The Serpent of Stars

by Jean Giono

  “Yes,” said the wife, “but, Césaire, don’t put him near the root.”

  “What root?” I said. “What do you mean a root?”

  “The root of a tree,” said the woman, “a white root. It’s there bulging from the ground like running milk, but it’s hard and full of ill will, you can’t imagine. And it’s sly and impossibly strong, and once it tried to wrap itself around my foot and it was going to draw me down to the bottom of the earth.”

  “There you go again with your root,” said Césaire, his voice slow and true as he turned his head, and then he drifted off into the night once more on the beautiful wings of his gaze.

  The young witch had wrapped her soft dress around her waist. The shepherd hummed quietly like a spring. The children were asleep, you could hear them sleeping, and there was the moon, over the hilly heap of naked children.

  “Let me, Césaire, let me talk. On the other side of the wall, when we were at the inn in Lincel, you remember, Césaire, a house above ground. There were two charcoal burners, a man and a woman who was his wife. We heard them living. On the other side of the wall, there was a block of day or a block of night and human life. We heard him, the man, when he slapped her like a mill with arms, slapped all that was only skin and bones and rang like an empty barrel. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she said, ‘this savage is going to kill me!’ A little later, she was laughing and they began fooling around so noisily that I said to that one... (she pointed to the young redhead), ‘Sleep, close your eyes, it’s none of your business what they’re up to.’

  “And then they were snoring, which wasn’t hard to imagine and was no cause for fear. There you have it. In the morning, the man would walk out, ho hum, swinging his carbide lantern, whistling that song of the Piémont, and with the first notes I said to you, ‘Césaire, wake up, he’s whistling, listen, isn’t it beautiful.’ And the woman, that was easy to imagine, too. She would come down the stairs about the time I would be sitting by the fountain combing my hair. She would come down the stairs, heavy with a big bundle of dirty laundry in her arms, and she would stop from time to time to pull up her slipping stocking, and she would come and throw it all into the washing basin, and then standing up again, she would say, ‘Ouf! That’s enough to keep me busy today.’ Yes, whatever is human I can imagine, and I do like to go off into those lives that aren’t mine and follow them a bit, and then leave them when things become difficult, and come back into the life of my body, which is what it is, but it’s mine. I like that well enough and so I don’t need to be afraid. But as for what happens behind the walls of the earth, that I don’t like, but it’s stronger than me, it draws me in and it sucks me under and it drinks me.”

  She stopped for a moment to lick her lips with her big, quick tongue.

  “Here,” she went on, “you could say that I have the bread and the knife, but I like the bitterness of it; it makes my brain water, you might say. I’ve spent a long time listening to the sound of the earth and I’ve always listened to the neighbors, but here, the neighbors, well, first of all, it’s those huge gray pines and then those fine old oaks as thick as men, with human voices but so heavy with a power that comes from the depths of time, so that you say to yourself, ‘If they wanted to . . . !’ And at first, I lay down against the right wall. And there, all at once, as soon as I stretched out on my bed, I was plunged into sleep, like a candle blown out. A thing that blew out my life all at once. One night, I struggled with my eyelids. They lowered, I lifted them, until I had to hold them open with my fingertips. There was a purring, like a cat’s, in the earth’s big throat. And I was going into this noise, saying to myself, ‘It’s that, or that, or maybe it’s that!’ until the moment when I saw the black life of a spring, and I said, ‘Césaire, I’m making my bed over there, you can come if you like, and if you stay, there’ll be no more children, because I tell you I’m not leaving that left side anymore. My mother didn’t make me for sleeping beside a spring that never sleeps.’ And Césaire came because he has to be against a woman’s flesh, that’s his nature.

  (Césaire is still out in the night; the wife wets her lips.)

  “. . . There, one fine evening, I heard scratching for a long time. It made a tock, and a bit of earth fell on the blanket and from the hole, a long white root came out. Ever since, it’s grown, it twists itself and twists again. Luckily, it’s blind. It’s searching for me.

  “It was a summer evening, and the big door was opened wide onto the night. That one lay down beside me and put her little arm around my neck. That was no good because I have a big neck and I’m heavy, and I said to her, ‘Move your arm, I’ll hurt you,’ but she stayed close to me and I was frozen with fear and she was hot as a coal burning me where she clung. And she said to me, ‘Mama, look at the night. It’s full of stars someone’s only just sown. Who is it who sows them? Who is it who has a sack full of them? It’s fistfuls and fistfuls that someone throws. They look like rice, look.’

  “She talked without stopping, all hot with her heat. And I slept with her little arm around me.”

  IT WAS now the middle of the night. Madame Escoffier’s voice was slow and heavy like mortar, like the mortar of her flesh. I saw her again hardly two weeks ago, and I thought about all the bends and turns of that night as I tossed in my hands the large fruit picked at the end of the road. And I was drawn back to the clay cave and to my friends. In Lincel, in Saint-Martin-les-Eaux, you wouldn’t know that this fat woman with the beautiful children knows the countries beyond the air. When she goes off to do her shopping in Forcalquier, if she examines the eggplant, if she squeezes the artichoke, you don’t know, you couldn’t know, that she is knowledgeable in the great science of sky and earth, that she knows, according to the very deepest secrets, the eggplant’s true weight and the artichoke’s bitter blood.

  At that hour, it was the middle of the night, night thick with uncut leaves, beautiful night slapping like a sail, sea blue night, and its wave rolled onto the beach of trees, into those reefs of the hills’ summits. The moon’s spray broke gently against the rocks.

  Césaire grabbed me by the wrist and, without thinking, drew me to him with his rough strength, and I felt the great pincers of his fingers enter my flesh.

  “SO,” HE SAID, brusquely and between his teeth, “now you know, now you’ve heard the woman. Do we understand each other or not? . . .”

  Suddenly my head was full of all those emotions raised by trees, that great love for bark, that friendship with boughs, and also that fear before the motionless sway of their overwhelming life, everything that, since my youth and my first steps into the hills, inhabited me, and I answered straight from the heart, “Yes, we understand each other, we were made to understand each other, this must have been destined long ago.”

  “Speaking of that,” said the wife . . .

  But the shepherd raised his hand in the moonlight and began to speak.

  As I’ve said, this was a dry man, made of a pile of scree. He spoke with a dark creaking. His mouth opened into his beard and the words came out from between teeth all healthy and ice white despite his age.

  “In the rock of Volx, there are tawny eagles. If you lie down in the grass, they come. They turn into the wind, there overhead, and then they dive straight down. The eagle’s shadow wakes you. If you’re asleep, it passes cool over your eyelids, and you wake up. There it is. You wake up, even if you’re sleeping well.

  “Once, I had a dog. He was mean as the wind. He didn’t know what he did anymore than the wind does. He passed over everything, brutal, all his strength concentrated. He cowed a Corsican ram as big as a load of hay. It was the sheared ewes that killed him. They revolted. They smothered him, then trampled him to death. Then they came to see me, contrite. And I said, ‘Good!’

  “Once I saw someone, a man, a child I should say—I saw someone who carried the weight of the sky. His whole back trembled from it and he bellowed like a bull because he didn’t know how to talk, because he had never known how to talk to men. An
d the birds all came from across the fields. The birds and all the beasts, but the first day, it was only the birds, that first day, he had a bird on the tip of each of his fingers.

  “I knew a man called Martial of Reillanne who had the curse of the beast upon him. Dogs, cats, horses, sheep, anything; at the scent of him, they all went mad. He wanted to try an experiment. He bought a horse at the Mane fair. It was his wife who led the horse; he was walking at least a hundred meters behind, but when the woman touched the snaffle with her left hand, the horse raised its head and clacked its teeth against the bit. It was because the woman touched her husband with this left hand at night. When the horse was in the stable, Martial said, ‘I have to see. Maybe it’s this jacket that I’m wearing.’ He took off the jacket. Then on down, he took off his belt, his breeches, his shoes. He got completely naked, and he said, ‘Just in case! . . . Like this, I’ll really be able to tell.’ It was no use. He went into the stable naked. The horse smashed its hoofs rearing against the stone wall. Everything died from disgust: chickens, ducks, rabbits. It got worse and worse. One day, he was leaving a café, and a pigeon flew over his head, beat its wings, and rolled over dead. He looked at the bird and said, ‘That’s it.’ He went to find a rope and he hung himself. He walked through the whole village with his rope. Nobody stopped him.

  “There are trees and there are animals. I was a small-time boss, a small-time shepherd. Two hundred sheep. My proprietor lived in Raphèle. Two hundred sheep, it’s not many, not enough to understand.

  “There are great bosses, there are big-time shepherds. In charge of ten thousand beasts, a hundred thousand beasts, masters who open the door, say only one word into the darkness of each sheepfold. The great wooden gates are opened wide, the hired hands are there lined up on either side. And the boss says the word, just one, no more, then he turns his back, tightens his hand around his staff and he sets off, and the sheep come out, and the sheep walk behind him. It’s like a sash that he’s attached to his sides and that he unravels over the country. He walks along ahead, he sets off, he draws the sheep. They fall into step, they start walking. He is already over there in the far distance, having crossed through two or three villages, two or three woods, two or three hills. He is like the needle and the whole thread of sheep passes where he has passed. It passes through the villages, the woods, the hills behind him. Here, the sheep are still leaving the stable. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, that’s quite a stretch. As they go along, the assistants who are there with the hired hands say, ‘Good-bye, it’s my turn,’ and one after the other, they set off. The last sheep goes out, the stable is closed. It goes out of the yard, the big gates are closed. No one watches. It’s a mystery. Above the wall, the dust rises. You hear that sound of a big stream, a big herd, that sound of the world, that sound of sky, that sound of stars. It’s a mystery. The proprietor takes off his hat. He feels small with all his paper deeds housed at the lawyer’s office. That isn’t what makes a master. He thinks of the needle that draws the long thread of sheep. He says, ‘Come, let’s have a drink,’ and everyone goes into the kitchen.

  “Those others are the great masters of the beasts; they are the ones that know.”

  THAT WAS how the night proceeded, and now I felt it all damp, stuck against the round of earth like a sheet coming out of the wash. The moon had taken on its full speed; a little spray of cloud escaped from under its sinking weight. I remembered my tremendous youth, that time when, by whatever divination, I had been delivered over to the great powers, in confidence, with the words, “Here’s the child, take him.” Now I understood that great blue gaze of my father’s when, returning from those summer months when I had followed after Massot the shepherd, pale from the green of the grass and emitting the scent of fennel, I entered the workshop where he had remained crouched over. So it wasn’t the health of the flesh that he felt in me when, seizing me by the shoulders, he planted me in front of him to look, before embracing me. It was the health of the spirit. “And now, you know, son?”

  That was how the night proceeded. We were on the rooftops of the world.

  Césaire breathed in the four corners of the sky.

  “There’s the wind,” he said, “there’s our wind, shepherd. We’re going to be able to play.”

  In the quick of the moon, in that circle of short grass embraced by the woods, a beautiful pine lyre held up its two trunks.

  As you approached, the tree began to sing in a voice that was human and vegetable at the same time. I saw that someone had harnessed the two horns of the tree by means of a hollow yoke. They had extended nine cords from the yoke to the foot of the tree. Thus, it had become a living lyre, full all at once with the ample life of the wind, the mute life of the trunks swollen with resin, and the blood-gorged life of man.

  The shepherd touched the cords to adjust them. You could hear the sounds falling far below, in the middle of the brush, and the leaves muttered, as though under large raindrops from a storm. Finally, the shepherd stood with his back against the huge curved trunk, he spread his hands wide to span the strings, and he waited for the wind.

  We heard it. Beyond the valleys, the wide plateaus were already whistling under it like hot iron dipped in water. It arrived.

  It arrived, and immediately, from the level height of the hill soared the song of the three lives. The whole tree vibrated all the way down to its roots, and with the wide reach of his fingers, the man gripped the reins of that beautiful flying horse. The whole sky streamed through the lyre. Then a hailstorm of birds fell from the night, and, like stones on the move, the sheep began to climb up through the woods.

  They emerged quietly from the line of trees. They came, step by step, one by one, without a sound. There they were, heads lowered, listening, and rams’ horns dragged in the grass, and trembling all over, the lamb hid under its mother’s belly.

  Without a sound!

  Only once in a while, deep in the grass, the beasts sighed, all together. The hills fell silent. The man gave a voice to the joy and the sadness of the world.

  II

  A PRISON OF FOUR WALLS AND A whole cemetery of books, but, sometimes, those walls draw apart, open, like a huge flower, and a deluge of sky crashes down inside there in a rush.

  When you carry away with you the words “masters of beasts,” and the mute music of the pine-lyre, you are no longer the man you were before. You have taken a step toward the countries beyond the air; you are already beyond the air. The ordinary world passes just against your back. Before you opens the wide plain of clouds, and all your skin expands under the suction of those unknown lands.

  I have always remembered how that night ended. Dawn came. I knew it because the eyes of the sheep all went out at the same time. The moon sank behind the darkness.

  “Let’s take advantage of the good hours,” said Césaire.

  The wind died. The last note flew off all alone like the dove from the ark.

  The wife gathered the cluster of children. She took them off into the clay cave. The young sorceress woke her brother, the next oldest after her, and she dragged him along, pulling him by the hand, him lagging heavily behind, his head hanging, his eyes closed, her, lean as a bone, with those living antennae, her yellow eyes.

  I said, “I’ll sleep outside with the shepherd.”

  Yes, I was afraid of the root and that spring from the depths of the earth. The shepherd lent me a homespun coat, tight at the collar, but then full around the body, and, folded within that wool which smelled of mule and thick grass, I was going off to sleep when the man leaned over me, with his white face, and said, “When you come back, I will tell you what I did the night of the great revolt.”

  THEN CAME the time of the summer solstice. The desire was constantly within me like a caper bush, beautiful flowers, but thorns and a taste of pepper to make you salivate like a fountain. Tired of the inner turmoil all that created, I took up my walking stick. That act alone was magic. It was a ritual gesture. A great wave of smells rushed over me. Th
e wind took me by the shoulders like a sail and I set off from the coast of Saint-Martin-l’Eau.

  First of all, I have to say that lots of things gave me impetus that day. In the morning, first, I heard a large herd enter the town from the south and grate against the houses as it crammed the streets. I went to wait for them at the fountains. The shepherds were wild-eyed. The head shepherd jumped out from all sides like a grasshopper giving orders which, at hearing them, you sat down, mouth open. Only the dogs went to stretch out in the shade. They watered the sheep. They gave them a little rest, standing, not letting them fold their legs or lie down, then “Hup!” The head shepherd whistled through his fingers and they all set off with their sleepiness and their suffering.

  After that, I was watching peacefully from my window which looks out over everything, and there I saw it: the whole county was smoking under the hooves of the sheep. From Pertuis, from Valensole, from Pierrevert, from Corbières, from Sainte-Tulle, the lead sheep nudged one another on along the roads in the full fire of the great sun. Already, in the background, the Durance was lying in a cloud of earth thicker than the clouds of the sky, and the sound of a spring that had released all its waters danced over the country like a huge serpent crushing all the foliage.

  It was the height of the move to summer pastures. All the animals left the red Crau, where the full sun was already crushing everything.

  So, in the hills at noon, I ate my bread at the Turpine spring and I stayed there for an hour to watch the water fleas jumping. That noise of animals on the move was constantly in the sky. It resounded across the clouds as if across stretched skin. The noise no longer rose from the earth. A gray haze which was the dust from the fields and roads poured across the sky in the slow curves of thick, beautiful muscles. The whole world took part in the emigration of the beasts. The order had come from beyond the sky in the dazzling mystery of the sun. The rising tide of beasts obeyed the world’s orders. I was filled with that great monotonous noise like a sponge in a basin. I was more that noise than myself. The streams of sheep descended the length of my arms. I heard them gathering in the great woods of my hair. Their horned feet sounded heavily against the full of my chest. All of a sudden, I felt the dizzying rotation of the earth and I woke up.