Jean Giono: The Serpent of Stars

At that hour, it was the middle of the night, night thick with uncut leaves, beautiful night slapping like a sail, sea blue night, and its wave rolled onto the beach of trees, into those reefs of the hills’ summits. The moon’s spray broke gently against the rocks.

Césaire grabbed me by the wrist and, without thinking, drew me to him with his rough strength, and I felt the great pincers of his fingers enter my flesh.

“SO,” HE SAID, brusquely and between his teeth, “now you know, now you’ve heard the woman. Do we understand each other or not?. .”

Suddenly my head was full of all those emotions raised by trees, that great love for bark, that friendship with boughs, and also that fear before the motionless sway of their overwhelming life, everything that, since my youth and my first steps into the hills, inhabited me, and I answered straight from the heart, “Yes, we understand each other, we were made to understand each other, this must have been destined long ago.”

“Speaking of that,” said the wife. .

But the shepherd raised his hand in the moonlight and began to speak.

As I’ve said, this was a dry man, made of a pile of scree. He spoke with a dark creaking. His mouth opened into his beard and the words came out from between teeth all healthy and ice white despite his age.

“In the rock of Volx, there are tawny eagles. If you lie down in the grass, they come. They turn into the wind, there overhead, and then they dive straight down. The eagle’s shadow wakes you. If you’re asleep, it passes cool over your eyelids, and you wake up. There it is. You wake up, even if you’re sleeping well.

“Once, I had a dog. He was mean as the wind. He didn’t know what he did anymore than the wind does. He passed over everything, brutal, all his strength concentrated. He cowed a Corsican ram as big as a load of hay. It was the sheared ewes that killed him. They revolted. They smothered him, then trampled him to death. Then they came to see me, contrite. And I said, ‘Good!’

“Once I saw someone, a man, a child I should say — I saw someone who carried the weight of the sky. His whole back trembled from it and he bellowed like a bull because he didn’t know how to talk, because he had never known how to talk to men. And the birds all came from across the fields. The birds and all the beasts, but the first day, it was only the birds, that first day, he had a bird on the tip of each of his fingers.

“I knew a man called Martial of Reillanne who had the curse of the beast upon him. Dogs, cats, horses, sheep, anything; at the scent of him, they all went mad. He wanted to try an experiment. He bought a horse at the Mane fair. It was his wife who led the horse; he was walking at least a hundred meters behind, but when the woman touched the snaffle with her left hand, the horse raised its head and clacked its teeth against the bit. It was because the woman touched her husband with this left hand at night. When the horse was in the stable, Martial said, ‘I have to see. Maybe it’s this jacket that I’m wearing.’ He took off the jacket. Then on down, he took off his belt, his breeches, his shoes. He got completely naked, and he said, ‘Just in case!. . Like this, I’ll really be able to tell.’ It was no use. He went into the stable naked. The horse smashed its hoofs rearing against the stone wall. Everything died from disgust: chickens, ducks, rabbits. It got worse and worse. One day, he was leaving a café, and a pigeon flew over his head, beat its wings, and rolled over dead. He looked at the bird and said, ‘That’s it.’ He went to find a rope and he hung himself. He walked through the whole village with his rope. Nobody stopped him.

“There are trees and there are animals. I was a small-time boss, a small-time shepherd. Two hundred sheep. My proprietor lived in Raphèle. Two hundred sheep, it’s not many, not enough to understand.

“There are great bosses, there are big-time shepherds. In charge of ten thousand beasts, a hundred thousand beasts, masters who open the door, say only one word into the darkness of each sheepfold. The great wooden gates are opened wide, the hired hands are there lined up on either side. And the boss says the word, just one, no more, then he turns his back, tightens his hand around his staff and he sets off, and the sheep come out, and the sheep walk behind him. It’s like a sash that he’s attached to his sides and that he unravels over the country. He walks along ahead, he sets off, he draws the sheep. They fall into step, they start walking. He is already over there in the far distance, having crossed through two or three villages, two or three woods, two or three hills. He is like the needle and the whole thread of sheep passes where he has passed. It passes through the villages, the woods, the hills behind him. Here, the sheep are still leaving the stable. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, that’s quite a stretch. As they go along, the assistants who are there with the hired hands say, ‘Good-bye, it’s my turn,’ and one after the other, they set off. The last sheep goes out, the stable is closed. It goes out of the yard, the big gates are closed. No one watches. It’s a mystery. Above the wall, the dust rises. You hear that sound of a big stream, a big herd, that sound of the world, that sound of sky, that sound of stars. It’s a mystery. The proprietor takes off his hat. He feels small with all his paper deeds housed at the lawyer’s office. That isn’t what makes a master. He thinks of the needle that draws the long thread of sheep. He says, ‘Come, let’s have a drink,’ and everyone goes into the kitchen.

“Those others are the great masters of the beasts; they are the ones that know.”

THAT WAS how the night proceeded, and now I felt it all damp, stuck against the round of earth like a sheet coming out of the wash. The moon had taken on its full speed; a little spray of cloud escaped from under its sinking weight. I remembered my tremendous youth, that time when, by whatever divination, I had been delivered over to the great powers, in confidence, with the words, “Here’s the child, take him.” Now I understood that great blue gaze of my father’s when, returning from those summer months when I had followed after Massot the shepherd, pale from the green of the grass and emitting the scent of fennel, I entered the workshop where he had remained crouched over. So it wasn’t the health of the flesh that he felt in me when, seizing me by the shoulders, he planted me in front of him to look, before embracing me. It was the health of the spirit. “And now, you know, son?”

That was how the night proceeded. We were on the rooftops of the world.

Césaire breathed in the four corners of the sky.

“There’s the wind,” he said, “there’s our wind, shepherd. We’re going to be able to play.”

In the quick of the moon, in that circle of short grass embraced by the woods, a beautiful pine lyre held up its two trunks.

As you approached, the tree began to sing in a voice that was human and vegetable at the same time. I saw that someone had harnessed the two horns of the tree by means of a hollow yoke. They had extended nine cords from the yoke to the foot of the tree. Thus, it had become a living lyre, full all at once with the ample life of the wind, the mute life of the trunks swollen with resin, and the blood-gorged life of man.

The shepherd touched the cords to adjust them. You could hear the sounds falling far below, in the middle of the brush, and the leaves muttered, as though under large raindrops from a storm. Finally, the shepherd stood with his back against the huge curved trunk, he spread his hands wide to span the strings, and he waited for the wind.

We heard it. Beyond the valleys, the wide plateaus were already whistling under it like hot iron dipped in water. It arrived.