Once in Europa by John Berger Page B

him a gesture of authority, and from the age of thirty to the age of seventy, the authority of the gesture had not changed. He wore his hat now as if he were expecting total obedience from thirty cows and one dog.
    That’s Violette there, he muttered to Danielle, pointing with his stick to a large brown cow with black eyes and horns. Always the last to come when called, always wandering off by herself, she has her own system, Violette, and I shall get rid of her in the autumn!
    He had lost his father at the age of fourteen. His father, who married twice, had a passion for cards. Every evening in the winter he would say:
Sauva la graisse!
Wipe the grease off the table, we are going to play cards. And so he became known as Emilien à Sauva, and his son as Marius à Sauva.
    Emilien, the father, left little behind except debts. The family house was sold, and Marius, who was the eldest son, had to leave to look for work in Paris. As he climbed for the first time in his life into a train, he swore that he would come back with enough money to pay off the family debts and that eventually he would have the largest herd of cows in the village.
    So you’re going to sweep their chimneys? asked the ticket collector.
    I’ll eat their shit, said Marius the boy, if they pay me more for it.
    He achieved what he swore he would. He worked in a tannery in Aubervilliers, a little to the north of the Arc de Triomphe. By the time he was thirty he had paid off the family debts. By the time he was fifty he had the largest herd in the village.
    They are calm today, Danielle, he went on, calm and agreeable, and they stay together. Not like yesterday—yesterday they couldfeel the storm, and there were flying ants. They ran with their tails straight out. They were as disagreeable as you can imagine yesterday. And today they are honey-sweet. As sweet as honey, Danielle.
    It was the beginning of the summer and the grass was full of flowers, vanilla orchids, arnica, red campion, globeflowers, and blue centaurea that people say are the souls of poets.
    Danielle was twenty-three. Her mother was dead and she lived with her elderly father, who had five cows and some goats. She had a job in the warehouse of a furniture factory. But in the spring of ’82 the factory went bankrupt, and so she proposed to take her father’s animals to the mountains—to the chalet where she had spent several summers as a child with her mother.
    How does she have the courage to stay up there alone? people in the village asked. Yet the truth was she didn’t need courage. It suited her—the silence, the sun, the slow daily routine. Like many people who are sure of themselves, Danielle was a little intimidating. At village dances the boys didn’t fall over themselves to partner her—though she danced well and had wide hips and tiny feet. They weren’t sure she would laugh at their jokes. So they called her
slow
. In reality, this so-called slowness of hers was a kind of imperturbability. She had a wide face—a little like that of a Red Indian squaw—with dark eyes, large shoulders, small wrists and plump capable hands. It was easy to imagine Danielle as the mother of several children—except that she seemed to be in no hurry to find a man to be their father.
    Grandad! she teased Marius, when she paid him a second visit a few days later. You dye it, don’t you?
    Dye what?
    Seventy and not a single white hair!
    It’s in the breeding.
    Danielle looked away as if she had suddenly forgotten her joke. The few white clouds above the peaks were the only sign that the world was still going on.
    My father had the same head of hair, Marius continued, thick and black as a lamb when they nailed him in his coffin. Go fetch Lorraine, Johnny! he called to the dog, Find Lorraine!
    The dog bounded away to fetch a cow who was straying along the slope to the west. Over the seasons the cows at Peniel have made, with their own feet,