HOURS IN THE GARDEN
There are people whose eyes alone are sensitive to light; and to them, for the most part, the sun is but a free lantern, by whose light every one carries on his especial work; the writer with his pen, the farmer with his ox. But I absorb the light with my eyes and ears, my mouth and nose, and all the pores of my skin. Like a fish, I float in it and I drink it in.
Just as they say the fires of morning and afternoon will ripen wine that is exposed in bottles, as though it were still the grapes on the vine; so the sunlight penetrates my blood and clears my brain. Rejoice in this tranquil and piercing hour! I am like seaweed in the current, moored only by a thread, its weight floating on the water,—or like the Australian palm; a tuft with great swaying leaves, high upon a tall trunk,—which last, flecked with the gold of evening, curl, wave, and uncurl with the outspread balance of wide and supple wings.
The formidable aloe sprang, undoubtedly, from one of the dragon’s teeth that Cadmussowed over the Theban field. The sun drew this warrior from a ferocious soil. It has a heart of sword-blades, a flowering of glaucous thongs, belts, and straps. Sentinel of solitude, color of the sea and the sword, its artichoke bristles on all sides with enormous poniards. Persistently it upraises its harrows, rank after rank, until, having flowered, it dies; and from its heart springs a flower like a post, like a candelabra, like a standard driven into the final corpse!
By my order they have closed the door with bolt and bar. The porter sleeps in his corner, his head sunk on his breast; all the servants sleep. Only a pane of glass separates me from the garden; and the silence is so complete that, all the way to the walls of the enclosure, the mice between two floors, the lice in the breasts of the pigeons, the bubble of a dandelion on its fragile stem, must feel the noise in their midst as I open the door. The celestial spaces appear to me, with the sun just where I had imagined it, in the afternoon splendor. On high, a kite descends in wide circles through the blue; from the summit of a pine a cone falls. I am glad to be where I am. My walks in this enclosed place are distinguished by precaution and a taciturn and quiet vigilance,—asa fisher fears to startle fish in the water if he so much as thinks. There is no trace here of that free and open country which distracts the mind and leads on the body. The trees and the flowers conspire to my captivity; and, as in a child’s game the player must continually go back and begin again, so all the turns in this thick grass lead me to that furthest corner, where the wells are. Across the little hill, by means of a long cord, I shake the invisible pail. Like a ripening fruit, like a poet maturing his thought, I rest in the immobility all about me where life is measured only by the circling of the sun, by the beating of my pulse,—by the growth of my hair. Vainly the turtle-dove makes her pure and sad appeal, heard from afar. I will not stir from the house today. In vain the murmur of the great river reaches me.
At midnight, returning from a ball where, during many hours, I have watched human beings,—some in black, others in quainter draperies,—turning in couples (each figure expressing incomprehensible satisfaction) to the gymnastic modulations of a piano; at the moment when the porters who have reached the top of the stairway lift the curtain of my litter, I see in the light of my lantern, under the torrential rain, amagnolia tree adorned with great ivory globes. Oh, fresh apparition! Oh, confirmation of imperishable treasure in the night!
The theme of the earth is expressed by the detonations of this distant drum, as one might hear a cooper in a cavernous cellar striking his casks with measured blows. The magnificence of the world is such that one anticipates at any moment having the silence shattered by the terrific explosion of a cry, thetarabaof a trumpet,—the delirious exultation, the intoxicated elation of copper! The news goes about that the rivers have reversed their courses; and, charging the swollen streams, all the battering force of the sea descends upon the island continent, to trade there the produce of the horizon. The work of the fields benefits by this change; chain-pumps function and confabulate; and, as far as the inundated harvest-meadows, mingled with the somber prairie, mirror the guava-colored evening, all space is filled with an hydraulic murmur. A ragged tuft of pine crosses the circle of the moon. In another place, at this most shining hour, four lovers holding a sugar-cane, stamping on the golden wheels of a press, make a stream of blue and white milk flow like the waterof the sea through a very green field. And suddenly, against the blue, is thrust this young Bacchic face, inflamed with passion and with a superhuman gaiety, the eye sparkling and cynical, the lips twisted in mockery and invective! But the heavy blows of a hatchet in meat show me clearly enough where I am; and also the arms of this woman who, red to the elbows with blood dark as tobacco juice, drags out entrails from the depth of that great pearl-white carcass. A basin of iron, that some one turns over, flashes. In the rosy and golden light of Autumn, the whole bank of the canal is screened from my sight under pulleys which draw great blocks of ice, baskets of pigs, unwieldy bunches of bananas, streaming clusters of oysters, like pudding-stones,—and barrels of edible fishes so large that they are garnished and polished like porcelain. I have the energy still to notice these scales, where, with one foot placed on the platform, one fist clinging to the chain of bronze, they overturn the mighty heap of watermelons and pumpkins, and bundles of sugar-cane, tied with blossoming creepers from which spring tiny lip-colored flowers. And suddenly, lifting my chin, I find myself seated on a step of the stairway, my hand in the fur of my cat.