The Accordion Player

Will you play at my wedding? Philippe the cheesemaker asked him. Philippe was thirty-four. People had been saying he would never get married.

When is it?

Saturday next.

Why didn’t you ask me before?

I didn’t dare. Will you?

Where does the bride come from?

Yvonne comes from the Jura. Drop into the Republican Lyre tonight and she’ll be there — her parents have come and some friends from Besançon.

The same evening the accordionist, a man in his fifties, found himself sitting in the café, drinking champagne offered by the bride’s father, next to a plump woman who laughed a lot and wore dangling earrings. The accordionist had been looking hard at the young bride and he was sure she was pregnant.

You will play for us? Philippe asked, filling up the glasses.

Yes, I’ll play for you and the Yvonne, he said.

On the floor at his feet lay a dog, its coat turned grey with age. From time to time he caressed its head.

What’s your dog’s name? asked the woman with earrings.

Mick, he said, he’s a clown without a circus.

He’s old to be a clown.

Fifteen Mick is, fifteen.

You have a farm?

At the top of the village — a place we call Lapraz.

Is it a big farm?

Depends who’s asking the question, he answered with a little laugh.

Delphine is asking you the question.

He wondered if she was often drunk.

Well, is it a big farm? she asked again.

One winter the Mayor asked my father: Have you got a lot of snow up at Lapraz? And do you know what Father replied? Less than you, Mr. Mayor, he said, because I own less land!

That’s beautiful! Delphine said, knocking over a glass as she put a hand on his shoulder. No fool, your father.

Have you come for the wedding? he asked her.

I’ve come to dress the bride!

Dress her?

It was me who made the wedding dress and there are always finishing touches to make on the Great Day!

Are you a dressmaker? he asked.

No! No! I work in a factory … I just pin things up for myself and friends.

That must save you money, he said.

It does, but I do it because it amuses me, like you play the accordion, they tell me …

You like music?

She disentangled her arms and held them wide apart as though she were measuring a metre and a half of cloth. With music, she sighed, you can say everything! Do you play regularly?

Every Saturday night in the café, weddings excepted.

This café?

No, the one at home.

Don’t you live here?

Lapraz is three kilometres away.

Are you married? she asked, looking him straight in the eye. Her own eyes were grey-green like the jacket she was wearing.

Unmarried, Delphine, he replied. I play at other men’s weddings.

I lost my husband four years ago, she said.

He must have been young.

In a car accident …

So quick! He pronounced the two words with such finality that she was silenced. She fingered the stem of her glass, then lifted it to her lips and emptied it.

You like playing the accordion, Félix?

I know where music comes from, he said.





That it was going to be a bad year had been evident to Félix from the moment in the spring when the snow thawed. All around the village there were pastures which looked as though they had been ploughed up the previous autumn and they hadn’t been. In the orchards the fruit trees were growing out of mud instead of grass. The earth everywhere was like an animal whose fur was falling out. All this was due to the invasion of the moles. Some maintained that the moles had multiplied so catastrophically because the foxes had died or been shot the year before. A fox eats thirty or forty moles a day. The foxes had died because of the rabies which had been brought to our region from the distant Carpathians.

He was standing motionless in the garden in front of his house. Across his body he was holding a spade. He had been like that for ten minutes. He was looking at the earth just ahead of his boots. Not a grain of soil stirred. Towards the mountain, a buzzard was circling, otherwise nothing in sight was moving. The leaves of the cabbages and cauliflowers in the garden were wilted and yellow. With one hand he could have lifted any one of these plants off the earth, as you lift a candlestick off a table. All their roots had been severed.

When he saw the soil stir, he raised his spade and struck, grunting as the spade entered the earth. He kicked the soil away. There were the disclosed tunnels and the dead culprit mole.

One less! he said, grinning.

Albertine, Félix’s mother, was watching her forty-year-old son through the kitchen window when he killed the mole with the spade. She shouted to him to come in because the meal was on the table.

With today’s sun, she said whilst they were eating, the potatoes shouldn’t be dirty.

They shouldn’t be, he replied.

The pup under the table looked up, hoping for a bone or some cheese-rind. He was large and black with blond marks shaped like almonds over each eye which made him look comic.

Ah, Mick! said Félix, our Mick’s a clown without a circus, isn’t he?

If you like, said Albertine, I’ll make potato fritters tonight.

With cabbage salad! He took off his cap and smeared his sleeve across his hot forehead. Why not?

Years before, when Albertine had been strong enough to work in the fields, they used to lift the potatoes together. Whilst working they would recite all the ways in which potatoes could be eaten: potatoes in their jackets, potatoes with cheese in the oven, potato salad, potatoes with pork fat, mashed potatoes with milk, potatoes cooked without water in the black iron saucepan, potatoes with leeks in the soup — and, best of all, potato fritters with cabbage salad.

The potatoes, unearthed that same morning, had dried well in the sun on the topsoil of the field. As Félix gathered them by hand into buckets, he sorted them. The small ones for the animals and poultry, the large ones for the table. Sometimes he moved forward stooping, sometimes he knelt between the rows and went forward on his knees, like a penitent. Mick, panting in the heat, lay on the ground and each time Félix moved forward, he accompanied him. When the buckets were full the man emptied the potatoes into sacks along the side of the field. The sacks were of strong white plastic and had contained fertiliser. When they were full, they looked liked praying drunks in white shirts.

Suddenly the dog became alert, his head down, nose in the broken earth. Breathing out heavily, he started to scrabble with his front paws and to scatter the soil behind him.

Fetch him! Mick, fetch him! Félix sat back on his heels to watch the young dog. He was happy to be diverted and to rest his back, which ached. The dog continued to dig excitedly.

You want him, Mick, don’t you?

At last the dog deposited a mole on the earth.

You have him, don’t let him go!

The dog tossed the mole into the air. For an instant the little animal in its grey fur coat, measuring fifteen centimetres in length and weighing a hundred and fifty grammes, with paws like hands, with very weak eyesight and acute hearing, renowned for his testicles and the exceptional amount of seminal fluid they produced, for an instant the little animal was hapless and alone in the sky.

Quick, Mick!

Fallen back onto the soil, the mole, no longer capable of flight, began to squeal.

Have him!

The dog ate the mole.

Alone in the house, Albertine asked herself for the hundredth time the same question: when she was gone, what would Félix do? Men, she considered, were strong-backed, reckless and weak, each man combining these essential qualities in his own way. Félix needed a woman who would not take advantage of his weakness. If the woman were ambitious or greedy, she would exploit him and use his strong back and his recklessness to ride him where she wanted. Yet now he was forty and the woman had not been found.

There had been Yvette. Yvette would have cuckolded him, just as she was now cuckolding the poor Robert whom she married. There had been Suzanne. One Sunday morning, just before Félix did his military service, she had seen him caressing Suzanne on the floor beneath the blackboard in the schoolroom — the same schoolroom where he had learnt as a boy! She had crept away from the window without disturbing them, but she repeatedly reminded her son, when she wrote to him in the army, that school-teachers can’t sit on milking stools. Suzanne had left the village and married a shopkeeper.

Was it going to be worse for her son to be alone than to have married the wrong woman? This question made Albertine feel as helpless as she had sometimes felt as a child.

In the evening Félix emptied the sacks full of potatoes into a wooden stall in the cellar under the house. Potatoes just lifted from the earth give off a strange warmth and in the darkness of the cellar they glow like children’s shoulders after a day in the sun. He looked at the heap critically: there were going to be far less than last year.

Did you finish? asked Albertine when he entered the kitchen.

Four more rows to do, Maman.

I’ve just made the coffee … Get under the table! You’re not firm enough with that pup, Félix.

He caught five moles this afternoon.

Are you going out tonight?

Yes, there’s a meeting of the Dairy Committee.

Félix drank the coffee from the bowl his mother handed him and began reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.

Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?

Not round the neck of one of our cows!

It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.

That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.

When he went into the stable to start milking, she took out his suit from the wardrobe which her husband had made one winter when they were first married, and brushed the trousers with the same energy as she had once groomed their mare. Then, having laid the suit on the high double bed beneath her husband’s portrait, she did something she had never done before in her life. She took off her boots and lay, fully clothed, on top of the bed.

She heard Félix come back into the kitchen, she listened to him washing by the sink. She heard him taking off his trousers and washing between his legs. When he had finished, he came into the bedroom.

Where are you? he asked.

I’m taking a rest, she said from the bed.

What’s the matter?

A rest, my son.

Are you ill, Maman?

I feel better now.

She watched him dress. He stepped into the trousers with the creases which she had ironed. He put on the white cotton shirt buttoned at the cuffs, which showed off his handsome shoulders. He slipped into the jacket — he was putting on weight, no question about that. Nevertheless he was still handsome. He ought to be able to find a wife.

Why don’t you go to a dentist? she asked. He glanced at her, puzzled.

He could arrange your teeth.

I haven’t a toothache.

He could make you more handsome.

He could also make us poorer!

Let me see you in your cap.

He put it on.

You’re even more handsome than your father was, she said.



When Félix returned to the farm that night, he was surprised to see a car, its lights on, parked outside the house. He entered hurriedly. The doctor from the next village was in the kitchen washing his hands in the sink. The door to the Middle Room was shut.

If there’s no improvement by the morning, your mother will have to go to the hospital, the doctor said.

Félix looked through the kitchen window at the mountain opposite, which, in the moonlight, was the colour of a grey mole, but he could not see around what had happened.

What happened? he asked.

She telephoned your neighbours.

She won’t want to go to the hospital.

I have no choice, said the doctor.

You’re right, said Félix, suddenly furious, it is her choice which counts!

You can’t look after her properly here.

She has lived here for fifty years.

If you’re not careful, she may die here.

The doctor wore glasses and this was the first thing you noticed about him. He looked at everything as if it were a page to read. He had come straight to the village from medical school full of idealism. Now, after ten years, he was disillusioned. Mountain people did not listen to reason, he complained, mountain people drank too much, mountain people went on repeating what they thought they had once heard as children, mountain people never recognised a rational process, mountain people behaved as if they thought life itself was mad.

Have a drink before you go, Doctor.

Does your mother have a supplementary insurance?

Which do you prefer, pears or plums?

Neither, thank you.

A little gentian? Gentian cures all, Doctor.

No alcohol, thank you.

How much do I owe you?

Twenty thousand, said the doctor, adjusting his glasses.

Félix took out his purse. She has worked every day of the year for fifty years, he thought, and tonight this shortsighted quack asks for twenty thousand. He extracted two folded bank notes and placed them on the table.

The doctor left and Félix went into the Middle Room. She was so thin that, under the eiderdown, her body was invisible. It was as if her head, decapitated, had been placed on the pillow.

An expression of irritation, like that on a dog’s muzzle when it sniffs alcohol, ruffled her face whilst her eyes remained closed. When the spasm was over, her face resumed its calm, but was older. She was ageing hour by hour.

Noticing the dog lying on the floor at the foot of the bed, Félix hesitated. She would have insisted on the dog being put out.

Not a sound, Mick!

He climbed onto the bed beside his mother so that he would be reassured by her breathing throughout the night. She stirred and, turning on the pillow, asked for some water. When he gave her the glass, she could not raise her head. He had to hold her head up with his hand, and her head seemed to weigh nothing, to be no heavier than a lettuce.

They both lay there, awake and without saying a word.

You’ll get the rest of the potatoes in tomorrow? she eventually asked.

Yes.

Next spring there’ll be fewer moles, she said. There won’t be enough for them all to eat to survive the winter.

They breed quickly, Maman.

In the long run such troubles correct themselves, she insisted, if not by next year, by the year after. Yet you, you, my son, you will always remember the Year of the Thousand Moles.

No, Maman, you’re going to get better.



The next day whilst he was cutting wood on the circular saw, Félix stopped every hour to go into the house and reassure himself. Each time, lying on the large bed, her arms straight by her side, she opened her eyes and smiled at him.

Everything was ready and prepared, she knew, in the second drawer of the wardrobe. Her black dress with the mother-of-pearl buttons, the black kerchief with blue gentian flowers printed on it, the dark grey stockings, and the shoes with laces which would be easier to put on than boots. How many times had Marie-Louise promised to come and dress her if it was she, Albertine, who was the first to go?

That night after Félix had come to lie down beside her, she said: It’s years, my boy, since you played your accordion.

I don’t even know where it is.

It’s in the grenier, she said, you used to play so well, I don’t know why you stopped.

It was when I came out of the army.

You let it drop.

Father was dead, there was too much to do.

He glanced at the portrait hanging above the bed. His father had a thick moustache, tiny comic eyes and a strong neck. He used to tap his neck, as if it were a barrel, when he was thirsty.

Would you play me something? Albertine asked.

On the accordion?

Yes.

After all this time I won’t get a breath out of it.

Try.

He shrugged his shoulders, took the electric torch off its hook on the wall, and went out. When he came back he extracted the accordion from its case, arranged one strap round his shoulder and, slipping his wrist under the other, started to pump. It worked.

What tune do you want?

“Dans tes Montagnes.”

The two voices of the accordion, tender and full-blown, filled the room. All her attention was fixed on him. His body was rolling slowly to the music. He has never been able to make up his mind, she reflected, it’s as if he doesn’t realise this is his only life. I ought to know since it was I who gave birth to him. And then, carried away by the music, she saw their cows in the alpage and Félix learning to walk.

When Félix stopped playing, Albertine was asleep.



Neighbours came to visit the house, bringing with them pears, walnut wine, an apple tart. Albertine repeatedly declared she had no need of anything except water. She stopped eating. She would take whatever messages they wanted, she would pray with them for what they thought they needed, she would bless them, but she would accept no pity and no competition. She was the next to leave.

To the old man, Anselme, she whispered: Try to find him a wife.

It’s not like our time, he said, shaking his head. Nobody wants to marry a peasant today.

I’m glad you say that, she said.

I’m not saying Félix couldn’t get married, answered Anselme pedantically. I’m simply saying women of his generation married men from the towns.

It’s the idea of his being left alone.

I’ve been alone for twenty years! It’s twenty years now since Claire died and I can recommend it. He chuckled.

Abruptly Albertine lowered her head to indicate that it was his duty to kiss her whilst she prayed. Obediently Anselme kissed the crown of her head.



She was now so weak and thin that Félix was frightened of smothering her when he slept. One night he woke up from a dream. He listened for her breathing. Her breath was as weak as an intermittent breeze in grass waiting to be scythed. Through the lace curtains he could see the plum trees his father had grafted. The light of the moon going down in the west was reflected in the mirror behind the wash bowl.

In the dream he had again been a conscript in the army. He was walking along a road, playing an accordion. Behind him was a man carrying a sheep. It was he, Félix, who had stolen the sheep, or, rather, a young woman had given the sheep to him on condition that … and he had taken the sheep knowing full well …

The dream became vaguer and vaguer as, awake, he saw something else. He saw Death approaching the farm. Or, rather, he saw Death’s lamp, bobbing up and down, as Death strode leisurely past the edge of the forest where the beech trees in October were the colour of flames, down the slope of the big pasture which drained badly at the bottom, under the linden tree full of wasps in August, over the ruts of the old road to St. Denis, between the cherry trees against which, every July, she asked him to lean the long ladder, past the water trough where the source never froze, beside the dungheap where he threw the afterbirths, through the stable into the kitchen. When Death entered the Middle Room — where the smoked sausages were hanging from the ceiling above the bed — he saw that what he had taken to be a lamp was in fact a white feather of hoarfrost. The feather floated down onto the bed.

Abruptly Albertine sat up and said: Fetch me my dress, it is time to go!


The day after the funeral, when Félix delivered his milk to the dairy, he surprised everyone there by his cheerfulness.

Have you ever worked as a butcher? he asked Philippe, the cheesemaker. No? Well, you’d better take a correspondence course — with diagrams! Next year there’s going to be no hay, no cows, no milk, no bonus for cream, no penalty for dirt … We’re all going to be in the mole-skin business! That’s what we are going to be doing …



The absence of the mourned is as precise as their presence once was. Albertine’s absence was thin with arthritic hands and long grey hair gathered up in a chignon. The eyes of her absence needed glasses for reading. During her lifetime many cows had stepped on her feet. Each of her toes had been stepped on by a cow on a different occasion, and the growth of its nail consequently deformed. The toenails of her absence were the yellow of horn and irregularly shaped. The legs of her absence were as soft to touch as a young woman’s.

Every evening he ate the soup he had prepared, he sliced the bread, he read the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers, and he lit a cigarette. He performed these acts whilst hugging her absence. As the night drew on and the cows in the stable lay down on their bedding of straw and beech leaves, the warmth of his own body penetrated her absence so that it became his own pain.

On All Souls’ Day he bought some chrysanthemums, white ones the colour of goose feathers, and placed the pot of flowers, not by the tombstone in the churchyard, but on the marble-top commode in the Middle Room beside the large empty bed.

A week later the snow came. The children ran screaming out of school, impatient to build snowmen and igloos. When Félix delivered his milk to the dairy, he repeated the remark that Albertine had made every year when the first snow fell:

Let it snow a lot tonight, let the snow get so high our hens can peck the stars!

Through the kitchen window he stared at the white mountain. Mick was licking a plate on the floor.

The winter’s long, it would be better if we could sleep.

The dog looked up.

Who do you think is going to win the elections? The same gang as before, eh?

The dog started wagging his tail.

Do you know what you like and what they manufacture in Béthune? Do you know, Mick?

Félix strode across the kitchen towards the massive dresser. To take something off its top shelf it was necessary to stand on a chair. Its doors, with their square panes of glass and their bevelled window frames, were big enough for a cow to go through.

So you don’t know, Mick, what they manufacture in Béthune? From the bottom shelf he picked up a packet of sugar.

Sugar, Mick, sugar is what they manufacture in Béthune!

Brusquely he threw two lumps towards the dog. Three more. Six. Then he emptied the whole packet. Fifty lumps of sugar fell onto the floorboards in a cloud of dust.

Sugar in Béthune! Milk here! He shouted the words so violently the dog hid under the table.



One day in January he noticed that the floorboards, instead of being bread-coloured, were now grey like slates. He put the dog out, he stoked up the stove with wood, he took off his boots and trousers and began scrubbing on his knees. He had left it too long, the dirt was engrained. He ground his teeth, he refilled and refilled the bucket with water from the giant saucepan on the stove. The planks slowly changed colour.

The more he scrubbed, the more he saw the countless washings the floor had undergone as but a single instant in an eternity of dust and neglect. He straightened his back and looked up at the dresser. On the top shelf was their best china, decorated with sprays and garlands of flowers: violets, forget-me-nots, honey-suckle. The way the flowers were painted around the rims of the plates, in the hearts of the dishes, on the flanks of the bowls, made him think of ears, mouths, eyes, breasts.

He put on his trousers and boots, laid down sheets of newspaper and stepping from one sheet to another reached the door. Outside it was snowing grey snow. He teetered like a drunk into the stable and there, his forehead resting on one of his cows’ haunches, he vomited till there was nothing left in his stomach.



A few days later he beat the cow Myrtille. Myrtille had the bad habit of butting the cow next to her. If he showed Myrtille a stick, this was usually enough to deter her. She glowered at him with her insolently tranquil eyes, and he brandished the stick in the air and said: The bow of the violin, eh! Is that enough or do you want some music!

On the evening in question he forgot the stick and Myrtille knocked him off his stool whilst he was preparing her neighbour’s teats before plugging the milking machine onto her. Seizing a rake, he beat Myrtille across the haunches with the handle. She put her head down and he beat her harder. He was beating her now because she had reduced him to beating her. She lay down on the floor and he beat her out of the fury of his knowledge that he could not stop beating her.

In the name of God! he spat out the words as if they were his own broken teeth. Nothing! Nobody!

The shock of each blow was transmitted to his shoulders. Then the handle of the rake broke.

It seemed to him that the animal never forgave him.



Towards the end of March the giant bedspread of packed snow began to slide down the roof of the house a few centimetres each day. After a while, a border of packed snow overhanging the roof would crack and fall to the ground in a thousand pieces. In the cellar, despite the darkness and the thickness of the walls, the potatoes were putting out pink-violet shoots. The force of these shoots is so strong that they can pierce canvas or denim as if they were thin air.

A week earlier the doctor had asked him: Are you still vomiting? Do you want some more pills?

Félix had replied: No, Doctor … what I need is an extra pair of hands. Can you give me a prescription for that? Preferably a woman’s hands, but I’ll accept a man’s or even a boy’s.

Thus he confirmed one of the doctor’s favourite dinner-table dissertations: namely, that the dearth of women in the valley — the best men having left with the women following them — was pushing the idiots who remained towards homosexuality and even bestiality.

In twenty-four hours a well-fed cow shits a wheelbarrow of dung. The winter had lasted a hundred and fifty days and Félix had seventeen cows. He recalled the time, before they bought a tractor, when all the winter’s dung had to be forked into a tip-cart, hauled by the horse and unloaded in heaps, to be spread out again with a fork over the fields. Now he had a mechanical shovel and a spreader. And now he was alone.

Albertine had been right: there were fewer mole hills. Many moles must have died, the strongest eating the weakest. In the morning when he started up the tractor it was freezing. By midday on the hillside with the spreader, he was sweating. This year he refused to take off his sheepskin jacket. If he caught cold and fell ill, there would be nobody else to milk the cows. His solitude had strange ramifications. His trousers caked with cowshit went on stinking until he himself put them in the washing machine. Sometimes the solitude of the house smelt acrid like cowshit.

Every evening, sitting at the table beneath the clock that was always half an hour fast so that he would not deliver the milk too late at the dairy, he decided what to do the following day. Shit till Sunday, Mick, or shall we do the wood?

During the winter it had been a question of killing time. Now time was resurrected. He forgot obvious things. He fed the chickens and forgot the eggs. He hadn’t collected eggs from the hen house since he was seven when his father went away for the second time. The first time his father went away was for his military service, the second time was when he went to Paris to earn the money to re-cover the roof of the house with tiles; it took him four winters to earn enough.

How often had he heard his father tell the story of his time in the army. Soldier Berthier! Why did you not obey the order given to you? Replied his father: One of you tells me to do this, another of you tells me to do that, another of you tells me to do something else, so what am I to do? Just tell me clearly what you want and I’ll do it! Soldier Berthier! Clean out this room! One of you tells me to do this, another one tells me to do that … To every order, his father replied in the same way. Soldier Berthier, one month’s detention! He was put in a cell. Prisoner Berthier, are you a good shot? You tell me clearly what you want, and I’ll do it. The Company needs a good marksman, Berthier! He was taken out and given a rifle and five bullets. He scored five bull’s-eyes. For the rest of his military service he had no duties and no fatigues. All he had to do was go occasionally and shoot in the regimental competitions on the rifle range. When his father finished the story, he always added: On this earth, Felo, you need to be clever.



In April he planted his potatoes. It was as hot that year in April as it usually is in June. Walking slowly along the drill, he dropped a potato between his legs every twenty centimetres. Sometimes the potato fell badly and he was forced to bend down to place it properly.

There are some who know where to go, Mick, and some that have to be put in their place!

Each time he chose with his eyes the exact place between the clods where he hoped the potato would fall. If he did not do this, it fell badly.

The last potato planted, he climbed towards the house. It was almost noon. Suddenly he stopped in his steps. High above the roof a swarm of bees was flying away from the sun towards the north.

Rushing into the kitchen, he came out with a large saucepan and a metal soup ladle. He ran through the orchard rattling the ladle in the saucepan. Mick was barking at his heels. When he was ahead of the swarm, he drummed harder than ever, and held the saucepan so that it glinted in the sun and flashed like a mirror. The swarm, subject to a single will, made straight for the nearest plum tree and settled on one of its branches.

Now he could take his time. He found an empty hive and rubbed its inside with plum leaves. He strolled over to the outhouse to fetch a saw. He sawed off the branch on which the bees were settled and carried it over to the hive. There he tapped the branch smartly with a plank and the swarm fell off like a wig.

If the Queen is there, they’ll stay. If not, they’ll leave tomorrow.

It was then that he heard his mother’s voice calling him by name. The sound the bees were making gave birth to her voice, and at the same time muffled it. The voice went on repeating his name as if the solitude of his days were now in the name itself.



Each season loads up men as if they were wheelbarrows and then wheels them forward to do its tasks. Félix ploughed the field for the alfalfa. One day, when he was twelve, in the field he was now ploughing, his father had said to him:

Do you want to come hunting with me?

They climbed, both of them, to the forest below Peniel.

We’ll wait here, Felo, and do nothing. Shut your mouth and keep your eyes skinned.

His father cut some branches from a beech tree and arranged them like a light screen in front of them. The beech leaves, just unfurled, were as fresh-looking as lettuces. They waited behind the screen for what seemed to Félix an eternity. The bones in his body began to ache one by one because he didn’t dare move a limb. His father sat there as patient as if he were listening to music, his gun between his knees. From behind a spruce twenty metres away, a wild boar appeared, hesitated, and then walked, like a confident habitué, across their vision. The father fired. The boar keeled over and lay down as if inexplicably overcome by sleep.

Do you know what’s important in this life, Felo?

No, Papa.

Good health. And what does good health give you? It gives you a steady hand.

The father prodded the animal with his boot.

Guard him! he said and disappeared down the path to the village. Félix sat on his heels beside the dead boar, whose small eyes were open. When his father returned with a sledge across his back, he was panting hard but grinning. Together they tied the carcass — it weighed a good hundred and fifty kilos — onto the light sledge. Then they started the difficult journey down.

Father Berthier put himself between the two wooden arms in the position of a two-legged horse. Like this he could pull when the runners of the sledge met an obstacle or when the slope wasn’t steep enough, and like this, if they were running too fast over the mud or the new slippery grass, he could brake by digging in his heels and lifting up the front of the sledge so that its weight leant backwards and the back of the sledge was forced into the ground. Félix followed, holding on to a rope to brake the speed, but in fact being pulled along ever faster. One false step on his father’s part and the charging boar and sledge would knock him onto his face and ride over him.

His last run home, Felo!

Not so fast, Papa!

The boy had his father’s gun across his back.

When they were down on the road which passes the café, they stopped to give their legs a rest.

It’s the knees, isn’t it, which feel it?

My legs aren’t tired, lied the boy.

There’s a man for you!

Along the grass bank by the side of the road the sledge slid gently and easily. The boy let go of the rope and put the gun under his arm, carrying it like a hunter.

They met Louis, who could argue a politician under the table.

The month of May, the season for hunting? asked Louis.

It’s no gazelle! said his father.

I’d hide him quick if I were you, said Louis. How many shots?

One shot, only one shot. Felo here is going to be a hunter. His hand’s as steady as a rock.

And Félix, although he knew why his father, cunning as ever, had invented this story, was filled with pride.

When they got home and the boar had been hidden in the cellar, his father said: It’s time you learnt to use a gun, I’ll find you one. What do you say to that?

I’d rather have an accordion, replied Félix.

An accordion! Ah! you want to seduce the girls, eh?

One night, a few months later, Félix was in bed and he heard his father come into the kitchen, shouting in the sing-song voice which meant he had been drinking. There were some other men with him who were laughing. Then there was a silence, and, suddenly, the strains of an accordion being clumsily played. I got it for Felo, he heard his father shout, got it off Valentine. She was glad to be rid of it, now Emile’s dead, what could she do with an accordion? Poor Emile! said another voice. She never liked him playing, said a third man, she’d walk out of the room as soon as Emile picked the thing up. How’s that? She was jealous was our Valentine and Emile encouraged her to be so. He liked to make her jealous! Do you know what he named his accordion? What did he call it? He called his accordion Caroline! Come and sit on my knees, Caroline, he’d say, come and have a cuddle! All you men are the same! Félix heard his mother protest. Come and sit on my knees, Albertine! his father roared, come here and I’ll give you a squeeze! He pressed on the bass buttons and the instrument lowed like a bull. You’ll wake up Félix, you will! his mother said.

It was a diatonic accordion with twelve bass keys for the left hand, made by F. Dedents in the 1920s. The keys had pearly heads, its sides were blue decorated with yellow flowers, and the reeds were made of metal and leather. He learnt to play it seated, resting the right-hand keyboard on his left thigh and opening the accordion like a cascade falling towards the floor to the left of the chair. A cascade of sound.



Late in the month of May, the grass grows before your eyes. One day it is like a carpet, the next it is halfway up your knees. Get it scythed, Albertine would say, or it’ll be tickling the cunt.

The cows in Félix’s stable could smell the new grass. They followed with their insolently patient eyes the two swallows who were building a nest on the cross beam above the horse’s stall, empty since the purchase of the tractor. They stared at the squares of sunlight on the north wall which had been in shadow all winter long. They became restless. They lowed for Félix before it was milking time. They wouldn’t eat their croquettes quietly whilst being milked. When they licked each other with their large tongues, they did so with a kind of frenzy, as if the salt they were tasting had to be a substitute for all the green grass outside.

They want to be out, don’t they? They don’t need a calendar to tell them, and they don’t give a fuck what year it is. Tomorrow we’ll put ’em out, tomorrow when the grass is dry.

Late the following morning Félix undid each cow’s chain and opened the large door of the stable.

Myrtille turned towards the sudden light and felt her neck free. Then she tottered, like a convalescent, to the door. Once outside, she raised her head, bellowed and trotted in the direction of the green grass she could see in the meadow. With each step she found her strength again.

Hold her back, Mick!

The dog bounded after the cow and barked at her forelegs so that she stopped, her neck stretched out taut and straight, her ears up like a second pair of horns, and her imperturbable eyes staring through the sunshine at the meadow. Immobile, her muzzle, her neck, her haunches and her tail in one straight line, she was like the first statue ever made of a cow. The other cows were pushing through the stable door three at a time.

Calm, for Christ’s sake! There’s enough for you all. Get back, Princesse!

They trundled their way down the slope towards Myrtille. Mick saw the whole herd charging at him. His mouth open without a bark, without a whine, he slunk to the side of the road as they thundered past and triumphantly swept Myrtille into the field. As soon as they felt their feet in the grass, their stampede ended. Some threw their hind legs up into the air. One pair locked their horns and shoved against each other with all their weight. Some turned slowly in circles, listening. The streams from the mountains above the village, white with froth because so much ice had melted, were babbling like madmen. The cuckoo was singing. Entire fields were suddenly changing their colour from green to butter-yellow, because the dandelions, shut at night, were opening their petals.

Princesse mounted Mireille — when a cow is in heat, she often plays the bull.

Get her off her!

Mireille, with Princesse on her back, stood gazing at the mountains. The sunshine penetrated to the very marrow of their bones. When the dog approached, Princesse slid gently off Mireille’s back, and the wind from the northwest, from beyond the mountains, ruffled the hair between both their horns.

Félix arranged the wire across the opening to the field, switched on the current, and, plucking a stalk of hemlock, held it against the live wire. After a second his hand shot up like a startled bird. He returned slowly to the house, stopping twice to look back at the happiness of the cows.

He phoned the Inseminator to ask him to pass by for Princesse and gave him the code number of her previous insemination.



In making hay there’s always a wager. The quicker the hay is in, the better it is. Yet the hay must be dry, otherwise it ferments. At the worst, tradition had it, damp hay could eventually set a house on fire. If you don’t take any risks you’ll never get your hay in early. At the best, you’ll be left with hay like straw. So, impatient, you bet on the sun lasting and the storm holding off. It’s not us making hay, repeated Albertine every year, it’s sun that makes the hay.

This lottery made haymaking something of a fête. Each time they won they had cheated the sky. Sometimes they won by minutes, the first drops of rain falling as the horse pulled into the barn the last cart of the hay cut two days before. The hurry, the women and children in the fields, the sweat washed away with spring water, the thirst quenched with coffee and cider, being able to jump from a height of fifteen feet in the barn to land deliciously unharmed in the hay, the hay which he knew how to untangle and comb, the barn as tall as a church slowly filling up until, on top of the hay, his head was touching the roof, the supper in the crowded kitchen afterwards, this had all made haymaking a fête during the first half of his life.

Today he was alone, alone to decide the risks, to cut the hay, to ted it, to turn it, to windrow it, to load it, to transport it, to unload it, to pack it, to level it, to quench his thirst, to prepare his own supper. With the new machines he did not have to work harder than in the first half of his life; the difference now was that he was finally alone.

He had cut half the grass in what his father always called Grandma’s Field. It was on the slope above the linden tree. The hay had been turned but still needed a good hour’s sunshine. It was hot and heavy, the weather for horseflies. He studied the sky as if it were a clock to tell him how many hours away the storm might be. Then he bent down to pick up another handful of hay, assessing its dryness with his fingers. There were four trailer-loads to bring in. He decided to give it half an hour before windrowing. He switched off the tractor engine and walked over to the edge of the field where there was a strip of shade from a little ash grove. There he lay down and pulled the cap over his eyes. He tried to remember the cold of winter but couldn’t. He thought he heard thunder in the distance and jumped to his feet.

Get it in now, Felo.

He walked back towards the tractor along the edge of the un-mown half of the field where the grass was green and the flowers still coloured. The compagnon rouge, pink like lipstick. The tiny vetch scattered like stars of creamy milk. The bellflower, mauve, head bowed. The deep blue mountain cornflower, which cures conjunctivitis, its calyx crisscrossed with black lace like the stockings of dancers. As he noticed them he picked them. Herb bennett, yellow like a scarf. Crepide fausse blathaire, vigorous cropped blond. Fragrant orchid, red like a pig’s penis. He began to pick quickly and indiscriminately in order to make a bouquet, the first since he left school.

Get it in now, Felo.

He drove the tractor back to the house, unhooked the tedder and attached the windrower. The flowers he stuck into a jam jar which he filled with water from the kitchen tap.

The storm broke as he was bringing the last load in.

Saved by the skin of our teeth, Mick!

In the barn he was stripped to the waist. His stomach and back, so rarely exposed to the air, were as pale as a baby’s. When you looked at him you thought of a father as seen by his child. Perhaps this was because his own flesh looked both manly and childish.

When he had unloaded the trailer it was time to begin the milking. He walked out into the rain. He could feel it cooling his blood. It ran down his back into the inside of his trousers. Then he put on his vest and his tartan shirt, threw the blue cap onto his wet hair, switched on the motor for the milking machine and went into the stable. He left the door open, for there was little light inside and his eyes still smarted from the hay dust.

The milking finished, he entered the kitchen. He had closed the shutters as Albertine had always insisted upon doing in the summer to keep the room cool. Light from the sunset filtered between their slats. On the window sill was the bunch of flowers he had picked. On seeing them he stopped in midstride. He stared at them as if they were a ghost. In the stable a cow pissed; in the kitchen the stillness and silence were total.

He pulled a chair from under the table, he sat down and he wept. As he wept his head slowly fell forward until his forehead touched the oilcloth. Odd how sounds of distress are recognised by animals. The dog approached the man’s back and, getting up on its hind legs, rested its front paws on his shoulder blades.

He wept for all that would no longer happen. He wept for his mother making potato fritters. He wept for her pruning the roses in the garden. He wept for his father shouting. He wept for the bobsled he had as a boy. He wept for the triangle of hair between the legs of Suzanne the schoolmistress. He wept for the smell of a woman ironing sheets. He wept for jam bubbling in a saucepan on the stove. He wept for never being able to leave the farm for a single day. He wept for the farm where there were no children. He wept for the sound of rain on the rhubarb leaves and his father roaring: Listen to that! That’s what you miss when you go away to work for months, and when you come back in the spring and hear that sound you say, Thank God in Heaven I’m home! He wept for the hay, still to be brought in. He wept for the forty-two years that had gone by, and he wept for himself.

In July the evenings seem endless. When Félix, his boots full of hayseed and his face tear-stained, took his two churns of milk to the dairy, he could see for miles across the valley towards the mountains. Most of the fields were mown. Because he was alone, he would always be the last to finish his hay. The heat gone, the shaved ground lay there in a kind of trance waiting for hares or lovers. He drove faster than usual, cutting the corners. His tyres screeched as he braked. There were already five other cars there. He kicked open the door as if he wanted to break it down. The cheesemaker and the other peasants who had delivered their milk looked at him quizzically. He poured his churn into the tub on the scales without glancing at the reading. And when he emptied the tub into the vat he did so with a ferocity that wiped the smile off the others’ faces. The milk splashed the wooden ceiling. His second churn he emptied the same way.

Everything all right at home, Félix?

Nothing, nobody to complain about.

Have a glass of rouge? Albert, the old man, lifted a bottle off a shelf above the sink. Félix declined and left.

For God’s sake! muttered one of them shaking his head.

In a year or two, said Albert, he’ll start drinking. Men aren’t made to live alone. Women are stronger, they merge with the weather, I don’t know how.

Find him a wife!

He’ll never marry.

Why do you say that?

Too late.

It’s never too late.

To set up house with a woman, yes, it’s too late.

He’d make a good husband.

It’s a question of trust, insisted Albert.

Whose trust?

After forty a man doesn’t trust a woman enough.

Depends on the woman.

Any woman.

In God’s name!

Suppose he finds an old maid — he’ll say to himself: there must be something the matter with her, nobody else wanted her. Suppose he finds a woman who’s divorced — he’ll say: she did wrong by one man, she may do the same to me. Suppose he finds a widow — he’ll say: she’s been a wife once, it’s my farm she’s after! With age we all become a little meaner.

And what if he finds a young woman who’s unmarried?

Ah! my poor Hervé, said Albert, you say that because you’re still young yourself. If Félix finds a virgin—

Virgin!

No matter! Suppose he finds a young woman, he’ll say to himself — and who knows? he might be right — he’ll say to himself: in a year or so she’s going to cuckold me as sure as day follows night …

The men laughed, Albert handed out a glass of wine, and they watched, idly, the white liquid heating in the copper vat, the white liquid that only starts flowing after a birth. Outside the sky was darkening faintly and the first stars were like sleep in its eyes.

Félix, already back in the kitchen, was reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.

Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?

Not round the neck of one of our cows!

It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.

That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.

Suddenly he got up from the table and walked across the bare floorboards into the Middle Room. From under the large bed he pulled out the accordion case and came back with the instrument in his arms. There was no longer enough light to read by, yet he did not switch on the light. Instead, he opened the door to the stable and entered its darkness. He felt with his foot for the milking stool that he kept by the water tap and he sat down on it. Myrtille eyed him, another cow mooed. And in the stable, a yard from the gutter full of the cows’ greenish shit, he began to play. The air, hot with the heat of the animals who had spent the day in the sun, smelt strongly of garlic, for wild garlic grows in the field by the old road to St. Denis where they had been grazing. The instrument breathed in this air and its two voices smelt of it. He played a gavotte in quadruple time. Gavotte, which comes from gavot, meaning mountain dweller, meaning goitre, meaning throat, meaning cry.

Most of the cows were bedded down. At first they turned their heads to where the music was coming from and the ears of those who were nearest went up, querying, yet very soon they discovered that the music represented nothing more than itself, and their ears relaxed and they put their heads again on their own flanks or on a neighbour’s shoulder. One of the swallows flew around like a bat, less easily reassured than the cows. As he played, Félix looked towards the small window beside the door. The stars were no longer like sleep in the corner of its eye, but like rivets. His head was rigid, only his body moved with the music.

Now he was playing “Le Jeune Marchois,” a plaintive wedding march he’d learnt in the army from a friend who came from Limoges. Two fingers of his left hand, their nails broken, their knuckles engrained with dirt, the chapped tip of one cracked by the cold of winters, played a staccato beat which was as high and raucous as the cry of a corncrake. His right hand, raised level with his shoulder, was playing the melody which rose and fell like a chain of hills, a chain of gentle hills, of hillocks, of young breasts. His head was now nodding to the tune, his boot on the cobblestones tapping to the beat. The wedding procession approached and the undulating hills gave way to a hedgerow behind which appeared, disappeared and reappeared women with glistening stoles thrown over their shoulders. The calls of the corncrake too were transformed. No longer the cries of a bird, they were the whistle of air emitted from a leather bag punctured by the point of a knife. His two fingers hit the keys like rivet chargers. The procession had risen in the east by his right shoulder, now it was midday and was before his eyes. Each woman had removed her stole, and the white linen undulating in the wind caressed the bare shoulders of the woman behind her. The women could see the procession of men approaching. The whistles of air were gasps of breath. Appearing and disappearing behind the branches of the hedgerow, the women were undoing their hair. Yet already they were passing to the west. The gasps of breath became again the cry of a corncrake, more and more distant, disturbed, fleeting. The road behind the hedge was deserted. A mist covered the hills.

A cow shat when he ceased playing. A pungent smell of wild garlic was wafted towards him. He remembered the waltz of “Rosalie de Bon Matin.” He played it as loud as he could.



It was due to Louis, who can still argue a politician under the table, that Félix began to play regularly every week in the café at Lapraz. One evening the following winter Louis went to try to sell Félix a ticket for a lottery which was being organised to raise money to pay for the transport of the village children to the nearest swimming pool. Everyone born in the mountains should learn how to swim! was the motto of the campaign.

There I was, explained Louis afterwards in the café, climbing up through the orchard to Felo’s house. It was already dark and I was glad I had a pocket lamp. At the top of the hill I thought I heard music. It must be the radio, I told myself. My hearing’s not as good as it used to be. From the big pear tree beside the yard a white owl flew up. There’s not many come up this way at night, I said. The music was clearer now, and it was an accordion. No radio sounds like that. The crafty boy, he’s got company, I said. Nearer the house, I couldn’t believe my ears. The music was coming from the stable! There was a light in the window and the music was coming from the stable! Perhaps he’s dancing with the gypsies, perhaps he likes to dance with gypsies and is frightened to let them into the house, thieving good-for-nothings that they are. Who would have believed Felo would dance with gypsies if he wasn’t his father’s son? I peered through the filthy little window and inside I could make out the dancing figures. No use knocking here, Lulu, I said. So I tried the door. It was locked. To hell with the lottery ticket, I simply wanted to see what was going on. All the doors were locked and he was with the gypsies in the stable. Then I had an idea. Ten to one, Félix didn’t lock the barn door above the house. Up the ramp in five seconds and I was right, it was open. By each trap he’d prepared the hay to fork down to each cow in the morning. Not everyone does that, he’s farsighted, Félix. The music was coming up through the floorboards louder and wilder than ever — a mazurka. I lifted up one of the traps and, lying on my stomach on the little pile of hay, I peered through. There was the cow bedded down, and there was Félix seated on a stool, beneath the one dim electric light bulb, an accordion between his arms. For the rest I couldn’t believe my eyes. Lulu, you’re seeing things, I told myself. Félix was alone! Not another soul in the stable, playing to the fucking cows! He can play though, Félix can. You should get him to bring his music down here sometime.





On the night of Philippe’s wedding, when the sky was already getting light from the dawn, long after Philippe had taken Yvonne to bed, and the parents and the parents-in-law had gone home, a few of us, including the dressmaker with dangling earrings who liked laughing and who worked in a factory that produced wooden handles for house painters’ brushes, a few of us were still dancing and Félix sat playing on his usual chair, his cap on the back of his bald head, his heavy working-boots tapping the floor as he played. We might have stopped dancing before, yet one tune had led to the next, and Félix had fitted them together like one pipe into another till the chimney was so high it was lost in the sky. A chimney of tunes, and the women’s feet so tired they had taken off their shoes to dance barefoot.

Music demands obedience. It even demands obedience of the imagination when a melody comes to mind. You can think of nothing else. It’s a kind of tyrant. In exchange it offers its own freedom. All bodies can boast about themselves with music. The old can dance as well as the young. Time is forgotten. And that night, from behind the silence of the last stars, we thought we heard the affirmation of a Yes.

“La Belle Jacqueline” once more! the dressmaker shouted at Félix. I love music! With music you can say everything!

You can’t talk to a lawyer with music, Félix replied.

Perhaps they are right, those who pretend there are harps in heaven. Maybe flutes and violins too. But I’m sure there are no accordions, just as I’m sure there’s no green cowshit that smells of wild garlic. The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand marking the bass and the heartbeats, the arms and shoulders labouring to make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!

Finally we stopped dancing.

Come on, Caroline, come on, Félix muttered as he made his way alone to the door. It’s time to go.

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