Balthazar the Existentialist In the year of Our Lord, 999, Balthazar treated himself to a well-earned day off from back-breaking work in the barley fields. During the off season, when the fields lay fallow, he walked to the castle every day and labored there. He was 36 years old. He looked 49. He felt like an old man. Balthazar began his daily work in the fields as a small boy, and he had never taken any kind of vacation. He woke up with the first cock crow, and returned to his hut as the sun retreated into gathering darkness. On this Christmas Day, he sat with his large family drinking warm beer and enjoying the first mellowing flush of intoxication. He looked almost lovingly and indulgently at his enormous wife Marta. How pretty she had been all those years ago when they had first made love in the woods as teenagers. Young and slim and pretty. The beer in Balthazar’s brain sent him reeling back to that time when he and Marta had coupled like animals, night after night. And then the children came, one after another, seven whelps in as many years, three others dead in the womb, two others never seeing a week of life. Marta had expanded like a balloon. Now Balthazar gazed whimsically at her enormous rear end as she bent over the stove. As his youngest daughter Ruth passed before him, Balthazar reached out for a hug but Ruth ignored her father’s unusual plea for affection. Those days were gone, too, Balthazar realized. His children had other concerns, and no longer yearned for his love. It was Christmas. Two hours in church, bored out of his skull as usual, listening to Latin he couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. He was illiterate. He was a peasant. His job was to work every day and sleep at night and never question the ways of the world. He was a strong man, willing to work hard. But he had been gifted, or perhaps cursed, with a bit of intelligence. Something in his brain revolted at the thought of lords and ladies living in their big clean castles, and he detested even more those supercilious priests and their mysteries. One time, just to see what would happen, Balthazar held the Host in his mouth and spit it into his hand when no one could see. A small part of him expected to be struck dead by lightning on the spot, but Balthazar took the risk anyway. Nothing happened. He went to sleep that night and woke up fresh and brisk in the morning in perfect health. By the end of the week, he had forgotten his own monumental blasphemy. There were rumors going around the village, and in the surrounding towns nearby. People had been gossiping and whispering for months. Some were terrified out of their minds. The end of the world was nigh. The year 1000 would be here in a few days. A plague would sweep over the land. Lord Jesus would return and judge the deeds of the wicked and the righteous. Some of Balthazar’s friends had given up their work in the fields and spent all day pouring warm beer down their throats while their families went hungry. A few people had taken poison, seeing that as the lesser of two evils when confronted with the fiery judgment of God. Balthazar suspected that it was all a bunch of nonsense, so he kept on with his daily fight against the barley fields, day after day. He was quite sure there had been scares like this before, and he was quite sure there would be scares like this again. Life went on; through war and plague and famine and flood, life went on. People lived, people died, people were born. The newborn came and went. Everyone was forgotten. Balthazar saw no guiding hand of justice in his life, or in the life of his betters. He didn’t want to be a member of the priesthood, with its fancy book learning and magic spells. He didn’t want to be a lord in any castle. The idea of someone serving him was as distasteful to him as his own lowly status. Yes, he had seen pretty young maidens walking lazily nearby as he labored in the fields. They were clean and pretty, and they wore magnificent linens which Marta would have been so lovely in when she was young if she could have afforded such finery. Brief vicious thoughts passed through Balthazar’s mind when he spied these castle maidens. To possess them quickly and brutally right there in the dirt, to cover their mouths and pull their golden locks and take them like the animals they were, underneath their fancy veils and elaborate tresses. But that was a sin, against God, against Marta, and against his own sense of decency. Balthazar didn’t care a straw for the end of the world, whether it came in a few days or in the Lord’s good time a thousand years hence. He knew the end of his own life was only fifteen or twenty years off, if he was lucky, or unlucky. In the depths of his troubled soul and bitter heart, Balthazar strongly suspected that a cruel joke had been played on him, that God had brought him into the world in order to laugh at his pointless struggles. He knew he would never be anything but a lowly peasant, battling the elements, reaping, sowing, hoping for a good harvest, praying for a good harvest, and facing the angry hungry looks of Marta and his children when the rains came at the wrong time or didn’t come at all. In those times, he would take some comfort in warm beer and thoughts of Marta’s once lovely curves. Would he outlive his wife? Would he be overcome with grief if she passed on before him? How many of his children would mourn Balthazar after he was gone? What would the world think of him? Would someone far in the future tell his story? Would anyone believe the story of his life was a tale worth the telling?
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:48:27 +0000
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