Jean Giono - Hill

“I’ve made a bacon omelet,” she says.

•

They’ve eaten, all the men together, at Gondran’s. And every one of them has unbuttoned his trousers.

“Me, old buddy, I was in a fine pickle — it was catching here, it was catching there, it was crackling under my feet…”

“I kept scratching myself and scratching, then it turned out my shirt was on fire and scorching my back.”

“A pinecone in the face, yep, they explode like gunshots. I got hit by a pinecone right in the face, I’m telling you, right there beside my eye…”

All of this spoken with arms waving and enough pounding on the table to make the glasses jump. Arbaud hugs Babette. He leaves black streaks on her forehead and her cheeks. He’s determined to bring a glass of wine and a biscuit to their little Marie, who’s stretched out on her mattress. From under the bedclothes, she slips out a wrist as thin as thread, and the spidery tips of her fingers tremble as she grasps the glass.

“It can’t do her any harm today.”

This was a golden day. The wine had never tasted so good, nor the omelet, nor the tobacco.

“You’re a cook fit for any establishment,” Gondran says, as he gives Marguerite an affectionate pat on the bum.

Only Jaume holds back from the merriment, with a dense band of shadow across his brows.

Doubtless, like the others, he can feel the warm, fragrant caress of renewed life brushing like petals across his skin, but there’s an uneasiness still embedded in his bitter heart.

Before coming in, he took a glance at the whole of the Bastides. They had their usual look — four houses crouched under the oak. But the fields!

Yes, they’ve fought, they’ve won, but the blows of the other side have hit hard.

From where he sits, he looks over at Janet’s bed, and sees Janet like a tree trunk, under the sheets.

A moment ago they tried to get the old man to drink, and he played possum. When Marguerite insisted, he turned his head away, dismissively. Now he’s just opened his eyes. From his bed, his glance, clear and hard as a knife, has slid over toward the men.

“We won,” says Jaume.

“We won. That’s all well and good.

“What it cost us, we’ll find that out soon enough. It cost a lot, I’m afraid, an awful lot, but we won.

“We’re all still here, in one piece… but…

“But all of us are still here because it was over in the very nick of time.

“In the very nick of time. A tiny bit longer and we’d have been done for. Another ten minutes, I’d have been dead, and the Bastides would have been done for. It was a near miss.

“All in all, it’s another strike against us, like the spring, like the row with Maurras, like this disgusting business with Ulalie that I’ve had on my mind ever since, like Marie’s sickness.

“We won again, up against this last blow, but it was harder.

“And it tore off a piece of our hide.

“We won again this time, but what about the next strike?

“The hill.

“It’s always there, the hill.

“And Janet? He’s always there.

“We’re in a shaky state. If the hill hammers a little harder now…

“It will always be there, the hill, with its enormous power to harm us. It can’t go away. It can’t be defeated once and for all.

“This time we won. Tomorrow, the hill will win.

“It’s just a matter of time. What will we have accomplished after all, in the final reckoning? We’ll have held out a little longer — that’s all.

“This time it let us go, barely, but it spared us. Tomorrow it will hammer us good and hard.

“And who knows, maybe it won’t wait until tomorrow.

“Maybe it’s already flexing its muscles to put us away, in one fell swoop, for all eternity, before we’ve even had our first sip of morning coffee.

“There’s nothing to be done. The hill would have to forget about us. And then we’d have to live together like we always have, as good neighbors, as good friends, not doing each other any harm.

“But as long as Janet’s around…

“The dirty bastard.

“It’s Janet who made this happen, with his head full of ideas.

“Things were going well before all of this. It had never said or done anything to harm us. It was a good hill. It knew pleasant songs. It hummed like a big wasp. It let us have our way with it. We never dug too deep. One or two blows of a spade, what harm could that do? We walked across it without fear. When it spoke to us, it was like a spring. It spoke to us through its cool springs and its pine trees.

“He must have messed with it.

“He must have known this whore of a secret — to be able to control it, to have it at his beck and call, to stir it up whenever he wanted.

“It had to be this stinking bastard who knew it.

“He doesn’t even have two bits worth of life left and he’s still making mischief.

“He doesn’t want to go out by himself. He wants us all to go along with him — women, trees, chickens, goats, mules, everybody and everything — like a king…

“For sure he wants to make the rest of us cross over to the other side with him, all together.

“And his life’s hanging by a thread.

“We can’t afford to give him the time.”

•

“Alexandre, give me your cup,” Marguerite says as she comes forward with the percolator.

•

“I won’t give him the time,” thinks Jaume, his head fit to burst with rage.

•

After the coffee, the brandy. The little bottle that Jaume has lugged around in his pocket all morning sits on the table.

Gondran jokes as he pours it out: “If this had been milk you’d have churned it into butter.”

Then a blissful silence; matches strike; somebody bangs a pipe against the table.

This is an hour opening up in flower, like a meadow in April.

All of a sudden, Jaume stands. They watch him. He’s uneasy. Babette doesn’t dare to keep on soaking her lump of sugar.

“All you men, we have to go outside. I have something to say to you. It’s serious.”

They can tell it’s serious by the look on his face. Behind his unshaven beard his cheeks are as white as candle wax.

“All right, let’s go.”

They stand up, ill at ease and listless. They won’t gladly give up the spring daisies that were flowering just a moment ago.

“Let’s go under the oak. The women don’t need to hear everything. We’ll tell them what we want to, nothing more.”

“Is something the matter?” asks Gondran.

“Yes, there is something the matter,” says Jaume, pointing past the Bastides at the earth, naked, scarred, blackened, wisps of smoke still trailing across it.

“Let’s sit down. This is going to take a while.

“I didn’t want to tell you this back there for a number of reasons. First, because of the women, and second, for another reason that you’ll understand later.

“It’s been a while that I’ve been thinking about it in this way, without really knowing for sure. Now I do know, and I’m going to tell you.

“But first, because it’s a deadly serious business that I’m going to talk to you about — serious for me and for you too, whether we agree about it or not — I want to know if you trust me. I mean, whether when I ask you for something, you believe I’m asking you because it’s the right thing, and for the good of us all?”

Jaume has been looking mainly at Maurras.

“Me, I believe it,” goes Maurras.

He’s sincere — it’s obvious.

“You’ve never done any harm,” say the others.

Jaume is getting paler and paler.

“I’ve never done any harm, that’s for sure. I’ve been mistaken, like everybody else, but that… that’s not my fault. This time I’m not mistaken. I’m sure of what I’m going to say to you. Remember this: I’m sure of it. I don’t need to talk to you about what happened last night and this morning. If I told you that we’d barely escaped, we’d agree, wouldn’t we? But don’t you believe that this fire is just one more vicious trick, like the others we’ve suffered through lately?”