FRANÇOIS AUGIÉRAS
THE
SORCERER’S
APPRENTICE
Translated from the French by
Sue Dyson
THE
SORCERER’S
APPRENTICE
Contents
Title Page
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Afterword
Also Available from Pushkin Press
About the Publisher
Copyright
IN PÉRIGORD there lived a priest. His house stood high above a village made up of twenty dilapidated dwellings with grey stone roofs. These houses straggled up the side of the hill, to meet old, bramble-filled gardens, the church and the adjoining presbytery, which were built on rocks reflected in the River Vézère, flowing past at their base. Few people lived there; this priest served several parishes, which meant that, since he spent all day travelling round the countryside, he did not return home until evening. He was aged around thirty-five, just about as unpleasant as a priest can be, and although this was all my parents knew about him, they had entrusted me to his care, urging him to deal strictly with me. Which indeed he did, as you will see.
On the evening of my arrival, the sky was a soft shade of gold. He did not offer me any supper; the moment I turned up on his doorstep he took me straight to my room, which was located in a corridor as ugly as himself. Leaving the door ajar, he abandoned me without a word, if you discount a few unanswerable phrases, such as: every cloud has a silver lining; the tables are turned; come what may; sleep well in the arms of Morpheus; and other such drivel. I heard him go into the next bedroom, moving about, doing God knows what, talking to himself, then there was silence.
I had been asleep for less than an hour when I was awakened by a terrible howling. Sitting bolt upright in bed, my eyes wide open, I waited for what seemed an eternity, petrified that I would hear another sound as terrible as the first. But nothing else disturbed the silence of the night. The moon picked out a few leafy branches among the shadows in a wild garden behind the presbytery; its beautiful rays shone through the panes of my little window, lighting up the corner of a table covered with my blue school notebooks, and a whitewashed wall, and faintly outlining the rim of a water jug. I was sleepy; I drifted off again without worrying too much about my extravagant priest’s odd ways, for it was he who had shouted out in the next room, which was separated from mine only by a thin partition wall.
In the morning, when I went downstairs, I found my parish priest in an almost good mood, making coffee. I owe it to him to mention that at his house I drank the best coffee in the world, delicate yet strong, with a curious taste of embers and ash. He took a great deal of care preparing it according to his own method, all the time muttering away, not to me, but to the flames which he blew on gently, rekindling the embers, talking to them as if they were people. He removed the coffee from the heat as soon as it began to bubble, returning it for a brief instant to the burning coals which he picked up in his bare fingers, as though he derived enjoyment from the act, and without noticeably burning himself. The whole process took a good quarter of an hour, and he spent the entire time crouched in the hearth, with his cassock bunched up between his thighs.
After we had drunk our coffee, we went out into the garden. Sitting on some steps, at the intersection of two pathways, he got me to translate some Latin passage or other from my school books. As far as I could see, he had a rather poor grasp of Latin. He had the unpleasant habit of vigorously scratching his horrible black hair, and that got on my nerves. What’s more, he kept reminding me how grateful I should be to my parents, who had had the excellent idea of entrusting me to him. If my attention wandered, even for a moment, he seized me by the ear and I felt two hard, sharp fingernails sink into my flesh. He wore a disgustingly dirty cassock, for he was extremely mean with money, and thought he looked good in it. He addressed me by the sweetest names, while at the same time poking fun at me; he displayed the polite manner one might use when celebrating a small Mass; he kept calling me “Young Sir”; it was as if he were saying: I’m only a peasant, I owe you a little politeness; and there you have it, all in one go; try to be content with it, young Gentleman. This Latin lesson, punctuated with little courtesies, lasted no more than a page; he stood up; I did likewise, and both of us were delighted that it was over—in my case the Latin, in his, the politeness. To tell the truth, in that June of my sixteenth year, what I really wanted were language lessons of a different kind, for love is a language, even more ancient than Latin (and there are those who say even that defies decency).
Leaving me to Seneca and Caesar, he strode off into the countryside. He had charge of several parishes; very well then, let him leave me on my own, this solitude would not be without its attractions; I was perfectly capable of passing the time and getting by without my priest.
As soon as he had gone, I put down my books and gave up trying to follow Caesar’s conquests; instead, I opened my eyes wide and took a long look at my new life. All along the banks of the Vézère ran the vast, thickly-wooded hills of the Sarladais. Closer to me, our garden was broken up by little low walls made of heaped-up stones, and by steps and pathways. All kinds of plants were jumbled up together, growing wild, almost hiding the once-ordered layout of a rather fine formal garden. Everything flourished higgledy-piggledy, rose bushes and brambles, flowers, grass and fruit trees. This lost order reinforced the garden’s charm, as well as the anxiety which you felt as you tried to find your way round that tangled mess, whose traceries of flowers were bizarrely watched over by a pale blue plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. She rose above the wild jumble of plants, looking just a touch simple-minded, with her tear-filled eyes, her insignificant, veiled face like a blind woman’s, her gentle, soft hands and her belly tilting forward. Beyond her it was all emptiness; our garden, which was perched at the very summit of the rocks, tumbled down towards the azure sky, the waters of the Vézère and the village rooftops.
Our church shone in the sunshine. It was a former monastery chapel, with thick walls pierced by narrow windows like arrow-slits. But the thing which commanded my attention was the presbytery, which I had caught only a glimpse of the night before. It seemed very ancient, with its lintelled windows and its substantial stone roof. As I was alone, I decided to get to know it better.
On the ground floor was the kitchen, where we had drunk our coffee. The dominant feature was a vast fireplace, which filled the whole room with smoke. I pushed open a little door beside a cupboard, and was surprised to see that it led into a stable, occupied by a sparse flock of bleating sheep. I found log-piles and a kind of forge.
A flight of stone steps led up to the first floor. The previous evening, as I got ready for bed, I had noticed a large, beautiful seashell in my room, and some naval swords, bows and arrows piled up under a dressing table. Did my priest have a nostalgic longing for the sea? I opened the door to his bedroom; the thing which struck me particularly was that there was no bed, just a pile of blankets in one corner. Nearby, I found exactly what I might expect to see in the way of basic conveniences and piety, except for some more weapons, hanging from nails on a wall, and several collections of butterflies. I noted also that there was no clock, calendar or newspaper; in fact nothing at all to tell you the time of day or the date.
The other bedrooms, further down the corridor, were used for storage. They were unusable and dark because of the piles of assorted objects accumulated by generations of parish priests. It would have taken several days to get to the bottom of the various heaps.
I opened the shutters of the first room I entered, so that I could see more clearly. It turned out to be a chaos of prie-dieux, desks, benches, broken chairs bowed
beneath the weight of gaping chests of drawers, and pea-sticks, heaped so high they touched the ceiling.
In the second room, which had whitewashed walls like all the other rooms in the presbytery, I bumped into another chaotic jumble of furniture, chests and baskets filled with long-forgotten clothes. There, I found clothing for housemaids and priests, cassocks and heavy cotton skirts, lavender sachets, linen, sun-hats, and white “Bâteau” knickers, slit up the sides, as worn by the Young Ladies you see on a Sunday morning, lifting their skirts behind country churches, while the bells are ringing for Mass. I counted more than fifty pairs in one trunk, all clean and new. Further on in a willow basket, I found faded skirts, soldiers’ uniforms, theatrical costumes; enough clothes to dress myself a thousand times over. Near to a nice little cradle, a picture of the Burial of Christ was rotting away in a corner, and a swarm of maddened wasps was buzzing ceaselessly inside a wardrobe.
The third bedroom was used as a drying chamber for corn cobs, which had been laid out on the floor. I was going to close the door without going in, when I realised that these corn cobs had been arranged to form a number of perfectly geometrical shapes: circles, squares, suns, and more complicated figures, structured according to gradations of colour, which must have taken my priest several days’ work and infinite patience.
The final room, at the far end of the corridor, was used purely as a drying-room for tobacco. Bunches of long tobacco leaves hung from the ceiling, and their sweet, pungent scent impregnated the whole house.
A ladder and trapdoor provided access to the attic, which covered the whole of the first floor. The glimmers of sunshine which filtered between the stone roofing-slabs and the traceries of beams and laths cast an almost adequate light on a scattering of old books on the floor: the complete Virgil, Lucretia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cervantes, a copy of Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Men, devotional texts. Rotting portraits of priests, stored away without their frames, looked at me with their large, wide eyes, like judges who were either benevolent or stern, meek or evil, watching me, following every move I made. That made me feel awkward for a while, I couldn’t do a thing without them immediately swivelling their eyes towards me.
I was reading, sitting comfortably—or as comfortably as one could in a stuffy roof-space—when I heard someone climbing the ladder. My priest pushed open the trapdoor with his head. He did not see me, for it took several seconds to get used to the semi-darkness of the attic. I did not move. A delicious anxiety clutched at me. He climbed up the last few rungs:
“For God’s sake, are you there?”
No reply. So as not to have climbed up for nothing, he set about removing the dust which covered the old books, striking the volumes with the flat of his hand, so frequently and so hard as he grumbled to himself that he stumbled and fell on top of me:
“Ah!” he exclaimed, “so that’s where you were.” Yes! I told him, in the same tone of voice. But could he see my smile? Already he was pulling me towards him. As I was on my knees, he too knelt down to give me a good thrashing. After taking most of my clothes off, he struck me roughly, as he had struck the books. Did I weigh heavy in his arms? He made me get up and lie down across a low beam which ran across the attic; then, pushing my head down, he finished beating me in comfort. After that he went away, leaving me half-naked, panting, covered in sweat, my flesh burning against the rough beam. Once the trapdoor had closed, I regained my senses, telling myself that my fate was not really cruel, that the boys of Ancient Rome had undergone the same punishments and had not died; at last, rather cheerfully, I got down off my beam with my dust-blackened knees and my scarlet torso, put my clothes back on and went back to reading Plutarch.
By the time I too left the attic, I could tell from the silent house that I was alone again. I went into my room and washed myself in cool water, which took the entire contents of my little water jug, as I was so dusty. Then I rested my elbows on the window ledge and gazed out at the trees and the sky. Birds were singing, hens were pecking around in the yard; a fine, strong smell of weasels drifted up from below. Worn-out from the beating I had endured, and feeling feverish, I was drawn by the calm of the garden.
At the far end of a pathway was a little murmuring spring, where I drank. In those early days of June, I found the power of the growing plants exhilarating; the scent of the carnations and roses troubled my young flesh. The warm air caressed my face. Evening fell. A sound of violently rattling saucepans told me that my priest had returned. A few logs tossed into the fireplace suddenly crackled and burned all at once. After he had called me two or three times, and since I was mischievously refusing to reply, he appeared in the kitchen doorway, which was all lit up by flames, his tall, thin silhouette stark against the firelight. Finally he came towards the clump of leafy vegetation where I had hidden myself. From my hiding place, among the leaves of a box tree, I saw his hand feel around for me, and finally encounter my face.
“Right,” he shouted, “get into that house. I’ll teach you to disobey me, you cheeky young…” How had I offended him? We left the moonlit garden and I followed him up to my room, where, after tying me across a chair, he thrashed me with a switch. Then he knelt down next to me and—as peculiar as ever—covered me with caresses, tenderly rocking me in my rush-covered clothes. He put out the light and remained there, beside my chair, in perfect darkness, saying nothing, kissing my face, for a whole quarter of an hour, before freeing me from my bonds.
It was at least nine o’clock in the evening when we decided to go back downstairs. We had a swift supper of coffee, lentils and biscuits, then I went up to bed.
My room had a narrow window which opened out onto the trees. My cool sheets smelt good. Unusually sweet bird-calls echoed in the branches. The birds’ cries mingled with those of the tree-frogs in the garden pond, who were equally preoccupied with love and seduction. The green countryside sang beneath the starry sky. Other tree-frogs called back, from far away, their songs unspeakably loving and lingering. From time to time a whole section of the countryside would fall silent; in another, the songs would continue, then stop, then begin again, never tiring. Their calls kept me awake. Lying in my bed, I breathed in the perfume of the flowers which the night’s spell had brought to life. The beautiful June sky shone, filled with stars; scents of pollen and roses floated up to me from the garden. I could not bear to stay in bed. Quite apart from the fact that my back was burning, I did not feel the slightest bit sleepy; on the contrary, I felt like plunging into the deepest depths of the cool greenery and shadows.
Barefoot, and as silently as I could, I tiptoed down the presbytery stairs. I opened a door. I felt as though I was walking out into a paradise of trees and flowers. Our dark stone roof stood out starkly against the sky. The calm surface of the pond gleamed in the shade of the pine trees. White flowers shone in the moonlight. I walked on slowly, following the light-coloured pebbles of a garden path, in the splendour and stillness of the night, until I reached a mass of thousands of green leaves and plunged in, cooling down the weals which burned my back and flanks, rubbing my flesh for a long time against this bed of greenery. From time to time the flutter of a bird’s wing in the darkest depths of the foliage made my heart pound. The ewes in the stable jostled against the wooden walls; the occasional sounds they made, in the very special atmosphere of the night, were punctuated by matchlessly seductive silences. These made me want to pleasure myself, and I did so before collapsing into the low branches, which were kind enough to catch me.
After exciting myself in this way, and feeling a little weak, I returned to the presbytery, hoping that my parish priest was sleeping soundly.
MY WINDOW was set deep into the wall and, in the morning, I settled myself down on the sill. From this calm, cool recess I could look down towards the north and see one side of the church. The previous evening’s supper had not satisfied my appetite, and now a whole host of things served to sharpen it: the sun riding high above me, rays of light, the brisk air, a section of hill-side which
I could just make out, and all the fun I was promising myself while I was living with my priest.
There was nobody in the garden. I could clearly make out the rows of peas, and a stream with its network of irrigation channels. At that hour of day, my priest must be out doing his rounds. I went down and cut myself some bread, putting the chunks into my pockets. For the time being I could see nothing else to eat in this worse than poor house. I was beginning to suffer from hunger, and to realise to my astonishment that this deprivation gave me just as much pleasure as my priest’s unjust punishments. In fact, if I wanted to be better fed all I had to do was attend to my own needs, since in that month of June the kitchen garden was positively bursting with peas which nobody ever picked, with cherries and with delicious, ripe strawberries which I could gather every day. I was considerably strengthened by this discovery, and by the pleasure I would undoubtedly derive from raiding the garden. In this happy state of mind, and in my imagination already full of cherries, I also convinced myself that several of the locked cuboards in the presbytery would contain excellent foodstuffs, hidden away inside.
It was not terribly difficult for me to find keys which opened almost all of them, hidden here and there. I found nothing to eat, but in one cubbyhole I did happen upon this strange object: a wooden stump about a metre tall, with four branches, inexpertly carved to resemble arms and legs. At the upper end of this log was a roughly-carved woman’s head, topped by a straw wig. A few details had been added, in pencil. Was this my priest’s woman? It wore a red rag instead of a skirt. Someone had burned incense before this horrendous idol, in a collection of seashells. Not quite sure what to make of this discovery, I locked the cupboard again, and put the key back into a little pot on the kitchen shelves. I was exhilarated by this unusual house, which drew me out of myself, troubled me and changed my character to the point where I felt I could do anything without blushing, and I would have stolen money if I had found any. I confined myself to raiding the tobacco drying-room for dried leaves, crushing them into powder in a handkerchief, ready for smoking, and hiding a kilo in a corner, for my own personal use.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice Page 1
