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no accordions, just as I’m sure there’s no green cowshit that smells of wild garlic. The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand marking the bass and the heartbeats, the arms and shoulders labouring to make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!
    Finally we stopped dancing.
    Come on, Caroline, come on, Félix muttered as he made his way alone to the door. It’s time to go.

Boris Is Buying Horses
    Sometimes to refute a single sentence it is necessary to tell a life story.
    In our village, as in many villages in the world at that time, there was a souvenir shop. The shop was in a converted farmhouse which had been built four or five generations earlier, on the road up to the mountain. You could buy there skiers in bottles, mountain flowers under glass, plates decorated with gentians, miniature cowbells, plastic spinning wheels, carved spoons, chamois leather, sheepskins, clockwork marmots, goat horns, cassettes, maps of Europe, knives with wooden handles, gloves, T-shirts, films, key rings, sunglasses, imitation butter-churns, my books.
    The woman who owned the shop served in it. She was by then in her early forties. Blond, smiling but with pleading eyes, pleading for God-knows-what, she was buxom, with small feet and slender ankles. The young in the village nicknamed her the Goose—for reasons that are not part of this story. Her real name was Marie-Jeanne. Earlier, before Marie-Jeanne and her husband came to the village, the house belonged to Boris. It was from him that they inherited it.
    Now I come to the sentence that I want to refute.
    Boris died, said Marc, leaning one Sunday morning against the wall that twists like the last letter of the alphabet through our hamlet, Boris died like one of his own sheep, neglected and starving. What he did to his cattle finally happened to him: he died like one of his own animals.

    Boris was the third of four brothers. The eldest was killed in the War, the second by an avalanche, and the youngest emigrated. Even as a child Boris was distinguished by his brute strength. The other children at school feared him a little and at the same time teased him. They had spotted his weakness. To challenge most boys you bet that they couldn’t lift a sack of seventy kilos. Boris could lift seventy kilos with ease. To challenge Boris you bet him that he couldn’t make a whistle out of a branch of an ash tree.
    During the summer, after the cuckoos had fallen silent, all the boys had ash whistles, some even had flutes with eight holes. Having found and cut down the little branch of wood, straight and of the right diameter, you put it in your mouth to moisten it with your tongue, then tapped on it, all round, briskly but not too hard with the wooden handle of your pocket knife. This tapping separated the bark from the wood so that you could pull the white wood out, like an arm from a sleeve. Finally you carved the mouthpiece and reinserted it into the bark. The whole process took a quarter of an hour.
    Boris put the little branch into his mouth as if he were going to devour the tree of life itself. And his difficulty was that he had invariably struck too hard with his knife handle, so that he had damaged the bark. His whole body went tense. He would try again. He would cut another branch and when it came to tapping it, either he would hit too hard, or, with the concentrated effort of holding himself back, his arm wouldn’t move at all.
    Come on, Boris, play us some music! they teased him.
    When he was fully grown, his hands were unusually big and his blue eyes were set in sockets which looked as though they were meant for eyes as large as those of a calf. It was as if, at the moment of his conception, every one of his cells had been instructed to grow large; but his spine, femur, tibia, fibula had played truant. As a result, he was of average height but his features and extremities were like those of a giant.

    One morning in the alpage, years