Year of the Drought by Roland Buti

Author:Roland Buti [Roland Buti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910400388
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Dad was sitting at the end of the table. He looked as if he didn’t have enough air to function normally. When he exerted himself, for example by lifting a heavy sack of feed, his creased, red face would metamorphose into a strange landscape of hollows and humps. Now, he was at rest. Staring straight ahead, he seemed to want nothing more than to reduce the world to the space between his nose and the coffee-pot on the stove. Yet even a reality of these shrunken proportions was too large for comfort.

“Music is breath. Nature breathes. The water of the river swirling around the rocks breathes. The wood that creaks with the changes of weather breathes. The earth becomes wet, dries out, closes, opens up, breathes… It’s an exchange, always an exchange between the inside and the outside… We don’t just breathe with our lungs. We breathe with our skin too, with our bones… with everything! We’re much more permeable than we think. Out… in… out… in… That’s the real rhythm of the world. That’s why each inhalation is… is like a prayer… and music is a cosmic breath… a breath that links us to the earth, to the sun, to the moon… the stars emit pulsations because their temperatures vary… pulsations that are acoustic waves, that can actually be heard by the human ear.”

Every time Cécile turned towards Léa or Mum, her necklace of coloured pearls and shells, with its swirling orifices shaped like big nostrils, moved against her breasts, clinking against each other. This sound was alien to our kitchen. We were all acutely aware of it, perhaps even more than we were of Cécile’s words.

“Neil Armstrong had a recording of Dvořák with him during the Apollo mission. He was listening to the New World Symphony before he set foot on the moon,” said my sister.

“That’s crazy,” replied Mum, a bit lamely.

Cécile was sitting abnormally close to her. There was a lot of room around our big table, but their chairs were almost touching. Each time they moved, their shoulders rubbed against each other, and they would remain stuck together for a few seconds by the sweat of their naked skin, as if to permit the exchange of some mysterious fluid.

“The spring that gurgles and breathes, the grain that cracks and whose seed makes a passage for itself to the open air, the tree that contracts its leaves, then dilates them when the wind cools down… that’s what it means to be natural. A lot of people are shrivelled inside… closed up… their vital organs are shrunken… their lungs become stiff and dry… the body is no longer illuminated … it’s not open … it becomes coated with miasma. As if living were nothing special, just a necessary evil! That’s because of unhappiness… Not feeling accepted by what surrounds us…”

Cécile looked at Dad, who ignored her. He was still absorbed in the space between himself and the coffee-pot.

“Good breathing calms the nerves, calms fears… It’s like when wind blows on fire, scattering the ashes and reviving the flame that was suffocating underneath.

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