Jean Giono - Hill

Jaume started. The chair toppled behind him. He grabbed Janet by the neck.

“You,” he said, and the words sprayed out between his clenched teeth, “I’ve had enough of your vicious tricks. You’re worse than a wolf. You know you haven’t a right to say a word about my wife, you of all people. Or about my daughter… If you were in your right mind I’d smash your face in. So, don’t go on asking for it.”

Jaume gathers himself, gulps some air, turns his ear toward the bedroom where Marguerite is sleeping.

He stands his chair back up and sits down. He’s regained control of himself.

Janet looks dead, but you can hear his chuckles nibbling away at the silence.

“Janet, I didn’t come here to argue. You see, I’m calm now. It’s not just me who could suffer, it’s everybody. Think about it. If you know what we need to do, say it.”

“I’m about to tell you… It’s a bit complicated. You have to see things from above, like you were at the top of a tree, as though the whole of earth were spread out underneath you.”

Janet is panting — the rapid panting of a bird. He’s closed his eyes. He’s looking inside himself, at the cellar in his chest where so many things have piled up over eighty years.

And all of a sudden it comes unblocked. It flows — thin, thick, thin again, lees and wine mixing together, as if a neglected barrel had popped its bung.

“You want to know what you need to do, only you don’t even know what kind of world you’re living in. You realize something’s against you, but you don’t know what. And all this because you’ve been staring at what’s around you without really seeing it. I bet you’ve never given any thought to the great power?

“The great power of animals, plants, and rock.

“Earth isn’t made for you alone to keep on using the way you’ve been used to, on and on, without getting some advice from the master every once in a while. You’re like a tenant farmer — and then there’s the landlord. The landlord in his handsome, six-button jacket, his brown corduroy vest, his sheepskin coat. Do you know him, the landlord?

“You’ve never heard him hissing like the wind across a leaf, a leaflet just unfolding, a newborn leaf on a dappled apple tree. It’s his loving voice. He talks that way to animals and trees. He’s the father of everything. He has the blood of all things in his veins. When rabbits run out of breath, he lifts them up in his hands:

“ ‘Ah, my lovely one,’ he’ll say, ‘you’re soaking wet, your eyes are rolling around in your head, your ears are bleeding, have you been running for your life? Settle down here, between my legs. Don’t be afraid, you’re safe now.’

“The bittersweet sanctuary, and the stream of…

“Then it’s the dogs who race up.

“When you say to yourself: ‘My dog’s gone off hunting on his own,’ it’s because he’s shaken you off to go see the landlord.

“The handsome, six-buttoned jacket, and the bowl of the bell on the neck of the sheep.

“And in the shelter, between his legs, the dog and the rabbit get friendly, nose to nose, coat to coat. The rabbit sniffs your dog in the ear, your dog shakes its ear because the rabbit has breathed into it. He looks around and he has the air of saying: ‘It’s not my fault if I’ve chased it all day through broom-grass, and up and down furrows, and the pools in the stream. There are weeds in there, like twine, that bind your hands and feet.’

“That’s when everybody turns up: the turtledove, the fox, the snake, the lizard, the mouse, the grasshopper, the rat, the weasel, and the spider, the moorhen, the magpie, everything that walks, everything that runs. There are roads full, you might even go so far as to say streams full of animals. It’s a stream that’s singing and leaping and it flows and rubs at the sides of the path and tears away lumps of earth and carries away whole limbs from hawthorns the stream has uprooted.

“And they all come because he’s the father of caresses. He has a word for each one of them:

“ ‘Tourturtle, take route, tooraloo; fox, phlox, flame-in-a-box.’

“He teases tufts of fur toward himself.

“ ‘Lachrymizard, muse, musette, calf’s muzzle wedged in a bucket.’

“Next he’s going to take a stroll through the trees.

“For the trees, it’s the same. They know him. They’re not afraid.

“You — you’ve never known anything but trees that are on their guard. You don’t know what a tree really is. Around him, they behave the same as they did during the first days of the world, before we’d cut a single branch.

“…There were woods, and no sound of the axe yet, or of the pruning hook. No knife blade yet on the hillside. The woods on the hillside, and no axe.

“He passes alongside, in his sheepskin jacket. Linden trees make sounds like weeping cats, the chestnuts sound like women moaning, and the plane tree creaks from inside itself, like a man begging for charity.

“He sees their wounds — the knife stabs and the clefts from the axe — and he soothes them.

“He speaks to the linden, the plane tree, the laurel, the olive, the olive grove, the savory, and the newly planted vine, and it’s for all this — the pomegranate too — it’s because of his compassion that he’s master, and that they love him and obey him.

“And if he wanted to wipe the Bastides right off this tiny bump of a hill, ’cause humanity has done too much harm, it’s no big deal for him. Just like it’s no big deal to let himself be seen by jackasses. He just puffs a little breeze into the daylight, and it’s done.

“He holds the great power in his hand.”

•

“Animals, plants, rock!

“It’s strong — a tree. A hundred years it’s spent holding up the weight of the sky, with a hopelessly twisted branch.

“It’s strong — an animal. Especially the little ones.

“They sleep curled up in the grass, all on their own in the wide open world.

“All alone curled up in the grass, and the whole world circling ’round.

“They have stout hearts. They don’t cry out when you kill them. They fix your eyes and then they pierce them with their own, like needles.

“You haven’t spent enough time watching animals die.

“It’s strong — a rock, one of those big rocks that part the wind in two. Standing for who knows how long? A thousand years?

“One of those rocks that have been in the world forever — long before you, Jaume, before the apple and olive groves, before me, before the woods and the rest of the animals. Before the fathers of all this — of you, me, the apple. Before the time, Jaume, when the father of all of this might have been nothing but a swelling in his own father’s loincloth.

“One of those rocks that was around on the first day and have always been the same, never changing, for who knows how long? That’s what you have to know to get at the remedy.”

•

Jaume listens. He feels the world rocking under his feet, like the floorboards of a rowboat.

His head is full of images of earth: He sees trees, plants, animals — from the grasshopper, to the wild boar — and for him it’s all part of this truly solid world, where he moves along familiar grooves.

And now?

There’s no way he would have believed that Janet could be so strong. To begin with, it’s this glimpse of power that’s frightened him. This time, somebody in the know is talking.

And him , he really does know. Everything that was obscure till now is becoming clear. Incomprehensible things are being explained. But what’s coming to light in this way is terrifying.

The old ways were so straightforward. There was humanity, and all around, but underneath, animals and plants. And things were going along well that way. You kill a hare, you harvest a fruit. A peach — it’s nothing but sweet juice in your mouth; a hare — it’s a heaped-up plateful of rich, dark meat. And afterward, you lick your lips, and you smoke a pipe on the front step.