It is Easter night, after the village bells have ceased to mingle in the
air so many holy vibrations that came from Spain and from France.
Seated on the bank of the Bidassoa, Ramuntcho and Florentino watch the
arrival of a bark. A great silence now, and the bells sleep. The tepid
twilight has been prolonged and, in breathing, one feels the approach of
summer.
As soon as the night falls, it must appear from the coast of Spain, the
smuggling bark, bringing the very prohibited phosphorus. And, without
its touching the shore, they must go to get that merchandise, by
advancing on foot in the bed of the river, with long, pointed sticks in
their hands, in order to assume, if perchance they were caught, airs of
people fishing innocently for “platuches.”
The water of the Bidassoa is to-night an immovable and clear mirror, a
little more luminous than the sky, and in this mirror, are reproduced,
upside down, all the constellations, the entire Spanish mountain, carved
in so sombre a silhouette in the tranquil atmosphere. Summer, summer,
one has more and more the consciousness of its approach, so limpid and
soft are the first signs of night, so much lukewarm langour is scattered
over this corner of the world, where the smugglers silently manoeuvre.
But this estuary, which separates the two countries, seems in this
moment to Ramuntcho more melancholy than usual, more closed and more
walled-in in front of him by these black mountains, at the feet of which
hardly shine, here and there, two or three uncertain lights. Then, he
is seized again by his desire to know what there is beyond, and further
still.--Oh! to go elsewhere!--To escape, at least for a time, from the
oppressiveness of that land--so loved, however!--Before death, to escape
the oppressiveness of this existence, ever similar and without egress.
To try something else, to get out of here, to travel, to know things--!
Then, while watching the far-off, terrestrial distances where the bark
will appear, he raises his eyes from time to time toward what happens
above, in the infinite, looks at the new moon, the crescent of which, as
thin as a line, lowers and will disappear soon; looks at the stars,
the slow and regulated march of which he has observed, as have all the
people of his trade, during so many nocturnal hours; is troubled in the
depth of his mind by the proportions and the inconceivable distances of
these things.--
In his village of Etchezar, the old priest who had taught him the
catechism, interested by his young, lively intelligence, has lent books
to him, has continued with him conversations on a thousand subjects,
and, on the subject of the planets, has given to him the notion of
movements and of immensities, has half opened before his eyes the grand
abyss of space and duration. Then, in his mind, innate doubts, frights
and despairs that slumbered, all that his father had bequeathed to him
as a sombre inheritance, all these things have taken a black form which
stands before him. Under the great sky of night, his Basque faith has
commenced to weaken. His mind is no longer simple enough to accept
blindly dogmas and observances, and, as all becomes incoherence and
disorder in his young head, so strangely prepared, the course of which
nobody is leading, he does not know that it is wise to submit, with
confidence in spite of everything, to the venerable and consecrated
formulas, behind which is hidden perhaps all that we may ever see of the
unknowable truths.
Therefore, these bells of Easter which the year before had filled him
with a religious and soft sentiment, this time had seemed to him to be
a music sad and almost vain. And now that they have just hushed, he
listens with undefined sadness to the powerful noise, almost incessant
since the creation, that the breakers of the Bay of Biscay make and
which, in the peaceful nights, may be heard in the distance behind the
mountains.
But his floating dream changes again.--Now the estuary, which has
become quite dark and where one may no longer see the mass of human
habitations, seems to him, little by little, to become different; then,
strange suddenly, as if some mystery were to be accomplished in it; he
perceives only the great, abrupt lines of it, which are almost eternal,
and he is surprised to think confusedly of times more ancient, of an
unprecise and obscure antiquity.--The Spirit of the old ages, which
comes out of the soil at times in the calm nights, in the hours when
sleep the beings that trouble us in the day-time, the Spirit of the old
ages is beginning, doubtless, to soar in the air around him; Ramuntcho
does not define this well, for his sense of an artist and of a seer,
that no education has refined, has remained rudimentary; but he has the
notion and the worry of it.--In his head, there is still and always
a chaos, which seeks perpetually to disentangle itself and never
succeeds.--However, when the two enlarged and reddened horns of the
moon fall slowly behind the mountain, always black, the aspect of things
takes, for an inappreciable instant, one knows not what ferocious and
primitive airs; then, a dying impression of original epochs which had
remained, one knows not where in space, takes for Ramuntcho a precise
form in a sudden manner, and troubles him until he shivers. He dreams,
even without wishing it, of those men of the forests who lived here in
the ages, in the uncalculated and dark ages, because, suddenly, from a
point distant from the shore, a long Basque cry rises from the darkness
in a lugubrious falsetto, an “irrintzina,” the only thing in this
country with which he never could become entirely familiar. But a great
mocking noise occurs in the distance, the crash of iron, whistles: a
train from Paris to Madrid, which is passing over there, behind them, in
the black of the French shore. And the Spirit of the old ages folds its
wings made of shade and vanishes. Silence returns: but after the passage
of this stupid and rapid thing, the Spirit which has fled reappears no
more--
At last, the bark which Ramuntcho awaited with Florentino appears,
hardly perceptible for other eyes than theirs, a little, gray form which
leaves behind it slight ripples on this mirror which is of the color of
the sky at night and wherein stars are reflected upside down. It is the
well-selected hour, the hour when the customs officers watch badly; the
hour also when the view is dimmer, when the last reflections of the sun
and those of the crescent of the moon have gone out, and the eyes of men
are not yet accustomed to darkness.
Then to get the prohibited phosphorus, they take their long fishing
sticks, and go into the water silently.