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THE OPEN DOOR AND THE GAME SEPTEMBER 1799

A little more than two hundred years ago in the year 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte, the son of a Corsican lawyer, became the First Consul of France. A short stocky man with close-cut hair, his enemies called him ‘Little Crop-head’. Nobody knew very much about his personality, but the French people had confidence in a man who won battles. Napoleon changed many things. He gave France a new legal system. He strengthened the police administration and improved a chaotic financial system. His main interest, however, lay in military affairs. He passed a law obliging all adult men to serve as soldiers and encouraged them by making it possible for even the poorest and humblest to become officers.

Not long after coming to power, Napoleon turned his eyes towards France’s eastern frontiers, where an alpine people lived peacefully but in great poverty among the mountains, in a way that had seen no change since the days of William Tell. The Consul had once before marched his army round the shores of Lake Geneva and over the snowbound Saint Bernard Pass to fight the Austrians on the Italian plains. Now he wanted to protect that frontier definitively from further attacks. So he occupied the wide fertile valley of the river Rhone and proclaimed it an independent French republic. His administration and military base at Martigny did not have an easy task. He gave his administrators the right to forcibly enlist hundreds of local men into the French army. The impoverished peasant farmers of the isolated mountain valleys, rising to the frontier with Italian Savoy, soon manifested their displeasure.

In one such valley, two days hard climb by foot from Martigny, lies still today the village of Liddes, one of the last permanently occupied settlements on the winding mule track to the Saint Bernard Pass. To the west a series of ragged ridges rises progressively to the higher summits along the frontier. To the east the eternal snow and ice of the Grand Combin towers over the village, sometimes shrouded in whirling cloud, sometimes clear and blinding against the deep blue sky. But very often a thick grey mist shrouds the moss-covered rocks and gnarled larch trees that dot the steep slopes.

The inhabitants of Liddes and the surrounding farms allowed their lives to be governed by the weather and the seasons. In the long winter months they stayed inside. Odd jobs were never lacking—a wooden drinking trough to be finished or a gate post repaired. After a heavy rain shower, dislodged rocks rumbled down the mountainside from above the tree line and sometimes carried away a hut or hay barn. In the narrow streets, people paused at the familiar sound of falling rocks. Housewives in their hoop skirts and homespun shawls raised their eyes to follow the threatening landslide. They remembered perhaps that not so many years before part of the Diablerets Mountain on the north side of the valley had slid away and crashed down on the sleeping village of Liapey, burying all the inhabitants and their cattle under a million tons of rock. Only one man had survived and when he finally extricated himself from the mountain of debris he had lost his wits. For three days the sun had been hidden behind a dense cloud of dust as far away as Lausanne, the lake-side city half way to Geneva.

Damien André Berra was born on July 15, 1782 and spent his childhood in this apparent paradise with his widowed father in one of the highest mayens, on the steep grassy slopes above the village. His dark skin and hair could be traced back to the time when the Saracens had occupied the Rhone Valley. His black curls fell thickly to his strong shoulders. Summer suns and winter winds had tanned his face to the color of new leather. At seventeen he walked already with the slightly crouched but muscular gait of someone well-used to carrying heavy bales of hay up the steep hillside from an early age. A handsome youth, his juvenile, almost girlish face contrasted incongruously with a powerful hirsute body and often led strangers into thinking he was younger than his age, until they saw him haymaking beside his father on the steep slope, muscles taut as a bent bow, broad back arched under the lifted load.

Few people passed by the isolated farm, situated well above the village at a spot called Arpille, but in those early adolescent days the isolation rarely oppressed Damien. Whenever lack of work permitted, however, he seized his faded blue three-cornered hat from the peg by the door and roamed the woods in search of deer trails or blueberries or birds’ nests or practiced the French he was learning with the village priest, filling a dog-eared wad of hand-stitched paper with his neatly calligraphed script.

Two hundred feet above the highest pastures, on a small plateau known as Champlong, a small lake of melting snow formed each spring in a hollow, surrounded by a mad jumble of boulders and clumps of alpine roses. It almost dried up for a few weeks at the end of summer. Then you could see the dainty hoof prints of chamois in the mud, for even in October a thin silver thread of water continued to trickle down from the spongy marshland above. Only the tinkle of falling water, the lazy drone of flies and the musical melody of distant cow bells breached the pervasive silence. Despite this deceptive peace, hardly a day passed without a rumor reaching the village of a further fifty men from a neighboring valley being forced into the French army and escorted down to Martigny, the large town the Romans had founded, where the River Rhône made a sharp turn before heading west towards the distant lake.

Solitary by nature and circumstances, Damien only joined the other village boys on Sunday. After church they changed out of their tight knee-breeches and clump-heeled, squaretoed shoes. The girls cast off their triangular-shaped bodices, laced down the front with silk ribbons and hung up their short shoulder capes for another week. Then everyone scampered up the stony track to the hidden lake. Damien could never decide if he really enjoyed this group activity. Without brothers or sisters, even contact with his ageing father revolved round their nine brown and white cows and the four long-haired goats. His mother had died a long time ago, when he was five, and he no longer remembered clearly what she had looked like. All his companions in the village belonged to large peasant families. His closest friend, Paul Reille, a chubby freckled-faced boy with globular green eyes, had four brothers and five sisters.

Pierre’s only other close companion was Jean Chapuys. His family owned the wagon that transported goods and passengers from Liddes down the long winding track to the valley, through beech woods and along the precipitous forested flank of a torrent-rushing ravine. Their bad-tempered mule had the objectionable habit of kicking out at anyone rash enough to approach it. Most of the time it wiled away the tedious hours tied to a larch tree behind the church, where it brayed punctually whenever the bells rang. Only Jean’s influence held any sway with the mule. Once he drove the beast all the way to the top of the pass on the Savoy frontier, a journey of two days each way, just to see if he could tire it. After this experiment, born of despair and desperation, the mule kicked more than ever and eventually had to be sold to the French garrison in Martigny, who lost little time in transforming the mule into that compact spiced sausage so popular with troops of a less discerning taste in culinary refinement.

Among the older village girls, Biquette Reille, Paul’s younger sister, occupied Damien’s thoughts with a disturbing urgency. Her forefathers had originally migrated from farther west and Biquette had inherited their fair hair and pale skin, often covered with the family freckles in summer. Her long copper tresses fell abundantly almost to her waist. Her nose, disproportionally broad, might well have marred her looks but was compensated by her timid benevolent gray eyes that half closed whenever she thought deeply. Her oval face and wide forehead indicated an obstinacy and strength of character, well suited to her name ‘Little Goat’. Her recurrent smiles revealed a perfectly symmetric row of small white teeth.

Even though her father was the village mayor, her family lived in modest conditions, but Biquette always managed to look clean and tidy in the same long tightly-laced dress with close-fitting sleeves. She took pains with her hair too, brushing it close to her head in the fashion of town girls, although she had only been down as far as Orsières twice in her life. This eccentric hairstyle, coupled with the intriguing bulge of her developing breasts beneath the tightly-laced bodice, made Biquette especially conspicuous among the village youth. Damien was no exception and often hid behind a timber pile to watch her pass with a heavy wicker basket of neatly-hewn logs straining her slender shoulders.

One memorable Sunday afternoon, the three friends slipped away from the village and scrambled up the boulder-strewn bed of the Drance. This hazardous venture, later to become a regular ritual, remained a well-guarded secret. The roaring torrent foamed among massive moss-covered boulders, slippery and treacherous, carved by the thundering water into weird fantastic shapes. So as not to attract attention on their return with their Sunday clothes soiled and sodden, they decided to remove them and splashed naked through rapids and pools in a rainbow of mist and flying spray. They scaled smooth wet walls of weathered limestone or slid down chutes. By the end of the afternoon, blue with cold and teeth chattering, they recuperated their hidden clothes and returned to the village. Surprisingly these secret expeditions never ended in tragedy. Biquette prevented the boys taking any risks she considered too great. The sight of her standing, pale and almost ethereal, at the bottom of a tempting pillar to be climbed always convinced them to abandon the attempt.

On other occasions they would meet in a favorite haunt beneath a series of rock ledges that centuries of avalanches had crumbled and cracked. A perfect spot for watching chamois, they never tired of waiting for a glimpse of these shy secretive mountain goats, so difficult to see, unless they uttered a warning whistle that betrayed their position. The same color as the surrounding rocks, they could remain motionless for long periods, nibbling at a patch of moss, their short tails twitching, ears alert to the slightest alien sound. On these beautiful autumn days, the snow clinging to the summits reflected brilliantly and hurt their unprotected eyes. The exposed ice of the glaciers glistened against the lengthening violet shadows along the precipitous rock faces. Bands of yellow-billed trilling choughs wheeled overhead, riding the warm wind currents.

Damien’s growing delight in Biquette’s company, often to the exclusion of her brother, conjured up memories of their intimate water games and the tantalizing tuft of tight copper curls that barely covered her pubis. Once or twice he intercepted what he presumptuously took for a glance of admiring approval as her eyes fell on his powerful body. Damien refused to take it for granted that the only future possible was to grow prematurely old like his father, to marry Biquette perhaps, and die in the shadow of the towering mountain.

When a spell of wet weather made roaming the slopes impossible, Damien might spend hours in the priest’s house among his modest collection of books. Mostly Latin prayer books, he did possess a Bible in French and he had taught Damien to read and write from it. At sixteen he was the only literate boy on the mountain. Verbal communication among the villagers was in Arpitan, a dialect that had only very distant roots in the French language and no written form.

Damien liked the sounds words made most. He suspected that books other than the Bible existed and his first attempts at creative writing stem from this period. The Bible, however, as interpreted by Father Martel, merely lectured him on moral virtues, conjugal fidelity or social philosophy, which was not what he sought. Only his growing obsession with Biquette inspired him to write and seemed to suggest that in some way a man’s desire for women was at the root of his need to create. When he raised the subject with Father Martel, the priest only waved him aside.

“Pagan sentiment!” he scoffed. “Only God can inspire creation,” As a Catholic priest he could hardly have thought otherwise, but the argument failed to convince Damien, who continued to look upon Biquette as a sort of hidden goddess he could secretly worship and who was progressively becoming a source of inspiration. At sixteen an idea had already formed in his mind that one day he would write down the tales that had begun to fill his fertile imagination.

Immersion in the Bible had other more philosophical consequences. Damien found himself thinking that to believe blindly in the existence of Father Martel’s God was as flawed as not believing in Him at all. Surely to be of any practical use a door had to be always open. Belief like disbelief closed the door on any reasonable hope of contemplative evolution. Damien decided that in future his door would always be open.

One evening on their return from the pool Damien and Biquette stopped to say goodnight by the stone bridge on the outskirts of the village. The setting sun cast long fingers of shadow from the surrounding summits. A longer belt of deep shade filled the valley, where the Drance torrent roared sullenly among the boulders. Housewives in traditional embroidered costumes had lit flickering oil lamps in the shuttered chalet windows along the narrow cobbled street. Grazing cattle settled down for the night in the golden pastures. Clouds of wing-beating bats flitted from the barns. Plumes of blue smoke spiraled from chimneys. An alerted dog barked from an isolated farm yard and away in the dusk-dark forest a lone wolf replied.

On an impulse Damien decided to accompany Biquette to the door of her parents’ house in the village center and waited breathlessly for the usual peck on the cheek from Biquette. For the first time she kissed him languorously on the mouth and pressed her hard round breasts against his heaving chest. The clinging embrace was disturbed by the clamor of angry voices rose from beyond the open door with its carved frieze of alpine flowers. The couple exchanged glances of surprise. The introverted inhabitants of the Entremont Valley rarely expressed themselves. Normally a timid morose race, they isolated their feelings. Hidden passions seldom burst into flame, but when they did, the result could often be dramatic, leading to lethal clan feuds lasting for generations.

Damien pulled Biquette into the shadow of the outside staircase as Jacques Boval, the village elder, slipped from the room, his clump-heeled buckled shoes echoing on the wooden step. He buttoned his long square-tailed jacket over his embroidered waistcoat and headed towards the church. The incensed voices continued to rumble inside the smoke-wreathed room.

Paul’s father growled. “What’s this Republic to me? What need have the citizens of Entremont for his Act of Mediation? If he wants to mediate, let him stay in France and mediate there!” Other wrathful voices joined the uproar.

“Remember when they came through here two years ago with their cursed troops? I said nothing good would come of it.”

“Let the folks down on the plain look after their own affairs. They may welcome the French and their mediation, if they wish. We want nothing to do with it here.” The agitated assembly approved this patriotism with much cheering, hand clapping and stamping of feet. Paul’s father raised his hand for silence.

“This is a weighty matter,” he insisted. “We have all been informed of this Act. If we don’t send the French our young men for their army, they’ll come up here and take them. We can bend before the will of these foreign invaders like the valley folk have or…” Not finding a suitable sentiment for the occasion, he coughed loudly instead. Heavy chairs scraped on the coarse floor boards and six village men filed out into the moonless night in a halo of tobacco and wine fumes. Damien’s father being among them, he fell into step beside him.

A canopy of autumnal cold covered the combe. Settling dew frosted the tufts of springy grass. The banks of low cloud that had lain over the Rhone Valley all day were disintegrating under the buffeting of a rising wind. Damien’s father remained silent. Visibly perplexed, he walked as though he carried a heavy burden on his back. His hunched shoulders made him look like a tired bear. This impression left Damien strangely indifferent. Despite the absence of a mother, he had never felt totally dependent on his honest but guileless father. Well, not in the way that he now depended on Biquette’s companionship or the mountain, the veritable key to his young life, a captivating place of both birth and death, a centuries-old pattern that expected to be obeyed.

The next morning a printed notice appeared on the fountain in the centre of the village. It informed the inhabitants of Liddes that the council of the newly-created Rhodanic Republic intended to enforce the Act of Mediation. It required the Republic to contribute their young men to serve in the French army, once more at war with Austria and preparing to send twenty thousand soldiers over the Saint Bernard Pass. Few people in Liddes wondered what both the French and the Austrians were doing in Italy, a question of political strategy beyond their limited comprehension. The notice from the military governor at Martigny requested the mayor of each commune to enlist fifteen men over sixteen years old and send them down to the valley within ten days. It didn’t require much genius to realize that if they lost even fifteen working men, the entire community risked starving to death. Damien mingled with the fulminating crowd at the fountain. Like him many of the boys his age, bored with the monotony of village life, were eager for adventure and were tempted to enlist. Only the thought that his relationship with the red-haired, bewitching Biquette might soon rise to beguiling heights prevented Damien from throwing in his lot with them.

No immediate action followed, however, and the little community slipped sleepily back into a centuries-old routine. Patience is a well-honed acquisition among mountain folk, used to being isolated for months during the long winters, buried below the wind-blown snow drifts. Autumn faded as the larch needles turned orange and fell in a thick carpet on the dying yellow grass. The first snow appeared overnight and powdered the higher slopes. Once or twice a thin film of ice formed on the fountain. The village held its breath and waited for the blow to fall.

***

OCTOBER 1799

The first half of October passed without incident. The mountain village waited uneasily in a stubborn silence. The perfect autumn weather, warm, golden and luminous, diverted their attention. Endless days of cloudless azure sky followed each other and at dawn the barren hillside drowsed below a glittering carpet of frost crystals. The fountain froze at night to a thin trickle that disappeared into a shining cone of opaque ice. It needed a stout axe to topple it over the side of the trough and free the water. All the farmers had brought their cattle inside the chalets to survive the long harsh winter, warmly bedded in the hay, so patiently raked from the terraced fields along the Drance. Their heavy bells hung in a long line under the sloping eaves, the thick leather collars, studded with worn brass. The sturdy larch-beamed chalets exhaled the sour musty smell of ruminating cows behind the blind shuttered windows. Nature too imposed itself on this frail smudge of human presence. Timid deer approached the houses apprehensively to drink from the stream at dusk. They left delicate forked hoof prints in the hardened mud among the brown withered mallows. The foxes descended from the higher slopes to slink through the streets at night. The wolves in the forest howled more insistently.

During these short bright days Damien and the other farm folk worked diligently to harvest the last hay scythed before the frost. In the mountain the growing grass is like a calendar. It follows the seasons. The first crop is gathered a bare three weeks after the snow has finally melted. After lying brown and flattened on the sodden ground, it springs into startling abundance. In spring you can watch it climbing up the slopes from the distant plain with its blossoming orchards and terraced vineyards, while the higher villages still slumber under three feet of snow. June brings a second hay harvest, when the alpine meadows are brilliantly dotted with pale mauve crocuses and deep blue gentians. By September the grass has grown high for a third time. Stooped sway-backed villagers dot the steep slopes, dancing tirelessly to the swinging rhythm of the scythes.

Damien saw less of Paul and his sister. The three friends found time for only one last visit to the rock pools. After bathing under the waterfall, they lazed on a smooth white boulder sunning their naked bodies in the warming rays of the setting sun. Paul slipped away mysteriously and left the couple alone. Suddenly Biquette reached over and slid her caressing fingers into his lap. Unknown to Biquette such sensual caresses were already a familiar experience for Damien. At twelve years old in the secrecy of the church vestry the priest had ordered him to undress and stand before him and sing hymns in his fluted treble. Damien had experienced his first precocious ejaculations against a backdrop of hanging cassocks in the incense-laden gloom of the vestry. He had informed his father, who just waved him off impatiently. Such things were considered normal for Catholic priests. They could never marry and carnal relationships with the opposite sex were forbidden fruit. Robert Martel had doubtlessly been born four thousand years too late and in the wrong country. In ancient Greece, “boy-love” was highly recommended and often mandatory, where traditional statutes obliged all adult men educate a boy lover into the responsibilities and practices of adulthood. Not altogether an unpleasant experience, the priest’s caresses had little immediate effect, other than to awake in the boy a predisposition for masturbation, which remained with him for the rest of his life.

“Paul won’t come back for a while,” Biquette assured him. “I told him to leave us alone for at least half an hour,” she giggled, guiding Damien’s inexperienced hand into a novel world of sensual pleasure. They only drew apart when they heard Paul’s diplomatic cough. “Don’t latch your shutter tonight and we can play some more,” she whispered hastily.

Shortly after midnight Damien heard a tapping on his shutter and when Biquette finally slipped back down to the sleeping village, the blush of dawn already illuminated the eastern summits and the first awareness of an insatiable desire had seriously undermined their waning innocence and effectively terminated their childhood. Their subsequent love-making under the moon-bright beams of the old chalet and sometimes in broad daylight, hidden in the forest fringe, acted as a catalyst and inspired Damien to delve farther into an ever-evolving world of words, alternate ways of expressing his emotions. It laid down the blueprint of the tall tales that were to make him a legend in later years.

Too busy in the final rush to harvest the last hay before the snow fell, the whole community labored from dawn to dusk, raking the new-mown grass and hanging it on wooden frames to dry. The Berra farm being situated high above the village at Arpille, Damien could observe Paul and Biquette far below in the family fields at the lower end of the village. His eyes often strayed to the flitting figure, high-hipped and lithe, in her long blue skirt and straw hat, raking the hay into rows. He even distinguished the wisps of copper hair beneath her head scarf. They caught the setting sun and gleamed at intervals on her shawled shoulders. But mostly his mind dwelled on how she looked lying, marble-veined and pallid on the bed in the brilliant moonlight.

Then one day the spell of waiting snapped. Word reached the village that a squadron of French soldiers from the garrison at Martigny had entered the gorge. Everyone expected they would sleep at Orsières, the biggest village on the route to the pass, situated at the junction of the Drance d’Entremont and the Drance de Ferret. In two days they would reach Liddes. A few people pretended that they might continue up to the monastery and over into the Aosta valley, but nobody really believed such wishful thinking. In fact the French wasted no time. Shortly after dawn next day the son of a woodcutter from Muot spotted the column from his perch in a pine tree above the track. After a hasty gallop across the hillside, he reached the mayor’s house with the French party still thirty minutes away. Father Martel appeared in the porch of his church and soon a confused crowd gathered in the cobbled street by the fountain to gaze with peasant resignation at the plume of dust from the horses’ hoofs, drifting above the wooded slopes. Father Martel began ringing the church bell. Damien scrambled to the door of the barn and peered through the racks of hay aligned along one wall. Among the wind-rocked fir trees he clearly distinguished the blue uniforms of the approaching French. An officer rode at the head of the column. Already the muffled rattle of drums reached his ears on the breeze. His father shuffled out onto the balcony over his head, his boots dragging on the rough boards and making them creak.

“They’ll not come up here,” he speculated, scratching the back of his neck. In the village center the men drove the women and girls inside the chalets and bolted the doors, before trooping off to assemble in the church. The bell continued ringing. Monotonous and mellow, the sound echoed among the toppled boulders and rock-strewn ravines that ringed the alarmed village.

“They’ll not come up this far,” Berra repeated. For the first time in his life he really appreciated the relative isolation at Arpille. Side by side on the worn wooden balcony the two men watched as the French entered the deserted street, silent and shuttered now. The wind had ceased. Even the geranium blossoms in the carved wooden boxes along the balconies no longer stirred. A solitary brindled cat crept cautiously out of a byre and blinked into the low-slanting autumn sun. Only the wistful wheeling of choughs and the mournful monotony of the bell broke the torpid silence.

The elegantly uniformed officer called a halt at the fountain and allowed his horse to drink. With the typical arrogance of his race and rank -he felt little affinity with uncultivated peasants who massacred the French language with their barbaric mountain dialect—the officer’s eyes roamed round the deserted square, at the carved balconies basketed with flowers, the neatly-chopped piles of firewood underneath. He scrutinized the shuttered windows while his weary dust-covered troops waited for orders. Finally the church bell faltered and fell silent. The officer dismounted, spurs flashing, sheathed sword swinging at his side and summoned six soldiers. Then he sauntered over to the simple stone chapel. In his best surplice, Father Martel leant forward authoritatively in the carved larchwood pulpit. His voice never faltered as the doors swung open and a wide swath of sunlight flooded the narrow nave.

“So do comings and goings,” he proclaimed to the assembled men. “The rhythm of change, alternate and persistent in everything under the skies, the rhythm…”

“In the name of the Republic,” barked the officer, clutching the handle of his sword. He produced a document from inside his jacket and unrolled it. Somebody coughed a harsh grating cough like an old ram with a sore throat. “The Mayor of Liddes is summoned within the hour to present himself before the official of the military government of the Republic. Beyond that period the official will take whatever action he deems fit and just in order to fulfill the conscription mandate in his possession.” The officer vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. In the shadow-deep gloom of the little church the men in the polished pews sat sullenly. Apart from the priest nobody had understood a word but everyone guessed the general meaning. Isolated protesting voices burst out. Father Martel climbed down from the pulpit, attempting to conceal his anxiety. Only the weariness in his movements and the damp sweat-soaked mesh of graying hair that hid his forehead betrayed his fears. He took the mayor by the elbow and led him to the side, where an ancient polished pillar supported the centre arch.

“It can do no harm to see what action this Frenchman intends to take,” he suggested with a sigh, but everyone knew what action the French would take if the village refused to hand over the twenty men for conscription. “Let us compromise for the present,” the priest suggested. He peered through the crack in the heavy porch doors. The dismissed soldiers sprawled in disinterested clusters round the dusty square and its gushing fountain, too numerous and well-equipped for any armed opposition.

The French officer had installed himself in the mayor’s chalet and ordered a fire to be lit in the huge open hearth, blackened by generations of soot. The villagers crowded the door to watch him remove his cavalry boots and stretch his legs to the flames. Sporadic gusts of wind sent puffs of smoke into the room, where it ascended to the planked ceiling and spiraled along the cracks between the boards. The relaxing officer left the villagers in little doubt as to his instructions. He had brought orders from Martigny to establish a census of all male inhabitants of Liddes over sixteen, including outlying hamlets and isolated farms. Until the mayor had drawn up this list the French intended to remain camped in town. Each family would accommodate one of his soldiers, which made it almost impossible to hold secret meetings.