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the mixture to bring it to truffle consistency. But now it smells of history; of the mountains and forests of South America; of felled wood and spilt sap and campfire smoke. It smells of incense and patchouli; of the black gold of the Maya and the red gold of the Aztec; of stone and dust and of a young girl with flowers in her hair and a cup of pulque in her hand.
IT’S SNOWING AT last. It’s been snowing all day. Big fat fairytale flakes like whirligigs from the winter sky. Snow changes everything, so says Zozie, and already the magic’s beginning to work: changing shops, houses, parking-meters into soft white sentinels as the snow falls, grey against the luminous sky, and little by little, Paris disappears; every flake of soot, every discarded
and the snow outside claiming everything with its quiet gluttony. Snow comes so relentlessly; it swallows sound, kills scent, steals light right out of the sky.
Isn’t that what we all want? To believe that Christ arose from the dead; that angels guard us; that fish on a Friday is sometimes holy and at other times a mortal sin; that it somehow matters if a sparrow falls, or a tower or two, or even an entire race, annihilated in the name of some specious deity or other, barely distinguishable from a whole series of One True Gods – ha! – Lord, what fools these mortals be,
their temples made into ‘heritage sites’, their stones toppled, their pyramids overgrown, all lost in time like blood in the sand?
because the fear of Death is so much greater than honour, or goodness, or faith, or love
‘The worst of all things is nothing, Anouk. No meaning; no message; no demons; no gods. We die – and there’s nothing. Nothing at all.’
