“If you had them inside your fingers, like I have, you’d know.
“If you’d ever come face to face all at once, one evening, with what’s in the air down at the bend in the road, you’d see them like I do.
“The hill. You’ll notice it one day from the hill.
“For the time being our hill’s lying down like an ox in the grass, and only its back is showing. Ants are crawling all over its bristles, running back and forth.
“For the moment it’s lying down, but if it ever gets up, then you’ll tell me whether I’m raving or not . . .
“Look, look at that one! A real beauty with eyes like apples. Oh, but that one, he has eyes like a man. He’s tearing at my flesh. Ayay, ay me!
“And then there’s that one, the one over there on the floor. It’s twisting itself up tighter than a worm that’s cut in two. Look at it there pretending to be dying, the sly devil . . .”
Gondran looks right and left: the tiles are bare.
But Janet’s still making out that the bedside rug is moving. Under the table, there’s one of them! Under the table—a snake as thick as your thumb, sleeping, curled into the shape of an S.
“It’s the lash of a whip.”
“It’s a snake.”
“It’s the lash of a whip.”
Outside, the weight of the wind is crushing the oak. Dead branches crash into the watering trough. The chimney begins to roar, and ashes swirl around the fireplace like the dust stirred up by a flock of sheep.
•
In two bounds Gondran is at the door. It takes all his strength to wrench it open—the bolt is jammed so hard into the wall—and he bawls out toward the goat barn, where Marguerite is sorting some olive boughs:
“Gritte? Gritte? Aren’t you done down there yet, goddamit?”
•
The wind’s blown for two days and two nights, loaded with clouds. Now it’s raining. The storm that the gorge had blocked has reared up like a bull lashed by grass blades. It’s ripped itself out of the mud of the plains. First, its muscular back expanded, then it leapt over the hills and charged off across the sky.
It’s raining. A little raging rain, stirred up and then appeased for no reason, pierced by arrows of sunlight, battered by the rough blows of the wind, but undaunted. And its eager feet have flattened the oats. The entire population of swallows and blackbirds is sounding off in the trees.
The sky is like a swamp where patches of open water gleam between pools of slime.
•
At first Jaume had set himself down under the oak to sharpen his scythe. The leaves were shading him. He laughed at the women racing to bring the laundry in from the line. But the rain chased him off, just like the others. And now the folded sack he’s been sitting on is soaked like a sponge.
Arbaud, standing in the doorway of his barn, watches the rain. He’s been meaning to head off to the hill. Now he’s unhitched his mule. Maurras and Jaume have come to meet up with him.
The rain.
The fountain murmurs in unison, under the tree.
Gondran has turned up too, with his back arched against the downpour.
“Shitty weather!”
“Every time I’m set to go and make hay, it’s the same thing.”
•
Gondran’s talking. He’s been mulling his words over and over, he’s cursed the weather, he’s said what there is to say about the rain and the shape the soil is in, but now he’s striking at the root.
“I tell you, in my whole lifetime I’ve never seen anything remotely like this. I have to wonder where on earth he gets his crazy ideas. His brain is different from other people’s. You have no idea. It runs out of him in a stream and it’s not always so funny. Gritte can’t stay alone with him anymore. She’s afraid of him. Come on in, we’ll drink some absinthe, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“This business,” says Jaume, “it’s a bit like . . .”
He doesn’t finish his thought. Maybe he has an explanation to give, maybe he wants to see for himself before he makes up his mind.
•
There’s only the little square to cross, and the rain has let up a bit. It takes them no time to get to Gondran’s.
Janet is still lying there, stiff and shadowy. Paralysis has turned his scrawny neck into a rigid stake. Under his tawny skin his Adam’s apple rises and falls as he swallows tobacco juice. His eyes have fixed, once and for all, on the wall across from the bed, at the spot where they’ve hung the post office calendar.
Gondran brings out glasses and absinthe. They speak in hushed voices, as though they’re staked out for hares.
“He looks bad.”
“The tip of his nose is already drooping.”
“He won’t last much longer.”
It almost seems like a form of politeness, when they tell Gondran his father-in-law’s going to die soon.
And then, all of a sudden, without warning, that one starts up again. At first, he gives a bit of a sigh, like somebody who takes a deep breath before lifting a sledgehammer—nothing to really put the rest of them on guard—but then wham! it’s on top of them, before they’ve had any chance to prepare:
•
“There were little curls of smoke out in the meadow. They were women.
“They were bounding over the bristly grass, with their hair standing straight up like hoopoes’ crests.
“They were all different colors—there were bottle-green ones with moon-shaped piercings all sewn up with little red and blue stitches.
“They were fumeales, you know—little smoke-ladies. One had an ass like a bale of straw and a chest like a corkscrew, and she was wriggling around so much that her tits were flapping like streamers, going flip, flop, and fuck you too. . . .
“And she was killing fleas by running her tongue under her arms, and scraping herself with lavender till her nails cracked.
“ ‘Strange piece of tail,’ I said to myself. I moved ahead, calm and composed as can be. She was so light on her feet it was like they were making music.
“There was another one of them, drinking at the stream, very ladylike. She was scooping up water with an oat casing, stretching her lips back as wide as her hand, baring her lovely teeth, and wiggling her rump in the breeze, like a ripe apple.
“I threw my arms around her. And she pissed on me, the dirty slut . . .”
•
“The toad that lived in the willow has come out.
“It has the hands and eyes of a man.
“A man who’s been punished.
“It made its home in the willow, out of leaves and mud.
“Its belly is full of caterpillars. But it’s still a man.
“It eats caterpillars, but it’s a man, you only have to look at its hands.
“It runs its little hands over its belly to check itself out: ‘Is it really me,’ it’s asking itself, ‘is it really me?’ It has good reason to ask, and then it cries when it’s certain it really is him.
“I’ve seen it crying. Its eyes are like kernels of corn, and the more it cries the more music it croaks through its mouth.
“One day I asked myself: ‘Janet, who has any idea what he did to be punished like that, to be left with only his hands and his eyes?’
“These are things that the willow would have told me if I knew how to talk its language. I tried. But there was nothing doing. It was as deaf as a fence post.
“The two of us, the toad and me, once we went all the way to Saint-Michel. It hopped along the bank to watch me.
“I used to say: ‘Hey, brother. So, what’s new?’ When I was watering the meadow it’d follow me around.
“Once, at night, I heard it coming. It was crawling through the mud going glug, glug with its mouth to get the worms to come out.
“And so they came along, dancing on their bellies and their backs. One of them was as thick as a blood sausage, all covered in hairs. Another one looked like a diseased finger.
“The toad put its paws on
my feet.
“Its little clammy hands on my feet—I hate that. Then it made a habit out of it, the little prancer. Every time it came along I had to be on the lookout, it’d always put its clammy little paws onto my bare feet.
“The time came when I’d had it up to here. The thought hit me just as I was leaving the house.
“The toad was croaking, kind of a low croaking sound. It had a black worm and it was eating it. It had blood on its teeth, and its mouth was full of blood, and it was crying out of its corn-kernel eyes.
“I said to myself: ‘Janet, that food’s not fit for Christians, you’ll be doing a good deed . . .’
“And I swung my spade at it and lopped it in two.
“It clawed at the ground with its hands. It was chewing at the ground with its bloody teeth. It lay there with its mouth full of dirt, and tears in its corn-kernel eyes . . .”
•
When Jaume chances on a wild boar, and his gun is loaded with ten-gauge shot, he hurries to hide himself.
He has something of the same air about him at the moment. Arbaud and Maurras are watching the door.
•
From outside, Gondran questions them with his eyes. All four of them are scrutinizing each other in silence.
“Well, this is all we needed.”
•
After ten hours of night wind, a brand new day breaks this morning. The first rays of sun pierce through a pristine atmosphere. Having barely taken flight, they’re already striking the junipers and thyme on the distant hills. You’d think those parts of earth had moved closer overnight.
“You could really reach out and touch them,” Gondran thinks.
The sky is blue from horizon to horizon. The silhouette of the grasses is distinct, and you can make out every shade of green in the patchwork of fields. Here the wind has dropped an olive leaf on a spray of borage; there the lamb’s lettuce stands out lighter than the chicory; and here in this corner, where somebody must have shaken out some bags of fertilizer, really dense grasses, almost black, are shooting up like thick hairs on a mole. And you could count the needles at the tops of the pines.
There’s something strange too: the silence.
Until yesterday the sky was an arena of sound. Iron-shod mares with carts were rumbling though it at full gallop, whinnying with rage.
Today, silence. The wind has blown beyond all bounds and it’s raging on the far side of earth.
No birds.
Silence.
Even the water has stopped murmuring. All the same, if you listen carefully, you can hear its shy, sliding step. Hidden from sight, it’s trickling from the pasture to the laneway on its delicate, silvery feet.
•
Gondran watches the new day break, while he gets his game bag ready. He’s going to do some hoeing in his olive grove, in the bottomlands over at Font-de-Garin. It’s way down over there behind the three hills that block the valley. To get past them, you have to climb across their navels.
He’s carrying his midday meal: a really fresh, firm cheese in its crust of herbs, six cloves of garlic, a vial of oil stopped with a scrap of paper, salt and pepper in an old pill box, a slice of ham, a hefty loaf of bread, wine, a roasted thigh of rabbit rolled up in a vine leaf, and a little pot of jam. All this pell-mell in a leather bag.
In the kitchen Marguerite rakes the coals in the stove with big thrusts of her poker to hurry up the coffee.
The silence outside weighs like lead. Gondran makes the only familiar morning sound as he comes and goes in his hobnailed boots.
Jaume’s doves are usually the earliest to stir. The dawn likes to caress them with its supple hands. Today, the dovecote seems dead.
Gondran comes to check the clock and finds out it’s only four in the morning.
“Is it working all right?”
“I set it by the sundial just the day before yesterday.”
•
In spite of it all, the silence feels good. The scents of honeysuckle and gorse waft through in big waves. What’s more, what good does it do to worry about what earth is getting up to? She does whatever she wants. She’s old enough to mind her own business, and she goes about it at her own pace. . . .
“Ain’t much sound out there t’day,” says Janet.
“You’d think everything had died. Listen . . . you can’t hear anything moving.”
“This is bad. Take it from me, boy, it was just like this when it started up the other time . . .”
“What?”
“. . . that I can’t talk about.”
And Janet glues his eyes back to the post office calendar.
•
Gondran slips his spade through the strap of his leather game bag and hoists it. At the bottom of the stairs he whistles for Labri, his dog, who’s asleep under a rose bush. Labri comes out, stretches, yawns, sniffs the bag, and follows. Gondran’s reassured to hear the patter of claws behind him.
•
Past Maurras’s meadow—which straddles the slope—the path might as well not even exist. It gradually peters out in the grasses, like a dwindling stream.
•
This orchard where Gondran’s headed—he bought it last year from a guy from Pierrevert who was scraping money together to bid for a postal route.
It’s in the Reillanne district, to hell and gone, but he got it for next to nothing, and the olive trees have already paid off. When all is said and done, with next to no effort he gets oil and wood from it. The only thing is, it’s far away. And it’s that much farther away seeing as there’s no road to get there. You have to find your way through hollows, trek along stream beds choked with viburnum and brambles, and then skirt around the hills and take unnamed passes where there are rocks that have the faces of half-formed men.
Gondran’s thinking that next time he’d be better off following the hilltops over by Trinquette. The path climbs a bit, but afterward you get a great view the whole way. The air’s good and fresh—and you can hear partridges clucking. Over here, the silence is really unnerving. He’s thankful for Labri’s company.
•
Seen from the summit of Pymayon, Gondran’s orchard looks like a scabby patch in the scrub. All around it, the coat of the garrigue is healthy, shaggy, curly. But at this spot, Gondran’s spade has scraped it bare.
It’s an olive grove that slopes down the fertile side of the hill in an area where the runoff has laid down rich deposits. Below it, the streams have split earth open in a narrow, shadowy cleft, which exhales clammy air, like the mouth of a chasm. A Roman aqueduct straddles it. Its two, spindly haunches, powdery with age, emerge from the olives.
•
First, Gondran digs a hole under the bushiest juniper in sight. Once he’s hit black earth he puts his bottle there to stay cool. He chooses a branch, safe from ants, to hang his bag, and then, with his sleeves rolled up, he sets to work.
His spade’s steel rings out amongst the stones.
•
The shade of the olive trees has shrunk back bit by bit. Just a short time ago it made the whole field look like a carpet patterned with gold. As the sun’s rays rose higher, the shadows broke up and grew rounder. Now they’re nothing but blue-gray blobs around the bases of the trunks.
It’s noon.
The spade stops.
•
Siesta.
The fly-filled air grates like unripe fruit against a knife. Stretched out flat on the ground, Gondran sleeps heavily.
He wakes all at once. With the same, effortless motion he plunges back into sleep, then comes out of it again. With a start he’s on his feet.
Reaching for his spade, he comes face to face with the earth. Why, today, this uneasiness inside of him?
•
The grasses shiver. The long, muscular body of a startled lizard, cocking its head to the sound of the spade, trembles under the esparto grass.
“Ah, son of a whore!”
The creature advances, bounding like a green stone ricocheting
off rocks. It freezes, with its legs bowed; the glowing ember of its gullet puffs and crackles.
In an instant Gondran becomes a tower of strength. Power inflates his arms, bunches up his fists on the grip of his spade, and makes the wooden shaft tremble.
Man wants to be the master-beast, the one who kills. His breath flutters like a thread between his lips.
The lizard comes closer.
A flash, and the spade strikes.
With his boot heel Gondran pounds relentlessly on the writhing stumps.
Now it’s nothing more than a clump of quivering mud. Over there, thicker blood reddens the ground. This was the golden-eyed head. The tongue still twitches like a tiny pink leaf, with the unconscious pain of shattered nerves. A paw with little balled-up claws clutches at the dirt.
Gondran gathers himself. There’s blood on the blade of his spade. His heavy breathing flows, rhythmic and full. Then his anger dissolves in a deep inhalation of sky-blue air.
Suddenly he’s ashamed. With his foot he pushes dirt over the dead lizard.
And there: there it is. The wind comes rushing.
The trees confer in low voices.
The dog’s gone. It must have taken off after some wild prey.
Without knowing why, Gondran’s ill at ease. He’s not sick—he’s full of disquiet, and this disquiet sticks in his throat like a stone.
He turns his back on a big tangle of elderberry, honeysuckle, clematis, and figs that moans and writhes more loudly than the surrounding bush.
While he digs, it occurs to him for the first time that there’s a kind of blood rising inside bark, just like his own blood; that a fierce will to live makes the tree branches twist and propels these sprays of grasses into the sky.
He thinks about Janet too. Why?
He thinks about Janet and he cocks his eye at the little pile of brown dirt still twitching over the crushed lizard.
Blood, nerves, suffering.
He’s caused flesh and blood to suffer, flesh just like his own.
So all around him, on this earth, does every action have to lead to suffering?
Is he directly to blame for the suffering of plants and animals?
Can he not even cut down a tree without committing murder?
It’s true, when he cuts down a tree, he does kill.