The Solitude of Compassion (18 page)

Monsieur, my dear friend, man. Man, that's how I'd like to address you, if you'll permit me? Man, do not run any more, do not hurry anymore, I saw your goal. I saw your goal because I have new eyes, because I am like a child, because I understand, like children. Do not run any more, you went the wrong way. I watched you, I saw you; I know how to watch men, and I do not want to believe that the goal towards which you ran was that corner of the sidewalk with the smell of cheeses where the bus stops at a square filled with mud. It was because you looked far away with your sad eyes. Listen to me, I am going to say it gently to you:

You saw, in the evening, that phosphorescent blot of autos that turn around the Place de la Concorde. One might say that something kneads this dough with great blows; it cries, it turns, it does not rise, it does not have any yeast, it turns then it flows like clear water and it will stagnate in the fine depths of houses. All of that, the entire city, all Paris hastens and runs like you towards the goal.
Blind men! You are blind men. Run, you can run: the goal is behind your back. There is no bus for that direction. You have to go on foot. We would have to take you by the hand and say to you: Come, follow me!

Man, listen to me, I am going to take your hand and say to you: Come, follow me. Here I have my vineyard and my vines; my olive trees, and I am going to supervise the oil myself in the old mill all steamed up among the naked men. Have you seen my dog's love? It makes you think, doesn't it? This evening in which I write to you, the sun just set in a striking splashing of blood. The original myth of the death of the sun, I have never read it in books. I read it in the great book, the one around us. I was slightly annoyed yesterday morning because I had three extra pigeons in my pigeonhouse. Three ring pigeons all proud and cooing who came to submit themselves to the seeds in my hand. I have here under my window the fountain of a water that I went looking for with a pickaxe.

That is the goal, that is what you saw with your sad eyes, there in the depths of the air. Come, follow me.

 

Follow me. There will never be any happiness for you, man, except for the day when you are in the sun standing beside me. Come, tell the good news to those around you. Come, come all of you; there will only be happiness for you the day when the great trees burst up through the streets, when the weight of the wild vines will make the obelisk crumble and bend the Eiffel Tower; when in front of the ticket windows of the Louvre you will not hear anything but the light sound of ripe pods opening and the wild grains falling; the day when wild boars will emerge from subway tunnels wiggling their tails.

I met, en masse, these men charged with great strength. I only had to push the door of the little café run by Antoine…

For a long time I have been coming to this slender mountain village. It is on the outskirts of my land; it is on the border of the mountains, besieged by foxes, boars, forests, and icy waters. The high pastures sleep among the clouds; the sky ebbs and flows beneath the great wind; up there, only the empty grey and the silent flights of eagles like passing shadows remain.

The men who live there are hardly numerous: ten, twenty, call it forty by counting those from the lost hamlets and the travelers, those who enter by one road, take a breather there within the shelter of the houses and leave by the other road. And the earth, all around is wide open. The width of the land, precisely, is terrible, the nudity of the land, the solitude of the land around there. For, you see: ten, twenty, call it forty, that makes only a few men to inhabit all of that. Every day you have to go to work: trapping animals, cutting trees, reaping the harvest in some lost valley; or even, suspended
on the grey shoulder of the Garnesier, walking in the warm footsteps of some strange mountain beast made of rocks and clouds.

So there is a lot of sky, a lot of air between these men when they leave the village for their work. What they inhale does not have the odor of having been previously inhaled. The air that they breathe does not come from the gut of other people. It is pure and from the source. It is good on the one hand, but it is bad on the other, given that this purity has to be bought with solitude and desperation.

You, me, and I say me out of politeness, because truly my greatest pride is to have this magnetism which I will tell you about, we would be there, all year, playing our games like they do; a strange fear would take hold of us, no longer daring to dip our full pitcher into the spring or hack a tree with an axe.

I pushed the door of the little café run by Antoine and, all together, I had them there, with me, those men charged with great strength, those men who carry the magnetism of the earth, the men who have steeped too long in the thickness of the sky and who now, are like sponges heavy with sky. The sky is there under their tongue and by merely opening their mouths, out flows the sky with all of its wisdom, so that their breath is cut short.

Ah! Just before coming here, I was with other men—if one can put the same name on a noble animal, my brother, covered with hair, who plays his accordion there, before his bottle of wine and the artifice of over there, so hollow under his beautiful vest that he resounds like a pipe.

And I was saying to myself: If some spasm of the earth, suddenly, made everything but this place cave in, if right now, going out for the “evening” one found the virgin forest at the door, the virgin land, the sky, the wind, the rain all virgin; if everything was lost of
the discoveries and the sciences and art, if we were suddenly back at the beginning, how many true men would there be in there? Of those who know how to select a slope, choose the grass, make traps for meat, walk with the stars, propel themselves by the wind, vanquish the cold, live in the end, to live with all this would demand courage. How many? Maybe you, I say to myself; maybe your friend who is there and who is like you, that would make two. What pride!

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.”

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!”

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.