A VISIT
There are long cries before any one opens,—furious batterings upon the patient portal,—before the servant, grown conscious of this “concert,” comes to recognize the stranger deposited on a litter in the midst of his porters, before the door. For here there is no deep-sounding bell, no button which, by the pulling of a wire attached through the walls to secret mechanism, sets off a sudden explosion, like the squeal of a beast that one pinches. The Black Mountain is the quarter where the old families live, and the silence is profound. The space that Europeans would reserve for recreation and games, the Chinese consecrate to retreat. In this animal honeycomb, between these streets seething with an unclean humanity, they reserve wide unused spaces,—empty enclosures that are the inheritance of some distinguished person, and that cloister his household gods. Only a noble roof can possess the enormous shade of these banyans older than the city, and of these vines which droop under the weight of their purple globes.
I have entered. I am waiting all alone in the little parlor. It is four o’clock, and the rain has ceased,—or is it still raining? The earth has received its fill of water; the soaked leaves breathe freely. As for me, under this somber and friendly sky I know the compunction and peace which one feels after having wept. Facing me is a wall with an uneven coping, where three square windows open, each crossed with porcelain bars imitating bamboo. As they adjust a “grille” over diplomatic papers, which isolates the important words, so they have applied this screen of triple openings to the wide countryside of trees and water, and have reduced it to a single theme repeated as in a triptych. The frame defines the picture; the bars, which let my sight pass, exclude me, and, better than a closed and bolted door, make certain that I remain inside.
My host does not arrive. I am alone.
THE RICE
It is our very teeth that we sink in the earth, in this plow that we plant there; and even now our bread eats there as we shall eat. At home, in the cold north, it is the sun who kneads our bread; he ripens the field as the open fire cooks our pancakes and roasts our meat. With a strong plowshare we open a furrow in the solid earth where that crust of bread is formed which we cut with our knife and grind between our teeth.
But here the sun does not serve only to heat the domestic sky like a furnace full of coals. One must take precautions with it. When the year commences, the waters overflow. These vast fields without slopes, scarcely separated from the sea that they continue, that the rain soaks without ever draining away, take refuge under the sheet of water in which the peasants fix a thousand rice-frames. The work of the village is to enrich the mud by means of many buckets; on all fours the farmer strokes the mud and dilutes it with his hands. The Mongol does not nibble bread, he snatches it with his lips, he gulps it down, without fashioning a semi-liquid aliment of it in his mouth. So the rice grows, as it is cooked, in steam; and the intention of its people is to furnish all the water it will need to sustain the heat of the celestial furnace. Also, when the waters rise, the chain-pumps sing like crickets everywhere; and they do not have recourse to the buffalo. Side by side, clinging to the same bar and pressing the red handle with knees in unison, men and women watch the kitchen of their field as a housewife watches a smoking dinner. And the Annamite carries the water in a sort of spoon; in his black soutane, with his little tortoise head, as yellow as mustard, he is the weary sacristan of the mire. How many reverences and genuflections there are when, with a bucket fastened to two cords, the pair of nhaques go seeking in all the hollows for juicy mud with which to anoint the earth and make it good to eat.
THE PERIOD
I stop. There is a period to my walk as to a phrase that is finished. It is the title of a tomb at my feet, at this turning where the road descends. From there I take my last view of the earth. I survey the country of the dead. With its groups of pines and olive trees, it spreads out between the deep fields that enclose it. Everywhere there is consummate plenty: Ceres has embraced Persephone. Inescapably this marks the ultimate. I recognize at the foot of these unchangeable mountains the wide line of the river. I define our frontier, I accept it. My exile is symbolized by this island crowded with the dead, devoured by its harvests. Standing alone amid a buried people, my feet among the names spoken by the grass, I watch this cleft in the mountains, through which the soft wind, like a growling dog, has tried for two days to force the enormous cloud it has drawn from the waters behind me.
It is done; the day is completely gone. There is nothing left but to return, traversing again the road that leads me to the house. At this halt, where rest the carriers of coffins and buckets, I look behind me for a long time at the yellow road where the living fare with the dead, which ends like a red period upon the crowded sky.