A King Alone by Jean Giono

Author:Jean Giono
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

“No, no, don’t try to understand! Shut up, please!” cried Sausage one day.

It was long afterwards, very long afterwards, at least twenty years later.

She was no longer at the Café de la Route. The Négrels had taken over (and even increased its business). She was living in the Bongalove with Delphine. Dog and cat. People never knew how those two women hadn’t skinned each other alive, leaving behind only a fingernail-size piece of each other.

Delphine—but now I realize I’ve skipped over too many years. I have to tell you about Delphine, obviously. But Sausage, in ’67 or ’68, which is about the time when I come on the scene, wasn’t done with life and had no wish to be.

Sure, she didn’t have the same energy she’d had. It’s pretty unlikely she still had the strength to go all the way down to the Chalamont valley bottom. She was approaching her eightieth year but, believe you me, she was approaching it the way a cat approaches embers.

During those twenty years she’d endured so many mortifications, one after the other, she’d been beaten black-and-blue so many times, and had had to forge herself under the blows of hammers against anvils of so many kinds that she’d lost her stature or, more precisely, she had assumed a new stature better adapted to bitterness, fury, and fire.

For those who, after losing sight of her, saw her again, it was impossible to recognize Sausage in the blue larding needle she’d become, but those of us who had followed her step by step knew very well why she’d grown so thin; what she’d been sharpened by; she was a thousand times more recognizable than before. It even seemed to us that, at the time of the Café de la Route, we’d hardly known her at all. It’s now that it was worth the trouble, while she was creeping up on her eighty years as if they were something pleasant but could burn.

Not that she had anything to be afraid of. Delphine’s forty years, well, she knew how to handle them; even if they were of a vitality to make you forget how fresh Sausage was in Madame Tim’s time. She needed to watch herself, that one! I mean Delphine, because Madame Tim . . . It’s amazing what can happen in twenty years. Yes, Delphine needed to be on her best behavior. Some things were difficult to keep in check.

Do you know what Sausage was doing? At the time of the Café de la Route, she’d had a man’s face; now she had the face of a notary. And with this face that radiated like a sun with the knowledge of the law in all its secret workings, she was on the lookout for how the laws of the march of time worked on Delphine. Ten seconds couldn’t pass without reading the obligatory entry of the cost of those ten seconds and the legal and unavoidable ramifications of spending those ten seconds on the notary’s face.

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