The Serpent of Stars Read Free Page B

Forcalquier, if she examines the eggplant, if she squeezes the artichoke, you don’t know, you couldn’t know, that she is knowledgeable in the great science of sky and earth, that she knows, according to the very deepest secrets, the eggplant’s true weight and the artichoke’s bitter blood.
    At that hour, it was the middle of the night, night thick with uncut leaves, beautiful night slapping like a sail, sea blue night, and its wave rolled onto the beach of trees, into those reefs of the hills’ summits. The moon’s spray broke gently against the rocks.
    Césaire grabbed me by the wrist and, without thinking, drew me to him with his rough strength, and I felt the great pincers of his fingers enter my flesh.
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    â€œSO,” HE SAID, brusquely and between his teeth, “now you know, now you’ve heard the woman. Do we understand each other or not? . . .”
    Suddenly my head was full of all those emotions raised by trees, that
great love for bark, that friendship with boughs, and also that fear before the motionless sway of their overwhelming life, everything that, since my youth and my first steps into the hills, inhabited me, and I answered straight from the heart, “Yes, we understand each other, we were made to understand each other, this must have been destined long ago.”
    â€œSpeaking of that,” said the wife . . .
    But the shepherd raised his hand in the moonlight and began to speak.
    As I’ve said, this was a dry man, made of a pile of scree. He spoke with a dark creaking. His mouth opened into his beard and the words came out from between teeth all healthy and ice white despite his age.
    â€œIn the rock of Volx, there are tawny eagles. If you lie down in the grass, they come. They turn into the wind, there overhead, and then they dive straight down. The eagle’s shadow wakes you. If you’re asleep, it passes cool over your eyelids, and you wake up. There it is. You wake up, even if you’re sleeping well.
    â€œOnce, I had a dog. He was mean as the wind. He didn’t know what he did anymore than the wind does. He passed over everything, brutal, all his strength concentrated. He cowed a Corsican ram as big as a load of hay. It was the sheared ewes that killed him. They revolted. They smothered him, then trampled him to death. Then they came to see me, contrite. And I said, ‘Good!’
    â€œOnce I saw someone, a man, a child I should say—I saw someone who carried the weight of the sky. His whole back trembled from it and he bellowed like a bull because he didn’t know how to talk, because he had never known how to talk to men. And the birds all came from across the fields. The birds and all the beasts, but the first day, it was
only the birds, that first day, he had a bird on the tip of each of his fingers.
    â€œI knew a man called Martial of Reillanne who had the curse of the beast upon him. Dogs, cats, horses, sheep, anything; at the scent of him, they all went mad. He wanted to try an experiment. He bought a horse at the Mane fair. It was his wife who led the horse; he was walking at least a hundred meters behind, but when the woman touched the snaffle with her left hand, the horse raised its head and clacked its teeth against the bit. It was because the woman touched her husband with this left hand at night. When the horse was in the stable, Martial said, ‘I have to see. Maybe it’s this jacket that I’m wearing.’ He took off the jacket. Then on down, he took off his belt, his breeches, his shoes. He got completely naked, and he said, ‘Just in case! . . . Like this, I’ll really be able to tell.’ It was no use. He went into the stable naked. The horse smashed its hoofs rearing against the stone wall. Everything died from disgust: chickens, ducks, rabbits. It got worse and worse. One day, he was leaving a café, and a pigeon flew over his head, beat its wings, and rolled over dead. He