Stephen opened a box of mushrooms. It was all he had left in his cupboard. He looked furtively out the window. He didn't have a view of the Eiffel Tower but of a suburban neighborhood.
At what point did the memories begin to resurface? He was sitting in front of his plate of mushrooms. The lights of the city and everything around him were fading. Now he was in the woods. He was about ten years old. Mary, his great-grandmother, was walking beside him, slowly, with the help of a cane. She spoke little, stopped sometimes, searched the ground with the tip of her cane and turned over the leaves. Stephen remembered his great-grandmother's gestures, the smell of the undergrowth, the colors and the roughness of the trees.
From far and wide a mushroom would appear, as if it could be caught. Mary knelt down to pick it up. Stephen was watching her. Her gnarled fingers would slowly release the foot to cut it. Then she would hand her catch to Stephen, who would carefully put it away in a bag.
Mary was born in 1901 and Stephen sixty years later. A century, almost, separated them. He had always known her to be old, and it didn't matter whether she was a hundred or a thousand years old. It seemed to him that she had infinite wisdom and rights over death, which had become her confidant. Mary was the friend of time, she was time itself and had the penetrating gaze that all those who can see between worlds have.
Time had worked like a river and dug a gap between these two beings. But mushrooms, even if fragile, had the power to create a complicity between them. In his apartment in the Parisian suburbs, Stephen was alone. It seemed that mushrooms did not have the same power. Yet Mary was always there, in his memory.
Stephen closed the shutters and packed his bags, taking his time, smiling. When you know where you are going and where you come from, the present becomes lighter. He had long hours of road ahead of him. He was beginning to understand that what his great-grandmother had to teach him could not be expressed in words. It had taken thirty years for it to become obvious.
The teaching hidden in Mary's silences had always been within him, and only by paying close attention could it be discovered, like the mushrooms in the forest.
It was enough to bend down inside oneself to pick up all the power in the world.
