Now the world we tourists came from has no form. It is too busy trying to decide what it is to impose itself on other places. This life in Crete for me is my life. It’s the only place I actually live. I’ll leave in a month, but I don’t know what world I’m “coming back to”. How can tourism exist when humans can’t go back home?
The answer lies in there being no back or forth, in time as a construct of capitalism, in possessive verbs in French in English, in America not being worthy of its creed, in Black Lives Mattering, in Indigenous language resurgence, in ending carbon dependence, in colors other than “red or blue”, in all the other stuff I wanted to write to you about. But instead, we’ll pause and shift to another story. Something about traditional music in Bretagne. It all started with a cabbage.
PART THREE
That Most Impervious of Qualities
Marthe Vassallo is one of those figures. Incomprehensibly cool and talented, she carries on the Breton signing tradition with what I identify as European cosmopolitan grace, mixed with an aura of bygone times. Her kind may have been standing on the cliffside, singing a long ballad for the return of a sailor. Not a sailor she loved but one she’d hexed with hydrangea petals and roses in the barnyard, with cidre and blood in the root cellar, or fire and metal at the lighthouse’s apogee. She was the emblem of the Bretange I’d imagined through the internet. Her presence on Youtube was as visceral to me as the moment I actually saw her, at the Saturday market in Vieux Marché, a small village in the Trégor region, where gangsters and cult leaders are said to be hiding out in estates far from the gaze of the world, and where activists for refugee rights in France are also the organizers of Fest Noz events.
I can hear Marthe’s voice even when she is silent and searching through winter vegetables. She reaches for a green cabbage a couple market stalls away from where I am standing, before a glass case of spiced chèvre. I have chosen a ball of cheese caked in turmeric, fennel seeds, and red pepper. As I pay, I turn my head to my coins, trying to decide wether or not to approach her. I turn my head back, and she has disappeared. All that is left of the woman I so dreamed of meeting was a vacancy in the pile of cabbages.
I was brought to this place by an important friend. Gabriel held the cheeses we’d purchased and I turned in the direction of his car. The smoke from chimneys laced the clear morning air. A church of sand colored stone rung 10:30 AM, ringing in yet another weekend of local life. I couldn’t tell Gabriel, a talented fiddler of many traditions, deeply engrained in the Breton music circuit, that I’d caught a glimpse of my hero, and was now wallowing in the tragedy of not having approached her. The words I might have said to Marthe floated in my brain. My regret billowed with the steam from villager’s cups of hot coffee. I cut my losses. Beyond the honey stand was Gabriel’s car, the Citroen which would carry me from the sting of missed opportunity.
“Where are you going?” He said as I walked toward the vehicle. “We have more business in this town.”
From base of my spine to nape of the my neck, I was filled with a sense of enchantment. The air was cold and I was still fragile, having spent the bulk of that month laid up in bed, suffering from the most severe flu that has ever befallen me. Perhaps it came from spending too long on the cliffside in the rain listening to the sound of distant bombard squealing in the harbor. Perhaps I’d caught my malady from the revelers at New Years festivities, from attending Fest Noz after Fest Noz, where the chains of country dancers held me close in rhythm, sweating into the night, warm with cider and the pleasure of company. The lack of food, lack of human contact, and the lack of physical movement endured from the couch had turned me into the kind of thing sensitive to invisible forces. I was the last leaf on a tree in the square, coming unstuck of its branch and floating now to the door of this ramshackle village house where our business was to be carried out.
We walked into this barn-like entry room, where antique furniture and farm equipment were situated in contrast to a stack of many fresh copies of the same magazine. Shoes and boots still warm from their wearers sat aligned next to another door. On the other side of it, I sensed the warmth of family life, peppered with another ingredient. I could taste it. The ephemeral thing which follows the kinds of people whose lives are made for art. There were people nearby whose work schedules do not align with regular business hours. There was a wooden table here in the entry, crooked with age and scarred by coats of paint. Upon it sat a green cabbage.
We entered a long stretch of living space, at the back of which was gathered a kind of council, circled around the woodstove. I passed through the air around me alert, as though every painting, every sculpture, every photograph hanging about the walls whispered yes, and urged me forward.
Her face is the same shape as the moon, yet carved to produce a jaw sharp with shadow. Her skin is like honey poured over parchment whereupon the first songs in the Breton language were scrawled. Around her were grown men paying rapturous attention to her words. They look up and greet us.
One is the owner of this home. He’s the director of a documentary about the Fest Noz, at the moment it became a piece of “immaterial patrimony”. This distinction is given by UNESCO, which keeps track of endangered languages like Breton. I sat by the director as Marthe was speaking. He and I said words to one another in hurried whispers. Each piece of language lingered in the air above the fire a moment and splashed upon him like a squall of rain, to which he responded by bursts of thought in turn. He did not have the vocal cadence of anyone I’d talked to before in this land. Artist! I had the feeling I was conspiring not so much with somebody but with something. There were chickens outside of the window in a courtyard. At one time this place was the home to a farming family. Now posters for the director’s films hang on the thick stone walls. Yet I could imagine him bent to the earth, humble, nurturing the soil outside, just as well as I could see him focused, taking in this world with a digital camera.
The place smelled of sweaters. Wet wool commingled with the steam of hot beverages and I was offered something to drink. In my hushed voice I said yes and introduced myself as writer, whose subject was the oral transmission of musique Bretonne itself. The weight of the room then shifted to envelop me. I was amidst and one of them, part of a covert operation. I’ll call it a resistance, but the threat is invisible. It is silence itself. We operate just under the surface, carrying the old way, through the tall grassed soaked with rain on a moon-drenched night.
The men are important. Along with the film director, I am introduced to the person who runs Dastum Media, which is the online archive of all Breton music recordings. The project started as a magazine at the critical juncture of the early 70s, when the last original speakers were approaching their deaths. Two my left were two professional and powerful instrumentalists. Across from me was a man from Poland, who ran a Breton music and dance association there, and was here to create a film featuring the interview he is now conducting with the queen of all of them.
She speaks in a way where I can imagine, that if elongated, her words would turn to song. She is calm and surrounded by that most impervious of qualities. Rapt attention from a group of men.
I have a hard time focusing on the words she speaks. We have shaken hands and have been formally introduced, but I am of not of the illusion we have connected or that she will remember me. This is not my goal. My goal is to be soaked by this environment. I want to remember everything. Her words crash over my ears as I sip the strong black tea. I rock in the wicker chair and notice a cat on the prowl. The window beyond Marthe’s head reveals the back of the church. We are all but meters away from the altar. I am aware that this has long been a sacred mound of land. Now the council has gathered to protect the thing with no true boundary. It is not God. It is music.
She speaks of a woman who gave her a hard time for having learned a version of a Breton gwerz from a 1990s field recording found on Dastum. She is then talking about a spring fed fountain. These stories go back and forth. She speaks, turning into the Polish man’s microphone. It is hard to catch every word. But she is talking about the limits of acceptable tradition in Breton music. I have already manufactured a belief, having seen her on Youtube, that she is the vanguard of what acceptable evolution of tradition is. Though the Breton music scene is dominated by male musicians, she shines brightest to me. She is neither pop star nor hometown hero. I’d put her age between 35 and 52, but her eyes scream childlike whimsy, and her comportment is that of a wise woman crone.
Marthe finishes a final talking point. The men start to murmur, and the circle is humming with the ideas of these people. I have a hard time accepting that this meeting should be adjourned. For I’ve arrived at the heart of my inquiry. I want to stay forever in the the unnamable core, in this world of tradition bearers, whose shared goal is to be of service to songs and melodies, which, I remind myself, are in French called airs. They are the stuff we breathe.
How will I elongate the morning so as to never make it end? I want to take a picture, or a covert video of the moment. Could I back up to the end of the room and take a shot of the group? No. Too corny. I opted instead to go the bathroom, leaving the company of all of them, and committing as much of the space to memory as possible. In the bathroom I looked over the chickens in strutting int he yard. The plucked away at the earth, scratching it with their talons, creating impressions.
There is something about that day I can’t hold onto no matter how hard I try.
I returned to the living room with desperation on my tongue. If I was smart I would ask her if I could call her and arrange an interview at her home. I should get the contact information for all of these people. By what means could I manufacture this feeling again? The sense of wonder and intrigue brought a lightness to my stomach, which was lately so twisted with flu and angst, because the constant search for comfort, as this comfort which now fades from me, drives me to want to consume the room. With a picture, I could at least prove that it once was like this. That I found the one I sought. She was putting on her coat. These people had places to be. She pulled her dark hair back and it poured over her shoulders like black water over river stones. I am not the customer, I am not the customer. I am the witness, I am the stranger, and I have heard the secrets of an ancient world, refracting through her vocal cords in this special time that she was alive, and I had the fortune of her company.
