The old woman had her repeat the story, and when the sun was near its peak, she suspended the young woman by her feet from the beams of her house, over a basin of water, and she waited. Once the sun had reached its zenith, the snake dropped out of the woman’s mouth into the basin. A black snake, gleaming, all the darker after its passage through the entrails of the woman. Once it was in the basin, it was covered with a thick black cloth so it would think it was still inside, then buried in a pit, and covered with a thick layer of earth. So that it would remain there until the hour when all knots are untied, and so that it would never be tempted to return to the young woman’s belly. For a snake that has tasted of the entrails of a woman only leaves her once her days are done, once she is dead. And sometimes it follows its victim even beyond death, so it was said.
By all accounts, in a not so distant past, but one perhaps forgotten, there was another black snake and a young woman it inhabited for a time. When the time came to deliver the serpent, not enough care was taken and it escaped. The young woman died as a result of this invasion. During the ritual visits to the dead person in the days following the burial, a hole was observed in the grave, which the visitors filled in. On the next visit the hole had reappeared. A watch was then kept at the grave, to find out what was happening. It became clear that they were not the only visitors, that the black snake they had allowed to escape during its deliverance from the young woman had also been paying her visits. It was then that they finished what they had begun; they killed the snake so that everyone would now be at peace, both the snake and the young woman in her grave.
In order that there be no surprise this time, the old woman had taken precautions. As soon as it fell into the basin, the snake was thrust into darkness so it would not have time to notice the passage from one darkness to another, and would think it had received yet another jug of water emptied by the woman. It then had to be placed it in a pit as soon as possible, and left in total darkness for a long time. The old woman had thought of everything, and so it was done. The serpent was poured from one blackness to another, and the woman was saved from the snake and from her thirst.
Snakes were still on the prowl, and that could happen to anyone, any time, we were warned. When it was very hot and we were tired and felt like lying down in the shade of a tree, we thought about the serpent. And we chose to stay awake rather than sleep in the shade.
There were still other snakes. It was a spring day, perhaps a day in May. Not autumn, no. It was a day of fresh greenery, not russet humidity. And of waking to joy rather than readying for sleep. Of dew on bright leaves, not drops falling onto autumn’s muddy soil.
Suddenly, on this spring morning, there was a commotion, a disturbance, a flare-up of fear. I had just awakened. Uncle Moussa was either coming back from the fields or setting out for them. My father was on the terrace, his head and feet bare. Or perhaps he was on a neighbouring terrace cutting tobacco for smuggling. That was often the case, my father being the only one in the village with the proper tools and the know-how for cutting tobacco. Was my mother not there? I can’t remember seeing her. Did she have a pot in her hand that she had just washed? Had she just left the fire and the bread to respond immediately to the cries of alarm? I cannot place her physically. Around the house, everything was in shadow. In shadow the little stream to the west of the house, my father on the terrace, my uncle on the road; in shadow the terraces and the neighbouring houses. You could still sense the departure of the herd, which could not have been far off. I didn’t know what had happened, or how, or what it all meant. But I was assailed by a fear for which knowledge can do nothing, that it cannot diminish. I was afraid of what was being relayed from one terrace to another. Cries that, passing over me, entered my ears, and wrenched me from my morning drowsiness into fear: my brother had been bitten by a snake. A snake had bitten my brother.
Uncle Moussa had sounded the alarm from the road below our house. I didn’t know if he was coming to the village or leaving it, but he was the one who spread the news. He said that my brother had walked into a bush and that the snake had bitten him. He had perhaps bitten him through his shoe. And some details: most of the poison would have stayed in the shoe. But the bite had reached him all the same. His leg was bound tightly with a cloth so the poison would not rise in his body. His foot was washed with the morning dew. The bite was bled. He was lifted onto the back of a donkey. A cousin was nearby. He went with him. He had to be carried, he was being carried into town.
They had to skirt the village on the north side to head for the town. I have no memory of my brother from that morning, or of his return in the afternoon or the evening of that day. I only remember my fear on waking up that morning.
There was also the snake that had chased me outside with barely a towel to cover myself when I was getting ready to wash in the corner of the room at the back where we bathed and performed our ablutions. It was afternoon. There was my father and the smuggler cousin who shared our house and whom I already saw as a kind of father-in-law. As he was not getting along well with his parents after his marriage, we had invited him to stay with us, where he remained with his young bride for almost a year in one of the rooms that we continued to call by his name after he left. He had used that time to build his own house, where his wife gave birth to a daughter, whom I considered to be my betrothed. And he visited us on a regular basis. In case of need, he was the one my father called on. It was during one of these visits. My father and my cousin were talking on the terrace.
My mother had heated the water, prepared my things, and called me to come and wash. I entered the room at the back, where it took some time for my eyes to become accustomed to the semi-darkness. I had begun to take off my clothes, when I heard a noise from the ceiling. I didn’t pay any attention; any creature could make such noises. Only the snake and the scorpion could be dangerous; the rest, like the mouse, the rat, the lizard, were harmless, and we had a cat to deal with them. I was just starting to wash myself when I heard the noise again. My eyes had by now adjusted, and I looked more closely to identify the spot. First, I thought I saw a bit of rope where the wall met the ceiling. Looking again, I saw a snake’s head sticking out from the beam. Covering myself with a towel, I ran outside and gave the alert. I was told that I must have made a mistake; there was no snake in the room at the back. When I insisted, my mother and cousin came to see, with a lamp and the gun. The snake really was there, hissing menacingly, clearly visible under the light. It was exposed for the gunshot that soon came. You must never keep a snake waiting too long in your sights if you want to kill it. The shot hit home, and the snake fell full length onto the ground. It was buried, my mother wiped up the blood, and I could finally wash. But was I not ashamed of acting out of fear? Out of paternal indulgence, my father would have glossed over my fear, but my cousin, the father of my betrothed, who might one day be my father-in-law? Did I want to pass for a weakling, for someone fearful, in the eyes of my future father-in-law?
There was also, like a world apart, the valley of serpents, or the hollow of serpents, that faced a rock on one side, and a greyish slope on the other, which, in the hot hours of noon, became reflectors and, where there was no hint of shade, heated the hollow like a cauldron. Snakes liked the heat, and this hollow became their garden in those hot hours. Grey earth covered the pebbles you had to cross to reach the vineyards after keeping watch until the first warmth of noon. A narrow path, little used, crossed the hollow. It was cleared of stones and covered with sandy earth and if you stepped off it, you risked coming upon a snake under each overturned stone, or in every hole. Our hearts stopped and any thought of heroism vanished when we saw them, small and large, moving around in waves: emerging from holes, from under stones, threading their way through dry grass, or disappearing farther along under other stones. It was important not to oppose them, much less attack them, but to cross the hollow quickly and without incident to reach the sweetness of that bunch of grapes we had been eyeing since the first light of
day. Silent and cautious, we would start along this path, hoping not to wake or disturb anything, then rush to safety in the vineyard or on the opposite slope, which led to the spring below the citadel.
The grownups told us about another valley of serpents, or rather a gorge, a chasm with cliffs for walls, whose height and breadth were difficult to judge. Walls with rows of caves or niches, and in each of these holes a snake with a white head, black teeth, and a tongue longer than its body, which disappeared deep in the caves. But they never told us more, claiming that they didn’t want to upset us with the horror of such a vision. Besides, they only knew the beginning of this story. But why begin a story if you don’t know how it turns out? Do you ever know how things are going to turn out for you? they said – and yet there you are, a story, a story whose ending you will never know.
There were as many snakes as there were fears. Those snakes that had raised themselves up in love before my child’s eyes were to be found in the west, on the other side of the stream. We were waiting for the herds to come home, and the two snakes showed us the breadth of love. After that moment, I kept on looking to the west in the hope that the unknown worlds I encountered would one day bring me back to the known world of the stream with its intertwined snakes, and to the east that slips first into the darkness and that will always be there on the other side of our house, with its mystery, its trees, and its earth.
We had a field at the western edge of the village, near the White Rock, a legendary rock that was inaccessible for the greater part of my childhood. It was a rock whose name was associated with gunfire, blood, raids on the village, escapes, kidnappings. With missed targets, misfirings, knives to the heart, scythe blows to the skull. It was near the White Rock that my aunt, already old, went to hang herself thirty years after the first hanging, at the end of her old age and of her patience, as if to engrave the rock in my memory by shrouding it in one more film of fog. From time to time I caught a glimpse of it from afar when we were in the fields. I saw nothing to distinguish its colour from that of the other rocks, nothing to make it worthy of the name White Rock. But it kept its distance in its indefinable whiteness. To my eyes it was the unknown incarnate, a farthermost marker signalling the vastness of its territory, its limitless possibilities.
I wondered if it was not the Rock of the White Ladies, the hiding place of those who abducted the women they loved from a family and tribe opposed to their union. Wondered if it might not be this rock that hid them in its cloak, as snow covered the ground with whiteness, and concealed them from enemy eyes that viewed their love with hatred. If it was not this rock that, in its whiteness, inspired pity and charity in the hearts of the pursuers, leading them to abandon their hunt and leave the lovers in peace with their passion.
Or if it was not perhaps the Rock of Whiteness. If a hidden whiteness did not appear by magic, by enchantment, when you passed near. If the blackness covering the body, the head, or the face did not miraculously disappear. Why, when the rainbow could, at one stroke, turn boys into girls and girls into boys, could the White Rock not turn blackness into whiteness and unburden those passing before it?
The grownups told us not to move if ever a rainbow appeared, for fear of changing our sex and being forced to wait for another rainbow to reassume our original form. We wondered why men without sons who remarried in order to have one did not simply pass their daughter under a rainbow. They would be spared the complaints and disputes that followed on a second marriage and, in addition to a boy, they would have peace. But it was hard to pass under a rainbow, they said. At each end it was held by an angel, whose role it was to stop anyone from going through. Every time you got closer, the angels shifted the rainbow; the more you walked, the farther away it moved. Only an evil spirit, by obscuring the angel’s view, could make it happen. But anyone who sought the help of this spirit would be damned forever. Still, you had to take care when a rainbow appeared; you were never immune from malice, from the ill-intentioned. But our fear of the rainbow was allayed, and we could again admire its colours, watched over by two angels.
What was only an accident, the workings of an evil spirit in the case of the rainbow, could it not be transformed into goodness where the White Rock was concerned?
When I saw the workers pass by whose fields lay beyond the rock, I watched for their return to see if the rock’s powers, as I perceived them, were well founded, if the rock’s hidden whiteness brightened the face of anyone who returned, if a man’s hardness, which had verged on meanness when he caught us near his plantings, became kindness when we next met, or if I had to revise my theory.
Our field was not very large. It had been inherited from the grandfather who had divided it in two, one half for each brother. We grew wheat and tobacco, each in turn. Later, to plant tobacco, we had to go and fetch water up by the Rock, where there was a well. On the heights near the Rock I saw before me an expanse that opened onto other rocks whose names I did not even know, whose existence I did not even suspect. The White Rock was not a culmination, a summit rising from the mists. It was greyish rather than the white I had imagined. It represented one step that, depending on the direction, took one up or down, one stage that led to others, farther into the mountain. It was a threshold. We found ourselves at the portal of childhood, at the door to the memories that had come before us. The Rock had set a boundary at a time when I did not yet dare scale it, when my fears did not allow my nascent memory to join with those of others. Now the rock gave way before other rocks that set new limits, as far as the horizon, and of its legend it left me only its name, and its memory, at the doors of the village.
We grew wheat and tobacco in this field. For us children, the wheat seemed a very remote crop, until it was harvested. Once it had been sown, it demanded nothing from us. When lunches were taken to the site and we went along, it was only from a distance that we saw the plantings, which our father did on his own or with the help of a relative or a neighbour whom he would help in his turn.
Once the sowing was complete, the cold took over, with the slow ripening of the seeds within the earth and no one present. After the snow and the cold were gone and spring returned, if we ventured farther from the village and its surroundings, we made out fields covered in seedlings that were breaking through the ground.
We dared not approach the still-muddy field, or the shoots, which we might damage. Only certain grownups who were used to hunting dared step a short way into the field to gather tender shoots for the partridges that were their hunting partners. They knew the places near the village where the earth was softer and warmer at the height of winter, and still moist in the spring. They went with small sacks to gather earth for their favourite birds to bathe in. Once ensconced in the softness and warmth of this earth, and attended to by the hunter, the partridges treated themselves to a meal of tender wheat sprouts.
When the soil was perfectly dry and the wheat near maturity, we could go into the field looking for field peas, one of our favourite delicacies at the beginning of summer. We were still not very welcome. We had to approach with caution, as in hunting for wild peas we could trample the wheat, which would not come back up and would be lost to the harvest.
We made ourselves useful shouting and chasing away the birds that found an easy and abundant source of food in the young wheat. But we quickly got tired of the commotion and all that running after birds, who also needed something to peck at. We traded in that noisy task for more light-hearted, amusing games or went off in search of other foodstuffs, lured by the abundance of spring, which we had to enjoy to the full, for it lasted such a short time and wouldn’t soon return.
The grownups told us that at harvest time only a third of the crop was our due, a small third that we could store within our walls. Everyone on earth had to support those who lived under the same skies. People depended on each other, and we all depended on the one who made it possible for us all to be here. Not to share would in no way increase our portion of the harvest, it would only lessen what
came to us from the harvest of others. Those who could not have their share could not give us ours.
Everyone had to gather his own third. We had to make sure that our third was brought within our walls for our provisions, so we would survive the days allotted to us. Our watchfulness and our surveillance of the fields, of what had been sown, was part of this effort, the grownups said.
During these outings, we were uncertain, not knowing at what point we should let others take their share, and at what point we should begin to protect our own. Because, we were told, you had to be fair in the sharing. The day would come when we would be judged according to how honest we were among ourselves as well as toward others.
We heard about the plagues that made off with all three portions and disappeared, leaving behind them ruined fields, a sad land, and a despairing population faced with no subsistence for the days to come. These plagues came down like lightning, rose up like a storm, blanketing nature with a black veil and a deafening clamour.
One of these plagues was the grasshoppers, we learned. It seemed strange to us that grasshoppers could constitute a danger. We saw them in the fields, thin and frail, alert for the slightest movement that would send them leaping away to a safer place. How could they devastate fields and forests? We wondered what they could possibly eat, given how weak they seemed. To glean a few scraps on the edge of a leaf? They could not possibly raze the greenery of nature and of our crops. But they could, said the grownups. These grasshoppers were behind plagues and disasters – and not just ordinary ones. Massive, destructive disasters that could never be forgotten.
To the Spring, by Night Page 13