¿Quién es la señora Pilon?
You would sit on the veranda with the cats and drink coffee as the morning cool burned into mid-day heat. Señora Pilon would walk by each morning, on her way to the market, and nod at you – her face a study in seriousness. She looked at you as if there was something honourable about writing, or dishonourable but nonetheless revered. You always wanted to chase after her, and walk beside her, and ask her about that nod – or her life, what she loved, who she loved.
You are working on the new book, living somewhere in Northern Spain, in the Basque Country for a few months. You’ve rented a house just outside the town of Oñati, where the San Miguel Roman Catholic church is still the tallest building in the town, signifying the traditional importance of the Church. You ask at the wine shop about the woman who nods at you every morning and they are suspicious, hesitant about giving you any information. Señor Negu, who proudly wears the Basque beret and encourages you to buy one because they are the best berets in the world, provides her name, but that is the limit of it. She is Señora Pilon.
After three weeks have passed, on a Thursday morning, you make more than enough coffee, place cheese and baguette on the table, and wait. At 7:30 a.m., she comes down the gravel road, which is held between lush green hands, carrying her empty bags inside a shoulder bag. She’s wearing sturdy leather boots and a light coat. Her gait is not old. It is fluid and easy. When she looks toward you, you stand and motion with both hands for her to join you. She pauses, shakes her head, no, continues on her way. The next morning, you try again, and the next, and the next. On the ninth morning, she smiles and turns off the road toward your veranda.
Señora Pilon is not as old as you’d first imagined.
“I do not want to disturb your writing,” she says. “But I would take a cup of coffee. We will be a few minutes only.”
You stick out your hand. “Tomas Bruce.” The orange tabby is up on your chair, eying the cheese. You push her gently and she hops to the floor.
“I know,” she says. “I have asked about you at the wine shop. Señor Negu is saying you are writing a novel. They are saying to me, ‘another’ novel. So, one of many?”
“One of many. Yes.” So this is the moment when the Señora Pilon you’d imagined comes face-to-face with the Señora Pilon in the flesh. Perhaps she has no reverence for writers. Perhaps she finds nothing honourable about what you do. Her voice is thinner and higher, her face more wrinkled than you imagined, and the way in which she slurps her coffee is shocking to your fantasy. You would like to learn about her life, but you don’t know how to ask – What do you care about? Who do you love? Are you okay? What do you know to be true? What makes you angry?
“The weather is warm,” she says. “Tomorrow we will have twenty-nine degrees. Hot, but there is nothing to be done.”
“Nothing to be done,” you say, like a mimicking idiot parrot.
“It is because of the altitude, and the mountains,” she says. “There is a micro-climate in this region. It has always been so. Since I can remember. The mountains and the ocean. The ocean and the mountains.”
You don’t sigh, but there is a long sigh inside of you. Life, after all, is not a novel. Nor is it a movie. It is a long and boring list of banalities with occasional brilliant moments. Your wife farts in her sleep. You make the same drive to work every morning – the same traffic, the same pattern of traffic signals, the same blather on your radio. You make your morning coffee in the same way, every day. And Señora Pilon slurps her coffee and likes to talk about the weather. You want to know her heart, but you will have to settle for a Basque weather report and a slurping sound.
Her eyes are almost grey. The romantic in you wants to say they’re sad, or damaged, but no, there’s a vibrating curiosity and joy. She places her mug on the table and turns toward you. “Who do you love?” she says.
the appallingly underestimated intelligence of cows
​Look, I’m not sure how this started. I think we were talking about elephants and their intelligence, their compassion, their sense of family. I’m at a book club, 45-minutes out of the city on the Yellowhead. It’s a simple box of a community hall with two small shelves of books in a corner, with a sign that reads Beaver Creek Library. It’s a fine group of about twenty women, who are blunt about their thoughts on my book, but kind for the most part. Somewhere in the middle of our discussion, a woman with stunning red hair and a loose-jointed recklessness to her body, locks eyes with me across the table and says: “Cows aren’t dumb.” Her voice is stern and commanding and true.
My mind does a quick backflip and I’m confused. Was there a cow in the book that I can’t remember? Did I insult this cow? Did I cast aspersions on all cows? I honestly do not know where this is coming from. “I never thought they were,” I say. “Cows. I don’t think they’re dumb.”
I still think it’s something I’ve written in one of my books. I did write a short story once about a man who gives his girlfriend a cow for her birthday despite the fact they live on the sixth floor of an apartment building. But that cow was not dumb. The man was. I find myself really liking this woman for her wild red hair, and her absurd honesty.
“Well, people are always telling me how dumb cows are. And they’re not.”
“I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone who’s said that.”
“That’s because you don’t live here,” she says, dismissing me with a wave of her hand.
By “here,” she means the country, rural Alberta, a Range Road address, a muddy road – where apparently, an awful lot of folks think cows are dumb. She’s drawing a line in the sand between city folk who think steaks come from Safeway, and country folk, who have cows in their every-day lives. I should ask the follow-up questions – What evidence do these people who say cows are dumb offer? Why do they think cows are dumb? But I don’t ask. I let it go. There’s a tension around the table now. Maybe some of these women think cows are dumb and they’re afraid to speak up. It feels like the room is divided.
After the book club is done, the intense, red-haired woman who has a high regard for the appallingly underestimated intelligence of cows, is out the door without a goodbye – out into the rain without a jacket. And I am left with my unspoken questions, and fascination, and unrequited curiosity.
The dream
​There is a Japanese legend that says if you can’t sleep at night, it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream. David Pinsky remembers this saying as he stares at the ceiling at 3 a.m. Is he running a marathon in someone else’s dream, barely worthy of being in the race, but determined to finish? Is he inside a former lover’s dream about driving all night across Saskatchewan – swilling gas-station coffee and being mesmerized by the straight line of the headlights. Pinsky is fabricating possible scenarios. Speculating without a hint of an idea about what’s really going on. The one thing he knows for certain is that he’s sure as shit not doing any of his own dreaming. He’s wide awake. His body is heavy with sleep but his mind is saying no, no, no.
He’s done that drive from Lloydminster to Moose Jaw in the middle of the night. The flat highway across the flat landscape – a straight line of sleep-inducing dullness. The sweep of the headlights a constant push through the darkness. He was with Sarah, who stayed awake with him, talked and talked, about anything and nothing at all. Lots of women would have let themselves fall asleep. Was it because she wanted to make sure he stayed awake? Or was she just naturally a chatty night owl? They were going to a funeral. Sarah’s aunt Elsie.
He doesn’t sleep. At 3:30 a.m., he turns on the television and watches Stagecoach, a seemingly benign1939 Western with a young John Wayne. In the middle of the night, all the themes of misogyny, sexual and social prejudice, alcoholism, greed, and redemption rise up to the surface and he sees it as something deeper than he remembers.
In the morning, after two espressos, he calls Sarah. He has decided to think of this supposed Japanese legend as the Japanese Dream Theory.
“Were you dreaming about me last night? Was I in your dream?”
“Good morning, David. What?”
“Yes, yes. Good morning. I just need to know if you were dreaming about me last night.” He can hear one of her dogs barking somewhere in her house.
“Why?”
“Because there’s a Japanese dream theory that says if you can’t sleep at night, it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream.”
“A Japanese what?”
“Just tell me. Was I in your dreams?”
“Why would you pick me? We broke up, what? Two years ago?”
“I haven’t slept. I’m out of my mind. You were the first person I thought of. I don’t know why.”
“I don’t remember my dream. Not last night. So, I don’t know if you were there or not. Sorry.”
“Okay. Thanks. Sorry to bug you.” He hangs up. He doesn’t know who to try next. It’s such a narcissistic presumption, he’ll likely let it go.
Sarah lied about her dreams. He was there, in her dream, sitting at the table on the verandah in Cyprus, at the Hotel Burhans in the bright sun. He’s wearing a ridiculous straw hat and sunglasses, shorts and sandals. They are drinking the thick Cypriot coffee and there are cats lounging on the paving stones. Always in this dream, she can’t speak. She has no voice and she has so much she needs to say. She tries to mime her feelings, but Pinsky can’t figure it out. It was the most frustrating dream, and it repeats itself with very little deviation. She does not know what this important thing is that she can’t seem to say, but it will stop them from breaking up. If she can speak it, they will stay together. They’ll be living together and there’ll a baby on the way. If only she could say what she needs to say. This conversation that never happens would have been the turning point for them. In the dream, a cat will always hop into her lap looking for food, or a saucer of milk, and this is when she wakes up.