The rain has come with its beautiful fragrance of oceans and air, everywhere present wiith the first big drops that fall on my summer shirt as I pick raspberries. It makes me feel the writing in me, pushing, stirring. Where will it come out? Through an ear? Through an eye? Yes. The eye that caught a glimpse of a particular shade of deep blue of a car just passing. Much better really to use the word apercevoir, which has the sense of perceiving something quickly, something suddenly touching your consciousness through some impression on your senses, something so fleeting that you nearly don’t perceive it. J’ai aperçu le couleur bleu foncé and now it has left an impression like a taste I can see and recall as if it exists somewhere inside the space of my chest. I can breathe it in and then send it out through my throat and my nostrils into the atmosphere of the air of the village now glittering with rain.
I play with the color for awhile, sending it through the space left under my neighbor’s electric shutters across the road, in through the chimney of the man with the big Doberman dogs that bark, sending it like a trailing cloud behind an anonymous car passing by, making that light squelching sound through the puddles. Then I pull it back inside to feel its texture inside my throat and then let it dissolve into its essence and become part of my blood and marrow.
I think about the English-speaking women I spoke with there at the café under the platane trees near the river. I taste the flavor of them, the spice of one enough to wake me, the other flavors, delicate, herbal, wafting off to be dissolved by the wet drops and wash eventually into the river. The one with a bit of spice tastes slightly of sorrow and fatigue, with a lingring pungent undercurrent of a clear, sharp look at the life in which she swims.
And the rain keeps coming. Who would have believed it, even as late as lunchtime that the clouds (that have cheated us all so often of late) would actually let down persistent wetness for an hour or more on end. The gaping cracks in the dry earth must feel the drops beginning to round their edges, loosening the particles of dirt that will now begin their slide downwards into the gaps, pulled by the gravity that made the wetness fall from up above to down below.
All this is happening while the wiry, robust young man who drove his other-kind-of blue car madly into the parking area across from the café around noon, slammed on his brakes, burst open his door and walked with long, strong strides across the road to the terrace of the café, is probably sleeping off the alcohol that had pumped up the blood in his head enough to come storming after a woman who he probably had thought betrayed him, ready to put his strong hands around her throat. And the older man, perhaps his father, who had flung open the passenger door when they stopped, striding behind the younger man to back him up, is probably at the Saturday local afternoon pétanque match , sitting on the sidelines, steaming to the other old men on the bench, telling them the story of how he and his son gave that woman what was coming to her, glossing over the humiliation of being moved on by the equally robust Spanish café owner.
And I imagine that the rain, gently wetting their t-shirts and gradually diluting their “pressions”, eventually brings the old man to silence as the sound of the pétanque balls, clicking against each other, becomes the background to his thoughts of supper and an evening spent in front of the glowing tele.
