Édition Hirmann ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cavatina Andante, Allegro, Presto Cavatina Allegro, Andante, Presto Allegro The bus stopped along a long straight road running on top of the coastal dunes. Its door opened with a dry sneeze and the driver craned his neck back, searching for the man he had promised to deposit at the spot. He spotted him a few rows further back, impassively staring out to sea. ‘Oi!’ the driver called. A neighbour had to nudge the man to make him take notice. At last he pulled himself together and got up, clutching a picture postcard in his hand. He came forward and held the card to the driver’s face. The driver nodded emphatically and motioned him to get off at last, pointing to the open door. The man clambered down stiffly and then waved a polite thank you to the driver. The door slammed shut and the ancient bus pulled out into slow moving traffic. Scrawny, neglected looking, perhaps in his late 70’s, the man stood for a while, slowly taking in a strange scene unfolding before his eyes. He found himself on the edge of a long straight, narrow road fringed by occasional palm trees and scrawny bushes. It was like a scene from the Vietnam war: thin smoke drifting across the road from invisible fires on either side lower down the slope of the levee carrying the road. Along its length as far as he could see a slow thin stream of people was straggling towards him in disordered little clusters – women mainly, small children padding alongside, mostly barefoot, keeping close to the dusty verge of the road. Most of them, children included, were lugging things, hampers and baskets and rolled up sheets and blankets festooned with objects of gaudy plastic. Most adults wore straw hats or had one hanging on their backs; they wore not much else apart from a sarong or shirt tied at the waist….the children were practically bare. He half expected fighter-bombers to swoop down from the sky and drop napalm to scatter the straggling line and force everyone to seek safety, running down the slope of the levee into the shelter of trees. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, it stayed peaceful – it was just a late summer evening by the seaside. He watched for a while, then shrugged and turned around. Opposite the straggling file moved a slow stream of cars heading home from the beach, stopping here and there by the roadside to pick up a family and load them into a car already overstuffed with beach kit and kids, squeezing the living into dead spaces left between their disordered kit, anywhere where room could still be found. Kids started to howl, too tired at the end of a long hot day even to feel relieved. The man stood still for a while, watching the strange scene unfolding and waiting for some sort of inspiration for taking action or for something dramatic to happen to galvanize him into it. Nothing did, the tired traffic just moved slowly on in almost total silence – the odd shout or cry did not penetrate his fuzzy consciousness. Then he glanced down on the postcard still held in his hand, examined it more closely and looked around in search of the scene depicted. 2 Cavatina Allegro, Andante, Presto Behind him was a battered banner stretched across a crudely made arch of rough hewn timber. It formed the entrance to a campsite situated in the floodplains lower down, well below the level of the road running on top of the levee. He held up the picture….the similarities were obvious but so were some vaguely unsettling differences – the text on the banner was the same but the lettering was curiously different and the arch was of a more sturdy construction suggesting that the previous one somehow failed the test of a few harsh seasons of winter storms. He stood still for a long time, trying to figure out the meaning of it all and to find some new bearings for himself – it all seemed very confusing. He had been there before, he sort of knew that, but beyond that nervy feeling of déjà vu lay an unsettling penumbra of uncertainty – when, why, how, and what was the point of it? The answers escaped him – the fluffy shapeless stuff in his brain refused to shift or coalesce into any recognisable meaning. With a shrug he put the postcard away, stuffing it into a breast pocket of his windcheater. He looked around and then crossed the road and walked up to the campsite’s pitiful arch and leaned against one of its legs, still trying to puzzle it out. He found himself standing on a little timber platform forming the top end of wooden stairs leading down the steep side of the levee to scattered clumps of trees. Down there, under the trees, were tightly packed large tents and a few parked cars sheltering under the trees’ ready-made camouflage. Blue smoke was curling from dozens of charcoal fires, filling the air with alien smells of the paraffin used to light them – just napalm by another name, he thought, no doubt dreamed up for more effective marketing. As his head emptied of the shuffling noises of slow moving traffic behind him he became aware of snatches of conversation: distant parental calls, a babble of indistinct music and a host of domestic noises of things being moved or chopped or flattened, spilled or dumped. They provoked evocative but unsettlingly elusive feelings in him. He took a few steps down and then stopped to make room for some families coming off the road behind him, trailing their kit and kids. With every step down the stairway the hubbub of the campsite intensified and some discrete spikes of noise became discernible. There was even a snatch of melody suddenly becoming distinct, some tired hit from the 60’s, though he could not recall the words or its name. He retrieved the postcard from his pocket once more for confirmation and satisfied, replaced it, then moved on to continue his descent into the thin blue smoke filling the undergrowth. At the bottom he halted again and then moved on slowly between lines of almost suburban tents hidden under trees, subdivided by rows of neglected bushes. He stopped momentarily to watch a baby astride the edge of an inflatable pool and wondered who was looking after it. Then a woman emerged from the tent and grabbed the baby with one strong hand and then, holding it under one arm, disappeared behind the flap of a tent. Then he noticed a man, overweight and naked, lying prone on a deckchair…..the man had been watching him. Now he lifted a glass to him in acknowledgement of good intent…..and so he waved back, before moving on. 3 Cavatina Allegro, Andante, Presto The sounds surrounding him became more intense – these were social rather than domestic noises, relatively unrestrained and without any sign of serious concern over the possibility of disturbing any neighbours: loud working class banter, giggling, music and cross-talk in which you could no longer follow the thread of any meaning. Then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, he spotted her – he was quite taken aback. Finding her had not been in his mind, it had never been an explicit part of his plans, but when it did happen, unexpectedly, it somehow felt fulfilling, as if he had finally attained some distant goal after an arduous journey. But who is she? he asked himself. She was naked, her lush dark hair pinned up in the back of her neck: a ghost from Gaugin’s Tahiti, skin tanned deep brown, jewellery around her neck, a sarong loosely tied around the waist. She was busy shifting and arranging cushions and mattresses around a little encampment laid out for a feast in front of a large tent. She was helped by three women, all of them more or less naked…. loud, giggly, full of chat as if they had only just met following a long absence. He stopped some distance away staying in the shelter of a tree, trying to get things into some kind of focus in his head. He watched some men unloading provisions from the back of a car and lugging big cardboard boxes into an enclosure behind the tent – middle aged balding men, their shorts supporting bellies grown fat from comfortable living beyond the vanity of youth. Then other helpers joined in from the tent next door – younger men, in much better shape, and stark naked. ‘A nudist encampment, that’s what it is….facultative rather than fanatical’, he mused to himself with relief. In places like that he would have preferred to keep on his bathing suit or a pair of shorts….only women look good in the nude, women and a few carefully posed Gods and perhaps very young boys and little children. ‘She…..now she always loved taking her clothes off,’ he remembered, ‘she liked to be seen by men and to be wanted by them – it made her whole; it’s always been like that. Women dress and go topless for other women but she took her clothes off for men. She still looked beautiful, even in her full ripeness, as beautiful as he remembered. She rearranged some cushions and then straightened up and turned and then noticed him standing under the tree. She glanced at him and turned away to carry on with her preparations for a feast but then stopped in her tracks and turned back once more and looked hard at him and then her face lit up, bit by bit, like a street scene as the evening lights come on one by one and then she came towards him, tentatively at first but then with quickening pace.