Arnaud

Tran Hang My

The richest man lives in France: his name is Arnaud.

He knows where the pasture cools, where the wild fires. He knows where the weather’s happening.

He has ten strong cows, a dog.

The cows he knows by name, the trees he knows by name.

The hill—for he stands on a hill—is shrubbed with conifers.

The house—for every rich man, there is a house—nests on the hillside with brick skirts and bay windows.

Jagged clumsy slopes run every which way.

He tells me it used to be the mayor’s house.

From floor to ceiling, it is covered in books. He reads everything—Maupassant, Louÿs, the almanac,

Flaubert (he loves Trois contes).

When I visited in spring, he was sixty-two, I was twenty-seven.

Now, seventy-two, he is more cunning.

He tells me stories and asks for my opinion of them.

In his garden, there’s a bed for runner beans and blushed tomatoes.

In the shed, he’s arranged the wheelbarrow, the tools. Mattocks, milk cans, and twine in coils.

Maud—the dog—stands guard against the lusting partridges.

At night, it is dark and wide so she keeps in the shed, otherwise she lies on the cool square under his bed.

For my visit, he uncorks the best red wine. A rare wine plucked from the end of the war.

We have it glass by glass with large slices of potato cake.

He tells me Madam Faucher makes it at his request (he tells me that hers is the best, but it’s his cows, the butter from his pasture, that makes it so good).

I have never met Madam Faucher, but her cake makes me giddy.

There is potato, cheese, prune, and bacon in the cake.

The bacon comes from the pig baron, Monsieur Barbier, on the next hill over.

I ask if he is even richer than the pig baron.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m afraid so.”

Every year, Arnaud gets richer. You can see it in the pictures I take of him.

A majestic, quasi-religious air.

A suspect for veritable miracles. They say he will be given sainthood.

But he has no time for miracles.

He gets up at dawn and calls to the cows who come trudging,

Forty languid legs from the stable.

The daily paper, a hunk of cheese, a half hard loaf that he gets from the breadsmith—

He carries them up the alpage with his cows.

At the top, he unwraps the paper, reading each column carefully.

At the top, the cows lower their gaze: Vincent, Victor, Marcel, Aimé . . .

Sometimes, his grandson visits from the valley and they go up the slope together.

I have only met him once, when Petit had just turned six.

The boy constitutes another of Arnaud’s veritable miracles—Arnaud, who is veritably impotent.

Still, there is no time for miracles.

He drives a motorbike for God’s sake; it saves him time when he has to get down to the valley to pick up Petit.

And still drives through gorges and switchback roads (and sports, over his farmer’s gilet, a leather jacket that belies his age).

At his request, I have taken a picture of him on the superbike,

Another on the alpage by his ten strong cows,

Another in the kitchen where he reads to me “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier”—

“How is it that Julien, who never showed any mercy, who would cut the legs off a cockcrow and strike a church mouse (only a boy then)

“And onto the pile of animals he’s slain: the stags, the deer, the badgers, peacocks, foxes, and jays . . .

“Who spared not even his father, and mother,

“How does he allow himself to stretch himself out to warm a dying leper?

“With his whole body upon the leper’s wounds—”

And we marvel together at the inexhaustible range of what is humanly possible.

Now it is odd, but I have never quite made up my mind about Arnaud,

Whether it is his saintliness which has brought me here or some impish, diabolical hand, plucking at the question,

Saying,

“See if you catch the devil eking from his soul.”

I have photographed him from every angle, if just to catch the devil flicker,

But what I catch is a filament,

A hair’s width

Taut

As a mathematical line

Drawing the eye from the present to that untouchable point of the past, occupying no space, no width—

“Here.”

He shows me a picture from ’39, not much older than Petit who is turning sixteen in a week.

In the valley to his hip in the grass with a shotgun.

The dog is out of sight.

I recognize the face, and he recognizes the facts that begin to close in on him like a wheel

Wheeling years of music,

Prejudice,

Dance,

And the girls fastened down like insects.

Édith, Élodie, Marie, Benoîte . . .

Names that have lost their order of importance

That had one time occupied him, ideologues that had been unbreakable,

Songs that were memorized . . .

They crowd him, dot by dot blotting out the interval.

And the present? It is almost unbearable. I see a man who is seventy-two—

A poet without a poem, a saint without his brutality, in which remains the eventual, predictable facts of life.

Petty desires, banal heroism,

Dirty despair.

He is incapable of surprise.

Still, I come back to make a photograph of him. Like clockwork, in the spring

The hills are set on fire.

When the dry foehn wind returns, he leaves the fuels to cure on the warming pasture. For three days and nights he waits and waits

And rereads the tales from Trois contes in order: the heart, the hospitalier, Hérodias.

On this last evening, when there are no stories left, Arnaud leaps from his part of the hill and onto the pasture.

He shouts at me to follow, and I hurry, clumsily, in the dark behind.

Maud is shouting too.

She leaps up and down between us. “Come quick!” she says and trusts that I am one of her cows.

“Arnaud is waiting! He is waiting!”

In a few hours, the fire will run every which way, over the winter grasses, spent roots, shrubs and dead wood in the pasture,

Then downslope like the burning arm of a saint,

Then down to the shed and up to the conifers.

This time, Arnaud tells me the fire will die out a half meter from his house. His arms held to the side, hardly moving.

I can tell that he is lying.

Flashes of gold, and the air whisks up in columns.

Long exaggerated shadows move across the sky, copious smoke.

Maud backs up from the heat.

It is so wide, so loud. The whole hill pulsing with heat, even the quadrants which the fire has yet to reach.

No more rush, or pity. Those central human characters are carried up by the same columns—

And together, we marvel at the ordinary length between two heartbeats

Like two insatiable brides.

Acknowledgement

“He tells me stories and asks for my opinion of them” and “we marvel together at the inexhaustible range of what is humanly possible” are borrowed from Omnibus: Pig Earth (1979), written and presented by John Berger, directed by Mike Dibb.