“You haven’t spent enough time watching animals die.
“It’s strong — a rock, one of those big rocks that part the wind in two. Standing for who knows how long? A thousand years?
“One of those rocks that have been in the world forever — long before you, Jaume, before the apple and olive groves, before me, before the woods and the rest of the animals. Before the fathers of all this — of you, me, the apple. Before the time, Jaume, when the father of all of this might have been nothing but a swelling in his own father’s loincloth.
“One of those rocks that was around on the first day and have always been the same, never changing, for who knows how long? That’s what you have to know to get at the remedy.”
•
Jaume listens. He feels the world rocking under his feet, like the floorboards of a rowboat.
His head is full of images of earth: He sees trees, plants, animals — from the grasshopper, to the wild boar — and for him it’s all part of this truly solid world, where he moves along familiar grooves.
And now?
There’s no way he would have believed that Janet could be so strong. To begin with, it’s this glimpse of power that’s frightened him. This time, somebody in the know is talking.
And him, he really does know. Everything that was obscure till now is becoming clear. Incomprehensible things are being explained. But what’s coming to light in this way is terrifying.
The old ways were so straightforward. There was humanity, and all around, but underneath, animals and plants. And things were going along well that way. You kill a hare, you harvest a fruit. A peach — it’s nothing but sweet juice in your mouth; a hare — it’s a heaped-up plateful of rich, dark meat. And afterward, you lick your lips, and you smoke a pipe on the front step.
It was simple, but it left a lot of things in the dark.
From now on it’s going to be necessary to live in a lit-up world, and it’s painful.
It’s painful because it’s not just humanity anymore, with everything else underneath, but there’s a giant ill will and, way down below, humanity tossed in together with the animals and the plants.
He can feel the hill — alive and terrible — moving under his feet.
•
“Now, I’m going to tell you the secret.”
Jaume would be happier if Janet kept quiet for the moment.
•
“I’m going to tell you. Everything’s sickly sweet, like a corpse.
“There’s too much blood around us.
“There are ten holes, there are hundreds of holes in the flesh of living creatures and in living wood, and out of them the blood and the sap flow over the world like a gigantic river, like the Durance.
“There are a hundred holes, there are a thousand holes we’ve made with our hands.
“And the master no longer has enough saliva and soothing talk to heal them.
“When all is said and done, these animals, these trees, they’re his, they belong to him — to the landlord. His sheepskin jacket — it’s the sheep who gave it to him, without having to skin itself, without bleeding, just so; and the sheep-bone buttons, just so, without bleeding; the button-bones, the sheep…
“You and I, we belong to him too. Except that for some time now we’ve forgotten the way to get to the shelter of his knees. We’ve tried to heal and comfort ourselves, all on our own, but we really needed to be able to find this path again. To find it under the dead leaves. There are leaves on the path, you have to pick them up with your hands, one after the other, carefully, so that the moon doesn’t scorch the slender path that leaps like a kid goat under the moon.
“And when we’re close to him, in the streams of his saliva and in the wind of his words, he’ll say to us:
“ ‘My lovely little man, with your pretty little fingers that grab and squeeze, come here my man, let’s see if you remember how to soothe things with your hands. That’s what I taught you at the very beginning, when you were on my knees — a mere babe with your mouth full of my milk…”
Suddenly, the grand vision gets all jumbled:
“…milk…mou…mouth…plain, wool, milk, milk, milk…”
Then a rattling and a grating, as though you were jamming on the brakes of a cart racing downhill.
In one bound, Jaume is there beside the bed.
Janet is twisted, his head buried in the pillow. A darkish fluid gurgles at the bottom of his open mouth. If he’s going to die…
“Janet, Janet, hey!”
The eye, which had already been glancing back from beyond the land of the living, returns to earth, still trembling like a periwinkle tossed in the wind. He rallies, and his tongue rolls around:
“… milk, your mouth full of milk, and no blood yet on your hands.”
•
Silence.
You can hear Marguerite snoring.
“It’s over now,” Janet says to Jaume, “get a grip on yourself.”
•
When he went back to the ghost village to fetch water, Jaume found a woman’s comb: one of the tortoiseshell kind that sticks into a bun. He found it under the mulberry bush, where the grass was flattened as though somebody lay down there regularly. Certain words spoken by Janet came back to his memory, as well as Maurras’s remark. He put the comb into his pocket.
When he got home, even before he unhitched the mule, he went straight to his daughter’s bedroom. He left the comb on the dresser, between the glass-domed clock and the wicker alms basket full of buttons.
He glanced around this room as though he expected it would reveal the secret life of his daughter: petticoats hanging on the wall, an old corset on a chair, a lace on the bedside rug. From a half-opened dresser drawer, the tail of a coarse, yellow chemise spills out. On the headboard, a pair of women’s trousers is spread; a wide, oval slit gapes between the grey flannel thighs. An installment of a popular novel—Chaste and Debased—rests on the night table.
The comb is in a good spot. You can see it easily.
So now, this morning, Ulalie has been doing her hair in front of the mirror, and, naturally, she’s stuck the comb in her bun. But on her way to the meadow she’s come to a halt on the sunken pathway. In this spot, nobody can see you from any direction. She’s taken hold of the comb and examined it front to back, turning it over between her fingers.
She’s stood still for a long time, waiting for her thoughts to return from the place where she’s just cast them.
Ulalie returns home. Jaume glances sideways at her bun. The comb is there.
“Is it you, father, who brought this?” she says, pulling the comb out of her hair.
“This what?”
“This comb!”
“This comb? No, what would make you expect—”
“I don’t know. It was on my dresser. It’s not mine.”
“Then throw it away, if it’s not yours.”
“You can be sure I’m going to throw it away. What if it used to belong to a sick person? I wonder who could have put it on my dresser. I wasn’t paying enough attention this morning when I was doing my hair.”
And she throws the comb out the window.
•
And now, at noon, something happened as if by design. All of them were in the square, each one ready to take off on his own, since at this point they were as good as unconnected to each other. And all of a sudden, there it came, like a leaf the wind was trying to drag along the ground. All of them turned around together: It was the cat.
It crossed the little square in no hurry at all, just as though it was at home.
It was heading toward Gondran’s house. Through the open window of the kitchen you could see Janet’s bed and, in the middle of the bed, the mound that marked where Janet’s body lay.
The cat has gathered itself into a ball, leapt onto the windowsill, and gone in.