Gemini

“An exceptional, 

incomparable novel.”

Jean Genet

________________________       

Jean and Paul are identical twins. Outsiders, even their parents, cannot tell them apart, and call them Jean-Paul. The mysterious bond between them excludes all others; they speak their own language; they are one perfectly harmonious unit; they are, in all innocence, lovers. For Paul, this unity is paradise, but, as the twins grow up, Jean rebels against it. He takes a mistress and deserts his brother, but Paul sets out to follow him in a pilgrimage that leads all around the world, through places that reflect their separation—the mirrored halls of Venice, the Zen gardens of Japan, the newly divided city of Berlin. An exquisite love story set against the ugliness and pain of human existence, Gemini is a novel of extraordinary proportions, intricate images, and profound thoughts.

“The most extraordinary piece of writing … Gemini is about a pair of identical twins collectively known as Jean-Paul. Saying this, however, is a bit like saving that Ulysses is about man walking around Dublin, because Tournier uses the theme of twinship to explore a near infinity of dualities. In addition to playing with such traditional oppositions as heterosexuality and homosexuality, city and countryside, heaven and hell, Tournier elaborates ingeniously on the profound opposition of chronology and meteorology—the fixed, regulated march of the hours on the one hand, and the wild, unpredictable fluctuation of the seasons on the other.”

—Salman Rushdie

“Astonishing; an El Dorado of ideas.” —New Statesman

Born in 1924, Michel Tournier studied philosophy and then became a journalist and a writer. He is the author of several novels, including The Ogre, Friday, and The Four Wise Men. also available in paperback from Johns Hopkins.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore and London

ISBN 0-8018-5776-7

Cover design: Rebecca S. Neimark, Twenty-Six Letters

Cover photograph: Gypsy Children, Hungary, 1917, in André Kertész

GEMINI

Michel Tournier

GEMINI

Translated from the French Les Météores

by Anne Carter

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

BALTIMORE AND LONDON

Originally published as Les Météores

Copyright © 1975 by Editions Gallimard

Translation copyright © 1981 by William Collins, Sons & Company, Limited

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1998

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4319

The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tournier, Michel.

[Météores. English]

Gemini / Michel Tournier ; translated from the French Les Météores by Anne Carter.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8018-5776-7 (alk. paper)

I. Carter, Anne. II. Title.

      

PQ2680.083M413    1998   97-18469

843’.914—dc21     CIP

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

CONTENTS

GEMINI

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I The Pierres Sonnantes

CHAPTER II The Anointing of Alexandre

CHAPTER III The Hill of the Innocents

CHAPTER IV The Quarry’s Quarry

CHAPTER V Heaven and Hell

CHAPTER VI The Identical Twins

CHAPTER VII The Philippine Pearls

CHAPTER VIII Wild Strawberries

CHAPTER IX Fur and Feather

CHAPTER X Almond Turnovers

CHAPTER XI The Saint-Escobille Train

CHAPTER XII The Breaking of the Stones

CHAPTER XIII  Death of a Hunter

CHAPTER XIV   Misadventure

CHAPTER XV  Venetian Mirrors

CHAPTER XVI   The Island of the Lotus Eaters

CHAPTER XVII   Icelandic Pentecost

CHAPTER XVIII  Japanese Gardens

CHAPTER XIX   The Vancouver Seal

CHAPTER XX   The Prairie Surveyors

CHAPTER XXI   Behind the Berlin Wall

CHAPTER XXII   The Extended Soul

CHAPTER I

The Pierres Sonnantes

On the twenty-fifth of September 1937, a depression moving from Newfoundland to the Baltic sent masses of warm, moist oceanic air into the corridor of the English Channel. At 5:19 p.m. a gust of wind from the west-southwest uncovered the petticoat of old Henriette Puysoux, who was picking up potatoes in her field; slapped the sun blind of the Café des Amis in Plancoët; banged a shutter on the house belonging to Dr. Bottereau alongside the wood of La Hunaudaie; turned over eight pages of Aristotle’s Meteorologica, which Michel Tournier was reading on the beach at Saint-Jacut; raised a cloud of dust and bits of straw on the road to Plélan; blew wet spray in the face of Jean Chauvé as he was putting his boat out in the Bay of Arguenon; set the Pallet family’s underclothes bellying and dancing on the line where they were drying; started the wind pump racing at the Ferine des Mottes; and snatched a handful of gilded leaves off the silver birches in the garden of La Cassine.

The sun was already dipping down behind the hill where the children of St Brigitte’s were picking Michaelmas daisies and chicory flowers to heap in untidy bunches at the feet of their patron saint’s statue on the eighth of October. This side of the Bay of Arguenon, facing east, got the sea wind only overland; and in among the salty brume of the September tides Maria-Barbara caught the acrid smell of the stubble burning everywhere inland. She threw a shawl over the twins lying curled up together in one hammock.

How old are they? Five? No, six at least. No, they are seven. How hard it is to remember children’s ages! How can one recollect a thing that is forever changing? Especially with these two, so puny and immature. In any case, this immaturity, this backwardness in her two youngest soothes and comforts Maria-Barbara. She breast-fed them longer than any of her other children. She was thrilled to read one day that Eskimo mothers suckled their children until they were capable of chewing smoked meat and frozen fish—which meant to three or four years old. For them at least, learning to walk did not inevitably take them away from their mothers. She has always dreamed of a child that would come to her, upright on its small legs, and deliberately, with its own hands, undo her bodice and take out the gourd of flesh and drink, like a man at the bottle. The truth is that she has never been able to distinguish very clearly between the nursling and the man, the husband, the lover.

Her children … A mother so many times over that she does not really know how many there are.