•
When Jaume chances on a wild boar, and his gun is loaded with ten-gauge shot, he hurries to hide himself.
He has something of the same air about him at the moment. Arbaud and Maurras are watching the door.
•
From outside, Gondran questions them with his eyes. All four of them are scrutinizing each other in silence.
“Well, this is all we needed.”
•
After ten hours of night wind, a brand new day breaks this morning. The first rays of sun pierce through a pristine atmosphere. Having barely taken flight, they’re already striking the junipers and thyme on the distant hills. You’d think those parts of earth had moved closer overnight.
“You could really reach out and touch them,” Gondran thinks.
The sky is blue from horizon to horizon. The silhouette of the grasses is distinct, and you can make out every shade of green in the patchwork of fields. Here the wind has dropped an olive leaf on a spray of borage; there the lamb’s lettuce stands out lighter than the chicory; and here in this corner, where somebody must have shaken out some bags of fertilizer, really dense grasses, almost black, are shooting up like thick hairs on a mole. And you could count the needles at the tops of the pines.
There’s something strange too: the silence.
Until yesterday the sky was an arena of sound. Iron-shod mares with carts were rumbling though it at full gallop, whinnying with rage.
Today, silence. The wind has blown beyond all bounds and it’s raging on the far side of earth.
No birds.
Silence.
Even the water has stopped murmuring. All the same, if you listen carefully, you can hear its shy, sliding step. Hidden from sight, it’s trickling from the pasture to the laneway on its delicate, silvery feet.
•
Gondran watches the new day break, while he gets his game bag ready. He’s going to do some hoeing in his olive grove, in the bottomlands over at Font-de-Garin. It’s way down over there behind the three hills that block the valley. To get past them, you have to climb across their navels.
He’s carrying his midday meaclass="underline" a really fresh, firm cheese in its crust of herbs, six cloves of garlic, a vial of oil stopped with a scrap of paper, salt and pepper in an old pill box, a slice of ham, a hefty loaf of bread, wine, a roasted thigh of rabbit rolled up in a vine leaf, and a little pot of jam. All this pell-mell in a leather bag.
In the kitchen Marguerite rakes the coals in the stove with big thrusts of her poker to hurry up the coffee.
The silence outside weighs like lead. Gondran makes the only familiar morning sound as he comes and goes in his hobnailed boots.
Jaume’s doves are usually the earliest to stir. The dawn likes to caress them with its supple hands. Today, the dovecote seems dead.
Gondran comes to check the clock and finds out it’s only four in the morning.
“Is it working all right?”
“I set it by the sundial just the day before yesterday.”
•
In spite of it all, the silence feels good. The scents of honeysuckle and gorse waft through in big waves. What’s more, what good does it do to worry about what earth is getting up to? She does whatever she wants. She’s old enough to mind her own business, and she goes about it at her own pace….
“Ain’t much sound out there t’day,” says Janet.
“You’d think everything had died. Listen… you can’t hear anything moving.”
“This is bad. Take it from me, boy, it was just like this when it started up the other time…”
“What?”
“… that I can’t talk about.”
And Janet glues his eyes back to the post office calendar.
•
Gondran slips his spade through the strap of his leather game bag and hoists it. At the bottom of the stairs he whistles for Labri, his dog, who’s asleep under a rose bush. Labri comes out, stretches, yawns, sniffs the bag, and follows. Gondran’s reassured to hear the patter of claws behind him.
•
Past Maurras’s meadow — which straddles the slope — the path might as well not even exist. It gradually peters out in the grasses, like a dwindling stream.
•
This orchard where Gondran’s headed — he bought it last year from a guy from Pierrevert who was scraping money together to bid for a postal route.
It’s in the Reillanne district, to hell and gone, but he got it for next to nothing, and the olive trees have already paid off. When all is said and done, with next to no effort he gets oil and wood from it. The only thing is, it’s far away. And it’s that much farther away seeing as there’s no road to get there. You have to find your way through hollows, trek along stream beds choked with viburnum and brambles, and then skirt around the hills and take unnamed passes where there are rocks that have the faces of half-formed men.
Gondran’s thinking that next time he’d be better off following the hilltops over by Trinquette. The path climbs a bit, but afterward you get a great view the whole way. The air’s good and fresh — and you can hear partridges clucking. Over here, the silence is really unnerving. He’s thankful for Labri’s company.
•
Seen from the summit of Pymayon, Gondran’s orchard looks like a scabby patch in the scrub. All around it, the coat of the garrigue is healthy, shaggy, curly. But at this spot, Gondran’s spade has scraped it bare.
It’s an olive grove that slopes down the fertile side of the hill in an area where the runoff has laid down rich deposits. Below it, the streams have split earth open in a narrow, shadowy cleft, which exhales clammy air, like the mouth of a chasm. A Roman aqueduct straddles it. Its two, spindly haunches, powdery with age, emerge from the olives.
•
First, Gondran digs a hole under the bushiest juniper in sight. Once he’s hit black earth he puts his bottle there to stay cool. He chooses a branch, safe from ants, to hang his bag, and then, with his sleeves rolled up, he sets to work.
His spade’s steel rings out amongst the stones.
•
The shade of the olive trees has shrunk back bit by bit. Just a short time ago it made the whole field look like a carpet patterned with gold. As the sun’s rays rose higher, the shadows broke up and grew rounder. Now they’re nothing but blue-gray blobs around the bases of the trunks.
It’s noon.
The spade stops.
•
Siesta.
The fly-filled air grates like unripe fruit against a knife. Stretched out flat on the ground, Gondran sleeps heavily.
He wakes all at once. With the same, effortless motion he plunges back into sleep, then comes out of it again. With a start he’s on his feet.
Reaching for his spade, he comes face to face with the earth. Why, today, this uneasiness inside of him?
•
The grasses shiver. The long, muscular body of a startled lizard, cocking its head to the sound of the spade, trembles under the esparto grass.
“Ah, son of a whore!”
The creature advances, bounding like a green stone ricocheting off rocks. It freezes, with its legs bowed; the glowing ember of its gullet puffs and crackles.
In an instant Gondran becomes a tower of strength. Power inflates his arms, bunches up his fists on the grip of his spade, and makes the wooden shaft tremble.
Man wants to be the master-beast, the one who kills. His breath flutters like a thread between his lips.
The lizard comes closer.
A flash, and the spade strikes.
With his boot heel Gondran pounds relentlessly on the writhing stumps.
Now it’s nothing more than a clump of quivering mud. Over there, thicker blood reddens the ground. This was the golden-eyed head. The tongue still twitches like a tiny pink leaf, with the unconscious pain of shattered nerves. A paw with little balled-up claws clutches at the dirt.