Once in Europa (9 page)

I don't even know how many sheep I'm buying, muttered Corneille.

On this earth, Corneille, we never know what we're buying. Perhaps there's another planet where all deals are straight. All I know is that here the earth is peopled by those whom God threw out as flawed.

Five and a half, said Corneille.

Six.

Corneille lifted his hand from the pile and shook Boris's hand.

Six it is. Count it.

Boris counted the notes.

If you want a tip from a very old King Cole, Corneille spoke evenly and slowly, if you want a tip, don't spend it all on her.

For that you'll have to wait and see, Corneille, just as I am going to do.

There followed the correspondence between Boris and the blond. This consisted of two letters. The first, with the postmark of October 30th, was from him:

My darling,

I have the money for our fares to Canada. I am waiting

for you—

always your Boris.

The second, dated November 1st, was from her:

There were no longer any sheep to feed. The horses had gone from the snow-covered orchard. When the lorry had come to fetch them, there was half a bale of hay lying on the snow and Boris had thrown it into the lorry after his horses. On one small point Marc was right when he said that Boris died like one of his own beasts. Not having to feed his animals gave him the idea of not feeding himself.

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.

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.