by Jean Giono
Here I pushed the door to the little café run by Antoine, and now that I am here, if I think of the same thing, I see them all, my beautiful men heavy with great strength. I see all of them there heavy with the great magnetism of the earth and the sky going out into a virgin world with the same square shoulders which they just used to open the door and go out into the night of the old world, in their village threatened by foxes, boars, the forests, and the icy waters.
And that is why the morning after, when I met at the gate of the barn the man who twisted the long straw strips and fixed them with the bark of a hazel tree, coiling them in great flats for the chicken feed, that is why I approached him and said:
“Show me. That is good work; show me how it’s done.”
And in my heart I said:
“Yes, teach me, teach me, tell me what I really want to learn, I beg you. Teach me. If you refuse I will be desperate and naked.”
Fear of the Land
Yes! And I told myself: “By living in the thick of the hill that will leave you. Look: it is not the earth that piles up in your shoe; it is a flower; it is the wind; it is the plateau that is used and which cries out under the wind like iron in the mold. What are you afraid of?”
Good. But, summer or winter, the wide-open land is there and I survey it over and over, the wide-open land holds me at its mercy.
I also told myself: “It is in your head. You see what happens to you when you try to get to the bottom of things! Drop all of that, make yourself into pure peacefulness while working the earth for food, like all of those people of the forgotten farms around you, like Jacques, like Clovis, like Hugues, like Sansombre.” And, you know, I just saw Sansombre; and he was fighting against this very same fear!
I went down to Reillanne. Not on business, no, but with my hands in my pockets, like that, filled with enthusiasm, because on that very day the plateau wore its malice in full view. I had given a stroke of the hoe in the thick of the garden and underneath were the roots of junipers, as broad as my thigh, and ready for the attack. Usually I pass through that forest; this time I took the road: the road is a little bit of domestic land. There I heard a cane up ahead tapping and I said to myself: “That must be either the postman, or I don’t know who.” But I did not try to catch up with him; this fear of the land does not give you the desire for company but rather disgust for everything.
I have good legs, and without even trying, I gained on the person up ahead. At a turn I saw him, it was Sansombre. What was he going to do at Reillanne, on a day like this?
This village which I am telling you about is just a twisted road, and, lined up on the road are the grocer, the tobacconist, the post office, the café Fraternité, the Mouranchon sisters’ house, and then the sows, and the stables, and then the low windows and behind the windows the old women knitting stockings. After that, the road turns out again on the flat of the round earth.
I spend the morning looking at the houses, breathing in the odor of manure, watching a horse that went by itself to drink at the fountain. And I said to myself: “That, yes, is an animal that matters! If you had that next to you, then you would know what to cling to!” I caressed the horse. He was turned with two legs crossed, and without stopping his drinking he made me see his big troubled eyes, troubled…
I avoided my Sansombre who tried to do the same thing as I did two or three times. He went into the stores. Not to buy anything: he entered, he said: “Hello, well, how’s it going?” They responded: “Not bad, and you?” And he responded: “Oh, me!…”
I went to the Fraternité. Well in the back, in the shadow. I asked for some wine. Sansombre also came into the Fraternité; he could not do otherwise. He sat by the window, he had them serve him a bottle of wine. He drank it in full glasses, leaving a little space between each glass, then he asked for a second liter. At one point he looked in my direction, without seeing me; in my shadow, I drank softly and then I set the glass softly on the table without making a sound. He looked in my direction, his eyes were troubled like those of the horse. There was only he and I in the café.
He asked for large coins; and they gave him some for twenty centimes; ten big coins of bronze spread out on the marble. He gathered them up and went over to the player piano.
He played all of the pieces, one after another without stopping, then he began again. He was there, on his chair, squarely poised, his body straight, arms hanging, but his head was tilted to the side on his shoulder like the end of a sick plant. And as for me, I was also like that in my shadow.
The night came. Outside they lit the three oil street lamps: one in the middle of the road, the others at each end. The owner of the café was frying onions in his kitchen. Sansombre left money on the table and left. As for me, I waited a little, then I called “Boss!” She did not respond; I left the amount as well and left.
Sansombre was ahead of me, but I found him at the end of the street, stopped at the edge of the night, just at the frontier of the lanterns and the night. He looked, from there into the depths of shadow of our damned land. I stopped next to him; I began looking, too, for a good while, and then I said:
“Yes, it is over there!”
He turned his big troubled eyes towards me. I understood that he was thinking like me: “And to say that we are going to have to go there!”
Lost Rafts
In a little village of Ventoux, a family of peasants is on trial. The young man strangled his wife. After that he took his dead wife on his shoulders and went out and to hang her like a Guinea hen by the stairs of the barn. The father was eating his cheese under the oak. He saw the son pass by with his charge.
“Where are you going?”
“To hang Augusta.”
It seemed entirely natural to him.
That should be rather hard to understand when one is not out in the middle of the land. I say “middle of the land” as they say “middle of the sea.” This old Rodolphe who was eating the cheese, he was the captain of all that. If he did not move, if he did not see anything but the ordinary in the weight of the dead woman that his son balanced while crossing the yard, it was because he had prepared everything long before. Augusta was a rich orphan. Before going farther, and explaining everything, you have to know the countryside: the black woods, the red and dark hills, the mute valleys. Once in awhile, a bird passes by. It is a magpie carried by the wind, who fights against the wind to return to his land but who allows himself to go with the flow because, from above, he saw beyond the hills the wide red and green countryside. One has to wait again for another gust of wind before seeing another bird. The land is covered with low oaks. The oak takes a long time to sprout its leaves. It takes a long time to lose them and it keeps them dead on its branches for a long time. There are barely two months of green leaves. The rest of the time there is no voice in the landscape, no song of the trees, only this sound of dry bones and broken stones, when the wind flows in the oak groves. The farm, I know it; attached to the land like some domesticated animal, a back of stone with huge muscles, and, blowing in the black dust of shale, a little head which is like a sow with piglets. Narrow windows, just wide enough to allow the muzzle of a gun to pass through. Inside one has to feel the way with one’s feet like in a cave. Stairways everywhere, those which go up and those which go down. They are not the same: some lead to the attics, the others to hidden places in the rock. Down below, in the black belly of the house, there is always a well or a cistern. It is never protected. It yawns with its big humid mouth at the level of the stairs. It remains there. It is a good threat, a good remedy which is there waiting patiently. It could be put to use, maybe by chance, maybe one could help chance a little with an elbow push if one has a wife who produces too many children, a girl who is a little beyond help, or an old father who is lingering.
So, Augusta was a rich orphan. A little farther on, in the hills, there was a notary. A notary, a cistern, these are things to make use of. First they made Augusta sign a legal notice. Normal. I see Rodolphe. H
e must have pulled off his hat and scratched his head, then squeezed his chin and pulled two or three times on the skin of his chin. At that point, he said:
“Let us see it.”
They passed the paper across the table to him.
He asked several times:
“What does that mean?”
The notary took back the paper, put on his glasses, and reread the act up until the word that Rodolphe kept his finger on.
“There.”
“There, that means…”
“Good. It is standard.”
Augusta signed, the notary signed. All that was left was to prepare his big hands and the rope.
I read that in Paris certain gun brokers sell revolvers to excited people and, distrusting them, give them blank cartridges. The evil is that in the middle of the land one cannot accomplish acts with blanks.
For Rodolphe, his son, and for the entire chestnut farm, we could perhaps avenge Augusta because they believed too much that the middle of the land was worth the middle of the sea. But I know other stories, another story that the newspapers do not talk about.
Last summer, in a little mountain village, I was going to smoke my pipe along the ravine with a dear old laughing man, slow, filled with wisdom, in bloom from the eye down to the lips. Towards noon his wife called him with a soft, loving voice and he went in to soup. Walking the flat of the fields at his leisure, one felt that he had a firm foot, long thoughts, a good weight.
I said to him often:
“Father Firmin, we are still going to have good pipes before the time…”
It did not bother him to speak about death. Everything was well-oiled in him. He saw himself at the end of his life with still a good bundle of years.
The wife died. Father Firmin stayed alone in the house. Then his nephew came to live in the house. They had spoken so much about company, they had spoken so much about children, little girls, of good society all cosy around the stove, they had waved good soups under his nose, good stews, fresh tobacco, the good young women fussed so much for the pains of the old man that Firmin went to the notary.
Twenty days later, after twenty mouthfuls of a very bitter truth, Firmin threw himself in the torrent.
The nephew is red-haired and a solid man. He has a lot of blood. He has to eat a lot. They are not plentiful, those little fields of dark grain up there in the high waves of the mountain.
Men lost on rafts, in the middle of the land.
Song of the World
For a very long time I have wanted to write a novel in which you could hear the world sing. In all of today’s books they have given, in my opinion, too big a place to small-minded people and they have neglected to make us perceive the breathing of the beautiful inhabitants of the universe. The seeds that are sown in books, they all seem to have been purchased from the same granary. They sow a lot about love in all its forms, and it is a thoroughly bastardized plant, then one or two fistfuls of other seeds and that is all. Besides, all of that is sown into man. I know that we can hardly conceive of a novel without people, because they are part of the world. What is needed is to put man in his place, not to make him the center of everything, to be humble enough to perceive that a mountain exists not merely as height and width but as weight, emissions, gestures, overarching power, words, sympathy. A river is a character, with its rages and its loves, its power, its god of chance, its sicknesses, its thirst for adventures. Rivers, springs are characters: they love, they deceive, they lie, they betray, they are beautiful, they dress themselves in rushes and mosses. The forests breathe. The fields, the moors, the hills, the beaches, the oceans, the valleys in the mountains, the lost summits struck by lightning and the proud walls of rock on which the wind of the heights comes to disembowel itself since the first ages of the world: all of this is not a simple spectacle for our eyes. It is a society of living beings. We only know the anatomy of these beautiful living things, as human as we are, and if the mysteries limit us on all sides it is because we have never taken into account the earthly, vegetable, fluvial, and marine psychologies.
This appeasement which comes to us in the friendship of a mountain, this appetite for the forests, this drunkenness which equalizes us, extinguishes our gaze and deadens thought, because we have smelled the odor of these humid burdocks, the mushrooms, the barks, this joy of entering in the grass up to our waist, they are not creations of our senses, it exists all around us and it directs our gestures more than what we believe.
I know that, at times, they have made use of a river to carry the weight of a novel; the silt of its terror, mystery, or strength. I know that they have made use of mountains and that every day they still make use of the land and the fields. They make the birds sing in the forests. No, what I want to do, is to put everything in its place. Despite everything, in the admirable, most recent novel of Jules Romains, Paris is too small. Paris by way of a character is much stronger than that. I know it poorly; the few times that I was there, it showed me the play of some of its muscles so well, the few strokes of its secret battles succeeded so well that ever since I have kept a distant respect for it. In this society of fat inhabitants of the universe, it is, along with all the big cities, the beautiful, cultivated, sportive, seductive, and rotten hoodlum.
If I say that it is small, in this book, it is because for the moment men are too important in relation to it. Besides, it is possible that in the coming volumes, his portrait will be complete and at the end of things we will see Paris as it is: flat, gnawing, scolding, destroyer of the earth, embued with the stinking of human sweat like a great ant hive that exhales its acid.
Yes, they have made use of all that. One should not make use of it. One must see it. One must, I believe, see, love, comprehend, hate the association of men, the world around it, as one is forced to look, to love, to detest men profoundly in order to paint them. One should stop isolating the character-man, sow him with simple, habitual seeds, but show him as he is, that is to say pierced, drunk, weighty and luminous with humors, influences, the song of the world. For whoever has lived a while in a little mountain hamlet, for example, it is useless to say what place that mountain holds in the conversations of men. For a village of fishermen, it is the sea; for a village in the countryside, it is the fields, the wheat, and the prairies. We do not want to isolate man. He is no longer isolated. The face of the earth is in his heart.
To write this novel, all that is needed is new eyes, new ears, new skins, a man bruised enough, beaten enough, flayed enough by life to no longer desire anything but the lullaby sung by the world.
JEAN GIONO (1895-1970) was born in Manosque, Provence, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman. A widely loved figure in his native France, he is the author of many books, the best known of which, perhaps, are Song of the World and Horseman on the Roof. In 1953, he was awarded the Prize of the Prince Rainier de Monaco for his body of work, became a member of the Académie Goncourt in 1954, and accepted a seat on the Literary Counsel of Monaco in 1963.
Except for a few journeys to Paris or abroad, Giono spent his entire life in Manosque, faithful to his native Provence.
HENRY MILLER (1891-1980) is the author of many books, including the classics Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, which chronicle his life as an American expatriate living in Paris.
EDWARD FORD, a lifelong admirer of Giono’s, completed a Master’s in French at the University of Virginia. Solitude de la pitié was the first book of Giono’s he read, and it remains his favorite to this day. Ford lives in the Boston area.
a Curé = parish priest
b Attendez = the polite command form of wait
Copyright © 2002 by Seven Stories Press
Foreword © 1969 by Henry Miller.
Originally published in France as Solitude de la pitié. © 1973 by Éditions Gallimard.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, rec
ording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giono, Jean, 1895-1970.
[Solitude de la pitié. English]
The solitude of compassion / Jean Giono; translated by Edward Ford.
p. cm,
eISBN : 978-1-609-80031-4
1. Ford, Edward (Edward Bruce) II. Title.
PQ2613.I57 S613 2002
843′.912—dc21
2002010009
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