The sad curlews, annunciators of the autumn, had just appeared in a
mass in a gray squall, fleeing from the high sea under the threat of
approaching tempests. At the mouth of the southern rivers, of the Adour,
of the Nivelle, of the Bidassoa which runs by Spain, they wandered above
the waters already cold, flying low, skimming, with their wings over the
mirror-like surfaces. And their cries, at the fall of the October night,
seemed to ring the annual half-death of the exhausted plants.
On the Pyrenean lands, all bushes and vast woods, the melancholy of the
rainy nights of declining seasons fell slowly, enveloping like a shroud,
while Ramuntcho walked on the moss-covered path, without noise, shod
with rope soles, supple and silent in his mountaineer's tread.
Ramuntcho was coming on foot from a very long distance, ascending the
regions neighboring the Bay of Biscay, toward his isolated house which
stood above, in a great deal of shade, near the Spanish frontier.
Around the solitary passer-by, who went up so quickly without trouble
and whose march in sandals was not heard, distances more and more
profound deepened on all sides, blended in twilight and mist.
The autumn, the autumn marked itself everywhere. The corn, herb of the
lowlands, so magnificently green in the Spring, displayed shades of dead
straw in the depths of the valleys, and, on all the summits, beeches
and oaks shed their leaves. The air was almost cold; an odorous humidity
came out of the mossy earth and, at times, there came from above a light
shower. One felt it near and anguishing, that season of clouds and of
long rains, which returns every time with the same air of bringing the
definitive exhaustion of saps and irremediable death,--but which passes
like all things and which one forgets at the following spring.
Everywhere, in the wet of the leaves strewing the earth, in the wet
of the herbs long and bent, there was a sadness of death, a dumb
resignation to fecund decomposition.
But the autumn, when it comes to put an end to the plants, brings only
a sort of far-off warning to man, a little more durable, who resists
several winters and lets himself be lured several times by the charm
of spring. Man, in the rainy nights of October and of November, feels
especially the instinctive desire to seek shelter at home, to warm
himself at the hearth, under the roof which so many thousand years
amassed have taught him progressively to build.--And Ramuntcho felt
awakening in the depths of his being the old ancestral aspirations for
the Basque home of the country, the isolated home, unattached to the
neighboring homes. He hastened his steps the more toward the primitive
dwelling where his mother was waiting for him.
Here and there, one perceived them in the distance, indistinct in the
twilight, the Basque houses, very distant from one another, dots white
or grayish, now in the depth of some gorge steeped in darkness, then on
some ledge of the mountains with summits lost in the obscure sky. Almost
inconsequential are these human habitations, in the immense and confused
entirety of things; inconsequential and even annihilated quite, at
this hour, before the majesty of the solitude and of the eternal forest
nature.
Ramuntcho ascended rapidly, lithe, bold and young, still a child, likely
to play on his road as little mountaineers play, with a rock, a reed, or
a twig that one whittles while walking. The air was growing sharper,
the environment harsher, and already he ceased to hear the cries of the
curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath. But Ramuntcho
was singing one of those plaintive songs of the olden time, which are
still transmitted in the depths of the distant lands, and his naive
voice went through the mist or the rain, among the wet branches of the
oaks, under the grand shroud, more and more sombre, of isolation, of
autumn and of night.
He stopped for an instant, pensive, to see a cart drawn by oxen pass
at a great distance above him. The cowboy who drove the slow team sang
also; through a bad and rocky path, they descended into a ravine bathed
in shadows already nocturnal.
And soon they disappeared in a turn of the path, masked suddenly by
trees, as if they had vanished in an abyss. Then Ramuntcho felt the
grasp of an unexpected melancholy, unexplained like most of his complex
impressions, and, with an habitual gesture, while he resumed his less
alert march, he brought down like a visor on his gray eyes, very sharp
and very soft, the crown of his woolen Basque cap.
Why?--What had to do with him this cart, this singing cowboy whom he
did not even know? Evidently nothing--and yet, for having seen them
disappear into a lodging, as they did doubtless every night, into some
farm isolated in a lowland, a more exact realization had come to him of
the humble life of the peasant, attached to the soil and to the native
field, of those human lives as destitute of joy as beasts of burden, but
with declines more prolonged and more lamentable. And, at the same time,
through his mind had passed the intuitive anxiety for other places, for
the thousand other things that one may see or do in this world and
which one may enjoy; a chaos of troubling half thoughts, of atavic
reminiscences and of phantoms had furtively marked themselves in the
depths of his savage child's mind--
For Ramuntcho was a mixture of two races very different and of two
beings separated, if one may say it, by an abyss of several generations.
Created by the sad fantasy of one of the refined personages of our
dazzled epoch, he had been inscribed at his birth as the “son of an
unknown father” and he bore no other name than that of his mother. So,
he did not feel that he was quite similar to his companions in games and
healthy fatigues.
Silent for a moment, he walked less quickly toward his house, on the
deserted paths winding on the heights. In him, the chaos of other
things, of the luminous “other places”, of the splendors or of the
terrors foreign to his own life, agitated itself confusedly, trying
to disentangle itself--But no, all this, being indistinct and
incomprehensible, remained formless in the darkness.
At last, thinking no more of it, he began to sing his song again. The
song told, in monotonous couplets, the complaint of a linen weaver whose
lover in a distant war prolonged his absence. It was written in that
mysterious Euskarian language, the age of which seems incalculable and
the origin of which remains unknown. And little by little, under the
influence of the ancient melody, of the wind and of the solitude,
Ramuntcho found himself as he was at the beginning of his walk, a simple
Basque mountaineer, sixteen or seventeen years old, formed like a man,
but retaining the ignorance and the candor of a little boy.
Soon he perceived Etchezar, his parish, its belfry massive as the
dungeon of a fortress; near the church, some houses were grouped;
others, more numerous, had preferred to be disseminated in the
surroundings, among trees, in ravines or on bluffs. The night fell
entirely, hastily that evening, because of the sombre veils hooked to
the great summits.
Around this village, above or in the valleys, the Basque country
appeared, at that moment, like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses.
Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the
depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to have
grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew
not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries
was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the
Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the finishing
mind of that race, the fragments of which have been preserved and to
which Ramuntcho belonged by his mother--
And the child, composed of two essences so diverse, who was walking
alone toward his dwelling, through the night and the rain, began again
in the depth of his double being to feel the anxiety of inexplicable
reminiscences.
At last he arrived in front of his house,--which was very elevated, in
the Basque fashion, with old wooden balconies under narrow windows, the
glass of which threw into the night the light of a lamp. As he came
near the entrance, the light noise of his walk became feebler in the
thickness of the dead leaves: the leaves of those plane-trees shaped
like vaults which, according to the usage of the land, form a sort of
atrium before each dwelling.
She recognized from afar the steps of her son, the serious Franchita,
pale and straight in her black clothes,--the one who formerly had loved
and followed the stranger; then, who, feeling her desertion approaching,
had returned courageously to the village in order to inhabit alone the
dilapidated house of her deceased parents. Rather than to live in the
vast city, and to be troublesome and a solicitor there, she had quickly
resolved to depart, to renounce everything, to make a simple Basque
peasant of that little Ramuntcho, who, at his entrance in life, had worn
gowns embroidered in white silk.
It was fifteen years ago, fifteen years, when she returned,
clandestinely, at a fall of night similar to this one. In the first days
of this return, dumb and haughty to her former companions from fear of
their disdain, she would go out only to go to church, her black cloth
mantilla lowered on her eyes. Then, at length, when curiosity
was appeased, she had returned to her habits, so valiantly and so
irreproachably that all had forgiven her.
To greet and embrace her son she smiled with joy and tenderness, but,
silent by nature and reserved as both were, they said to each other only
what it was useful to say.
He sat at his accustomed place to eat the soup and the smoking
dish which she served to him without speaking. The room, carefully
kalsomined, was made gay by the sudden light of a flame of branches in
the tall and wide chimney ornamented with a festoon of white calico.
In frames, hooked in good order, there were images of Ramuntcho's first
communion and different figures of saints with Basque legends; then the
Virgin of Pilar, the Virgin of Anguish, and rosaries, and blessed palms.
The kitchen utensils shone, in a line on shelves sealed to the walls;
every shelf ornamented with one of those pink paper frills, cut in
designs, which are manufactured in Spain and on which are printed,
invariably, series of personages dancing with castanets, or scenes in
the lives of the toreadors. In this white interior, before this joyful
and clear chimney, one felt an impression of home, a tranquil welfare,
which was augmented by the notion of the vast, wet, surrounding night,
of the grand darkness of the valleys, of the mountains and of the woods.
Franchita, as every evening, looked long at her son, looked at him
embellishing and growing, taking more and more an air of decision and
of force, as his brown mustache was more and more marked above his fresh
lips.
When he had supped, eaten with his young mountaineer's appetite several
slices of bread and drunk two glasses of cider, he rose, saying:
“I am going to sleep, for we have to work tonight.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the mother, “and when are you to get up?”
“At one o'clock, as soon as the moon sets. They will whistle under the
window.”
“What is it?”
“Bundles of silk and bundles of velvet.”
“With whom are you going?”
“The same as usual: Arrochkoa, Florentino and the Iragola brothers. It
is, as it was the other night, for Itchoua, with whom I have just made
an engagement. Good-night, mother--Oh, we shall not be out late and,
sure, I will be back before mass.”
Then, Franchita leaned her head on the solid shoulder of her son, in
a coaxing humor almost infantile, different suddenly from her habitual
manner, and, her cheek against his, she remained tenderly leaning, as
if to say in a confident abandonment of her will: “I am still troubled
a little by those night undertakings; but, when I reflect, what you wish
is always well; I am dependent on you, and you are everything--”
On the shoulder of the stranger, formerly, it was her custom to lean and
to abandon herself thus, in the time when she loved him.
When Ramuntcho had gone to his little room, she stayed thinking for a
longer time than usual before resuming her needlework. So, it became
decidedly his trade, this night work in which one risks receiving the
bullets of Spain's carbineers!--He had begun for amusement, in bravado,
like most of them, and as his friend Arrochkoa was beginning, in the
same band as he; then, little by little, he had made a necessity of this
continual adventure in dark nights; he deserted more and more, for this
rude trade, the open air workshop of the carpenter where she had placed
him as an apprentice to carve beams out of oak trunks.
And that was what he would be in life, her little Ramuntcho, so coddled
formerly in his white gown and for whom she had formed naively so many
dreams: a smuggler! Smuggler and pelota player,--two things which go
well together and which are essentially Basque.
She hesitated still, however, to let him follow that unexpected
vocation. Not in disdain for smugglers, oh, no, for her father had been
a smuggler; her two brothers also; the elder killed by a Spanish bullet
in the forehead, one night that he was swimming across the Bidassoa, the
second a refugee in America to escape the Bayonne prison; both respected
for their audacity and their strength. No, but he, Ramuntcho, the son of
the stranger, he, doubtless, might have had pretensions to lead a less
harsh life than these men if, in a hasty and savage moment, she had
not separated him from his father and brought him back to the Basque
mountains. In truth, he was not heartless, Ramuntcho's father; when,
fatally, he had wearied of her, he had made some efforts not to let her
see it and never would he have abandoned her with her child if, in her
pride, she had not quitted him. Perhaps it would be her duty to-day to
write to him, to ask him to think of his son--
And now the image of Gracieuse presented itself naturally to her mind,
as it did every time she thought of Ramuntcho's future. She was the
little betrothed whom she had been wishing for him for ten years. (In
the sections of country unacquainted with modern fashions, it is usual
to marry when very young and often to know and select one another for
husband and wife in the first years of life.) A little girl with hair
fluffed in a gold mist, daughter of a friend of her childhood, of a
certain Dolores Detcharry, who had been always conceited--and who had
remained contemptuous since the epoch of the great fault.
Certainly, the father's intervention in the future of Ramuntcho would
have a decisive influence in obtaining the hand of that girl--and would
permit even of asking it of Dolores with haughtiness, after the ancient
quarrel. But Franchita felt a great uneasiness in her, increasing as the
thought of addressing herself to that man became more precise. And then,
she recalled the look, so often sombre, of the stranger, she recalled
his vague words of infinite lassitude, of incomprehensible despair; he
had the air of seeing always, beyond her horizon, distant abysses and
darkness, and, although he was not an insulter of sacred things, never
would he pray, thus giving to her this excess of remorse, of having
allied herself to some pagan to whom heaven would be closed forever.
His friends were similar to him, refined also, faithless, prayerless,
exchanging among themselves in frivolous words abysmal thoughts.--Oh,
if Ramuntcho by contact with them were to become similar to them
all!--desert the churches, fly from the sacraments and the mass!--Then,
she remembered the letters of her old father,--now decomposed in the
profound earth, under a slab of granite, near the foundations of his
parish church--those letters in Euskarian tongue which he wrote to her,
after the first months of indignation and of silence, in the city where
she had dragged her fault. “At least, my poor Franchita, my daughter,
are you in a country where the men are pious and go to church
regularly?--” Oh! no, they were hardly pious, the men of the great city,
not more the fashionable ones who were in the society of Ramuntcho's
father than the humblest laborers in the suburban district where
she lived hidden; all carried away by the same current far from the
hereditary dogmas, far from the antique symbols.--And Ramuntcho, in such
surroundings, how would he resist?--
Other reasons, less important perhaps, retained her also. Her haughty
dignity, which in that city had maintained her honest and solitary,
revolted truly at the idea that she would have to reappear as a
solicitor before her former lover. Then, her superior commonsense, which
nothing had ever been able to lead astray or to dazzle, told her that it
was too late now to change anything; that Ramuntcho, until now ignorant
and free, would not know how to attain the dangerous regions where
the intelligence of his father had elevated itself, but that he would
languish at the bottom, like one outclassed. And, in fine, a sentiment
which she hardly confessed to herself, lingered powerfully in the depths
of her heart: the fear of losing her son, of guiding him no longer, of
holding him no longer, of having him no longer.--And so, in that instant
of decisive reflection, after having hesitated for years, she inclined
more and more to remain stubborn in her silence with regard to the
stranger and to let pass humbly near her the life of her Ramuntcho,
under the protecting looks of the Virgin and the saints.--There remained
unsolved the question of Gracieuse Detcharry.--Well, she would marry, in
spite of everything, her son, smuggler and poor though he be! With her
instinct of a mother somewhat savagely loving, she divined that the
little girl was enamoured enough not to fall out of love ever; she had
seen this in her fifteen year old black eyes, obstinate and grave under
the golden nimbus of her hair. Gracieuse marrying Ramuntcho for his
charm alone, in spite of and against maternal will!--The rancor and
vindictiveness that lurked in the mind of Franchita rejoiced suddenly at
that great triumph over the pride of Dolores.
Around the isolated house where, under the grand silence of midnight,
she decided alone her son's future, the spirit of the Basque ancestors
passed, sombre and jealous also, disdainful of the stranger, fearful of
impiety, of changes, of evolutions of races;--the spirit of the Basque
ancestors, the old immutable spirit which still maintains that people
with eyes turned toward the anterior ages; the mysterious antique spirit
by which the children are led to act as before them their fathers had
acted, at the side of the same mountains, in the same villages, around
the same belfries.--
The noise of steps now, in the dark, outside!--Someone walking softly
in sandals on the thickness of the plane-tree leaves strewing the
soil.--Then, a whistled appeal.--
What, already!--Already one o'clock in the morning--!
Quite resolved now, she opened the door to the chief smuggler with a
smile of greeting that the latter had never seen in her:
“Come in, Itchoua,” she said, “warm yourself--while I go wake up my
son.”
A tall and large man, that Itchoua, thin, with a thick chest, clean
shaven like a priest, in accordance with the fashion of the old time
Basque; under the cap which he never took off, a colorless face,
inexpressive, cut as with a pruning hook, and recalling the beardless
personages archaically drawn on the missals of the fifteenth century.
Above his hollow cheeks, the breadth of the jaws, the jutting out of the
muscles of the neck gave the idea of his extreme force. He was of the
Basque type, excessively accentuated; eyes caved-in too much under the
frontal arcade; eyebrows of rare length, the points of which, lowered
as on the figures of tearful madonnas, almost touched the hair at the
temples. Between thirty and fifty years, it was impossible to assign an
age to him. His name was Jose-Maria Gorosteguy; but, according to the
custom he was known in the country by the surname of Itchoua (the Blind)
given to him in jest formerly, because of his piercing sight which
plunged in the night like that of cats. He was a practising Christian, a
church warden of his parish and a chorister with a thundering voice. He
was famous also for his power of resistance to fatigue, being capable of
climbing the Pyrenean slopes for hours at racing speed with heavy loads
on his back.
Ramuntcho came down soon, rubbing his eyelids, still heavy from a
youthful sleep, and, at his aspect, the gloomy visage of Itchoua was
illuminated by a smile. A continual seeker for energetic and strong boys
that he might enroll in his band, and knowing how to keep them in spite
of small wages, by a sort of special point of honor, he was an expert in
legs and in shoulders as well as in temperaments, and he thought a great
deal of his new recruit.
Franchita, before she would let them go, leaned her head again on her
son's neck; then she escorted the two men to the threshold of her door,
opened on the immense darkness,--and recited piously the Pater for them,
while they went into the dark night, into the rain, into the chaos of
the mountains, toward the obscure frontier.