The Whisper of Grasshoppers

By Teddy Tessier

Sometimes I stayed there, lying on the green grass of a flowerbed leaning against a country house. The lawn rustled in the wind that touched each strand of its emerald hair. My little fingers were tangled in its cut short hair. I stroked with tenderness the skull on which I was napping. I listened to the breathing of the trees that bordered my zone of discomfort. I perceived then the discreet arrival of an insect.I could hear this grasshopper approaching in muffled steps to whisper in my ear the story of a world that was unknown to me. I could smile without fear. Alice had her white rabbit, Pinocchio his Jiminy.My grasshopper urged me to become an explorer, to scour the country by following its bounds, marveling. I stayed there, half asleep, and I listened to its escape plan.I needed time to get back from my dreams. I even got up a little bit dizzy and staggering. With a smile on my lips, I walked step by step toward my destiny. I only had to cross the leafy border that separated me from a more enviable elsewhere.Without luggage or goodbye, I left my country to join the tranquility of another more welcoming. I left behind me screams and cries. I abandoned violence and fear. I extended my arms forward and touched a life, ephemeral, of perfect happiness. Freedom !

• Language: English
• Publisher: Teddy Tessier
• Release date: Aug 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781088981696

Book preview

The Whisper of Grasshoppers

Teddy Tessier

The Whisper of Grasshoppers

Copyright Teddy Tessier

All rights reserved

Code ISBN: 9781088981696

Preamble

T

his is the story of a man who just light a cigarette and sit in front of the keyboard of his computer. Banality is depressing. But we must start somewhere this story. Why does a story always has a beginning and an end ? It would sometimes be so much nicer to settle with pleasant moments, relive the fun and throw in the trash surplus before erasing it with only one click. Everything could be so simple. Nothing really is.

Our modern age does not simplify anything that established for millennia. Concerns remain the same, more or less. The consideration is social, ethnic, professional or personal or even all at once. In this, the tenuous thread that connects us to our origins suffers no consideration border or personal property. Still, it is the sense of ownership that gives us the fuzzy feeling of belonging or possessing.

If one believes the Chinese thinker: The art of living is a subtle mix between letting go and holding on. There is always a moment, a fuzzy interlude during which we simply suffer the vagaries of life. No matter if we fight or struggle, it doesn’t seem to make a difference.

Misfortune then occurs when we realize that mere dots form a continuous line, a standard to which there is no escape. We look for signs in the sky or in the coffee ground. We seek a reason to avoid resignation. We have to fight, to work hard and accept the inevitable. If we look more closely, the tumult of depression is implicitly visible.

Few words or expression describe life in all its splendor. Modern society seems to have decided, by mutual agreement with itself, to drive the point into the flesh raw of a human being fan of sadomasochism. The work is an ordeal. The issue is torture. The hope is conjugated in the future when the regret and remorse refer to the past. The present, on the other hand, often comes down to a bitter conclusion.

There is always amorphous day before and difficult future. Life can seem trivial as a whole. It is a succession of low and high, good and bad times. Everyone places the slider of the acceptable where to create its own standard. It is always about standard. The society establishes hers and beware of those who don’t comply with it. The law decides what is permitted and prohibited. To contravene constitute misconduct, an offense or a felony. We create a set of values for everything. Pain, grief, the wonderful and the hateful ranged in variables sailing between one and ten. The particular case is drowned among the masses. The Human agglomerates.

Despite many similarities, each life is made of particularities, details that make it different from another. We meet. We live with each other. We love, we hate. We tend to react under the influence of emotion without seeking the detail that would bring the accuracy our critical mind would need to form a unbiased opinion.

We define ourselves by our personal history. Our life runs through our passions, our friendships, our enmities, our joys and our sorrows. This amalgam of sensations, experiences, makes us what we are, defines our perception of the world around us.

My life doesn’t escape this rule. This is just one story among many with its own specific aspects. Where to start ? The beginning of course.

We must then define the beginning, the starting point of an ordinary life. Without going back to the Ice Age, a common base connects our forgotten memories: the birth.

The birth takes shape in the cries of a woman and her child. Advances in medicine have changed this data but the idea remains. From the first breath of life, the mother and her offspring are bound by the suffering caused, more or less consciously, by the man they will sometimes be the pendant for a single generation and maybe more.

The good father then will embrace, with his manly arms, the family which he became the protector sometimes, sometimes the executioner. And life goes on proclaims the eternal fate that sticks to our skin.

You will note the sarcasm.

The Whisper of Grasshoppers

1

I

was born and I grew up in a family we often see.

My mother and father were both workers in the same company. Having given birth to two boys, each have their own, a third child was started accidentally : me.

First disappointment, I was there. At first, I was not particularly desired or hoped.

Second disappointment, I was a boy, another. Even to have to deal with one more mouth to feed, a girl would have been preferred. It provides a firm foudation of life.

Three children, two and a half year gap between each of them, the average was good.

My birth nevertheless coincided with a unifying novelty. The family lodge was out of the ground and the whole family moved to a village in Mayenne countryside : Aron. The avenue of lime trees rocked my youth an address that smelled good herbal tea. We lived, five at number seven.

Children, a house, it only wanted the dog to complete the picture of the ideal family. This was the case quickly. A female Great Dane named Sara joined us.

Cheers !

In this a priori idyllic setting I made my first steps, barely ten months old. To the paternal disdain, maternal pride was opposed. That was the general idea which led the rest of my life.

Precocious child or not, I've always been driven by an irrepressible curiosity with the world around me. It is still valid today. Curiosity is a bad thing ? Mea culpa.

Adventurer, private detective, secret agent, I embraced all these careers during my early years of youth.

At a time when the balance of my steps was still risky, I climbed the dizzying heights of the couch and improvised a makeshift camp under an overturned chair.

My mother was vacuuming while I was preparing my next expedition meticulously.

My mornings were hyperactive to better find maternal tenderness during afternoon naps. I spent it curled up against the legs of my mother, my head on the pillow of her thighs.

The sofa was there a quieter utility under the loving smile of a mother to her offspring. I could sleep peacefully and sail to new sleepy adventures.

The atmosphere was very different when evening fell on the household. The decline of the day announced the return of the father figure. He was the villain of my cartoon, the monster hiding under my bed.

This father, hero to some, reigned as a tyrant over my days and extended its influence into the nightmares of my child nights.

On arrival, a shadow stretched all around us and ended up totally embracing us. I was suffocating to the point that I was diagnosed with asthma at this time.

Throughout my childhood I was plagued by diseases under their psychosomatic form, ranging from asthma to what approaches epilepsy.

About my father, I have difficulties to remerber the face again. There’s nothing left in my mind but the back of his skull, the top of his shoulders and a striped shirt as he sat on the only chair in the living room, watching TV.

About him, I have few memories. My brain is recalcitrant. About his hands I remember the burn they left on my childish thighs. The whiff of his aftershave still make me sick.

He is and will probably remain the only person in the world that I could never give my forgiveness.

Who knows why.

2

I

have grown up in a village in expansion, not to say explosion. The real estate madness of the early eighties turned what was certainly a hamlet in a semblance of suburban village.

Behind the family house, the fields stretched as far as the eye could see, quickly replaced by new houses, new streets, new potential friendships.

Which brings me to my first day of kindergarten, first big social shock of my life. The attractiveness of novelty aroused in me a new excitement. I was jubilant at the idea of this new world open to me. It took only the removal of the maternal arms to give birth, in my disoriented being, to unsuspected distress. The feeling of abandonment was so oppressive that hot tears ran down my cheeks.

Minutes later, the comfort of those who became friends for many years, and a puppet show, awakened the infantile ingratitude of oblivion.

Go, mother, go about your business. We'll meet later. I would be forgiven by snuggling my face against your neck, closing my eyes to breathe your perfume. I will tell you my day in a whirlwind of tangled words without asking you how yours was. You, you’ll listen to me with a smile, tender, amused by so much theatricality, proud of this little piece of man you will have trouble untangling the excited sayings. Ungrateful, I tell you.

I was talking fast. I was talking much,