Silence has become a rare currency. Noise leads us everywhere. Through her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand draws us into the rustling of silence, a balm for our bodies and minds in these noisy times, a common good to cherish and protect. Seventh of eight articles.
Abondance, Haute-Savoie, early June. When, at the bottom of the valley, Sophie Duchêne, 54, closes her grocery store and says goodbye to the last customer among her melons, sausages and cheeses, the sun is still lingering over the Roc de Tavaneuse which touches the sky at 2156 meters. Her father has a small chalet there on the heights. To get there, you have to climb on foot for an hour on a very steep slope, no other way. The father no longer has the legs. “I climb in my head,” he says. But his daughter does. “It’s worth it,” she smiles. “I like to go there in the evening, when the birds are singing.”
“The silence up there,” Sophie continues, “is like the air we breathe.” But each time, strangely, it has to be reclaimed. “You have to be able to find it, then listen to it. I say to my dog: give me this moment.” As if listening to the silence meant being able to listen to yourself.
Crazy about their mountains
Perched near monsters and gods, the Savoyards are crazy about their mountains. “Not a morning goes by when I’m not aware of the places I live in,” continues the shopkeeper from Abondance, who tends her vegetable garden before opening the grocery store. “When the moon rises between the peaks, I sow what rises: my salads and my flowers. When the moon descends, what descends: potatoes and carrots.” I smile, I had never thought of sowing in these terms. “When things are bad, I go for a walk in the silence of the mountains,” says Lucienne Pras, 80. “It gives me new energy.” “I go up to the mountain pastures,” says Paul Girard-Despraulex, the mayor of the town of 1,500 inhabitants, “and I contemplate. We are perched, we dominate everything.” Perhaps from up there, we can see our lives better, a tiny piece of time inscribed in the centuries?
We are of our geography, molded in its physical, biological and cultural reality. Living with infinity at one’s doorstep, frequenting altitude and “solidified hurricanes”, an expression of the Franco-British mountaineer Henry Russell, shapes human profiles and forges characters. The mountaineer, writes Russell, “is almost as wild as he is tender and there always remains something abrupt, inaccessible and rough about him. […] He has analogies with the monk.”**
The mountain people are sparing in their speech. “Our villages were completely isolated,” Sophie relates. “My grandmother tended the cows in the mountains by crocheting. And my grandfather almost never spoke.” “We are rather silent,” Lucienne adds, “we take a long time to tame.” Like their mountains, long and slow to tame.
So high, so far
To get to his house, at 1200 meters, on the Cornettes de Bise which peak at 2432 meters, you have to drive a few good kilometers on winding roads brushing against precipices, so narrow that I allow myself to honk my horn to warn oncoming vehicles of my presence. Which, I agree, is completely incongruous in this country. “Why so high, so far? To find silence and peace?” I ask as I approach him. A mysterious smile lights up his face. He pauses. “This is my chalet. Otherwise, I live down there, in Vacheresse.”
Gilles Bouvier, 64, worked for 40 years at the Evian water bottling plant. “Six million liters a day, madam, pumped, bottled, sealed, then shipped to 125 countries!” While the Savoyards are generally not very talkative, Gilles is very talkative. This water, produced by rain and snow, infiltrates the ground, transiting for about fifteen years in the Alpine depths before ending up, purified and loaded with minerals, in the bottle. “The running water is captured on the Gavot plateau,” adds my interlocutor, “above Lake Geneva.”
And silence, Mr. Bouvier? Can you find it so high up, so far away? “Oh! If you knew… In two weeks, it will be the holidays and the hustle and bustle here! There will be cars, bicycles. Tourists in clusters will climb even higher to walk their dogs and eat potato fritters at the restaurant above.” A highly frequented restaurant so high up, so far away? It’s hard to imagine. “I’m too old to move. But in winter, it’s peaceful. I climb up here on snowshoes.”
Silence is scary
My mountain romanticism, I admit, takes a slight hit. Only slightly. So there are the dog walkers, the tourists, the cyclists and the joggers. Generally from the cities, the latter climb into the mountains puffing like oxen, ears well plugged by headphones, seeming impervious to everything else. “This image shocks me,” laments our grocer Sophie Duchêne. “They miss the essential,” adds Lucienne Pras, “the song of the birds, the murmur of the wind, of the streams. The noises up there are good noises.” The mayor of Abondance, Paul Girard-Despraulex, tempers. “Well, you have to be of the times.” “But silence is scary,” he continues, “because it pushes us to reflect.” It forces us to think.
“Silence can be interpreted as an absence of life,” explains psychoacoustician and McGill University professor Catherine Guastavino in a Radio-Canada podcast, “which creates a feeling of oppression or suffocation in some people.”*(1) “It’s a face-to-face with oneself, our emotions, our unconscious fears,” emphasizes the website Psychologue.net.*(2) “Our era is one of communication, of speech,” says David Le Breton, author of the book From silence. “He who keeps quiet worries those around him. […] “Is it not going well?” In his eyes, speech is now king. “It makes us exist, creates the bond. Silence is rather considered as a space to fill, often in a bulimic way.” Which means that finding yourself alone with yourself or even with others becomes unbearable for many. “Noise then serves as a screen, a barrier, a shell.” *(3)
Illumination
I can’t get away from the feeling of strangeness at the heart of these colossal relief lines, domes, cornices and spectacular recumbent figures that leave me speechless. Strangeness of these bell noises around the necks of cows that we hear without seeing them, bells sometimes pierced by the barking of a dog. Strangeness of the color of the waters here, unknown at home, velvety, verdigris, where the green of the pastures and the gray of the stone mingle. Striking strangeness that would take me weeks to absorb to feel a little at home there. The powerful spirit of the mountain is not familiar to me, I am more of that of rivers, lakes and peat bogs.
Evening slowly creeps into the heights. In my dream, I see Sophie the grocer climbing, cheerful, up the Roc de Tavaneuse. Forgotten, the customers, cheeses and sausages. Her step is determined. To reach the chalet before it gets dark. Her dog follows closely behind her. A few stones tumble in her path. Finally she is there. She can breathe. Two golden eagles circle above the peaks. Bright stars have appeared. “I belong to all this, as if impregnated,” she had told me to describe these moments of illumination, these little seconds of immortality up there. “The mountain is for me a deserted place,” wrote the Italian Erri De Luca, “where we see the world as it was without us and as it will be after.” **
I leave behind me, moved, abysses and summits. I learned a new word: “démontagner”, to descend from the mountain. Goodbye, Abondance, I dismount.
*(1) “Human beings and their fear of silence”, podcast, Radio-Canada, December 2021
*(2) “Why are we afraid of silence?”, Psychologue.net, February 24, 2016
*(3) From silenceLe Breton David, Métailié, 1997
** Quotes from Henry Russell and Erri de Luca are taken from Mountain. Anthology. The most beautiful pages from Antiquity to the present dayThiriez Frédéric, Mont-Blanc editions, 2020