Scenes from Village Life (19 page)

Before I came here, a quarter of a century ago or more, the district governor once came on a visit, surrounded by a large retinue. He stayed for an hour or two, and gave orders for the course of the river to be diverted so as to put an end to the malignant marsh. The governor was accompanied by officers and secretaries, surveyors, holy men, a legal expert, a singer, an official historian, one or two intellectuals, an astrologer and representatives of the sixteen secret services. The governor dictated his orders: dig, divert, dry out, dig up, cleanse, inject, remove, upgrade and turn over a new leaf.

Nothing has happened since.

Some say that over there, beyond the river, beyond the forests and mountains, a succession of governors has taken his place: one was ousted, one was defeated, another fell from grace, a fourth was assassinated, a fifth was imprisoned, a sixth became a turncoat, a seventh fled or fell asleep. Here everything has remained as it always was: the old folks and babies continue to die and the young grow old before their time. The population of the village, if my cautious statistics can be trusted, is in terminal decline. According to the graph I have drawn up and hung over my bed, not a single person will be left alive here by midcentury. Just the insects and creepy-crawlies.

In fact, large numbers of children are born here, but most of them die in infancy and are hardly missed. The young men escape to the north. The girls grow beetroot and potatoes in the thick mud, they have their first child at twelve, and by twenty they seem worn out. Sometimes in an excess of mad lust the whole village is swept up in a night of debauchery by the light of bonfires of damp wood. They all commit outrageous acts: old men with children, girls with cripples, humans with beasts. I cannot communicate the details, as on such nights I barricade myself inside the dispensary, where I live, and go to sleep with a loaded pistol under my pillow, in case they get any bright ideas.

But such nights occur infrequently. The next day they wake at midday, heavy-headed, bleary-eyed, and go back to squelching submissively in their muddy fields from dawn to dusk. The days are ferociously hot. Insolent fleas, as big as a coin, swoop down on us, and as they bite they emit a nauseating, piercing squeak. The work in the fields seems backbreaking. The beetroot and potatoes that are extracted from the spongy mud are nearly all rotten, yet they are eaten either raw or cooked in a foul, putrid liquid. The gravedigger's two elder sons ran away to the mountains and joined a gang of smugglers. Both their wives, with the children, moved into the hut of their younger brother, a boy of barely fourteen.

As for the gravedigger himself, a taciturn, solidly built hunchback, he decided not to pass over this in silence. But the weeks and months went by in total silence, and the years went by. Then one day the gravedigger, too, moved in with his youngest son. More and more children were born there, and nobody knew which of them were the offspring of the runaway brothers, who sometimes spent a nocturnal hour or two in the village, and which were from the loins of the youngster, or indeed the gravedigger or his elderly father. Whatever the truth, most of the babies died within a few weeks of being born. Other men came and went there at night, and simple-minded women, too, in search of a roof or a man, or shelter or a child or food. The present governor has not replied to the three urgent memoranda, each more serious than the last, sent at short intervals to warn of the deterioration of the moral climate and demand his immediate intervention. I was the outraged author of these memoranda.

The years pass in silence. My replacement has still not come. The policeman has been ousted in favor of his brother-in-law. Rumor has it that the original policeman has joined the smugglers in the mountains. I am still doing my duty, but I am becoming increasingly weary. They no longer address me in the third person, nor do they bother to doff their threadbare caps to me. There is no disinfectant left. The women are gradually emptying the dispensary of its drugs, without giving me anything in exchange. My intellect is waning along with my desires. I can no longer find enough light within myself. The thinking reed is becoming empty of thoughts. Or maybe it is my eyes that are becoming dim, so that even the midday light seems murky, and the line of women waiting at the door of the dispensary looks like a row of sacks. Over the years I have become accustomed to their rotten teeth and their stinking breath. So I go on gently from morning to evening, from day to day, from summer to winter. I long ago stopped noticing the insect bites. My sleep is deep and peaceful. There is moss growing on my bedding and damp rot has invaded the walls. Some peasant woman or other takes pity on me from time to time and feeds me a gelatinous liquid apparently made from potato skins. All my books are going moldy. The covers crumble away and fall off. I have nothing left, and I can barely distinguish between one day and the next, between spring and autumn, between one year and the next. Sometimes at night I seem to hear the distant wail of some primeval wind instrument: I have no idea what it is or who plays it, or whether it comes from the forest or the hills or from inside my skull, under my hair that is turning gray and thinning. So I am gradually turning my back on everything around me, and in fact on myself as well.

Apart from one event that I witnessed this morning, which I shall report now in writing, without expressing an opinion.

This morning the sun rose and transformed the marshy vapor into a dense, viscous rain. Warm summer rain that smelled like an unwashed, sweaty old man. The villagers were beginning to come out of their huts and preparing to go down to the potato fields. Suddenly, on top of the hill to the east, a healthy, handsome man appeared, between us and the rising sun. He started waving his arms, describing all manner of circles and spirals in the damp air, kicking, bowing, jumping on the spot, without uttering a sound. "Who is that man?" the village men asked one another. "What is he looking for here?" "He's not from here, and he's not from the next village, and he's not from the hills either," the old men said. "Perhaps he's come down from a cloud."

"We must watch out for him," said the women. "We must catch him red-handed. We must kill him."

While they were still discussing and arguing, the yellowish air filled with a rush of sounds, of birds, dogs, bees, mooing, scolding, buzzing of insects as big as beer mugs. The frogs in the swamp joined in, and the chickens were not slow to follow suit. Harnesses jangled. There were coughs, groans and cursing. All sorts of different sounds.

"That man," the gravedigger's young son said, and then he stopped.

"That man," said the innkeeper, "wants to seduce the girls."

The girls shrieked: "Look, he's naked, look how big it is, look, he's dancing, he's trying to fly, look, like wings, look, he's white right through to the bone."

And the old gravedigger said: "What's the good of all this chatter? The sun is up, the white man who was there, or who we imagined was there, has disappeared behind the bog. Words won't help. Another hot day is beginning and it's time to go to work. Whoever can work, let him work, put up or shut up. And whoever can't work anymore, let him die. And that's all there is to it."