The two chalets are separated by a pass flanked by two peaks, the St. Pair and the Tête de Duet. It took Danielle half an hour to walk across the pass to Marius’s chalet.
Why do he-goats smell so strongly? Marius asked her when she arrived the first time. After a winter of ice and snow you go into the stable and you know that last year there was a he-goat here! Rams don’t smell like that, bulls don’t smell like that, stallions don’t smell like that, why do he-goats? The only other smell as strong as the smell of the he-goat, Marius continued, is the smell of a tannery. When I came back to the village, it took me six months to get that stench out of my skin. When I came back to the village, you could pluck a hair out of any part of my body — he fixed Danielle with his shrewd unflinching eyes so that what he meant should not escape her — any part of my body, sniff it, and say: this man has worked in a tannery.
What do you want a he-goat to be? replied Danielle, all he-goats have a strong smell, don’t they?
Another thing — apart from the stench of the tannery — which Marius brought back with him to the village was his way of wearing a hat. He wore his hat pulled rakishly down over one eye. Like a boss. Not the boss of a factory but of a gang. And he was never without a hat. He slept with a hat on. When he brought in his cows after a storm — if the downpour is violent they refuse to budge, they put down their heads, they arrange their backs like roofs so the rain runs off either side, and they wait — when Marius brought in his herd after a storm and his hat was so drenched that even indoors it went on raining, he took it off and straightaway put on another.
Putting on a hat was for him a gesture of authority, and from the age of thirty to the age of seventy, the authority of the gesture had not changed. He wore his hat now as if he were expecting total obedience from thirty cows and one dog.
That’s Violette there, he muttered to Danielle, pointing with his stick to a large brown cow with black eyes and horns. Always the last to come when called, always wandering off by herself, she has her own system, Violette, and I shall get rid of her in the autumn!
He had lost his father at the age of fourteen. His father, who married twice, had a passion for cards. Every evening in the winter he would say: Sauva la graisse! Wipe the grease off the table, we are going to play cards. And so he became known as Emilien à Sauva, and his son as Marius à Sauva.
Emilien, the father, left little behind except debts. The family house was sold, and Marius, who was the eldest son, had to leave to look for work in Paris. As he climbed for the first time in his life into a train, he swore that he would come back with enough money to pay off the family debts and that eventually he would have the largest herd of cows in the village.
So you’re going to sweep their chimneys? asked the ticket collector.
I’ll eat their shit, said Marius the boy, if they pay me more for it.
He achieved what he swore he would. He worked in a tannery in Aubervilliers, a little to the north of the Arc de Triomphe. By the time he was thirty he had paid off the family debts. By the time he was fifty he had the largest herd in the village.
They are calm today, Danielle, he went on, calm and agreeable, and they stay together. Not like yesterday — yesterday they could feel the storm, and there were flying ants. They ran with their tails straight out. They were as disagreeable as you can imagine yesterday. And today they are honey-sweet. As sweet as honey, Danielle.
It was the beginning of the summer and the grass was full of flowers, vanilla orchids, arnica, red campion, globeflowers, and blue centaurea that people say are the souls of poets.
Danielle was twenty-three. Her mother was dead and she lived with her elderly father, who had five cows and some goats. She had a job in the warehouse of a furniture factory. But in the spring of ’82 the factory went bankrupt, and so she proposed to take her father’s animals to the mountains — to the chalet where she had spent several summers as a child with her mother.
How does she have the courage to stay up there alone? people in the village asked. Yet the truth was she didn’t need courage. It suited her — the silence, the sun, the slow daily routine. Like many people who are sure of themselves, Danielle was a little intimidating. At village dances the boys didn’t fall over themselves to partner her — though she danced well and had wide hips and tiny feet. They weren’t sure she would laugh at their jokes. So they called her slow. In reality, this so-called slowness of hers was a kind of imperturbability. She had a wide face — a little like that of a Red Indian squaw — with dark eyes, large shoulders, small wrists and plump capable hands. It was easy to imagine Danielle as the mother of several children — except that she seemed to be in no hurry to find a man to be their father.
Grandad! she teased Marius, when she paid him a second visit a few days later. You dye it, don’t you?
Dye what?
Seventy and not a single white hair!
It’s in the breeding.
Danielle looked away as if she had suddenly forgotten her joke. The few white clouds above the peaks were the only sign that the world was still going on.
My father had the same head of hair, Marius continued, thick and black as a lamb when they nailed him in his coffin. Go fetch Lorraine, Johnny! he called to the dog, Find Lorraine!
The dog bounded away to fetch a cow who was straying along the slope to the west. Over the seasons the cows at Peniel have made, with their own feet, narrow paths like terraces along the slopes. You can wander along one of those paths without really noticing that on one side the drop below is getting steeper and steeper.
Go fetch Lorraine!
Marius had his own way of calling. His calls sounded like an order and an appeal at the same time. Everyone discovers how to make their voice carry in the mountains, and everyone knows that animals respond to sounds which are like songs. Yet his shouts were not musical, they were a kind of convulsive cry and each phrase ended with the sound OVER! Johnny bring over! Take over! Over there Johnny over! Somebody suddenly awaking from sleep might cry out like Marius calling to his dog.
Fetch Lorraine over!
Dangerous, he said. Lilac fell there two years ago and broke a leg. To save the meat I had to hack the carcass with an axe and take the quarters back to the chalet on a sledge. Alone. No one to help and no one to see.
The next time Danielle paid him a visit was in the evening. It had been very hot all day, the goats were as languid as she was. When she had finished milking, she climbed up to the pass. There she could hear the bells of Marius’s herd, and at the same time, behind her and much louder, the bells of her own five. She had an electric torch with her in case she needed it for the walk back.
Marius was sitting on a stool in his stable, empty except for one cow. He looked up from under his hat, his black eyes fixed intently upon Danielle.
I was doing my best to make you come, he growled, may need your help when it comes to pulling. I know my Comtesse.
Comtesse, the cow before them, had her tail in the air and glistening loops of mucus trailed from her distended vulva. Danielle approached her head and felt the temperature of her horns.
What she needs, she said, is some dew on her nose.
She wanted to joke because she saw that Marius’s hands were trembling. How many calves had he delivered during his lifetime? And now he owned not one but thirty cows. Why should he be nervous? The last sunlight was shining between the slats of the west wall. When Comtesse moved her head the bell around her neck tolled like an animal in pain. It was stifling as though all the wood of the floor and walls and roof, all the wood of the stable, were feverish; Danielle knew why he was nervous. To be nervous like that he had to be a man and he had to be old: it wasn’t the danger of losing the calf or the cow which worried him, it was a question of pride. As if he were being put to a test, as if he were on trial. No woman, young or old, would suffer like that.