#117: Diary of a Chambermaid

(originally published Nov. 12, 2013)

Autumn will always be associated with death. It’s the way the leaves turn red, then brown, then fall. It’s the colder winds, the longer nights. It’s the onset of winter. Look at the holidays: Samhain, All Saint’s Day, El Dia de Muertos, P’chum Ben, Famadihana, my birthday. I dreamt last night that I had an L-shaped gash on my thumb, from the tip down the knuckle, and that I could peel back my fingerprint to reveal what was underneath. And instead of flesh and muscle, there was instead what looked like the inside of a rotting, hollow branch. Thick cords of dark organic sludge, white spots of what I assumed to be mold. Something out of a Quay Brothers film. This is the inside of my body, I thought, I dreamt.

Nowadays, roadkill is more abundant. Sometimes there’s nothing left but a rusty streak that stretches from the blacktop and up onto the sidewalk, but more often, smaller carcasses line the gutters and the medians: raccoons, possums, the occasional fox. Whenever we pass one, Matthew coos, Poor thing. I no longer point out dead cats.

On the highways, deer obstruct the shoulders with their thick, dun bodies. Apparently, deer collision cause about 200 human fatalities a year. It’s unlikely that the deer walk away from these incidents unscathed. The carcasses of whitetail deer can be collected, if the gatherer files a claim with the regional game commission for a permit number. Without a permit, the gatherer is required to butcher the deer himself, rather than taking it to an official deer processing center. Delawareans donate more than 20,000 pounds of venison to charitable organizations statewide.

Hunting season has come again.

The landowner in Diary of a Chambermaid asks his son, who has been hunting, Aren’t animals more beautiful alive than dead? His son replies, Hunting… is hunting. The son then teaches his father how to hunt butterflies. As the father shoots one off of its flower, the son asks, I thought you liked butterflies? and the father replies, I do. I rather I’d have missed.

A few years before she died, Matthew’s cat, Gwinny, hunted butterflies in his backyard garden. He watched her, of course; she was 13 years old—elderly for a cat—so she never caught one, but her eyes grew wide and wild at their fluttering. She couldn’t meow, but instead squeaked, at times imploring them to come within reach of her paws, of her fangs. When Matthew moved from there, he gave the house a thorough cleaning. In the living room, as he was vacuuming, he pulled back a curtain to discover a pile of butterfly corpses, a mass grave years in the making. There were a few intact specimens, dried and discolored, but most of them were in pieces: a wing flake; a torso; some dry, crisp antennae. Monarchs waylaid on their migratory path. Dismembered swallowtails.

Perhaps Matthew yelled at Gwinny. Perhaps he was secretly proud. Either way, I imagine her response would have been a single squeak: What did you expect? It was their season.

#102: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

(originally published July 8, 2012)

On the last day of our 2010 Belgian trip, my friend Rudi, whose last name can either mean “fisherman” or “sin,” depending on how you mispronounce it, took us in his Fiat for a tour of the Belgian countryside. I had told him that we wanted to see places lesser-traveled by tourists, and he suggested the medieval cities of Huy, Dinant, and Namur. Great, I said. We can find some lunch along the way.

After Huy, along the Chaussée de Dinant, we stopped at a farmhouse restaurant beside a brook. As we enjoyed the sunshine, sipping tea, nibbling Speculoos, and watching the chickens wandered the grounds, the waitress informed us that we had arrived at their nether-time: too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. We could wait around for another hour if we wanted, but we decided to push on. Rudi said he knew a place in Dinant.

We reached Dinant in the full force of the afternoon. The sun glinting off the River Meuse competed with the Casino de Dinant for the title of Brightest, Gaudiest, the Most Neonic. The restaurant Rudi had chosen was in a prime location: our backs to the cliffs, tower of Notre-Dame to our left, the river before us. And, in keeping with Walloonian Catholic tradition, it was closed on Sundays. Matthew bought a couque de Dinant in the shape of a pig, but Rudi advised against biting into it. “Not unless you want to break your teeth,” he said.

In Namur, Rudi drove us to the Citadel, at the top of a hill. Other tourists, mostly Belgians, had lined their chairs alongside the edge of the stone wall for a view over the city. On the tables next to them, plates of food. It was just after five, and the river cut through Namur like a sickle. Rudi flagged down our waiter came and had an animated conversation with him. The waiter turned to us, apologetic, and shrugged.

“If you learn any French today,” Rudi said, ruefully, “it will be the phrase, Desolée, la cuisine est fermée.”

The waiter brought a condolence plate of cheese and celery salt. And a few packets of Speculoos.

Taking the E411 back towards our hotel, the countryside browning in the fading sunlight, we could have been the titular bourgeoisie from Buñuel’s film, hungry, following an endless highway towards an unknown destination.

We stopped in Wavre, a suburb southeast of Brussels. Outside a take-out shop, people congregated in line and around the picnic benches to the right of the shop. “OK,” Rudi said, “this place must be open.” The other customers seemed bemused by our presence: What are they doing here? people asked Rudi, as if their suburban lives were far removed from the tourist trade. In a way, this was exactly what I had asked Rudi for. Almost everyone ordered frîtes; most of the menu board was devoted by the various frîtes sauces. I chose one that seemed most unfamiliar—merguez—and as we settled into the warm evening with our paper boats of fries, we finally did something new and heretofore unexplored: we began to eat.