Jean Giono - Hill

It was simple, but it left a lot of things in the dark.

From now on it’s going to be necessary to live in a lit-up world, and it’s painful.

It’s painful because it’s not just humanity anymore, with everything else underneath, but there’s a giant ill will and, way down below, humanity tossed in together with the animals and the plants.

He can feel the hill — alive and terrible — moving under his feet.

•

“Now, I’m going to tell you the secret.”

Jaume would be happier if Janet kept quiet for the moment.

•

“I’m going to tell you. Everything’s sickly sweet, like a corpse.

“There’s too much blood around us.

“There are ten holes, there are hundreds of holes in the flesh of living creatures and in living wood, and out of them the blood and the sap flow over the world like a gigantic river, like the Durance.

“There are a hundred holes, there are a thousand holes we’ve made with our hands.

“And the master no longer has enough saliva and soothing talk to heal them.

“When all is said and done, these animals, these trees, they’re his, they belong to him — to the landlord. His sheepskin jacket — it’s the sheep who gave it to him, without having to skin itself, without bleeding, just so; and the sheep-bone buttons, just so, without bleeding; the button-bones, the sheep…

“You and I, we belong to him too. Except that for some time now we’ve forgotten the way to get to the shelter of his knees. We’ve tried to heal and comfort ourselves, all on our own, but we really needed to be able to find this path again. To find it under the dead leaves. There are leaves on the path, you have to pick them up with your hands, one after the other, carefully, so that the moon doesn’t scorch the slender path that leaps like a kid goat under the moon.

“And when we’re close to him, in the streams of his saliva and in the wind of his words, he’ll say to us:

“ ‘My lovely little man, with your pretty little fingers that grab and squeeze, come here my man, let’s see if you remember how to soothe things with your hands. That’s what I taught you at the very beginning, when you were on my knees — a mere babe with your mouth full of my milk…”

Suddenly, the grand vision gets all jumbled:

“…milk…mou…mouth…plain, wool, milk, milk, milk…”

Then a rattling and a grating, as though you were jamming on the brakes of a cart racing downhill.

In one bound, Jaume is there beside the bed.

Janet is twisted, his head buried in the pillow. A darkish fluid gurgles at the bottom of his open mouth. If he’s going to die…

“Janet, Janet, hey!”

The eye, which had already been glancing back from beyond the land of the living, returns to earth, still trembling like a periwinkle tossed in the wind. He rallies, and his tongue rolls around:

“… milk, your mouth full of milk, and no blood yet on your hands.”

•

Silence.

You can hear Marguerite snoring.

“It’s over now,” Janet says to Jaume, “get a grip on yourself.”

•

When he went back to the ghost village to fetch water, Jaume found a woman’s comb: one of the tortoiseshell kind that sticks into a bun. He found it under the mulberry bush, where the grass was flattened as though somebody lay down there regularly. Certain words spoken by Janet came back to his memory, as well as Maurras’s remark. He put the comb into his pocket.

When he got home, even before he unhitched the mule, he went straight to his daughter’s bedroom. He left the comb on the dresser, between the glass-domed clock and the wicker alms basket full of buttons.

He glanced around this room as though he expected it would reveal the secret life of his daughter: petticoats hanging on the wall, an old corset on a chair, a lace on the bedside rug. From a half-opened dresser drawer, the tail of a coarse, yellow chemise spills out. On the headboard, a pair of women’s trousers is spread; a wide, oval slit gapes between the grey flannel thighs. An installment of a popular novel— Chaste and Debased— rests on the night table.

The comb is in a good spot. You can see it easily.

So now, this morning, Ulalie has been doing her hair in front of the mirror, and, naturally, she’s stuck the comb in her bun. But on her way to the meadow she’s come to a halt on the sunken pathway. In this spot, nobody can see you from any direction. She’s taken hold of the comb and examined it front to back, turning it over between her fingers.

She’s stood still for a long time, waiting for her thoughts to return from the place where she’s just cast them.

Ulalie returns home. Jaume glances sideways at her bun. The comb is there.

“Is it you, father, who brought this?” she says, pulling the comb out of her hair.

“This what?”

“This comb!”

“This comb? No, what would make you expect—”

“I don’t know. It was on my dresser. It’s not mine.”

“Then throw it away, if it’s not yours.”

“You can be sure I’m going to throw it away. What if it used to belong to a sick person? I wonder who could have put it on my dresser. I wasn’t paying enough attention this morning when I was doing my hair.”

And she throws the comb out the window.

•

And now, at noon, something happened as if by design. All of them were in the square, each one ready to take off on his own, since at this point they were as good as unconnected to each other. And all of a sudden, there it came, like a leaf the wind was trying to drag along the ground. All of them turned around together: It was the cat.

It crossed the little square in no hurry at all, just as though it was at home.

It was heading toward Gondran’s house. Through the open window of the kitchen you could see Janet’s bed and, in the middle of the bed, the mound that marked where Janet’s body lay.

The cat has gathered itself into a ball, leapt onto the windowsill, and gone in.

This apparition of the cat has brought them together again, in fear.

Since the row broke out between Jaume and Maurras, all four of them have lived completely cut off from each other. Maurras would go and get water for himself, the others would go and get water for themselves, separately. Each of them would set off alone on the mountain trails, and then the water barrow would be brought back to only one house. And when the barrow was empty, you wouldn’t ask for any water from your neighbor; you’d set off on your own again, along the mountain trails.

But this selfishness, while separating them from each other, has restored their concern for earth and put some distance between themselves and the overwhelming fear. They’ve been at the point of coming back to life.

Arbaud has been to look at the neglected grain fields. The overripe ears have buckled the stems, and thistles have erupted through the yellow mat. Patiently, with his sickle, he’s cut a sheaf, happy to be alive and out in the open air, far from Babette’s groaning and Marie’s frightening body. Gondran, far removed from Janet, has picked a basket of grapes in his vineyard. There, too, it’s nothing more than a vast republic of wasps, field mice, pillaging birds. On the village forge, Jaume has straightened out his ploughshare. The flailing of his arms and the rhythm of his hammer blows have, little by little, laid his anxiety to rest. Maurras, far removed from Jaume, has eaten fresh figs. “Tomorrow,” he’s been thinking, “I’ll say to him: Let’s make peace. I have a quick temper, but it’s over. I’ll go get water for everybody.”

They were at the point of coming back to life, I tell you. It wouldn’t have taken much. And then, the cat came. It came out from the mulberry bush, it strode out into the sunlight, it jumped onto Janet’s windowsill. It didn’t take more than five minutes altogether to get from the one place to the other, but at the same time, just like that, both earth and sky took on an ugly cast.