“I’ve got two pickaxes,” says Maurras.
Gondran comes out of Les Monges.
“They’ve put Marie to bed.”
“She didn’t cry?”
“And my mother?”
“Gad almighty!” goes Jaume. “Are you ready, or not?”
A flock of birds, as thick as a river, flies crying overhead.
Jaume climbs into the crotch of the fig tree. In the room, Janet lies stiff, at rest, in the same position he was in a moment ago. Near him, the cat grooms itself with short strokes of its claws.
•
“Janet, it’s blazing at Hospitaliers, do you hear me? The wind’s coming from over there. Don’t you have anything to say to me?”
•
A silence with a stream of wind roaring through it, loaded with violent essences. Then you hear Janet cry out with all his might:
“Jackass.”
•
It had spread like hellfire and damnation down there, between two villages where people were burning the stalks and leaves of dried-up potato plants.
The slippery fire-devil leapt from the heather brush at the stroke of three in the morning. To begin with, it was raging in the thick of the pinewoods, making a hell of a racket. At first people believed they could master it before it did too much damage. But it roared so hard for the whole day and part of the following night that it wore out the arms and wearied the brains of all the lads who were fighting it. By daybreak, they saw it slithering its big body in between the hills, like a torrential stream, more robust and gleeful than ever. It was too late.
Since then it’s thrust its scarlet head through woods and moors, followed by its flaming belly. Trailing behind, its tail beats at the embers and the ashes. The devil crawls, it leaps, it advances. Lashing one claw to the right, one to the left, it guts a whole oak grove on one side; on the other it devours twenty white oaks and three clumps of pines. Like a stinger, its tongue flicks into the wind to taste its direction. You’d think it knew where it was going.
And it’s this sickening muzzle soaked with blood that Maurras has seen just below them in the combe.
•
Babette was scared to be in the back room, so they laid a mattress down in the kitchen for Marie and some sacks beside it for her mother and her baby sister. Between the back door and the sideboard they piled up big sheets of jute — the kind they used for wrapping up hay — for Madelon to sleep on.
“Don’t worry about me,” says Ulalie, “I’ll find someplace easily enough.”
•
“What a crowd!” exclaims Marguerite, “there’s some comfort being all together.”
The walls of the room toss her back and forth like a limp ball. She travels from the linen cupboard to the buffet. She’d like to give everybody sheets, to make coffee, at one and the same time, and she wanders around empty-handed, not knowing where to begin, and she laughs with a big laugh, frozen like in a photograph.
“Help yourselves, help yourselves. I don’t know which way to turn anymore. Babette, get the cups, Ulalie, hand out the sheets, get out the flowered blanket, under there…”
•
They’ve lit the petrol lamp. Janet’s bed raises the old man’s body right to the edge of the shadow cast by the lampshade.
Twice already Marguerite has said: “Ulalie, come and lie down here behind the stove, you’ll be comfortable here, you’ll have a bit of space.”
“Let me be. I have lots of time. I wouldn’t be able to sleep, knowing they were just over there.” When everything was arranged, the others bedded down on the floor on straw pallets. Now they’re all stretched out, at rest: Babette between the two girls, Madelon in her corner between the sideboard and the door, fully dressed in her wraparound skirt and her scarves, Marguerite on the bedside rug. She’s taken off her blouse, but left on her petticoat and hose. She’s lain down flat on her back, and her ample breasts, covered with freckles, flop, one on one side, one on the other, projecting their thick, rose-coloured tips.
Long-drawn breaths have already merged into a chorus, interspersed by short puffs that flit through little Marie’s feverish, dried-out lips. And through the twin notes that play through Marguerite’s nostrils. And through the pipe-smoker’s rattle issuing from old Madelon. Once in a while, a raucous gurgling rises up through this concert, swells, diminishes, ceases: Janet is breathing with difficulty.
They’ve trimmed the wick of the lamp. The light is a yellow ball fastened to the hoops of the iron hanger, a compact sphere stuck in the middle of the room, whose rays don’t even reach into the corners. It barely brushes Babette’s pretty, upturned white nose, one of Marguerite’s breasts, and the hem of Madelon’s petticoat.
•
Suddenly, the shadowy wall lights up, and a casserole dances against it in silhouette. The window opposite is lit up by a big, dazzling, russet flower.
Ulalie moves closer to the window.
“There, now it’s grabbed hold of Les Ubacs,” she murmurs to herself.
•
Outside: the blackened bulk of the empty houses and, beyond them, the hill brushing the belly of the night. The hill’s contours are outlined by the russet flames devouring the woods of Les Ubacs, lower down on the neighbouring hill.
With its freight of plants and animals, the hill rises up, dark, massive, heavy with immobility and power.
“And if this hill gets roused up like the rest…”
•
The lamp gutters. The ball of light shrinks. Babette’s nose — it’s nothing more now than a tiny, pale triangle, anonymous. Only Marguerite’s breast keeps its semblance of a breast, lifting and falling to the two tones of her snoring.
As she faces the window within the dark wooden interior, the glare of the blaze hollows out Ulalie’s harsh features.
•
The lamp has just guttered out. Very quietly.
The breast, the nose, have faded. On the wall where the cooking pots hang, a big, reddish patch is flickering. At its center there’s a little pattern, egg-shaped, which elongates, then flattens. When it’s inflated it’s the projection of a flaw in the glass through which the flames of Les Ubacs are glaring.
On the hearth, an ember groans for a moment, then goes out.
•
A cock crows. The oak shakes itself off in the wind. It must be dawn.
A dreary, grayish thread of dawn. The clock strikes seven. With firm finality.
Marguerite is the first to wake up. She sits on the bedside rug where she’s slept and scrapes long and hard at her belly with her nails, as though it were the drum of a tambourine. She slips her breasts inside the straps of her chemise and then pushes them snugly into the bodice of her corset.
The door opens. Ulalie pokes her head into the opening. She seems put out to see Marguerite awake.
“You’re already up?” Marguerite asks her.
“I couldn’t sleep. You know what — Les Ubacs are completely on fire.”
“Les Ubacs?…
“Les Ubacs?” Marguerite asks, a second time. She’s still half asleep, completely out on her feet. She can’t come to grips with the fact that Les Ubacs are burning.
“What time is it?”
“Almost seven-thirty.”
“Seven-thirty? But you can’t see a thing!”
“Les Ubacs are on fire, that’s why you can’t see anything. There’s so much smoke you can’t see Sainte Roustagne anymore.”
“Oh, my goodness, this time it’s…” Marguerite says, terror-stricken.
Then, as though coming back to herself:
“I’m going to make coffee.”
At the sound of the percolator, Babette wakes up all at once, with a cry and a defensive gesture.
“Hey, what’s going on? I was frightened. Does it ever smell like something’s burning.”
“It’s Les Ubacs that are burning,” Marguerite says, casually, as she goes about serving the coffee.