Books: Ramuntcho
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Pierre Loti >> Ramuntcho
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When he ceased to be a child, when Ramuntcho began to desert from school,
to wish to follow the smugglers in the mountain, Franchita would say to
him:
"Anyway, you take after your uncle Ignacio, we shall never make anything
of you!--"
And it was true that he took after his uncle Ignacio, that he was
fascinated by all the things that are dangerous, unknown and far-off--
To-night, therefore, if she did not talk to her son of the message which
had just been transmitted to them, the reason was she divined his
meditation on America and was afraid of his answers. Besides, among
country people, the little profound and intimate dramas are played
without words, with misunderstandings that are never cleared up, with
phrases only guessed at and with obstinate silence.
But, as they were finishing their meal, they heard a chorus of young and
gay voices, coming near, accompanied by a drum, the boys of Etchezar,
coming for Ramuntcho to bring him with them in their parade with music
around the village, following the custom of New Year's eve, to go into
every house, drink in it a glass of cider and give a joyous serenade to
an old time tune.
And Ramuntcho, forgetting Uruguay and the mysterious uncle, became a
child again, in the pleasure of following them and of singing with them
along the obscure roads, enraptured especially by the thought that they
would go to the house of the Detcharry family and that he would see
again, for an instant, Gracieuse.
CHAPTER X.
The changeable month of March had arrived, and with it the intoxication
of spring, joyful for the young, sad for those who are declining.
And Gracieuse had commenced again to sit, in the twilight of the
lengthened days, on the stone bench in front of her door.
Oh! the old stone benches, around the houses, made, in the past ages, for
the reveries of the soft evenings and for the eternally similar
conversations of lovers!--
Gracieuse's house was very ancient, like most houses in that Basque
country, where, less than elsewhere, the years change the things.--It had
two stories; a large projecting roof in a steep slope; walls like a
fortress which were whitewashed every summer; very small windows, with
settings of cut granite and green blinds. Above the front door, a granite
lintel bore an inscription in relief; words complicated and long which,
to French eyes resembled nothing known. It said: "May the Holy Virgin
bless this home, built in the year 1630 by Peter Detcharry, beadle, and
his wife Damasa Irribarne, of the village of Istaritz." A small garden
two yards wide, surrounded by a low wall so that one could see the
passers-by, separated the house from the road; there was a beautiful
rose-laurel, extending its southern foliage above the evening bench, and
there were yuccas, a palm tree, and enormous bunches of those hortensias
which are giants here, in this land of shade, in this lukewarm climate,
so often enveloped by clouds. In the rear was a badly closed orchard
which rolled down to an abandoned path, favorable to escalades of lovers.
What mornings radiant with light there were in that spring, and what
tranquil, pink evenings!
After a week of full moon which kept the fields till day-light blue with
rays, and when the band of Itchoua ceased to work,--so clear was their
habitual domain, so illuminated were the grand, vaporous backgrounds of
the Pyrenees and of Spain--the frontier fraud was resumed more ardently,
as soon as the thinned crescent had become discreet and early setting.
Then, in these beautiful times, smuggling by night was exquisite; a trade
of solitude and of meditation when the mind of the naive and very
pardonable defrauders was elevated unconsciously in the contemplation of
the sky and of the darkness animated by stars--as it happens to the mind
of the sea folk watching, on the nocturnal march of vessels, and as it
happened formerly to the mind of the shepherds in antique Chaldea.
It was favorable also and tempting for lovers, that tepid period which
followed the full moon of March, for it was dark everywhere around the
houses, dark in all the paths domed with trees,--and very dark, behind
the Detcharry orchard, on the abandoned path where nobody ever passed.
Gracieuse lived more and more on her bench in front of her door.
It was here that she was seated, as every year, to receive and look at
the carnival dancers: those groups of young boys and of young girls of
Spain or of France, who, every spring, organize themselves for several
days in a wandering band, and, all dressed in the same pink or white
colors, traverse the frontier village, dancing the fandango in front of
houses, with castanets--
She stayed later and later in this place which she liked, under the
shelter of the rose-laurel coming into bloom, and sometimes even, she
came out noiselessly through the window, like a little, sly fox, to
breathe there at length, after her mother had gone to bed. Ramuntcho knew
this and, every night, the thought of that bench troubled his sleep.
CHAPTER XI.
One clear April morning, they were walking to the church, Gracieuse and
Ramuntcho. She, with an air half grave, half mocking, with a particular
and very odd air, leading him there to make him do a penance which she
had ordered.
In the holy enclosure, the flowerbeds of the tombs were coming into bloom
again, as also the rose bushes on the walls. Once more the new saps were
awakening above the long sleep of the dead. They went in together,
through the lower door, into the empty church, where the old "benoite" in
a black mantilla was alone, dusting the altars.
When Gracieuse had given to Ramuntcho the holy water and they had made
their signs of the cross, she led him through the sonorous nave, paved
with funereal stones, to a strange image on the wall, in a shady corner,
under the men's tribunes.
It was a painting, impregnated with ancient mysticism, representing the
figure of Jesus with eyes closed, forehead bloody, expression lamentable
and dead; the head seemed to be cut off, separated from the body, and
placed there on a gray linen cloth. Above, were written the long Litanies
of the Holy Face, which have been composed, as everybody knows, to be
recited in penance by repentant blasphemers. The day before, Ramuntcho,
in anger, had sworn in an ugly manner: a quite unimaginable string of
words, wherein the sacraments and the most saintly things were mingled
with the horns of the devil and other villainous things still more
frightful. That is why the necessity for a penance had impressed itself
on the mind of Gracieuse.
"Come, my Ramuntcho," she recommended, as she walked away, "omit nothing
of what you must say."
She left him then in front of the Holy Face, beginning to murmur his
litanies in a low voice, and went to the good woman and helped her to
change the water of the white Easter daisies in front of the altar of the
Virgin.
But when the languorous evening returned, and Gracieuse was seated in the
darkness meditating on her stone bench, a young human form started up
suddenly near her; someone who had come in sandals, without making more
noise than the silk owls make in the air, from the rear of the garden
doubtless, after some scaling, and who stood there, straight, his
waistcoat thrown over one shoulder: the one to whom were addressed all
her tender emotions on earth, the one who incarnated the ardent dream of
her heart and of her senses--
"Ramuntcho!" she said. "Oh! how you frightened me. Where did you come
from at such an hour? What do you want? Why did you come?"
"Why did I come? In my turn, to order you to do penance," he replied,
laughing.
"No, tell the truth, what is the matter, what are you coming to do?"
"To see you, only! That is what I come to do--What will you have! We
never see each other!--Your mother keeps me at a distance more and more
every day. I cannot live in that way.--We are not doing any harm, after
all, since we are to be married! And you know, I could come every night,
if you like, without anybody suspecting it--"
"Oh! no!--Oh! do not do that ever, I beg of you--"
They talked for an instant, and so low, so low, with more silence than
words, as if they were afraid to wake up the birds in their nests. They
recognized no longer the sound of their voices, so changed and so
trembling they were, as if they had committed some delicious and damnable
crime, by doing nothing but staying near each other, in the grand,
caressing mystery of that night of April, which was hatching around them
so many ascents of saps, so many germinations and so many loves--
He had not even dared to sit at her side; he remained standing, ready to
run under the branches at the least alarm, like a nocturnal prowler.
However, when he prepared to go, it was she who asked, hesitating, and in
a manner to be hardly heard:
"And--you will come back to-morrow?"
Then, under his growing mustache, he smiled at this sudden change of mind
and he replied:
"Yes, surely.--To-morrow and every night.--Every night when we shall not
have to work in Spain.--I will come--"
CHAPTER XII.
Ramuntcho's lodging place was, in the house of his mother and above the
stable, a room neatly whitewashed; he had there his bed, always clean and
white, but where smuggling gave him few hours for sleep. Books of travel
or cosmography, which the cure of the parish lent to him, posed on his
table--unexpected in this house. The portraits, framed, of different
saints, ornamented the walls, and several pelota-players' gloves were
hanging from the beams of the ceiling, long gloves of wicker and of
leather which seemed rather implements of hunting or fishing.
Franchita, at her return to her country, had bought back this house,
which was that of her deceased parents, with a part of the sum given to
her by the stranger at the birth of her son. She had invested the rest;
then she worked at making gowns or at ironing linen for the people of
Etchezar, and rented, to farmers of land near by, two lower rooms, with
the stable where they placed their cows and their sheep.
Different familiar, musical sounds rocked Ramuntcho in his bed. First,
the constant roar of a near-by torrent; then, at times, songs of
nightingales, salutes to the dawn of divers birds. And, in this spring
especially, the cows, his neighbors, excited doubtless by the smell of
new-mown hay, moved all night, were agitated in dreams, making their
bells tintillate continually.
Often, after the long expeditions at night, he regained his sleep in the
afternoon, extended in the shade in some corner of moss and grass. Like
the other smugglers, he was not an early riser for a village boy, and he
woke up sometimes long after daybreak, when already, between the
disjointed planks of his flooring, rays of a vivid and gay light came
from the stable below, the door of which remained open always to the
rising sun after the departure of the cattle to their pastures. Then, he
went to his window, pushed open the little, old blinds made of massive
chestnut wood painted in olive, and leaned on his elbows, placed on the
sill of the thick wall, to look at the clouds or at the sun of the new
morning.
What he saw, around his house, was green, green, magnificently green, as
are in the spring all the corners of that land of shade and of rain. The
ferns which, in the autumn, have so warm a rusty color, were now, in this
April, in the glory of their greenest freshness and covered the slopes of
the mountains as with an immense carpet of curly wool, where foxglove
flowers made pink spots. In a ravine, the torrent roared under branches.
Above, groups of oaks and of beeches clung to the slopes, alternating
with prairies; then, above this tranquil Eden, toward the sky, ascended
the grand, denuded peak of the Gizune, sovereign hill of the region of
the clouds. And one perceived also, in the background, the church and the
houses--that village of Etchezar, solitary and perched high on one of the
Pyrenean cliffs, far from everything, far from the lines of communication
which have revolutionized and spoiled the lowlands of the shores;
sheltered from curiosity, from the profanation of strangers, and living
still its Basque life of other days.
Ramuntcho's awakenings were impregnated, at this window, with peace and
humble serenity. They were full of joy, his awakenings of a man engaged,
since he had the assurance of meeting Gracieuse at night at the promised
place. The vague anxieties, the undefined sadness, which accompanied in
him formerly the daily return of his thoughts, had fled for a time,
dispelled by the reminiscence and the expectation of these meetings; his
life was all changed; as soon as his eyes were opened he had the
impression of a mystery and of an immense enchantment, enveloping him in
the midst of this verdure and of these April flowers. And this peace of
spring, thus seen every morning, seemed to him every time a new thing,
very different from what it had been in the previous years, infinitely
sweet to his heart and voluptuous to his flesh, having unfathomable and
ravishing depths.
CHAPTER XIII.
It is Easter night, after the village bells have ceased to mingle in the
air so many holy vibrations that came from Spain and from France.
Seated on the bank of the Bidassoa, Ramuntcho and Florentino watch the
arrival of a bark. A great silence now, and the bells sleep. The tepid
twilight has been prolonged and, in breathing, one feels the approach of
summer.
As soon as the night falls, it must appear from the coast of Spain, the
smuggling bark, bringing the very prohibited phosphorus. And, without its
touching the shore, they must go to get that merchandise, by advancing on
foot in the bed of the river, with long, pointed sticks in their hands,
in order to assume, if perchance they were caught, airs of people fishing
innocently for "platuches."
The water of the Bidassoa is to-night an immovable and clear mirror, a
little more luminous than the sky, and in this mirror, are reproduced,
upside down, all the constellations, the entire Spanish mountain, carved
in so sombre a silhouette in the tranquil atmosphere. Summer, summer, one
has more and more the consciousness of its approach, so limpid and soft
are the first signs of night, so much lukewarm langour is scattered over
this corner of the world, where the smugglers silently manoeuvre.
But this estuary, which separates the two countries, seems in this moment
to Ramuntcho more melancholy than usual, more closed and more walled-in
in front of him by these black mountains, at the feet of which hardly
shine, here and there, two or three uncertain lights. Then, he is seized
again by his desire to know what there is beyond, and further still.--Oh!
to go elsewhere!--To escape, at least for a time, from the oppressiveness
of that land--so loved, however!--Before death, to escape the
oppressiveness of this existence, ever similar and without egress. To try
something else, to get out of here, to travel, to know things!--
Then, while watching the far-off, terrestrial distances where the bark
will appear, he raises his eyes from time to time toward what happens
above, in the infinite, looks at the new moon, the crescent of which, as
thin as a line, lowers and will disappear soon; looks at the stars, the
slow and regulated march of which he has observed, as have all the people
of his trade, during so many nocturnal hours; is troubled in the depth of
his mind by the proportions and the inconceivable distances of these
things.--
In his village of Etchezar, the old priest who had taught him the
catechism, interested by his young, lively intelligence, has lent books
to him, has continued with him conversations on a thousand subjects, and,
on the subject of the planets, has given to him the notion of movements
and of immensities, has half opened before his eyes the grand abyss of
space and duration. Then, in his mind, innate doubts, frights and
despairs that slumbered, all that his father had bequeathed to him as a
sombre inheritance, all these things have taken a black form which stands
before him. Under the great sky of night, his Basque faith has commenced
to weaken. His mind is no longer simple enough to accept blindly dogmas
and observances, and, as all becomes incoherence and disorder in his
young head, so strangely prepared, the course of which nobody is leading,
he does not know that it is wise to submit, with confidence in spite of
everything, to the venerable and consecrated formulas, behind which is
hidden perhaps all that we may ever see of the unknowable truths.
Therefore, these bells of Easter which the year before had filled him
with a religious and soft sentiment, this time had seemed to him to be a
music sad and almost vain. And now that they have just hushed, he listens
with undefined sadness to the powerful noise, almost incessant since the
creation, that the breakers of the Bay of Biscay make and which, in the
peaceful nights, may be heard in the distance behind the mountains.
But his floating dream changes again.--Now the estuary, which has become
quite dark and where one may no longer see the mass of human habitations,
seems to him, little by little, to become different; then, strange
suddenly, as if some mystery were to be accomplished in it; he perceives
only the great, abrupt lines of it, which are almost eternal, and he is
surprised to think confusedly of times more ancient, of an unprecise and
obscure antiquity.--The Spirit of the old ages, which comes out of the
soil at times in the calm nights, in the hours when sleep the beings that
trouble us in the day-time, the Spirit of the old ages is beginning,
doubtless, to soar in the air around him; Ramuntcho does not define this
well, for his sense of an artist and of a seer, that no education has
refined, has remained rudimentary; but he has the notion and the worry of
it.--In his head, there is still and always a chaos, which seeks
perpetually to disentangle itself and never succeeds.--However, when the
two enlarged and reddened horns of the moon fall slowly behind the
mountain, always black, the aspect of things takes, for an inappreciable
instant, one knows not what ferocious and primitive airs; then, a dying
impression of original epochs which had remained, one knows not where in
space, takes for Ramuntcho a precise form in a sudden manner, and
troubles him until he shivers. He dreams, even without wishing it, of
those men of the forests who lived here in the ages, in the uncalculated
and dark ages, because, suddenly, from a point distant from the shore, a
long Basque cry rises from the darkness in a lugubrious falsetto, an
"irrintzina," the only thing in this country with which he never could
become entirely familiar. But a great mocking noise occurs in the
distance, the crash of iron, whistles: a train from Paris to Madrid,
which is passing over there, behind them, in the black of the French
shore. And the Spirit of the old ages folds its wings made of shade and
vanishes. Silence returns: but after the passage of this stupid and rapid
thing, the Spirit which has fled reappears no more--
At last, the bark which Ramuntcho awaited with Florentino appears, hardly
perceptible for other eyes than theirs, a little, gray form which leaves
behind it slight ripples on this mirror which is of the color of the sky
at night and wherein stars are reflected upside down. It is the
well-selected hour, the hour when the customs officers watch badly; the
hour also when the view is dimmer, when the last reflections of the sun
and those of the crescent of the moon have gone out, and the eyes of men
are not yet accustomed to darkness.
Then to get the prohibited phosphorus, they take their long fishing
sticks, and go into the water silently.
CHAPTER XIV.
There was a grand ball-game arranged for the following Sunday at
Erribiague, a far-distant village, near the tall mountains. Ramuntcho,
Arrochkoa and Florentino were to play against three celebrated ones of
Spain; they were to practice that evening, limber their arms on the
square of Etchezar, and Gracieuse, with other little girls of her age,
had taken seats on the granite benches to look at them. The girls, all
pretty; with elegant airs in their pale colored waists cut in accordance
with the most recent vagary of the season. And they were laughing, these
little girls, they were laughing! They were laughing because they had
begun laughing, without knowing why. Nothing, a word of their old Basque
tongue, without any appropriateness, by one of them, and there they were
all in spasms of laughter.--This country is truly one of the corners of
the world where the laughter of girls breaks out most easily, ringing
like clear crystal, ringing youthfulness and fresh throats.
Arrochkoa had been there for a long time, with the wicker glove at his
arm, throwing alone the pelota which, from time to time, children picked
up for him. But Ramuntcho, Florentino, what were they thinking of? How
late they were! They came at last, their foreheads wet with perspiration,
their walk heavy and embarrassed. And, while the little, laughing girls
questioned them, in that mocking tone which girls, when they are in a
troupe, assume ordinarily to interpellate boys, these smiled, and each
one struck his chest which gave a metallic sound.--Through paths of the
Gizune, they had returned on foot from Spain, heavy with copper coin
bearing the effigy of the gentle, little King Alfonso XIII. A new trick
of the smugglers: for Itchoua's account, they had exchanged over there
with profit, a big sum of money for this debased coin, destined to be
circulated at par at the coming fairs, in different villages of the
Landes where Spanish cents are current. They were bringing, in their
pockets, in their shirts, some forty kilos of copper. They made all this
fall like rain on the antique granite of the benches, at the feet of the
amused girls, asking them to keep and count it for them; then, after
wiping their foreheads and puffing a little, they began to play and to
jump, being light now and lighter than ordinarily, their overload being
disposed of.
Except three or four children of the school who ran like young cats after
the lost pelotas, there were only the girls, seated in a group on the
lowest one of these deserted steps, the old, reddish stones of which bore
at this moment their herbs and their flowers of April. Calico gowns,
clear white or pink waists, they were all the gaiety of this solemnly sad
place. Beside Gracieuse was Pantchika Dargaignaratz, another fifteen year
old blonde, who was engaged to Arrochkoa and would soon marry him, for
he, being the son of a widow, had not to serve in the army. And,
criticizing the players, placing in lines on the granite rows of piled-up
copper cents, they laughed, they whispered, in their chanted accent, with
ends of syllables in "rra" or in "rrik," making the "r's" roll so sharply
that one would have thought every instant sparrows were beating their
wings in their mouths.
They also, the boys, were laughing, and they came frequently, under the
pretext of resting, to sit among the girls. These troubled and
intimidated them three times more than the public, because they mocked
so!
Ramuntcho learned from his little betrothed something which he would not
have dared to hope for: she had obtained her mother's permission to go to
that festival of Erribiague, see the ball-game and visit that country,
which she did not know. It was agreed that she should go in a carriage,
with Pantchika and Madame Dargaignaratz; and they would meet over there;
perhaps it would be possible to return all together.
During the two weeks since their evening meetings had begun, this was the
first time when he had had the opportunity to talk to her thus in the
day-time and before the others--and their manner was different, more
ceremonious apparently, with, beneath it, a very suave mystery. It was a
long time, also, since he had seen her so well and so near in the
daylight: she was growing more beautiful that spring; she was pretty,
pretty!--Her bust had become rounder and her waist thinner; her manner
gained, day by day, an elegant suppleness. She resembled her brother
still, she had the same regular features, the same perfect oval of the
face; but the difference in their eyes went on increasing: while those of
Arrochkoa, of a blue green shade which seemed fleeting, avoided the
glances of others, hers, on the contrary, black pupils and lashes,
dilated themselves to look at you fixedly. Ramuntcho had seen eyes like
these in no other person; he adored the frank tenderness of them and also
their anxious and profound questioning. Long before he had become a man
and accessible to the trickery of the senses, those eyes had caught, of
his little, childish mind, all that was best and purest in it.--And now
around such eyes, the grand Transformer, enigmatic and sovereign, had
placed a beauty of flesh which irresistibly called his flesh to a supreme
communion.--
They were made very inattentive to their game, the players, by the group
of little girls, of white and pink waists, and they laughed themselves at
not playing so well as usual. Above them, occupying only a small corner
of the old, granite amphitheatre, ascended rows of empty benches in
ruins; then, the houses of Etchezar, so peacefully isolated from the rest
of the world; then, in fine, the obscure, encumbering mass of the Gizune,
filling up the sky and mingling with thick clouds asleep on its sides.
Clouds immovable, inoffensive and without a threat of rain; clouds of
spring, which were of a turtle-dove color and which seemed tepid, like
the air of that evening. And, in a rent, much less elevated than the
summit predominating over this entire site, a round moon began to silver
as the day declined.
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