Jean Giono - The Serpent of Stars

All this time, the Sardinian has remained with his hand raised in greeting and the music has made that sound of water and tumbling earth. You saw the hills walk. You heard their big feet slap in the mud, in the rot of the streams of fruit. Now the narrator lets his raised hand fall. The aeolian harps are all alone trying their hand at the great Sunday. There’s the sound of sheets flapping on the clothesline, whirlwinds of swallows, the wind coming from far away in one long slide, now caught in fistfuls in the trees.

A dry music begins, made up of just the tympon, those tries at joy along the scale and the loud notes sounding like calls. With a wing beat of his arms, this is what the Sardinian did: he changed character. He is no longer the anonymous narrator, he is the earth-narrator. He is the Earth. From now on, he is going to tell us of his anxiety; the drama opens.

THE SARDINIAN. The great grasses have eaten all my strength. I realized this because I wanted to leap into the sky and I couldn’t, and I remain stuck here, powerless.

I’ve been too lax with all these beautiful trees. Already everything that ran and danced over me, the hills and the mountains, and the high rocks, everything has stopped, hindered by forests and undergrowth.

Oh! I wanted to go much farther and I couldn’t, and I turn, and I turn again, but it’s all clamped together in me by hooked roots. I’m like a moldy apple.

The summers came upon me like huge bees, and they sapped my moisture. They didn’t budge. They were upon me, wings open.

I knew it: I had seen the great marshes of squash withering on the waters. The squash drifted off and then, suddenly, they plunged into the water’s depths. And then, other times, I saw bubbles rise, and then, other times, all the water moved.

The summers’ swarm drank up nearly all the lovely depth of the water. And then, I saw the great serpent’s back.

There is that great serpent who is a creature of the mud. Then there are those who have four feet and are made according to the model of the sky because they have teats to drink from. There is one of those who is almost nothing but a mouth; it swallows huge platefuls of pines and birches and whole cherry orchards along with the ground underneath, covered with grass and shadows. There are many others, too.

And I was lighter with grass, but I was heavier with meat and I sank into the sky like a lead weight because all these beasts were stepping over each other, were mounting each other, making little ones who were making little ones.

And then, one fine moment, I stopped drifting because the beasts began to eat meat. There were some who ate grass and others who ate the ones who ate the grass. And that created balance.

And I am in balance.

But, now, I feel this balance coming all undone again, and it’s swaying. Something else has happened. Oh, what a worry it is to have skin and a belly!

I’m very nervous because of that one, I’ve heard he wants to take charge.

And yet, he is small; I raise and lower my eyebrows and I widen my eyes, and I turn them about, and I turn them about again. I see nothing.

Nevertheless, this thread of balance is swaying. I have to ask. .

Since he became the earth-narrator, the Sardinian was clearly hurrying to reach those words by which the drama opens. At first, he added a bit of polish. Then, he abandoned his images as he went along. He spoke of the summers like bees. I saw the Sardinian again a little later. He told me very beautiful things about the summer: the summer that alights on us like a swarm; the summer that covers the land with a hot flayed skin.

Moreover, the whole circle of shepherds had begun to talk and near me I heard repeated “And you, what will you say?” After “I have to ask,” the Sardinian stood for a moment not saying anything. All the music stopped.

THE SARDINIAN (He calls). The Sea!

Nothing. Silence. Shepherds who squeeze close to each other like sheep who are afraid.

THE SARDINIAN (in another, natural, voice). So, there’s no one to do the sea?

Over there, in back, there’s a group where a little dispute is bubbling and you can hear “Go on,” “Go on,” in low voices.

He goes forward.

It’s a short, fat shepherd. He takes two or three steps, then he turns around and flings his big felt hat to his friends. He is bald, with two little wings of white hair above his ears.

I learned afterwards that his name is Glodion and that he’s from Le Bachas, a country of complete wilderness: nothing but stones, nothing but stones and thistle.

GLODION. I’m the Sea!

He and the Sardinian face each other like two men who are going to dance.

THE SARDINIAN. Sea.

Tell me if you know what is worrying me.

Look at me swinging to and fro.

Who knows where I am going to go now?

Things went better for me when I was young.

But then my worries started.

And I am much more afraid of what is coming than of what has been.

GLODION. What is it you want me to say?

THE SARDINIAN. Tell me if you have seen man.

GLODION. Man?

Stop swinging me from side to side for a bit. You are hurling me into the mountains with the goats; you are throwing me from the flat sand as far as the eye can see, all the way to where the monkeys live.

Wait!

I don’t have time to look around.

Man?

You mean that fish who is all planted with grass like a big meadow and whom all my purple rage can’t budge, and who sleeps stretched out on the grill of a thousand of my waves?

THE SARDINIAN. Maybe.

What does this fish do?

You say that he sleeps on a thousand waves, so he is big?

GLODION. Yes.

It’s because he’s too big that he sleeps. What use would it be for him to go anywhere? With one stroke, he’s on this side, with another stroke, he’s on the other. He is just one big pocket of skin. When it’s full of water, he sinks into my shade, toward the coolness because it’s hot. When it’s full of air, he climbs back up, he is over me like a meadow of grass. Big pieces of ice come to plant themselves in him, and then they melt there.

THE SARDINIAN. No.

That’s not the one who makes me nervous, then, if he only sleeps. Look harder.

GLODION. What is it I feel in me?

It’s anger or maybe it’s great distress that twists me in its pains?

The wind suddenly put its foot in the middle of me and that’s what made me leap up to the clouds.

Oh, this anger, you don’t know how bad it can be, because it’s anger against nothing.

It swells in me like a bad hurt; it makes a kind of heavy pus that sleeps for a long time deep inside me.

Then, all of a sudden:

With one of those swings that you make me take when you throw me against my shores, this anger rips me apart.

And then, first of all, I become full of huge flowers like the wide open flowers of carrots.

I swell like abscesses on bad meat.

I explode, I groan, I weep, I gnash my huge sand teeth.

I twist and turn and I endure the great death.

THE SARDINIAN. That’s because the cold despair of the whole universe has rested upon you.

It’s because he’s unhappy that the god made the world.

He wanted to get out of himself and each time he thought of something, the forms began to clarify everything he thought.