That bird was dead as a dodo, I thought, as I turned the Focus onto the main road. Cécile staring silently out her window, wooded slopes throwing ocher autumn light into the car, and my thoughts going where I didn’t wanna go. In my version of what I saw, the bird’s guts were hanging out of its stomach. In my version of the truth, there’s something seriously wrong about what just happened.
And that looped me back in a large circle to what I saw last night. Or thought I saw. Sure, it was a flash. It was late. My head was reeling from Cécile’s collection of happy horror stories. But there, in the gloom above the beer taps, closely confined and pitch-black, I saw a person in the birdcage. A man. One bony hand gripping the bars, the other hand and two legs dangling out. Precisely how you pictured the way they used to cage thieves and leave them to starve, when that was still, like, a thing.
Precisely what you didn’t expect above a Swiss bar, with a barwoman rinsing glasses and cold-shouldering her pet-toy.
It didn’t fit, of course. The cage was way too small for jailing a dude. And yet he was there. But that wasn’t even what made you feel like you’d stuck a wet finger into a wall socket—your heartbeat racing, sweat spouting, on the verge of hyperventilation. It was his face. You saw it for a nanosecond. Like he was wearing a mask. Like you were looking at a puppet’s face that was staring into the distance, staring past you, but definitely seeing something.
And he was grinning. That was the worst.
That grin froze your innards.
Look back just once, search Cécile’s gaze just once, and it was gone; you saw just a bird in a cage. One of those ancient mountain men gaping at you from his stool like you’d gone nuts.
Yeah, I was zonked. Had a head full of ghosts.
And nope, I wasn’t absolutely positive Ramses’s bird had been dead.
You only knew what you thought you saw.
We didn’t exchange a single word the whole drive down the valley. One hairpin turn after the other, the blacktop could bring us to Paris or Milan or the Mediterranean and it wouldn’t make a diff. Behind us was that mountain. We felt its power reaching for us with invisible fingers. Wherever we’d go, it would still follow us there, like glacier water that drips into brooks, flows into rivers, and ends up in the sea half a continent away, where you, a random swimmer, could suddenly be enveloped by a cold current that made you shiver with unease.
8
The person Cécile wanted to introduce me to turned out to be her grandmother, a blind woman who in her whole life had rarely if ever been outside the Val d’Hérens. Her name was Louetta Molignon and she lived in a slate-roofed house in the upper parts of the village of Evolène.
“Mamie, c’est moi, Cécile,” Cécile said loud and clear, when we found the old woman sitting in a wickerwork garden chair behind the house. “I’ve come to visit you, and I’ve brought a friend from America.”
She hugged her grandmother, and from behind Cécile’s body, wrinkled, liver-spotted hands appeared that probed her and read her like braille. From behind her long, yoga-stretched thighs, you could hear the muffled rasps of something antediluvian. Then she stepped aside and made room for me.
I said, “Bonjour, Madame Molignon. Je m’appelle Sam.”
Louetta looked like she’d been spewed out by the big bang itself. White hair, so thin you could see her scalp. Large ears and crooked teeth, a flaky neck that disappeared into a hideously jolly pink floral vest that looked like it didn’t contain even a carcass. But her eyes, the romantic poet muses, were still young, and you could see her whole life reflected in them . . . Just kidding. One was spooky white, and the other hung lewdly downward, like it was searching in vain for whatever had once filled her wiry old-lady bra.
No, with Louetta Molignon, it was her spirit that was peppy. Still hip and with it.
“Sweetie,” she said, as she took my hand with her haggard claw, “why bother with a foreigner?”
And she started laughing so hard her face wrinkled like a cinnamon roll.
Madame Molignon would later tell us she had help for the housekeeping and the shopping but still lived self-sufficiently. A bit like how a fossil in a natural history museum lives self-sufficiently.
“As long as you make my granddaughter happy, young man,” the old woman said, her fingers probing upward along my arms and shoulders. “A good specimen, by the looks of it. Exactly how you’d picture an American.”
Cécile, her face flaring scarlet: “Ah, but we’re not a couple, Mamie . . .”
Louetta, waving a dismissive hand: “You can’t fool your old grandmother, child.”
And me, with a winning smile: “Don’t worry, Madame Molignon. For better or worse.”
She said she had fresh milk and Cécile should go get it. The setting was so idyllic it made me think of Auntie Bernstein, who walked/didn’t walk the Panther Mile with me. Weird how at a certain point old people’s faces all start to look the same in our memory. What makes them unique is the stories they tell. And like all elderly ladies, Louetta had the greatest stories. She’d fused with the mountains. She talked about the mountains with such love, it even started to rub off on me. She made it seem like she’d been there when the youngest of them were born.
The milk really was the freshest and creamiest I’d ever tasted. I was surprised I liked it.
We’d been there a while when Cécile suddenly said, “Mamie, tell Sam about the Morose. About the time it almost got Grandpa.”
“Dear Lord,” Louetta said, and before you could say “Lucifer” she’d crossed herself. “Why would you want to rake up those kinds of things? They’re bad; we don’t talk about them.”
Cécile said I had a friend who’d had an accident high in the mountains. That we thought the mountains had made him sick, that a specific mountain had made him sick, and that we wanted to know what we were dealing with so we could help.
The way she said it, I suddenly got a lump in my throat.
And the old lady goes, “Oh, that’s not good, young man. No, that’s not good at all.” Like she was the Oracle of Delphi herself. “Anyone who goes into the mountains brings the mountains back with them.” Louetta Molignon suddenly looked right at me with that opaque white eye. “You also carry a mountain with you, young man. A very old one. I can see it.”
And before I could react, she started talking.
Everyone here feared what they called the Morose, she said, even though it never occurred in this valley. The winds blew differently here. In this valley, God had been merciful.
You had to strain to understand her dialect, but I knew what morose meant. Everything that’s dismal and gloomy and depressing.