And when he scythes, he slays.
So that’s the way it is—is he killing all the time? Is he living like a gigantic, runaway barrel, leveling everything in his path?
So it is really all alive?
Janet has figured this all out ahead of him.
Everything: animals, plants, and who knows, maybe even the stones too.
So, he can’t even lift a finger anymore, without unleashing streams of pain?
•
He straightens himself up. Propped on his spade he surveys the expanse of earth stretching around him, covered with scabs and wounds.
The aqueduct, whose empty channel now funnels nothing but wind, sounds like a mournful flute.
•
This earth!
Which stretches far and wide, clay-heavy, with her burden of trees and springs, her rivers, her streams, her forests, her mountains and her hills, and her circular towns that whirl amongst shafts of lightning, her hordes of humans clinging onto her coat: what if she really is a living being, what if she really is one body?
With power and bad intentions?
A huge mass that could flatten me, the same way I came down on top of that lizard?
This valley, this fold between the hills, where I scratch away at the soil, what if the whole thing flinched under the sharp edge of my spade?
A body.
And alive.
Life is movement, it’s breathing . . .
It’s the voice of the aqueduct and the singing of the trees.
Alive? But absolutely! Because she does move, this earth. Ten years ago she shook hard. Down below, toward Aix, there were whole villages that crumbled, Lambesc, and some others, and the Manosque church bells rang all by themselves, high up in their belfry.
•
The idea rises in him like a storm.
It wipes out all his reason.
It’s overwhelming.
It’s hallucinatory.
Along the horizon the rolling hills unwind their snakelike coils.
Earth breathes haltingly.
An immense life force, slow to move, but awesome in its naked power, rouses the stupendous body of earth, flows over her valleys and knolls, folds her flatlands, bends her rivers, and builds up her thick coat of soil and vegetation.
In no time, to avenge herself, she’ll haul me up to where the skylarks lose their breath.
•
Gondran grabs his game bag with one swing of his arm and traverses the hill with long strides, not even daring to whistle for his dog.
•
He’s talked to Jaume about it.
Without any bashfulness.
What’s more, ever since, the mystery has turned up everywhere: in the wheat field, under the alfalfa, everywhere. And yesterday, the grove of the three big willows, usually so peaceful, growled at his heels like a guard dog.
This can’t go on. It would be best for everybody to talk it through together.
For two evenings they’ve been mulling it over, huddled around the absinthe bottle.
What matters above all is Jaume’s opinion. But Jaume doesn’t have much to say. Maurras and Arbaud are there too, their elbows on the table, covering their mouths with their hands.
It’s Jaume who knows the hills the best. And on top of that, he reads. Not just the odd newspaper when he goes to town, but books.
Including a copy of Raspail’s Natural Remedies, and that’s serious business.
What matters most is Jaume’s opinion.
For the moment, he hardly says anything. He doesn’t say “That’s impossible.” That’s what they expect from him. But he doesn’t say it. He shakes his head and breathes into his drooping moustache.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” he decides to say at last.
“So you do think it’s possible?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
He suggests that they go down there, tomorrow, with guns.
Agreed.
Who’s going?
“Me, I’m going,” says Jaume, “and who else?”
The others don’t look too sure of themselves.
“Well, for my part,” says Maurras, “I’d be glad to go with you, but, honestly, I’ve got to clean out my stable.”
Arbaud stares into his absinthe.
In the end it’s decided: Jaume and Gondran will go. The other two will stay with the women.
“After all, we’re going to be on our own here too,” says Arbaud.
Janet’s high-pitched voice threads through the linen curtain and into the kitchen.
“You think I’m raving? Oh, yes, I’m raving. You saw the wind roaring yesterday, didn’t you, you smartass? And on the other side of the air? . . . I suppose you’d know, wouldn’t you, what’s on the other side of the air?”
Young Maurras stops halfway down the steps.
“You’d better make him keep quiet,” he says in an undertone, “it’s not healthy, that kind of talk.”
•
They’ve seen nothing.
They’ve spent the whole day stretched out under the broom grass, hidden by twisted tree branches, with their double-barreled shotguns sticking out from their bodies, like limbs.
But today the clematis is still a clematis, the fig tree still a fig tree. And earth is at rest. Except for a dainty, indecisive squirrel, cocky and abrupt, who crosses the Roman bridge and claws at the sandstone.
The whole day long, without saying a word.
Jaume has chewed on peppermint stems.
When Gondran cleared the saliva that was clinging to his throat, Jaume silenced him with a wave.
Under the grim gaze of their guns the land went on sleeping, verdant, scented.
Step by step, shadow forced the sunlight into retreat.
The evening breeze made the grasses bow over.
Daylight has dropped down on the other side of Lure.
Jaume touches Gondran’s arm. They pull back over the stones, flat on their bellies, until they reach cover. With their fluid strides, they make their way back to the Bastides.
Arbaud and Maurras are waiting for them in front of the oak.
“So?”
“Nothing.”
But Jaume takes his pipe out of his mouth.
“Let’s go to the other side of the tree. There’s no need to alarm the women.”
Once they’re off to the side, Jaume seems to have made up his mind. He talks more than ever:
“To my way of thinking, this is a truly nasty business. When I said to you, ‘Let’s go,’ it was because something happened to me the other morning that really made me wonder. You know, I went to stalk that boar . . . I was on Manin’s rise, you know, in the old dovecote. So at daybreak I hear a little pattering overtop of the leaves. ‘It’s just a young one,’ I say to myself. I slide my barrel ever so gently through the slit in the wall and I stay on the lookout. All around, it’s dwarf oaks, and there’s a little grassy clearing in front. I was staring at the opening where the trail starts. Something that looked like a black ball comes out and it was doing a weird kind of dance. I say to myself: ‘That’s not it yet, wait a little longer.’
“It jumps again, rolls itself back into a ball. Then it stretches itself out in the sunlight, and then I realize it’s a cat.
“A completely black cat.
“So far, so good. It’s plopped down on its belly and it’s tipping its muzzle up into the shaft of sunlight, then it’s lain down on its back and it’s combing the grass with its claws, fooling around with the grass blades—all in all, just doing catlike things, the way cats do.
“I kept it in sight. If I didn’t fire, it was only because I already knew, or at least I thought I knew . . .
“And I wasn’t wrong. A moment later it lifted itself up on all fours, stiff and straight as a wire, and changed the way it was clowning. It took three steps this way, three steps that, planted itself right in front of that cleft in the hill that lets you see our whole part of the country all the way
to Digne. And then it started to caterwaul. . . . I lifted my barrel and slid it back, ever so gently, not making a sound. I huddled up in the shadow of the dovecote with my hands wrapped around my knees, all hunched up, because that meowing—I recognized it.”
•
All the evening air seems to congeal into silence. Jaume draws twice on his pipe. It’s out. He strikes his lighter, gets his pipe going again and, taking a draw, he looks at Gondran, Maurras, and then at Arbaud, who’s twirling a straw between his fingers.
•
“As for the earthquake back in ’07,” he says after a pause, “it was on a Thursday. The Monday before that, when I was stalking partridge, I’d seen the cat.
“As for the storm on Saint-Pancrace Day, when the flood carried away Magnan’s haystack and the baby in its cradle along with the mother who was trying to fish it out, it was on a Tuesday, and on the Sunday before that—I’d seen the cat.
“When the lightning did your dad in, Maurras, in the charcoal makers’ hut, I’d seen the cat two days before that.
“Again, I’d seen the cat, I’d heard it meowing, and two days later when I went up into the attic, I found my wife hanging from the skylight.
“When Gondran told us what had happened to him, I knew it had to be this cat. Now listen, I’m telling you all: Stay on the lookout. Every time it shows up, it’s two days before earth is going to strike out.
“These hills, you shouldn’t trust them. There’s sulphur under the stones. You want proof? What about that spring over at Imbert’s End, the one that purges your guts every time you swallow a mouthful? It’s made of stuff that’s foreign to us, but it’s alive.”
•
His pipe has gone out again. As usual, he’s forgotten to keep drawing through the clay stem. He turns toward Gondran.
“You,” he says, “you might be able to get right to the heart of the matter . . . I mean Janet. I’m not saying this to flatter you, or him. But it is because of him that everything got started.
“It’s not to flatter you, or him . . . you didn’t know a thing about it, and neither did he.
“This kind of thing, it always starts with somebody who sees farther than the rest of us. When someone sees farther than the rest of us, it’s because there’s something a little out of kilter in their brain. Sometimes it could be by nothing at all, just by a hair, but from that moment, it’s all over. A horse, it’s no longer a horse. A blade of grass, it’s no longer a blade of grass. Everything we can’t see, they see. Outside the shapes, the outlines we’re familiar with, for them there’s something extra floating around, like a cloud. You remember what he said about the toad?
“It’s like there’s somebody next to them explaining everything, laying everything bare.
“We already know a lot about what’s happening to us now, and Janet will show us the rest.
“Beyond any doubt, he’s bound up in it. He’s always been close to earth, more than the rest of us. He used to charm snakes. He knew what all the different kinds of meats taste like—fox, badger, lizard, magpie . . . He used to make melon soup. He’d take chocolate and grate it into cod stew. Our blood is made from everything we eat, and the brain, it’s really nothing but the thickest layer of the blood.
“Listen to him, Gondran, try to learn as much as you can, it will help us out.”
•
The women call them in for supper.
In the gloom, the Bastides are nothing but glimmerings under the trees.
A big star climbs over the hills.
They make their way back.
“Don’t shove,” Arbaud says quietly to young Maurras, who’s hanging on his elbow.
•
It’s morning, two days later. No wind. Nothing but silence. A thick wreath of violets weighs heavily on the unblemished brow of the sky. The sun rises through the mist like a pomegranate.
The air scorches like a sick person’s breath.
Young Maurras half opens the door of his stable. He looks at the houses one after the other. They’re still sleeping, soundlessly, like tired-out animals. Gondran’s place alone is making a soft, rattling sound, behind its hedge.
Maurras goes out, takes two steps into the square, then climbs up on a grain roller to see better. The house has its eyes open—big, watery eyes, which Marguerite’s plump shadow passes across like a rolling pupil. The doorway drools a stream of dishwater.
Maurras makes up his mind. He comes up on his noiseless, raffia sandals.
“Gondran,” he calls out in a muffled voice that still carries on the morning air.
Gondran appears in the half-opened doorway. He hushes Maurras, with a finger to his lips. Gondran looks like he’s still listening a little toward the kitchen, and then he comes out on tiptoe.
“So?” Maurras asks.
“Still the same. A terrible night. My head feels like it’s ready to burst. I tried to keep track of things to tell to Jaume, but they’re like water—even when you grab them with your fists they run right through. It’s like a flock of sheep going by—the noise, the bells, a pair of eyes in every head, a reflection in every eyeball. I saw things in his words . . . You can’t have the slightest idea . . . It’s like having a swarm of bees in my head. I do remember, though—he talked about the cat. Marguerite was drinking coffee. She was making a racket with her spoon, and I shut her up. It was really hard to hear—his voice—it was like oil running out of a broken bottle. He was talking to himself inside, you understand? I cocked my ears as sharp as I could, but that whore of a clock was knocking away, tick, tock, tick, tock. I slid behind the head of the bed. He was saying: “Here kitty, kitty, you in your pretty, pretty coat, you’ll freeze your butt out on that bare hilltop. Make yourself a real man’s bed. Your claws are like ploughshares, and your tongue’s a rasp. It’s Janet chatting with you. I’ll prune your claws off with a few strokes of my billhook, yes I will.”
“He said that, you’re sure?”
“For sure. I wrote it down on a bit of newspaper.”
“He wouldn’t ever have a remedy for all this, ever, would he?”
“A remedy?”
“Yeah, a remedy to sort out this business of the cat. A charm of some kind, I don’t know exactly . . . you know what I’m trying to get at. Some braids of horsehair, a goat’s hoof, a parrot’s feather, you know, whatever . . .”
“It’s possible, now that you mention it. It is possible. We’d have to go and look at his stash in the willows, you know, where he hides his bottles.”
Marguerite opens the door wider and sticks her head out. There are white patches glowing on her cheeks—her peculiar way of going pale. She makes a sign toward her husband:
“Come, come quick.”
•
Maurras is left standing in the morning light, alone.
Now the sky is like a long, blue whetstone that’s sharpening the cicadas’ scythe. The violet mist begins to invade the lowlands, like a muddy river.
Over the shoulders of the houses you see Arbaud’s meadow on the hill, with the mown hay all in windrows, but nobody’s thinking of forking it over, or bringing it in; they have other concerns at the moment.
Maurras heads back home. His raffia sandals and the carpet of dust underfoot turn him into a shadow that slides around soundlessly. Even so, when he gets close to Jaume’s door, it opens. Alexandre is there in the darkness. All you can see are his mustache and his eyes.
“So?” he asks.
Maurras explains his idea about a remedy.
“That’s not where you have to look,” says Jaume. “I’m the one who knows, and I’m the one who’ll say so, when the time is right.”
And then, in an undertone, he adds:
“Above all, we have to keep our eyes on Janet, and there you have it.”
He shuts the door, and you can hear him sliding home the bolt.
At Arbaud’s house a shutter opens. They’re on the lookout there too.
•
The dreaded day has arrive
d, slowly but surely, one hour nudging the next along.
They’ve gone to check out Janet’s stash. There are two empty bottles, a bit of chocolate wrapper, and a bizarrely shaped dried root. Maurras has stuck the root in his pocket. Jaume has shrugged his shoulders:
“The remedy has to come from us. These roots, these cypress seeds, all this folderol, it’s worth nothing, I’m telling you. The remedy? It’s in our arms and in our heads. In our arms most of all. You have to treat these hills rough, like a horse. You know I know their ups and downs like the back of my hand. I haven’t hunted all over them for thirty years without getting to know their ways. It’s going to jump onto our backs from someplace we’re not expecting, and, right away, we’ll have to put our best front forward and get our arms moving. Who’ll win? We will. There’s not even a shadow of a doubt. There’ll be a dicey moment or two to get through, but I wager we’ll win. It’s always been like this. The only thing is, if we’re going to win, we can’t stand around gaping like a bunch of plaster saints.”
Even so, Maurras has put the root in his pocket. Arbaud said, “Let’s see it.” And he got a look: It resembled a little pitchfork scraped smooth with a knife. He whispered, “Hold on to it, you never know.”
At last it was time to fill the women in on what was happening. They were already shocked to see the men neglecting their chores, and all of these hushed conferences around Jaume. “So that’s what it is,” they said. Then each one of them had her own tale to tell. One had seen the cat. Another had heard voices in the trees. Babette mentioned her cupboard muttering away on its own like a fully-grown human being. Marguerite was already in the know. But with her, you’d have to cut your way through three layers of fat to touch any kind of a nerve.
•
At night, they’ve barricaded themselves in.
Jaume has carefully loaded all six of the barrels of his three shotguns. His grown-up daughter, as weathered and tanned as a grapevine, weighs the powder in a little scale—“Just a pinch more than we use for wild boar.” Then she passes it to her father in the hollow of her palm. It’s she who’s made sure of the door bolts, stuffed the kitchen drain with a rag, and checked the house out from top to bottom, until her father shouts, “Ulalie, to bed with you.”
Babette has prepared a night lamp for the bedroom. Then she’s bundled herself up under the sheets with her head against her knees, while her husband gets undressed. When he’s ready to get into bed she shows her face: “Aphrodis, did you shut the shed up good and tight? You should have leaned the plough against the door.”