The Serpent of Stars

by Jean Giono

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Appendix

  Copyright Page

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  I first read The Serpent of Stars in France in 1998. First published in 1933, it was out of print at that time, but I found a copy of the fifth printing (1949) at a used book stand at the market in Apt. The pages were still uncut. I am deeply indebted to Elizabeth Deshays, first for recommending the book, and then for reading through and repairing my translation of it. I would also like to thank M. Dumas, of the Dumas Bookstore in Apt, for serving as consultant. It is to them I owe the following anecdote.

  When the composer Darius Milhaud read this novel, he loved it, and curious about the extraordinary, unknown musical instruments described in it, he wrote to Giono to find out more about them. Giono wrote a laconic note back saying that he couldn’t tell him anything more about them, simply because he had made them up.

  All the footnotes in this text are also Giono’s inventions. As translator, I’ve added none of my own.

  To Professor Eduard Wechssler

  Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?

  WALT WHITMAN

  I

  IT ALL BEGAN WITH CÉSAIRE ESCOFFIER. It all began that May day. The sky was smooth as a washing stone; the mistral had scrubbed it blue; the sun spurted out from all sides; things no longer had shadows; the mystery was there, against the skin; this wind of perdition tore words from the lips and carried them off into other worlds. Despite all that, “you did the fair.” You can hardly give up a fair in May. If rain threatens, you take along an umbrella. If this wind comes up, you hurl yourself into it like a swimmer, you thrash about like a mill with arms, you bellow out the prices, you spend the whole day with your eyes shut, your ears ruptured, as if in a sea, but even so, you do business, and in the evening, sheltered by the walls, you open your eyelids, burned by the salt and the wind. Your bag of coins, like something ripped from the sea bottom, is full of bits of grass and sand.

  That was when I went looking for the shepherds. Usually I found them near the blanket merchant buying themselves what they needed for life on the plateaus. This time, I didn’t find their cart and the edge-toolmaker told me, “He didn’t come. He took cold in the mountain passes. We were all together at the Laragne fair. We left in the middle of the night. It got to him in no time at all. ‘It seems as though I’m breathing knives,’ he said to me. He’s up there at the inn by the road, Au Panier des Filles, do you know it?”

  That took the wind out of my sails! No more shepherds! No more fair this time around! I had counted on today, hoping I might learn the rest of that epic, “The Evergreen Oaks”! It was as though I was in a dream and unable to think. I drew away into those sheltered alleyways: the Observantine and the Aubette where the wind makes more peaceful lakes.

  There the honeysuckle on the houses barely moved, pools of silence and shadow slept in the curve of the walls. This was at street level beyond the wind’s reach, a country where you always have to be on your guard.

  After a little while, in this bay between the grocery and the boat captain’s house, I saw gleaming on the cobblestones what looked like a stream of little stars. It ran under a large arbor of roses. I let myself get used to the darkness; the coolness and calm of the street poured into my open eyes like the good black water of sleep. At my feet, I saw a whole herd of gleaming pots, and the potter was looking at me.

  There were olive jars, tea pots, water jugs, and a great paunch of sweaty black clay for the man to use. He had just finished drinking. He wiped his mustache. He was also made of clay.

  FROM ALL sides, the sly day shifted about; and the mistral shook the sky like sheet metal.

  In the middle of the pots, in a square marked off by cords of red wool, arranged in three rows, there were little pot-bellied pots, stuffed with newspaper. I thought of the honey from the hills and I said to the man, “You must give me one of those.”

  “Are you in love?” he asked in response.

  It reached me at the same time as his blue gaze, soft and amenable as underwater grass, and the sudden mystery of the day pure of shadows.

  Should I say yes? No? How to find the truth in that!

  I explained, “I’m married, and so . . .”

  He asked, “Is your wife sick?”

  I quickly said no, because all of a sudden, I had understood. It all tied in: the alleyway resonant as a large flute, this diluted sun, this sky so thick that its color ran over the outline of the houses, this clay man gifted with speech: it was all a spell!

  WE SEALED a good, strong friendship, not over a glass of anise at the Café de la Boscotte, but like that, without moving from our spots, him over there, me here on the other side of the pots and our looks exchanging between them more and more of his blue and my blue of friendship.

  In the end, he stepped over all his mute clay, he reached out his tree root of a hand, all rough; he said, “If you have the time, come see me. Judging from what you were about to say, we’ll get along fine together. My name is Césaire Escoffier.”

  HE HAD explained very clearly to me that he lived in Saint-Martin-l’Eau, that you first had to go to the village, then take a left after the threshing ground with all the bales of wheat, then climb to the spine of the Berre hut, then cross through the pine woods, then look for the bloody wound of his clay pit in the hill. When I reached the jostling rush of hills, my heart began to sink. Such waves of earth and spray of trees as far as the eye could see! A big ivy squatting in the hollow of the valley was gnawing the fleshless bones of a dead farm. It swung its heavy head. It tossed its green suckers in the grass; it went off in its slow desire, heavy with branches and black leaves, toward a groaning sheepfold. The earth was torn up by great claws; in other places, it was beaten and trampled like a wallow, but all along its width and length it retained the imprint of some beast heavier than the sky. Apart from that, there was no sign of a bird, no squeal of rats in the bushes, or that sound of a spring big snakes make when they flow sleepily through the grass. There was only the life of sap, but all of it so hot with life you felt that ferocious burning just by touching the light stem of a honeysuckle.

  I am used to it, but I stood there facing it a good while, naked and cold. Finally, I got up my courage and I went down into the foam of the trees. By noon I was wandering lost, my throat on fire, in this prison of a valley that forms the base of a huge crater. Where to turn when, with each step, a tree moves, scolding you from behind? Three times already, separating the branches of apple trees grown wild, I had seen a solid wall of rock behind them. The sun had sucked out all my moisture. I was dry as dead wood hearing my skin crack, my brain doing red cartwheels in the blackness of my head, when I heard the sound of a three-tone flute, completely human, so very human, so human that with the rest of my moisture, I let out an “Oh!” full of hope. The flute fell silent. After a moment, it sounded further on, near the willows of an abandoned drinking trough. I went there. No one! Just water which leaped in fits and starts out of the wooden spout, water heavy with the smell of sulfur, water so thick with earth that it had filled its basin with yellow mud and was overflowing it.

  The flute rang out from under the pines. In its direction I found an opening between two rocks. Struggling desperately with the serpents of an elder tree, I passed through. There were seeds, bits of flowers in my hair; a big sticky leaf clung to my cheek. But, emerging like that when you’ve lost hope, your courage quickly returns. The path was there beneath my feet; the flute rang out there ahead of me like a hunting d
og’s bell. I walked, the trees withdrew from my road, the grass was cool against my legs, and all of a sudden I saw, above, on the hillside, a deep wound, dark from bleeding clay.

  “So!” he called, seeing me arrive, “you come from below? You look like a human plant. Whatever possessed you?”

  He waited for me above his clearing, and drawn by his large hand which had grasped my own, I made the last step. He gave me the two-spouted jug. I replenished myself with water inside and out by pouring it down my throat, by spraying my chest with its clear rays. After that, I felt a breath of wind. Everything returned to order in my head, and it seemed to me that I was still the master.

  I MIGHT as well say at once how strange this dwelling place was. In the hills, a current of water is life. The place knows it so well that it remains there, arid and dry, motionless, sure of its old powers, its burning ground, its blurry air, like flames in which those broad illusions of mirage silently explode. A current of water passes under the nostrils, and you’re saved. As for me, I just had the entire hand of water caressing me. It was still there curling my hairs in its cool fingers. I had become the master of my body once again when, before following Césaire, who said to me, “Come to the workshop,” I gazed all around, from the distant depths of the sky to the thick dappled meadow that kept the spring water folded safely within its leaves.

  BELOW US the brush, like a swamp with its thick odor of rotting grass, went off on its foaming way to rest against the far horizon of blue iron. This tip of the hill emerged like a small island; a great cavern, black and bloody as a hole in live flesh, was the home of Escoffier.

  Within, against the daylight of the doorway, two wheels were set up: one large one for a man to use, one small one for I don’t know what, so miniature it immediately conjured a light body made of air and thought. On the shelf was another one of those little magic pots.

  “You see,” he said to me, “she was just making it.”

  “Who?” I said, my eyes wide, not daring to move my feet for fear of stepping on her.

  “My daughter, the eldest, the redhead. She’s the one who invented everything. There you have it. I believe that it came from a dream she had. She began to turn that from the hollow of her thumb. The teacher told me, ‘She doesn’t do anything, she yawns if I talk, it’s as if she was drawn out of another world and she’s still watching that other world through a little hole.’ ‘Her eyes are completely empty, your daughter’s.’ So, I said, ‘Okay, she’ll stay at home.’ It’s true, she has the eyes of a goat. So one evening, I talked it over with her. We were lying down under the pines. She was stretched out against my side, her head resting on my arm. She said ‘Papa!’ I said, ‘ Yes, my girl!’

  “BUT I’M making you stand there and you’ve just had a long walk. Have a seat, we’ll just wait for you to stop sweating, and then I’ll introduce you to my family. You’ll stay with us tonight, we’ve got a place for you to sleep. You don’t mind sleeping on the ground?”

  We were there on the front bench, a bit of evening was beginning to rise up in the woods, and already its calm water, rocked in the base of the crater, was engulfing the holm oaks. The earth sighed a long sigh, so soft, so calm that no more than two or three eddies of birds rose. The wild swallows called to one another. All together they dove from the top of the sky toward our two human faces. They were like bits of dead wood in a great whirlpool. The ocean of sky rolled over us in the peaceful life of its waves. We were there in the depths of that great brine of all life, at the very source of truth in life’s thick mud, which is the mixture of men, beasts, trees, and rock. Under the palm of my hand, I felt the slow pulse of granite, I heard the currents of sap carrying their loads; my blood throbbed in my head, and coming from the boundaries of the sky, powerful rushes of cold and heat brushed my cheeks as if from a thrown stone.

  The sun remained perched like a pigeon on our summit. This meadow which protected the spring extended further than the waters. From the grass where she was taking an afternoon nap, the mistress of the pottery rose with the rush of the wind.

  “My wife,” said Césaire.

  She was white and soft, and fat, completely covered with fat, so much fat, so soft that you expected to see her arms suddenly pour out of the barrels of her sleeves like mortar. Her lovely full, round head laughed the eternal laugh of the moon. Her beautiful black, well-groomed hair, glistening with pure oil, smelled of olive and fennel. Her eyes were as big as green almonds. She stood up. And immediately one, two, three, four, five children began to pour from her like a spray of seeds, like drops of spring water. Suddenly there she was, in the grass, like a spring rushing with children, and the last to detach herself from her—frail, red-haired, milky and salty as an April morning—was that young sorceress with gentian eyes.

  THESE were the gestures, natural and simple. We made a meal of grass and night. On the edge of the clearing was set down a large plate full of this salad of the hills, very pale, picked in the shade, wriggling about, gleaming with oil, like a nest of green spiders. We dug in with our fingers, each in turn. We were all in a circle, with the plate in the middle. A large slab of bread in the left hand served as plate and napkin, and when that bread had soaked up enough oil, had wiped the fingers well enough, we ate it, and it tasted like a harvest afternoon.

  The night we munched with the salad. The night overflowed from the crater in slow gushes, and our mouths were full of night when we bit into the bread crusts rubbed with garlic. So we had those grasses to eat, and then the night—and it was a night in the brush, and then, those strange yellow glances from the fourteen-year-old witch. It all provided food for the belly and the brain. I don’t know if the brain really had its separate share. I think rather that everything, salad, oil, dark bread, night, and the gentian glances, they all went into the belly, there they all made weight and warmth, there they were all changed into saps and smells, so much so that finally, we were drunk from the triple power of the sky, the earth, and truth.

  TWICE already I had heard that sound of the cowbell, once near the pine forest which slept growling like a sheep dog, the other time near that crouching white rock, liquid as a weasel when it moves, and now I heard it again and I looked up at a big red star.

  “The shepherd will be with us,” said Escoffier. “Woman, chill the hyssop water.”

  The children’s bed had been laid out: a thick, creaking layer of dried grass. They were on top of it, completely naked, sprawled out, arms and legs tangled, scraping bellies, slapping bottoms, the force of their movements releasing the scents of savory and citronella. I heard them say, “We haven’t killed the lion!”

  “Poor thing! Let it sleep a little first.”

  “The sun’s out.”

  “It’s the sun of the rain.”

  “There’s only one sun.”

  “There’s the right sun and the left sun.”

  AND THE shepherd arrived at the same time as the moon. No, the moon had arrived first. It was there, rising slowly over the roundness of the opposite hill, when the shepherd came noiselessly out of the lower valley, and he obliterated the moon with his huge body.

  “Company, Césaire and everyone,” he said, “so, how are you?”

  “Fine,” said Césaire, “as you can see, we’re enjoying this fine night.”

  A moment ago, the young sorceress had undressed at the same time as her brothers and sisters; I had heard snaps click, and then she shed her dress like a skin, throwing it off her shoulders, shaking it from the ends of her arms, freeing her legs one after the other from that fallen thing. From over there she cried, “Oh, shepherd!”

  Then she came, without shame in front of the men, and for all we could see, her whole body smooth as a washed stone.

  We were there, on the edge of the clearing, on a moon beach. A big night beetle’s shell made the empty salad bowl ring as it scrabbled with its huge forehead and mad feet against the slippery curve of the earthenware. We could hear ourselves breathe. The wind was hot, then cool, acco
rding to whether it brought in the hollow of its hand the round air from the depths of the valleys or the air flat as a knife sharpened on the millstone of the high moors. Each time the beetle’s armature sounded in the empty bowl, the almond eyes of the pottery’s mistress gazed long at her naked daughter, then at Césaire and the shepherd, and I saw her white mouth, which was attempting silent words. The shepherd, a man of about fifty, big of bone but not heavy with flesh, without anything more than dry leather skin over leather muscles, a man of the hills, made of sun, dust, and dead leaves, the shepherd, sitting on the hard ground, facing the night, played around on a big nine-pipe flute with his fingers; he tapped out a little tune, scratching the sensitive pipes with the ends of his fingernails.

  All this was difficult, as much for Césaire as for the shepherd as for the wise little girl. You could feel it, they were like big balloons full of a thick wine. And the mother only removed the cork after looking hard at me. Here I was, simpler and more fragile than fleabane. All the winds battered me, and I had just heard the thick gravel of the sky rolling in this silence when she said, “And you, mister, you know how to sleep on a grass bed in our earthen home?”

  “Yes,” I said, completely overcome, and then, “yes, this won’t be the first time. I often do it. And I love the coolness of caves and that warmth you get, come morning, and then, Césaire, shepherd, let’s not put on airs, this is our true home, in fact, beneath it all.”

  Little by little, equilibrium and ease returned to me. I had only to show my heart to these men, to these women, and I was sure of being loved, and I was sure of understanding all their thoughts, of being at the source of their reflections, of being their very selves, neither more fat, nor less fat, of being with them and emerging from the grass no more than they did, healthy beasts among the grasses and the beasts.