The Solitude of Compassion (15 page)

“Because you get ideas and then once they are formed your mind
gets stuck. What was it after all? A pig like any other.”

“Yes, but just at that very moment.”

“Yes, at that moment…the principal, was to kill the pig before he was dead. That makes you laugh? That is how it is. I should not have been there. It was crazy. It was a rush job, you know.”

That day at Moulières-longues, the daughter was married. First I must tell you two things: Moulières-longues is a very isolated farm, lost in a sort of crater in the hills where everything takes on a great importance because the surrounding view is not pretty but rather scowling. That is the first thing. The second, is that they have a lot of money at Moulières-longues. Father Sube is renowned for it. So, rather than keep his daughter for the land, he has allowed her to climb and has sent her to school in Aix. Blanchette Sube, big and pliant as a switch, pretty face, but, ever since she has kept me at a distance. There she found a son of a professor or a lawyer, or…anyway, blond and like her: well-matched. Two straws. A puff of wind and then nobody.

I was at the wedding because Sube is still a friend of the family. Philémon was there: because he is a fourth cousin. And then people from all around; and the mother of the young man who pinched her dress together and raised it so she could walk cleanly on the grass. There were about thirty of us. All that I know is that in the end, for the last carriage there was only the “couple,” father Sube, Philémon, and myself.

“Go ahead and get in the carriage,” said Sube; “I will take a look at the pigs and come along.”

He entered the stable, he came out almost immediately, crying:

“Philémon, come quick.”

The three of us stayed in the carriage.

After a minute the young monsieur asks:

“What are we waiting for?”

As for me, I had already seen Philémon pass by on the run, then come back with his vest and with a basin before entering the stable, he set the basin on the ground, then he took off his starched shirt front.

I said:

“I don't know.”

Sube cried out again:

“Chette, bring me the big knife…the table drawer…in the kitchen…quick.”

We saw Chette's eyes grow wide.

I handed the reins to the young monsieur.

“Hold the horse a bit, I'm going.”

The pig was lying on its side. Sick. Apoplexy. He tried to breath by wagging his mouth like a fish on the grass but it gargled like a stopped drain.

“Give me the knife,” said Philémon, “and catch his feet…lie on top of him.”

I had on my good clothes but, I knew what to do, I lay down.

“The basin…under the head…higher…someone to stir the blood…do not let go of his feet.”

“Blanchette,” howled Sube, “are you coming or do I have to come after you?”

Philémon bled the pig. At first the blood blocked the hole like a pea but Philémon drilled with the knife and it pissed red, clear, in a beautiful arc, like an unstopped fountain. With a little heather broom, Blanchette stirred the blood in the basin. She turned her
head; she felt like she was going to throw up, but she kept it in her mouth with her little brocaded kerchief. She was almost as white as her dress. I say almost; and if her dress appeared more white it was because right in the middle was a big spot of blood.

“It's nothing,” said Sube, slightly calmed because the affair looked like it would work itself out. “We'll stick a pin in, and it won't be seen.”

Joselet is sitting facing the sunlight.

The sun is descending in full fire. It has illuminated all of the clouds and made the sky bleed onto the woods. It gathers this whole impenetrable forest, it tramples it, it makes a golden juice come out all warm which then flows down the paths. When a bird passes through the sky it leaves a long black trace all wound up like the tendrils on a vine. You hear the bells ring in the village belfries, there behind the hills. You hear the herds coming in along with the people who harvest the last olives in the highlands as they call from orchard to orchard with voices that are like tapping a glass.

“Oh! Joselet,” I said to him.

“Oh! Monsieur,” he responds without turning his head.

“So, you are watching the sun?”

“So I am, you can see.”

Now the sun is in the middle of battling with the belly of a great cloud. It tears it apart with big knife thrusts. Joselet's beard is filled with sun like peach juice. It dapples all around his mouth. He has
it full in his eyes and on his cheeks. You want to tell him: “Wipe it off.”

“So, you are eating the sun?” I say to him again.

“Ah! Yes, I am eating it up,” says Joselet.

Veritably he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and he swallows his saliva as if he had perfumed it with some great fruit from the sky.

And when there only remained the green day of dusk, and there, in the pines on the slope, a little drop of light all trembling like a pigeon, Joselet explained it to me.

“That,” he said to me, “is what I knew before everyone else. You have heard that I am the master of the rain and that I heal burns with saliva alone? You have heard that when someone has shingles and has tried everything and fed up with everything, he comes to see me, and I'll touch the man or the woman just a little at the place on their waist and the malady goes away? I dry myself with a towel, and they burn the towel and it is over with. They must have told you, too, that with a word, if one has a dislocated limb I'll fix it. If you have a love which makes you thrash about, thrash as if you were on a grill, then you come and see me, we'll come to an understanding, I'll give you a big reading of the stars, I'll put my hand slightly behind your head, and then the woman, there she'll be beneath you, right away, in a moment, even if she is frigid. It is understood that I do that for you once, to please you, then afterwards it is your turn to talk. I give you what is necessary, that is my secret, and if you do well with what I say, she cannot resist, she'll come and you'll work things out with her.”

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.

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: