Occasional Piece, Aug 8

Subject: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Peter T.
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 08:27 AM

Some kind people have asked me to return to posting Thoughts for the Day, but because of time constraints I can't. I thought that "occasional pieces" might fit the bill, in part because the TFTD became more like prose pieces, and less short quotes. I will do these when the fit strikes. Anyway, a piece for today:

There are cities that have learned to live in the heat, but mine is not one of them. A Canadian city, it stutters between building for winter and summer, and satisfies neither well, but it is particularly bleak now, in the hottest of Augusts. Abandoned by the cottagers, and the rest huddled around their air conditioners, it has no life. I walk out in the baking streets, and my mind turns to scorching hot days in other cities, where they handle these things differently. I particularly remember one incandescently brutal summer week I spent in Toulouse in the south of France, when the desert wind, the simoom from Africa, late for the year, roared over us like bitter flames.

The city seemed to be almost made of the dust of the sky, the red Romanesque cathedral of St. Sernin appeared like some beached sand fantasy, and the only relief was that through the howling heat we could often see lemon and orange trees tucked away behind white walls, like momentary oases. Shutters crashed everywhere.
The heat never let up, but the wind would come and go, and one evening, while dust lay heavy on everything, the wind died down for a moment, and as if on signal, the entire populace came out for their long delayed stroll around the central market, greeted each other, and remarked as if nothing were out of the ordinary, on this and that, while above hung a blood red moon. "Autan" the waiter at the outside cafe informed us, brushing sand off our table. "That is what we call it here. Not simoom, Autan."

A small erudite crowd gathered around us. "Yes, and the dust is the dust of the heretics, the Cathars mudered by de Montfort, blown back in the face of Christendom," another, professorial type, said. A third said, "Have you read Dante, Dante, the Inferno, he came here you know, and the burning whirlwind of the desert where the betrayers are, this is where he got it from." "That is just legend," said another, "don't lie to the tourists." "No, no," said the Dantist, "it is true." We bought them all drinks, and then the wind began to pick up a bit. But still the elegant citizens walked and talked in the stifling heat, some with umbrellas, some just walking, hats off, swirling dust everywhere, but determined to make the standard evening show of it.

We walked back to our hotel, the wind rising, and I said I was going for a bit of a walk, it was so stifling, and she said I was crazy from the heat, and we had another bad argument, and I went back through the hot wind to the cafe in the now screaming wind, beating like pepper spray in my face, and asked to use the phone. And I phoned the other woman longdistance, the woman I was not travelling with, but the one I would soon leave the one I was travelling with for, and I shouted through the sandstorm to the amused delight of the patrons. And I put down the phone, and went out into the night wind, the vicious particulate quintessence of heat, like being bombarded by sparks and flakes of fire, and I walked around in it for an hour letting it strike me as hard as it could, pitting me with sharp pain, letting it get into my eyes and clog my nostrils and mouth, because I had been in hell for a long time, and was about to become a betrayer, and it seemed like the right thing to do, and then I went back, through the choking hot sandstorm, to our hotel.

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Amos
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 02:36 PM

Peter:

I think you have Paul Theroux' doors blown right off, man. Time to get on that train to Chile!!

A.

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: MMario
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 02:44 PM

I'd applaud - but I'm too busy using my hands to pick my jaw up off the floor. Once again, you have awed, amazed and astounded me - while delighting my soul with imagery

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Dave Swan
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 03:33 PM

Glad to see a Peter T. piece. Thanks. Beautiful, as always.

D

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 04:07 PM

He rode along the sandy road on a rusty moped with a vacant socket where the headlamp used to be. "Bring it back before dark, Senor. I give you one with a light that works!" This was the road that cut across the island from the commercial Western beaches to the raw, surf-pounded Eastern ones, a road flanked by long vistas of scrub palm and occasional hard-scrabble farms hacked and burned in a violent act of liberation from the undergrowth. The air smelled, as did most of Mexico, of smoke, flowers, and rotting fruit. Looking up from a map pinched between his thumb and the left handgrip, he spotted several funereal forms hunched on the road ahead, rippling in the heat. These were a motley pair of black-winged vultures, each the size of a small labrador retriever, and they briefly abandoned their solemn communion over the smashed carcass of an iguana as he approached, flapping the tattered looking wings with enormous effort in the tropical sun, an effort which landed them some three feet from the road's shoulder, where they turned away in unison from their postponed luncheon to look into the jungle with blank eyes.

He swerved past the roadkill and glimpsed a crossroad ahead. He stopped at the intersection and found its counterpart in the map as the Mexican heat closed on him like something that had been stalking just behind as he clipped along on the bike, and now pounced. He turned into the dirt road and followed the line of a wood fence beside a decaying plantation until it deadended at a dilapidated farm house. The house featured a ramshackle porch upon which two straw-hatted farmers had found sanctuary against the afternoon heat. They treated his appearance as the vultures had : a brief glance and then the glazed stare into the steaming forest. To his right, a large mass of stone was partially engulfed in twining vines. He parked the moped and unsnapped the camera case as he walked toward the monolith. From beneath the strangling green growth stone heads peered out at him, sprawled contorted bodies, swastikas, pinwheels, granite roses, skulls, all manner of detritus left behind by these ancient men, icons of luck and sex and death and sacrifice, silent in stone, anything but mute.

He snapped the photos, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and batted away at the insects that were finding him. He moved into the monolith to find the narrow shade it offered, and found another pair of eyes, inches away, looking into his. Startled, he stepped back, but the huge lizard was unperturbed, tongue lapping the hot air, perched upon a lintel of crumbling rock, a piece of pagan sculpture come alive. He didn't look away, but instead looked deeply and calmly into the man's eyes. One clawed foot shifted, dislodging a small chunk of carved stone, and the Iguana continued to taste the air and stare and the thought came to the man "all this shall pass, all but this creature. And the heat." And again he raised the camera, but he couldn't. It felt like sacrilege, a cheapening of the realization.

He climbed back onto the machine and traveled down the dirt path to the road. Here he turned, and attempting to free himself of the heat, aaccelerated the machine in a desparate rush to the ocean.

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Peter T.
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 08:00 PM

Nice one, LEJ. yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Noreen
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 09:17 PM

Phew! I'm feeling hot in spite of the damp chill in the air here... Thank you both.

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Amos
Date: 08 Aug 01 - 10:41 PM

LEJ, the Golden Tongue of the Rockies. Beautiful job, man.

A.

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: katlaughing
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 12:51 AM

You guys! WOW, just beautiful!! Thank you both so much!

It seems that hot here, too. It's been miserable. Like teh people in Toulouse, I wait for the sun to retire, then try to make a time of it in the yard, watering the poor little shrubs, petunias, and snapdragons which have wilted during the day. Everywhere I look on the prairie it seems parched. They say there'll be rain, tomorrow...

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 8
From: Jim the Bart
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 06:35 PM

Very nice, Peter T. and LEJ. They've promised us some relief from the heat tonight, but your prose has helped me transend it.

I 'ppreciate it

Have a nice evening.
Bart