I had understood then. I understood much better now. I understood that finger resting on the flimsy calendar map, Césaire who was borrowing a horse, and everything that was going to carry me, rolled in the grandfather’s coat, toward that land the sky sucked like a mouth.
At the Chabrillans’, the gates were closed.
“I knew it,” said Césaire, “when you’re in a hurry, it’s always like that.”
We banged on the gate with our fists and our feet; that set the iron chains clanging. We cried out, “Bartholomé! Bartholomé! Of all the luck! Are you going to wake up or not?”
The farm went on sleeping, eyes shut tight. But the dogs howled in the yard.
“All the same, we’re making a hell of a noise,” said the shepherd. “What if they aren’t there?”
“That can’t be it,” said Césaire, “there’d have to be some disaster. They have a little girl. They wouldn’t have left her alone.”
He bellowed once more, “Bartholomé!” and then he added hoarsely, “Christ, I’ve done in my vocal chords!”
But this time, a little line of light shone around a closed shutter. The shutter began to open.
“Who’s there?” demanded a woman’s voice.
“Ah!” cried Césaire, relieved. “Is that you, Anaïs? What a lot of sleep for such a little woman! Wake up Bartholomé.”
“Who are you?”
“Ah, Anaïs, come on, unplug your ears. It’s Césaire from the pottery. You know who it is, Bartholomé!”
“He isn’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“He went to the village!”
“He’s crazy!”
“No, he needed to see Pancrace, and Pancrace is only there in the evening, so he had to stay.”
“We want you to lend us Bijou,” said Césaire, “and the cart. The three of us have to go that way, and it’s alright with your Bartholomé.”
Anaïs remained silent for a moment, and then she said, “I don’t open the gate. I’m afraid at night, I don’t open it. Wait for Bartholomé.”
“But we don’t have time, Anaïs. Are you crazy or what? You know very well that it’s me. You can hear me talking. What, you don’t recognize the way I talk? For goodness sake, it’s me! Once more, it’s me, Césaire, and Barberousse the shepherd, and someone from town, a friend. Come on, open up, cheese head!”
She remained, up against her idea there in her window. She leaned with her bare arms on the bar and she answered everything Césaire said with her “yes, but. .,” “yes, but. . ”
“Yes, but, you know, there are times. . it’s like this, it seems like a voice but it isn’t, . times at night, it’s the work of the devil. It seems like Césaire, and then you open up, and then. . ”
And Césaire was completely out of patience, pacing in circles like a mule on the threshing ground, and Barberousse was swearing into his beard, when Bartholomé arrived, carrying a lantern. The lamp gave him a shadow a kilometer long.
“Ah!” he said, “yes.” Then, yes again, but he didn’t have the time to get his bearings. Césaire pushed him through the gate, and from there to the stable, and soon Bijou, all harnessed, arrived.
“Close it, close it!” cried Césaire. “We only have time to leave.”
Already two rises of land were rolling us into the great wave of hills, far from the gates where Bartholomé stood, lantern raised.
IT MIGHT have been eleven o’clock at night judging from the Reillanne church tower bells, but it was hard to tell because of the wind and especially because of the swinging wagon, creaking and groaning in the hard waves of the earth.
Then we entered the great Sans-Bois wilderness and the stars leaned down right to its slatted sides.
“It will take us three hours,” said the shepherd.
Our pilot was Césaire. He looked at the sky to find the path. The stars, it seemed, marked it.
“You see,” he said, “we are going to pass between that one and that one.”
Then he pulled on the bit a few times to wake up Bijou who was fast asleep.
We went down into the depths of the earth, as if into whirlpools. We heard jaws closing over the emptiness of our wake, or we rose again to the fragile and trembling summit of a hill in all the muted noise of the stars.
At other times, a wide flat stretch carried us along without dip or rise; coasting smoothly, we glided over a plateau. Bijou’s big hoofs lapped the sand. Then it seemed to us that over there, in front of us, other vessels sped along. Then we saw they were immobile, as if anchored. The pilot pulled on the leather helm and we skimmed past huge rustling chestnut trees like reefs. The night frothed under such flights and frolics, and the heavy swimming of boars ripped apart the juniper bushes. On our vessel, there were three of us. Césaire, who was looking for the path of stars, and Barberousse, who didn’t say a word, and me. Ever since I had felt the heaving breath of the earth under the boat, I was as lost as a kitten and I hung for dear life onto Césaire’s velour jacket.
We reached the great slope. Barberousse let out a cry. Césaire used all his strength to come to a stop. All three of us stood up on the trembling boards of the cart.
As far as the eye could see, the plateau descended toward the distant chasm of the Durance. There were so many stars overhead that in the gray light, you could make out the short spray of the heather and lavender, and below, very far away and very much lower, the scaly skin of the Durance.
“Too late,” cried Barberousse.
He pointed out to us, off in the distance, four large squat fires which were no longer anything but coals. The whole great slope of the plateau flowed with herds. You didn’t see them, you heard the noise of their cascade, and the shepherds’ whistles, and the swaying of the lanterns that they rocked slowly in the night to give the sheep a rhythm to walk by. The alpine roads already sounded like streams. Too late! The shepherds were leaving.
Ahead of us, a great land had just been swallowed up as if by the sea.
III
IN THE PRECEDING PAGES, YOU WILL have found an obsession with water and the sea. That’s because a herd is a liquid thing, a marine thing.
From Crau to the Alpe, there are only dry rivers, streams which transport cicadas and lizards. The herds climb into the thorns and the furnaces of dust. Yes, but this flood grating the ground with its belly, this wool, this deep, monotonous noise, it all gives the shepherds souls that possess the resonant movement and weight of the sea.
Summer days on the mountain plateaus, the shepherd stretches out in the grass with his face to the sky. The clouds have a life of seaweed and algae, blooming grasses in the breasts of the wave like fountains of milk in the breasts of women. Sometimes, when the expanse is all blue, after the north wind passes, a little white sail still makes its way in the high winds toward the horizon’s distant ports.
Finally, this love shepherds have for water and the sea, this obsession which, up there, on the high ground, makes them speak of pilots, helms, sails, waves, sand, spray, flight, swimming, gulfs, and depths, this great affinity is traced deep in their flesh. Because the occupation of the masters of beasts is something like water which runs through the fingers and which cannot be held. Because that odor of suint and wool, that odor of man cooked in his own sweat, that odor of ram and goat, that odor of milk and of full ewes, that odor of nascent lambs rolled in their slime, that odor of dead beasts, that odor of herds in the high mountain summer pastures, that is life, like the brine of the great seas.
RETURNING toward Saint-Martin-l’Eau, we saw rising out of the beauty of the sunrise the perched village of Dauphin. Césaire let us wait for him by the bridge and he took the shortcut to lead Bijou back to his stable. The shepherd went into the Largue up to his knees. He bent over the water, watching the slow life below. With his hand, he fished out a barbel round as an eggplant, and then he drew from a hole a long angry eel that flipped around his arm. Césaire came back from above with fistfuls of green peppers. At that moment, the sky was milky and the day promised to be beautiful. As we arrived at the pottery, the young sorceress arrived, too, skin and bones, covered with dust, dust packed hard on her thin legs by a long night of running. Then I understood that she had run behind our cart. We skinned the still-live eel, and the skin billowed in the wind. We put the barbel on an iron grill and, over a fire of vine shoots, it all began to cook; the eel in a fennel stock, the fish on the grill. The girl carefully basted the fish with oil.