The Serpent of Stars

by Jean Giono

  Here, everything is new, land and men. You have wine from Arnoulas and water in seven lovely springs. Springs as round-faced as girls, all gushing and plump. It’s true that this water is not welcoming and that it wells up without bindweed, without rushes, without periwinkle, without moss, from between bare lips of rock. But so what, must you always have frills? Can’t you love cold water for being cold water and do you think you quibble over such things when you’ve just spent twenty days going through the dust rising from all of Provence? The water is all by itself in a stream of blue schist. It is the blue of the blue of cornflowers. When it lets out one of its braids, its white heart glistens. That’s why we choose to stop at Mallefougasse. We don’t have the same spans for measuring fear. For us, the country is wide, comfortable, flat. We have wine from Arnoulas and water in the little valley of seven springs, peace, the joy of feet. That’s why!

  And then, too, it’s a kind of reunion. Sometimes you have things to say that you’ve saved for a whole year. You think, “I’ll tell him that at Mallefougasse.”

  And so, it must have evolved quite naturally.

  There, reunited on the sparseness of Mallefougasse, exhausted herds, heavy shepherds. Night came. They lit a fire. There was only the night full of stars, this land all alone under the sky, bordered all around by sky, and, as in the earliest times, an ocean of beasts surrounded a few men. They huddled close to the fire. The Sardinian was there that time. And he told stories about the stars above, about the earth below. He told them to make the night pass, and also because his heart was all reflections in which the soul of the world moved.

  The next time, someone said to him, “Sardinian, stand up.” He stood up, and now there were a few more shepherds because it had been repeated from pasture to pasture with “That Sardinian, really, if you could have heard him!”

  The next time, word passed all around, “What if we perform? The Sardinian would lead, and we would speak when it was our turn, what do you say, Sardinian?” And that’s what they did and it went very well because, among the shepherds, the soul of the universe is like a ray of sunlight in water.

  The next time, or maybe that time, the flute warbled in joy, in tune with the words.

  And so, beginning from that moment, the infant-poem could walk sturdily. It was alive and well.

  THE STAGE, as I’ve said, is a square clearing of about twenty paces. At each corner is a fire which dances on pine and cedar boughs, heaps of dry thyme. Four shepherds are in charge of supplying the wood and herbs and, sometimes, when the flame dies down, they fan the coals briskly with leafy branches. These are actors that really count! First of all, it’s from them that the light comes and it’s from them that the scent comes, that essence of resin and burnt juniper that thickens the air and drifts off towards Ganagobie and makes the villages in the woods nervous.

  The drama is accompanied by music, music for three instruments. I won’t talk about that first instrument from which everything springs, from which all music has run, the freely singing earth which is there all around with its weight of animals, herds, trees, grass, wind, springs, the Durance rumbling deep in the valley. The others are the aeolian harp, the tympon, and the water jug. I’ve said how the aeolian harps are made, how the man merges with them to play them, or more precisely, to play the trees and the wind. But, the mixture of that human touch and that breath, master of time and racer through space, creates a god’s voice which goes all the way to the harmonious depths of the horror.

  It is a shepherd’s invention. One of those secret and solitary harps unleashed fear throughout the whole region of Queyras, in ’12 or ’13, a little before the war. This was a village of simple people, with goiters heavy as melons, and for that reason, with heads bent toward the earth. This country has no water. The village is built on rock, hollowed by three long, dark and rumbling underground wells. The opening of the wells, capped by a hood of stone, remains locked with large key all day. The gate is only opened in the evening, just time for the women to draw buckets, to fill pails, to redden their hands on the rust from the chains, to wet their feet in the cool water, to laugh. . . . That particular shepherd, they say, wanted to drink and couldn’t. He was told it was too late. He argued. Arguments with men with goiters always end in yelling and stone throwing. Our shepherd climbed back up his hill to his pasture and there, he made his harp. He claimed, afterwards, to have made it to distract himself, having, of course, forgotten the star branded on his forehead by a piece of flint. What’s certain is that if this harp was made by chance, chance is a great master, because it gave it exactly the resonance of flowing water. It sounded like a huge singing spring. What’s more, having no pine-lyre at this elevation, the shepherd hung it in the branches of an oak. Thus, it was much bigger than usual and it entered the earth more deeply by long radish-like roots.

  At the first sounds of music, the whole village cocked its ear, grunted, grabbed pails and tubs, buckets, pitchers, jugs, and rushed toward the valley where the water seemed to be running. But only the wind ran there. They rubbed their eyes, they wondered aloud to each other, they looked right and left without seeing anything, and yet the sound of water was all around them. At the edge of that dry valley, its stones cutting like a hot knife, they got so excited in their desire for live water, that under the sway of that harp, in the supple open air, they began to imitate the movements of swimming, throwing themselves head first onto the rocks, stretching out in the thorns, scraping themselves, scratching themselves, tearing at their goiters, bloody, drunk with despair and desire. Evening came, when the wells were to be opened. They were opened and from them poured, weaker but also blacker, that song of water which came to sing there through the spell of those huge oak roots thrust deep into the rock.

  Then there was complete chaos. They thought their water was escaping because some underground river had suddenly given way. Caliste went down into his well to touch the water with his hand and never came up again. And, assembled on the clearing that overlooks the valley of Saint-André, the whole village began to howl at his death like a family of wolves. Our shepherd, having gone too far, made a fast escape into the region of Briançon. Some hunters from Saint-André found the harp, cut the strings, and peace returned with the silence.

  So, this is a kind of music that must be measured out, the muted strings not used too much, or just used as a starting point, as a landing for letting the clear notes take wing and fly off. The muted notes have the sadness of doves’ songs. The wind is not perfectly round like a iron rod, but made of waves and undulations. It coos and warbles, and if the pleasant notes sound like bird calls, the muted notes weigh on your heart and make the clouds seem like fat pigeons.

  Here, the wind harps are at a distance from the clearing of at least a good thousand paces. They must be set up on the ridge to allow them the life of the wind. Then, too, too close up, they would have cut off and killed the narrator’s voice. Up above, they are exactly in their place and their distant music is very much the base it must be in the drama.

  There are five harps. They are worked by five shepherds and conducted by a sixth who stays there on the stage and whistles through his fingers. Once for silence, twice for sound.

  Thus, through the play, the music of these harps unfolds. It doesn’t follow the turns in the action. It is distant and monotone like the voice of the world.

  TH E TYMPON is that flute with nine pipes, the flute of play and of distress. It has one scale and two deep, bass Cs, one at the beginning of the scale, one at the end. These somber notes are always there, ready to sound the alarm at each end of the song.

  When all you know is how to play the flute, you only blow into the seven pipes by making the reeds flow before your mouth. That makes a flute song. But, if you’ve grown accustomed to the tympon from long use and when you truly know how to play it, that adds the leavening to the dough, believe me. Right in the middle of the songs, there’s the deep note that sets ringing the whole black basin at the bottom of your heart mea
nt to hold your reserve of tears. Then, you remember in a flash the days of distress. The harsh mountains appear, climbing the sky like she-bears, and the flute song becomes a lyric of life, a verb alive as the day, made at once of joy and sadness.

  You can recognize true tympon players by two very specific signs. This is what they are. When a shepherd sits down, the dog comes to lie beside him, the flocks remain a little farther away. If he’s a tympon player, every time, you’ll see a sheep approach, lay its head on the man’s knees and wait for solace. The second sign is that a tympon player, when he’s alone, when he’s walking alone along his way, he looks behind him ten times, twenty times, to try to see what is back there following him, whose steps he hears in his head.

  THE GARGOULETTES are the water flutes. There are two kinds. One is made out of elder wood. They are like pipes. The other is made out of glazed earth. They are like pitchers, and they imitate bird songs.

  With little gargoulettes, you can very easily hunt quail or any bird with a trilling song. They imitate them, they call to them, they sound exactly like the female. But the gargoulettes the shepherds use are very big. Their song is at once bird song and horse whinny. Ten men blowing hard into ten gargoulettes can make music that turns you to salt. You have only enough time to raise your eyes to search the sky for a flying winged horse.

  The instrument isn’t beautiful, just a pipe or a pitcher, and it takes enormous breath to move and puncture water. The players bind their cheeks with a handkerchief or a scarf. Gargoulette music has great power over animals. After just a little, it makes them mad for love, females as well as males. It has the power of springtime. Extending from where a man plays a gargoulette alone on a hill, you can see the rays afterwards, the marks in the grass of all the love struggles of beasts who heard him. They radiate out like the spokes of a wheel.

  So there is the whole orchestra. Above, on the ridge, the wind harps, here, next to the stage, the tympon and gargoulette players. This time, there were twelve of them. Everything is invention, even in the music. They don’t play traditional tunes. They set off in a flurry, without knowing where they are going, improvising on their own sounds. Before beginning, they say, “With us, you are going to travel far!” And then they play.

  So this is what I myself saw in all that. The harps make the sound of the earth which rolls along over the routes of the sky; the tympons, the sound of men, words and steps, and the sound of beating hearts; the gargoulettes, the sound of the beasts who are born, make love, bellow, and die. All that as if, all of a sudden, you had the ears of a god.

  AS FOR the actors, first of all, there’s the Sardinian. The Sardinian, well, he’s at the very center of the stage, and he’s the one who begins. The others are there, mixed in with the audience; they aren’t designated in advance. They are there just to lean toward their neighbors to tell them, “Wait till you hear what I’ve got to say!”

  The Sardinian cannot go on any longer. He calls, “The Sea,” for example. And, all of a sudden, it’s someone near you who begins to answer. Everyone shouts to him, “Stand up, stand up!”

  He stands up, he goes over, he stands facing the Sardinian, he answers. Only then you know that the one whose velour elbows rubbed against your side was the Sea, was really the sea; he has its voice and soul. When he has finished, he stays there. He has taken his place among the elements. There are even some who won’t ever leave their elemental rank; they’ll remain all their lives as the the Sea, the River, the Woods. It’ll be said that the Sea has claimed his pasture to the left of Seyne, or that the River will come down tomorrow, because one night they were so much that sea and that river that they can never again be called by their father’s name, but only by the name of what they are.

  The one who has finished speaking remains there with the Sardinian. Another one comes, speaks, then falls silent, and then, he takes the hand of the man who was there before him and he waits. At the end of the play, there is a whole wreath of big homespun men holding each other’s hands.

  All that happens on stage are steps and greetings, steps to take up one’s position, greetings to the Sardinian. As for the rest, it’s the words that must show it, and the man who speaks remains still, his arms dangling. There are just two or three places where there is some stage action, always very simple, but occurring at the very height of the pathos. These will be indicated in the play’s translation on the following pages.

  Written down, the text presents in translation a chaos of bristling and tragic words. Tragic, because I sense all their dense beauty and because I am hopeless before them. The language is the most wild type of sea jargon, made up of Provençal, Genoese, Corsican, Sardinian, Niçoise, Old French, Piedmontese, and words invented on the spot as needed. It is a marvelous instrument for epic drama: cries and howls themselves can be long narratives. The imitative harmony is such that gestures are superfluous as the procession of the planets, the rocking of the sea, the drenched course of the land losing its oceans in space all suddenly appear before the stunned listener. I say this to make your mouth water, but you’ll find nothing of all that in my translation. I’ve done my best to put it into very faulty French, but the language of free men is a leaping beast and, here, I’ve only forced open the bars of the cage a little.

  May I be forgiven.

  V

  NIGHT. DISTANT SAINT-JEAN FIRES are eating away at the whole circle of the horizon.

  The Mallefougasse plateau. Four fires at the corners of a square of grazed earth. Next to each flame, a man is standing, a heavy branch of leaves in his hand. All around this lit clearing, the night, and just at the edges of the night, like bubbling foam, the shepherds are seated in their mantles, their overcoats, their big velour jackets.

  The Sardinian. He stands up. He looks to the right, and then to the left, and, at the same time, there is silence to the right and then to the left.

  “So, should we begin?”

  Just at that moment, without any other command but that silence, the wind descends, worked by the harps. The flutes begin to play the sound of a man who is walking in the sea.

  THE SARDINIAN (He moves forward to the middle of the clearing; raises his hand in greeting). Listen, shepherds:

  The worlds were in the god’s net 1 like tuna in the madrague:

  Flips of the tail and foam; a sound that rang out, expelling the wind from every side.

  The god was in the sky up to his knees.

  From time to time, he leaned over, he took some sky in his hands. It ran between his fingers. It was white as milk. It was full of creatures like a huge stream of ants. And in it, images became clear and then faded like things in dreams.

  The god washed his whole body with the sky. Slowly, to get used to life’s cold. He had a sensitive belly. Because everything was created in his belly.

  Afterwards, he began to walk into the sky until he was out of his depths, where he could no longer touch, and he began to swim. His huge hand rose and dipped like a spoon; his great feet dug like pickaxes with nails in front. He was followed all along by a swirl of ripped up grasses. After a little while, he was far off over there, no more than an island amidst the spray.

  He went off because the beginning was finished.

  Blood! Clots of blood!

  The earth is crouching 2 in the belly of the sky like a child in its mother.

  It is in the blood and the guts. It hears life, all around, which is roaring like fire.

  A blue vein enters its head like a snake. That is how it is filled with its kindness.

  A red artery enters its chest. That is how it is filled with its meanness.

  It grows thicker. The more it thickens, the more light it has.

  Finally, it presses against the portal. It wants to be born. It is heavy with the reason of its seed.

  Suddenly, in a jet of fire it is born and it takes off.

  This is the earth’s youth!

  It rolls about in the universe like in the grass. It is all wet with the great blossoming w
aters. It steams with sweat like a horse who has galloped in the sun.

  It trails behind it a lovely odor of milk. You can hear it laughing far off like the sound of nuts cracking.

  Its skin is in the process of drying. There are colors that run in circles around it like rainbows. When a patch of its skin is dry, it turns green.

  This is the earth’s youth!

  This is the great Sunday !

  All the trees are flowering at the same time. On the water there are wide marshes of blue squash. Rocks pass, full of vines which trail like hair. Little round stones run under the grass. All the flowers are ruddy with good health. The leaves are thick as your arm. You can hear the fruits which are all ripening together. The big squash float on the sea. Each time the earth moves, the herds of ripe fruit pour from all sides into the folds of the hill. It begins to smell like sugar. The hills drift off very slowly, bent under that great weight. The plains of sand try to lift up their burden of ripe grasses, and then remain completely flat. The mountains weep water. Bitter flowers grow in the bottom of the streams. The rocks stop, ecstatic. That smell of Sunday, which is the smell of tomato soup! 3