The Serpent of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

most important thing is to win their trust. Every movement you make must be true. Maintain your balance. When you’re carrying a big bowl full of water, you don’t run.”
    You’ve slept in good thick hay once in a while, haven’t you? Then you know that after two nights, you aren’t the same anymore. It gets you as drunk as brandy. Every morning, Bouscarle put his outstretched hand on my head and looked me in the eye. “You resist, son,” he would say to me, “you resist; that’s no good.” And in fact, I’ll admit to you that I did resist that drunkenness of the grass with all my strength. But the grass is stronger than anything because its days are endless and because, from the beginning of time and until the end, it has always wanted the same thing. And one fine morning, Bouscarle looked me straight in the eye without saying anything. I saw a shadow of a smile in the dark of his beard. That afternoon, he led me to the sheep. He opened the door of the stable; he shut it again behind us, and there we stood motionless in the shadows. He gave me no advice that day. I did everything as though
someone else was doing it through me. The odor of beasts was a great thing for raising fear.
    After a moment, we began to see more clearly in there. A little daylight came through a round window, through the cobwebs. A large hornet swam softly around the stable, effortlessly, carried on the thickness of all that breathing. Bouscarle said one word. All the heads of the sheep turned toward us. In the faint light from the window, the beasts’ eyes began to gleam like stars in the night, and it seemed like I could hear their brains jostling in their skulls.
    â€œJesus,” said Bouscarle, “is the smallest of all the gods. A shepherd, nothing but a shepherd. First, there was the one whose body we all were, before becoming pieces of it. Jesus was a bigger piece than the others, that’s all. There are big gods, my boy, and those are the ones you’re going to have to get used to.”
    As we were going out, Bouscarle said, “Come, I’m going to teach you to play the fife.”
    We had to go out to the big strawshed in the open fields, and there, just the two of us played far into the night. He showed me how to place my fingers over the holes. And I tried as hard as I could, but the joints of my fingers needed oiling, and sometimes I let up too soon, sometimes too late. Then he had me learn the art of breathing. First he blew and then he passed the flute, all warm, to me and on the willow reed I tasted garlic and wine, the breath of Bouscarle. The first notes went well, because the shepherd’s breath was still in the flute, and then I was left on my own, alone in a void emptier than the great void of the sea, and it was hard to raise it, the weight of the music, with this little hollow reed.
    â€œYou resist, my boy,” said Bouscarle, “you resist and sink to the
depths. Let yourself yield; make yourself limp. Let yourself live life without thinking that you’re playing the flute, and then you will play.”
    He spoke the truth. Worn out from struggling, at that moment when all the stars sped through the sky like so much grain in the wind, I played. It rose from the heart in a sudden bound, gradually making me lighter. And through the barrel of my flute, I emptied myself, like a good fountain purges itself of its dark water.
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    OURS WAS a large farm; we had twenty thousand sheep. Five large sheepfolds lined the road to hold them all throughout the winter. At this time of poor grazing in the dry marshes, they would lick the salt at the base of the plants, and nibble the red behen. And knowing that there wasn’t a flower to be found, the bees, who are the flies of the grass, made a leap of more than ten kilometers over our area.
    On the day of the great departure, Bouscarle took the reins of the whole farm and began shaking the bit hard.