The Solitude of Compassion (8 page)

A large bolt of lightning flew over our heads like a bird.

 

Then the door to the stables broke open. Mules and horses fell upon us, and colts and single-minded donkeys which were all in heat.

Then the hen houses opened up like nuts, and we received in our faces chickens and cocks that scratched with their nails into our cheeks, pigeons fell upon us like snow, the air was boiling over with all of this fowl. From the depths of the valley all of the swallows that had amassed during the preceding days before taking off, from the depths of the valley, all the swallows surged up from the willows and copses, and the warm fields. In the sky it was like a great river
of the sky. It turned for a moment then dumped itself upon us, and it was a rain of swallows, and swallows were streaming, we were covered by them, we were weighed down by them, we were inundated, and wiped out as if by gushing water.

Then, all the greenery of the mountain also began boiling up like a soup. All that the forest had to offer of beasts began to sweat between the trees and the grasses. They came down the slopes like a landslide, like a mudslide. They were together, chest to chest, back to back, hair against hair, hair against shell. There were rams, foxes, wild boars, an old wolf, squirrels, forest rats, snakes which seemed like living branches, fistfuls of vipers and adders. There were eagles and hazel hens, partridges and veteran thrushes. There was a hare, I recall, who leaped, alone on the side, in the grass, and each time she jumped we saw a little baby hare, as big as a fist, suspended from one of her nipples, but who was not letting go of the goods. There was an old deer, noble and hard eyed like a man who was covered with lichen because he lived in the high fields of Durbonas.

There were bats from caverns that flew over this mass of beasts. And they flew in leaps, deploying their great, hairy skin, and they had legs with hooks like grasshoppers. They fell down and one heard them cry with the voices of young women. There were heavy crows, seemingly weighed down by the night, who swam above the storm.

Upon coming into the village the wolf lay down on the step of the Café du Centre. With his thick red tongue he licked his paws that had been wounded by the needles.

I watched the beasts come.

Soon the rain and the night came. The rain, hard and tight, was enough to make us believe that it was chunks of sky falling upon us. The night, and then, this abomination which filled me broke out all around me like a sun.

 

I danced that night, with François' horse, and I kissed her on her mouth with her yellow teeth, and, I tell you, I still have a taste of chewed grain on my tongue. I saw men going to the beasts with outstretched hands. I felt that someone was touching me. I put out a hand. I felt hair, I felt higher and I understood that it was the deer. He saw that I was a man; he turned towards my left, and there was Rosine, the daughter of the forest warden.

And there on the Oches hillside, the earth was white with sheep and the big rams were in front, and all of that wool illuminated the night like moonlight.

Then came a beautiful lightening flash which remained suspended in the sky like a lamp.

We woke up in a village sweating all sorts of juices, which stank like a rotten melon. I was wallowing in horse manure; a little farther on there was big Amélie, as if dead, her skirt in the air, her undergarments off, showing all that she had.

But, we did not know all of our misfortune until later. Already we knew that Anaïs had a smell about her which would not leave and which eventually drove her crazy. François' horse died of some new disease. It was lodged in the stomach; we opened it up to see. She had a big ball of blood all alive which we stifled under a pile of manure. Finally, Rosine gave birth. What she produced we drowned at night in the torrent, and the midwife of Aspres remained sick for six months. “I still have it before my eyes,” she said.

The man had gone off towards Provence. He arrived there by the northern route down the Sisteron corridor. We learned about it from a hired man who came to rent from the Chauvines. A few
days later, the man was tending sheep on the Ribiers slope. One morning he was sleeping on the grass when he heard a little noise among the herd. He lifted his head. He saw a man with a bird on his shoulder by the fences. The man was speaking to the sheep in a sheep's voice.

“I,” he told us, “when I saw that, I huddled down under my coat and I did not move.”

Yes, the man went off into Provence and the heaps of clouds followed him. Then the weather became clear again. But I have a cousin who lives on the slopes of Lure, who told me…

I often stopped before that wild garden. It was in the most silent fold of the hills.

The pointed roof of the stronghold hardly surpassed the underbrush. An immense black ivy, having gone through the door, swelled its stubborn muscles between the walls. Its hair, filled with lizards, overwhelmed the windows. The crossbar was of dry nettles and covered over with thistles. All around the wild hair of the undergrowth was waving and there was the strong odor of the hostile earth, which had a life of its own, and was independent, like a beast with cruel teeth.

 

Mute sighs, donning the veil, the color of nervous sprouts of grass, so the entire hillside sang the bitter harmony of despair; it seemed to me, each time, that the terrible bawling of a god was going to surge out of it.

The seasonal rains obliged me to remain in the kind olive groves at the edge of the town; I made use of the good weather one day to plunge into that air above the hillsides.

The stronghold was now clean. The ivy dead; its trunks burned slowly in a brushfire. At a dry clacking of pruning shears, I turned my head: a man was cutting the laurels.

I called out and asked for water.

“My good man. I can hardly give you water; I barely have a finger's worth up there in the old abandoned cistern that I opened, and it is still thick and green and would not agree with you. But, if you would please pass me that wicket of brambles and set yourself down a moment, then I will go find you some grapes.”

His mouth, one would have said that it was blossoming with the stalk of hyssop that he was chewing.

 

The man was made for this land.

He had golden eyes, very soft, a big beard which curled up in black balls; the little pear tree agonizing in the middle of the underbrush still had two leaves the color of his eyes.

 

I returned many times to see him.

With strokes of the spade and aided by an old fire he had pushed the undergrowth back to the other side of the valley. The land that had been opened up was then ready to receive the seeds of love. It seemed that in this clean space he had, with his heavy feet, danced the dance of order.

 

In the spring there was a last battle between the man and the undergrowth. The undergrowth had surreptitiously prepared its attack by the slow infiltration of feelers and the flight of blond seeds. One morning he found his land covered with insolent asparagus, gnarled and shiny, and he understood that it was time to settle the score once and for all. Despite the precocious heat,
the battle lasted all day long. It was already night when he stood up again and wiped his forehead. Nonetheless he was the victor. And I understood, the next day, that he had achieved a victory over this savage land which he wanted to be definitive, judging from the ferocious way that he had decimated the young oaks and pushed the waves of fire into the very prickly heart of the woods.

The hard sky, the hill, the stifling sun, were of an unheard of cruelty, he told me:

“I do not want to work today, I do not feel well, stay with me a while. Stay until evening.”

It was the first time that he had desired my presence.

Then, without transition:

“I am from the Alps: Saint-Auban-d'Oze. A beautiful land! At the bottom of the valley the road stretches between two lines of poplars. On Sunday, girls pass by on their way to the dance, on bicycle, with the handlebars loaded with red and yellow dahlias. At night we sleep to the great rushing of the torrent.

“My house is the last one in the village, on the side of Gap. It is calm; there are no bars across from it. But the long-faced procession of penitents never comes that far on holidays; when they dance under the nut tree in the square I cannot hear the music, and, well, perhaps it is too calm.

“What I have just told you, I understood it after the fact. But, let us sit under the laurel tree.”

 

“In the summer, I harnessed the mule, and we went into ‘the land'—a little pointed piece with three willows. You cannot know; there is nothing more beautiful in all the world than the poplars of that region in the morning sun and the wind. I was seated in the
front of the carriage, my wife behind. When I turned towards her, she laughed at me.

“Upon arriving, I cut the dry branches and we made a bed for Guitte, I did not tell you: a beautiful little girl that we had, fat, pink, with hips…”

 

He stopped.

 

“When one is so happy, one should be distrustful; only, there you go, one never notices it at the time.

“I had my suspicions, like everyone, but I did not have strong desires. I had a few dollars on the side at the ‘Credit.' I wanted to buy a carriage, that was my idea. After seeing my wife shaken on a bad seat I got the desire to place her on the slightly more delicate cushions of a carriage. That, too, was not a strong desire.”

 

“Then came the year when the torrent swelled. It ate up not a little bit of land and the commune had the idea of constructing a levee against the strongest arm of the water.”

 

“It was a businessman from Couni who got the assignment, he brought in masons from the piedmont.”

 

“Saint-Auban is not a big village: twenty houses lost in the chestnut trees. A traveler passes through every ten years. There is not even an inn.”

 

“This idea of the tilbury stuck with me. I said to my wife:

“‘If we took a lodger? Where two eat, three could eat. A few more cabbages in the soup…'

“She agreed.

“The man who presented himself was named Djouanin du Canavèse. A big man, like everyone who comes ‘from there.' He wore large blue breeches, colored shirts, a hat with a large brim set tilted on his curly hair.”

 

“I had met him a couple of times at the tobacconist's shop. He agreed with me. He did not get drunk. When he laughed you felt that you were about to laugh with him. He walked slowly as if his espadrilles were very heavy. In town, they called him: the prefect. I am explaining it poorly, but I cannot even tell you the color of his eyes (yet his stay lasted six months). Beside him I was happy, I never knew why.”

 

“He paid up every Saturday, completely. Once he said:

“‘Boss, I put forty cents extra in my payment, for you to buy a shawl for the lady; she makes good soup.'”

 

“On the fourth of June, we celebrated our daughter's birthday. I had waited for the peddler on the street and bought a headdress with blue ribbons on it. She was a brunette. Djouainin arrived with a bone rattle, a box of sugar plums, and a hidden bottle of wine.

“That was the night that I began to suffer.”

 

He looked at the sun, then the western end of the hill:

“It is time,” he said, “if you want to get home before nightfall.”

 

Two days later I saw that the great brambles had cast on the clean ground a thick tentacle of scaly leaves. I thought that I would find the man with his spade. He was sitting under the laurel tree.

“I was waiting for you!”

And with the same suddenness as the previous day he continued his account. There was a great crack inside him, through which the memories flowed.

“…Guitte did not want to sleep. Seated on her high chair she played at tapping the table with her spoon. We had drunk a bottle. My wife said:

“‘Djouanin, sing us a little of the song of the lark.' Then as he got up: ‘Wait so that we can see you.' And she raised the shade on her side.

“It was a song from the piedmont. His voice gave me goose-bumps; the little girl stayed calm.

“I told you the other day that I did not know the color of his eyes. That was true. Even this time, I saw him without looking closely at him. I was in shadow. I thought: ‘One would say that you have been removed from this room.' Truly there was only Djouanin standing in the light, my wife drinking him in with her eyes, and my baby all taken with it holding up her spoon in the air.

“Have you ever received knife thrusts? Excuse me. I am asking you so as to be able to explain what I felt like that morning where, the carriage going as usual along the poplars, I turned towards my wife and I saw her dreamy-eyed, looking at the peaks of the mountains singing the song of the lark.