The Serpent of Stars (6 page)

“He's crazy!”

“No, he needed to see Pancrace, and Pancrace is only there in the evening, so he had to stay.”

“We want you to lend us Bijou,” said Césaire, “and the cart. The three of us have to go that way, and it's alright with your Bartholomé.”

Anaïs remained silent for a moment, and then she said, “I don't open the gate. I'm afraid at night, I don't open it. Wait for Bartholomé.”

“But we don't have time, Anaïs. Are you crazy or what? You know very well that it's me. You can hear me talking. What, you don't recognize the way I talk? For goodness sake, it's me! Once more, it's me,
Césaire, and Barberousse the shepherd, and someone from town, a friend. Come on, open up, cheese head!”

She remained, up against her idea there in her window. She leaned with her bare arms on the bar and she answered everything Césaire said with her “yes, but . . . ,” “yes, but. . . .”

“Yes, but, you know, there are times . . . it's like this, it seems like a voice but it isn't, . . . times at night, it's the work of the devil. It seems like Césaire, and then you open up, and then. . . .”

And Césaire was completely out of patience, pacing in circles like a mule on the threshing ground, and Barberousse was swearing into his beard, when Bartholomé arrived, carrying a lantern. The lamp gave him a shadow a kilometer long.

“Ah!” he said, “yes.” Then, yes again, but he didn't have the time to get his bearings. Césaire pushed him through the gate, and from there to the stable, and soon Bijou, all harnessed, arrived.

“Close it, close it!” cried Césaire. “We only have time to leave.”

Already two rises of land were rolling us into the great wave of hills, far from the gates where Bartholomé stood, lantern raised.

 

IT MIGHT have been eleven o'clock at night judging from the Reillanne church tower bells, but it was hard to tell because of the wind and especially because of the swinging wagon, creaking and groaning in the hard waves of the earth.

Then we entered the great Sans-Bois wilderness and the stars leaned down right to its slatted sides.

“It will take us three hours,” said the shepherd.

Our pilot was Césaire. He looked at the sky to find the path. The stars, it seemed, marked it.

“You see,” he said, “we are going to pass between that one and that one.”

Then he pulled on the bit a few times to wake up Bijou who was fast asleep.

We went down into the depths of the earth, as if into whirlpools. We heard jaws closing over the emptiness of our wake, or we rose again to the fragile and trembling summit of a hill in all the muted noise of the stars.

At other times, a wide flat stretch carried us along without dip or rise; coasting smoothly, we glided over a plateau. Bijou's big hoofs lapped the sand. Then it seemed to us that over there, in front of us, other vessels sped along. Then we saw they were immobile, as if anchored. The pilot pulled on the leather helm and we skimmed past huge rustling chestnut trees like reefs. The night frothed under such flights and frolics, and the heavy swimming of boars ripped apart the juniper bushes. On our vessel, there were three of us. Césaire, who was looking for the path of stars, and Barberousse, who didn't say a word, and me. Ever since I had felt the heaving breath of the earth under the boat, I was as lost as a kitten and I hung for dear life onto Césaire's velour jacket.

We reached the great slope. Barberousse let out a cry. Césaire used all his strength to come to a stop. All three of us stood up on the trembling boards of the cart.

As far as the eye could see, the plateau descended toward the distant chasm of the Durance. There were so many stars overhead that in the gray light, you could make out the short spray of the heather and lavender, and below, very far away and very much lower, the scaly skin of the Durance.

“Too late,” cried Barberousse.

He pointed out to us, off in the distance, four large squat fires which were no longer anything but coals. The whole great slope of the plateau flowed with herds. You didn't see them, you heard the noise of their cascade, and the shepherds' whistles, and the swaying of the lanterns that they rocked slowly in the night to give the sheep a rhythm to walk by. The alpine roads already sounded like streams. Too late! The shepherds were leaving.

Ahead of us, a great land had just been swallowed up as if by the sea.

I
N THE PRECEDING PAGES, YOU WILL have found an obsession with water and the sea. That's because a herd is a liquid thing, a marine thing.

From Crau to the Alpe, there are only dry rivers, streams which transport cicadas and lizards. The herds climb into the thorns and the furnaces of dust. Yes, but this flood grating the ground with its belly, this wool, this deep, monotonous noise, it all gives the shepherds souls that possess the resonant movement and weight of the sea.

Summer days on the mountain plateaus, the shepherd stretches out in the grass with his face to the sky. The clouds have a life of seaweed and algae, blooming grasses in the breasts of the wave like fountains of milk in the breasts of women. Sometimes, when the expanse is all blue, after the north wind passes, a little white sail still makes its way in the high winds toward the horizon's distant ports.

Finally, this love shepherds have for water and the sea, this obsession which, up there, on the high ground, makes them speak of pilots, helms, sails, waves, sand, spray, flight, swimming, gulfs, and depths, this great affinity is traced deep in their flesh. Because the occupation of the masters of beasts is something like water which runs through the fingers and which cannot be held. Because that odor of suint and wool, that odor of man cooked in his own sweat, that odor of ram and goat, that odor of milk and of full ewes, that odor of nascent lambs rolled in their slime, that odor of dead beasts, that odor of herds in the high mountain summer pastures, that is life, like the brine of the great seas.

 

RETURNING toward Saint-Martin-l'Eau, we saw rising out of the beauty of the sunrise the perched village of Dauphin. Césaire let us wait for him by the bridge and he took the shortcut to lead Bijou back to his stable. The shepherd went into the Largue up to his knees. He bent over the water, watching the slow life below. With his hand, he fished out a barbel round as an eggplant, and then he drew from a hole a long angry eel that flipped around his arm. Césaire came back from above with fistfuls of green peppers. At that moment, the sky was milky and the day promised to be beautiful. As we arrived at the pottery, the young sorceress arrived, too, skin and bones, covered with dust, dust packed hard on her thin legs by a long night of running. Then I understood that she had run behind our cart. We skinned the still-live eel, and the skin billowed in the wind. We put the barbel on an iron grill and, over a fire of vine shoots, it all began to cook; the eel in a fennel stock, the fish on the grill. The girl carefully basted the fish with oil.

The shepherd worked a bit. He learned with a sigh that the ewe Joséphine had given birth and he went to wipe off the lamb with swabs
of grass. Then he brought it to us, still all trembling, all sticky, all surprised. The smell of newborn lamb mixed with the smell of our soup, our fire, and then came the smell of the dawn, that scent of awakened earth and trees coming back to life. The sky began to moan again softly under the sun.

We blamed all we had missed the night before on that fear-ridden Anaïs. It was that great drama of the earth that the masters of beasts put on every year, the night of the summer solstice.

I RETURNED to Manosque by the most convenient route. The walking, my strength, the eel soup had given me heart and I rolled along the paths like a stone, but I was hungry for that great thing of the spirit and I couldn't think of anything else. Insensible to the beautiful flower of sky, to all the hoopoes that were learning to fly around me, I went along and my thoughts, like a fledgling bird, learned to fly, too. They took off in the direction of that odor of newborn lamb.

“No more rest!” I had written to Césaire. This is what I said to him:

“This is what you must do, watch carefully for the date and the time for me. Try to find out, let me know exactly. Twenty opinions are better than one. Then, I put you in charge of the whole business because, you know, I am so far away from it all, I am so far from it, because, when all is said and done, I haven't been able to completely disengage myself from the easy life, because I have a family that is used to it, because Manosque isn't a big town, but it's a town all the same. Do you know what I mean? I'm telling you this so that you will know that I'm putting the whole business in your hands. I know that I myself could never
learn the time and date. I would have to go spend days and days in the hills and it would be exactly the moment I close my eyes when that red scarf would pass, and once more I would miss everything. Watch well and then tell me when it is close to the time. I'll arrange to be ready day or night. Send me a message, and I'll come up at once. Warn Anaïs and Bartholomé and, if perhaps you could get a faster horse.... Ah yes, Césaire, if only my life were like yours. To hollow out a burrow and to live there with only those you love for company. Maybe I would have had a witch daughter, too. Now, it's too late. A hug for everyone there.”

And I added to my letter a word to Barberousse. It was in a visiting card envelope and on the bottom I wrote, “For the shepherd.” I said to him, “Barberousse, so here's how it stands. We must not miss the shepherds' thing again. You talked to me about sheep, and the revolt, and your master who is buried in Saint-Martin-de- Crau. That filled me with longing. I have written to Césaire for him to watch for the man with the red scarf. Césaire, as you know, is a good man, but he has his work. He can't spend all his time watching the road. I need to be sure; that's why I'm writing to you, too. You, you get wind of things in the air. You said to me (you'll remember), ‘The eagle's shadow wakes you' and then, ‘there, it's the same thing.' I want to ask you for a favor. Watch for me. I need to be there when the shepherds do their play. I'll tell you why. It's because I want to copy down what they say on paper, and then afterwards show it to people to make them see that shepherds aren't just shepherds, but, as you say, the masters of the beasts. My warmest greetings.”

Those letters calmed my anxiousness for three days. Then, Lardeyret who drives a stage cart between Manosque and Simiane came to
bring me the response. It was, “Good, count on it” on Césaire's part and, on the part of Barberousse, “That's fine.”

I would have liked something more definite.

I would wake in the middle of the night. It seemed to me that the days had run from everywhere like water through a basket. The calendar was downstairs in the kitchen. To go down, to check it, was to make noise on the steps, knock over chairs, upset the whole house. I remained sitting up in bed. Let's see, yesterday, Thursday. It's February; the wind is in the chimney, the bare branch of the rosebush scratching the window. Until June 24th, there was time. February! The sheep were in their shelters, in Crau, and the shepherds were playing lotto in the cafés in Arles and Salon. Sleep, you have time.

Other times, in the thick of night, nothing indicated the season. Memories of past Junes were there alive all around me, the noise of watering in the fields, the smell of sap rising in the fig trees, the big leaves and the wind. All that so faint; I stopped breathing. The silence deceived my ears with its eternal drone.

I wrote another letter to Césaire, another note to Barberousse.

“Watch out,” I said, “It'll soon be time. It's May, I've already seen some of them.”

And Lardeyret came back with the answers:

“Don't worry.”

One morning, I tore off the page for May 31st from the calendar. There underneath was the month of June, as well hidden as a green lizard.

The first day didn't budge. The second day, a little uneasiness drifted in a long wind under a brand new sky, but the third day the tide of sheep overflowed from the hills to the south and the western passes at the
same time, and the great froth-browed herds made their way into our country.

At last, a telegram was delivered to me, opened, all torn and crumpled, read by at least the hundred or so Jeans of Manosque. It was simply addressed to Monsieur Jean. It said, “Forward!” and it was signed Césaire.

“Yes,” I said to the carrier, “yes, it's for me, don't worry, I know what it is.”

“Sure?”

“Sure!”

And I took my good curved walking stick. The sky played ball with that great noise of herds and all the echoes from the hills trembled with bleating.