Confluence

Many roads lead to the Triangle Swamp. If you come by boat, you can follow the Metep River down towards the Rock of the Eye, but the currents are violent and treacherous. The Nagat River is more peaceful and sleepy. When reeds swallow the river, when frogs sing and their cacophony, together with the reeds, creates a cocoon around your boat, you have reached the swamp. But you can also come by foot from Lake Echo. A narrow trail leads you from the side of the lake that faces the Y-Otla mountain range to the north tip of the Triangle Swamp. It is a one-day journey and the trail, in all seasons, is very beautiful. In the springtime, blue and purple wildflowers, shaped like stars with long fragile stems, sway on the hills above the Metep. But you have to be careful of snakes. Sing, clap your hands at regular intervals, carry a stick, make your presence known. The swamp is not inhabited by humans. The nearest village is Argon. Some people also built houses near the Water church, at the point where the Ré flows into the Metep. The swamp is inhospitable, full of ticks that bring fevers. Yet, at the north tip of the triangle, where the trail from Lake Echo ends, one wooden cabin stands, erected on long narrow stilts. The steep roof is covered with moss. One red chicken has her nest on the roof. Two black sheep, with ferns and brambles in their fleece, sleep underneath the cabin, against one of the stilts. From the window of the cabin, you can see the entire swamp. In June, pink and white lotus flowers invade the surface. High reeds, taller than men, guard the far corner where the two rivers, Nagat and Metep, meet. Vipers and grass snakes curl around lotus stems. Carp hide, follow your boat from deep in the muddy waters. Dragonflies, some blue, some red, land on the lotus flowers. Frogs remain invisible, except for vibrations that create circles around lotus leaves.

The cabin belongs to Gudule, a man prematurely aged by fevers. On his death bed he begged his wife to promise him never to abandon the cabin. The swamp was a sacred place and even if it took many generations, his last wish was for his offspring to learn to live in harmony with all its inhabitants, and learn from them, and embrace the fevers and the premature deaths as a part of the privilege to live on their territory, serve the swamp. The man believed that a powerful spirit lived at the center of the triangle, somewhere entangled in the rich mulch and the lotus roots. The spirit had appeared to him in a dream in the shape of a water plant with small white flowers, numerous and luminous, on the night he contracted his fever. He woke up covered in sweat, haunted by his oneiric vision of the light oozing from flowers in profusion. Though he could barely walk, he went to his boat. He wanted to explore the center of the triangle. His daughter Paule, who was then ten years old, asked to come with him. He loved Paule. He agreed in silence, but with eyes full of sorrow.

Many roads lead to the swamp: air, death, mist, sadness, profusion, seeping or longing.

The corpse of a fox

The corpse floats, bloated. The head has disappeared. Perhaps eaten. Or dismantled at the last vertebra. It follows a spiraling movement towards the center of the swamp. The orange fur, full of dragonflies, maggots, lotus petals, rain. It rains. It rains so hard that the swamp overflows into the Metep and the corpse changes its course, caught by violent contrary currents. Against a rock, the corpse rests, but soon leaves again, twirls among dead leaves, follows broken dead branches towards the ocean.

Winter morning

The water is cold, but not frozen. Nothing flowers. At the center of the swamp, frost at the tip of the reeds creates motifs resembling white flowers in the morning sun. As the boat leaves, a heron, hidden within the reeds, takes off, all white in the white sky. The frozen reeds close like a thick curtain behind the boat. From behind the curtain, two voices, muffled, rise: Paule’s voice calm and clear, busy naming all the creatures she loves: carp, a fox, the sheep, the white heron, robins, and her father’s voice, distant, feverish and exhausted, words increasingly harder to decipher. Then, silence.

From inside the silence, the reeds undulate, then shake. A cloud passes. A shadow covers the water and the plants, like a veil. Around the swamp, everything is still and frozen. From behind the reeds, where the boat vanished, a blue light reaches upward to just above the high grass. Always the same frozen silence, the paralysis of the plants.

Gudule is an old man

He lives with Blanche in the cabin at the North tip of the swamp. This is the place where he was born and where he grew up with his mother and with Lina. Lina. He sees so much of Lina in Paule. The way they stop in the middle of a word, a thought, to marvel at a tadpole. The way they both choose to shadow him in his explorations of the swamp. Or is it the other way around? Is he guided by their presence? Paule wears the medallion that once belonged to his mother: a small volcanic stone, black with dark green contours, not unlike a frog egg. A gift from his absent father.

Lotus flowers

Roots deep in the mud, unreachable, unseen, protected and fed by the mud, stagnant, flowers open, radiant pure white, light inside and around them, the texture of the petal dense and fleshy, a pink white color with a nocturnal scent. Flowers radiate light throughout the night. Gudule walks in the pond among all the long lotus stems, they trap his legs, his feet swallowed inside the mud. Mosquitoes, dragonflies, kingfisher, the two black sheep all witness the blooming at night. They stare from the side of the pond. The entire body of the flower protected by the mud, everything but the head.

The monk’s story

I came back to the swamp. I came by foot from Lake Echo. This was not my usual road. Each year, at the end of the summer, I came directly from the monastery. I first went down the mountain to Ivel, then I followed the Ré river all the way to the Water church and the rock of the Eye. But this year, something changed. Word came to the monastery that the swamp’s balance had been altered. Some plants had disappeared. Some animals. So I left the monastery early. I took a longer road, with the hope that the Y-Otla mountains and Lake Echo would prepare me, teach me about the changes taking place within the swamp.

One day before reaching Monk’s Bridge, high up in the mountains, the swamp appears down below. I see its almost perfect equilateral triangle and on that September morning, under soft light, it appears bright green and translucid, like the wild grapes that grow between Lake Echo and the North tip of the swamp, all along the mossy stone walls that border the path. Its surface, stagnant. Its borders, clear, as if drawn in pencil. I see the black cabin on stilts at the top north corner. I recognize the two black sheep and their owner, the old Gudule. The three of them leave the cabin and follow the path leading to the south-west corner, along the Metep. The sheep jump around, almost tripping him, and he, slow, patient, follows. He carries the slender staff of hazelnut wood I once gifted him, and wears his large straw hat.

I almost wave, but some fear prevents me from letting my presence be known. This fear has grown through the summers, and is hard to entirely justify. Gudule has always welcomed me. We are roughly the same age. We share a common love for the swamp. Yet I no longer feel at peace in his presence. When his silhouette appears by the black cabin, the peaceful silence turns threatening.

Birth

Paule is born in the cabin her grandparents built, at the north tip of the swamp. She is born the first day of March and that year the winter has been particularly long and cold and on the morning of her birth the water is still frozen. Nothing marks her birth. No dream. No animal visits her parents. But the birth is long, painful and difficult for Blanche. And the woman who had come from Argon to help is worried. Paule is born with a piece of placenta shaped like a small fig leaf on her forehead. She is born angry, full of rage and curiosity.

Fall equinox

A fatigue, a gentleness in the way the sun distributes its rays on the surface of the swamp, even at noon, a balance, a tipping towards darkness. We prepare to face the night. Each evening I whistle for the sheep to come back to their shelter a bit earlier. They do not protest. Dusk, smoke, constant fog above waters, humus saturated with water and rotten ferns, orange afternoon light. A faded exhaustion early in the morning. An understanding of the mud and all of its inhabitants. Fevers, fears. Unsteady hands with aching slender bones, wrapped with paper-thin skin. The middle of the swamp orange, silent. At night, close to the center, flowers open.

Gudule is a young man

He lives in Argon, alone. Each year, for his birthday, in November, he walks to the swamp. It is the muddiest time of the year. He leaves his house a bit before dawn, around six. He takes the trail that leads to the blue bridge, crosses the Nagat, then follows the water. When he sees the rice fields on his left, on the other side of the Nagat, he has two options. If he takes a right, the path goes up north towards Lake Echo, and the northern point of the swamp. He can then cross the Metep at Monk’s Bridge. That is, if he is not afraid that the old bridge will collapse under his weight. But the main reason why he does not choose that path is because he does not want to see his mother’s house. He is not even sure whether she is still alive. It takes him two days of walking to reach the southeast corner of the swamp. He takes his time. He always spends the night in the same cabin on the way; it is part of an old farm built on stilts, as it is customary in the region because the river overflows so frequently. The second day he reaches the swamp before noon. It is raining in profusion. The sound of rain covers everything, a curtain of sound. He is used to the mud and heavy rains. He is well-equipped to stay dry and to walk safely. Yet he slides and stumbles at every step. He holds on to branches so as not to fall.

It’s his birthday. He is twenty-nine. It is his ritual, since the year of the disappearance, to spend every birthday alone at the swamp. This year, something is different. At first, he thinks it’s simply because the rains are unusually violent, even for the season. But as he approaches the shore, he thinks his perception of change in the swamp is not due to the rain. He wonders whether someone is here, with him, at the swamp. He perceives movements, a swaying within the high reeds. But it could just be the wind. Although it’s almost noon, the skies are so gray it could be evening. Oaks, maples, birch and chestnut trees surround the water. They all provide color and light through their dense foliage: yellow ocher, azo yellow, vermilion, persimmon, burnt sienna, and here and there some residues of serpentine green from a dead summer.

Viper

Secretly, your friend. She knows you, follows you. When you think you are all alone in the swamp, she observes you from between the reeds. When you swim in the swamp in the summer she swims with you at a distance, she thinks you are beautiful, and she protects you. She knows about what grows at the center of the swamp. She curls around the unknown plant. She waits for the right moment to teach you.

The absence of humans around the swamp

Apart from the occasional visits of a young monk from the Angor monastery—and those pilgrimages traditionally take place around the fall equinox—Gudule has never crossed paths with anyone. Villagers from Argon and beyond believe that the swamp carries all sorts of diseases and though the fauna of this area is the richest, the most diverse, they would rather starve than eat the flesh from any creature that grows inside or anywhere near those stagnant green waters. Even as a young boy, before the disappearance, Gudule and his mother never had visitors. His mother seemed friendly only with a woman farmer, now a grandmother, who sells him flowers from her garden every year on his way to the swamp. So when Gudule senses that he is being observed, he thinks that perhaps it’s a dog watching. Or a small predator, such as the river-lynx, a large wild cat commonly seen near the mountain streams in Y-Otla. Sometimes the most adventurous of the creatures follow the river, swim across and reach the swamp.

Paule is three

She has bright pale blue eyes and short curly brown hair. She follows Gudule everywhere around the swamp. When she is too tired to walk, or needs a nap, Gudule carries her on his back. The two black sheep accompany them on their walks as well. Lina was three, like Paule, when she disappeared. Lina’s ghost is more present now, but Gudule does not talk about the ghost with Blanche. Instead, he spends more time near the cabin, at the North tip, or on the trails, muddy and often flooded, that lead to the Metep. He sleeps poorly, or not at all. He secretly acts towards Paule as if they were about to part. In return, Paule grows more attached, simultaneously to the swamp and to her father. Paule has never heard the word Lina.

Sing

Sing, clap your hands at regular intervals, carry a stick, make your presence known. You are not safe. You are not in a territory that will welcome you. You are afraid and it is good to be afraid. You should never feel comfortable or oblivious to the fact that you have a body and with each step you take you damage the soil, the tender new shoots of fern, the moss. You are an intruder. The noise you create, the smells you exude, aggress the swamp. Yet there is a way to walk, cross the meadows, follow the river. Show respect to the viper, prove to her that you know your place and she will guide you.

Being followed

The rain stops. A yellow disk, hazy, appears above the center of the swamp. A chickadee sings. A crow answers. Gudule bought seven chrysanthemums from the grandmother who was selling them in front of her garden. Three white and four yellow. He places them on the surface of the water. As the flowers enter the water, their heavy heads float. A current forms where all was stagnant. The rain has not destroyed the petals, but on the contrary has given more vibrancy to the colors. Against all physical laws, the flowers leave the shore, drift towards the center of the swamp. They curve slowly, counterclockwise. At the center of the swamp, no reed grows. Nothing grows. The water appears thicker, greener, oily. A small whirlpool forms. The seven flowers spiral, spiral closer, then sink. A dome-shaped bubble appears where the whirlpool originated. The dome at first sight is barely perceptible. It could be the sleek back of a trout. Then it swells. And as it swells it changes colors. The surface shines like oil: Payne’s grey, sap green, ocher. Light yellow. As it turns light yellow, it has reached the size of a small spirea bush. It pops in pure soundlessness and releases one color into spores.

River

Metep, Nagat, Ré, they all converge at the foot of the mountains, near the swamp. The current of the Metep in March swells with melted mountain ice, dislodges rocks, uproots trees, floods fields, protects fish that cannot survive anywhere else. Ocean fish swim upstream; swamp fish, flat, eyeless, hide deep in the green mud.

Gudule closes his eyes

Kneels into the mud, breathes in the color. The spores attach gently to his hair, his eyelashes, his lips. As the color enters him, his breathing slows. His face appears in a mist, like the yellow disk in the sky. The spores reach the three points of the triangle simultaneously. They remain in the atmosphere for a long time before falling back into the water. While they hover above the water, all is still, all is silence.

Paule is nine

Her territory expands to the three corners of the swamp, and beyond, to the shores of pebbles along the Nagat river. She befriends a frog, and a hedgehog. The frog lives very near the cabin, and on summer nights, Paule listens to their singing just outside her bedroom. The hedgehog lives further away on the trail that follows the Metep towards the Water church. He is very shy and sometimes hides from Paule, especially if the two sheep follow her on the trail. But Paule is patient. She waits. She can wait a very long time for the hedgehog to unfurl, show his nose. She always brings an offering: an earthworm, a caterpillar.

Recurrence

Gudule has recurrent dreams of storms, rainless, an accretion of dark thick clouds, so low they could touch his head. He feels light, focused. His neck aches. Gudule listens to the swamp through his skin, and when the color at the center of the swamp rises, his hands and feet burn and tingle.

The monk’s story

There was a time, decades ago, when Gudule and I were close. Or did I imagine the complicity between us? We would sit together in silence by the water, listen to the frogs, the fox, the herons. The two black sheep, at a distance, guarding us. But through the years, as my silence and solitude grew towards peace, his grew towards anger. Or perhaps not anger but what I interpreted as antagonism towards the swamp. We could no longer sit together by the water. Instinctively we avoided each other when I visited. We remained on opposite sides of the swamp, walked at different times of day.

I met him years after Lina’s disappearance, and we never talked about her. The few things I know about his life, I gathered from other monks in my monastery, from rare travelers I encountered on the path to Ivel, and mostly from fishermen on the Metep. Though the stories surrounding Lina’s disappearance vary—he pushed her; he drowned her; she never disappeared into the swamp, but was reclaimed by her father, a man who lives beyond Lake Echo in a frozen land with few fish—all converge when it comes to Gudule’s madness. They all dated its beginning precisely to the seventh of November, the year when a strange phenomenon occurred above the swamp, a sort of miniature typhoon that swallowed the Triangle for seventeen minutes. Nothing was destroyed. The swamp did not overflow. The cabin suffered no damage. But the swamp changed color permanently: from black-blue to yellow green. Gudule changed too, in ways that no one could accurately describe: his eyes, his voice, his gait. Some plants, among them heather, broom, and rosemary, disappeared.

Paule is twelve

Her father is ill, and she stays with him. Her mother Blanche lives in Argon now and only comes on occasion to visit them. Blanche begs Gudule to let her keep Paule in Argon, but he refuses. Her home is the swamp, he tells Blanche. And Paule agrees. Every morning Paule gathers a few small eggs from the chicken coop and makes an omelet for them both. Her days are spent exploring the swamp, repairing the cabin, taking care of the sheep and the chicken. In the evenings, Gudule and Paule read together. Paule can read but always asks Gudule to read for her out loud. Often the stories have cats as main characters.

The death of Gudule

Gudule dies in his bed and Paule is by his side. She holds his hands, but she does not see him; her eyes feel as if they’re under water and she looks at the ceiling. She whispers to Gudule as if afraid that someone might hear them. She talks about the swamp. The beauty of the white flower. She talks about her favorite animals: the fox, the robin. She says she wants to go back at night to the middle of the swamp to see the colors better. In one part of her mind, she knows that Gudule is dead, but she believes he can hear her. She just needs to whisper, to make sure no one else can. She uses his favorite words: boat, passage, flower, stem.

Gudule is twelve

Summer. In the distance, at the center of the swamp, something moves. White flowers. Very long, slender stems. A profusion of white petals, so thin, so delicate, like the wings of moths. At the softest breeze they break and cover the water like snow. Their stems grow so sturdy, impossible to uproot, hard to cut without sharp scissors. Gudule swims towards the cluster of white flowers. In parts of the swamp, he can almost walk. He must stay on his toes, tilting his head back so that his nostrils remain above water. In other parts, he pushes his way through thick vine-like algae and tall reeds. The algae smell of dead oceans, ink, the scalps of sleeping newborns. But also trapped sunshine. They tickle the soft territory of skin just below his belly button. As he reaches the first white flowers that mark the center of the Triangle, he hears a thump, followed by a low gurgle. The sound comes from the southwest shore he just left, behind the curtain of reeds. He thinks muskrat, nutria. Or perhaps one of the black sheep. Sometimes, when it’s too hot out, they can’t resist the urge to immerse their fleece in the swamp. The wing-like petals, vibrating, undulating, captivate him so much that he forgets Lina. For what feels like just a few minutes, he forgets her existence. He forgets the house on stilts where his mother lives, at the north tip of the Triangle swamp. He forgets his task to protect the two sheep and the baby girl. He forgets everything. He wants to see the flowers, understand why they sway without wind. Nothing else matters. He becomes aware for the first time of a presence, a shadow, at the center of the swamp. And this presence has a pull, tangible, in his chest. The closer he moves towards the center, the more pressure he feels in his lungs, under his skull, and he hears a sound that could be hundreds of insect wings, or leaves rustling, and he does not know whether it comes from inside or outside his body.

Hands

Cold hands, hands hidden in pockets, hands that betray pain, with fingers stained with tobacco and mud under the nails, mud from the swamp, but also hands that care for the two black sheep, hands that remove the brambles from their fleece, feel patiently for ticks, hands that mend shelters and shoes, palms face up with grain for the birds in the winter, hands with shears to cut the black fleece in the summer, hands that seek the yellow flowers of broom plants.

He can’t look at his mother

Later when he comes home alone, in tears, covered in green mud, and with a cluster of insect bites on his left ankle, left thigh, he can’t speak. As he tries to utter words, like the word Lina, swampwater gushes out of his mouth, full of translucent white petals. He is shaking. He was ten when Lina was born, and for the past two years, the baby girl has been the center of his existence. He has no idea what a father is, but until this morning at the swamp he has never left Lina. He has always been a wonderful older brother. Attentive, loving, caring, gentle, patient. Nothing can explain what happened.

The mother rushes to the place where she knows they love to play, the remote southwest corner of the Triangle, the muddier part of the swamp, near where the two rivers meet. She sees the two black sheep, unusually alert and distressed. They both gallop towards her. She sees Lina’s red boots, neatly placed on top of a big rock. She enters the swamp in her white summer dress.

We, Spores

We wake up above ground. We marvel. We don’t understand sunlight yet, but we have time: it is not yet dawn. A fox, hungry, sniffs the carpet of pine needles. The fresh air and light rain entice us to spread. Sunlight is a foreign language, but we speak rain and dew; swamp water communicated with us underground in our previous life, before we fruited. Now, above ground, we feel invincible, comestible. Perhaps we seek to be eaten. We think we do. Red and invisible, we sense life below and above: movements of clouds, vibrations of hyphae synchronize.

The fox comes back, famished. We thought we were done growing; we were wrong. As the sun pierces through the trees and the rain falls, we grow taller than any blade of grass; our cloud thickens, widens, darkens, takes on a bluish hue. We crave rain, sunshine; when they happen together, we unfurl into new words for new colors: arvl the color beyond yellow, ou-o- the color niched within blue. When we give ourselves to the wind, the fox inhales us. We become part fox, part wind, part rain. Porous, we dance with dandelion seeds. Some of us will come back underground. Some will remember the fox. Some will stay inside the lungs of the fox, red, unseen. Spores, dew drops, dandelion seeds, blades of grass, sun rays, other nameless invisible colors. There will be new mornings.

The monk’s story

Years after Gudule passed away, his widow Blanche comes to greet me in front of her cabin on the first day of my pilgrimage. We walk together in silence around the swamp, accompanied by the two black sheep. Then, unprompted, she confides in me about Gudule’s last day:

When the boat reappeared in front of the cabin, she told me, Paule looked taller. Blanche was disoriented and thought perhaps months had passed since Paule and Gudule had left the shore. He lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, peaceful, with his eyes open. Paule turned to Blanche, but when she spoke her eyes rested somewhere on the roof of the cabin, her voice too soft, her pupils too large and black: we saw only one flower, and it was closed. All around the stem, we could not speak nor move. After that, a color came. The water shook. The carp hid. Something started to cry. The color tasted good, like rain.