Hill

by Jean Giono

  In the other, everything’s still soft, ever so soft, covered with grasses and olive groves. There’s a bowl-shaped depression, like the imprint of a woman’s breast, in the grassland. In the middle sit the Bastides, and near the houses, there’s a little white patch that’s moving—maybe Babette? Ulalie? Madelon? Marguerite? Or, maybe just Arbaud’s youngest daughter, playing in the square.

  The fire keeps climbing.

  The four of them stand there watching it.

  Down below, the woods are already crackling. The wind knifes between the walls of Lure and rends the smoke. The flame leaps like water in an uproar. The sky bears a heavy rain of glowing pine needles. Burning pinecones, clicking as they fly, score the smoke with blood-red streaks. A massive cloud of birds rises straight up toward the shrill reaches of the sky, gets drunk on the purer air, drops down, soars again, whirls around, cries. The terrifying suction of the blaze carries away whole wings, torn out and still bleeding, which swirl like dead leaves. A flood of smoke surges up, blots out the sky, wavers for a second in the wind, and then, flexing its sooty muscles, holds still and spreads. Inside its smoky flesh, birds crackle in agony.

  Jaume is trembling from head to foot.

  As though it was trying to shake off a bad dream, Maurras’s gaze leaves the hollow of the Bastides and shifts over to Jaume, feels its way across Jaume’s face, delves into his wrinkles, into his folds, under his eyes, around his mouth, looking for hope.

  “And your moustache?”

  “Phooey,” goes Jaume, with a motion that means to say: “It’s the same power that’s destroying us and earth. My moustache? It’s there . . . in the flames . . .”

  Down below, the little girl plays on in the square of the Bastides.

  “Let’s go.”

  •

  After he lost his grip on Jaume’s jacket, Gagou ran frantically through the smoke. He was wailing with fright. Now all at once he’s come to a standstill, wonderstruck and trembling with joy. A long strand of saliva drools from his lips.

  The dense curtain has parted. Right in front of him, ten junipers are burning all at once. It’s over quickly. The flame continues to leap skyward, but now it’s like ten golden candelabras glittering. All the branches are glowing embers, even the twigs, even the fine netting of stems and veins in the leaves. They’re still standing upright like living trees, but instead of dark, motionless wood they’re fiery worms that undulate and twist, coil up, unwind with a light, clear, crackling sound. It’s pretty.

  “Ga, gou . . .”

  He comes nearer, holds his hand out, and, in spite of the fire that’s gripping his feet like a vise, he enters the land of a thousand golden candelabras.

  •

  The women weren’t ready for this. It was far away, this fire, and now, all of a sudden, here they are, the men, tumbling down on top of them: “Hurry, cover up the windows with wet sheets, and everybody get inside.” Next they set to hacking with all their might to open a ditch in front of the houses. Arbaud is slashing away at the dry grass and at the thatch of abandoned grain with big, rage-filled strokes of his scythe, off balance, as though he were drunk or crazed.

  Babette is crying. Marguerite is sniffing back tears. Only Ulalie has disobeyed orders. She’s gone back outside and now, along with the men, she’s hacking at the grasses and the undergrowth with her sickle to help clear an open space in front of the Bastides.

  Jaume looks like he has a hundred arms. The grayish, sticky air must be distorting appearances, because he looks gigantic and mobile, like a prehistoric lizard. He’s everywhere at once: He pounds with his pickaxe, he runs, he yells out words that the rest can’t understand but are glad to hear anyways.

  “What a man!” thinks Maurras.

  Yes, but if Jaume is battling with so much fury, the poor devil, he must have felt fear stirring deep within himself. In the midst of his activity he’s able to forget about it.

  As long as he was at a distance from the Bastides, he was battling only against the blaze. A blaze—it’s something natural.

  A short while ago, when he got back, the first thing he saw was Janet’s bedroom window, Janet’s bed, and the white mound marking Janet’s body.

  Now he’s seen into the heart of the matter. The crux, the hub of the relentless wheel is this little heap of bone and flesh: Janet. All at once he’s seen earth’s life-force spurting up all around him in leaps of hares, sprays of rabbits, flights of birds. Right under his feet, earth swarms with wild things. The clicking of grasshoppers raises a clatter, clouds of wasps whine and drone. Over there, spread-eagled over that decayed mushroom cap, a praying mantis darts its long, saw-toothed proboscis toward the flame. A crazed dung-beetle puffs its wings up against a tree trunk. Streams of worms ripple under the grass. Any kind of creature that knows anything at all is taking flight.

  “Before long we’ll be completely on our own. The whole hill has turned against us, the whole huge body of the hill. This hill that’s curved like a yoke that’s going to smash our heads. I see it. Now I see it. Now I know what I’ve been afraid of since this morning. Janet, hah, you dirty bastard, you’ve pulled it off.”

  A burst of anger straightens him up.

  “And what about us now, don’t we count?”

  He grabs his flail. His fist tightens around the wooden handle. Power runs through his arm, in clearly defined ripples. Pins and needles run through his flesh.

  He walks over the flame. Under his feet, the grass scorches.

  “Ah, now I’ve found you out at last, you rotten swine.”

  He strikes at the hill with his big flail. The flame shrinks back around him. A black patch smokes where the boxwood flail-head lands.

  “Dirty good for nothing.”

  The blows ring out. It looks like the bruised and battered hill is finally going to be defeated.

  “Jaume, Jaume! . . .”

  Maurras is running after him, grabs him by the shoulders, shakes him as if he’s trying to bring him back to his senses:

  “Are you crazy? You mean you can’t see it?”

  The time has come: the cunning flame has spun its opponent around. In another moment it will be closing its gaping, gold-toothed maw around him.

  In one bound Jaume gets clear.

  “Light the backfire.”

  Ah, the lighting of the fire that’s our friend, not our foe. It’s ready to take off from our feet, crouching over the ground like a warrior preparing to charge. Look: It strangles our enemy, knocks it down, smothers it.

  But ah, what rotten luck, now both fires are raging together and turning back on top of us.

  A terrible rumbling makes the sky shudder. The earth monster is awakening. It’s making its massive, granite limbs grind to the very center of heaven.

  Maurras throws his pickaxe to the ground and takes off on the run.

  Arbaud’s scythe rings out as he hurls it full force onto the stones.

  A door bangs. Windows crash down.

  Behind all the uproar, the cries of women.

  “Father, father . . .”

  The leaves of the big oak are crackling.

  So, is the whole world really falling to pieces?

  Jaume, his legs worn out, his head sagging, collapses.

  “You dirty whore!” he says as he falls. He pounds fiercely at the hill with his bare fists.

  •

  Honestly, he thought he was dead. He had glimpses of brimstone and cypresses.

  He lay stretched out on his back, short of breath. The air, avoiding his lips, passed by his mouth like a wall. All the little life-bearing packets were dancing on the frantic currents of his blood. Big swirls of blood were stirring up sprawling seaweed: his wife, hanged in front of the attic skylight with a triangle of dawn planted on her wine-dark face; the movement of his daughter’s lips, so, so petite, ever so petite, when she mouthed “Papa” for the first time. Then a mass of smoke came pouring down on top of him and he thought: “It’s all over.”

  Afterward, sud
denly: silence and sunlight. And now he’s found himself alive.

  He wasn’t altogether certain of it. For a moment it seemed to him that death had hardly changed him at all, but then, right away, he realized he wasn’t really dead.

  He’s gotten back up on his feet and he’s checked on the Bastides. They’re still standing. The oak is a bit singed. And the roof of one of the outbuildings is still smoking. But it’s sure to go out by itself.

  In the blink of an eye, he figures out what’s happened: A tongue of the backfire, propelled by the main mass of the flames, must have leaped across the open ground and rushed down on top of the houses. The main river of fire, that did get diverted all the same, is now flowing away to the left of them.

  They are saved.

  Ulalie runs across the square. It’s still swamped in smoke. Only half her body emerges out of it.

  “Nothing to worry about, father?”

  “No, daughter.”

  Maurras, laughing, with all his teeth bared, shouts out:

  “It’s heading down the other side toward Pierrevert. We’re safe.”

  “And once it’s over there, who cares,” says Arbaud, “it’s nothing but stones, it’ll do what it wants to. We’re done with it.”

  Marguerite comes out of Les Monges. She’s wearing a red camisole with white polka dots, the underarms stained with sweat. With her flat feet and her big, fur-lined slippers, she walks as if she were pulling her legs out of two feet of mud. She comes toward them, preceded by the aroma of hot oil.

  “I’ve made a bacon omelet,” she says.

  •

  They’ve eaten, all the men together, at Gondran’s. And every one of them has unbuttoned his trousers.

  “Me, old buddy, I was in a fine pickle—it was catching here, it was catching there, it was crackling under my feet . . .”

  “I kept scratching myself and scratching, then it turned out my shirt was on fire and scorching my back.”

  “A pinecone in the face, yep, they explode like gunshots. I got hit by a pinecone right in the face, I’m telling you, right there beside my eye . . .”

  All of this spoken with arms waving and enough pounding on the table to make the glasses jump. Arbaud hugs Babette. He leaves black streaks on her forehead and her cheeks. He’s determined to bring a glass of wine and a biscuit to their little Marie, who’s stretched out on her mattress. From under the bedclothes, she slips out a wrist as thin as thread, and the spidery tips of her fingers tremble as she grasps the glass.

  “It can’t do her any harm today.”

  This was a golden day. The wine had never tasted so good, nor the omelet, nor the tobacco.

  “You’re a cook fit for any establishment,” Gondran says, as he gives Marguerite an affectionate pat on the bum.

  Only Jaume holds back from the merriment, with a dense band of shadow across his brows.

  Doubtless, like the others, he can feel the warm, fragrant caress of renewed life brushing like petals across his skin, but there’s an uneasiness still embedded in his bitter heart.

  Before coming in, he took a glance at the whole of the Bastides. They had their usual look—four houses crouched under the oak. But the fields!

  Yes, they’ve fought, they’ve won, but the blows of the other side have hit hard.

  From where he sits, he looks over at Janet’s bed, and sees Janet like a tree trunk, under the sheets.

  A moment ago they tried to get the old man to drink, and he played possum. When Marguerite insisted, he turned his head away, dismissively. Now he’s just opened his eyes. From his bed, his glance, clear and hard as a knife, has slid over toward the men.

  “We won,” says Jaume.

  “We won. That’s all well and good.

  “What it cost us, we’ll find that out soon enough. It cost a lot, I’m afraid, an awful lot, but we won.

  “We’re all still here, in one piece . . . but . . .

  “But all of us are still here because it was over in the very nick of time.

  “In the very nick of time. A tiny bit longer and we’d have been done for. Another ten minutes, I’d have been dead, and the Bastides would have been done for. It was a near miss.

  “All in all, it’s another strike against us, like the spring, like the row with Maurras, like this disgusting business with Ulalie that I’ve had on my mind ever since, like Marie’s sickness.

  “We won again, up against this last blow, but it was harder.

  “And it tore off a piece of our hide.

  “We won again this time, but what about the next strike?

  “The hill.

  “It’s always there, the hill.

  “And Janet? He’s always there.

  “We’re in a shaky state. If the hill hammers a little harder now . . .

  “It will always be there, the hill, with its enormous power to harm us. It can’t go away. It can’t be defeated once and for all.

  “This time we won. Tomorrow, the hill will win.

  “It’s just a matter of time. What will we have accomplished after all, in the final reckoning? We’ll have held out a little longer—that’s all.

  “This time it let us go, barely, but it spared us. Tomorrow it will hammer us good and hard.

  “And who knows, maybe it won’t wait until tomorrow.

  “Maybe it’s already flexing its muscles to put us away, in one fell swoop, for all eternity, before we’ve even had our first sip of morning coffee.

  “There’s nothing to be done. The hill would have to forget about us. And then we’d have to live together like we always have, as good neighbors, as good friends, not doing each other any harm.

  “But as long as Janet’s around . . .

  “The dirty bastard.

  “It’s Janet who made this happen, with his head full of ideas.

  “Things were going well before all of this. It had never said or done anything to harm us. It was a good hill. It knew pleasant songs. It hummed like a big wasp. It let us have our way with it. We never dug too deep. One or two blows of a spade, what harm could that do? We walked across it without fear. When it spoke to us, it was like a spring. It spoke to us through its cool springs and its pine trees.

  “He must have messed with it.

  “He must have known this whore of a secret—to be able to control it, to have it at his beck and call, to stir it up whenever he wanted.

  “It had to be this stinking bastard who knew it.

  “He doesn’t even have two bits worth of life left and he’s still making mischief.

  “He doesn’t want to go out by himself. He wants us all to go along with him—women, trees, chickens, goats, mules, everybody and everything—like a king . . .

  “For sure he wants to make the rest of us cross over to the other side with him, all together.

  “And his life’s hanging by a thread.

  “We can’t afford to give him the time.”

  •

  “Alexandre, give me your cup,” Marguerite says as she comes forward with the percolator.

  •

  “I won’t give him the time,” thinks Jaume, his head fit to burst with rage.

  •

  After the coffee, the brandy. The little bottle that Jaume has lugged around in his pocket all morning sits on the table.

  Gondran jokes as he pours it out: “If this had been milk you’d have churned it into butter.”

  Then a blissful silence; matches strike; somebody bangs a pipe against the table.

  This is an hour opening up in flower, like a meadow in April.

  All of a sudden, Jaume stands. They watch him. He’s uneasy. Babette doesn’t dare to keep on soaking her lump of sugar.

  “All you men, we have to go outside. I have something to say to you. It’s serious.”

  They can tell it’s serious by the look on his face. Behind his unshaven beard his cheeks are as white as candle wax.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  They stand up, ill at ease and listless
. They won’t gladly give up the spring daisies that were flowering just a moment ago.

  “Let’s go under the oak. The women don’t need to hear everything. We’ll tell them what we want to, nothing more.”

  “Is something the matter?” asks Gondran.

  “Yes, there is something the matter,” says Jaume, pointing past the Bastides at the earth, naked, scarred, blackened, wisps of smoke still trailing across it.

  “Let’s sit down. This is going to take a while.

  “I didn’t want to tell you this back there for a number of reasons. First, because of the women, and second, for another reason that you’ll understand later.

  “It’s been a while that I’ve been thinking about it in this way, without really knowing for sure. Now I do know, and I’m going to tell you.

  “But first, because it’s a deadly serious business that I’m going to talk to you about—serious for me and for you too, whether we agree about it or not—I want to know if you trust me. I mean, whether when I ask you for something, you believe I’m asking you because it’s the right thing, and for the good of us all?”

  Jaume has been looking mainly at Maurras.

  “Me, I believe it,” goes Maurras.

  He’s sincere—it’s obvious.

  “You’ve never done any harm,” say the others.

  Jaume is getting paler and paler.

  “I’ve never done any harm, that’s for sure. I’ve been mistaken, like everybody else, but that . . . that’s not my fault. This time I’m not mistaken. I’m sure of what I’m going to say to you. Remember this: I’m sure of it. I don’t need to talk to you about what happened last night and this morning. If I told you that we’d barely escaped, we’d agree, wouldn’t we? But don’t you believe that this fire is just one more vicious trick, like the others we’ve suffered through lately?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yes, you do remember. We were sitting pretty just a few months ago. Things were coming along just so, the grain was doing well, we were getting by very nicely with what we had in our barrels, in our crocks, in our jars. I’d already had a word with the broker in Pertuis about my beans, and the prices were good. Things were falling into place.

  “Then, all at once, it started. If I remember right, it began on the day when Gondran came to tell us that Janet was raving. We came over to your place and we listened. It made me feel peculiar. The rest of you too. You must remember, we talked about it that evening on the way home. Next there was that business of Gondran’s, with his olive grove making groaning sounds down in the bottomlands. It was already starting to smell a little worse. After that came the cat. Since then there’s been the spring, Marie, the fire . . .The spring, we found a way around that. The little one, she doesn’t look like she’s getting any worse—isn’t that true, Arbaud?—but she’s not getting any better either. The fire—we don’t know the full story yet.