Books: Ramuntcho
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Pierre Loti >> Ramuntcho
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They were now in the middle of this lowland, Ramuntcho and his band, half
dozing under the dawning light. The colors of things began to appear, out
of the gray of night. They glided, they advanced by slight jerks, now
through yellow velvet which was sand, then through a brown thing, striped
regularly and dangerous to walkers, which was slime. And thousands of
little puddles, left by the tide of the day before, reflected the dawn,
shone on the soft extent like mother-of-pearl shells. On the little
yellow and brown desert, their boatman followed the course of a thin,
silver stream, which represented the Bidassoa at low tide. From time to
time, some fisherman crossed their path, passed near them in silence,
without singing as the custom is in rowing, too busy poling, standing in
his bark and working his pole with beautiful plastic gestures.
While they were day-dreaming, they approached the French shore, the
smugglers. On the other side of the strange zone which they were
traversing as in a sled, that silhouette of an old city, which fled from
them slowly, was Fontarabia; those highlands which rose to the sky with
figures so harsh, were the Spanish Pyrenees. All this was Spain,
mountainous Spain, eternally standing there in the face of them and
incessantly preoccupying their minds: a country which one must reach in
silence, in dark nights, in nights without moonlight, under the rain of
winter; a country which is the perpetual aim of dangerous expeditions; a
country which, for the men of Ramuntcho's village, seems always to close
the southwestern horizon, while it changes in appearance according to the
clouds and the hours; a country which is the first to be lighted by the
pale sun of mornings and which masks afterward, like a sombre screen the
red sun of evenings.--
He adored his Basque land, Ramuntcho,--and this morning was one of the
times when this adoration penetrated him more profoundly. In his after
life, during his exile, the reminiscence of these delightful returns at
dawn, after the nights of smuggling, caused in him an indescribable and
very anguishing nostalgia. But his love for the hereditary soil was not
as simple as that of his companions. As in all his sentiments, as in all
his sensations, there were mingled in it diverse elements. At first the
instinctive and unanalyzed attachment of his maternal ancestors to the
native soil, then something more refined coming from his father, an
unconscious reflection of the artistic admiration which had retained the
stranger here for several seasons and had given to him the caprice of
allying himself with a girl of these mountains in order to obtain a
Basque descendance.--
CHAPTER III.
It is eleven o'clock now, and the bells of France and Spain mingle above
the frontier their religious festival vibrations.
Bathed, rested, and in Sunday dress, Ramuntcho was going with his mother
to the high mass of All-Saints' Day. On the path, strewn with reddish
leaves, they descended toward their parish, under a warm sun which gave
to them the illusion of summer.
He, dressed in a manner almost elegant and like a city denizen, save for
the traditional Basque cap, which he wore on the side and pulled down
like a visor over his childish eyes. She, straight and proud, her head
high, her demeanor distinguished, in a gown of new form; having the air
of a society woman, except for the mantilla; made of black cloth, which
covered her hair and her shoulders. In the great city formerly she had
learned how to dress--and anyway, in the Basque country, where so many
ancient traditions have been preserved, the women and the girls of the
least important villages have all taken the habit of dressing in the
fashion of the day, with an elegance unknown to the peasants of the other
French provinces.
They separated, as etiquette ordains, in the yard of the church, where
the immense cypress trees smelled of the south and the Orient. It
resembled a mosque from the exterior, their parish, with its tall, old,
ferocious walls, pierced at the top only by diminutive windows, with its
warm color of antiquity, of dust and of sun.
While Franchita entered by one of the lower doors, Ramuntcho went up a
venerable stone stairway which led one from the exterior wall to the high
tribunes reserved for men.
The extremity of the sombre church was of dazzling old gold, with a
profusion of twisted columns, of complicated entablements, of statues
with excessive convolutions and with draperies in the style of the
Spanish Renaissance. And this magnificence of the tabernacle was in
contrast with the simplicity of the lateral walls, simply kalsomined. But
an air of extreme old age harmonized these things, which one felt were
accustomed for centuries to endure in the face of one another.
It was early still, and people were hardly arriving for this high mass.
Leaning on the railing of his tribune, Ramuntcho looked at the women
entering, all like black phantoms, their heads and dress concealed under
the mourning cashmere which it is usual to wear at church. Silent and
collected, they glided on the funereal pavement of mortuary slabs, where
one could read still, in spite of the effacing of ages, inscriptions in
Euskarian tongue, names of extinguished families and dates of past
centuries.
Gracieuse, whose coming preoccupied Ramuntcho, was late. But, to distract
his mind for a moment, a "convoy" advanced slowly; a convoy, that is a
parade of parents and nearest neighbors of one who had died during the
week, the men still draped in the long cape which is worn at funerals,
the women under the mantle and the traditional hood of full mourning.
Above, in the two immense tribunes superposed along the sides of the
nave, the men came one by one to take their places, grave and with
rosaries in their hands: farmers, laborers, cowboys, poachers or
smugglers, all pious and ready to kneel when the sacred bell rang. Each
one of them, before taking his seat, hooked behind him, to a nail on the
wall, his woolen cap, and little by little, on the white background of
the kalsomine, came into line rows of innumerable Basque headgear.
Below, the little girls of the school entered at last, in good order,
escorted by the Sisters of Saint Mary of the Rosary. And, among these
nuns, wrapped in black, Ramuntcho recognized Gracieuse. She, too, had her
head enveloped with black; her blonde hair, which to-night would be
flurried in the breeze of the fandango, was hidden for the moment under
the austere mantilla of the ceremony. Gracieuse had not been a scholar
for two years, but was none the less the intimate friend of the sisters,
her teachers, ever in their company for songs, novenas, or decorations of
white flowers around the statues of the Holy Virgin.--Then, the priests,
in their most sumptuous costumes, appeared in front of the magnificent
gold of the tabernacle, on a platform elevated and theatrical, and the
mass began, celebrated, in this distant village, with excessive pomp as
in a great city. There were choirs of small boys chanting in infantile
voices with a savage ardor. Then choruses of little girls, whom a sister
accompanied at the harmonium and which the clear and fresh voice of
Gracieuse guided. From time to time a clamor came, like a storm, from the
tribunes above where the men were, a formidable response animated the old
vaults, the old sonorous wainscoting, which for centuries have vibrated
with the same song.--
To do the same things which for numberless ages the ancestors have done
and to tell blindly the same words of faith, are indications of supreme
wisdom, are a supreme force. For all the faithful who sang there came
from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but
soft resignation to coming destruction. Living of the present hour, they
lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better
to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to
form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting
entireties, of almost infinite duration, which is called a race.
CHAPTER IV.
"Ite missa est!" The high mass is finished and the antique church is
emptying. Outside, in the yard, among the tombs, the assistants scatter.
And all the joy of a sunny noon greets them, as they come out of the
sombre nave where each, according to his naive faculties, had caught more
or less a glimpse of the great mystery and of the inevitable death.
Wearing all the uniform national cap, the men come down the exterior
stairway; the women, slower to be captivated by the lure of the blue sky,
retaining still under the mourning veil a little of the dream of the
church, come out of the lower porticoes in black troops; around a grave
freshly closed, some stop and weep.
The southern wind, which is the great magician of the Basque country,
blows softly. The autumn of yesterday has gone and it is forgotten.
Lukewarm breaths pass through the air, vivifying, healthier than those of
May, having the odor of hay and the odor of flowers. Two singers of the
highway are there, leaning on the graveyard wall, and they intone, with a
tambourine and a guitar, an old seguidilla of Spain, bringing here the
warm and somewhat Arabic gaieties of the lands beyond the frontiers.
And in the midst of all this intoxication of the southern November, more
delicious in this country than the intoxication of the spring, Ramuntcho,
having come down one of the first, watches the coming out of the sisters
in order to greet Gracieuse.
The sandal peddler has come also to this closing of the mass, and
displays among the roses of the tombs his linen foot coverings ornamented
with woolen flowers. Young men, attracted by the dazzling embroideries,
gather around him to select colors.
The bees and the flies buzz as in June; the country has become again, for
a few hours, for a few days, for as long as this wind will blow, luminous
and warm. In front of the mountains, which have assumed violent brown or
sombre green tints, and which seem to have advanced to-day until they
overhang the church, houses of the village appear in relief, very neat,
very white under their coat of kalsomine,--old Pyrenean houses with their
wooden balconies and on their walls intercrossings of beams in the
fashion of the olden time. In the southwest, the visible portion of
Spain, the denuded and red peak familiar to smugglers, stands straight
and near in the beautiful clear sky.
Gracieuse does not appear yet, retarded doubtless by the nuns in some
altar service. As for Franchita, who never mingles in the Sunday
festivals, she takes the path to her house, silent and haughty, after a
smile to her son, whom she will not see again until to-night after the
dances have come to an end.
A group of young men, among whom is the vicar who has just taken off his
golden ornaments, forms itself at the threshold of the church, in the
sun, and seems to be plotting grave projects.--They are the great players
of the country, the fine flower of the lithe and the strong; it is for
the pelota game of the afternoon that they are consulting, and they make
a sign to Ramuntcho who pensively comes to them. Several old men come
also and surround them, caps crushed on white hair and faces clean shaven
like those of monks: champions of the olden time, still proud of their
former successes, and sure that their counsel shall be respected in the
national game, which the men here attend with pride as on a field of
honor.--After a courteous discussion, the game is arranged; it will be
immediately after vespers; they will play the "blaid" with the wicker
glove, and the six selected champions, divided into two camps, shall be
the vicar, Ramuntcho and Arrochkoa, Gracieuse's brother, against three
famous men of the neighboring villages: Joachim of Mendiazpi; Florentino
of Espelette, and Irrubeta of Hasparren--
Now comes the "convoy", which comes out of the church and passes by them,
so black in this feast of light, and so archaic, with the envelope of its
capes, of its caps and of its veils. They are expressive of the Middle
Age, these people, while they pass in a file, the Middle Age whose shadow
the Basque country retains. And they express, above all, death, as the
large funereal slabs, with which the nave is paved, express it, as the
cypress trees and the tombs express it, and all the things in this place,
where the men come to pray, express it: death, always death.--But a death
very softly neighboring life, under the shield of the old consoling
symbols--for life is there marked also, almost equally sovereign, in the
warm rays which light up the cemetery, in the eyes of the children who
play among the roses of autumn, in the smile of those beautiful brown
girls who, the mass being finished, return with steps indolently supple
toward the village; in the muscles of all this youthfulness of men, alert
and vigorous, who shall soon exercise at the ball-game their iron legs
and arms.--And of this group of old men and of boys at the threshold of a
church, of this mingling, so peacefully harmonious, of death and of life,
comes the benevolent lesson, the teaching that one must enjoy in time
strength and love; then, without obstinacy in enduring, submit to the
universal law of passing and dying, repeating with confidence, like these
simple-minded and wise men, the same prayers by which the agonies of the
ancestors were cradled.--
It is improbably radiant, the sun of noon in this yard of the dead. The
air is exquisite and one becomes intoxicated by breathing it. The
Pyrenean horizons have been swept of their clouds, their least vapors,
and it seems as if the wind of the south had brought here the limpidities
of Andalusia or of Africa.
The Basque guitar and tambourine accompany the sung seguilla, which the
beggars of Spain throw, like a slight irony into this lukewarm breeze,
above the dead. And boys and girls think of the fandango of to-night,
feel ascending in them the desire and the intoxication of dancing.--
At last here come the sisters, so long expected by Ramuntcho; with them
advance Gracieuse and her mother, Dolores, who is still in widow's weeds,
her face invisible under a black cape closed by a crape veil.
What can this Dolores be plotting with the Mother Superior?--Ramuntcho,
knowing that these two women are enemies, is astonished and disquiet
to-day to see them walk side by side. Now they even stop to talk aside,
so important and secret doubtless is what they are saying; their similar
black caps, overhanging like wagon-hoods, touch each other and they talk
sheltered under them; a whispering of phantoms, one would say, under a
sort of little black vault.--And Ramuntcho has the sentiment of something
hostile plotted against him under these two wicked caps.
When the colloquy comes to an end, he advances, touches his cap for a
salute, awkward and timid suddenly in presence of this Dolores, whose
harsh look under the veil he divines. This woman is the only person in
the world who has the power to chill him, and, never elsewhere than in
her presence, he feels weighing upon him the blemish of being the child
of an unknown father, of wearing no other name than that of his mother.
To-day, however, to his great surprise, she is more cordial than usual,
and she says with a voice almost amiable: "Good-morning, my boy!" Then he
goes to Gracieuse, to ask her with a brusque anxiety: "To-night, at eight
o'clock, say if you will be on the square to dance with me?"
For some time, every Sunday had brought to him the same fear of being
deprived of dancing with her in the evening. In the week he hardly ever
saw her. Now that he was becoming a man, the only occasion for him to
have her company was this ball on the green of the square, in the light
of the stars or of the moon.
They had fallen in love with each other five years ago, Ramuntcho and
Gracieuse, when they were still children. And such loves, when by chance
the awakening of the senses confirms instead of destroying them, become
in young heads something sovereign and exclusive.
They had never thought of saying this to each other, they knew it so
well; never had they talked together of the future which did not appear
possible to one without the other. And the isolation of this mountain
village where they lived, perhaps also the hostility of Dolores to their
naive, unexpressed projects, brought them more closely together--
"To-night, at eight o'clock, say if you will be on the square to dance
with me?"
"Yes--" replies the little girl, fixing on her friend eyes of sadness, a
little frightened, as well as of ardent tenderness.
"Sure?" asked Ramuntcho again, whom these eyes make anxious.
"Yes, sure!"
So, he is quieted again this time, knowing that if Gracieuse has said and
decided something one may count on it. And at once the weather seems to
him more beautiful, the Sunday more amusing, life more charming--
The dinner hour calls the Basques now to the houses or to the inns, and,
under the light, somewhat gloomy, of the noon sun, the village seems
deserted.
Ramuntcho goes to the cider mill which the smugglers and pelota players
frequent. There, he sits at a table, his cap still drawn over his eyes,
with his friends: Arrochkoa, two or three others of the mountains and the
somber Itchoua, their chief.
A festive meal is prepared for them, with fish of the Nivelle, ham and
hares. In the foreground of the hall, vast and dilapidated, near the
windows, are the tables, the oak benches on which they are seated; in the
background, in a penumbra, are the enormous casks filled with new cider.
In this band of Ramuntcho, which is there entire, under the piercing eye
of its chief, reigns an emulation of audacity and a reciprocal, fraternal
devotion; during their night expeditions especially, they are all one to
live or to die.
Leaning heavily, benumbed in the pleasure of resting after the fatigues
of the night and concentrated in the expectation of satiating their
robust hunger, they are silent at first, hardly raising their heads to
look through the window-panes at the passing girls. Two are very young,
almost children like Ramuntcho: Arrochkoa and Florentino. The others
have, like Itchoua, hardened faces, eyes in ambuscade under the frontal
arcade, expressing no certain age; their aspect reveals a past of
fatigues, in the unreasonable obstinacy to pursue this trade of
smuggling, which hardly gives bread to the less skilful.
Then, awakened little by little by the smoking dishes, by the sweet
cider, they talk; soon their words interlace, light, rapid and sonorous,
with an excessive rolling of the /r/. They talk in their mysterious
language, the origin of which is unknown and which seems to the men of
the other countries in Europe more distant than Mongolian or Sanskrit.
They tell stories of the night and of the frontier, stratagems newly
invented and astonishing deceptions of Spanish carbineers. Itchoua, the
chief, listens more than he talks; one hears only at long intervals his
profound voice of a church singer vibrate. Arrochkoa, the most elegant of
all, is in striking contrast with his comrades of the mountain. (His name
was Jean Detcharry, but he was known only by his surname, which the
elders of his family transmitted from father to son for centuries.) A
smuggler for his pleasure, he, without any necessity, and possessing
beautiful lands in the sunlight; the face fresh and pretty, the blonde
mustache turned up in the fashion of cats, the eye feline also, the eye
caressing and fleeting; attracted by all that succeeds, by all that
amuses, by all that shines; liking Ramuntcho for his triumphs in the
ball-game, and quite disposed to give to him the hand of his sister,
Gracieuse, even if it were only to oppose his mother, Dolores. And
Florentino, the other great friend of Ramuntcho is, on the contrary, the
humblest of the band; an athletic, reddish fellow, with wide and low
forehead, with good eyes of resignation, soft as those of beasts of
burden; without father or mother, possessing nothing in the world except
a threadbare costume and three pink cotton shirts; unique lover of a
little fifteen year old orphan, as poor as he and as primitive.
At last Itchoua deigns to talk in his turn. He relates, in a tone of
mystery and of confidence, a certain tale of the time of his youth, in a
black night, on the Spanish territory, in the gorges of Andarlaza. Seized
by two carbineers at the turn in a dark path, he had disengaged himself
by drawing his knife to stab a chest with it: half a second, a resisting
flesh, then, crack! the blade entering brusquely, a jet of warm blood on
his hand, the man fallen, and he, fleeing in the obscure rocks--
And the voice which says these things with implacable tranquility, is the
same which for years sings piously every Sunday the liturgy in the old
sonorous church,--so much so that it seems to retain a religious and
almost sacred character!--
"When you are caught"--adds the speaker, scrutinizing them all with his
eyes, become piercing again--"When you are caught--What is the life of a
man worth in such a case? You would not hesitate, either, I suppose, if
you were caught--?"
"Sure not," replied Arrochkoa, in a tone of infantile bravado, "Sure not!
In such a case to take the life of a carabinero no one would hesitate!--"
The debonair Florentino, turned from Itchoua his disapproving eyes.
Florentino would hesitate; he would not kill. This is divined in the
expression of his face.
"You would not hesitate," repeated Itchoua, scrutinizing Ramuntcho this
time in a special manner; "you would not hesitate, either, I suppose, if
you were caught, would you?"
"Surely," replied Ramuntcho, submissively. "Oh, no, surely--"
But his look, like that of Florentino, has turned from Itchoua. A terror
comes to him of this man, of this imperious and cold influence, so
completely felt already; an entire soft and refined side of his nature is
awakened, made disquiet and in revolt.
Silence has followed the tale, and Itchoua, discontented with the effect
of it, proposes a song in order to change the course of ideas.
The purely material well-being which comes after dinner, the cider which
has been drunk, the cigarettes which are lighted and the songs that
begin, bring back quickly confident joy in these children's heads. And
then, there are in the band the two brothers Iragola, Marcos and Joachim,
young men of the mountain above Mendiazpi, who are renowned extemporary
speakers in the surrounding country and it is a pleasure to hear them, on
any subject, compose and sing verses which are so pretty.
"Let us see", says Itchoua, "you, Marcos, are a sailor who wishes to pass
his life on the ocean and seek fortune in America; you, Joachim, are a
farm hand who prefers not to quit his village and his soil here. Each of
you will discuss alternately, in couplets of equal length, the pleasures
of his trade to the tune--to the tune of the 'Iru Damacho'. Go on."
They looked at each other, the two brothers, half turned toward each
other on the oak bench where they sit; an instant of reflection, during
which an imperceptible agitation of the eyelids alone betrays the working
of their minds; then, brusquely Marcos, the elder, begins, and they will
never stop. With their shaven cheeks, their handsome profiles, their
chins which advance somewhat imperiously above the powerful muscles of
the neck, they recall, in their grave immobility, the figures engraved on
the Roman medals. They sing with a certain effort of the throat, like the
muezzins in the mosques, in high tones. When one has finished his
couplet, without a second of hesitation or silence, the other begins;
more and more their minds are animated and inflamed. Around the
smugglers' table many other caps have gathered and all listen with
admiration to the witty or sensible things which the two brothers know
how to say, ever with the needed cadence and rhyme.
At the twentieth stanza, at last, Itchoua interrupts them to make them
rest and he orders more cider.
"How have you learned?" asked Ramuntcho of the Iragola brothers. "How did
the knack come to you?"
"Oh!" replies Marcos, "it is a family trait, as you must know. Our
father, our grandfather were extemporary composers who were heard with
pleasure in all the festivals of the Basque country, and our mother also
was the daughter of a grand improvisator of the village of Lesaca. And
then, every evening in taking back the oxen or in milking the cows, we
practice, or at the fireside on winter nights. Yes, every evening, we
make compositions in this way on subjects which one of us imagines, and
it is our greatest pleasure--"
But when Florentino's turn to sing comes he, knowing only the old
refrains of the mountain, intones in an Arabic falsetto voice the
complaint of the linen weaver; and then Ramuntcho, who had sung it the
day before in the autumn twilight, sees again the darkened sky of
yesterday, the clouds full of rain, the cart drawn by oxen going down
into a sad and closed valley, toward a solitary farm--and suddenly the
unexplained anguish returns to him, the one which he had before; the fear
of living and of passing thus always in these same villages, under the
oppression of these same mountains; the notion and the confused desire
for other places; the anxiety for unknown distances--His eyes, become
lifeless and fixed, look inwardly; for several strange minutes he feels
that he is an exile, from what country he does not know, disinherited, of
what he does not know, sad in the depths of his soul; between him and the
men who surround him have come suddenly irreducible, hereditary
barriers--
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