In the icy trough in the yard he hid a bottle of champagne, ready to serve cold. The water detached the label and after a week it floated to the surface. When the police opened the kitchen cupboard, they found a large jar of cherries in eau-de-vie with a ribbon round it, and a box of After Eight chocolates, open but untouched. Most curious of all, on the kitchen floor beneath the curtainless windows, they found a confectioner’s cardboard box with golden edges, and inside it were rose-pink sugared almonds such as are sometimes distributed to guests and friends after a baptism. On the floor too were blankets, dogshit and wet newspapers. But the dogs had not touched the sugared nuts.
In the house during the unceasing period of waiting he did not listen to the sounds which came from outside. His hearing was as unimpaired as is mine now, registering the noise of my pen on the paper—a noise which resembles that of a mouse at night earnestly eating what its little pointed muzzle has discovered between its paws. His hearing was unimpaired, but his indifference was such that the crow of a neighbour’s cock, the sound of a car climbing the road from which one looks down onto the chimney of his house, the shouts of children, the drill of a chain-saw cutting in the forest beyond the river, the klaxon of the postman’s van—all these sounds became nameless, containing no message, emptier, far emptier than silence.
If he was waiting and if he never lost for one moment, either awake or asleep, the image of what he was waiting for—the breast into which his face at last fitted—he no longer knew where it would come from. There was no path along which he could look. His heart was still under his left ribs, he still broke the bread into pieces for the dogs with his right hand, holding the loaf in his left, the sun in the late afternoon still went down behind the same mountain, but there were no longer any directions. The dogs knew how he was lost.
This is why he slept on the floor, why he never changed a garment, why he stopped talking to the dogs and only pulled them towards him or pushed them away with his fist.
In the barn when he climbed a ladder, he forgot the rope, and, looking down at the hay, he saw horses foaling. Yet considering his hunger, he had very few hallucinations. When he took off his boots to walk in the snow, he knew what he was doing.
One sunny day towards the end of December, he walked barefoot through the snow of the orchard in the direction of the stream which marks the boundary of the village. It was there that he first saw the trees which had no snow on them.
The trees form a copse which I would be able to see now from the window, if it were not night. It is roughly triangular, with a linden tree at its apex. There is also a large oak. The other trees are ash, beech, sycamore. From where Boris was standing the sycamore was on the left. Despite the December afternoon sunlight, the interior of the copse looked dark and impenetrable. The fact that none of the trees were covered in snow appeared to him to be improbable but welcome.
He stood surveying the trees as he might have surveyed his sheep. It was there that he would find what he awaited. And his discovery of the place of arrival was itself a promise that his waiting would be rewarded. He walked slowly back to the house but the copse was still before his eyes. Night fell but he could still see the trees. In his sleep he approached them.
The next day he walked again through the orchard towards the stream. And, arms folded across his chest, he studied the copse. There was a clearing. It was less dark between the trees. In that clearing she would appear.
She had lost her name—as the champagne bottle which he was keeping for her arrival had lost its label. Her name was forgotten, but everything else about her his passion had preserved.
During the last days of the year, the clearing in the copse grew larger and larger. There was space and light around every tree. The more he suffered from pains in his body, the more certain he was that the moment of her arrival was approaching. On the second of January in the evening he entered the copse.
During the night of the second, Boris’s neighbours heard his three dogs howling. Early next morning they tried the kitchen door, which was locked on the inside. Through the window they saw Boris’s body on the floor, his head flung back, his mouth open. Nobody dared break in through the window for fear of the dogs, savagely bewailing the life that had ended.
So I have told the story. The wind is driving the powdered snow into deep drifts. Everything is being covered in white, even the air. If you walk across this wind, out in the fields away from the shelter of the village, it will line your cheeks with ice in one minute and the pain in your skull, if you stay there, will grow like a concussion after a blow.
Anyone who believes that evil does not exist and that the world was made good should go out tonight into the fields.
On a night like this a game of cards is like a bed dragged into the middle of the room. Four of us huddle together to play belote. The electricity has been cut. The two candles give just enough light to see the cards in our hands. La Patronne puts on her glasses. Sometimes she takes a torch out of her pocket to distinguish between a heart and a diamond.
The Time of the Cosmonauts
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary. A word is missing and so the story has to be told. What, for instance, was the relation between the old shepherd Marius and the baby in Danielle’s womb when she left the village? Was he the child’s godfather? Hardly.
The story began and ended in the summer of 1982, high up in the alpage which we call Peniel. Some say that they know the name Peniel comes from the bible. Genesis. Chapter 32. But if you read that, it won’t really tell you what happened between Marius and Danielle.
Peniel is a plateau at an altitude of 1,600 metres. One edge of the plateau dominates, from a colossal rockface, the village below. From there, when there’s a rainstorm and it’s sunny, you can look down onto the top of a rainbow—as if it were the arch of a bridge at your feet. The rockface is mostly limestone, occasionally mixed with flysch. The other edges of the plateau are lost in the mountains beyond.
Once there was a forest on this plateau and some gigantic tree trunks are still preserved beneath a layer of clay, under the topsoil on which the pastures grow. Where this clay and the ancient forest are nearest to the surface, the earth is oily and damp, and on the rocks a dark green moss grows, which, if you touch it or lie down on it, feels like fur. This is how the rocks become like animals.
A number of years ago when the Russian, Gagarin, the first man in space, was circling the earth, every one of the twenty scattered chalets at Peniel housed, each summer, cattle and women and men. So many cattle that there was only just enough grass to go round. By common accord grazing time was limited. You got up at three to milk and you took the cows out to pasture as soon as it was light. At ten, when the sun was beginning to climb high in the sky, you brought them home and made your cheese. In the stable you gave them grass which you’d scythed at midday. After lunch you took a siesta. At four you milked again, and only then did you take the cows out a second time to pasture, and there you stayed with them until you could no longer see the trees but only the forest. You brought the cows back in and when they were bedded down on their straw, you could go outside and peer up into the night, where the Milky Way looked like gauze, and try to spot Gagarin in his circling Sputnik. All this was twenty-five years ago. During the summer in question—the summer of 1982—only two of the twenty chalets were inhabited, one by Marius and the other by Danielle, and there was so much grass they could let their animals graze night and day.
The two chalets are separated by a pass flanked by two peaks, the St. Pair and the Tête de Duet. It took Danielle half an hour to walk across the pass to Marius’s chalet.
Why do he-goats smell so strongly? Marius asked her when she arrived the first time. After a winter of ice and snow you go into the stable and you know that last year there was a he-goat here! Rams don’t smell like that, bulls don’t smell like that, stallions don’t smell like that, why
do he-goats? The only other smell as strong as the smell of the he-goat, Marius continued, is the smell of a tannery. When I came back to the village, it took me six months to get that stench out of my skin. When I came back to the village, you could pluck a hair out of any part of my body—he fixed Danielle with his shrewd unflinching eyes so that what he meant should not escape her—any part of my body, sniff it, and say: this man has worked in a tannery.
What do you want a he-goat to be? replied Danielle, all he-goats have a strong smell, don’t they?
Another thing—apart from the stench of the tannery—which Marius brought back with him to the village was his way of wearing a hat. He wore his hat pulled rakishly down over one eye. Like a boss. Not the boss of a factory but of a gang. And he was never without a hat. He slept with a hat on. When he brought in his cows after a storm—if the downpour is violent they refuse to budge, they put down their heads, they arrange their backs like roofs so the rain runs off either side, and they wait—when Marius brought in his herd after a storm and his hat was so drenched that even indoors it went on raining, he took it off and straightaway put on another.
Putting on a hat was for him a gesture of authority, and from the age of thirty to the age of seventy, the authority of the gesture had not changed. He wore his hat now as if he were expecting total obedience from thirty cows and one dog.
That’s Violette there, he muttered to Danielle, pointing with his stick to a large brown cow with black eyes and horns. Always the last to come when called, always wandering off by herself, she has her own system, Violette, and I shall get rid of her in the autumn!
He had lost his father at the age of fourteen. His father, who married twice, had a passion for cards. Every evening in the winter he would say: Sauva la graisse! Wipe the grease off the table, we are going to play cards. And so he became known as Emilien à Sauva, and his son as Marius à Sauva.
Emilien, the father, left little behind except debts. The family house was sold, and Marius, who was the eldest son, had to leave to look for work in Paris. As he climbed for the first time in his life into a train, he swore that he would come back with enough money to pay off the family debts and that eventually he would have the largest herd of cows in the village.
So you’re going to sweep their chimneys? asked the ticket collector.
I’ll eat their shit, said Marius the boy, if they pay me more for it.
He achieved what he swore he would. He worked in a tannery in Aubervilliers, a little to the north of the Arc de Triomphe. By the time he was thirty he had paid off the family debts. By the time he was fifty he had the largest herd in the village.
They are calm today, Danielle, he went on, calm and agreeable, and they stay together. Not like yesterday—yesterday they could feel the storm, and there were flying ants. They ran with their tails straight out. They were as disagreeable as you can imagine yesterday. And today they are honey-sweet. As sweet as honey, Danielle.
It was the beginning of the summer and the grass was full of flowers, vanilla orchids, arnica, red campion, globeflowers, and blue centaurea that people say are the souls of poets.
Danielle was twenty-three. Her mother was dead and she lived with her elderly father, who had five cows and some goats. She had a job in the warehouse of a furniture factory. But in the spring of ’82 the factory went bankrupt, and so she proposed to take her father’s animals to the mountains—to the chalet where she had spent several summers as a child with her mother.
How does she have the courage to stay up there alone? people in the village asked. Yet the truth was she didn’t need courage. It suited her—the silence, the sun, the slow daily routine. Like many people who are sure of themselves, Danielle was a little intimidating. At village dances the boys didn’t fall over themselves to partner her—though she danced well and had wide hips and tiny feet. They weren’t sure she would laugh at their jokes. So they called her slow. In reality, this so-called slowness of hers was a kind of imperturbability. She had a wide face—a little like that of a Red Indian squaw—with dark eyes, large shoulders, small wrists and plump capable hands. It was easy to imagine Danielle as the mother of several children—except that she seemed to be in no hurry to find a man to be their father.
Grandad! she teased Marius, when she paid him a second visit a few days later. You dye it, don’t you?
Dye what?
Seventy and not a single white hair!
It’s in the breeding.
Danielle looked away as if she had suddenly forgotten her joke. The few white clouds above the peaks were the only sign that the world was still going on.
My father had the same head of hair, Marius continued, thick and black as a lamb when they nailed him in his coffin. Go fetch Lorraine, Johnny! he called to the dog, Find Lorraine!
The dog bounded away to fetch a cow who was straying along the slope to the west. Over the seasons the cows at Peniel have made, with their own feet, narrow paths like terraces along the slopes. You can wander along one of those paths without really noticing that on one side the drop below is getting steeper and steeper.
Go fetch Lorraine!
Marius had his own way of calling. His calls sounded like an order and an appeal at the same time. Everyone discovers how to make their voice carry in the mountains, and everyone knows that animals respond to sounds which are like songs. Yet his shouts were not musical, they were a kind of convulsive cry and each phrase ended with the sound OVER! Johnny bring over! Take over! Over there Johnny over! Somebody suddenly awaking from sleep might cry out like Marius calling to his dog.
Fetch Lorraine over!
Dangerous, he said. Lilac fell there two years ago and broke a leg. To save the meat I had to hack the carcass with an axe and take the quarters back to the chalet on a sledge. Alone. No one to help and no one to see.
The next time Danielle paid him a visit was in the evening. It had been very hot all day, the goats were as languid as she was. When she had finished milking, she climbed up to the pass. There she could hear the bells of Marius’s herd, and at the same time, behind her and much louder, the bells of her own five. She had an electric torch with her in case she needed it for the walk back.
Marius was sitting on a stool in his stable, empty except for one cow. He looked up from under his hat, his black eyes fixed intently upon Danielle.
I was doing my best to make you come, he growled, may need your help when it comes to pulling. I know my Comtesse.
Comtesse, the cow before them, had her tail in the air and glistening loops of mucus trailed from her distended vulva. Danielle approached her head and felt the temperature of her horns.
What she needs, she said, is some dew on her nose.
She wanted to joke because she saw that Marius’s hands were trembling. How many calves had he delivered during his lifetime? And now he owned not one but thirty cows. Why should he be nervous? The last sunlight was shining between the slats of the west wall. When Comtesse moved her head the bell around her neck tolled like an animal in pain. It was stifling as though all the wood of the floor and walls and roof, all the wood of the stable, were feverish; Danielle knew why he was nervous. To be nervous like that he had to be a man and he had to be old: it wasn’t the danger of losing the calf or the cow which worried him, it was a question of pride. As if he were being put to a test, as if he were on trial. No woman, young or old, would suffer like that.
The head’s twisted, muttered Marius, pushing his hat further back on his head, that’s why the bugger doesn’t come.
For the third or fourth time he rolled back his sleeve to the shoulder and plunged his right arm into the cow. The Comtesse was now so weak she was swaying like a drunk.
For Christ’s sake hold her up, he shouted, do you want to break my arm? Hold her up! God almighty, it’s not possible! Hold her up, do you hear me? Your father may be my worst enemy but you keep her on her feet, do you hear me?
Whilst he was shouting at Danielle he was quietly, systematically, searching wit
h his open hand, fingers separated like probes, to find the calf’s shoulders and then its haunches and then with a single hand to turn them so that the calf could engage the passage. He was sweating profusely, so were Danielle and the Comtesse. Mucus, wood impregnated with a century’s smell of cows, sweat, and somewhere the iodine tang of birth.
It’s done, he grunted. He withdrew his arm and almost immediately two front hooves appeared, forlorn-looking as drowned kittens. Danielle was fingering the rope, impatient to slip it round the hooves and pull, and so finish with a labour that had already gone on too long, yet she hesitated because Marius was standing there, his face a few inches from the cow’s cunt, his eyes screwed up as if he were praying.
He’s coming to us! He’s coming. The calf slipped out limply, wearily, into Marius’s arms. He poured eau-de-vie over his fingers and forced them into the calf’s mouth so that it could suck. It looked more dead than alive. He carried it to the Comtesse, who licked its face and lowed. The sound she made was high and penetrating—a mad sound, thought Danielle. The calf stirred. She went to fetch some straw.
When all was arranged, Marius sat there on his stool, his right hand, with which he had turned the calf, still held open and extended, still making in the air of the stable the same gestures it had made in the womb. The difference was that it was no longer trembling.
You certainly know what you’re doing, Grandad!
Not always, not always.
A sweet breeze was blowing through the open door. The light was fading in the stable.
I couldn’t have done it without you, he said.
I did nothing.
He laughed and began to turn down the sleeves of his shirt. You were there! he cried, you were there! You kept her on her feet.
On her way home she was glad to have the torch, because the pass crosses from north to south, and with the moon still low in the east, the way between the crags was in dark shadow. She stopped to look up at the stars, which from there, where it was dark, seemed ten times brighter.