He had decided to pull down the old farmyard, which has no animals apart from a horse and three hens and which merely spoils the view. This yard, which adjoins the chapel, was built on the edge of a spur and consisted of four sides around which the outbuildings were situated: hayloft, garage, stable, pantry, hen house and pressing shed. All these had to be “blown up”; what’s more it was “southern” work: bamboo covered with clay and straw mortar, and nothing held firm; a prod with a stick was enough to poke a hole through it. Only the four inner walls of the courtyard still remained standing.
That morning, Pierre was tackling the pointing in the wall by the gable; pickaxe in hand, using three times as much force as was needed, he brought the crumbling plaster down; suddenly he heard the noise of something hard beneath the iron bar.
“Hey! There’s stone down there.”
Some instinct made him dig more gently; throwing down his pickaxe, he began to scrape in small thrusts with a chisel; something black appeared: an old foundation stone? Pierre put his hand down, felt the cold, polished granite surface; his heart beating, he started to dig, clawing away at a crazy speed, his cheek pressed close to the ground, refusing to step back in order to see the whole thing, not allowing himself any conjecture for fear of disappointment.
No, there was no longer any mistake: what was appearing was a granite tambour bursting out of its battered clay plinth. There was the shaft of the column, the top of the shaft, the stone volute that surrounded it and finally the pink marble capital with its sculpted decorations, heads of men or animals that were still intact and most authentically Roman.
Pierre could scarcely believe it. He had been on excavations before, but he had never had anything jump out at him, in a leap of eight centuries, emerging quite untouched, still partly immured, but very much alive. His head was spinning beneath the winter sun and, because he had been staring so intently, his eyes saw nothing but darkness and red stars. Large blisters of water were bursting in the palms of his burning hands, preventing him from taking up his pickaxe again; he spat on his hands, hoisted up his trousers and called to his labourers so loudly that they broke off drinking from their wineskins and ran over to him, convinced that he had discovered treasure.
“Look at what I’ve found! A Roman column; while I was digging. There must be others!”
His enthusiasm was so obvious that the workers, who were disappointed, but who were moved and felt for him, eagerly took part in the search. The hatchet revealed a further column, supporting a fine stone arch and the beginnings of another; very gradually the continuous festoons of the arcatures were laid bare.
By the end of the day, two-thirds of a Roman cloister, freed of its layers of plaster, stood out against the sky.
Pierre no longer felt weary; alone now, standing in the midst of his newly discovered little basilica, he continued to contemplate the details; within each arch a picture had been formed in the landscape, with either a pine cone blown there by the mistral, a wisp of white foam from the sea, or the branch of a fig tree. Dusk was gradually falling, shadows and a scattering of stars filled the arches, and Pierre could still see the pure movement within them.
Cloîtres silencieux, voûtes des monastères,
C’est vous, sombres caveaux, vous, qui savez aimer.6
“If only Hedwige were here!” he murmured.
How he should love to live here with her, observing the monastic rule — and he the frenetic man! Together they would walk and shelter beneath the vaults; these angles and approaches would shatter their lethargy, divide their meditations into four cardinal points. A cloister, that was what had always been lacking in his life originally, an enclosed space; once they were enclosed within this square, their movements shaped by the collapsed decay of the arches, they would enter into the perfect rhythm.
Two kilometres from the Mas Vieux perched the village of La Penne. A minor road transformed into the bed of a stream ran down to it, spewing out schist and flint stones in torrents. Half a century previously, there were no inhabitants left in this village; fig trees grew freely, loosening the foundations of the houses that were still standing. Amid the collapsed roofs, gypsies and unemployed agricultural workers sometimes dossed down there, making their fires among the broken tiles. One of these nomads, a young Genoese man (who looked like Gambetta, what’s more), had set up camp there. He was a handsome wild bull of a creature, as tall as the Farnese Bull, with a craggy, hairy chest; he had gradually seduced the girls in this land where there was a paucity of men, had introduced some Ligurian blood into these French deserts, and had repopulated the region. He was known as Magali. A tribe of Magalis had been sired biblically among the crevices of these old walls, keeping themselves alive by burning sticks, vine shoots, beams and shutters, poaching, collecting chestnuts, repruning abandoned vines, dynamiting sea bream and sucking goats’ udders like vipers.
Nowadays a hundred or so people lived in the village, all either legitimately or illegitimately Magalis. From being a beggar, the eighty-year-old Magali had become a village worthy; from being a vagabond, the god Terminus. He had married the most successful, the best-endowed of his grandsons to the daughter of an estate agent from Grimaud, a Mademoiselle Estramuri, a parishioner who subscribed to fashion magazines, was imperious by nature and wise in business matters, and who ran an ancient little al fresco restaurant that she had restored, which served snacks and drinks beneath the bamboo awnings to cart drivers, seasonal workers and cork-strippers.
The Magalis rarely left La Penne; they could be seen in the autumn when they came down to the wine-growers’ co-operative in Bormes to tamper with the grapes, or at Le Lavandou station where they caught the train to Toulon. They did not live at all badly, they frequently ate meat, did some fishing for the local lords of the manor, worked listlessly, and were so lazy that they did not even bother to pick up their figs. It was only in September that they became a little busier, during the vendange, when they put a real effort into picking the grapes and producing their alcohol; they all had a fondness for drink. The father especially, puffy and red-faced, was always at the bottle. As his beard grew whiter, old Magali had exchanged his sexual vitality for political influence: a freemason and a bigwig who was listened to, for he made all his tribe vote, he had set up one of his daughters as postmistress at Hyères. With official approval, he kept a watch on neighbouring landowners and made their lives impossible unless an understanding was reached. From deep in the valley at La Penne, he scanned the horizon like a wrecked sailor; in the holiday season he found positions for his granddaughters and great-granddaughters who had not yet found jobs as maids at the summer visitors’ homes; in the winter, thanks to information they had gleaned, and with a deft Latin lightness of touch, he discreetly robbed those houses that had not been entrusted to his care. An innate malevolence, democratic impunity, and the friendliness of the police meant that the Magalis were formidable creators of myths; the girls spread slander as far as Saint-Raphaël, they listened to telephone conversations, read letters by holding them up to the light, and extended the area of their anonymous denunciations as far away as Marseille.