Stifling heat, and the road winds on without end between the mountains and the little villages. Unmistakably the south of France, and we meet all sorts of travellers on the way: grazing cows, a local driver inching along at his leisure, a speeding off-roader and a band of pilgrims on foot, all of them heading somewhere.
It is good to stop, and the little village comes at just the right moment. This small settlement at the end of the world has a single main street, and at its bend a tiny, many-sided square with a little church, a tall stone cross and, in front of it, a fountain of carved stone with a basin. Late in the afternoon there is not a soul anywhere, and the deserted little village seems ghostly. In the background stands a round rotunda, a fortress among the village houses. This is the local chateau, from the thirteenth century!
Inside the church, dedicated to Saint Roch, the air is cool, and the statue of its namesake saint shows his wounds. We soon walk round the tiny interior. On the way out we go over to the fountain, which is in proportion to the little square. Its rim is octagonal, perhaps as a sign of rebirth, or of baptism by water? From the stone column at its centre, spouts reach out on either side, ending in graceful but wrathful dragons' heads. Beneath one of them are iron rests, left over from the days when the villagers still carried their water in buckets.
On top of the column stands a carved stone statue of Saint Clarus, the legendary first bishop of the city of Albi, sometime in the fifth century. Local tradition honours him as the city's first great preacher. He is held to have been of African birth, to have made his disciple his successor and to have set out himself on a preaching journey, but met his death by beheading. Nowadays his story is disputed, but then, what would a faithless age not dispute? The shepherd's staff in Clarus's hand perhaps points to his rank and to his wanderings alike.
Eau potable – drinking water, announces a little sign painted in white letters on a blue ground. The water does not run, it merely trickles, but that is just right for the fish that live in the basin. At last a living person appears. He bends over the water of the fountain, but not to draw from it. His face cannot even be seen, yet one senses that he is young, though no longer a child. His occupation… is quite peculiar. He stares into the water, frozen, then a sudden movement, and with his bare hands he pulls a fish out of the fountain's basin. He flings it back, then freezes motionless once more. He seizes his prey a few more times, then suddenly vanishes, as if he had never been there. To what end this occupation? Is it man's hunting instinct at work in him, or is he the very pattern of the fishers of men, who throws back only the fish and will save the souls in due course? I will make you fishers of men…
As for me, I fall to thinking. Here we stand on the handkerchief-sized main square of a little village at the end of the world. Here, as patron saint of the church, is Saint Roch, the healing monk, beside whose cave in Italy a spring welled up. On the fountain's column is the statue of the African-born Saint Clarus, the legendary beheaded bishop. The village castle with its round rotunda tells of a more warlike age, and the water of the fountain is perhaps at once the water of life and the ocean of creation.
The strangest moment of all is the catching of fish. A surreal scene: appearing out of nowhere, a young vagabond sorcerer catches fish from the fountain's basin with his bare hands, then throws them back.
I wonder which of them I might be in another casting? Roch, who died a nameless nobody, whom people remembered only years later, during an epidemic, as the man who had given himself to rescuing and nursing the sick of the Black Death, and who so became the patron saint of healing? Or Clarus, who became a bishop as an immigrant, and who had perhaps, following the example of Saint Augustine, moved from Africa to Europe?
Or would I be the vagabond sorcerer, who catches a fish and throws it back, then catches a fish again and throws it back once more, and then vanishes? Or would I be the fish, just snatched from its natural element, whose slippery skin cannot save it from the grip of the strong hand? Or would I be myself, who even now am experiencing and beholding all these small wonders? For the afternoon life of the deserted village seems banal – nothing happens, just a bored lad grabbing at fish… and yet. Here are many of the elements of the universe: man, the saints, sickness, healing, death and exaltation, the animal and the fisherman, the water of creation and the drinking fountain… Now here is the universe in its fullness.
We have wandered here seemingly by chance, and not elsewhere, now and not at some other time. How do these fragments of the kaleidoscope belong together? Can we speak of concrete facts, or does the great pulse of life simply arrange events? Truths with a small t perhaps tell of Reality with a capital R, and the system of phenomena that point beyond themselves is the mystical key for those who already understand the code. In reality, man stands before open gates, but he cannot always walk through them…