The Serpent of Stars

by Jean Giono

  Already that lovely silence, already that edge of evening, and the cowbell of the poor shepherd rang over there from under the blue junipers.

  He let me get my breath beside him, and then he handed me his water jug. I saw that he, too, had his natural home there, not like the potter’s, who hollows out the earth and then kneads it, knowing the forms, but only goes that far, without knowing what spirit to breathe into it. No, this was the home of the master, the pine-lyre player, the initiated who listens to the words of the clouds and reads the great writing of the stars: a hut of loosely woven branches, ethereal, saturated with air.

  THIS IS what he told me:

  I was fifteen years old. In the middle of winter, the master felt my arms. He said, “Let me see your legs.” I lifted my pants. He passed his hands over my legs and felt my calves. “Good,” he said, “you’ll leave for the Alps this spring, but first, show me your teeth.” I rolled back my lips like a laughing dog, and he said, “Alright,” and this time, it was decided. First I went to say good-bye to my team of horses, and then I went to find the shepherds. They were camping in the hayloft, on the fine hay, humpbacked as the open sea. Like all young shepherds, I stayed there to test the waters, and in the evening, instead of sleeping under the stairs as I usually did, I dug myself a burrow in the hay to sleep beside them.

  At Christmas, we went to the church to welcome Jesus, and I wasn’t among the plowboys, but with the team of shepherds. I’d been lent a sheepskin jacket, a pointed hat, and a fife. Coming out, old Bouscarle put his hand on my shoulder. “Jesus,” he said to me, “is up there.” And as I looked at the vast sky, he said to me, “No, not in the vastness, in that little corner, there, you see, that tiny star.”

  Bouscarle was my boss. He was the one who gave me some idea of all you had to know to be an assistant shepherd, and especially, to take care of the beasts. “Look after them,” he would say to me, “but the most important thing is to win their trust. Every movement you make must be true. Maintain your balance. When you’re carrying a big bowl full of water, you don’t run.”

  You’ve slept in good thick hay once in a while, haven’t you? Then you know that after two nights, you aren’t the same anymore. It gets you as drunk as brandy. Every morning, Bouscarle put his outstretched hand on my head and looked me in the eye. “You resist, son,” he would say to me, “you resist; that’s no good.” And in fact, I’ll admit to you that I did resist that drunkenness of the grass with all my strength. But the grass is stronger than anything because its days are endless and because, from the beginning of time and until the end, it has always wanted the same thing. And one fine morning, Bouscarle looked me straight in the eye without saying anything. I saw a shadow of a smile in the dark of his beard. That afternoon, he led me to the sheep. He opened the door of the stable; he shut it again behind us, and there we stood motionless in the shadows. He gave me no advice that day. I did everything as though someone else was doing it through me. The odor of beasts was a great thing for raising fear.

  After a moment, we began to see more clearly in there. A little daylight came through a round window, through the cobwebs. A large hornet swam softly around the stable, effortlessly, carried on the thickness of all that breathing. Bouscarle said one word. All the heads of the sheep turned toward us. In the faint light from the window, the beasts’ eyes began to gleam like stars in the night, and it seemed like I could hear their brains jostling in their skulls.

  “Jesus,” said Bouscarle, “is the smallest of all the gods. A shepherd, nothing but a shepherd. First, there was the one whose body we all were, before becoming pieces of it. Jesus was a bigger piece than the others, that’s all. There are big gods, my boy, and those are the ones you’re going to have to get used to.”

  As we were going out, Bouscarle said, “Come, I’m going to teach you to play the fife.”

  We had to go out to the big strawshed in the open fields, and there, just the two of us played far into the night. He showed me how to place my fingers over the holes. And I tried as hard as I could, but the joints of my fingers needed oiling, and sometimes I let up too soon, sometimes too late. Then he had me learn the art of breathing. First he blew and then he passed the flute, all warm, to me and on the willow reed I tasted garlic and wine, the breath of Bouscarle. The first notes went well, because the shepherd’s breath was still in the flute, and then I was left on my own, alone in a void emptier than the great void of the sea, and it was hard to raise it, the weight of the music, with this little hollow reed.

  “You resist, my boy,” said Bouscarle, “you resist and sink to the depths. Let yourself yield; make yourself limp. Let yourself live life without thinking that you’re playing the flute, and then you will play.”

  He spoke the truth. Worn out from struggling, at that moment when all the stars sped through the sky like so much grain in the wind, I played. It rose from the heart in a sudden bound, gradually making me lighter. And through the barrel of my flute, I emptied myself, like a good fountain purges itself of its dark water.

  OURS WAS a large farm; we had twenty thousand sheep. Five large sheepfolds lined the road to hold them all throughout the winter. At this time of poor grazing in the dry marshes, they would lick the salt at the base of the plants, and nibble the red behen. And knowing that there wasn’t a flower to be found, the bees, who are the flies of the grass, made a leap of more than ten kilometers over our area.

  On the day of the great departure, Bouscarle took the reins of the whole farm and began shaking the bit hard. Everyone’s mouth bled, and I myself no longer mattered. Yet he was the one who had guided my fingers over the flute, who had put me, weak as I was, before the gaze of the sheep. But now he gave me no more notice than the hundred other shepherd’s helpers who buzzed around the packed bags. The proprietor approached in a fine flowered waistcoat just at the moment when the animals began to pour out of the first door, which had been raised like a floodgate. There was snorting, galloping, climbing over hedges, and at the far end of the great fields, dogs from distant farms barked. Our boss went straight over to the proprietor. He was glowing black with anger, as fearful to the touch as hot tar. He said some words. I saw them. I didn’t hear them in all that noise; I saw them in the white of his teeth, and the curl of his mustache, and in the disdainful spit that Bouscarle aimed right into the dust. I saw those words, and I also saw the proprietor go off, humbled, his tail between his legs, and the boss whose look was like a knife in his back, that’s all I can say. Each to his own place.

  ORDER returned, the foreman bellowing the long cries of the language of sheep the whole length of the sky, and that started the flow, thick and fast. And the road, taken by surprise, had already begun to groan and creak from every one of its stones, and great bands of magpie and hoopoe clattered around us like holiday streamers. A holiday, yes, the long-awaited holiday!

  THEN, before taking his first step ahead of the animals, before taking command of that white road, the boss Bouscarle approached the saddle packs where I was tightening up the straps. He rested a heavy hand on my shoulder and I felt the sweat from it through my shirt. I turned my head and looked up at him; this was no longer the same man.

  He glowed with the great rays of his sweat.

  “My boy,” he said, “don’t think you know everything. You know the sheep, but to know is to be separate from. Now try to love; to love is to join. Then, you will be a shepherd.”

  Ah! How well I knew I was only a little apprentice. But among them, I was one of the best, and he had guided my fingers along the length of the flute. I knew well enough that I couldn’t be quickly forgotten, even by the brain that drew forward twenty thousand sheep.

  And yet, he did forget me; at least everything led me to believe that.

  We moved out for long days across the breadth of a plain as red as raw flesh. I led a pack mule. That is, I just walked along beside him and tapped him on the nose when he sniffed out the shade of some cypress or stretched his mouth toward the nettle. The dust
burned my eyes; blood red, it got into my mouth; it stuck to my tongue; deep in my throat, it was mud. I could never count on being able to see the one leading the other mule up ahead, a thousand sheep away, unless I took advantage of a sudden drop in the wind. It was no easier to see the one behind. And soon, the wind itself no longer reached us because the airborne earth that followed us was too thick. Lost, rolled along in the herd like a bit of gravel, I held myself together around this shepherd’s love. I knew he was there, kilometers ahead, leading the way, marking the route. And from time to time, I felt along my thigh the fine roundness of the flute which clacked against the horn handle of my knife. I had a goatskin flask with a little more than a liter of fresh water in it; once in a while, I drank a little. The days stretched out; they extended over the earth. They had to be crossed from one end to the other by putting one foot ahead of the next. From time to time, the great phantom of a cypress appeared in the dust before me. It passed alongside, oblivious, following its own route, and I walked along mine. Sometimes, through the dust we saw a farm, pale and wide. Behind us, the whole country moaned with the moaning of the stragglers. At night, we stopped in little villages, all closed up like startled tortoises. Everything was dead. The one with the pack mule behind and the one with the pack mule ahead came up to me on aching feet. We remained there, listening to the great dust resettling.

  The one from up front said, “The boss has passed Villeneuve-les-Orges. That’s what a cart driver told me.”

  Or maybe:

  “They told me that the boss is farther than Saint-Raphaël-des-Roches, in the Luberon valley.”

  And all at once, I despaired of this great land, of all this country that had to pass under our feet. When I slept, I dreamed of the ball of the earth, this great ball of the earth, and I had to straddle it with my legs wide apart like they do with wooden balls in the circus, and I was split in two up through my stomach and chest.

  Sometimes, the one from behind said, “The mas! . . .”

  He said no more, and he kept tasting these words on his lips, because he had left a lover behind there.

  And so I thought of the mas as something lost in the depths of time, under layers and layers of rotting forests that had been dead for a hundred million turns of the earth.

  Then we set off again, getting underway with no order. Or rather, on a silent order coming on the wings of the air. The sheep rose, the mules rose, we had to follow. And we began walking again over the wide earth in the roiling dust.

  And so I went, thinking of nothing but the suffering of my flesh, until it brought me to tears, nothing but this great spine of fatigue running through me, until evening, when we made a twelve-hour-long stop in a village as cool and leafy as a peach on a tree. My two companions slept. As soon as the noise died down, and then its echo in the leaves of the high elms, I heard the song of the fountains. Water!

  It was a beautiful fountain, flat-nosed as a bee. It spoke out of three mouths at once, three long stories of water full of watercress, of fish, eel, and frogs; it spoke of lovely footbaths and of a long open-mouthed drink.

  I was leaving when a lamb leaned against my legs. It was covered with snot and couldn’t open its muzzle, blind with mucous. Its head was only a block of mortar and it was looking for the spring by knocking its gourd of a skull along the coping.

  So I took it in my arms, washed it, and gave it water to suck by filling my hand and making a teat with my thumb. Then I let it go, and it moved away toward its mother, water splattering in the sun.

  And that night, I knew that it was not only the flute that the shepherd Bouscarle had shown me by guiding my fingers over the holes in the reed, but all of life:

  “Don’t think about playing, and then you will play . . .”

  I looked at myself in the pool. I did not recognize my face. From a boy I had become a man; from a man I had become a shepherd. The radiance of my sweat dazzled me.

  AT THAT point, the shepherd’s voice changed as he offered me some dried figs.

  “And then, I have six nice fresh poivre d’âne cheeses. If you’d like some.”

  WE TOOK up summer quarters in a high pasture in the vicinity of the Croix pass. The glaciers had taken this whole area in hand and raised it up to the sky. Great frozen fingers held grass. It was rich enough to make any healthy beast mad. The meadowsweet was as thick as cream and the soles of our espadrilles turned green from its juice just from walking in the pasture.

  I spent long days lying on my back, sucking on my flute, from time to time pushing out some little curling note. My blood grew calm. But I stored up my experience, and more and more, especially in the evening hours, I thought of the words of Bouscarle and I heard the step of the great gods.

  I drank from the sky in long mouthfuls, like water from the pool of that fountain where I’d seen the first rays of the shepherd reflected back at me.

  The sheep were spread throughout the valley and on its slopes. They reached right to the edges of a village as lean as a pauper.

  I am going to tell you the secret.

  The shepherd’s true occupation, only one thing teaches that: the sky. For a long time after that in my life, I weighed them, weighed them in my hands, and passed them from one hand to the other, all those words of Bouscarle. And I understood that those words meant two things: one thing that you understood immediately, another thing that you understood slowly, gradually over time.

  “This Jesus is not the great vastness, but that little bit of night, over there, with one star, just one.” Say that to a fifteen-year-old peasant coming out of church after singing by the crèche. He looks at the star; he looks at the finger pointing to the star. He says yes; he hasn’t understood.

  He hasn’t completely understood.

  But, when it’s a man of my age who has chewed this over through the years, all alone, each time adding a bit of his own human experience to his reflection, then there is some chance for the second meaning to light up like a lamp.

  One star, one alone. And now, look at the night completely flooded with stars!

  There are the powers of the world. That is the secret!

  This is what he meant:

  “Son, you have heard our pastor. He’s told you a beautiful story of the little child who was not received by the hands of midwives, but by the straw, as the beasts are received. He told you that it was a virgin who made him. The beasts are virgins; they do not soil the acts that make life. They make life, simple as that. They go into the bushes, and then they come out with baby sheep and, right away, these babies taste fresh life with their muzzles, and right away, they are heavy with a great wisdom which astonishes men. The crèche, the straw, the cattle, the donkey, the virgin, this birth: among men, this is the birth of a healthy animal. That is the great lesson. That is why men crucified the child.”

  To know all that would have helped me, but I didn’t know it then, and I played the flute.

  But this flute playing, it wasn’t by accident that Bouscarle had put the reed to my lips. In this flute was all the knowledge of the sky. It was the reed that’s planted in the bank’s porous flesh to make fountains spring forth. I planted the flute in the sky. I took the other end in my mouth. And the music was only the noise I made filling myself with sky.

  When we reached the mountain, Bouscarle named the seconds-in-command. Ours was a meat-eater from Pontet, a knowledgeable man, nearly as knowledgeable as Bouscarle, except for the simple difference that he didn’t know the great words to make the herds start off, and that came from his liking meat nearly raw and being too saturated with blood.

  One evening he came over to me, his eyebrows knitted together with worry. He studied the sheep in a peculiar way.

  “Son,” he said to me, “go over to Corne-Blanche. You’ll find Bouscarle there. Ask him this for me: ‘Have you gotten wind of the planet?’ No more. Then, come back and tell me his answer.”

  Instead of being scattered all over the grass, our herd was clotted together in big lumps of trem
bling beasts.

  I went, and when it was late, I saw the boss’ lantern. He was sitting next to it. The boys of the “Vermeil” pasture were also there, and those who kept watch in the pastures of Norante, all of them, maybe thirty, bent over their staffs, all ears turned toward Bouscarle who breathed not a word.

  I was about to speak when someone said to me, “Yes, we know.”

  “And so?” I said.

  “And so! . . .”

  And someone next to Bouscarle shook his head, his forehead low and silent. And I leaned on my stick, too, and I waited like the others.

  “Who has hit the beasts?” asked Bouscarle gently.

  Someone answered, “Me!”

  “Come here.”

  It was a heavy-set man from Arles, dark and gray as a cicada.

  “I mean,” Bouscarle continued, looking at the man, “did you hit them without just cause?”

  The Arlatan said nothing for a moment, and then, “Yes, I hit them without just cause.”

  “Then,” said Bouscarle, “go down to the village while there’s still time, and stay there.”

  “It’s as bad as that,” breathed a shepherd next to me. Then he raised his hand to be noticed, and said, “Me, too, I hit them, boss.”