The Serpent of Stars Read Free Page A

heavy with a big bundle of dirty laundry in her arms, and she would stop from time to time to pull up her slipping stocking, and she would come and throw it all into the washing basin, and then standing up again, she would say, ‘Ouf! That’s enough to keep me busy today.’ Yes, whatever is human I can imagine, and I do like to go off into those lives that aren’t mine and follow them a bit, and then leave them when things become difficult, and come back into the life of my body, which is what it is, but it’s mine. I like that well enough and so I don’t need to be afraid. But as for what happens behind the walls of the earth, that I don’t like, but it’s stronger than me, it draws me in and it sucks me under and it drinks me.”
    She stopped for a moment to lick her lips with her big, quick tongue.
    â€œHere,” she went on, “you could say that I have the bread and the knife, but I like the bitterness of it; it makes my brain water, you might say. I’ve spent a long time listening to the sound of the earth and I’ve
always listened to the neighbors, but here, the neighbors, well, first of all, it’s those huge gray pines and then those fine old oaks as thick as men, with human voices but so heavy with a power that comes from the depths of time, so that you say to yourself, ‘If they wanted to . . . !’ And at first, I lay down against the right wall. And there, all at once, as soon as I stretched out on my bed, I was plunged into sleep, like a candle blown out. A thing that blew out my life all at once. One night, I struggled with my eyelids. They lowered, I lifted them, until I had to hold them open with my fingertips. There was a purring, like a cat’s, in the earth’s big throat. And I was going into this noise, saying to myself, ‘It’s that, or that, or maybe it’s that!’ until the moment when I saw the black life of a spring, and I said, ‘Césaire, I’m making my bed over there, you can come if you like, and if you stay, there’ll be no more children, because I tell you I’m not leaving that left side anymore. My mother didn’t make me for sleeping beside a spring that never sleeps.’ And Césaire came because he has to be against a woman’s flesh, that’s his nature.
    (Césaire is still out in the night; the wife wets her lips.)
    â€œ. . . There, one fine evening, I heard scratching for a long time. It made a tock, and a bit of earth fell on the blanket and from the hole, a long white root came out. Ever since, it’s grown, it twists itself and twists again. Luckily, it’s blind. It’s searching for me.
    â€œIt was a summer evening, and the big door was opened wide onto the night. That one lay down beside me and put her little arm around my neck. That was no good because I have a big neck and I’m heavy, and I said to her, ‘Move your arm, I’ll hurt you,’ but she stayed close to me and I was frozen with fear and she was hot as a coal burning me where she clung. And she said to me, ‘Mama, look at the night. It’s full of stars someone’s only just sown. Who is it who sows them? Who is it who has
a sack full of them? It’s fistfuls and fistfuls that someone throws. They look like rice, look.’
    â€œShe talked without stopping, all hot with her heat. And I slept with her little arm around me.”
    Â 
    IT WAS now the middle of the night. Madame Escoffier’s voice was slow and heavy like mortar, like the mortar of her flesh. I saw her again hardly two weeks ago, and I thought about all the bends and turns of that night as I tossed in my hands the large fruit picked at the end of the road. And I was drawn back to the clay cave and to my friends. In Lincel, in Saint-Martin-les-Eaux, you wouldn’t know that this fat woman with the beautiful children knows the countries beyond the air. When she goes off to do her shopping in