Couples

An observation of the couple in front of me in the queue at Ribeiro’s in the Capucins market in Bordeaux.

Couples

The butcher on the market is always busy. Grotesque quantities of raw flesh are flung from cold store to slab to display to counter. I wish, as I always do when standing in this particular queue, that I had the patience to learn how to be vegetarian. Instead of the pairs of hands working back and forth full of soft pink meat, I watch the shoppers with their critical eyes, frowning at too much gristle, the beef too thickly veined with fat, the chops with too much bone. Fingers point: not that one, the one behind. And all the time the choppers chop, and the white, bloodstained aprons swirl.

Further up the queue, a couple stands out from the crowd, he, grey-haired and thin on top, but his face young and alert and eyes that dart about. His mouth is mobile; one brief smile follows another, flickering across his lips. She is wooden-faced, her movements laborious, as though she is recovering from an illness. He moves quickly, speaks to his companion, points and frowns at the mountain of meat, turns back to her with a smile, his face, gestures, body always in movement. He is doing the choosing, the buying, asking his companion only for form’s sake. Her attention is elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere.

She turns her vacant eyes towards me, two lamps turned off. Her head turns, the blank gaze moves on, sweeping over the heads, the signs over the stands, the lights, and an expression appears. Not wonder, something hovering between apprehension and awe, as if she is seeing the market, any market, for the first time. She looks older than him, grey everywhere, inside and out. She wears a hat pulled down low on her forehead. Her clothes look as though they belong to someone else, not at all what she would have chosen if she had all her wits. He holds her hand tightly. She shuffles in unison, his shabby reflection, each time his body leans this way or that. He pulls her close, affectionately and kisses her cheek. She smiles at a memory. He whispers in her ear. She says something, a couple of low words, and his face lights up.

He chooses the meat; she doesn’t even look, her eyes following the pigeons on the forecourt beyond the butcher’s stand. A flicker of sadness crosses his face. His energy is flagging, and the taut muscles round his mouth betray the strain of keeping up enthusiasm for this empty husk the hospital has returned to him instead of his wife. He grips her hand so he won’t lose her, to make sure she follows, to keep her from stumbling perhaps, and they make their way to the checkout. She shuffles along, her shoes, ugly, sensible ones she probably only wore in the garden before.

They are alone in the crowd, life barging past them while they stand still. She is lost in memories so thickly wrapped in cotton wool she cannot distinguish one from another. He is so absorbed in his distress it takes form in his eyes, shouts out so loud I can almost hear. He hangs onto her hand, searching in the returned grip the fingers that used to caress his skin in the soft darkness of their nights, holding back the sob of pain as the memories surge and tell him there will only be memories from now on.

He pays, anxious because he no longer holds her hand in his, and picks up the package, hoping he will remember how she used to cook it so as to turn the bleeding lump into pleasure. How long, I wonder, before he can no longer take her out of the house except strapped in a car, before she cannot be left alone with such dangers as gas and matches, stairs and windows? How long before the effort of choosing what clothes to dress her in today breaks his heart?  Perhaps, if she had known what she was to become, a dead weight dragging him down into dark water, her own heart would have broken first.

They leave, he leading her to the edge of the market, she trailing behind, the beatific smile lingering in my mind though I can only see the back of her odd felt hat. I catch sight of his face once more as he turns, pulling her close, shouldering a path for the two of them through the crowd. I see such love in that mobile face, and such gratitude to have her back, even the little of her that remains. But behind the love is the emptiness of despair, with death the only issue.

I turn away from the open window into his thoughts, tasting the bitterness of loss and feeling the chill touch of sadness brush my own skin. I draw you into my thoughts, trying to fill the space left by the couple on the brink of oblivion with living warmth. But their shadow persists, that look of his that says love has no power against decrepitude. Such a slight shift of perception it would take, for the fluttering, shimmering lightness of the veil between us, that hides nothing but the deepest of secrets, to become heavy as a shroud. I long to feel your hand in mine, to dance our fingers into intricate knots, to banish the phantom touch of so much dead tendon and bone, that leads only to the grave.