Whenever they appeared as a plague it was during the hottest days of summer, they said. When everyone was preparing to harvest their crops. When the fruits of so much labour were about to be gathered, reaped for the nourishment of man and beast during the next seasonal cycle that would begin after the harvest. And this time of year, this moment of preparation for the harvest, was the moment when the predator called the grasshopper – small or large, they all became predators, it was only a question of circumstance and number – could descend upon territories broader than one could possibly imagine, given the insignificance of the insect usually seen in the fields. But like the ant that a certain king had learned – at his great cost – not to scorn, you could not underestimate the grasshopper, they told us.
There was once a king, proud of his power and of his army, whose authority extended over the animals and the winds, and who, thinking himself invulnerable given his might and his possessions, used to mistreat those he encountered along his way during his expeditions. It was as if an expedition justified any abuse, as if his strength absolved him from paying any heed to those he thought inferior. Beast or man, grass or tree, each suffered in turn. Some fled, others submitted, the rest let themselves be crushed. And the king advanced. Seeing this tidal wave approaching, the ants wanted to protect their territory, and set out to make the king aware of their presence. The procession came to a halt. The ants knew about the arrogance of those called humans. They had already seen evidence of it. But the future ought not to be sacrificed to past disappointments. It was essential that they inform the king of the whereabouts of their domain and alert him to the danger they faced.
And so they threaded their way into the campground and slipped into the king’s quarters. Upon seeing this invasion of ants in his sanctum, the king became enraged and wanted to chase them out immediately. The ants replied that they were not there to disturb him, and would withdraw as soon as he heard their request. They had come to let him know that their territory was in the path of his army, that they could not displace themselves in so short a time, and they asked him to respect their dwelling place. The king listened, still in a fury and exasperated by the audacity of these ants, who were concerned only with their own territory, whereas he was leading an expedition against an enemy that would put these lands out of reach – an enemy that, were it not for him, would bring ruin to the ants and their domain, to the trees and their forest, to men and their homes and offspring. He didn’t want his rest to be disturbed any longer. All the ants had to do, if they didn’t want to be seen as base creatures trying to impede his mission, was to leave their domain and build it up again after his army had passed. The ants tried in vain to make him see reason. The king wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t bear it that the ants, a negligible entity that occupied one of the lowest ranks among his subjects, kept harping on about their domain, daring to propose that his army’s advance be delayed. And he cut off all discussion. Rebuffed, the ants left the king to his repose. They couldn’t trust him. Before leaving, they told him, by way of warning, that they would take steps to defend their territory. The king paid no attention. Free of them, he went back to a night that they had shortened. The ants departed, not understanding why their simple request had been so poorly received.
The king’s glory ought not to pose a threat to their lives. The arrogance of some would have to find a response in the determination of others. The dawning day would have to make the king see reason, even if the night had found him complacent and blind to it. He who cannot steer clear of an error he is about to make only courts disaster. The ants alerted the anthills all around, and worked the night through without stopping. By dawn, their trap was ready.
At daybreak the army set out for its destination, the king as oblivious to the ants’ territory as to their warning. No whim, no shedding of tears was going to slow him or deflect him. He would cross their territory in no time without even being aware of it. But the road, up to then neither bumpy nor pitted, began to give way here and there; horses and riders, wagons and armaments, servants and their loads all sank in. The farther they advanced, the greater the calamity. Some trudged ahead, pushing others off the road into chasms that opened up in front of them. They were all dumbfounded. What enemy had set them such a trap? How did he control the earth that covered the road? The king could not understand. He held power and yet his army was in a state of collapse. All night long the ants had dug tunnels under the road, the whole length of their territory and all around it. They had made common cause with the ants of all the anthills against this arrogant and reckless king who refused to listen to reason. This king whose rush to glory had precipitated the fall of others. And so they had decided to stop him from abusing his authority. And it was done. The debacle continued. Horses slid onto soldiers, soldiers onto other soldiers, wagons onto horses. The more they forced their way forward, the more they tumbled into the holes, which kept on multiplying. What curse had befallen this expedition? The king ordered a halt to the advance. The army hauled its debris, its wounded, its mounts, its supplies out of the craters, and beat a retreat.
Returning the way he had come, the king mulled things over in his mind, from his departure to the retreat he was now forced to make, and concluded that the ants had made good on their threat and had cut his army off. How had they been able to engineer this disaster in so little time with their tiny bodies? How had they been able to shift earth and stone to set a trap that had nearly swallowed up his entire army? While the king pondered, the ants entered his sanctuary. Since, confident in his might, he had refused to listen to reason, they had been forced to act, they told him. The king, his wisdom returned, acknowledged his folly, admitted that the ants were right, and rerouted his expedition.
Large or small, each can become the scourge of the other, the grownups said. Appearances do not always give an accurate assessment of danger. So it was with the grasshoppers. They could appear out of nowhere and, in the blink of an eye, raze fields and harvests, greenery and forests, and return to the nothingness out of which they had come.
It was only at harvest time that all arms became useful and we could freely tread those fields, which had now become hard, hostile even, with their thorns, their spikes, their straw, leaving a good number of marks and scratches on our arms, legs, and feet for months to come. During the harvest, we had all the time in the world to watch the grownups show their skill at performing their tasks and, while they reaped, to try making the same motions ourselves. Motions that had turned the soil again and again ever since the foot of man had first touched this earth, motions passed on from hand to hand, from earth to flesh, motions that we had to learn and would be given us to pass on to others when we, in our turn, would be growers of food.
Our field was not vast, but, we were told, in a time that went back further than the time of Hâji Mouss, and even further than the time of Ayzer and his tribe; in distant times that left traces only in words and in the wind that took the words from one place to another; in those times when every group of valleys that we share today with several villages was inhabited by only one man and his family; in those times when men were few, the land abundant, and one could walk for days and meet only the animals that shared the earth and the forest with these first men; in those times before men, in greater and greater numbers, began to weigh down the earth with their iniquity; before the sky, in its wrath, began to overwhelm those on earth who had lost all moderation, so that there could emerge new inhabitants who saw before them the example of the first men, a warning that would incite them not to overstep bounds; in those times, before the floods transformed these heights into mountains and gorges stripped of earth, where each tree struggles to cover its roots with soil to keep it upright; in those times, they told us, the grower could without lifting his plough join the two summits of the great valley to the east of the village in a single furrow without the blade meeting any obstacles other than the peaks of the summits on either side. The mountains had risen up out of the fields that,
with each flood, drew back to take refuge in the corners where they now sought shelter, waiting for the final deluge that would erase them forever. And we, living on this land, would disappear with everything else, the grownups said.
The earth was a table laid open where the living flourished and flourished again, where the generations accomplished their journey. At the end of every journey the table was folded up, and life with it. The earth would in its turn taste of its own extinction, the end of all being, they said, in a scattering of everything to the winds, that the winds might return all to the valley where beings and things had been born a first time.
These memories did not make our fields any larger, did not cover our rocks and our mountains where the trees had to stretch their roots out to cling to their heights. Our fields, just as cramped, the remaining pockets, the surviving pockets on our mountains, which were themselves growing more and more bare as the earth drew away from their summits. Our fields where wheat was first sown. Wheat, the first seeds known to the earth, they told us. This seed that we deposited in the earth, that we harvested like a blessing, with the greatest of respect. The wheat that we gathered to the last grain any of us accidentally let fall, placing it out of reach of any foot that might trample it. The wheat we carried to those pockets of ground with prayers and invocations, that it might return to us from the earth increased and renewed. Pockets of earth that we tried to protect, like our dwellings, from the winds and sudden rains, with walls and conduits, so they would shrink no more, so they would be able to accommodate what we folded into them. Pockets that we tried to enrich, to increase with what passed through the entrails of our beasts and our herds, so that they would maintain their willingness to accept what we entrusted to them, and to have it thrive.
Tobacco, a recent interloper, was now widespread in our fields and, by contrast, required constant care. We paid it a visit practically every day, for a ritual that began at dawn and ended with the first fierce rays of the sun. With tobacco, everything had to be done in the morning coolness, as if to shield from heat a plant destined for the fire. The earth we piled at its base to shore it up so that it would grow more vigorously, had to be cool, cool and soft. The leaves, once they had reached a certain maturity, had to be gathered before being exposed to the sun’s rays, which would cast a pale light on them all, making it hard to distinguish those that were good. The flowered tips at the base had to be cut so that the leaves would absorb all the plant’s strength, so that its energy would not be wasted on greedy flowers that served no purpose in the growing of tobacco, except for those intended for reproduction, which added some spots of colour to the fields. This operation had to be performed when it was cool so that the base of the plant could heal before the sun attacked it. Every gesture had to be precise in order not to damage the plant or the rest of the leaves.
As children, we were invited to this ceremony because, large or small, hands could open for the same prayer, work at the same tasks, and, with a little attention, achieve the same precision. Once our movements had met the test, we were no longer so keen to mix our hands in with those of the grownups. Now they had to insist. As for us, soon exhausted by this fastidious work, we sought, with all sorts of pretexts, to avoid it, and to excuse ourselves from the carpet on which the tobacco leaves were piled. It was work that bent the back, tired the eyes, made our legs tremble, gave us pains in our joints. And there was the nausea, the disgust caused by the tobacco when your hands were covered with its thick excrescence, which disappeared only after you’d washed them, first in the earth and then several times with soap.
Still, despite the fact that it was bitter and disgusting on contact, tobacco prolonged the life of springtime greenery, an argument very much in its favour in this land of burning hot summers. Wheat followed the same rhythm as nature. The nature of grasses. It greened with the rest of the grasses, ripened, yellowed along with them. Modestly and with simplicity. As children, we hardly noticed. From the almond trees below the terraces to the wild plants we shared with the kids and the lambs, we were too busy, too beguiled by nature in its awakening. In this awakening, the fields of wheat were well-defined green spaces that we avoided for fear of being scolded. This delicate, green haze must never be trod on if it was to grow and stand and ripen. After an initial curiosity, we only went back once the green had disappeared, when the spontaneous spring hues began to fade and the wheat was tall and strong enough to hide us and withstand our clumsiness. Until then, we let the wheat grow under the watchful eyes of the grownups, and we were content with the abundance we found elsewhere, happy to grow with what was burgeoning and flowering in the spring.
But when the greenery of the grasses and the earth gave way to summer, when the green of the branches and leaves darkened to resist the sun’s heat, and when the wheat fields became a yellowish expanse that compounded the heat, then the verdant green of the tobacco fields came to represent the last breath of springtime in summer, the final refuge of green. With the cucumbers and tomatoes we planted between the rows, it prolonged the abundance of spring and our bond with the field while we waited for the ripening of the grapes far to the east.
While waiting for the grapes, we had to cross the village to reach the field at the extreme west. Our first crossings were of course made on our mothers’ backs, usually on top of another load, quite comfortable even though the crossings were punctuated by our mothers’ grumbling about their burdens and about us. In my case, these were made even worse by the fact that my mother had come from the western edge of the village to join my father in his paternal home in the centre, and once they had a family, they had settled far to the east. Later, I had to follow my mother’s footsteps, and on the return trip, forgetting myself, had to share in her fear of this crossing where killings were not unknown. Still later, I had to go with my father or ride on the back of a horse or a donkey, in the company of a parent or a brother.
You had to grow up some day and take the risk of crossing the village from one end to the other on your own. Man the forgetful thinks himself immortal at each stopping place where he finds welcome, the grownups said, even though he is but a sojourner. He only moves on when he is obliged to and has no choice. There was the memory of the first exile, certainly, and man lived in perpetual fear of having to relive it. His habit of thinking himself immortal at each stopping place served to attenuate this fear, even though the exile occurred only once and was temporary, and at the end there would be the return. But he who has burned himself with milk will blow to cool his water, the grownups reminded us. Before he will agree to move on and prepare himself for the destination to come, man holds stubbornly to the present. He cuts himself off from the past without yet knowing the future, and lives between veils that obscure his view backward or forward. When man is in his mother’s belly, they told us, he lives from her scraps and leavings, surrounded by her inner fragrances and emanations, and there he feels at home. Then he is expelled, with tears and cries, calling on the universe to witness the disaster that has befallen him. Even though he is entering a better world, it is a world he has seen only through the filter of the mother’s body, and has experienced as the beyond: it was the world that nourished the maternal paradise. Now this beyond will become his own, he will himself be immersed in its colours and tastes, will experience the day and the night through his own body. Rather than by the internal liquids of his mother, he will be nourished by two sources of abundance, his mother’s breasts, which will fill his mouth with the scent of the plains, the taste of fruit, the awareness of food and bread. This bread, whose aromas, as it is being baked, permeate the house and its surroundings. It is amid catastrophe and commotion that he makes his entrance and takes his place. And he does not want to leave his mother’s breasts, even though they are there only to meet a need, to make up for a deficiency. Now that he has teeth, now that his intestines are ready, he can taste on his own what his mother was transmitting to him through her breasts. But no, the drama is not over. He does not want to walk, he
does not want to chew on his own, he does not want to be separated from his mother. Even though his mother wants a rest from him, and in any case her sources of nourishment are drying up. With tears and sadness, he timidly says farewell to his mother’s breasts, only to find that what is before him now is infinitely richer and more varied than what he has just left behind him. And he starts to love his new port of call, and to gorge himself on what is there for the taking. When he begins to hold steady on his feet, he is reluctant to leave the arms of his mother. But he soon learns that with his own legs he can run wherever he wants, that with his hand he can take hold of whatever he desires. The world is no longer his mother’s alone, no longer a world known only through her. It can also be his world. But it is still hard, he is still afraid of leaving what is known for what is new, for the unknown.
Once he has found a place in the world on his own, with his jaws for chewing, with his hands and his legs, he imagines himself to be immortal. Even though this new stage is no more eternal than those that came before. It offers a slightly longer gestation that gives rise to a world one could not have imagined. But as no one has ever climbed into a mother’s womb to reassure the infant about to be born as to what to expect on the other side, so no one will return from the beyond to put our minds at rest about what lies in wait for us. Everyone must look back at what he has forgotten, must lift his own veils, so as not to be overwhelmed by the anguish of waiting and the fears aroused by the prospect of a new departure, a new birth into the unknown, so the grownups said.
We think we can live forever in our childhood, where everything is familiar. We think we are not growing up, but one day, even while we are still trying to protect our little world, we realize that this world has slipped away from us and that we are face to face with a new one. We are no longer what we were. You are big now, they tell us, closing doors that were until then open to us. And we accept, stamping our feet from time to time, kicking or beating our heads against doors now shut, that stay shut until we turn to confront the world of grownups.
To the Spring, by Night Page 14