Gondran gathers himself. There’s blood on the blade of his spade. His heavy breathing flows, rhythmic and full. Then his anger dissolves in a deep inhalation of sky-blue air.
Suddenly he’s ashamed. With his foot he pushes dirt over the dead lizard.
And there: there it is. The wind comes rushing.
The trees confer in low voices.
The dog’s gone. It must have taken off after some wild prey.
Without knowing why, Gondran’s ill at ease. He’s not sick — he’s full of disquiet, and this disquiet sticks in his throat like a stone.
He turns his back on a big tangle of elderberry, honeysuckle, clematis, and figs that moans and writhes more loudly than the surrounding bush.
While he digs, it occurs to him for the first time that there’s a kind of blood rising inside bark, just like his own blood; that a fierce will to live makes the tree branches twist and propels these sprays of grasses into the sky.
He thinks about Janet too. Why?
He thinks about Janet and he cocks his eye at the little pile of brown dirt still twitching over the crushed lizard.
Blood, nerves, suffering.
He’s caused flesh and blood to suffer, flesh just like his own.
So all around him, on this earth, does every action have to lead to suffering?
Is he directly to blame for the suffering of plants and animals?
Can he not even cut down a tree without committing murder?
It’s true, when he cuts down a tree, he does kill.
And when he scythes, he slays.
So that’s the way it is — is he killing all the time? Is he living like a gigantic, runaway barrel, leveling everything in his path?
So it is really all alive?
Janet has figured this all out ahead of him.
Everything: animals, plants, and who knows, maybe even the stones too.
So, he can’t even lift a finger anymore, without unleashing streams of pain?
•
He straightens himself up. Propped on his spade he surveys the expanse of earth stretching around him, covered with scabs and wounds.
The aqueduct, whose empty channel now funnels nothing but wind, sounds like a mournful flute.
•
This earth!
Which stretches far and wide, clay-heavy, with her burden of trees and springs, her rivers, her streams, her forests, her mountains and her hills, and her circular towns that whirl amongst shafts of lightning, her hordes of humans clinging onto her coat: what if she really is a living being, what if she really is one body?
With power and bad intentions?
A huge mass that could flatten me, the same way I came down on top of that lizard?
This valley, this fold between the hills, where I scratch away at the soil, what if the whole thing flinched under the sharp edge of my spade?
A body.
And alive.
Life is movement, it’s breathing…
It’s the voice of the aqueduct and the singing of the trees.
Alive? But absolutely! Because she does move, this earth. Ten years ago she shook hard. Down below, toward Aix, there were whole villages that crumbled, Lambesc, and some others, and the Manosque church bells rang all by themselves, high up in their belfry.
•
The idea rises in him like a storm.
It wipes out all his reason.
It’s overwhelming.
It’s hallucinatory.
Along the horizon the rolling hills unwind their snakelike coils.
Earth breathes haltingly.
An immense life force, slow to move, but awesome in its naked power, rouses the stupendous body of earth, flows over her valleys and knolls, folds her flatlands, bends her rivers, and builds up her thick coat of soil and vegetation.
In no time, to avenge herself, she’ll haul me up to where the skylarks lose their breath.
•
Gondran grabs his game bag with one swing of his arm and traverses the hill with long strides, not even daring to whistle for his dog.
•
He’s talked to Jaume about it.
Without any bashfulness.
What’s more, ever since, the mystery has turned up everywhere: in the wheat field, under the alfalfa, everywhere. And yesterday, the grove of the three big willows, usually so peaceful, growled at his heels like a guard dog.
This can’t go on. It would be best for everybody to talk it through together.
For two evenings they’ve been mulling it over, huddled around the absinthe bottle.
What matters above all is Jaume’s opinion. But Jaume doesn’t have much to say. Maurras and Arbaud are there too, their elbows on the table, covering their mouths with their hands.
It’s Jaume who knows the hills the best. And on top of that, he reads. Not just the odd newspaper when he goes to town, but books.
Including a copy of Raspail’s Natural Remedies, and that’s serious business.
What matters most is Jaume’s opinion.
For the moment, he hardly says anything. He doesn’t say “That’s impossible.” That’s what they expect from him. But he doesn’t say it. He shakes his head and breathes into his drooping moustache.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” he decides to say at last.
“So you do think it’s possible?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
He suggests that they go down there, tomorrow, with guns.
Agreed.
Who’s going?
“Me, I’m going,” says Jaume, “and who else?”
The others don’t look too sure of themselves.
“Well, for my part,” says Maurras, “I’d be glad to go with you, but, honestly, I’ve got to clean out my stable.”
Arbaud stares into his absinthe.
In the end it’s decided: Jaume and Gondran will go. The other two will stay with the women.
“After all, we’re going to be on our own here too,” says Arbaud.
Janet’s high-pitched voice threads through the linen curtain and into the kitchen.
“You think I’m raving? Oh, yes, I’m raving. You saw the wind roaring yesterday, didn’t you, you smartass? And on the other side of the air?… I suppose you’d know, wouldn’t you, what’s on the other side of the air?”
Young Maurras stops halfway down the steps.
“You’d better make him keep quiet,” he says in an undertone, “it’s not healthy, that kind of talk.”
•
They’ve seen nothing.
They’ve spent the whole day stretched out under the broom grass, hidden by twisted tree branches, with their double-barreled shotguns sticking out from their bodies, like limbs.
But today the clematis is still a clematis, the fig tree still a fig tree. And earth is at rest. Except for a dainty, indecisive squirrel, cocky and abrupt, who crosses the Roman bridge and claws at the sandstone.
The whole day long, without saying a word.
Jaume has chewed on peppermint stems.
When Gondran cleared the saliva that was clinging to his throat, Jaume silenced him with a wave.
Under the grim gaze of their guns the land went on sleeping, verdant, scented.
Step by step, shadow forced the sunlight into retreat.
The evening breeze made the grasses bow over.
Daylight has dropped down on the other side of Lure.
Jaume touches Gondran’s arm. They pull back over the stones, flat on their bellies, until they reach cover. With their fluid strides, they make their way back to the Bastides.
Arbaud and Maurras are waiting for them in front of the oak.
“So?”
“Nothing.”
But Jaume takes his pipe out of his mouth.
“Let’s go to the other side of the tree. There’s no need to alarm the women.”
Once they’re off to the side, Jaume seems to have made up his mind. He talks more than ever:
“To my way of thinking, this is a truly nasty business. When I said to you, ‘Let’s go,’ it was because something happened to me the other morning that really made me wonder. You know, I went to stalk that boar… I was on Manin’s rise, you know, in the old dovecote. So at daybreak I hear a little pattering overtop of the leaves. ‘It’s just a young one,’ I say to myself. I slide my barrel ever so gently through the slit in the wall and I stay on the lookout. All around, it’s dwarf oaks, and there’s a little grassy clearing in front. I was staring at the opening where the trail starts. Something that looked like a black ball comes out and it was doing a weird kind of dance. I say to myself: ‘That’s not it yet, wait a little longer.’