Jean Giono - The Serpent of Stars

And so I went, thinking of nothing but the suffering of my flesh, until it brought me to tears, nothing but this great spine of fatigue running through me, until evening, when we made a twelve-hour-long stop in a village as cool and leafy as a peach on a tree. My two companions slept. As soon as the noise died down, and then its echo in the leaves of the high elms, I heard the song of the fountains. Water!

It was a beautiful fountain, flat-nosed as a bee. It spoke out of three mouths at once, three long stories of water full of watercress, of fish, eel, and frogs; it spoke of lovely footbaths and of a long open-mouthed drink.

I was leaving when a lamb leaned against my legs. It was covered with snot and couldn’t open its muzzle, blind with mucous. Its head was only a block of mortar and it was looking for the spring by knocking its gourd of a skull along the coping.

So I took it in my arms, washed it, and gave it water to suck by filling my hand and making a teat with my thumb. Then I let it go, and it moved away toward its mother, water splattering in the sun.

And that night, I knew that it was not only the flute that the shepherd Bouscarle had shown me by guiding my fingers over the holes in the reed, but all of life:

“Don’t think about playing, and then you will play. .”

I looked at myself in the pool. I did not recognize my face. From a boy I had become a man; from a man I had become a shepherd. The radiance of my sweat dazzled me.

AT THAT point, the shepherd’s voice changed as he offered me some dried figs.

“And then, I have six nice fresh poivre d’âne cheeses. If you’d like some.”

WE TOOK up summer quarters in a high pasture in the vicinity of the Croix pass. The glaciers had taken this whole area in hand and raised it up to the sky. Great frozen fingers held grass. It was rich enough to make any healthy beast mad. The meadowsweet was as thick as cream and the soles of our espadrilles turned green from its juice just from walking in the pasture.

I spent long days lying on my back, sucking on my flute, from time to time pushing out some little curling note. My blood grew calm. But I stored up my experience, and more and more, especially in the evening hours, I thought of the words of Bouscarle and I heard the step of the great gods.

I drank from the sky in long mouthfuls, like water from the pool of that fountain where I’d seen the first rays of the shepherd reflected back at me.

The sheep were spread throughout the valley and on its slopes. They reached right to the edges of a village as lean as a pauper.

I am going to tell you the secret.

The shepherd’s true occupation, only one thing teaches that: the sky. For a long time after that in my life, I weighed them, weighed them in my hands, and passed them from one hand to the other, all those words of Bouscarle. And I understood that those words meant two things: one thing that you understood immediately, another thing that you understood slowly, gradually over time.

“This Jesus is not the great vastness, but that little bit of night, over there, with one star, just one.” Say that to a fifteen-year-old peasant coming out of church after singing by the crèche. He looks at the star; he looks at the finger pointing to the star. He says yes; he hasn’t understood.

He hasn’t completely understood.

But, when it’s a man of my age who has chewed this over through the years, all alone, each time adding a bit of his own human experience to his reflection, then there is some chance for the second meaning to light up like a lamp.

One star, one alone. And now, look at the night completely flooded with stars!

There are the powers of the world. That is the secret!

This is what he meant:

“Son, you have heard our pastor. He’s told you a beautiful story of the little child who was not received by the hands of midwives, but by the straw, as the beasts are received. He told you that it was a virgin who made him. The beasts are virgins; they do not soil the acts that make life. They make life, simple as that. They go into the bushes, and then they come out with baby sheep and, right away, these babies taste fresh life with their muzzles, and right away, they are heavy with a great wisdom which astonishes men. The crèche, the straw, the cattle, the donkey, the virgin, this birth: among men, this is the birth of a healthy animal. That is the great lesson. That is why men crucified the child.”

To know all that would have helped me, but I didn’t know it then, and I played the flute.

But this flute playing, it wasn’t by accident that Bouscarle had put the reed to my lips. In this flute was all the knowledge of the sky. It was the reed that’s planted in the bank’s porous flesh to make fountains spring forth. I planted the flute in the sky. I took the other end in my mouth. And the music was only the noise I made filling myself with sky.

When we reached the mountain, Bouscarle named the seconds-in-command. Ours was a meat-eater from Pontet, a knowledgeable man, nearly as knowledgeable as Bouscarle, except for the simple difference that he didn’t know the great words to make the herds start off, and that came from his liking meat nearly raw and being too saturated with blood.

One evening he came over to me, his eyebrows knitted together with worry. He studied the sheep in a peculiar way.

“Son,” he said to me, “go over to Corne-Blanche. You’ll find Bouscarle there. Ask him this for me: ‘Have you gotten wind of the planet?’ No more. Then, come back and tell me his answer.”

Instead of being scattered all over the grass, our herd was clotted together in big lumps of trembling beasts.

I went, and when it was late, I saw the boss’ lantern. He was sitting next to it. The boys of the “Vermeil” pasture were also there, and those who kept watch in the pastures of Norante, all of them, maybe thirty, bent over their staffs, all ears turned toward Bouscarle who breathed not a word.

I was about to speak when someone said to me, “Yes, we know.”

“And so?” I said.

“And so!. .”

And someone next to Bouscarle shook his head, his forehead low and silent. And I leaned on my stick, too, and I waited like the others.

“Who has hit the beasts?” asked Bouscarle gently.

Someone answered, “Me!”

“Come here.”

It was a heavy-set man from Arles, dark and gray as a cicada.

“I mean,” Bouscarle continued, looking at the man, “did you hit them without just cause?”

The Arlatan said nothing for a moment, and then, “Yes, I hit them without just cause.”

“Then,” said Bouscarle, “go down to the village while there’s still time, and stay there.”

“It’s as bad as that,” breathed a shepherd next to me. Then he raised his hand to be noticed, and said, “Me, too, I hit them, boss.”

“No, you should have said that a moment ago. I need everyone. I want to save what can be saved, but I need men. If it’s true, if you have hit them, take your chances; too bad for you, I’m keeping you here.”

Then he asked, “And the dogs—”

And then, along the embankment of the path where they could be seen as though it were broad daylight because of the moon’s reflection on the glaciers, we noticed the dogs running with their heads down toward the valleys.

I returned to my boss to tell him all this and I thought of that shepherd’s “It’s as bad as that,” and it seemed to me that somehow we must have gotten ourselves into deep trouble of some very strange kind.

I told the shepherd from Pontet what I thought.

He pointed to the sky, but I didn’t see anything.

“Remember when the sun set yesterday.”

I tried to remember. Nothing.

“You didn’t smell the sulfur?”