CHAPTER XII.
The winter had just come to an end.
Ramuntcho,--who had slept for a few hours, in a bad, tired sleep, in a
small room of the new house of his friend Florentino, at
Ururbil,--awakened as the day dawned.
The night,--a night of tempest everywhere, a black and troubled
night,--had been disastrous for the smugglers. Near Cape Figuier, in the
rocks where they had just landed from the sea with silk bundles, they had
been pursued with gunshots, compelled to throw away their loads, losing
everything, some fleeing to the mountain, others escaping by swimming
among the breakers, in order to reach the French shore, in terror of the
prisons of San Sebastian.
At two o'clock in the morning, exhausted, drenched and half drowned, he
had knocked at the door of that isolated house, to ask from the good
Florentino his aid and an asylum.
And on awakening, after all the nocturnal noise of the equinoctial storm,
of the rain, of the groaning branches, twisted and broken, he perceived
that a grand silence had come. Straining his ear, he could hear no longer
the immense breath of the western wind, no longer the motion of all those
things tormented in the darkness. No, nothing except a far-off noise,
regular, powerful, continued and formidable; the roll of the waters in
the depth of that Bay of Biscay--which, since the beginning, is without
truce and troubled; a rhythmic groan, as might be the monstrous
respiration of the sea in its sleep; a series of profound blows which
seemed the blows of a battering ram on a wall, continued every time by a
music of surf on the beaches.--But the air, the trees and the surrounding
things were immovable; the tempest had finished, without reasonable
cause, as it had begun, and the sea alone prolonged the complaint of it.
To look at that land, that Spanish coast which he would perhaps never see
again, since his departure was so near, he opened his window on the
emptiness, still pale, on the virginity of the desolate dawn.
A gray light emanating from a gray sky; everywhere the same immobility,
tired and frozen, with uncertainties of aspect derived from the night and
from dreams. An opaque sky, which had a solid air and was made of
accumulated, small, horizontal layers, as if one had painted it by
superposing pastes of dead colors.
And underneath, mountains black brown; then Fontarabia in a morose
silhouette, its old belfry appearing blacker and more worn by the years.
At that hour, so early and so freshly mysterious, when the ears of most
men are not yet open, it seemed as if one surprised things in their
heartbreaking colloquy of lassitude and of death, relating to one
another, at the first flush of dawn, all that they do not say when the
day has risen.--What was the use of resisting the storm of last night?
said the old belfry, sad and weary, standing in the background in the
distance; what was the use, since other storms will come, eternally
others, other storms and other tempests, and since I will pass away, I
whom men have elevated as a signal of prayer to remain here for
incalculable years?--I am already only a spectre, come from some other
time; I continue to ring ceremonies and illusory festivals; but men will
soon cease to be lured by them; I ring also knells, I have rung so many
knells for thousands of dead persons whom nobody remembers! And I remain
here, useless, under the effort, almost eternal, of all those western
winds which blow from the sea--
At the foot of the belfry, the church, drawn in gray tints, with an air
of age and abandonment, confessed also that it was empty, that it was
vain, peopled only by poor images made of wood or of stone, by myths
without comprehension, without power and without pity. And all the
houses, piously grouped for centuries around it, avowed that its
protection was not efficacious against death, that it was deceptive and
untruthful--
And especially the clouds, the clouds and the mountains, covered with
their immense, mute attestation what the old city murmured beneath them;
they confirmed in silence the sombre truths: heaven empty as the churches
are, serving for accidental phantasmagoria, and uninterrupted times
rolling their flood, wherein thousands of lives, like insignificant
nothings, are, one after another, dragged and drowned.--A knell began to
ring in that distance which Ramuntcho saw whitening; very slowly, the old
belfry gave its voice, once more, for the end of a life; someone was in
the throes of death on the other side of the frontier, some Spanish soul
over there was going out, in the pale morning, under the thickness of
those imprisoning clouds--and he had almost the precise notion that this
soul would very simply follow its body in the earth which decomposes--
And Ramuntcho contemplated and listened. At the little window of that
Basque house, which before him had sheltered only generations of
simple-minded and confident people, leaning on the wide sill which the
rubbing of elbows had worn, pushing the old shutter painted green, he
rested his eyes on the dull display of that corner of the world which had
been his and which he was to quit forever. Those revelations which things
made, his uncultured mind heard them for the first time and he lent to
them a frightened attention. An entire new labor of unbelief was going on
suddenly in his mind, prepared by heredity to doubts and to worry. An
entire vision came to him, sudden and seemingly definitive, of the
nothingness of religions, of the nonexistence of the divinities whom men
supplicate.
And then--since there was nothing, how simple it was to tremble still
before the white Virgin, chimerical protector of those convents where
girls are imprisoned!--
The poor agony bell, which exhausted itself in ringing over there so
puerilely to call for useless prayers, stopped at last, and, under the
closed sky, the respiration of the grand waters alone was heard in the
distance, in the universal silence. But the things continued, in the
uncertain dawn, their dialogue without words: nothing anywhere; nothing
in the old churches venerated for so long a time; nothing in the sky
where clouds and mists amass; but always, in the flight of times, the
eternal and exhausting renewal of beings; and always and at once, old
age, death, ashes--
That is what they were saying, in the pale half light, the things so dull
and so tired. And Ramuntcho, who had heard, pitied himself for having
hesitated so long for imaginary reasons. To himself he swore, with a
harsher despair, that this morning he was decided; that he would do it,
at the risk of everything; that nothing would make him hesitate longer.
