Sylvain’s Eggs

Montresor-Des-Roches is a tiny French village of 118 inhabitants where every birth, death, and marriage is announced with great solemnity in the monthly village circular. “Outsiders” are greeted politely but kept at a safe distance until the new faces have been seen frequently enough to be considered familiar.  My wife, children, and I were unquestionably “outsiders,”  living on the edge of the village. 
Our nearest neighbor was Sylvain. A field lay between our two houses – creating a natural barrier – or as the villagers would say, “a civilized distance” between us. Nevertheless, I could still see his house and he could see mine. I could hear his cockerel announcing the imminent arrival of sunrise and sunset, and he could hear me or my wife whistling for the cat in the evening. Sylvain was at the edge of the field when I first saw him, not long after we moved to the village,  seeking to escape the isolation of city life and provide our two small children and one cat with a rural idyll. 
He was angrily mending the wire of his chicken coop that had been torn in several places the night before by an inconsiderate fox. I felt it was my duty to introduce myself as his new neighbor, however due to the upset caused by the fox, we greeted each other briefly and somehow our names were not exchanged.  The welfare of the chickens dominated our brief conversation. He was enraged by the nights’ events and branded the fox, the elusive and distinguished creature I had always admired whenever I’d had the luck to catch sight of one in the city, as “vermin.” Sylvain made it clear that keeping chickens was just a hobby and that his real occupation was raising cows. He did not think it necessary to ask me any questions at all, and the frequent silences between short phrases compelled me to say that “I wouldn’t mind buying some eggs” if he was selling them. Sylvain continued fixing his coop without reacting to my suggestion, and the conversation ended there.
I had forgotten about the eggs. That is, until one morning, when I found a note in the post box. Although the half-torn piece of paper was lined, the words were scrawled through them.

Eggs ready on Sunday morning at 8.

€3.20 a dozen. 

Sylvain

I crossed the field to Sylvain’s house that Sunday, and sure enough, the eggs were “ready” and they cost “€3.20 a dozen.” His message had been straightforward and true. However, in the note, he had not conveyed that he expected me to stay and drink something with him.  
“I couldn’t possibly,” I responded. “My wife and I are going shopping,” I said.
“I have coffee,” Sylvain stated matter-of-factly, as if he had sensed somehow that it was the type of beverage on offer that might have been holding me back.  With or without knowing it, Sylvain had said what I needed to hear to change my mind, which was that he was not expecting me to drink alcohol, because that would mean having to explain things to a man I knew nothing about other than his love of chickens and visceral hatred of foxes, more than I felt was necessary at that point. He showed me to the kitchen where I sat down at the table, and he went about preparing things before finally presenting me with a cup of coffee and a broken biscuit.
Sylvain, who was built like an ox, sat opposite me on a perilously small chair unsuited to his large frame. He drank his coffee slowly, and every so often took a bite of his biscuit. The process was punctuated by several deep exhalations, the occasional loud cough, and a lot of staring out of the kitchen window. He behaved as if I was some sort of permanent fixture there in his kitchen – an ornament with a coffee cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other. It was as if I had been sitting opposite him for decades and everything that could have been said had been said, and now there was just no need to speak at all. Except, of course, that was not the case, and my presence did not elicit any of the conventional reactions that I thought it might. Perhaps, I was laboring under the arrogant and false assumption that it should. 
Having finished my coffee, eaten most of the biscuit offered to me, and wallowed briefly in some existential angst, I came to the realization that Sylvain was not going to break this intolerable silence. “So, do you live here alone?” I ventured. The simple answer was no. After a long pause, he decided to elaborate by pointing towards the living room. He then informed me that he had a fiancée and that she was “in there.” Celestine. That was her name. Any other details remained unspoken. One might have even questioned if she existed at all. Did he have any family in the village? His father, he said, but he was dead.
Interacting with Sylvain was what I imagined talking to a black-hole might be like.  My questions were never reciprocated in kind. He didn’t ask me if I lived with anyone or what I did for a living, but I told him about us nevertheless, that we were a family of four from the city and that my wife was a teacher, I was a software developer and that we were happy to be able to live in the countryside with our kids and cat and work from home. And so, at eight o’clock in the morning on a Sunday, I was being made to occupy the unenviable role of Grand Inquisitor, all because of Sylvain’s eggs and my preoccupation with what I had been taught about being a good neighbor, despite our differences. 
You might think that would be the end of it. That we would each just keep to our own side of the field and maintain the polite and safe distance so cherished by the inhabitants of Montresor-Des-Roches – a distance that would preserve everyone, chiefly me, from feeling awkward. Instead, I found myself seated at Sylvain’s kitchen table, every Sunday morning, for weeks. Following my first purchase of eggs, Sylvain would leave a scrawled note in the post box every Friday, informing me that my eggs would be ready to collect on Sunday, and every Sunday when I went to collect them, he would ask me to come inside to drink a coffee. He seemed to be pleased to finally have a neighbor, and I suppose I came to find his lack of curiosity somewhat reassuring.
For a while, it was just me, him, and the framed but faded poster of The Virgin Mary hung up on the wall behind Sylvain’s preferred place at the kitchen table. Then, unexpectedly one Sunday, we were joined by Celestine, who was unmistakably real. Celestine was half the size of her fiancé in height, twice his width, and around a decade older than him. She had the palest of blue eyes, protruding somewhat from her round face, which was framed by a short curly mop of bleached hair. She only spoke when spoken to, much like Sylvain, and there was always a packet of cigarettes clutched tightly in her left hand ready for her to smoke straight after finishing her first cup of coffee.
Not long after that, Sylvain, Celestine, the Virgin Mary, and I were joined in the kitchen by Sylvain’s deceased father, Jean-Baptiste. There he was one Sunday, seated at the head of the table, resurrected, and casually dipping a tartine of bread and jam into a bowl of hot milk. The family resemblance was clear. Jean-Baptiste was older and grayer, but had the same ox-like presence as his silent son. In fact, his “death” had come about due to my frequent inability to fully understand Sylvain’s strong regional accent, and though Jean-Baptiste shared the same accent as his son, he was extraordinarily garrulous and somehow easier to understand. He also knew the names, ages, and family history of every villager, and after shaking hands, he was keen to know all there was to know about me too. He started, as most people do, by asking my name, and when he did, Sylvain and Celestine stared at me blankly with their translucent eyes and seemed to be waiting for the answer just as much as Jean-Baptiste. Of course, it finally dawned on all three of us that although I had been at their kitchen table every Sunday morning for well over two months, neither Sylvain nor Celestine had ever asked me this simple question.
Jean-Baptiste looked back and forth between us, wondering what the mystery could be. Then, I told them.  It was not what they were expecting. It was not Claude, Sebastien or Jerome. It was a name that hailed from that place just on the other side of the Mediterranean. 
Nowadays, France and that place are considered neighbors – with a “civilized distance” between them in the form of a sea. But, as the Francophone tongues of our ancestors can attest, that was not always the case.  
  How I marveled, at the moment my name seemed to have detached itself from my tongue only to hover uncomfortably in the kitchen air like a tired balloon at the end of a party, drifting aimlessly until meeting its final crumpled earthbound fate. I wondered if those who had watched the pale-eyed foreigners arrive in port of Algiers nearly two centuries earlier would ever have imagined that one day some of their descendants would be born on the other side of the Mediterranean and that the utterance of their names would silence a room and send bristles down French spines?
Four pairs of blue eyes stared at me through the silence – Celestine’s protruded more than usual while the Virgin Mary’s appeared to be mildly disappointed. Jean-Baptiste broke the silence by asking where I was born. 
“Oh, just fifty kilometers away from here,” I replied. 
Jean-Baptiste quickly segued past this information by saying that he’d heard from someone in the village that I worked with computers, and he wondered if I would help him out with his.“Of course, I will,” I told him.  He then told me that his house was on the other side of the hill, which in his view meant that he and I were also neighbors. “Neighbors,” he said quietly, “should always be on good terms and not get too close, nor stay too far apart either.” 
I thanked Sylvain and Celestine for the coffee and biscuit, and said goodbye to Jean-Baptiste. Just as he usually did when I was about to leave, Sylvain scooped up the coins I had put on the table and then handed me his eggs. As I was making my way back across the field between our two houses, Sylvain started to shout. He was shouting the name with which he had only just become acquainted. I stopped near the middle of the field and turned towards him. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called out the only question he had ever asked me: “Will you be back next Sunday for eggs?” 
I thought about it for a few moments. “Yes!” I shouted back. 
Sylvain said nothing which was not unlike him at all, then bellowed, “I only sell eggs to my friends!” before turning his back and going inside the house to join Celestine, Jean-Baptiste, and the Virgin Mary.