Last night, the mistral had stopped suddenly, just after nightfall. There had then been a moment of delirium, the bars had turned into bodegas full of heady music, gleaming faces and sleepless eyes.
The police patrols cruised around in second gear, laid back and bored to tears. A few brawls broke out between gypsies, Arabs and gorillas from the town hall outside a gaudy fairground. But the national police force turned a blind eye—no treading on the toes of the boys from the municipal brigade.
The last crackers had exploded far away, in the hidden nooks and crannies of the town, before the sun came up: the last fireworks of a party that weariness had now put to bed.
That morning, liquid heat poured down from the sky.
The man was lying on the riverbank, in the fetal position, arms wrapped round his knees. He opened his eyes and, through his twitching eyelids, saw the white shape of the towers of the castle above him, melting into the saturated light.
The man was drenched in sweat, his raven hair stuck to his forehead like strips of cardboard. In the distance he could hear vague noises, presumably the last party animals stumbling home. But he very soon changed his mind: it was the baying of an angry crowd that was echoing off the walls of the fortress.
The clamor made his head spin. He closed his eyes again.
The man had hardly slept for three days. Three days of solitude. A taste of acid bile twisted his lips and flared his nostrils. The pastis he had drunk had now worn off. Time to get going.
He sat up. In front of him, the Rhône flowed calmly by. A few crooked roots scratched at the placid surface like monsters, as though trying to hold back the river’s regal progress. He tried to stand, but then realized that his legs would not hold him for a while, so he lay back on the warm, dry grass and stared at the powerful branches of the acacia that clawed at the sky above him.
It was time to think, to go over the past three days.
On the first day, as soon as the sun rose over the Camargue, he had started watching out for white spoonbills, spending hours hidden like a crocodile in the rock samphire across the marshland, a few meters from the Redon lagoon.
He had been waiting for months for the spoonbills, since March, when thousands of gray mullet gather in the placid waters of the delta, within easy swimming distance of the empty beaches, still shivering with cold; the time of year when the cormorants and herons come to gorge themselves on the surface fish.
For some time he had been studying the habits of spoonbills, and the places where they came to rest on their way back from Africa. This was often at the foot of clumps of tamarisks. He wanted to be able to observe them in the dawn’s golden light, but spoonbills are capricious as well as rare. That year, he had had to make do with the gluttonous antics of the cormorants and herons.
That morning, those large birds had still not appeared. He had waited until noon before finally deciding to change his vantage point and heading further west, toward the Capelière nature reserve. He had exchanged a few words with the keeper. Chitchat, nothing more.
During the afternoon, he wandered around for some time, his loaded camera in one hand and his binoculars in the other, stopping now and then to observe.
He had walked to the ends of the earth. Then the first spoonbill appeared, immaculate, stretching its long neck through the reeds, at the edge of the marsh. A second came to rest on a half-submerged tree trunk, in the middle of the dark waters. The ground, cracked in places and spongy in others, led away toward the setting sun, the flat horizon and the sea, which the mistral was furrowing.
The spoonbills had then flown back into their mysterious habitat, and night fell on the tip of the Camargue. In the distance, beyond the straight lines of the marshland, the flames of the great Fos oil terminal rose red into the dark sky, like proud banners. At one in the morning, he went back to his car and drove home, further north in Provence.
Day two was the day of the beast.
He had decided not to take his car and to hitchhike instead. He had waited a good hour for a friendly driver to pick him up at the Tarascon exit. It was a solitary tourist, an Englishman burned by the wicked sun, who had said, in perfect French:
“I’ve been living in Mouriès for three years now.”
“Really?” he had replied, pretending to take an interest in his driver. “I come from Eygalières.”
“I’m going to Marseille today … taking the boat to Corsica,” the Englishman went on, waving a hand through the hot air toward an imaginary sea.
“You have a good journey,” he had said, for want of anything better.
The Englishman’s Land-Rover, an old model, about as comfortable as a church pew, made one hell of a din. By the time they reached the turning that led to the Thibert farmhouse he had fallen into a sort of torpor, before pointing to a lay-by on the long straight stretch of Route Nationale 568, between Arles and Martigues.
“You can drop me off there.”
The Englishman braked abruptly, without asking any questions. The man got out and waited for the Land-Rover to fade into the distance. Then he slipped off through a barrier of reeds, careful to avoid their long leaves, which were as sharp as razors.
He walked straight on, like a bush hunter, across the huge flat expanse covered with scrawny grass and partitioned in squares by barbed wire: an hour’s walk, perhaps more. Behind him, in the distance, rose the dark crests of the Alpilles hills and the peak of Les Opiès, bleached by the sun’s last gleams.
Far off, in the direction of the rank of cypresses, the sheep of Méril farm were just visible. Not pausing for a moment, he leaped over a fence and found himself in the middle of some heifers, presumably belonging to the Castaldi herd. He walked straight on, keeping close enough to the pitch-black calves so as not to be spotted by chance passers-by, but far enough away so as not to spook them. A couple of times, his gaze met their empty eyes.
But he knew them too well to be afraid.
The day was fading by the time he reached Départementale 35, which marked the eastern border of Vigueirat national park, just a few kilometers away from Thibert’s farm. He decided to spend the night on that strip of the Camargue. The end of the day was luminous, as thousands of stars came out over Provence. Before nightfall, he was back at the beach and had crept through the ruddy clumps of samphire, without being noticed. Then he waited, as he usually did, flat on his stomach among the pink sea daffodils, white sand camomile and yellow sandy everlastings.
Then he sang, and the beast came. He told it of the Festival marvels and then took his leave.
When darkness fell on sea and land, he unrolled his sleeping bag in a warm hollow of a dune, sheltered from the wind. He slept for a few hours. In the depth of his sleep, he toyed with his craziest dream: to liberate the beast on the Festival of Saint Martha.
On the night of July 29.
He would talk about it with the master. But, in any case, he didn’t give a damn for his advice. The monster listened only to him.
The Rhône flowed on, heavy with late spring rain. Beneath the walls of King René’s Castle, some children had climbed onto a little promontory over the green waters of the river by clinging to the ivy that snaked its way along the rocks.
The man had completely recovered his spirits. He stood up, slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked toward the cries of the crowd.
It was Monday, June 30. The third day.
The last bull race had just finished, and with it, the grand festival of la Tarasque.