This is the earth’s youth!
It rolls about in the universe like in the grass. It is all wet with the great blossoming waters. It steams with sweat like a horse who has galloped in the sun.
It trails behind it a lovely odor of milk. You can hear it laughing far off like the sound of nuts cracking.
Its skin is in the process of drying. There are colors that run in circles around it like rainbows. When a patch of its skin is dry, it turns green.
This is the earth’s youth!
This is the great Sunday!
All the trees are flowering at the same time. On the water there are wide marshes of blue squash. Rocks pass, full of vines which trail like hair. Little round stones run under the grass. All the flowers are ruddy with good health. The leaves are thick as your arm. You can hear the fruits which are all ripening together. The big squash float on the sea. Each time the earth moves, the herds of ripe fruit pour from all sides into the folds of the hill. It begins to smell like sugar. The hills drift off very slowly, bent under that great weight. The plains of sand try to lift up their burden of ripe grasses, and then remain completely flat. The mountains weep water. Bitter flowers grow in the bottom of the streams. The rocks stop, ecstatic. That smell of Sunday, which is the smell of tomato soup! 3
All this time, the Sardinian has remained with his hand raised in greeting and the music has made that sound of water and tumbling earth. You saw the hills walk. You heard their big feet slap in the mud, in the rot of the streams of fruit. Now the narrator lets his raised hand fall. The aeolian harps are all alone trying their hand at the great Sunday. There’s the sound of sheets flapping on the clothesline, whirlwinds of swallows, the wind coming from far away in one long slide, now caught in fistfuls in the trees.
A dry music begins, made up of just the tympon, those tries at joy along the scale and the loud notes sounding like calls. With a wing beat of his arms, this is what the Sardinian did: he changed character. He is no longer the anonymous narrator, he is the earth-narrator. He is the Earth. From now on, he is going to tell us of his anxiety; the drama opens.
THE SARDINIAN. The great grasses have eaten all my strength. I realized this because I wanted to leap into the sky and I couldn’t, and I remain stuck here, powerless.
I’ve been too lax with all these beautiful trees. Already everything that ran and danced over me, the hills and the mountains, and the high rocks, everything has stopped, hindered by forests and undergrowth.
Oh! I wanted to go much farther and I couldn’t, and I turn, and I turn again, but it’s all clamped together in me by hooked roots. I’m like a moldy apple.
The summers came upon me like huge bees, and they sapped my moisture. They didn’t budge. They were upon me, wings open.
I knew it: I had seen the great marshes of squash withering on the waters. The squash drifted off and then, suddenly, they plunged into the water’s depths. And then, other times, I saw bubbles rise, and then, other times, all the water moved.
The summers’ swarm drank up nearly all the lovely depth of the water. And then, I saw the great serpent’s back.
There is that great serpent who is a creature of the mud. Then there are those who have four feet and are made according to the model of the sky because they have teats to drink from. There is one of those who is almost nothing but a mouth; it swallows huge platefuls of pines and birches and whole cherry orchards along with the ground underneath, covered with grass and shadows. There are many others, too.
And I was lighter with grass, but I was heavier with meat and I sank into the sky like a lead weight because all these beasts were stepping over each other, were mounting each other, making little ones who were making little ones.
And then, one fine moment, I stopped drifting because the beasts began to eat meat. There were some who ate grass and others who ate the ones who ate the grass. And that created balance.
And I am in balance.
But, now, I feel this balance coming all undone again, and it’s swaying. Something else has happened. Oh, what a worry it is to have skin and a belly!
I’m very nervous because of that one, I’ve heard he wants to take charge.
And yet, he is small; I raise and lower my eyebrows and I widen my eyes, and I turn them about, and I turn them about again. I see nothing.
Nevertheless, this thread of balance is swaying. I have to ask. .
Since he became the earth-narrator, the Sardinian was clearly hurrying to reach those words by which the drama opens. At first, he added a bit of polish. Then, he abandoned his images as he went along. He spoke of the summers like bees. I saw the Sardinian again a little later. He told me very beautiful things about the summer: the summer that alights on us like a swarm; the summer that covers the land with a hot flayed skin.
Moreover, the whole circle of shepherds had begun to talk and near me I heard repeated “And you, what will you say?” After “I have to ask,” the Sardinian stood for a moment not saying anything. All the music stopped.
THE SARDINIAN (He calls). The Sea!
Nothing. Silence. Shepherds who squeeze close to each other like sheep who are afraid.
THE SARDINIAN (in another, natural, voice). So, there’s no one to do the sea?
Over there, in back, there’s a group where a little dispute is bubbling and you can hear “Go on,” “Go on,” in low voices.
He goes forward.
It’s a short, fat shepherd. He takes two or three steps, then he turns around and flings his big felt hat to his friends. He is bald, with two little wings of white hair above his ears.
I learned afterwards that his name is Glodion and that he’s from Le Bachas, a country of complete wilderness: nothing but stones, nothing but stones and thistle.
GLODION. I’m the Sea!
He and the Sardinian face each other like two men who are going to dance.
THE SARDINIAN. Sea.
Tell me if you know what is worrying me.
Look at me swinging to and fro.
Who knows where I am going to go now?
Things went better for me when I was young.
But then my worries started.
And I am much more afraid of what is coming than of what has been.
GLODION. What is it you want me to say?
THE SARDINIAN. Tell me if you have seen man.
GLODION. Man?
Stop swinging me from side to side for a bit. You are hurling me into the mountains with the goats; you are throwing me from the flat sand as far as the eye can see, all the way to where the monkeys live.
Wait!
I don’t have time to look around.
Man?
You mean that fish who is all planted with grass like a big meadow and whom all my purple rage can’t budge, and who sleeps stretched out on the grill of a thousand of my waves?