejected me because I refused to give myself over body and soul to the love of nature. We would have lived in a demesne, in the deep forest, a cabin or a ruin, devoted to the contemplation of animals. The dream dissolved and I watched her walk away as softly as she had come, flanked by her animals, into the forest of the night. I went on my way, I traveled far and wide, leaping from plane to train, going from conference to conference, bleating (in a self-important tone) that humankind would do well to stop rushing around the globe. I rushed around the globe and each time I encountered an animal, it was her vanished face I saw. I followed her everywhere. When Munier first talked to me about the snow leopard on the banks of the Moselle, he could not know that he was suggesting that I go and find her.

If I were to encounter the animal, my only love would appear, embodied in the snow leopard. I offered up all my apparitions to her ravaged memory.

From: The Art of Patience

By Sylvian Tesson