“You must undergo the same,” he told me after a long silence, showing me a long scar in the thickest part of his calf, a furrow ploughed by a blade heated on burning coals.
I accepted enthusiastically. Yelling with pain as the fire burned me would bring me happiness. Renewing the secret agreement which bound us together would protect me from prison.
“A blade heated on burning brands,” he continued, laying the knife on the embers.
So much heat was coming off our flames that they were drying out the bushes all around and burning our faces and hands. Our shadows danced. In that cave, he lay down on a piece of scarlet fabric from Africa or Oceania. I rolled him cigarettes while sleep took hold of us, perhaps caused by the fierce heat from the inferno, or by the sound of the water flowing by; wind blew in off the river, fanning the flames. I was beyond fear, beyond myself; maddened by the murmur of the water, by the idea of death, I remembered that I had already lived, that I was no more than a spirit. Laughing at my fears, like a dreaming god, I felt an all-conquering gaiety. Gnawed away by the flames, our pile of firewood collapsed. He would have burned me with the point of his knife, if the delicious peace of the night had not suddenly plunged us into a half-sleep. Many feelings troubled my soul, feelings moreover that were exquisitely sweet, for fear had left me now. Among them was gratitude for this man who had brought me into this land of shadows in order to save me.
My eyes had been closed for a long time when, opening them again, I saw that our fire was dying down and the moon hung low in the sky. Moonglow lit up the Vézère as it passed beneath the trees, its waters forming a riot of small, noisy waves as it flowed over stones close to an island. Millions of mayflies with diaphanous wings were flying back upstream, against the current; you might have thought it was a mist, a migration of souls. I did not move from underneath my blankets, and only my gaze was carried towards the riverbank, turned white by the wedding flight of the mayflies.
My priest was sleeping next to me. Did I dream in the darkness as it was pierced by great rays of moonlight? It would be easy to imagine the whole thing was nothing but a dream. Our burned-up trees were no more than cinders among the green grass from which a thin grey smoke rose; all that was left of them now was a tracery of their former selves on the ground, dotted here and there with scarlet sparks. And so the judgement of the river had spared us; but I must give up the child; a sort of voice told me so clearly; I must lose him, now, tonight, until another life.
Getting up, pushing away my blankets, I picked up my short iron sword and threw it far away from me, with the thought that it was my love for the child which I was burying under ten metres of water, in the darkest part of the Vézère’s bed where no one would ever find it. That done, I swam silently into the zones of calm and light, into the peace of the night under the overhanging cliffs, hollowed by erosion, haunted by the water’s murmur. The memory of my drowned love pierced my heart like a sweet blade of flame; I wished I could roll down like a stone to join it and hold it in my arms, at the very depths of death; I wished I could die, yet all the time the same little voice kept stubbornly repeating: in another life, in another life, you will find me again.
My priest was waiting for me on the bank, still holding his blanket tightly around him. When we got back to the cave, he stoked up the embers, and when we had warmed up a little, I saw him flatten down a heap of hot cinders with his bloody hand, and in it draw squares which he filled with pebbles. Did he wish to tell my horoscope? Would I go to prison? That was what tormented me. I asked him to see my future. I will try, he said. He took one of the pebbles, closed his eyes, threw it onto the cinders; then another; several pebbles had landed on the squares. He examined their positions, considered, then threw some of them again to see the future more clearly.
“I see a trial, judges, police.”
He thought again, as though confused by a doubt. He rubbed everything out, and began to re-draw the squares, and throw the pebbles again.
“It’s incredible. I see the child, the trial, the judges; I see all that business. The child will talk without throwing too much of the blame on you, as much from some vestige of love for you, as through caution; I see an acquittal, you needn’t worry about that; but what I can’t see, not at all, is you.”
I asked him if he often told horoscopes.
“From time to time,” he replied, as though I were insinuating that he knew nothing of the craft. “I’ve never seen a case like it: the absence of someone who is not dead, who goes up before the judges, and yet who isn’t there.”
He threw other stones onto the squares, one last time, to put his mind at rest, carefully examined the positions, then wiped everything away furiously.
“You are not dead, it is as if you are absent from your own trial.”
A gleam entered my eyes.
“If I wasn’t absent from my trial, like you say, would I be found guilty?”
“Of course, your guilt is clear.”
“Then where am I?”
I took his hand:
“Where am I, now?”
He pulled out a hair, attached a small stone to it, drew a rough map of the area in the ashes of the fire, and moved the pendulum over it.
“We are here on the Vézère.”
“No, you are here on the Vézère, but not me; look, I’m somewhere else, go back up the Vézère.”
The pendulum came to a halt a long way upstream from the village.
“I see a spring,” he said, “and I see you.”
“That’s where I hid my soul.”
“There, in the spring?”
“Yes.”
“You are strong,” he murmured. Then he added: “You will have to take it back after your trial; don’t forget.”
“Do you really think I would forget my soul,” I said, leaning affectionately against him.
He stood up. We rolled our blankets into a bundle, stamped out the last embers, crossed the river in our boat and, after a long walk through the woods, we arrived back at the presbytery.
It was three o’clock in the morning; perhaps we were drunk with exhaustion? Nevertheless, before going up to bed we decided on a celebration. In the kitchen he gave me a little bread, and some wine. There was a long silence, then I poured him a drink. “There you are,” I said. He drank without answering, but I thought I saw a smile on his lips, a smile formed from great friendship. “To your good health,” he replied, and I saw clearly that what he meant was the happy outcome of my trial. I would willingly have raised my glass in honour of the magic which had protected me so well. And in my heart I heard the child’s softly-whispered words: “We have won now, you know”.
* There is a gap in the text here.
AFTERWORD
FRANÇOIS AUGIÉRAS was born on 18 July 1925, at Rochester in New York State; his father, a pianist and music teacher working in the United States, had just died from peritonitis. In November, mother and child began their return journey to Paris, setting sail on the France with the dead man’s embalmed body in the ship’s hold.
Augiéras spent his early childhood in Paris, but left at eight to live in Périgueux—the Dordogne was to become his base and his refuge in a life fragmented by journeys and escapes. At thirteen, he left school to learn drawing. For a while he belonged to the Jeunesse de France et d’Outre-mer, then in 1943 he joined the Compagnons de France, an organisation allied to the scouting movement. Whilst with them, he supervised delinquent children and worked on farms. In the summer of 1944, with the agreement of the Périgueux branch of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (the French Resistance) he left the town for Toulon. There, he signed on at the 5th depot of the Équipages de la Flotte and travelled to Camp Sirocco in Algiers. Invalided out, he remained in Algeria for about a year, staying first in a Trappist monastery at Thibar, then in a bordj (fort) at El Goléa with an uncle who was a retired colonel—the ancestral, mystagogical figure of this man was to play a major role in Augiéras’s work and imagination. On his return
to Périgord, he became involved with a small group of people interested in art and painting, explored the region on foot, visited the islands of the Vézère, and slept in abandoned farms, far from a “degraded civilisation”.
The first work by this pantheistic, pagan mystic, Le Vieillard et l’Enfant (The Old Man and the Child) appeared in 1949. It was published by Pierre Fanlac, at the author’s expense, under the pseudonym of Abdullah Chaanba (Chaamba in later editions). This tale of an intensely private, erotic and spiritual education in the Sahara enchanted Gide, who wrote to him: “Whom have I to thank for this intense and bizarre delight?” In 1954, the unabridged version of Le Vieillard et l’Enfant, published by Éditions de Minuit, revived the question raised by the author of Les nourritures terrestres: who was Abdullah Chaamba?
Augiéras loved mystery. Elusive and secretive, forever penniless, this anti-Christian nomad travelled constantly: Delphi, Mount Athos, Senegal, Mauritania. During this time Frédérick Tristan’s Structure published several examples of Augiéras’s writing. In 1958, he spent a few months as a member of the Saharan police, defending the fort at Zirara. The following year, he worked in Mali as an ethnographer, and published his second book, Voyage des Morts (Voyage of the Dead), again under the name of Chaamba. He married a distant cousin, Viviane de la Ville de Rigné and lived with his wife in Périgueux. When he was not writing, he produced abstract or realist paintings. In the Sixties, he began work on a volume of memoirs; this book, Une adolescence au Temps du Maréchal et de multiples Aventures (The Many Adventures of an Adolescent Boy in the Age of the Marshal), published in 1967, was the first under the name of Augiéras. He was often to be found at the community of l’Arche Lanza Del Vasto, in Hérault. He spent more and more time with the Orthodox monks of Mount Athos—his retreats inspired him in 1970 to write Un voyage au Mont Athos (A Journey to Mount Athos—1970), which dealt in particular with reincarnation and physical pleasure as a means of purifying the soul. But his health was in decline and a heart attack forced him to move into a residential home at Domme, in the Dordogne, where he eventually lived, meditated and worked in a cave. There, cocooned in a primeval, silent world, he wrote Domme ou l’Essai d’Occupation (Domme, or An Attempt at Occupation)—this book did not find a publisher until eleven years after his death. Although in 1970 and 1971 he was an inmate of the hospice at Montignac, he continued to travel to Greece, and to Tunis, where he exhibited his work.
This man, whom his friend Paul Placet* saw as “a barbarian in the West”, this man who lived bare-legged, with his head in the stars, died in hospital at Périgueux on 13 February 1971, from the after-effects of a heart attack. He was forty-five years old.
L’Apprenti Sorcier (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) belongs to French literature’s pantheon of secret, underground texts. The story was first published in 1964, at the writer, Jacques Brenner’s instigation. It appeared anonymously in Les Cahiers des Saisons (Éditions Julliard), and the only clue given was that it was “by the author of Le Vieillard et l’Enfant”.
In the depths of Black Périgord, in the Sarladais, “a land of ghosts, cool caves and woods”, a teenage boy is sent to live with a thirty-five-year-old priest. The man will become more than just a teacher. Soon, the adolescent meets a young boy in the village square: they make love to each other like shadows in a cave. The priest knows of their involvement; far from condemning it, he intensifies it. He teaches his pupil about pain and the whip, awakening his senses to exquisitely pleasurable mortification and guiding him to seek out his own soul. The adolescent ceases to be a mere pupil and becomes first a servant, then an initiate. Soon he will be able to detect “with an extreme intensity, the secret movements of life, the growth of plants, the fermentation of stagnant waters, here an imperceptible movement of air, there the crack of a branch”. He will hide his soul, sheltering it from men, in a secret spring of the Vézère; he will triumph against the laws of society. And it becomes clear that this tense, shadowy tale, burning with love, is a eulogy in praise of difference, an apprenticeship to purity, an act of worship to beauty in the temple of Périgordin nature.
The facts are simple, naked and brutal, but what takes place between the three characters of this mystical ballet—characters who are pure essences, rather than rounded individuals, and who are described in very little detail—comes close to being supernatural. Augiéras knew this, mentioning at the turn of a page that he wished to create: “A galant, almost magical book”, “an astonishing piece of fabric which deserves to survive”. It has survived.
Cahiers rouges, Grasset, 1995
* For observations on Augiéras’s life, personality, writings and paintings, see his work, François Augiéras: Un barbare en Occident, Pierre Fanlac, 1988.
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Copyright
First published in Cahier des Saisons, Éditions Julliard in 1964
Translation copyright © Sue Dyson 2001
This edition first published in 2001 by
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