Within rifle range of the shack, there is another one similar, but more
rustic. It's home to our keeper, his wife and their two eldest
children. The girl is responsible for the men's meal, and doing repairs
to the fishing nets, while the boy helps his father look into the keep
nets, and maintain the sluice gates in the ponds. The two youngest
children are in Arles, staying with their grandmother, until they have
learned to read and have taken their first communion. It is too far to
the school and the church from here, and the atmosphere of the Camargue
is completely unsuitable for young children. The fact is that, come the
summer, when the marshes are dry and the white mud of the irrigation
channels cracks in the great heat, the islet isn't really habitable at
all.
I experienced it once when I came in August to hunt ducklings and I
will never forget the miserable and ferocious appearance of the
burningly hot landscape. Here and there ponds were steaming in the sun
like huge fermentation vats, keeping scant signs of life, perhaps just
salamanders, spiders, and water insects looking for some moisture.
There was a pestilential air about, a miasmic, brooding fog thickened
by innumerable clouds of mosquitoes. At the keeper's house everybody
had the shivers, everybody had the fever, and it was pitiful to see the
yellowed, drawn faces, and the circled, popping eyes, of these
unfortunates, who were condemned to drag themselves around for three
months under this high, pitiless sun, which burnt, but didn't warm....
The life of a gamekeeper is miserable and hard in the Camargue. At
least ours has his wife and children round him; but a little further on
in the marsh, a horse-warden lives absolutely alone, from one year's
end to the next, Robinson Crusoe like. In his home-made reed cabin,
there isn't a single household utensil not made by him; the woven
wicker-work hammock, the three black stones that form the hearth, the
tamarisk roots made into stools, even the lock and key made from white
wood that secures this unique accommodation.
The man himself is at least as strange as his dwelling. He is a sort of
silent thinker like so many solitary people, hiding his peasant's
wariness under thick bushy eyebrows. When not on the pasture land, he
can be found sitting outside his door, and with touching, childlike,
care, slowly fathoming out one of the little coloured leaflets which
are wrapped around phials of medicines for his horses. The poor devil
hasn't any recreation but reading these leaflets. Despite being
neighbours, our keeper and he don't see each other. They actually avoid
each other. One day when I asked the stalker the reason for this, he
replied in a serious manner:
--It's because of a difference of opinion.... He is a red; I am a white.
Well, even in this wilderness, where solitude ought to have brought
them close together, these two unsociable people, as ignorant and naïve
as each other, these two cowherds of Theocritus, who barely go to town
once a year, and the small cafés of Arles must seem like the Palace of
Ptolemy to them, have managed to fall out about politics of all things.
V