English A Literature (HL) (Square)

I used to watch the storm coming up over the baker's house. Not that the house was lower than all those which were crowded around the little square, but it stood on the west side and its roof of round, sun-bleached tiles mirrored the sky.
       On the calmest of days, when the wind scarcely swayed the smoke from the oven chimney, I saw, slowly rising above the top of the bakery, big white clouds which only darkened much later and stayed for a long time fringed with light. The storm anticipated the evening, growing heavy with the sunset shadows, and drawing a deeper night over the world.
       The baker's house, with its bakery looking out on the little square, withstood the daylight, at first constant, then slowly fading, then the darkening of the clouds, and finally the first gusts of the storm, which beat the smoke onto the roof and into the square in a fiery swirl.
        Batches of bread followed one another, the glow of the oven flickering at intervals in the room where two men were working, their bare backs white and emancipated from the fire. When the oven was red hot, they poured the embers to deaden them into large metal drums, as tall as the child of ten that I was then, and they put them outside the bakery door to cool.
        Then the square, in the blazing heat that goes before a storm, seemed to catch fire. It was a sultry heat, a stifling inferno, a sightless summer added to summer. When I went up to the drums I heard the crackling of wood charcoal being formed. Later in the bakery, which the two bakers had just left to have a drink, rows of hot bread were crackling too, like a sunny field with the sound of grasshoppers.
       When I closed my eyes, the smell of bread was like the sighing of a fire-ravaged land which was flaking in its wait for the rain. You would have said that with the oncoming storm some of the darkness, still glowing from the empty oven, now appeared in the sky. A draught from the open door of the bakery sent wood ash scurrying to the middle of the square, a little slack grey trail, soon lost in the dust where a black hen was scratching.
       The first drops of rain sometimes fell before the great drums filled with embers were cold, and sputtered on their lids where I vainly tried to cook little cakes made of bread dough stolen from the bakery.
       I went back to our house on the other side of the square and stayed under the porch watching the rain come down and the clouds scudding by. Opposite the bakery was glowing for a new batch of bread. The smoke from the oven struggled against the wind and sometimes loosed a handful of sparks into the storm-blue evening.

      Pierre Gascar: The Little Square (transl. by Val Cohen)