Humdinger's Cat

C'était du tonnerre. Dans l'histoire des mauvaises idées celle-là est remarquable. Ça a fait un tabac. C'a été un journée d'enfer.

My wife and daughter left for Paris on the 15:03 from Plouaret-Trégor. We had a picnic before—gazpacho, slices of last night’s chicken pie and a salad. While we were eating, the sun came out. We watched a man in a wet suit slip into the water with a speargun. We did not have time for a swim ourselves.

At 14:49, I dropped them off at the train station. We each said I love you and goodbye.

That was three hours ago. My wife is now attending a farewell party for a friend, a sommelier whose request for a new visa was rejected. The border police told her she has to leave Europe for 180 days. She will contest the decision but thinks it best to do so after following the rules.

My daughter is seeing former classmates who also happen to be in Paris. One lives in Berlin, another in London, and a third in Marseilles. She returns to the University of Glasgow on Tuesday. My other daughter is in Amsterdam, applying to schools. My son is in New York, awaiting a green card. I’m back at the farm in Kerangwenn, where I will stay for six weeks, writing a play with music and food — an opéra bouffe — with the composer Richard Sears about the French writer Raymond Roussel.

The farm where I am staying faces south and has a closed courtyard and covered gables. It dates from the first half of the 19th century. Its main building is faced in small, square-cut granite stones. Some of its decorative elements—the double-arched door lintels—date from the 16th century. The barns date from the second half of the 19th century. The stables probably date back to the beginning of the 20th century, as the brick window frames would seem to indicate. A smaller cottage on its eastern flank is built in squared granite rubble, with frames and cornerstones in granite ashlar.

We stayed here for three months last year. I wrote about that experience.

The Mental Load

The farmsitters I am replacing told me that a feral cat now lives in the barns. I have not seen it. The grass needs cutting. The leaves on the chestnut tree in the courtyard have coloured. The sun is still out. I should go for a walk. The clouds are lowering and darkening. Thunder sounds in the distance. Across the courtyard, the three black sheep and Jack the goat bleat for kibble. Meanwhile, as I type these words—my first since August 12, 2024—blowflies buzz around me, attracted by the moisture and salt on my skin and the traces of food around my mouth. Their touch is intimate; they alight and lift off my face with brazen familiarity.

I am not entirely sure that they are blowflies. Perhaps they are house flies or stable flies. A blowfly is metallic green or blue. They are also called blue bottle flies. Calliphora vomitoria, so-called because they vomit excess water from the food in their crops by “bubbling,” misting whatever surface they land on. They are the type of flies you see laying eggs on decaying meat, carcasses and faeces. Their feet are filthy. They carry diseases. They are disgusting.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons. — Charles Baudelaire, “Une Charogne”, Fleurs du mal, 1861

(The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.—William Aggeler, “A Carcass”, The Flowers of Evil, 1954)

At the Super U in Guerlesquin barely an hour ago, I asked the fishmonger at the back of the shop to fillet a mackerel. She handled the knife deftly, but she was obviously in something of a hurry—it was nearing the end of her shift and she still had to clean her station—and as she handed the plastified paper envelope containing the fillets to me, I could see her bloodied fingerprints on it.

There was no tip jar. There were flies in the shellfish display.

I thanked her and took the blood-spattered package to the wine department, where I chose a white wine with what looked like Cyrillic words on its label. I think the wine was from Georgia, but I had left my glasses in the car, so I couldn’t make out the fine print on the back of the bottle. The only words I recognized were “Pinot” and “Grigio”. It was in the organic section, but there were no indications that it was certified organic. This is common.

I went to the meat section to look at chicken parts. The prices were high for breasts and thighs, so, instead, I chose a whole Label Rouge Breton chicken almost identical to the one I had bought and roasted two days before, in a sauce meant to replicate as best as the ingredients in the kitchen would allow the delicious roasted chicken I ate with my wife and son eight days ago in a Dominican restaurant in Washington Heights.

A year ago, I wrote this:

The town of Guerlesquin lost a third of its inhabitants between the Second World War and the 1960s, when an even larger exodus then occurred, as it did throughout Brittany, as modern farming pushed out most of the small holdings and families caught the train to Paris and stayed.

In the late 1960s, the son of the local butcher (his son owns the Super U franchise) opened a chicken slaughterhouse. By 1975, the abattoir was killing, packaging and freezing almost a million chickens a week. Over the next 20 years, the town’s population almost doubled. Then the company relocated. Then it was bought by foreigners. Then it went into receivership. Today, it has reopened, but only employs a handful of people. The streets are quiet. The original butcher shop is closed. Its facade has been painted to look like there are people in the windows. Similar paintings adorn the closed cinema and the epicerie.

Back at the Super U, I added a bag of walnuts, a courgette, a box of Medjool dates and a bag of cashews to the items I was already carrying. It was almost closing time. I returned to the wine department, returned the white wine, and selected a 2021 Haute Côtes de Nuits from a lower shelf in the organic section. It had two certification trademarks on its label.

Back at the checkout line, I realized I had forgotten to buy eggs. I put the items I was carrying in a plastic shopping basket and went to the egg section, where, after some deliberation, I chose a box of ten organic Keryann eggs.

Keryann eggs come from a farm of 9,000 chickens in Louannec, 40 kilometres north of Guerlesquin, or a farm of 12,000 chickens in Minihy-Tréguieris, 16 kilometres further east. It is one of three brands owned by Les Œufs d'Armor, a family-run company that owns five farms producing 50 million eggs annually. Les Œufs d'Armor chickens are not kept in cages. The farms control nuisance flies by dispursing the pupae of parasitic mini-wasps around the areas where the flies breed.

I returned to the cashier and laid out the items on the conveyor belt according to their sturdiness and weight—chicken first, mackerel last. I had brought my own plastified shopping bag, on which was printed a smiling cartoon cow standing on her back two feet with her front two spread out imploringly, as if asking the question printed above her head: Je suis végetarienne… Pas vous?

I saw cow feet on menus in Brooklyn last week.

I positioned myself at the end of the supermarket checkout.

“Ah,” the young cashier said, holding up the courgette.

“Ah,” I said. “Il faut la peser.”

She nodded, and her smile broadened. “Vous avez le temps?”

“Oui, oui,” I said. I took the courgette and jogged back to the weighing station. I searched for the word “courgette” and its depiction on the touchscreen above the scale. Vegetables were listed on the top, fruits on the bottom. Neither list was in alphabetical order. Finally, after several long seconds, I found “courgette” and pressed it. Then I realized I had to put the courgette on the scale first and only then press the “courgette” button. This I did. The machine spat out the price ticket. I stuck it to the back of my hand and ran back to the cashier. She was still smiling. To my relief, so too was the man behind me in the checkout line.

The cashier used her barcode reader to read the ticket, which was still stuck to the back of my hand. This felt oddly intimate.

“Vous voulez que je le prenne?” she asked. For some reason, I said “non” and stuck the courgette price ticket inside the shopping bag.

“Avez-vous la carte Super U?” she asked.

“Non,” I said. I waved my phone at her. She understood. We completed the transaction using Apple Pay.

“Vous avez besoin du ticket?”

“Non, merci.”

We said goodbye.

It is still not raining. The skies have cleared. The weather app is unreliable. I should have gone to the coast for a swim. I cannot find the courgette price ticket. I have no idea what the courgette cost. I have no idea when I started calling courgettes courgettes instead of zucchinis. Just now, however, I remember the moment I decided a month ago to take a break from writing in preparation for the Roussel project. I need two weeks off, I wrote:

Cancelled on Substack: An Agapastic reverie of sorts

Now, two weeks past that announced date, the sound of the leaves outside, the thunder in the distance and the buzzing wings of the flies landing and taking off from my face and hands drown out what little voice my thoughts might still possess. I appear to be entirely bereft of any words of substance. Or perhaps I have merely left this too long? Will anything come? Am I empty? The political realms everywhere are rife with danger. The counterfactuals of History are becoming reality. The weather, too, sucks. The rain has come. It is chucking down. It looks like it will never stop.

Meanwhile, the nuisance flies have left. In my present’s sprawling narrative, they represented the small yet profoundly irritating forces that I could never control. The unavoidable, the maddeningly persistent elements that disrupted my carefully constructed sense of self.

Now, they, like the cat, seem to have disappeared. Were they ever here? Will they return? How can we know? Does it matter? They demand all my undivided attention, even in their absence. They force me to confront the uncomfortable reality that not everything can be neatly categorized or managed, or known or seen or understood. Their presence and absence are reminders of the larger, more complex dance between order and chaos, and control and surrender. In this sense, they are not just a nuisance—they are the guiding principles of life itself, tiny studies of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, buzzing challenges to overcome turpitude and find meaning in the seemingly meaningless.

Perhaps it is time to eat something. Perhaps I am hungry. According to the chef André Guillot, on most weekdays in the 1920s, Raymond Roussel—who hardly anyone read when he was alive (1877-1933) and even fewer read today but who profoundly influenced the art and writing of Dadaists, Surrealists, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, OULIPOists like Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau and, especially, the poetry of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Mark Ford, sat alone in his dining room and was served, from 12:30 to 17:30, all the meals of the day. Breakfast, elevenses, lunch, gouter, dinner, souper—20-35 courses of heavy French bourgeoise dishes, with paired wines, pastries and desserts throughout, and always started with fresh fruit from his estate in the Alpes-Maritimes (he lived at the time almost 1,000 kilometres north in a giant mansion just outside of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine) delivered by a continuous convoy of Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts.

Here is a typical menu:

Did Raymond Roussel eat all these dishes? We do not—cannot—know. We, however, hope to serve them, along with a delectable assortiment of musical and theatrical accompaniment, sometime in the spring of 2025. Watch this space for details. In the meantime, what can I say? Steer clear of roadkill. Enjoy the company of your loved ones. Exercise regularly. Stay dry.

And keep both eyes on the cat.