Depends on the woman.
Any woman.
In God’s name!
Suppose he finds an old maid — he’ll say to himself: there must be something the matter with her, nobody else wanted her. Suppose he finds a woman who’s divorced — he’ll say: she did wrong by one man, she may do the same to me. Suppose he finds a widow — he’ll say: she’s been a wife once, it’s my farm she’s after! With age we all become a little meaner.
And what if he finds a young woman who’s unmarried?
Ah! my poor Hervé, said Albert, you say that because you’re still young yourself. If Félix finds a virgin—
Virgin!
No matter! Suppose he finds a young woman, he’ll say to himself — and who knows? he might be right — he’ll say to himself: in a year or so she’s going to cuckold me as sure as day follows night …
The men laughed, Albert handed out a glass of wine, and they watched, idly, the white liquid heating in the copper vat, the white liquid that only starts flowing after a birth. Outside the sky was darkening faintly and the first stars were like sleep in its eyes.
Félix, already back in the kitchen, was reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.
Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?
Not round the neck of one of our cows!
It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.
That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.
Suddenly he got up from the table and walked across the bare floorboards into the Middle Room. From under the large bed he pulled out the accordion case and came back with the instrument in his arms. There was no longer enough light to read by, yet he did not switch on the light. Instead, he opened the door to the stable and entered its darkness. He felt with his foot for the milking stool that he kept by the water tap and he sat down on it. Myrtille eyed him, another cow mooed. And in the stable, a yard from the gutter full of the cows’ greenish shit, he began to play. The air, hot with the heat of the animals who had spent the day in the sun, smelt strongly of garlic, for wild garlic grows in the field by the old road to St. Denis where they had been grazing. The instrument breathed in this air and its two voices smelt of it. He played a gavotte in quadruple time. Gavotte, which comes from gavot, meaning mountain dweller, meaning goitre, meaning throat, meaning cry.
Most of the cows were bedded down. At first they turned their heads to where the music was coming from and the ears of those who were nearest went up, querying, yet very soon they discovered that the music represented nothing more than itself, and their ears relaxed and they put their heads again on their own flanks or on a neighbour’s shoulder. One of the swallows flew around like a bat, less easily reassured than the cows. As he played, Félix looked towards the small window beside the door. The stars were no longer like sleep in the corner of its eye, but like rivets. His head was rigid, only his body moved with the music.
Now he was playing “Le Jeune Marchois,” a plaintive wedding march he’d learnt in the army from a friend who came from Limoges. Two fingers of his left hand, their nails broken, their knuckles engrained with dirt, the chapped tip of one cracked by the cold of winters, played a staccato beat which was as high and raucous as the cry of a corncrake. His right hand, raised level with his shoulder, was playing the melody which rose and fell like a chain of hills, a chain of gentle hills, of hillocks, of young breasts. His head was now nodding to the tune, his boot on the cobblestones tapping to the beat. The wedding procession approached and the undulating hills gave way to a hedgerow behind which appeared, disappeared and reappeared women with glistening stoles thrown over their shoulders. The calls of the corncrake too were transformed. No longer the cries of a bird, they were the whistle of air emitted from a leather bag punctured by the point of a knife. His two fingers hit the keys like rivet chargers. The procession had risen in the east by his right shoulder, now it was midday and was before his eyes. Each woman had removed her stole, and the white linen undulating in the wind caressed the bare shoulders of the woman behind her. The women could see the procession of men approaching. The whistles of air were gasps of breath. Appearing and disappearing behind the branches of the hedgerow, the women were undoing their hair. Yet already they were passing to the west. The gasps of breath became again the cry of a corncrake, more and more distant, disturbed, fleeting. The road behind the hedge was deserted. A mist covered the hills.
A cow shat when he ceased playing. A pungent smell of wild garlic was wafted towards him. He remembered the waltz of “Rosalie de Bon Matin.” He played it as loud as he could.
It was due to Louis, who can still argue a politician under the table, that Félix began to play regularly every week in the café at Lapraz. One evening the following winter Louis went to try to sell Félix a ticket for a lottery which was being organised to raise money to pay for the transport of the village children to the nearest swimming pool. Everyone born in the mountains should learn how to swim! was the motto of the campaign.
There I was, explained Louis afterwards in the café, climbing up through the orchard to Felo’s house. It was already dark and I was glad I had a pocket lamp. At the top of the hill I thought I heard music. It must be the radio, I told myself. My hearing’s not as good as it used to be. From the big pear tree beside the yard a white owl flew up. There’s not many come up this way at night, I said. The music was clearer now, and it was an accordion. No radio sounds like that. The crafty boy, he’s got company, I said. Nearer the house, I couldn’t believe my ears. The music was coming from the stable! There was a light in the window and the music was coming from the stable! Perhaps he’s dancing with the gypsies, perhaps he likes to dance with gypsies and is frightened to let them into the house, thieving good-for-nothings that they are. Who would have believed Felo would dance with gypsies if he wasn’t his father’s son? I peered through the filthy little window and inside I could make out the dancing figures. No use knocking here, Lulu, I said. So I tried the door. It was locked. To hell with the lottery ticket, I simply wanted to see what was going on. All the doors were locked and he was with the gypsies in the stable. Then I had an idea. Ten to one, Félix didn’t lock the barn door above the house. Up the ramp in five seconds and I was right, it was open. By each trap he’d prepared the hay to fork down to each cow in the morning. Not everyone does that, he’s farsighted, Félix. The music was coming up through the floorboards louder and wilder than ever — a mazurka. I lifted up one of the traps and, lying on my stomach on the little pile of hay, I peered through. There was the cow bedded down, and there was Félix seated on a stool, beneath the one dim electric light bulb, an accordion between his arms. For the rest I couldn’t believe my eyes. Lulu, you’re seeing things, I told myself. Félix was alone! Not another soul in the stable, playing to the fucking cows! He can play though, Félix can. You should get him to bring his music down here sometime.
On the night of Philippe’s wedding, when the sky was already getting light from the dawn, long after Philippe had taken Yvonne to bed, and the parents and the parents-in-law had gone home, a few of us, including the dressmaker with dangling earrings who liked laughing and who worked in a factory that produced wooden handles for house painters’ brushes, a few of us were still dancing and Félix sat playing on his usual chair, his cap on the back of his bald head, his heavy working-boots tapping the floor as he played. We might have stopped dancing before, yet one tune had led to the next, and Félix had fitted them together like one pipe into another till the chimney was so high it was lost in the sky. A chimney of tunes, and the women’s feet so tired they had taken off their shoes to dance barefoot.