Hill, Page 6

  And so on and so forth until, in the end, Arbaud has made up his mind to go out. But he hasn’t left the room yet before she leaps out of the bed in her nightshirt: “Aphrodis, wait for me, don’t leave me alone, I’m going with you!”

  Maurras has set up his bed in his mother’s room. Their farmhand has come and scratched at the door, in tears. He didn’t want to go to bed by himself alone in the attic. They’ve let him come in and have laid a mattress down on the floor for him.

  Gondran and Marguerite have sat down at Janet’s bedside, their eyes transfixed, a bitter taste in their mouths, feeling sick with anxiety, mystery, and fear.

  •

  And the dreaded day has arrived, slowly but surely, through the course of the night, one hour nudging the next along. And now, look: It’s peeking above the hills.

  •

  In a single leap the sun clears the crest of the horizon. It enters the sky like a wrestler, atop its undulating arms of fire.

  Everybody has rushed outside: the men, the women, the two little girls, Labri the dog. They’re in a hurry. They want to get it over with. Since the middle of the night they’ve been waiting for dawn. Gagou, leaning against his pillar, watches on.

  They’ve gathered under the oak, all of them. Without speaking, they’ve turned toward Jaume. He’s realized that he’s in charge. He’s conscious of it. It’s good this way. He has his two guns strapped across his back. Ulalie follows him, with her own firearm. And it’s not just a lady’s musket, but a good, stout, double-barreled shotgun loaded on both sides. On her hip, a haversack packed with cartridges.

  Babette is there, a little girl on each arm, like a splendid tree ready to march forth bearing its fruits. She’s there with her well-scrubbed, lightly powdered girls, in their Sunday best. “You never know . . .”

  •

  Jaume has pulled the men aside.

  “Let the women be,” he says. “Here’s the plan: I’m going up to Les Sablettes. From over there I’ll try to figure out what’s going on. Maurras, you’ll keep a watch over toward Bournes. Gondran, Les Ubacs. Arbaud, Les Adrets. What are we looking for? Everything, and nothing. How moist the air is, how warm, how cold, the wind, the cloud—you can get information out of all of them. So let’s go . . .”

  He sets off right away, with his long strides. But before he disappears into the thickets of broom grass, he turns around and, cupping his hands, cries out: “It always comes from where you least expect it. Focus on everything, keep your eyes peeled. And, most important of all, if you see the cat, don’t shoot.”

  Then he plunges back into the grass that’s up to his shoulders.

  •

  The men have left.

  And Gagou has come out from between the pillars of his doorway.

  He’s made his way into the square, over where the women are, with his arms dangling. He’s leading with his head, like a dancing marmot.

  His lower lip droops, and he’s drooling. His chin is shiny with saliva. A grimace—actually a smile—wrinkles his nose and the outlines of his eyes.

  Now, in the little square, he lurches heavily and swings his arms. One foot, then the other, one foot, then the other, and then the arms . . . His footsteps go thwack, thwack, and dust rises in a rusty, blue plume around him.

  •

  Right up till noon they’ve been keeping watch on all the paths leading to the Bastides.

  Nothing has shown up; neither the cat, nor anything else. But who says bad fortune is obliged to travel by road? Isn’t there lots of room for it to pass right between the tops of people’s heads and the clouds?

  •

  Rightly so. Gondran is examining the shapes of the clouds.

  There’s one weighing down heavily on the hills’ back, like a sky-mountain, like a whole country in the sky—a huge, completely deserted country with shaded valleys, sunlight glancing off ridges, terraced escarpments.

  Completely deserted . . . who really knows? There could be celestial mountain people up there, with black beards down to their waists and teeth flashing like suns. It’s a whole country above and beyond the country of humans.

  Until now Gondran used to study the clouds for the threat of storms, for the white light that warns of leaden hail. Hail is no longer on his mind.

  Hail means flattened wheat, hacked-up fruit, ruined hay, and so forth . . . but what he’s on the lookout for now, it’s something that threatens him head-on, and not just the grass. Grass, wheat, fruits—too bad for them. His own hide comes first.

  He can still hear Janet saying: “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil, what’s on the other side of the air?”

  And so, Gondran stays absorbed, right until the moment they call out to him from the Bastides.

  •

  It was only for lunch.

  This peaceful morning has reassured them a little. So has this hearty cabbage and potato soup that sticks to your ribs. It fortifies your blood in an instant and flows fast through your arteries to your brain, full of promise.

  “You’ll see,” says Arbaud, “we’ll get away with just a scare.

  “We were right to be on guard, for sure, because we’d been warned, but whatever it is, so far it looks like it’s just playing around.”

  They’re stretched out under the oak, for siesta.

  “Hey you over there, quit that racket!” they yell at Gagou, who’s drumming on an empty canister. Then they throw stones at him. And Gagou stops.

  •

  It’s the silence that wakes them up. A foreign silence. Deeper than usual. More silent than the kind of silence they’re used to.

  Something has up and left. There’s an empty place in the air.

  “Hey,” says Gondran, alarmed.

  Next thing, they’re all standing. Something’s missing from the background noise of the Bastides. But what?

  It’s come over them, just like that. Now they’re gazing around, craning their necks. They’re looking hard at familiar objects: the roller, the harrow, the plough, the winnower. And then back again: the plough, the harrow, the roller . . .

  Nothing. Everything’s the way it usually is.

  But there’s something missing.

  All of them turn at once toward the fountain.

  It’s stopped running.

  •

  Jaume comes along while they’re trying their last resort.

  Gondran has wrapped his lips around the spout of the fountain. The iron pipe fills his mouth. He sucks with all his might to get the water to come. With each inhalation, you can hear a gurgling somewhere deep down in the rock. But it subsides just as quickly. The only thing that’s fluid is a drop of Gondran’s saliva clinging to the iron.

  They’ve all had to give it a try. Now they all have rust on their lips.

  “It’s too deep,” says Jaume. “You won’t be able to get to it. But it’s true, you weren’t around yet when we built this fountain. The pipe runs straight up that bit of a slope, right there, you see? Just about where that little fig tree is. There’s a pocket of water up there. If it isn’t running, either the pipe is blocked, or else the whole thing’s empty from one end to the other. So you can suck all you want, brother. Tomorrow morning we’ll have to dig up the pipe.”

  •

  This morning they’ve dug up the whole length of iron pipe. It’s stretched out on the hill, like a monstrous, pus-covered snake.

  That’s not where the problem lies.

  They’ve searched for the stone slab over the mouth of the spring. It’s under a juniper. They’ve pried it loose and pulled it up.

  Leaning over the hole, they’ve listened. They can’t hear anything flowing.

  “Sometimes,” says Jaume, “water from springs like this makes no sound. It just oozes out of the ground. But in the end it would fill a whole lake that would last us for life. I’m going down.”

  He’s at the bottom in no time. It wasn’t deep. They pass him an oil lamp.

  “Hey,” Arbaud asks, “how does it
look?”

  Jaume’s voice drifts up with the smoke of the lamp.

  “The water’s gone. It’s completely dry.”

  •

  “And so,” says Marguerite, “how are we going to make his soup and his herb tea?

  “I still have a bit in the pail, and I’m going to go fetch what I took down to the goats. . . .

  “What did Jaume say? Didn’t he have any idea at all? Doesn’t he know if we’ll be able to find water anywhere?”

  “The rest of us, we’ll drink wine, no doubt about that, but your dad?”

  “I have barely enough for today, maybe tomorrow, and then what?”

  This morning they’re hard at work on the hillside before daybreak, all four of them, searching.

  They dig until they hit black soil, and then Jaume lowers his face and sniffs.

  They dig another hole a little farther on.

  Their hopes rise for a moment, when they spot a bunch of rushes. But they’re rushes that the old spring had kept alive, and now they’re almost dead.

  •

  This evening, on the third day, they’ve come back beat, worn out mostly by disappointment. And they’ve eagerly knocked back big, cool glasses of wine.

  •

  “And so,” Marguerite asks again, “how are we going to make his soup and his herb tea?

  “I don’t have any more.

  “Neither does Babeau . . . Neither does Ma Maurras. Ulalie gave me a pitcher full, just enough for tonight.”

  •

  Gondran stands under the oak with his whole shaving kit: his razor, his strop, his army mug, his brush, his mirror.

  He carries all this pell-mell, squeezed against his chest, except for the mug, which he carries delicately before him between his thumb and his index finger.

  In the trunk of the oak there’s a nail for his mirror, and the stub of a branch for his towel. All in all, a very convenient setup.

  He begins lathering his face. The foam is purple. Jaume looks at him.

  “What’s that you’re shaving with?”

  “With wine, of course. I had to do it once before, in Queyras, during maneuvers.”

  “You’re sprucing yourself up?”

  “Mainly it’s just a good reason to get away from there for a bit,” says Gondran, gesturing toward his house.

  Jaume pauses for a moment to listen to the razor hissing across Gondran’s cheeks. He looks at the fountain. Under the spout the moss is bleached as white as a goat’s beard.

  “Guess what I’m thinking? Maybe Janet could figure it out for us—where the spring’s gone.”

  “Janet? Hah! Get out of here, he’s nothing but a crazy raver.”

  “Not really as bad as all that. Listen, Médéric, in his day your father-in-law was famous for knowing a lot about water. Well-diggers used to come around to ask him questions before they started digging. When he was still down on the plain, I remember a Monsieur Boisse—who was building fountains in those days—came looking for him in a car, for that very reason. That was before you married Marguerite. Janet’s the one who found our pocket of water. ‘Dig here,’ he said, ‘it isn’t deep, I can feel it.’ At first we laughed all around, but then we felt obliged to try digging where he said, and sure enough, we found it. I want to go see him.”

  “If you want.”

  Gondran scrapes away at his chin with delicate care. There’s a little dimple right at the tip, where he always cuts himself.

  •

  “So, Papa Janet, how’s it been going since the last time I saw you?”

  “He doesn’t recognize you,” whispers Marguerite.

  Janet takes clear aim at his daughter with his gaze.

  “She’s nuts, that one. Not recognize you? So what, you think I’ve flipped, too?”

  “Hey, his hearing’s still good . . .”

  Jaume sits down at the foot of the bed, directly in line with Janet’s stretched-out body—now nothing but skin and bones, looks, and words.

  “How’s it going, Janet?”

  “Bad. And it’s not about to go any other way.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “In my head.”

  “You have a headache?”

  “No. It’s not aching like other people’s. It’s full . . . just full, and it’s cracking up all by itself, in the dark, like an old washbasin. They leave me on my own all the time. I can’t talk to anybody, so it builds up inside me, it weighs on my bones. A bit of it runs out through my eyes, but the big pieces, they can’t make it through, so they stay inside my head.”

  “Big pieces of what?”

  “Of life, Jaume.”

  “Pieces of life? What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you’ll find out. . . .

  “I remember everything I’ve done in my life. It comes to me in big blocks, piled up like rocks, and it pushes out through my flesh.

  “I remember everything.

  “I remember that I picked up a piece of string on the Montfuron road when I was going to the fair at Reillanne. I fixed my whip with it. I see the string, I see the whip, I see the cartwheel, just like I saw it when I bent down to pick up the string. I see the hoofs of the mule I owned at the time.

  “On the wall over there, I see all of that, all the time: the string, the whip, the wheel. When I close my eyes, it stays there in my head.

  “It’s like that with everything I’ve done.

  “Now that I’ve told you about it, it’s gone down a little.”

  “You remember everything?”

  “Everything. Even things—”

  “Things?”

  “I mean things that you do sometimes, thinking they’ll go away, but they stick around anyway. And then, down the road, you run into them again, head on. They’re waiting for you.”

  “Bad things?”

  “What, you think you can tell what’s bad from what’s good?”

  Jaume falls speechless. In the old man’s talk there are chasms where untold powers rumble.

  “Gritte, some water.”

  He’s put on a different voice to demand a drink.

  Marguerite comes obligingly with a tiny bit of water in a cup.

  “Do you have any more?” Jaume asks in an undertone.

  “This is some holy water I’d put aside for Palm Sunday. It was in the armoire. It’s just as well that it gets used for something.”

  •

  “Janet, since you remember everything, shouldn’t you be able to remember the day when you found the spring?”

  “Yes. You were one of those who laughed. You too.”

  “Who could’ve possibly guessed that there’d be water there?”

  “You’re all the same. You always want to understand: This one does this . . . why? This one does that . . . why? Let the people who really know what they’re doing get on with it. Did I find it? Yes or no?”

  “You found it.”

  “And was it good water?”

  “It was good water.”

  “What more do you want?”

  In an instant Jaume makes up his mind.

  “I’d like to know how you did it. How you have to root around in the ground, or if there’s some kind of a plant that shows you where there’s water running underneath.”

  “Have a look and see if you can find my wad.”

  “Where?”

  “There, under the sheet, take a little peek.”

  Jaume finds the wad of tobacco, already chewed up, still moist.

  “Give it to me.”

  Janet slips it into his mouth.

  “Do you know the song, Alex?”

  At Pertuis fair

  If you don’t pay

  The stable boy

  Will snatch your hay.

  Janet beams. Tobacco juice trickles from the corner of his mouth.

  “Ah, you old rascal,” says Jaume good-naturedly, “you’re being cagey. Don’t you want to tell me your secret for finding water?”

  “My boy, it just isn’t possi
ble. Either you’re born with it or not, and if you’re not, nothing doing! It’s your mother’s womb that transmits it. You have to get going on it way ahead of time. Now it’s too late.

  “What, the water you have already isn’t good enough? You’re saying my water isn’t any good? Water that comes right out of our own hill, water you’ll never find the equal of.”

  Jaume’s going to tell him that the spring has failed, but Marguerite is already shushing him with her stubby finger.

  Anyway, now it’s clear beyond a doubt: Janet won’t say a thing, whether out of deceitfulness, sickness, or spite.

  “I knew it,” Gondran says, coming back in. “What can you make of that?” He points toward Janet, who has finally fallen silent. “He’s all bad, rotten from head to toe.”

  •

  The hardest time is from noon onwards.

  For the past two days it seems as though the sun has leapt closer to earth. Its molten mass is crackling right at the edge of the sky. Heat descends from it like a heavy downpour. Wide, rippling whirlwinds blur the air.

  There’s nothing to drink but wine, and your parched throat craves it constantly.

  Thirst is ever-present.

  They fill their hours with expansive dreams of dancing, silver waters.

  •

  Everything’s ready for the expedition: ropes, canteens, the gas lighter, the alpenstocks, the shotgun. Now they only have to wait for night to fall. It won’t be long now—the sky’s already green, and banks of cloud, pinkish just a moment ago, are gradually turning blue. What’s left of the blinding dust of the sun is settling into a bowl on the horizon. Lure’s shadow is rising.

  Here’s what they’re going to do: Since they’ve found out from Maurras that he’s seen Gagou twice coming back at dawn with his pants all muddy and his hair dripping wet, tonight they’re going to follow him. He has to have found a spring. So they’ll find out for sure.

  It goes without saying that they’d prefer not to be heading out into the wasteland during the night, but it’s the only way.

  And after all, there’s the moon. Look: The shadow of the cypress is already growing darker by the minute and taking shape on top of the grass.