The Solitude of Compassion

by Jean Giono

  Eugène did not look right or left, he went to fetch the little girl and took her. This Eugène is not a bad sort, he has heart, but he is without strength of character. He kept the young girl for two years. And his wife was always around to whine: ‘And she is here and she is there, and it’s all because of Rosine, and she wets the bed.’ They had a little boy, who, on seeing Annette climb up on Eugène’s knees and call him papa, wore himself out crying: ‘He is not your father. He is mine.’ Finally there were scenes. In the end, after two years he brought the young girl back to her grandmother. She in turn acted as if he were bringing her a dirty handkerchief. She put her in an orphanage.

  There it is! Well, the day before yesterday, now that you know, Amélie came back from Chausserignes and she rushed into the house, and went to chat with my wife: hush hush, under wraps. And my wife said, ‘That, after all!’ So I asked: ‘What is it?’ She told me: ‘The little girl, Annette, is out of the orphanage she has been placed in Chausserignes!’—‘Annette? And why did she come out?’—‘She’s free,’ Amélie said to me, ‘She is twenty-one.’

  So that’s it! You see that, why, she is free!

  I said to my wife: ‘You are going to put on your hat, and then tomorrow you will go down there to see her boss, and you might even bring him a dozen eggs, not the freshest ones, but the ones from the jar. You will go see him, and you will tell him ‘This is our niece, well, this is true, we cannot deny it, but with children like that, one never knows what will become of them after they have been brought up in those houses. Well, you are warned. We are not responsible for anything.’

  You won’t see her doing anything bad and then their coming around and making a claim against us!”

  On the Side of the Road

  I went to the inn on the side of the road, my friend Baptiste Gaudemar, called “Gonzales.” “Sit down,” he said and he sat down next to me by the only table. I drew out my pipe, I smoked; I did not say a word. When I go there it is to listen, to learn. And “called Gonzales” goes for a long time without talking. He has a big cocoa-colored hat that is all stretched out, all washed by the year’s rains, all powdered with dusts and summer grains. He has a beautiful handkerchief of red silk with green and blue flowers, this handkerchief which he spreads out in front of the sun at times to peer through and to make others look through as well. “Look,” he said “look at this thing that you can only see through my handkerchief.” You look and you do not see anything. Then he says: “Look at the sun dance: look there, through the battling sky.” You look again. Then, this time you see it.

  In the open doorway the entire hillside of “Saint-Mère and Saint-André” is sketched and a good bit of the junipered land all gone wild, despite a high pigeon roost which spits out in silence white pigeons pointed like quince seeds.

  The eldest daughter “Mia des Roches” passes by with her basket filled with onions and pears. And there, on the tile floor, her last child—the one she had with a carriageman or a woodsman from Saint-Sylvestre—plays with empty spools. Jeanton, this little one is named.

  He looks at me. He passes his tongue along his lip.

  “Do you want me to pull out your belly?”

  He tells me:

  “No.”

  I say:

  “You want me to tear off your arm?”

  “No.”

  “You want me to take off your leg?”

  “No.”

  “You want me to cut off your head?”

  “No.”

  “Well then we can’t have any fun.”

  I look at “called Gonzales.” He is smoking and caressing his nice handkerchief.

  “During the time when I was in Mexico,” he begins…because he went to Mexico when he was quite young. He made his trip in his first communion vest. There they were supposed to have him work in a candy shop. But that is another story.

  “At that time…”

  That is what gave him the nickname Gonzalès. When we saw him return, dry like a carob bean and so thin that we could count all the joints of his bones on him, so that at first we nicknamed him “thirty joints” for that reason. He was in a vest of old, blackened thread; you would not give more than ten cents for the man and the vest, even with a guarantee. But little by little we learned that underneath, what we took for a big clump of bone was, without a doubt, a small purse, and then we called him Gonzalès, for his money.

  “As I was getting off a horse, I saw her behind the gate with her hair parted and her big cherry of a mouth. I said to myself: ‘You will give her a dab of your handkerchief.’”

  Which made us think that besides the purse he also had a box; because he had a nice way of yawning open-mouthed, of unsticking his teeth and he knew how to look bored and get all the attention in the “Café Glacier” just by sitting sideways on one of the benches. Girls began to hover around him. He yawned, then he had a little, sharp gaze under his eyelashes, and he folded up the entire circle of his mouth, “like a tiger” the apothecary said.

  “In the wool shed, with the sound of all those windy sluts with mouths as smutty as bishops’, a bed, Monsieur Jean, which has its hundred comings and goings on one side and a full eighty on the other, a mattress as thick as a house, and upon it…”

  Upon it—I mean to say after having been well-surrounded by the girls around here, in his story, which I know, since he has told it to me twenty times, he loves it, he sucks it, he chews it like baked honey, and so I do not listen any more from the moment he says: “I saw her behind the gate.” I know what he is going to say—one perhaps could imagine that he got some money from it, but, in any case, he does not let on a whit because Jean and Anaïs, and Adelinde are involved, he does not move more than a conclusion. And yet, they were pretty girls, and good for keeping one busy.

  To the one who had pulled him closer he said:

  “As for me, I am at the side of the road, who knows if tomorrow everything will change? Then, I will get up, I will walk on my road without anything holding me back.”

  He stayed thus yawning, drinking, and saying: “Look through my handkerchief at the whole sky fighting.” From time to time, he came into the middle of the square with his compass, he found north, then he turned towards a patch of sky, and he looked at it as if he wanted to move onward with his glance to that place where the sky meets the earth.

  He was at the side of the road. As for me, I understand. Do you understand?

  You will understand.

  In the evening, his wallet flat, he bought with his last pesos this inn on the side of the road. He married that fat, mustached woman who is there by the stove frying pig tripe. He had two children with her: this “Mia des Roches” who is all wild around his body like a colt, and a son, gone off to who knows where?

  “Look,” he said to me.

  I know the end of the story, I do not listen to it, but each time I look and each time it gives me a great blow in my heart because of all that I am wasting by remaining on the side of the road; I look.

  He gently takes his left hand out of his vest, he stretches it out before me… He is like some old, very feeble beast, and there on the middle finger he wears a young lady’s ring, even more, a young-lady-ring, all gilded with gold like hair, red-stoned, with a grey blue reflection like an eye.

  Jofroi de Maussan

  I saw Fonse coming; he was utterly overwhelmed at having his mouth without a chew, at having forgotten to turn up his pants, and with his wool belt below his belly. He was getting ahead!

  “If you are going far like that…” I told him in passing.

  He did not see me, stretching out his old straw limbs in the air. He turns his head. He looks at me. He climbs the slope, he comes to lie down beside me and remains puffing to get his breath. As for me, who knows his malady… Do I? He speaks about it everywhere: in the café, in the fields, at wakes, on every occasion, ever since Monsieur de Digne spoke to him about it. I tell him:

  “That is not good for your heart, you know?”


  “Ah! With the heart that I have, if it were only that, but something just happened to me…”

  It must actually be something… He, who ordinarily looks at events without haste for a good hour before deciding, he is here, utterly lost, flapping his eyelids, as if amazed by his own speed.

  “Did you know that I bought Maussan’s big orchard? This winter Jofroi came to my house; I brought him into the kitchen; I told him: ‘Warm yourself up.’ He drank a small glass and then he decided. He told me ‘Fonse, I am getting old; my wife is sick, I am too; we don’t have any children, it’s a big problem. I went to see the notary of Riez and it was almost understood. He showed me the account, I went to see the tax collector and… I tell you it was almost understood. If I put so much in life annuity, it will give me so much income.’ Then I told him that it was a good idea, and, after one or two things, we agreed, and I bought Maussan’s big orchard. Not the house; he told me: ‘Leave me the house, I am used to it, besides it would hurt me, but take all the land, knock down the walls if you want.’ Finally I left him a good part so that he could get his sun and a tree or two for his pleasure. You see that I was agreeable and that I paid straight up. He made use of his money, he had his income. We were very happy. Right.

  “Have you seen Maussan’s orchard? It is all old peach trees; they should have been taken up ten years ago already. Jofroi, for him, a little more or a little less, it still works, but for me, peach trees are not my forte, and then our land is not a land for that; in the end, see it as you will, me, my intention is to sow wheat there, to pull out the trees and grow wheat. It is as good an idea as any, and anyhow, it is nobody’s business; I paid, it is my choice, I’ll do what I want.

  “This morning I said to myself: “The weather is so-so, you have nothing to do, you’ll begin taking them out. And, right away I went to Maussan… (Typical Fonse, this phrase. He did not make it to Maussan until three o’clock in the afternoon.)

  “…I attached a rope to the biggest branch and I pulled, pulled and it came; it made a sound. Then I was going to pull out the stump; I heard a window open, then Jofroi came out.

  “‘And what are you doing?’ he asked me.

  “His face was not itself.

  “‘You can see,’ I replied.

  “‘Are you are going to do that to all of them?’

  “‘All of them.’

  “I did not see what he was getting at. He went back into the castle, and I saw him come out with his rifle. Not on his shoulder, well in hand, with his right hand on the tumbler, his left hand on the barrels, and he carried it out in front, firmly, and he walked like a crazy man. He was even less himself than before.

  “Me, I had attached the rope to the second tree and, seeing Jofroi with the rifle, I asked him laughing:

  “‘Are you going to go and hunt down your enemies?’

  “‘I am going to chase away the scoundrel,’ he said to me. And he came over to me.

  “My arms dropped.

  “‘You’ll leave me the trees,’ he said to me.

  “‘Jofroi…’

  “‘You will leave them?…’

  “He raised his barrels there beneath his shirt, and you know, he was no longer a man. I said to him, without getting mad (his finger was ready):

  “‘Jofroi don’t be childish.’

  “He was only able to repeat:

  “‘You’ll leave them, my trees, you’ll leave them?…’

  “What was there to discuss? I dropped the rope and came down, there you have it.

  “Ah! That is all the stuff of a story!

  “And what am I going to do now?”

  We all tried, tried everything; I myself went to see Jofroi. He is like a dog who has sunk his teeth into a piece of meat and does not want to let go.

  “They are my trees; I was the one who planted them all; I cannot take this, here, under my own eyes. If he comes back I will shoot him in the belly, and then I will blow my brains out.”

  “But he paid for it.”

  “If I had known what it was for, then I would not have sold it.”

  “Jofroi,” I told him, “it is because you kept the house; so you are still here, you see everything; it breaks your heart, it is a slap in the face, I understand, but put yourself in Fonse’s place. He bought it, he paid, it is his; he has the right to do what he wants.”

  “But my trees, my trees. I bought them at the fair at Riez, I did, in ‘05, the year that Barbe said to me: ‘Jofroi we are probably going to have a child and then the big Revaudières fire made her miscarry. These trees, I carried them on my back from Riez; I did it all alone: the holes, carted in the manure; I got up in the night to light the damp straw, so that they would not freeze; at least ten times I made the nicotine remedy and each can went for a hundred francs. Here, look at the leaves, if they are not healthy, I don’t know what is. Where will you find trees this old that are still like that? Ah, of course, they hardly bear any more, but we have to be reasonable, after all. You know that old trees are not young; one does not kill everything just because they get old. Then would you have to kill me, me too, just because I am old? Come on, come on, let him think a little, too.”

  It is difficult to make him understand that it is not the same thing for him as it is for the trees.

  Then everyone set upon Fonse. We went to him after supper in a group. They said to me: “You know how to talk, talk to him; we cannot leave things like this.”

  I said to him:

  “Fonse, listen: Jofroi is stubborn; there is nothing to be done, he thinks like a drum you know. You are the only intelligent one in the affair, so show it. Do you know what I advise you to do? We’ll arrange everything: you give him back his land, and he gives you back your money, no fees for the deal, as you said, of course, you do not need to be out anything, and then it’s over. He is an old man, we cannot leave him like this, maybe two years away from his death, with sorrow. Let us arrange it in this manner.”

  And Fonse who is the best old fellow in all creation said right away:

  “Let’s do it.”

  But then there was something else.

  Jofroi has already deposited everything into the safety deposit box. He no longer has the money. He only has his income.

  He is there in the village square; they made Fonse come, everyone is around; there is no gun, there is no risk of anything. We are here to discuss matters.

  “Well if you do not have the money,” says Fonse, “what do you expect me to say to you? I cannot give you back your land for nothing; I paid, I did.”

  Jofroi is steadfast. Fonse’s reasoning is solid. It is a wall to crack your head against. There is nothing to say.

  There is something to be said by Fonse, because he is, as I said, the best man in creation: frank like a healthy pig who will give all of his blood so that he can be eaten.

  “Listen Jofroi, I will arrange things even so. You have your income; you need so much to live; your land, since you cannot return the money, let’s call it a loan. So. It will be there for you as long as you live, and you can do what you like with the trees.”

  That seemed like the wisdom of Solomon to us. We all looked on with happy eyes. It was finished. Things were squared away; I even thought that the monument to the dead was not all that bad. We heard magpies singing.

  Jofroi does not seem satisfied. He mulls it over and over again.

  In the end he says:

  “That means that even if you loan it to me, it will not be mine any more. It will still be yours. The trees will be yours.”

  “What do you want me to say?” said Fonse desperately.

  And the comedy began.

  Albéric came, one of the neighbors of Maussan. He was running. He stopped suddenly, whirling his arms, crying out: “Quick, quick, come quick.”

  We all began to run towards the farm and, while running, Albéric cried to us:

  “Jofroi has thrown himself out the window.”

  No, he had not thrown himself out the window
. When we arrived he was up there on the roof of the house, well to the side, the tips of his toes on the zinc of the gutter. He cried:

  “Move away so I can jump.”

  Barbe was there, on her knees in the dust.

  “Do not jump Jofroi, do not jump” she cried. “Do not stand there on the edge where the dizziness might get to you, oh, great God and good Virgin and holy Monsieur le Curé; take him away from there. Do not jump, Jofroi.”

  “Take her away from there so I can jump.”

  We are all there, not knowing what to do. Fonse went in to get a mattress from the bed; he set it on the stones of the courtyard just at the place where Jofroi might jump.

  “Take it away,” cries Jofroi, “take it away so I can jump.”

  “You are a beast,” cries Fonse, “What good will it do you to jump?”

  “If I want to jump,” responds Jofroi.

  “No, no, good mother,” says Barbe.

  It went on: jump, do not jump; he kept us there for more than an hour. In the end I called out to him:

  “Jump and get it over with.”

  Then he stepped back a bit and asked:

  “Who was it that said that?”

  “I did,” I said, “Yes I did; aren’t you done playing the clown up there? Ah, you are making out well on your roof. You are going to break the tiles with your big shoes and break the gutter. That is what you are going to do. And then you will have gotten far. If you are going to jump, then jump and get it over with.”

  He thought about it, he looked at us, all of us, mute, below, not knowing how it was going to end, all of us with faces raised towards him, so that he must have thought we were a row of eggs in a basket. Then he said:

  “No, if that’s the way it is, and since you want me to jump, I will not jump. I will hang myself when no one else is around.”