Tête-d'Or. Paul Claudel
makes them fat like fowls.
But to slip away thus like a handful of sand that runs through the fingers …
Pah! These fancies!
Perhaps some day you will understand.
(They come to the road.
Cébès: Who is that? (aside) It is her father.
(An old man, bent almost double, enters, trundling a wheelbarrow on which is a basket and a hoe.
Simon (aside): Speak to him.
Cébès (to the peasant): Good evening.
(the peasant stops and sets down the wheelbarrow.
(Silence.
How are things going to-day?
The Peasant: Eh, I don't know. I think it can't be more than five o'clock. The days don't get much longer.
Simon (shouting in his ear): And how is your daughter?
The Peasant: I don't know. She is not with me any more.
Simon: Perhaps she is better off than you are, eh?
The Peasant: Ah! She might help me out a bit then.
'Tis a bad business, surely!
Good-night to you, masters.
(He goes out. They remain silent for a moment.
Cébès (pointing up the road): That way lies the village.
You must spend the night with me.
Simon: No, my road lies yonder.
There is now no place to receive me. I will not lodge in the house of another.
I have no other wealth than these old clothes. But I shall stretch myself on a stone and be content.
I myself am my table and my bed.
I shall not die, but live!
I shall not die, but live!
I wish not to die, but to live!
For I am not alone.
Cébès: Who is with you?
Simon: The voice of my living soul!
I have heard men mourn their misfortunes, but what misfortune can there be?
None.
—It grows dark.
Cébès: It is night.
Simon: Watch the road and speak more softly.
The dry brambles shiver; the branches creak or sway without a sound; the brooks gurgle among the reeds.
We stand in the midst of space, with all about us the blackness,
The melancholy of Earth.
We pass along the road.
And we alone exhale the warm breath of living beings.
Haha! My nerves are unstrung.
You there … Cébès … Do you hear me?
Cébès: Yes.
Simon: Speak to me. Had you not something to tell me?
Cébès: I want …
Simon: What do you want?
Cébès: Nothing!
Only a room when it snows and that no one should know where I am!
Simon: What did you say?
Cébès: I am only a boy. There has been no one to help me!
I have had to endure much suffering.
I am plagued with bitter fancies. I shrink from the light of the sun.
Why should you force me to speak only to mock at me? Simon: I will take you by the hair of your head and shake you.
Come, in whom will you confide if not
In the man who at this very moment
Walks at your side through the blackness of night.
I tell you that you are a man and not a child, like some pale seedling pushing its way through the mould.
I am only a little older than you,
Yet I have sworn
To hold myself erect!
To never yield, to have no fear, and to accomplish what I undertake!
Speak! Take my arm
For the night is so dark one can scarcely see.
Cébès: Ah, well! I am very wretched! O that I might set forth clearly things that are obscure!
Where shall I begin?
To express the weariness that has no beginning, but has become a part of one's consciousness like the familiar things of every day?
Thus might the young man speak
Who like an emperor dethroned, his head thrust through a sack, sits motionless with haggard eyes,
While the wind makes free with his hair like a wanton trull,
Vacantly contemplating the dawn of another day
Full of little whisperings like a dead tree;
The multitude of foolish men who interrogate each other, fight, talk, and cast their eyes this way and that,
And then, turning towards us the hairy side of the head, disappear like the Manes;
The catastrophes and the sombre passions;
The clouds that cover the hills with shadows; the cries of beasts, the hum of the villages, the clatter of the highways;
The wood, and the chant of the coursing wind; the carts that are charged with sheaves and flowers;
And the Victories that pass their appointed way like harvesters, with swarthy cheeks,
Veiled and bearing a drum on a golden thigh.
Simon: Finish. What would he say?
Cébès: Nothing. Are there not men whose eyes
Melt like the broken medlar that scatters abroad its pips,
And women with cancer at work in their bodies, like the amadou in the beech?
And monstrous births, men having the muzzles of oxen?
And children violated and murdered by their fathers,
And old men whose children grudgingly count the days that still are left them?
All the diseases spy upon us, ulcer and abscess, epilepsy and shaking palsy and at the last, comes gout and the gravel that clogs urination.
Phthisis lights its fire; the pudenda grow mouldy like grapes; and the bag of the belly
Breaks and empties out entrails and excrements.
Is it not horrible? But our life,
Spreading a feast, stuffs itself with a banquet of crawling maggots
Till, like a dog who vomits worms and morsels of meat,
The loaded belly revolts and disgorges it all on the table!
I long for happiness!
But I am like a man beneath the earth in a cell no sound can enter.
Who will open the door? Who will descend into the blackness of my dungeon, bearing in his hand the yellow flame?
Simon: I also lie in that secret place.