by Jean Giono
I stop him:
“Tell me, Joselet, is it practical?”
“Is it practical? I believe you it is practical!”
“Do you make use of it yourself?”
He turns his big red savage’s face fully towards me. He has a silent laugh all white and red under his beard.
“I have used it, but now…”
He imitates with his hand the wing of a bird in flight:
“…it has left me!
“Yes, it has left me, I had it for a time, but I have left everything behind that has to do with lust for women, it annoyed me. It makes you lose your strength. It does not seem to: you get used to it, it is good, it seems to be good. One fine morning you tap your finger against your forehead. It sounds empty. You say: ‘Oh! how light I am; oh! how I am walking; oh! how I am jumping!’ You are just empty. It has gotten you off track on the inside. As for me, truly I have need of my power. Power and power, the more I have the better it is. So I shut off the tap.”
“You made a big sacrifice,” I told him.
“Big sacrifice you say? I believe you.”
He has a serious look in his yellow eyes then it widens into a smile.
“But it is worth the trouble.”
He remains a minute without saying anything. He looks at the big copse, below it, which starts to move with its nocturnal life. Me too, I look at the copse.
“Yes, it is worth the trouble. Sit down. I will explain it to you. The world, you see, is a big machine. There are the wheelworks, and the springs, and the steam which makes the whole thing go. There are wheels with teeth, they make other wheels with teeth turn, and so on, the entire apparatus: the trees, the animals, the stones, us, the sky, the hill, the Durance, the sea, the seas that are in the stars, the mountains of the stars, the animals on the moon, down to the little creatures below, in the depth of the sky, there where there is no earth, nothing but the mud of the sky made with the dust of the earth and the drops of all the seas that revolve. You see it! When one knows that, one knows a lot, but one does not know everything. Because the wheels are contained one within another, so that when one turns the others turn also. The big one moves just a little, the little one makes three revolutions, the smallest one makes twenty revolutions, a slightly bigger one makes only one turn. You understand? So look: you see the big wheel. It moves just a little. You say to yourself: ‘The little one is going to make three revolutions.’ Up until that moment it is true, but the other one down there which is much farther away, the smallest one there, takes a moment before it makes its twenty turns. Then you say: ‘That wheel down there is going to make twenty revolutions.’ You watch. You wait, it makes twenty revolutions. So they look at you and say: ‘He guessed, do you understand? ’ He did not guess, no, he knew. Sometimes the movement that goes from one wheel to another wheel over there takes two years, ten years, twenty years; then in advance you know, that is the whole matter, that is why, me, if I wanted to, I could tell you a thousand things that will happen, it is fatal, the good and the bad, without a mistake.”
“Joselet, I would rather not know. Let it happen, maybe I turned the big wheel…”
“You have misunderstood: you are not the one who turns the wheel. You are the wheel. You have done this or that: this or that happens to you because of your movement… But that is not the question, and then, you…”
He begins laughing.
“…plus you did not make the big sacrifice, and I would have trouble explaining it to you, you would not come to know, at least…”
“At least until I come to make the big sacrifice? You know Joselet, you tempt me.”
“No, for you this is not possible, at least I mean that you would build up strength inside yourself.”
“There, Joselet, I am your man. Every morning I do an hour’s work with the axe, and then a walk in the hills, and then I eat…”
“Not that sort of strength. That everybody…”
“Well what strength?”
“The strength of the sun. Set yourself there facing the sun. There, in the evening, when it is not too hot. And then, eat it up, eat it up, as much as you can, quickly, quickly, fill yourself up with sun. Then, strength, it’s not in our arms. It is in one’s head and one knows what life is made of.
The dusk came. Now the sky is peaceful like a field and the olive harvesters are back in their homes, the chimneys emit blue smoke.
“Joselet,” I say gently, “Joselet, is it really worth all that: the big sacrifice and then consuming the sun? A man and a woman who love one another, it is simple and they live life. They are the ones who live life. As for me, I love a woman, she loves me. I create life, a child…”
“Yes,” says Joselet raising his hand in the air, “yes, but it is the steam that makes you go, it is the wheelworks, it is the wheel. You are the wheel, she is the wheel. And then, there is only Joselet who knows it, only Joselet.”
He stands up. Away from the grass he is nothing more than a big man like a vine stock with legs like tendrils, arms like manure, and, on his bird’s shoulders, his big head sways like a pumpkin.
Sylvie
I can see her from here. She is up there under the olive trees, standing with her left foot planted sideways on the ground to steady her against the Alpine wind which plays in her skirts. She is making stockings. She applies herself to it. I see her round neck like that of little a lamb and that packet of red leaves which is her hair. A hornet watches her in its circular flight. She thinks that she is alone. She moves her hand a little. She says: “Go away,” and the hornet goes.
I heard the bell of her old sheep. They did not give the ram to her. First, because she is a girl; then, because it is Sylvie; then, because of the twenty sheep that she has to watch, and there on the warm slope of this hill it is not necessary to bother with a ram.
I thought: Sylvie is up there. That made me leave my sunny corner and take to the wind. It is a slow wind, flat and sharp like a knife, and very slow to enter, well set on the scabby terrain and olive trees. It moves at its own pace, it does its job. It will freeze up tonight.
Yes, I thought: Sylvie is up there. And then…it made me think of that afternoon when she came back from the city. I arrived almost on her heels without knowing it. I enter the farm. I see her. It has been more than five years. She was sitting there alone at the table. She had not taken off either her coat of fine material, nor her satin hat; she held in her little fingers a great bowl steaming with good tea, it smelled like hyssop and boiled fennel. Standing before her, hands on her apron, her mother watched her drink; standing beside her, her father watched her drink while sucking on his pipe. As I entered she looked at me over the bowl without stopping and everyone toward me with eyes that said:
“No noise. She is drinking.”
And I stood by the door.
The bowl now on the table, she sighed: “Ah!” glancing at the three of us, and I saw her face.
I said:
“Jean, she is a woman. She is no longer a young maiden” (That is what is said for a girl who is a real girl. You understand what I mean? A supple girl, a beautiful girl, a fresh girl to put it that way). In her mouth, in her regard, in her skin, there were sure signs which could not fool me.
And to myself I repeated, “Sylvie, Sylvie, who would have thought?” And then: “That’s life, are you upset?… Are you jealous? That is life; that is the way of the world; that’s it, the law. She’s a woman; very well, and so?…”
That very day I noticed the signs on her face; a small starlike design there under her eyes, made with folds of her skin; her lips which at times swell in the middle and this swelling spreads along the lips when one goes to kiss her. Her hands also had very visible signs for me who loved them.
She will never know it; and besides, who am I after all?…
Finally, all in all, when I knew that she was staying once more at the “Chussières” and that she had asked for her old clothes, and that she had taken the red off of her lips, I came for
ward on my large feet.
I say this because I am not bold. You understand that it is forced: always alone with my washing and my beehives, and so used to the ways of the bees that want slow gestures and things filled with precision, this was a rather loud entrance and people believe that I have big feet.
It is not true. I looked at them in the stream. No, they are not big: they are a man’s feet, of course, they are narrow in the middle and then all the toes stick out.
So, that’s just the thread in the needle, and, jumping from one track to another, we began to talk, no, she began to talk. As for me, I said: “Yes Ma’m, no Ma’m.” That’s all.
That is how I knew. Ah! It is not pretty. She still believes that it is beautiful, that it was beautiful. And when I ask her: “But why did he do that?” she tells me: “He loved me, you know,” and I say: “Yes Ma’m,” and inside myself “No Ma’m.”
She does not know. She did not have good lessons, lessons of bitches and dogs, and of male and female birds, and of all the simple mixture that forms even these days, the fruit of the world.
She works on her stockings while watching the sheep. Yesterday she told me: “You see when I began, I was still all nervous, and I skipped the links, look! But now I am applying myself, it is all connected, and it’s going much better!”
Yes, it’s going better: the juice of the sky is flowing through her.
And, as for me, I am here in the grass watching; I am sunk down low in the yellow grasses. She does not see me. She cannot see me. She will never see me.
Me, I see her.
Babeau
I ask her:
“Babeau, was it really right here that Fabre drowned himself?”
She begins laughing, she looks at her sheep; she looks at me and laughs.
“Ah! Monsieur Jean!”
I approach, and, to soften her up, I also begin chatting.
“That was really some idea of his to go uphill to drown himself!”
In fact it was on one of those fanned out slopes which are the source of floods, two fingers away from being the highest spot in the region. There is a great wart of cut grass and on this wart the cadaver of an ancient farm. A beautiful cypress too, near dead walls, and we are below them.
What made me think of asking Babeau about it, was that on my way up I saw the reservoir, a subterranean basin all in shadow. When one leans on the door, because there is a little door which opens out on the water level, nothing but your breathing snorts inside; it seems like you are blowing into a bull’s horn. If you stop breathing, you can hear the drops of water which make a “glout glout” sound like a clock.
“…Yes, here, up above,” I say again to put Babeau at ease.
She counts in a high voice: “Four, five, six,” the links of the stockings that she is knitting. Then:
“Wait, I am at the skipping part; do not make me miss.”
I wait. It is a nice day and the sheep are at peace in the pasture.
“Look,” says Babeau, “to get back to what you said about Fabre, did you know that I was the one who found him? Ah! I can assure you, it was laughable. It was done like that, with bravado. Ah! I tell you it was so stupid that I could not keep myself from laughing. I was here, where I am now, under the tree. There was a wind that day! And here you got it first and quite badly because it was the first patch of trees around. It made noise, and I said to myself: ‘Babeau you are going to go deaf.’
“He was down below cutting little oaks. Suddenly he came up. He came upon me and said: ‘You had better go.’ I told him: ‘Oh! it is not yet four o’clock.’ He said to me: ‘Not because it is four o’clock, but because if you stay there, you are going to see me die.’ ‘Ah! Go ahead, die!’ I said and I looked away. He was standing in front of me, there, on that pile of rocks, holding himself straight, very calm, freshly shaved, mustache a little in the air, with a healthy cheek like everybody else. ‘How stupid you are,’ I told him. I looked down at my stockings and heard him leaving. I thought to myself: ‘Even so, that man, how stupid he is, how stupid he is! Not bad, he is just stupid!’ And then again the sound of the wind in the trees filled my ears, and the needles kept my eyes busy, and that went on; I made a crossing of my hands on the stockings, then from the sun I saw that it was four o’clock, and I called my sheep.
“Coming down, in front of the reservoir, I saw Fabre’s hat, and then his vest, and on his vest, his watch. I said: ‘He is even stupider than I imagined.’ I looked in at the door. By God, there he was lying on the water, all calm. Earlier, he must have beaten the water with his arms and legs because it was all splashed up on the walls and the ceiling, and the moss in back was torn out; there was a big piece of it on the stone. What made me laugh was that above his cheek a little frog had settled. It was terribly frightened! And I had to see that at my age!”
The Sheep
Félippe was going out into his almond trees; I saw him out there where the wind blew, sniffing, nose in the air, looking carefully at the four corners of the sky, and what he saw decided him. It was a wind that wanted to work; something heavy swept in from the sea, with beautiful, thick clouds. That was the state of things.
I came down, I took big steps on the path where Félippe went at his own pace. It is very much Félippe, that slow movement of the legs, that head looking right and left at the same time, that way of carrying the hoe, the steel against the shoulder, the arm pointing out in front; the tool holding itself up by itself, hands free to enjoy the warmth in his pockets. I catch up to him; he says to me:
“I am going to the almond trees; if it rained a little later that would be good. Me, I always arrange to do half of everything.”
“How, do you share things with your son-in-law?”
“No, that is not what I mean; I mean that I do everything halfway: a little bit by me, a little bit by the weather. As for me, I am going to dig circles around the bases of the trees; the weather will make the rain. Between the rain and the circles, we will surely manage to have flowers.”
“Ah! Yes, like that, I see, but you have not thought of everything; there is not just you and the weather, there is also the tree.”
“The tree? I left it out intentionally. I can tell that you are not familiar with them. If I were not here, it would do just as it pleased. The tree is entirely whimsical. It is intelligent, I do not mean, that it understands things…but it is like an animal, it spends its time pleasurably. I will tell you. Do you know where my orchard is? There, at the end of the plain. The cold wind, it hits full-force. Well, since before Christmas, you have noticed that there has been fine weather? Good, very well, you will see. There are two or three that have blossomed; if they were still young, that would work, there would be an excuse, but old ones! And well, they seem to find that fine and good. They do not do it in secret, no, they do it just like that, for glory, to say: you see, look how strong I am! I am out in front. They are like that, you know, trees are. And then, as soon as the mistral begins they will bend as if they were in front of Jesus. The others, with their folded flowers, that will be easy for them; they will rain down on your back because they are like that, this wind, which wants them to rain down on your back, if they do not have flowers, then it is easy for them. These trees, by following their whims, first they freeze, and then comes their pride and joy, these flowers, but they stick out their stiff arms, they want to be showy and that makes them break their branches. I have seen them die of it.”
We arrived on the edge of the plain. In the ground there are big fingernail marks from the storms and fresh scars, and there are ravines that are slightly revived with a crust of young trees. I go all the way down to the valley below. I see the tops of the roofs of two villages across from me, one on each side of the torrent, and a bridge. You can see the river with its blue water clearly cut in its bed of stone; and then the fields in the valley which resemble those throw rugs that you make for the foot of beds with pieces of cloth from all the clothes that you no longer wear. You know how they sew
the pieces together with big stitches, there are bits of every color, plus bits of velour, canvas, wool, cloth, silk, at times a piece of a nightgown…
“Look, the nightgown,” says Félippe to me, “that could be this field, there, I think that it is the field of Bélin de la Bégude. You see it with its little flourishes. My wife had a nightgown like that when she was a little girl.”
We walked along the edge of the plateau, then Félippe said:
“I’ll show you the sheep.”
“A dead sheep?”
“Ah! I don’t know if he is dead, but I’ll let you see him. Come on, he has to be here.”
Here is a promontory that extends its point out over the valley. It presides over all of the lower parts of the hill.
He points his finger.
“Look, you see him there?”
I look: there are small hills and green oaks. I say in good faith: “No, I don’t see him.” And even though I know my Félippe, I was looking for an actual sheep. There are times like this when one lets oneself get taken in.
“You do not see him? You do not see him there? Look he is lying flat on his belly, his feet folded beneath him. You see there, you see his rear haunch. His tail, it is that great tuft of trees down there by Anatole’s farm. You see the sheep? It is an old one: look, above his back, he is all bare; all that is left are those pom-poms of junipers on his flanks, which really seem like wool. You see over there you could say that his front feet are folded. The sheep, he has feet like a folding yardstick, and it folds straight up. And well, then you see there his neck stretched out on the side of the plateau; he is going to hide his head, there in the pine trees. You see him? Doesn’t it look just like one?”
“Yes, it looks just like one, it is a hill lying like a tired lamb in the mud from the torrent; his neck extends down towards us, all stretched out; you even look for his head, there under the pines. It is a lamb who extends his four kilometers in length and at least two in width from the valley of Fontenouille to the farm at Garcins.”