The Serpent of Stars (9 page)

Authors: Jean Giono

BOOK: The Serpent of Stars

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The one who has finished speaking remains there with the Sardinian. Another one comes, speaks, then falls silent, and then, he takes
the hand of the man who was there before him and he waits. At the end of the play, there is a whole wreath of big homespun men holding each other's hands.

All that happens on stage are steps and greetings, steps to take up one's position, greetings to the Sardinian. As for the rest, it's the words that must show it, and the man who speaks remains still, his arms dangling. There are just two or three places where there is some stage action, always very simple, but occurring at the very height of the pathos. These will be indicated in the play's translation on the following pages.

Written down, the text presents in translation a chaos of bristling and tragic words. Tragic, because I sense all their dense beauty and because I am hopeless before them. The language is the most wild type of sea jargon, made up of ProvenÃ§al, Genoese, Corsican, Sardinian, NiÃ§oise, Old French, Piedmontese, and words invented on the spot as needed. It is a marvelous instrument for epic drama: cries and howls themselves can be long narratives. The imitative harmony is such that gestures are superfluous as the procession of the planets, the rocking of the sea, the drenched course of the land losing its oceans in space all suddenly appear before the stunned listener. I say this to make your mouth water, but you'll find nothing of all that in my translation. I've done my best to put it into very faulty French, but the language of free men is a leaping beast and, here, I've only forced open the bars of the cage a little.

May I be forgiven.

N
IGHT. DISTANT SAINT-JEAN FIRES are eating away at the whole circle of the horizon.

The Mallefougasse plateau. Four fires at the corners of a square of grazed earth. Next to each flame, a man is standing, a heavy branch of leaves in his hand. All around this lit clearing, the night, and just at the edges of the night, like bubbling foam, the shepherds are seated in their mantles, their overcoats, their big velour jackets.

The Sardinian. He stands up. He looks to the right, and then to the left, and, at the same time, there is silence to the right and then to the left.

“So, should we begin?”

Just at that moment, without any other command but that silence, the wind descends, worked by the harps. The flutes begin to play the sound of a man who is walking in the sea.

THE SARDINIAN (He moves forward to the middle of the clearing; raises his hand in greeting).
Listen, shepherds:

The worlds were in the god's net
¹like tuna in the madrague:

Flips of the tail and foam; a sound that rang out, expelling the wind from every side.

The god was in the sky up to his knees.

From time to time, he leaned over, he took some sky in his hands. It ran between his fingers. It was white as milk. It was full of creatures like a huge stream of ants. And in it, images became clear and then faded like things in dreams.

The god washed his whole body with the sky. Slowly, to get used to life's cold. He had a sensitive belly. Because everything was created in his belly.

Afterwards, he began to walk into the sky until he was out of his depths, where he could no longer touch, and he began to swim. His huge hand rose and dipped like a spoon; his great feet dug like pickaxes with nails in front. He was followed all along by a swirl of ripped up grasses. After a little while, he was far off over there, no more than an island amidst the spray.

He went off because the beginning was finished.

Blood! Clots of blood!

The earth is crouching
²in the belly of the sky like a child in its mother.

It is in the blood and the guts. It hears life, all around, which is roaring like fire.

A blue vein enters its head like a snake. That is how it is filled with its kindness.

A red artery enters its chest. That is how it is filled with its meanness.

It grows thicker. The more it thickens, the more light it has.

Finally, it presses against the portal. It wants to be born. It is heavy with the reason of its seed.

Suddenly, in a jet of fire it is born and it takes off.

This is the earth's youth!

It rolls about in the universe like in the grass. It is all wet with the great blossoming waters. It steams with sweat like a horse who has galloped in the sun.

It trails behind it a lovely odor of milk. You can hear it laughing far off like the sound of nuts cracking.

Its skin is in the process of drying. There are colors that run in circles around it like rainbows. When a patch of its skin is dry, it turns green.

This is the earth's youth!

This is the great Sunday !

All the trees are flowering at the same time. On the water there are wide marshes of blue squash. Rocks pass, full of vines which trail like hair. Little
round stones run under the grass. All the flowers are ruddy with good health. The leaves are thick as your arm. You can hear the fruits which are all ripening together. The big squash float on the sea. Each time the earth moves, the herds of ripe fruit pour from all sides into the folds of the hill. It begins to smell like sugar. The hills drift off very slowly, bent under that great weight. The plains of sand try to lift up their burden of ripe grasses, and then remain completely flat. The mountains weep water. Bitter flowers grow in the bottom of the streams. The rocks stop, ecstatic. That smell of Sunday, which is the smell of tomato soup!
³

All this time, the Sardinian has remained with his hand raised in greeting and the music has made that sound of water and tumbling earth. You saw the hills walk. You heard their big feet slap in the mud, in the rot of the streams of fruit. Now the narrator lets his raised hand fall. The aeolian harps are all alone trying their hand at the great Sunday. There's the sound of sheets flapping on the clothesline, whirlwinds of swallows, the wind coming from far away in one long slide, now caught in fistfuls in the trees.

A dry music begins, made up of just the tympon, those tries at joy
along the scale and the loud notes sounding like calls. With a wing beat of his arms, this is what the Sardinian did: he changed character. He is no longer the anonymous narrator, he is the earth-narrator. He is the Earth. From now on, he is going to tell us of his anxiety; the drama opens.

THE SARDINIAN.
The great grasses have eaten all my strength. I realized this because I wanted to leap into the sky and I couldn't, and I remain stuck here, powerless.

I've been too lax with all these beautiful trees. Already everything that ran and danced over me, the hills and the mountains, and the high rocks, everything has stopped, hindered by forests and undergrowth.

Oh! I wanted to go much farther and I couldn't, and I turn, and I turn again, but it's all clamped together in me by hooked roots. I'm like a moldy apple.

The summers came upon me like huge bees, and they sapped my moisture. They didn't budge. They were upon me, wings open.

I knew it: I had seen the great marshes of squash withering on the waters. The squash drifted off and then, suddenly, they plunged into the water's depths. And then, other times, I saw bubbles rise, and then, other times, all the water moved.

The summers' swarm drank up nearly all the lovely depth of the water. And then, I saw the great serpent's back.

There is that great serpent who is a creature of the mud. Then there are those who have four feet and are made according to the model of the sky because they have teats to drink from. There is one of those who is almost nothing but a mouth; it swallows huge platefuls of pines and birches and whole cherry orchards along with the ground underneath, covered with grass and shadows. There are many others, too.

And I was lighter with grass, but I was heavier with meat and I sank into the sky like a lead weight because all these beasts were stepping over each other, were mounting each other, making little ones who were making little ones.

And then, one fine moment, I stopped drifting because the beasts began to eat meat. There were some who ate grass and others who ate the ones who ate the grass. And that created balance.

And I am in balance.

But, now, I feel this balance coming all undone again, and it's swaying. Something else has happened. Oh, what a worry it is to have skin and a belly!

I'm very nervous because of that one, I've heard he wants to take charge.

And yet, he is small; I raise and lower my eyebrows and I widen my eyes, and I turn them about, and I turn them about again. I see nothing.

Nevertheless, this thread of balance is swaying. I have to ask . . .

Since he became the earth-narrator, the Sardinian was clearly hurrying to reach those words by which the drama opens. At first, he added a bit of polish. Then, he abandoned his images as he went along. He spoke of the summers like bees. I saw the Sardinian again a little later. He told me very beautiful things about the summer: the summer that alights on us like a swarm; the summer that covers the land with a hot flayed skin.

Moreover, the whole circle of shepherds had begun to talk and near me I heard repeated “And you, what will you say?” After
“I have to ask,”
the Sardinian stood for a moment not saying anything. All the music stopped.

THE SARDINIAN (He calls).
The Sea!

Nothing. Silence. Shepherds who squeeze close to each other like sheep who are afraid.

THE SARDINIAN (in another, natural, voice).
So, there's no one to do the sea?

Over there, in back, there's a group where a little dispute is bubbling and you can hear “Go on,” “Go on,” in low voices.

He goes forward.

It's a short, fat shepherd. He takes two or three steps, then he turns around and flings his big felt hat to his friends. He is bald, with two little wings of white hair above his ears.

I learned afterwards that his name is Glodion and that he's from Le Bachas, a country of complete wilderness: nothing but stones, nothing but stones and thistle.

GLODION.
I'm the Sea!

He and the Sardinian face each other like two men who are going to dance.

THE SARDINIAN.
Sea.

Tell me if you know what is worrying me.
Look at me swinging to and fro.
Who knows where I am going to go now?
Things went better for me when I was young.
But then my worries started.
And I am much more afraid of what is coming than of what has been.

GLODION.
What is it you want me to say?

THE SARDINIAN.
Tell me if you have seen man.

GLODION.
Man?

Stop swinging me from side to side for a bit. You are hurling me into the mountains with the goats; you are throwing me from the flat sand as far as the eye can see, all the way to where the monkeys live.

Wait!

I don't have time to look around.

Man?

You mean that fish who is all planted with grass like a big meadow and whom all my purple rage can't budge, and who sleeps stretched out on the grill of a thousand of my waves?

THE SARDINIAN.
Maybe.

What does this fish do?

You say that he sleeps on a thousand waves, so he is big?

GLODION.
Yes.

It's because he's too big that he sleeps. What use would it be for him to go anywhere? With one stroke, he's on this side, with another stroke, he's on the other. He is just one big pocket of skin. When it's full of water, he sinks into my shade, toward the coolness because it's hot. When it's full of air, he climbs back up, he is over me like a meadow of grass. Big pieces of ice come to plant themselves in him, and then they melt there.

THE SARDINIAN.
No.

That's not the one who makes me nervous, then, if he only sleeps. Look harder.

GLODION.
What is it I feel in me?

It's anger or maybe it's great distress that twists me in its pains?

The wind suddenly put its foot in the middle of me and that's what made me leap up to the clouds.

Oh, this anger, you don't know how bad it can be, because it's anger against nothing.