Gemini by Michel Tournier

Author:Michel Tournier
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2015-11-06T13:00:00+00:00

The winter, which came very early that year, was broken up by such generous allowances of Christmas leave that Saint-Amand and its vicinity were emptied of Allied troops as though from the effects of a temporary demobilization. Edouard found himself back with Maria-Barbara and the children around the Christmas tree, to which the war seemed to give an added luster. The children of St. Brigitte’s, formed into a choir and a company of actors, sang carols and mimed the wonderful story of the Three Kings come from far Arabia to worship the Messiah. For the first time in decades quite a thick layer of snow covered the countryside and coast of Brittany. From his first arrival, Edouard saw his family, his house and the landscape with an unreal clarity, which came perhaps from a kind of unwonted stillness, as though things and people had been momentarily fixed, as in a photograph. A photograph, yes, that was how the familiar world looked to him, like an old photograph which is all that remains after time has destroyed everything. And in its center tall Maria-Barbara, ever serene amid that host of children, her own and the innocents, mother and foster mother, protectress of all the inhabitants of the Pierres Sonnantes.

Edouard cut his stay short in order to be able to spend twenty-four hours with Florence. He found her her usual self, not appearing to take either the war or Edouard in uniform, who personified it in her eyes, very seriously. She sang him soldiers’ songs in her grave voice, accompanying herself on her guitar, “La Madelon,” “Le Clairon,” “Sambre-et-Meuse,” a whole spirited and ingenuous repertoire, and she gave the gay, swinging old march tunes such a melancholy sweetness that they took on a mournful charm, like an echo gathered from the lips of dying soldiers.

It was with relief that he returned to his winter quarters in Saint-Amand and Angelica’s big, fair, stalwart body, smelling of hot bread. But once he had resumed the thread of his thermal meditations, he found himself comparing the three women who seemed to preside over his destiny. It had bothered him before the war that his flesh and his heart were pulling different ways,

Maria-Barbara retaining all his affection while he no longer desired anyone but Florence. Surely this divorce between what he called his hunger and his thirst was as if love were decaying and already giving off a smell of death? The war had come to reconcile him to himself and had given him this Angi who was both desirable and touching, exciting and reassuring. But this gift had fallen out of a sky which had the faint, sad splendor of a wayside pulpit pervaded with dying scents. He was going to die and Angi was the farewell gift that life was giving him.

The photographic look the Pierres Sonnantes had seemed to wear during his Christmas leave and even more the sad march tunes Florence had sung had been proof that the grim, warlike skies of

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