Jean Giono - The Serpent of Stars

“So!” he called, seeing me arrive, “you come from below? You look like a human plant. Whatever possessed you?”

He waited for me above his clearing, and drawn by his large hand which had grasped my own, I made the last step. He gave me the two-spouted jug. I replenished myself with water inside and out by pouring it down my throat, by spraying my chest with its clear rays. After that, I felt a breath of wind. Everything returned to order in my head, and it seemed to me that I was still the master.

I MIGHT as well say at once how strange this dwelling place was. In the hills, a current of water is life. The place knows it so well that it remains there, arid and dry, motionless, sure of its old powers, its burning ground, its blurry air, like flames in which those broad illusions of mirage silently explode. A current of water passes under the nostrils, and you’re saved. As for me, I just had the entire hand of water caressing me. It was still there curling my hairs in its cool fingers. I had become the master of my body once again when, before following Césaire, who said to me, “Come to the workshop,” I gazed all around, from the distant depths of the sky to the thick dappled meadow that kept the spring water folded safely within its leaves.

BELOW US the brush, like a swamp with its thick odor of rotting grass, went off on its foaming way to rest against the far horizon of blue iron. This tip of the hill emerged like a small island; a great cavern, black and bloody as a hole in live flesh, was the home of Escoffier.

Within, against the daylight of the doorway, two wheels were set up: one large one for a man to use, one small one for I don’t know what, so miniature it immediately conjured a light body made of air and thought. On the shelf was another one of those little magic pots.

“You see,” he said to me, “she was just making it.”

“Who?” I said, my eyes wide, not daring to move my feet for fear of stepping on her.

“My daughter, the eldest, the redhead. She’s the one who invented everything. There you have it. I believe that it came from a dream she had. She began to turn that from the hollow of her thumb. The teacher told me, ‘She doesn’t do anything, she yawns if I talk, it’s as if she was drawn out of another world and she’s still watching that other world through a little hole.’ ‘Her eyes are completely empty, your daughter’s.’ So, I said, ‘Okay, she’ll stay at home.’ It’s true, she has the eyes of a goat. So one evening, I talked it over with her. We were lying down under the pines. She was stretched out against my side, her head resting on my arm. She said ‘Papa!’ I said, ‘ Yes, my girl!’

“BUT I’M making you stand there and you’ve just had a long walk. Have a seat, we’ll just wait for you to stop sweating, and then I’ll introduce you to my family. You’ll stay with us tonight, we’ve got a place for you to sleep. You don’t mind sleeping on the ground?”

We were there on the front bench, a bit of evening was beginning to rise up in the woods, and already its calm water, rocked in the base of the crater, was engulfing the holm oaks. The earth sighed a long sigh, so soft, so calm that no more than two or three eddies of birds rose. The wild swallows called to one another. All together they dove from the top of the sky toward our two human faces. They were like bits of dead wood in a great whirlpool. The ocean of sky rolled over us in the peaceful life of its waves. We were there in the depths of that great brine of all life, at the very source of truth in life’s thick mud, which is the mixture of men, beasts, trees, and rock. Under the palm of my hand, I felt the slow pulse of granite, I heard the currents of sap carrying their loads; my blood throbbed in my head, and coming from the boundaries of the sky, powerful rushes of cold and heat brushed my cheeks as if from a thrown stone.

The sun remained perched like a pigeon on our summit. This meadow which protected the spring extended further than the waters. From the grass where she was taking an afternoon nap, the mistress of the pottery rose with the rush of the wind.

“My wife,” said Césaire.

She was white and soft, and fat, completely covered with fat, so much fat, so soft that you expected to see her arms suddenly pour out of the barrels of her sleeves like mortar. Her lovely full, round head laughed the eternal laugh of the moon. Her beautiful black, well-groomed hair, glistening with pure oil, smelled of olive and fennel. Her eyes were as big as green almonds. She stood up. And immediately one, two, three, four, five children began to pour from her like a spray of seeds, like drops of spring water. Suddenly there she was, in the grass, like a spring rushing with children, and the last to detach herself from her — frail, red-haired, milky and salty as an April morning — was that young sorceress with gentian eyes.

THESE were the gestures, natural and simple. We made a meal of grass and night. On the edge of the clearing was set down a large plate full of this salad of the hills, very pale, picked in the shade, wriggling about, gleaming with oil, like a nest of green spiders. We dug in with our fingers, each in turn. We were all in a circle, with the plate in the middle. A large slab of bread in the left hand served as plate and napkin, and when that bread had soaked up enough oil, had wiped the fingers well enough, we ate it, and it tasted like a harvest afternoon.

The night we munched with the salad. The night overflowed from the crater in slow gushes, and our mouths were full of night when we bit into the bread crusts rubbed with garlic. So we had those grasses to eat, and then the night — and it was a night in the brush, and then, those strange yellow glances from the fourteen-year-old witch. It all provided food for the belly and the brain. I don’t know if the brain really had its separate share. I think rather that everything, salad, oil, dark bread, night, and the gentian glances, they all went into the belly, there they all made weight and warmth, there they were all changed into saps and smells, so much so that finally, we were drunk from the triple power of the sky, the earth, and truth.

TWICE already I had heard that sound of the cowbell, once near the pine forest which slept growling like a sheep dog, the other time near that crouching white rock, liquid as a weasel when it moves, and now I heard it again and I looked up at a big red star.

“The shepherd will be with us,” said Escoffier. “Woman, chill the hyssop water.”

The children’s bed had been laid out: a thick, creaking layer of dried grass. They were on top of it, completely naked, sprawled out, arms and legs tangled, scraping bellies, slapping bottoms, the force of their movements releasing the scents of savory and citronella. I heard them say, “We haven’t killed the lion!”

“Poor thing! Let it sleep a little first.”

“The sun’s out.”

“It’s the sun of the rain.”

“There’s only one sun.”

“There’s the right sun and the left sun.”

AND THE shepherd arrived at the same time as the moon. No, the moon had arrived first. It was there, rising slowly over the roundness of the opposite hill, when the shepherd came noiselessly out of the lower valley, and he obliterated the moon with his huge body.

“Company, Césaire and everyone,” he said, “so, how are you?”

“Fine,” said Césaire, “as you can see, we’re enjoying this fine night.”

A moment ago, the young sorceress had undressed at the same time as her brothers and sisters; I had heard snaps click, and then she shed her dress like a skin, throwing it off her shoulders, shaking it from the ends of her arms, freeing her legs one after the other from that fallen thing. From over there she cried, “Oh, shepherd!”