2023-07-09 03:07:00
André, a peasant from the hillsides of Gascony, continued to farm his land until he was well into his seventies. But what can a farmer who has reached retirement age hope for, with no one to hand over to, other than leaving his land fallow or planting it with poplars? On the last evening of his final harvest, he remembers his childhood, his youth and all the joys and sorrows of his long and hard life as a farmer.
This phobia was carried over to smokers for whom medicine predicted the most terrible catastrophes, and whom modern crusaders accused of poisoning their fellows. Since his youth, when he sometimes allowed himself the pleasure of a cigarette, André had hardly smoked, except at the end of a few family meals, two or three times a year. Nevertheless, he found that this new psychosis testified to an unhealthy intolerance. In any case, the tobacco growers had paid the price, and in the plain of the Garonne, the gaze no longer met these alignments of green plumes, at intervals as carefully kept as the paths of a park, and above of which flowers of rare beauty, close to those of lagestroemia, formed a pappus. The Italian farmers, who had carpeted the landscape with it, had to fall back on monotonous maize, under pain of sharing the shame and the opprobrium with the guilty smokers.
The wine drinkers had received absolution, then the blessing of the cardinals of science. As long as it’s good quality wine. Fortunately, the cooperative cellar had been created a few years following the war, requiring noble grape varieties, imposing rigorous standards. Merlot and Cabernet replaced bouchalès which were always too green, prone to rot, and to the acidity of sorrel. An important commercial network had been set up, and prices had risen, providing the winegrowers with income capable of ensuring their subsistence.
But might André rejoice in it, this evening, when he had just finished the last harvest of his life, and when he would never once more go, in winter, with muffled hands, to prune the vine shoots, consolidate the stakes, sucker the vines in the spring, prune the tops, go up and down the long slopes for constantly renewed sulphating? Never once more would he watch with the fervor of a lover for the bursting of silvery buds, the tiny leaves which unfold in the month of May, stretch, mount an assault on the iron wires, twist them with solid tendrils and tenacious. All of this would continue, but without him from now on.
The oak log suddenly split in two, releasing a bouquet of sparks that went out immediately. The crack snapped him out of his thoughts. He got up, took the tongs and brought the two pieces back to the andirons. He blew towards the embers and a small orange almond rose above the glowing cartons. It hissed for a few seconds, then silence returned. For so many years that he had been alone, he had ended up getting used to this impressive silence of the walls, as oppressive as the heavy air that precedes storms.
What inextricable combination of circumstances, what succession of misfortunes and misfortunes had brought him there, in this solitude which would last until death!
“You have to believe that when I was born, we must have forgotten to invite the good fairies,” he sighed.
It is true that his life had not started under the best auspices. Her mother, Suzanne, gentle and discreet, had remained a spinster with her parents, protected and pampered by them. She did not agree to marry until she was approaching forty, with Ishmael, a nurseryman from Xaintrailles who came to settle on this property where there had been no male heir. It was following the Great War. Her father had died on Armistice Day. Distraught, she ended up giving in to the idea of this union. Louisa, their old maid, who had family in Xaintrailles, had gone through, and in a few weeks the marriage was concluded. As her tongue, accustomed to peddling the secrets of the alcove, was not one that stays in the pocket of the apron, she liked to tell that Grandmother Octavie had spent hours in prayer during the wedding night. , on the other side of the partition: rumors had circulated, and it was said that during his many trips to the fairs in the region, Ishmael, at the time of his celibacy, had not only occupied with frequenting nurseries. According to Louisa, these rumors only reached the poor grandmother on the eve of the wedding, which explained her concern.
André mightn’t help but smile when he recalled this memory, this ray of mischief in the midst of so many shadows. Yet he quickly chased this thought from his mind because he didn’t like to joke regarding these things, especially when it came to his parents.
The other memory that came to mind was less funny. It was doubtless the first that his memory had preserved. He saw himself once more, at the age of four, a little boy opening the door of the room where his sick mother slept:
“Here mum, I brought you some oranges. Eat them, mum, it will do you good.”
His mother’s pale stillness was etched deep inside him. The coldness of his cheek too.
She had died giving birth to her younger brother, Paul, who had not survived either.
Grandmother Octavie resented her son-in-law. She attributed her daughter’s death to some illness contracted by Ishmael before his marriage. In fact, Suzanne was in fragile health. When she had given birth to André, she had very nearly not recovered: she was already too old to embark on this adventure. She ran out of milk when it had to be fed: we had to look everywhere for a wet nurse, and it was in the Landes, near Castets, that a cousin had ended up finding them Maria Cardouat, a poor girl whose poverty was so great that she had consented to leave her husband and her children for several months and to go and earn a few sous by selling her milk. During the breastfeeding period, however, she had brought with her her youngest child, Gabriel, whom she had fed at the same time as André. Besides, she had always remained miserable, and until the last years of her existence, as long as she had been able to take the bus, she had come every year to spend one or two months of winter in Bertranot from where she left with a little money.
“How lucky you are to save your life!” (It was I who saved your life!) she repeated to André. Even in patois, those were regarding the only words she knew how to say, poor old woman that she had become, as parched as the sand of the pine forests. The time when she had remained a nurse at Bertranot was undoubtedly the only happy period of her life, the one in any case when she had lacked for nothing.
One of the rare images André had kept of his father was in the yard where he had passed earlier following bringing the tractor back under the shed. The father climbed furiously onto the cart, the whip cracked on the horse’s back, and Grandmother Octavie came out shouting to him:
“You killed one woman, Ishmael, you will not kill two.”
André had never known the end of this dispute, the recollection of which remained incrusted in his memory. The other image was in the main hallway of the house. The servants pushed his father’s body with their feet, as one compresses the vintage, to make it fit into the too narrow coffin. Struck down by angina pectoris, Ishmael had not survived his wife six months.
All these memories, which he had not evoked for a long time, began to jostle in his head. He preferred to go up to bed. The logs were now dying in the hearth, while a thin, almost cold smoke gently licked the soot from the great cast iron plate. As he passed through the corridor, just before taking the stairs, he saw himself as a child, snuggled up once morest the cupboard, and the scene of the coffin arises once more. He climbed the stairs without turning around, lay down on the bed, and buried his face in the pillow so as not to see these ghosts once more.
No sooner had he heard the trees shake with the wind than the fatigue of the day seized him, drove away the dreams. And he suddenly fell asleep.
Chapter III
It was the day that woke him. A dull gray light, but it was day nonetheless. He was surprised to find himself on the bed without undressing. Nor did he ever go to bed without closing the shutters. He saw the rain falling, thick, and streaming down the windows. His first thought was for the vine:
“Fortunately I have finished harvesting!”
But immediately, what had overwhelmed him the day before came back to him: his last harvest; the lease that would be signed soon, following All Saints’ Day, perhaps on Sainte-Catherine’s Day, as was done in the past with sharecroppers.
The warmth of the day before had disappeared. The downpour had brought cool, damp air into the room. The temperature drops quickly in October. He pulled the comforter over to him to warm up. Ordinarily, despite his age, he would have jumped out of bed: on the ground, when you wake up, you don’t go back to sleep. We get dressed, and we wash: there is always something to do on a farm.
But André had nothing more to do, since the property was going to be rented soon. The notary had probably already prepared the lease, all that remained was to sign it.
This property, which belonged to his family as far back as memories and bundles of old deeds, he was going to leave to others, who were not of the same blood as him. French or Italian, it mattered little to him: it was the first time that a son or a son-in-law would not take over the lands that generations of ancestors had accumulated, from inheritance to inheritance, or purchased one by one in succession. depriving, if necessary, of the superfluous, and often even of the necessary.
He relives his somewhat sad childhood with his grandmother Octavie: the property was nearly sold. His grandfather Bertrand, his father Ismaël, his mother Suzanne, all were dead. They were servants, or sharecroppers, who had cultivated the estate, as one can do when there is no longer a master in the house. Poor Octavie was sometimes obliged to cut pine trees, when the harvest was bad, to pay their wages. The image of this old grandmother, bruised by bereavement, always in prayer, came back to him at this moment. His eternal advice, too. The cold she felt in her veins, she also feared for her grandson. “André, don’t forget your coat. Did you put on your big socks?
The rest next Sunday in Le Petit Bleu
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