I once met a German pensioner couple who had moved to Spain for the sun. They lived like two monitor lizards in brightly colored shirts on a hill and had already become leathery from the Mediterranean light. Her biggest hobby was collecting stones. Stones that looked like a bird’s head if you turned them often enough. Rocks that were flat and stacked well in poolside towers. Stones in which they chiseled holes and which, when strung on a string, became the heaviest garland in the world. In any case, a variety of stone that you won’t find in Hamburg-Bramfeld.
Since I was young and stupid when I visited the monitor lizard, I thought: Pff, stones. I’ve now reached the age of the stone. My recovery from all the hustle and bustle of the presidential election in France is to walk along an Atlantic beach, catching one out of the sea every few meters. My jacket pockets were dented yesterday by a sphere stone, a heart stone, a show-the-yellow-stripe-stone and all sorts of other pebbles. Just when I thought my day’s work was done, my fellow collector said, “Wow! Mom! What’s THAT?”
It was only gradually that I understood how appropriate this question was. At first I thought it was just a bottle washed up with a ball of shells stuck to the top. Then I saw that every single shell was stuck on a thumb-thick black worm. The worms were pulsing, perched on the neck of the bottle as if someone had recreated Medusa’s head in goo. And little arms began to stretch out of the shells. It was, nothing against nature, but: disgusting.
We looked at it like we were two marine biologists in training
Because my child is growing up in Paris, where wild animal is used interchangeably with rat or dove, I have made it a habit, to overcompensate, to show him that every form of nature is beautiful and interesting. So we looked at the goo medusa like we were two marine biologists in training. “Ah look, a lot of worms seem to have eaten their way into a lot of shells, aha, okay.” I secretly hoped I wouldn’t have nightmares about the creature.
Then, in the evening, I understood that I still hadn’t become French. Gooey, shelly, strange: of course you can eat it! Instead of throwing that thing back into the sea, I should have carried it home and cooked it with a bay leaf. Because a search of the Internet revealed: We had found a barnacle. Or pouce-pied, in French. Contrary to what these names might suggest, it is neither a duck, nor a shell, nor a thumb (pouce), nor a foot (pied), but a distant relative of the crab. From 20 euros per kilo. Instead of preparing bizarre crabs, I looked at my stone collection. The retirement is progressing.