TRANSIT VISA: On Captivity

ON CAPTIVITY                                 

Potter’s Line Market, April, 2010

The two new hogs are wilder looking than the others up the hill. Their bodies are huge barrels atop tottering hooves, their black fur porcupine coarse. They have flapping donkey ears that taper absurdly to delicate tips. One looks like a brown bear with a tan snout. She won’t come out of her shed much. When she does the male tries to mount her, even though they’ve just met. I come upon him having a loud guttural conversation with the other females through the far end of his fence. I knock on the side of the shed. Her head emerges. I open the metal gate and step in. I say hello and extend my palm close to the flat, grey end of her wet nose.

My jetlag finally owns me and I’ve come out here to cry for no reason other than I am lost in a new land. But these two giants have captivated me, as stars do, and stopped the rush of my tears. I barely notice the sheep, goats, or cows.

Captivity. It is a strange place for my heart to be - caged, set free, locked up again without warning. My man can’t always be kind. There is a visceral battle between staying and going – all that nonsense in me. I realize captivity means endless waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am sure, as the animals are, that I’ve come here for a reason, even if unfathomable. There is a greater plan at work, even if I only came for a connection with another. But I’m unable to be free. I am at my heart’s mercy, and will ride the highs and lows even if they take make me dizzy. I am as on guard as the hogs, and yet am making my place slowly in the pen, retreating to my shed, searching for scraps in the mud.

I wonder how the pigs’ days will pass with so few markers here, only kibble, mud, sleep. They are gorgeous to me, unimaginable creatures, even for story books. But I am the other; caged out. They won’t talk to me.

What’s the bottom line on captivity? He asks.

Human or animal? I say.

He says the captive is the only one who can set himself free. He says it’s possible that the animals are more evolved than us, and have given themselves to the bigger picture. It’s possible they feel sorry for humans and have decided to offer themselves up to us to get us out of our jams.

I consider the Zen eyes of the cows. They stand sideways, nose to nose, in their paddock in the sun. Only their heads turn to watch my progress across their line of vision.
I visit the black piglet locked in his shed at the far upper corner of the property. I touch his kibbles in the stone trough that enters the side wall. They are soggy. A pile of droppings the size and color of charcoal briquettes lies neatly in the corner. It’s not right for him to be alone, so far from the familiar sounds of the others. He won’t move from his place in the hay. He accepts my arrival by opening his eyes. I sing him a piglet song and he closes them.  
 

Bernard is grounded here. Who knows what forced him down?   The former pilot lives in a green metal shipping container next to the main gate. He’s been here at least fifteen years. He has squatter’s rights and cannot be put off. He has piled odd sections of scrap fence along the side of his house to camouflage it. My man says he’s like ivy, he can’t let anything go. He piles his growing collection of old packing boxes, broken pieces of stone, scraps of wood, dying plants next to his table on the patio. Rent payers get priority and my man has displaced him from the small workroom in order to paint masterpieces.

Bernard’s artwork is now carefully displayed, leaning against the patio wall. All of the paintings are faithful renderings of aircraft, including the one he won first place for 40 years ago and for which he received a trip to Munich.
 

If he finds you he will waylay you for ten minutes at least with his tales of the animal life on the compound, or with fifty year old stories in which his memory of the details is clear as a bell. I don’t mind him as much as the others, who see him as stealing from them rather than adding anything to the place. He does both simultaneously. I’m told he’s an old British racist. But my man says he listens to loud hip hop in his container at night. I see his entrance/ exit for the first time today as I catch him emerging from the small twists and turns of his scrap walls and high potted evergreens. He’s just woken and it’s more apparent how scrawny he is. He could be broken like a twig. His hair is a tangle of salt and pepper connecting to his beard. He carries a metal kettle and wears blue quilted slippers on the parking tarmac.

My man says living in this place is like living in a filling station in Barstow, and he’s right. The shower is downstairs off the communal office kitchen. I’ve bought a pair of black plastic slippers to stand in the grubby shower stall. The bottom fills quickly with cloudy water and begs to overflow its bounds. The old shampoo froths around my ankles. I ask him why the toilets don’t flush and the drains won’t drain here. English plumbing, he says.

It’s become clear to him that he cannot leave this country. He is captive to his young daughter’s charms, and they are many. Apple cheeks, squeals of delight, one-footed scooter and trampoline prodigality. He says this is the first time in his life he’s been loved unconditionally. On the nights she visits his room we move as shadows across her bedtime landscape, holding torches cupped in our palms. I go silently down to the kitchen for last toast or yoghurt, a last cigarette smoked under the extractor fan. I unlock the low metal gate across his door at the top of the stairs, and lock it again, always when she is here, in case she should fall out of his close circle of protection. She is two and a half. She does not understand captivity yet. Perhaps she never will.

I don’t know if I’m capable of riding out his bursts of anger. I ask him to be as gentle with me as he is with his daughter. Today we can’t make ourselves understood. I roll a cigarette and sit on a pile of two by six planks piled near the chicken pen. I smoke and look across the far low fields toward the canal. I have it all locked up in my throat, ready to spill. The taste of salt is already in my eyes. But the stallion in the farm across the road whinnies and rises up on his hinds at the two females who stand facing him, their noses through their separating fence.

I feel the wildness in me. I am ready to ride it into the future, the past, to collect all my sorrows into one pitch and hurl it out: I am a failure at love. I start to sob, but a hooting laughter escapes me. I see in a flash the enormity of the ridiculous situation. I have taken another huge gamble. I am far from home and in a no man’s land of emotion. I have flung myself out here into this new country with a man who may not be capable of liking me. I sob and laugh simultaneously, and every time I cackle the roosters give the ‘Cock a Doodle Doo!’ call of the morning, as their answer.