Free The Solitude of Compassion by Jean Giono

hillside sang the bitter harmony of despair; it seemed to me, each time, that the terrible bawling of a god was going to surge out of it.
    The seasonal rains obliged me to remain in the kind olive groves at the edge of the town; I made use of the good weather one day to plunge into that air above the hillsides.

    The stronghold was now clean. The ivy dead; its trunks burned slowly in a brushfire. At a dry clacking of pruning shears, I turned my head: a man was cutting the laurels.
    I called out and asked for water.
    â€œMy good man. I can hardly give you water; I barely have a finger’s worth up there in the old abandoned cistern that I opened, and it is still thick and green and would not agree with you. But, if you would please pass me that wicket of brambles and set yourself down a moment, then I will go find you some grapes.”
    His mouth, one would have said that it was blossoming with the stalk of hyssop that he was chewing.
    Â 
    The man was made for this land.
    He had golden eyes, very soft, a big beard which curled up in black balls; the little pear tree agonizing in the middle of the underbrush still had two leaves the color of his eyes.
    Â 
    I returned many times to see him.
    With strokes of the spade and aided by an old fire he had pushed the undergrowth back to the other side of the valley. The land that had been opened up was then ready to receive the seeds of love. It seemed that in this clean space he had, with his heavy feet, danced the dance of order.
    Â 
    In the spring there was a last battle between the man and the undergrowth. The undergrowth had surreptitiously prepared its attack by the slow infiltration of feelers and the flight of blond seeds. One morning he found his land covered with insolent asparagus, gnarled and shiny, and he understood that it was time to settle the score once and for all. Despite the precocious heat,
the battle lasted all day long. It was already night when he stood up again and wiped his forehead. Nonetheless he was the victor. And I understood, the next day, that he had achieved a victory over this savage land which he wanted to be definitive, judging from the ferocious way that he had decimated the young oaks and pushed the waves of fire into the very prickly heart of the woods.
    The hard sky, the hill, the stifling sun, were of an unheard of cruelty, he told me:
    â€œI do not want to work today, I do not feel well, stay with me a while. Stay until evening.”
    It was the first time that he had desired my presence.
    Then, without transition:
    â€œI am from the Alps: Saint-Auban-d’Oze. A beautiful land! At the bottom of the valley the road stretches between two lines of poplars. On Sunday, girls pass by on their way to the dance, on bicycle, with the handlebars loaded with red and yellow dahlias. At night we sleep to the great rushing of the torrent.
    â€œMy house is the last one in the village, on the side of Gap. It is calm; there are no bars across from it. But the long-faced procession of penitents never comes that far on holidays; when they dance under the nut tree in the square I cannot hear the music, and, well, perhaps it is too calm.
    â€œWhat I have just told you, I understood it after the fact. But, let us sit under the laurel tree.”
    Â 
    â€œIn the summer, I harnessed the mule, and we went into ‘the land’—a little pointed piece with three willows. You cannot know; there is nothing more beautiful in all the world than the poplars of that region in the morning sun and the wind. I was seated in the
front of the carriage, my wife behind. When I turned towards her, she laughed at me.
    â€œUpon arriving, I cut the dry branches and we made a bed for Guitte, I did not tell you: a beautiful little girl that we had, fat, pink, with hips…”
    Â 
    He stopped.
    Â 
    â€œWhen one is so happy, one should be distrustful; only, there you go, one never notices it at the time.
    â€œI had my suspicions, like