THE SARDINIAN. Maybe.
What does this fish do?
You say that he sleeps on a thousand waves, so he is big?
GLODION. Yes.
It’s because he’s too big that he sleeps. What use would it be for him to go anywhere? With one stroke, he’s on this side, with another stroke, he’s on the other. He is just one big pocket of skin. When it’s full of water, he sinks into my shade, toward the coolness because it’s hot. When it’s full of air, he climbs back up, he is over me like a meadow of grass. Big pieces of ice come to plant themselves in him, and then they melt there.
THE SARDINIAN. No.
That’s not the one who makes me nervous, then, if he only sleeps. Look harder.
GLODION. What is it I feel in me?
It’s anger or maybe it’s great distress that twists me in its pains?
The wind suddenly put its foot in the middle of me and that’s what made me leap up to the clouds.
Oh, this anger, you don’t know how bad it can be, because it’s anger against nothing.
It swells in me like a bad hurt; it makes a kind of heavy pus that sleeps for a long time deep inside me.
Then, all of a sudden:
With one of those swings that you make me take when you throw me against my shores, this anger rips me apart.
And then, first of all, I become full of huge flowers like the wide open flowers of carrots.
I swell like abscesses on bad meat.
I explode, I groan, I weep, I gnash my huge sand teeth.
I twist and turn and I endure the great death.
THE SARDINIAN. That’s because the cold despair of the whole universe has rested upon you.
It’s because he’s unhappy that the god made the world.
He wanted to get out of himself and each time he thought of something, the forms began to clarify everything he thought.
Thus, I was conceived in the belly of the sky, and you, sea, you were that side of me that rested against the sky at that place in its flank where it keeps its bile and its bitterness.
And you became the bile and the bitterness of the world.4 But look again and tell me. .
GLODION. What?
Why should I tell you and what should I tell you. .?
All this bitterness is exactly what I feel, and I would like to scatter it into the whole universe, and for the sky, that other ocean that is above me, to become bitter waves to its very depths and to go off tossing salt on the beaches of the stars.
Earth, do you remember the time of your youth, when you ran, water squash, in the great prairie of the night, and how, with my depths, I soaked the wide route?
In those quarters of the sky where, alone, we could live: me, the sea, them, the mountains, our immense life which goes from one side of life to the other, without stopping, slowly, slowly, slowly.
And you desired to carry more rapid lives, and you rolled over the blue slopes, and you crossed the quarter of fruits, and you were in the sky like a ball of sugar, like a ripe melon.
I heard you laughing.
But the slope threw you into the great region of beasts and there you are all covered with that mildew of blood, and there you are getting nervous over a new animal, and there you are like a girl who’s rolled in the hay with men and who’s looking at her belly.
THE SARDINIAN. There!
Calm down, Sea!
Let that high tongue of water that you raise to the sky come down. Make yourself flat.
Who knows what life the god has imagined for me?
Who can know in advance all the forms 5 which are still only air waiting ready in the darkness?
This course of mine, it was written in the stars. I was delighted with the fruits; I listened to the lowing of the beasts and now, there before me, opening wide, is this region of man, and my course can’t avoid it.
Because the god has bound into my flesh this curse: the capacity to produce.6
Make yourself flat, Sea, make yourself smooth and sleep.
I am going to ask the Mountain.
Mountain!
As before, silence. But this time, someone is ready, stands up, and waits. He respects the order of the play. You have to leave time for the aeolian harp players above to understand by the whistle that the sea’s scene is over.
Besides, that sound of the sea which continues to diminish, and then falls still, coincides with the gestures of Glodion the shepherd. He parts with the Sardinian, takes two steps backwards, and remains there.
One gargoulette, just one, very slowly plays the song of “O bellos montagnos.” It makes it into a kind of formidable monster, full of waterfalls, ice collapsing, the sound of the north wind, grinding, spitting, and it all ends in silence into which pipes a little tune from the tympon, only the scale notes, the little streamer of music that floats on the lips of the shepherd walking ahead of the sheep.
THE MOUNTAIN (The man moves forward, salutes, stands facing the Sardinian as if for a contredanse). Earth!
Are you worried?
Because someone came to look in at the gate and then, when you turned around to see, you saw only quick movements as they hid.
And now, in the great afternoon, you sense a presence over there behind the pillars, and everything is turning cloudy around you as in a stream when a big fish dies at the bottom, disturbing the mud.
And you call out, and you ask. .
Earth, I don’t know!
I don’t know, but I can feel your anxiety moving under my feet.
I expected it.
For a long time, I had my pasture of solitude and silence and already I was bound by the weight of all the grasses, the weight of trees, this mud of big, rotten fruits.
I learned to know the sound of the life of the plants. One day, a shadow came over me, a cold shadow that crossed me slowly.
It was the shadow of a bird.
And under it, I was colder than under the shadow of the night.
It was then that I felt your anxiety moving.
It was then I understood from the taste of the sky that we had passed the threshold that opens onto the region of men.
Listen to me.
I can no longer move and I am too high to see below.
But I have sent someone to explore it.
He already left a good while ago; he won’t be long in coming back.
Without another call, a man stood up, not very far from the spot where I am and where I’m scribbling this down. Césaire let out an “Eh, look!” and I felt Barberousse against me turn to look. Césaire’s girl leans the whole weight of her hand on my knee and stands up. I remain seated; I don’t want to upset my writing board and my papers and, in the movement of the girl’s head, in her gaze, I follow, from below, the one who moves forward into the play. I hear what someone says to him: “You, who are you?” He answers, “You’ll see.” He has entered the stage area; I can see him. He is tall and thin, all shaven. He has a slight limp.