The Solitude of Compassion (16 page)

“No noise. She is drinking.”

And I stood by the door.

The bowl now on the table, she sighed: “Ah!” glancing at the three of us, and I saw her face.

I said:

“Jean, she is a woman. She is no longer a young maiden” (That is what is said for a girl who is a real girl. You understand what I mean? A supple girl, a beautiful girl, a fresh girl to put it that way). In her mouth, in her regard, in her skin, there were sure signs which could not fool me.

And to myself I repeated, “Sylvie, Sylvie, who would have thought?” And then: “That's life, are you upset?… Are you jealous? That is life; that is the way of the world; that's it, the law. She's a woman; very well, and so?…”

That very day I noticed the signs on her face; a small starlike design there under her eyes, made with folds of her skin; her lips which at times swell in the middle and this swelling spreads along the lips when one goes to kiss her. Her hands also had very visible signs for me who loved them.

She will never know it; and besides, who am I after all?…

Finally, all in all, when I knew that she was staying once more at the “Chussières” and that she had asked for her old clothes, and
that she had taken the red off of her lips, I came forward on my large feet.

I say this because I am not bold. You understand that it is forced: always alone with my washing and my beehives, and so used to the ways of the bees that want slow gestures and things filled with precision, this was a rather loud entrance and people believe that I have big feet.

It is not true. I looked at them in the stream. No, they are not big: they are a man's feet, of course, they are narrow in the middle and then all the toes stick out.

So, that's just the thread in the needle, and, jumping from one track to another, we began to talk, no, she began to talk. As for me, I said: “Yes Ma'm, no Ma'm.” That's all.

That is how I knew. Ah! It is not pretty. She still believes that it is beautiful, that it was beautiful. And when I ask her: “But why did he do that?” she tells me: “He loved me, you know,” and I say: “Yes Ma'm,” and inside myself “No Ma'm.”

She does not know. She did not have good lessons, lessons of bitches and dogs, and of male and female birds, and of all the simple mixture that forms even these days, the fruit of the world.

She works on her stockings while watching the sheep. Yesterday she told me: “You see when I began, I was still all nervous, and I skipped the links, look! But now I am applying myself, it is all connected, and it's going much better!”

Yes, it's going better: the juice of the sky is flowing through her.

And, as for me, I am here in the grass watching; I am sunk down low in the yellow grasses. She does not see me. She cannot see me. She will never see me.

Me, I see her.

I ask her:

“Babeau, was it really right here that Fabre drowned himself?”

She begins laughing, she looks at her sheep; she looks at me and laughs.

“Ah! Monsieur Jean!”

I approach, and, to soften her up, I also begin chatting.

“That was really some idea of his to go uphill to drown himself!”

In fact it was on one of those fanned out slopes which are the source of floods, two fingers away from being the highest spot in the region. There is a great wart of cut grass and on this wart the cadaver of an ancient farm. A beautiful cypress too, near dead walls, and we are below them.

What made me think of asking Babeau about it, was that on my way up I saw the reservoir, a subterranean basin all in shadow. When one leans on the door, because there is a little door which opens out on the water level, nothing but your breathing snorts inside; it seems like you are blowing into a bull's horn. If you stop breathing, you can hear the drops of water which make a “glout glout” sound like a clock.

“…Yes, here, up above,” I say again to put Babeau at ease.

She counts in a high voice: “Four, five, six,” the links of the stockings that she is knitting. Then:

“Wait, I am at the skipping part; do not make me miss.”

I wait. It is a nice day and the sheep are at peace in the pasture.

“Look,” says Babeau, “to get back to what you said about Fabre, did you know that I was the one who found him? Ah! I can assure you, it was laughable. It was done like that, with bravado. Ah! I tell you it was so stupid that I could not keep myself from laughing. I was here, where I am now, under the tree. There was a wind that day! And here you got it first and quite badly because it was the first patch of trees around. It made noise, and I said to myself: ‘Babeau you are going to go deaf.'

“He was down below cutting little oaks. Suddenly he came up. He came upon me and said: ‘You had better go.' I told him: ‘Oh! it is not yet four o'clock.' He said to me: ‘Not because it is four o'clock, but because if you stay there, you are going to see me die.' ‘Ah! Go ahead, die!' I said and I looked away. He was standing in front of me, there, on that pile of rocks, holding himself straight, very calm, freshly shaved, mustache a little in the air, with a healthy cheek like everybody else. ‘How stupid you are,' I told him. I looked down at my stockings and heard him leaving. I thought to myself: ‘Even so, that man, how stupid he is, how stupid he is! Not bad, he is just stupid!' And then again the sound of the wind in the trees filled my ears, and the needles kept my eyes busy, and that went on; I made a crossing of my hands on the stockings, then from the sun I saw that it was four o'clock, and I called my sheep.

“Coming down, in front of the reservoir, I saw Fabre's hat, and then his vest, and on his vest, his watch. I said: ‘He is even stupider than I imagined.' I looked in at the door. By God, there he was
lying on the water, all calm. Earlier, he must have beaten the water with his arms and legs because it was all splashed up on the walls and the ceiling, and the moss in back was torn out; there was a big piece of it on the stone. What made me laugh was that above his cheek a little frog had settled. It was terribly frightened! And I had to see that at my age!”

Félippe was going out into his almond trees; I saw him out there where the wind blew, sniffing, nose in the air, looking carefully at the four corners of the sky, and what he saw decided him. It was a wind that wanted to work; something heavy swept in from the sea, with beautiful, thick clouds. That was the state of things.

I came down, I took big steps on the path where Félippe went at his own pace. It is very much Félippe, that slow movement of the legs, that head looking right and left at the same time, that way of carrying the hoe, the steel against the shoulder, the arm pointing out in front; the tool holding itself up by itself, hands free to enjoy the warmth in his pockets. I catch up to him; he says to me:

“I am going to the almond trees; if it rained a little later that would be good. Me, I always arrange to do half of everything.”

“How, do you share things with your son-in-law?”

“No, that is not what I mean; I mean that I do everything halfway: a little bit by me, a little bit by the weather. As for me, I am going to dig circles around the bases of the trees; the weather
will make the rain. Between the rain and the circles, we will surely manage to have flowers.”

“Ah! Yes, like that, I see, but you have not thought of everything; there is not just you and the weather, there is also the tree.”

“The tree? I left it out intentionally. I can tell that you are not familiar with them. If I were not here, it would do just as it pleased. The tree is entirely whimsical. It is intelligent, I do not mean, that it understands things…but it is like an animal, it spends its time pleasurably. I will tell you. Do you know where my orchard is? There, at the end of the plain. The cold wind, it hits full-force. Well, since before Christmas, you have noticed that there has been fine weather? Good, very well, you will see. There are two or three that have blossomed; if they were still young, that would work, there would be an excuse, but old ones! And well, they seem to find that fine and good. They do not do it in secret, no, they do it just like that, for glory, to say: you see, look how strong I am! I am out in front. They are like that, you know, trees are. And then, as soon as the mistral begins they will bend as if they were in front of Jesus. The others, with their folded flowers, that will be easy for them; they will rain down on your back because they are like that, this wind, which wants them to rain down on your back, if they do not have flowers, then it is easy for them. These trees, by following their whims, first they freeze, and then comes their pride and joy, these flowers, but they stick out their stiff arms, they want to be showy and that makes them break their branches. I have seen them die of it.”

We arrived on the edge of the plain. In the ground there are big fingernail marks from the storms and fresh scars, and there are ravines that are slightly revived with a crust of young trees. I go all the way down to the valley below. I see the tops of the roofs of two villages across from me, one on each side of the torrent, and a
bridge. You can see the river with its blue water clearly cut in its bed of stone; and then the fields in the valley which resemble those throw rugs that you make for the foot of beds with pieces of cloth from all the clothes that you no longer wear. You know how they sew the pieces together with big stitches, there are bits of every color, plus bits of velour, canvas, wool, cloth, silk, at times a piece of a nightgown…

“Look, the nightgown,” says Félippe to me, “that could be this field, there, I think that it is the field of Bélin de la Bégude. You see it with its little flourishes. My wife had a nightgown like that when she was a little girl.”

We walked along the edge of the plateau, then Félippe said:

“I'll show you the sheep.”

“A dead sheep?”

“Ah! I don't know if he is dead, but I'll let you see him. Come on, he has to be here.”

Here is a promontory that extends its point out over the valley. It presides over all of the lower parts of the hill.

He points his finger.

“Look, you see him there?”

I look: there are small hills and green oaks. I say in good faith: “No, I don't see him.” And even though I know my Félippe, I was looking for an actual sheep. There are times like this when one lets oneself get taken in.

“You do not see him? You do not see him there? Look he is lying flat on his belly, his feet folded beneath him. You see there, you see his rear haunch. His tail, it is that great tuft of trees down there by Anatole's farm. You see the sheep? It is an old one: look, above his back, he is all bare; all that is left are those pom-poms of junipers on his flanks, which really seem like wool. You see over there you
could say that his front feet are folded. The sheep, he has feet like a folding yardstick, and it folds straight up. And well, then you see there his neck stretched out on the side of the plateau; he is going to hide his head, there in the pine trees. You see him? Doesn't it look just like one?”

“Yes, it looks just like one, it is a hill lying like a tired lamb in the mud from the torrent; his neck extends down towards us, all stretched out; you even look for his head, there under the pines. It is a lamb who extends his four kilometers in length and at least two in width from the valley of Fontenouille to the farm at Garcins.”

“You see?” Félippe says to me. “He is not alive, the sheep. He must be dead, as you say.”

He remains silent a moment, then:

“Don't contradict me, but it really looks like a sheep doesn't it?”

Then he continues his thought, or perhaps his mind leaps to something else, or perhaps…one never knows with Félippe.

“I brought my knife-saw. You see the fourth tree down there? That is always the whimsical one; I am going to cut a few branches off it, that'll show it that I am the boss.”

There was an olive tree. Ah! In the valley all soft with greenery there was also a pine alley, a copse of cypress, and, in town, a boulevard under the elms.

Saturnin said to me one day:

“That olive tree, look at her, how pretty she is! Things like that hurt my eyes. The last time, I can't even remember what made me look. Would you like for me to tell you about it today? It makes me think of Africans. You see: little Africans who are not fat, Africans from the countryside with, all of them, full pitchforkloads of straw on their heads. You see: they are going up the hill. They are going up the hill, you see, with their grain; they are on their way to feed some big animal from their country. One of those animals that has thick skins like stones.”

The pine alley, set off from a field, ending in the middle of a field, without purpose, like that… But there was in the east a perpetual whisper of wind. It sounded like a beautiful underground stream with its cavernous rumblings. It was fresh, dark, supple.

The cypresses, when one entered the copse, were like a chalice of flowers with a white pistil: a pedestal of old stone all alone which sufficed. And they say, “Long ago it was…”

They cut down everything. Everything. And since the olive tree was troublesome with deep roots, they used petards with black powder to blow them out. They had the last word. Boulevard!

These elms clothe it. You could see, here and there, the old and flaccid skin of the houses and even the disturbing sanies, but beyond the trees, beyond the birds… Ah! The birds. Wait, I'm thinking of them. On summer nights, these elms shelter two owls; they coo a tremolo which makes all the water in your heart shiver. At sixteen they consoled me after a heartbreak.