Another day, another novel. Tremors jolt the air: a great trembling. The earth and trees are no longer sure of their roots, the rain falls with fire which it can’t put out. And yet, the cicadas’ song takes up again more beautifully around me, the vines are weighed down with leaves, dug up by the labours of wild boar, but the rain overthrows the sun and throughout the countryside farmers file past. The hamlets and barns, woods and heaths, surge with their sons and fathers. They make their way toward the cypress trees at the top of the village to look there at their tombs and monuments of flags in bronze. Dressed in dirty and torn uniforms, shot through with bullets, they rot where the world unfurled its horrors. I hear hymns and silences, and very soon it’s back to the rain and mud, the cluttered emptiness of the trenches, the profane saints and medals, the grey-faced and one-armed, the gassed and those rummaging through their own entrails, the rats. I am reading war.
Another day and yet another book. The weather has spoiled in the world of words. A cold, hard rain is falling. Very quickly the rivers overflow, springs spitting out like mini geysers, waters sparkling; the pine and oakwoods start to shudder. Soon the killer monster looms, pathetic as the small beached sperm whale spoken of in the local paper. All possible light born from darkness doomed to decay. In this book, the stench of the soul reigns.
It is time, the wind picks up. I close my box of apocalyptic visions. The rains of words still. I leave the washhouse in the almost summery insouciance of springtime, which has already sprouted blue flowers around the name Giono. It is something like a painter’s name. It is the end of wild asparagus season.
*
It is the summer of life. I’m still sitting astride the low wall. No longer, really, to escape but rather to listen to the silence of the angel who spoke so loudly that spring when I was fifteen. Drowning out the brouhaha of books that throw us into the mud or get us lost in a countryside scythed by the apocalypse, it is that voice above all else I remember. One day it told me: Write, you are going to die young. In spring, I now know, in the fog in which I wanted to vanish, its task was already underway in secret chambers. From then on, it no longer spoke, revealing something I was unable to discern, but which was stirring. I had a stomach ache that grew, that wanted to spread like a giant canopy with a thousand spars and as many masts and sails to reach the high seas. Again, the need for a dark light calls. An apocalypse? Where is the angel’s voice which I am no longer able to attune to because in summer we see too clearly, because we no longer live within the murmur, because we know too many things and no longer listen for the inaudible swell beyond oceans, nor the rumours beyond the hills, nor the heavens beyond the stars? Who cares. I return to sitting by the lavoir. There are still a few flowers and calm aquatic insects. There are still snaps and starts in the undergrowth. And there is also the intercessor’s name. I am surprised to rediscover it in the summer of my life, the very same which raised the countryside up, which leavened adventure, which underwent war and the curse of cholera, which presented the sailor Herman. Knowing one writer through another is a double pleasure. It is not just the intimacy of a friendship, but of a larger circle forming around us. The book is open—that of the great whale—and everything starts to falter. It is unlike in springtime, this vision of water and fire, of ashes and the dead on the field of battle awaiting some kind of resurrection, one I no longer believe in. No, ahead is another adventure. It’s not a question of faraway lands or hunting in the great outdoors. Whales, clearly, are first and foremost books. I’ve known it for a long time. I’ve known it since the voice said: Write, you are going to die young. The angel had no wings and didn’t ruffle feathers with its lyrical outbursts, but its presence was imperative, impossible to contradict, neither warm nor icy, a fact dashing along a steel wire over a void, like an acrobat. Having to write is a sign of the apocalypse: a terrifying injunction. I know that the body must pass through great challenges, that from there is where words come, when they come, from the fury unleashed by peril, where obscure words themselves are disgorged. I know by reading Melville that I am yet to have embarked on a great voyage. I know it even if I don’t know what that voyage will be. I wait for a book to breathe in me, for the trapdoor to rise and to enter, finally, the guts of truth, to fall into the stinking head of a whale and, with a teaspoon, scratch out its precious oil. These are the very first days of summer. I’ve done nothing yet with my life.
*
And here I am several years later. I have also confronted a strange monster, and felt my body delivered to this vassal of the sun which loomed from the depths of my fate. I escaped from that terror. I came back, but not completely. I was also caressed by the angel. This time I was ready. I obeyed. Since then I have written several books. And can set myself down as in other times on the low wall next to the lavoir—out of season—greeting Melville and Giono together, thanking those men because of whom I feel less alone all at sea. I came to venerate that essay which slipped slowly into a novel, becoming a wizard’s tale, which leads us to the immaterial line broken with an imperceptible sound, taking us to the other side, close to the great whale, in peacetime calm, a lover of the beauty that allows us to live better, a whale as white as the one which terrifies, but which above all else leads you to yourself. I wrote the books I had to write, and I wait for those that I should start. Am I seeking violent threats to bring the abyss closer yet? Symbols have their lure. Those who have brushed up against death know it well. Those who have survived are wary of hope and its promises. Those who have encountered death are lame before the world’s signs. Lame and light, too, no longer having to bear the meticulous carapace of certitude. But sitting astride the wall, I wait for the wings of imperative to beat within me, as happened to Melville before he wrote Moby Dick, said Giono, to push him toward another voyage, a hunt other than for the bestselling book he had just published, an adventure more grandiose than those in his past. No longer to go on writing the kind of insignificant books he knows how to write because [a] life’s work is of no interest unless it’s a relentless struggle with the great unknown. It’s on him to construct his compass and his rigging: In this game, you always set out to win it all or lose everything. Yes, I too am waiting for the gaping book which is stirring. On the brink of adventure, I am about to plunge into the new, toward that which swirls around me like an almost ripe cicada nymph who has yet to reach the daylight. And with fear in the belly, like Melville, to attain the deepest sleep of the bulb for the flower soon to wither. We never know when we’re writing a book whether we are the young, melancholic Ishmael or the furious Ahab. We are both, no doubt. So perhaps a brief and powerful love, like that offered to Melville (Giono, at least, transposed such), will come to break our moorings. Or some other earthquake, or, on the contrary, nothing, if not the quiet peace of uneventful days. Giono seems to be warning us that that angel has great expectations, and that we must abandon all complicity, all love, to go home, where we will sit at our desks and look at the mountain through the window, in Pittsfield, in Manosque, wherever; whatever the names of the trees, of the hills or the country set out before us. The only thing that will count is the work, hard graft, into which you can dive and in which, who knows, die. Every book costs heavily. Each one of mine has extracted a piece of my body. A pound of flesh. But so what? I’m away to befriend the guiltless birds of the high seas. I already know that, on uncertain waters, I’ll need a great wingspan and the great form of those who inhabit the tumult and the cold; I will need worldly eyes, which know how to contemplate the heavens beyond the stars, and the raft of prose on which we survive in bleak expanse, in the desert, in front of that great other. Even if, there, in the depths of the sea inside me, I know that the lavoir and wisteria live on, the faded flowers on the water, the humming insects, the wild boar which feed on grapes at night, digging up worms, the beetles and the legions of flies on the fruit and sweet blossoms, the rain and the sparkling springs, the mud again and again, and those forgotten graves covered in quiet earth.
I believe that, in this adventure, the abyss will have joined the stormy surface of the hills. The angel didn’t betray me. And the body whole has slipped into the mouth of my new book, where the formidable battles in which we engage alone and whose tumult passes silently to the rest of the world rumbles. I was finally able to speak in the language of the jays and rainbow wrasse, those of silver and of the waves, those above all of cicadas emerging from the mouths of the dead so as to fête the joy of a sunlit peace.
