“No. We sent the boy back home. It’s too risky.”
They climb, all four of them, up the Bastides’ last defense: the foothill of Les Bournes, still intact, though flame is already licking at its base.
From the summit, the enormous extent of the burning woods reveals itself: A black carpet, scintillating all over with embers, stretches right across to the outskirts of a village that one had never been able to see when there were tall trees in between. It’s gleaming now like a naked bone.
That’s what one sees in one direction.
In the other, everything’s still soft, ever so soft, covered with grasses and olive groves. There’s a bowl-shaped depression, like the imprint of a woman’s breast, in the grassland. In the middle sit the Bastides, and near the houses, there’s a little white patch that’s moving — maybe Babette? Ulalie? Madelon? Marguerite? Or, maybe just Arbaud’s youngest daughter, playing in the square.
The fire keeps climbing.
The four of them stand there watching it.
Down below, the woods are already crackling. The wind knifes between the walls of Lure and rends the smoke. The flame leaps like water in an uproar. The sky bears a heavy rain of glowing pine needles. Burning pinecones, clicking as they fly, score the smoke with blood-red streaks. A massive cloud of birds rises straight up toward the shrill reaches of the sky, gets drunk on the purer air, drops down, soars again, whirls around, cries. The terrifying suction of the blaze carries away whole wings, torn out and still bleeding, which swirl like dead leaves. A flood of smoke surges up, blots out the sky, wavers for a second in the wind, and then, flexing its sooty muscles, holds still and spreads. Inside its smoky flesh, birds crackle in agony.
Jaume is trembling from head to foot.
As though it was trying to shake off a bad dream, Maurras’s gaze leaves the hollow of the Bastides and shifts over to Jaume, feels its way across Jaume’s face, delves into his wrinkles, into his folds, under his eyes, around his mouth, looking for hope.
“And your moustache?”
“Phooey,” goes Jaume, with a motion that means to say: “It’s the same power that’s destroying us and earth. My moustache? It’s there… in the flames…”
Down below, the little girl plays on in the square of the Bastides.
“Let’s go.”
•
After he lost his grip on Jaume’s jacket, Gagou ran frantically through the smoke. He was wailing with fright. Now all at once he’s come to a standstill, wonderstruck and trembling with joy. A long strand of saliva drools from his lips.
The dense curtain has parted. Right in front of him, ten junipers are burning all at once. It’s over quickly. The flame continues to leap skyward, but now it’s like ten golden candelabras glittering. All the branches are glowing embers, even the twigs, even the fine netting of stems and veins in the leaves. They’re still standing upright like living trees, but instead of dark, motionless wood they’re fiery worms that undulate and twist, coil up, unwind with a light, clear, crackling sound. It’s pretty.
“Ga, gou…”
He comes nearer, holds his hand out, and, in spite of the fire that’s gripping his feet like a vise, he enters the land of a thousand golden candelabras.
•
The women weren’t ready for this. It was far away, this fire, and now, all of a sudden, here they are, the men, tumbling down on top of them: “Hurry, cover up the windows with wet sheets, and everybody get inside.” Next they set to hacking with all their might to open a ditch in front of the houses. Arbaud is slashing away at the dry grass and at the thatch of abandoned grain with big, rage-filled strokes of his scythe, off balance, as though he were drunk or crazed.
Babette is crying. Marguerite is sniffing back tears. Only Ulalie has disobeyed orders. She’s gone back outside and now, along with the men, she’s hacking at the grasses and the undergrowth with her sickle to help clear an open space in front of the Bastides.
Jaume looks like he has a hundred arms. The grayish, sticky air must be distorting appearances, because he looks gigantic and mobile, like a prehistoric lizard. He’s everywhere at once: He pounds with his pickaxe, he runs, he yells out words that the rest can’t understand but are glad to hear anyways.
“What a man!” thinks Maurras.
Yes, but if Jaume is battling with so much fury, the poor devil, he must have felt fear stirring deep within himself. In the midst of his activity he’s able to forget about it.
As long as he was at a distance from the Bastides, he was battling only against the blaze. A blaze — it’s something natural.
A short while ago, when he got back, the first thing he saw was Janet’s bedroom window, Janet’s bed, and the white mound marking Janet’s body.
Now he’s seen into the heart of the matter. The crux, the hub of the relentless wheel is this little heap of bone and flesh: Janet. All at once he’s seen earth’s life-force spurting up all around him in leaps of hares, sprays of rabbits, flights of birds. Right under his feet, earth swarms with wild things. The clicking of grasshoppers raises a clatter, clouds of wasps whine and drone. Over there, spread-eagled over that decayed mushroom cap, a praying mantis darts its long, saw-toothed proboscis toward the flame. A crazed dung-beetle puffs its wings up against a tree trunk. Streams of worms ripple under the grass. Any kind of creature that knows anything at all is taking flight.
“Before long we’ll be completely on our own. The whole hill has turned against us, the whole huge body of the hill. This hill that’s curved like a yoke that’s going to smash our heads. I see it. Now I see it. Now I know what I’ve been afraid of since this morning. Janet, hah, you dirty bastard, you’ve pulled it off.”
A burst of anger straightens him up.
“And what about us now, don’t we count?”
He grabs his flail. His fist tightens around the wooden handle. Power runs through his arm, in clearly defined ripples. Pins and needles run through his flesh.
He walks over the flame. Under his feet, the grass scorches.
“Ah, now I’ve found you out at last, you rotten swine.”
He strikes at the hill with his big flail. The flame shrinks back around him. A black patch smokes where the boxwood flail-head lands.
“Dirty good for nothing.”
The blows ring out. It looks like the bruised and battered hill is finally going to be defeated.
“Jaume, Jaume!…”
Maurras is running after him, grabs him by the shoulders, shakes him as if he’s trying to bring him back to his senses:
“Are you crazy? You mean you can’t see it?”
The time has come: the cunning flame has spun its opponent around. In another moment it will be closing its gaping, gold-toothed maw around him.
In one bound Jaume gets clear.
“Light the backfire.”
Ah, the lighting of the fire that’s our friend, not our foe. It’s ready to take off from our feet, crouching over the ground like a warrior preparing to charge. Look: It strangles our enemy, knocks it down, smothers it.
But ah, what rotten luck, now both fires are raging together and turning back on top of us.
A terrible rumbling makes the sky shudder. The earth monster is awakening. It’s making its massive, granite limbs grind to the very center of heaven.
Maurras throws his pickaxe to the ground and takes off on the run.
Arbaud’s scythe rings out as he hurls it full force onto the stones.
A door bangs. Windows crash down.
Behind all the uproar, the cries of women.
“Father, father…”
The leaves of the big oak are crackling.
So, is the whole world really falling to pieces?
Jaume, his legs worn out, his head sagging, collapses.
“You dirty whore!” he says as he falls. He pounds fiercely at the hill with his bare fists.