The Serpent of Stars (8 page)

And Mallefougasse is it!

What's more, when you're there, you're at a point where you've come more than a hundred kilometers along the way, and you have more than a hundred kilometers left to go. So you have the right to rest. Nothing screams in you if you lie down by the side of the road. It's a stopping point, and it suits us just right. It's like a great pool. The water of herds fills it at leisure, laps a bit, and then sleeps. But what is most beautiful is the great breadth of it. You don't have to pay attention to this earth like a bit of the night, to the fearful trees, to the free movements of the wind, no, the sheep are at ease. They are there in the open, bathing in the air on all sides. The animals' sweat smokes as if someone had just set fire to the hill. The bees who have been prisoners in their wool since the Châ-teauneuf hives set themselves free, flying awkwardly in this too pure air and falling into the fleece of thyme and wormwood. The ewes give birth. The males go off to push their snouts straight into the north wind, filling their brains with the fresh air until they shake off the surplus with a sneeze that leaves them trembling with drunkenness. All the bad folk are far off.

Here, everything is new, land and men. You have wine from Arnoulas and water in seven lovely springs. Springs as round-faced as girls, all gushing and plump. It's true that this water is not welcoming and that it wells up without bindweed, without rushes, without periwinkle,
without moss, from between bare lips of rock. But so what, must you always have frills? Can't you love cold water for being cold water and do you think you quibble over such things when you've just spent twenty days going through the dust rising from all of Provence? The water is all by itself in a stream of blue schist. It is the blue of the blue of cornflowers. When it lets out one of its braids, its white heart glistens. That's why we choose to stop at Mallefougasse. We don't have the same spans for measuring fear. For us, the country is wide, comfortable, flat. We have wine from Arnoulas and water in the little valley of seven springs, peace, the joy of feet. That's why!

And then, too, it's a kind of reunion. Sometimes you have things to say that you've saved for a whole year. You think, “I'll tell him that at Mallefougasse.”

And so, it must have evolved quite naturally.

There, reunited on the sparseness of Mallefougasse, exhausted herds, heavy shepherds. Night came. They lit a fire. There was only the night full of stars, this land all alone under the sky, bordered all around by sky, and, as in the earliest times, an ocean of beasts surrounded a few men. They huddled close to the fire. The Sardinian was there that time. And he told stories about the stars above, about the earth below. He told them to make the night pass, and also because his heart was all reflections in which the soul of the world moved.

The next time, someone said to him, “Sardinian, stand up.” He stood up, and now there were a few more shepherds because it had been repeated from pasture to pasture with “That Sardinian, really, if you could have heard him!”

The next time, word passed all around, “What if we perform? The
Sardinian would lead, and we would speak when it was our turn, what do you say, Sardinian?” And that's what they did and it went very well because, among the shepherds, the soul of the universe is like a ray of sunlight in water.

The next time, or maybe that time, the flute warbled in joy, in tune with the words.

And so, beginning from that moment, the infant-poem could walk sturdily. It was alive and well.

THE STAGE, as I've said, is a square clearing of about twenty paces. At each corner is a fire which dances on pine and cedar boughs, heaps of dry thyme. Four shepherds are in charge of supplying the wood and herbs and, sometimes, when the flame dies down, they fan the coals briskly with leafy branches. These are actors that really count! First of all, it's from them that the light comes and it's from them that the scent comes, that essence of resin and burnt juniper that thickens the air and drifts off towards Ganagobie and makes the villages in the woods nervous.

The drama is accompanied by music, music for three instruments. I won't talk about that first instrument from which everything springs, from which all music has run, the freely singing earth which is there all around with its weight of animals, herds, trees, grass, wind, springs, the Durance rumbling deep in the valley. The others are the aeolian harp, the tympon, and the water jug. I've said how the aeolian harps are made, how the man merges with them to play them, or more precisely,
to play the trees and the wind. But, the mixture of that human touch and that breath, master of time and racer through space, creates a god's voice which goes all the way to the harmonious depths of the horror.

It is a shepherd's invention. One of those secret and solitary harps unleashed fear throughout the whole region of Queyras, in '12 or '13, a little before the war. This was a village of simple people, with goiters heavy as melons, and for that reason, with heads bent toward the earth. This country has no water. The village is built on rock, hollowed by three long, dark and rumbling underground wells. The opening of the wells, capped by a hood of stone, remains locked with large key all day. The gate is only opened in the evening, just time for the women to draw buckets, to fill pails, to redden their hands on the rust from the chains, to wet their feet in the cool water, to laugh. . . . That particular shepherd, they say, wanted to drink and couldn't. He was told it was too late. He argued. Arguments with men with goiters always end in yelling and stone throwing. Our shepherd climbed back up his hill to his pasture and there, he made his harp. He claimed, afterwards, to have made it to distract himself, having, of course, forgotten the star branded on his forehead by a piece of flint. What's certain is that if this harp was made by chance, chance is a great master, because it gave it exactly the resonance of flowing water. It sounded like a huge singing spring. What's more, having no pine-lyre at this elevation, the shepherd hung it in the branches of an oak. Thus, it was much bigger than usual and it entered the earth more deeply by long radish-like roots.

At the first sounds of music, the whole village cocked its ear, grunted, grabbed pails and tubs, buckets, pitchers, jugs, and rushed toward the valley where the water seemed to be running. But only the wind ran there. They rubbed their eyes, they wondered aloud to each other, they
looked right and left without seeing anything, and yet the sound of water was all around them. At the edge of that dry valley, its stones cutting like a hot knife, they got so excited in their desire for live water, that under the sway of that harp, in the supple open air, they began to imitate the movements of swimming, throwing themselves head first onto the rocks, stretching out in the thorns, scraping themselves, scratching themselves, tearing at their goiters, bloody, drunk with despair and desire. Evening came, when the wells were to be opened. They were opened and from them poured, weaker but also blacker, that song of water which came to sing there through the spell of those huge oak roots thrust deep into the rock.

Then there was complete chaos. They thought their water was escaping because some underground river had suddenly given way. Caliste went down into his well to touch the water with his hand and never came up again. And, assembled on the clearing that overlooks the valley of Saint-André, the whole village began to howl at his death like a family of wolves. Our shepherd, having gone too far, made a fast escape into the region of Briançon. Some hunters from Saint-André found the harp, cut the strings, and peace returned with the silence.

So, this is a kind of music that must be measured out, the muted strings not used too much, or just used as a starting point, as a landing for letting the clear notes take wing and fly off. The muted notes have the sadness of doves' songs. The wind is not perfectly round like a iron rod, but made of waves and undulations. It coos and warbles, and if the pleasant notes sound like bird calls, the muted notes weigh on your heart and make the clouds seem like fat pigeons.

Here, the wind harps are at a distance from the clearing of at least a good thousand paces. They must be set up on the ridge to allow them
the life of the wind. Then, too, too close up, they would have cut off and killed the narrator's voice. Up above, they are exactly in their place and their distant music is very much the base it must be in the drama.

There are five harps. They are worked by five shepherds and conducted by a sixth who stays there on the stage and whistles through his fingers. Once for silence, twice for sound.

Thus, through the play, the music of these harps unfolds. It doesn't follow the turns in the action. It is distant and monotone like the voice of the world.

 

TH E TYMPON is that flute with nine pipes, the flute of play and of distress. It has one scale and two deep, bass Cs, one at the beginning of the scale, one at the end. These somber notes are always there, ready to sound the alarm at each end of the song.

When all you know is how to play the flute, you only blow into the seven pipes by making the reeds flow before your mouth. That makes a flute song. But, if you've grown accustomed to the tympon from long use and when you truly know how to play it, that adds the leavening to the dough, believe me. Right in the middle of the songs, there's the deep note that sets ringing the whole black basin at the bottom of your heart meant to hold your reserve of tears. Then, you remember in a flash the days of distress. The harsh mountains appear, climbing the sky like she-bears, and the flute song becomes a lyric of life, a verb alive as the day, made at once of joy and sadness.

You can recognize true tympon players by two very specific signs. This is what they are. When a shepherd sits down, the dog comes to lie beside him, the flocks remain a little farther away. If he's a tympon player, every time, you'll see a sheep approach, lay its head on the man's
knees and wait for solace. The second sign is that a tympon player, when he's alone, when he's walking alone along his way, he looks behind him ten times, twenty times, to try to see what is back there following him, whose steps he hears in his head.

 

THE GARGOULETTES are the water flutes. There are two kinds. One is made out of elder wood. They are like pipes. The other is made out of glazed earth. They are like pitchers, and they imitate bird songs.

With little gargoulettes, you can very easily hunt quail or any bird with a trilling song. They imitate them, they call to them, they sound exactly like the female. But the gargoulettes the shepherds use are very big. Their song is at once bird song and horse whinny. Ten men blowing hard into ten gargoulettes can make music that turns you to salt. You have only enough time to raise your eyes to search the sky for a flying winged horse.

The instrument isn't beautiful, just a pipe or a pitcher, and it takes enormous breath to move and puncture water. The players bind their cheeks with a handkerchief or a scarf. Gargoulette music has great power over animals. After just a little, it makes them mad for love, females as well as males. It has the power of springtime. Extending from where a man plays a gargoulette alone on a hill, you can see the rays afterwards, the marks in the grass of all the love struggles of beasts who heard him. They radiate out like the spokes of a wheel.

So there is the whole orchestra. Above, on the ridge, the wind harps, here, next to the stage, the tympon and gargoulette players. This time, there were twelve of them. Everything is invention, even in the music. They don't play traditional tunes. They set off in a flurry, without knowing where they are going, improvising on their own sounds. Before
beginning, they say, “With us, you are going to travel far!” And then they play.

So this is what I myself saw in all that. The harps make the sound of the earth which rolls along over the routes of the sky; the tympons, the sound of men, words and steps, and the sound of beating hearts; the gargoulettes, the sound of the beasts who are born, make love, bellow, and die. All that as if, all of a sudden, you had the ears of a god.

 

AS FOR the actors, first of all, there's the Sardinian. The Sardinian, well, he's at the very center of the stage, and he's the one who begins. The others are there, mixed in with the audience; they aren't designated in advance. They are there just to lean toward their neighbors to tell them, “Wait till you hear what I've got to say!”

The Sardinian cannot go on any longer. He calls,
“The Sea,”
for example. And, all of a sudden, it's someone near you who begins to answer. Everyone shouts to him, “Stand up, stand up!”

He stands up, he goes over, he stands facing the Sardinian, he answers. Only then you know that the one whose velour elbows rubbed against your side was the Sea, was really the sea; he has its voice and soul. When he has finished, he stays there. He has taken his place among the elements. There are even some who won't ever leave their elemental rank; they'll remain all their lives as the the Sea, the River, the Woods. It'll be said that the Sea has claimed his pasture to the left of Seyne, or that the River will come down tomorrow, because one night they were so much that sea and that river that they can never again be called by their father's name, but only by the name of what they are.