Stories – Just my imagination |
Stories – Just my imagination |
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Histoires pour enfants Divers Regain (journal de la Confédération Paysanne) |
The first faint glimmer of realization came when he saw her bike was still leaning against the wall of his house. Midday, early summer. He’d gone down to take the geldings back to the bottom field, and got delayed because a fence needed fixing. He thought she’d have gone home by the time he got back. It wasn’t the first time she’d invited herself to lunch, much to Ana’s irritation. He liked her company, but this was the first time he’d actually felt elated by the prospect of it. The feeling was unexpected and unsettling, but he put it to the back of his mind and thought no more of it. She’d come along that morning to ride one of the horses, and had stuck around to help them put the stallion with the mares. The three of them had watched and laughed at the horses’ antics. The golden stallion knew the older mare already, but not the young one. At one stage, both of them were standing there side by side, eagerly presenting their rumps in parallel. But the stallion was only interested in the mare he knew. He wooed her in his usual attentive if clumsy fashion, while completely ignoring the young one, or chasing her away if she got too insistent. There was much sense in it: better the safety of the experienced mare you knew than the risk of a violent kick from an overexcited inexperienced filly. Pedro watched Shaman as he often did, with a gaze that friends mistook for admiration but was in fact closer to identification. He’d bought the horse, a wild unbroken stallion, on a ridiculous impulse. He’d been charged and thrown often, but persisted all the same, and was proud of the real if meagre progress he’d made. All serious riders aspire to being as one with their horse. The expression sounds clichéd, but there is literal truth in it. There comes a point at which the rider is able to control the horse’s limbs almost as if they were his own. And further still along on the path to equestrian perfection, it becomes clear that this is not a simple matter of the human brain controlling the equine posture. Rather, there is a fusion of human and equine minds, a mystical phenomenon that explains the almost spiritual passion of the devoted horseperson. Pedro was not that good a rider, but he had experienced the fusion in a different way. He liked to joke about Shaman being his alter ego, but in fact he was quite serious about it. One day, early on, he’d watched horrified as his stallion smashed down the stable door to break free and join another horse in the yard, oblivious to the danger of the sharp splinters cutting deeply into his legs. In that bloody instant, Pedro actually saw himself in his horse, as vividly and troublingly as if looking in the mirror and seeing a different face, or repeatedly seeing another person dressed in the same clothes and reading the same book. He was thirty years younger, an out-of-control teenager smashing everything and everybody around him in a frenzied urge to break free of some imagined restraint, even if he killed himself in the process, which he very nearly did. When winter came, Carmen would be leaving. Her husband had found a good job in Barcelona, the other end of the country. Ana was relieved. Pedro would be sad to lose one of their best riders. The human capacity for self-deception is extraordinary. Neither he nor Carmen had any idea that the hello and goodbye kisses on the cheek were getting slightly wetter week by week, or infinitesimally closer to the mouth. The steadying hand on the arm lingering gradually longer. The evening before she was due to leave they met for the usual weekly lesson at the local riding school. A head on the shoulder. A tear in the eye. The length of the parting embrace tipped over the threshold point, and the mingling began. “I nearly didn’t come because I feared this might happen.” |
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