2.
In the hot, slow summer of 1783, the second night in Dublin goes even better than the first, and so for a third consecutive night the room is booked and the posters hurriedly printed. After decades of drudgery and disappointment, of swilling out his bar room, manhandling mute drunkards and sloshing wet sawdust into the street, Samuel Bisset has been thrust again into the dazzling limelight because his animal is a star; people love the black pig. And why not? It’s a good-looking beast, sturdy at the neck and haunches but not overgrown or flabby; it’s like the pigs everyone has at home but perhaps sleeker, with a better sheen to its hair and a nice sharp clip-clop to its trot as it crosses the boards of the stage. And it has a look in its eye that they haven’t noticed in their backyard animals: a glitter, a knowing gleam; an intimation, surely, of sagacity. This, they agree, is a once-in-a-lifetime pig, a prodigy of its race, some miracle of nature that they are blessed to witness. ‘Wonderful and extraordinary’ proclaim the newspapers.
Bit by bit, I unearth more details of Samuel Bisset and his twisting story. As I get to know Big Pig and Little Pig, as they preoccupy more and more of my time, so I become increasingly fascinated by this other pig, this black pig from a long time ago, wrenched from animal anonymity to a bizarre stardom. The act is simple enough. A series of alphabet or number cards are laid in a circle and when Bisset asks the pig a question, he points, letter by letter, or number by number, to the answer. Some questions are straightforward – what is the name of the fair lady in the blue dress, for example – but others demand apparent reasoning or calculation, or even telepathy: how many of the gathered company have debts of £500, or what’s the gentleman with the stick thinking at this very moment? There are no stooges or confederates planted around the room. Bisset and his pig work alone – that much is clear – and audiences can find no evidence of cheating or sleight of hand: Bisset makes no obvious signals, he doesn’t whistle or squeak or stamp or sneeze. People are puzzled by what they see, it’s true, mystified by such a clever pig, but they’re entranced, too, and quickly won over by its confident performance. No one seems to doubt that it’s the pig’s marvellous intelligence allowing it to pull off such feats, an intelligence honed by nothing more than Bisset’s careful training.
Offstage Bisset is very quiet, perhaps gathering his thoughts: I can find out very little about how he lives during these Dublin days, or what he does when he’s not performing. Most likely, he’s taken aback by his sudden fame. He has sustained himself for so many years on the thought of those heady days long ago in London that the memories would have worn thin and faint, and he could be forgiven for being overwhelmed by the bright bluster and noise of a new success. I imagine him in the relative peace of a rented room, pleased to have the pig alongside him, the familiar tart smell of dung in his nostrils and the pleasant feel of rough skin against his hand as he caresses his new star, flips his ears, mutters this and that about the day. And I wonder about the pig, thrust into a strange and raucous new world, a place of disconcerting commotion. I hear it chuntering, like my pigs chunter, snuffling the dust that’s packed into the cracks in the floorboards. Together, no doubt, they pass the hours between one performance and the next shut away in the gloom of their lodgings, inseparable: the pig needs to rest and eat, keep its strength and its spirits up; Bisset feels himself floating in the heat, not quite sure how it’s come to this again, his thoughts fermenting like yeast in beer, his dreams of the future vivid. He reaches out to pat the rump of his animal, to keep calm.
I find I revel in time spent with Big Pig and Little Pig, just watching, touching. There’s something calming about the way they go about things, their rhythmic, unruffled search for food, their confidence in finding it; there’s a pleasure in watching these sturdy, shapely beasts ambling between the trees. They are continually busy, in a slow way, perpetually occupied, moving steadily, covering ground. I always knew that animals required space to properly thrive and I’ve always bought free-range pork and poultry when I can. But watching the pigs shuffle and dig and grub, seeing the constant activity which occupies their day, has brought home to me how miserable it is to confine a pig, any pig, so that it has no room to move, nothing to do, nowhere to go. Pigs need land to roam, soil to turn, work to do, as much as they need the basics of food and water. I can’t imagine Big Pig and Little Pig in a cage.
As the days lengthen and the sun has more warmth, we bring down an old plastic chair and set it up inside the enclosure. Sometimes I come to sit and watch; sometimes Ed does. We come one at a time, alone. It is quiet, respectful, a fellowship of sorts, a way of sharing the day together. I begin to know the little habits of the pigs’ behaviour, their choreographed tussle over food, the way one will follow the other, their incessant curiosity for what lies just below the next layer of sticky soil. I enjoy seeing them dig or catching them sprawled and dozing, a lazy huddle. I laugh at the many ways weaners take fright, bolting in absolute terror at a sudden noise – a stick falling from the tree they’re shoving, a donkey braying, the bin lorry – while in the next moment they’re calm again, such a terrible ordeal completely forgotten.
And so, slowly and quietly, I get to know Big Pig and Little Pig. Before my eyes they grow. And as I watch them, inevitably, I sometimes think about their deaths. Ed and I rarely talk about killing the pigs. I know Ed is quite happy with the arrangements; he understands that we’ll need to slaughter them. That there will be no choice. And I understand that, too – but I also find myself imagining what it would be like to take a knife in my hand, to pull one pig aside, here and now, and slit its throat.
I couldn’t do it. I know that. If I was asked, now, to drag one of my weaners – Little Pig, say – out of the enclosure, squealing and writhing, and drive a knife through the soft black skin, I couldn’t do it. I shy away even from the thought of it; let my mind run on only so far; look away from the close-up view. But that doesn’t matter, surely. Because we don’t want to kill the pigs yet. There are six months or more of life to go. And by then it will be the proper time and so it will seem the proper thing to do. By then I will be prepared and it will all happen as it should. Everything in its season.
And so I construct a rational argument that suggests matters are perfectly in order. But there’s a part of me, the less rational part, that recoils from the prospect of the slaughter and I begin to wonder whether, in the end, rationality might not be enough. I begin to wonder whether the pigs might just trample logic and sensible husbandry as they trample the most robust and gnarled of roots. Which will leave just soft things: the feeling of me and them, the time we’ve spent together, our shared place on the land. It will leave me with the bare emotion of animals to kill. And I’m not at all sure what that might be like.
But Ed, I know, is steadily determined, his mind on practical matters of meat, and I don’t talk about my qualms. Instead I bury them, for now, in a smallholder’s matter-of-fact preoccupations. And as we watch the pigs together with increasing familiarity and fondness, we become more and more like Bisset in our determination to get the best from our animals. His eye was on performance, of course, on tricks and bravura, on the money that might be made, but our daily discussions about how to do this thing well, how to keep pigs well, how to have them in the very best of health, starts to have the same obsessive focus on detail, the same sense of scrutiny and expectation: how are the pigs looking? What’s their weight now? When should we move them to new ground? How do we move them? Are they happy? The pigs are already more than just a routine of daily feeding and cleaning: they’re a form of entertainment; they’re a responsibility, a connection to this place, a philosophical conundrum; they’re a precious investment. So I probably didn’t need to take pig poo to a publishing meeting; the anxiety about worms was probably an overreaction. But I’ve never kept pigs before and I marvel, like Bisset, that such remarkable animals are in my care and, like him, I’m eager not to let this opportunity slip through my fingers.
And sitting in the enclosur
e on a March morning, with the mist still drifting up from the lake and lingering in the nooks of the ruins behind me, with Big Pig and Little Pig standing in the sun so that the ridge of hair on their backs glitters with dew and the hide beneath transforms to a rich, shifting, storm-cloud grey, I continue to remind myself, as I must, that these animals are here for a reason. Even though they distract me from tedious worries, they’re not here for my distraction; even though I’m learning a great many interesting things about livestock and husbandry and wondrous performing pigs, their purpose is not an educational one. All such things are nothing more than a pleasant by-product: the product is meat. When we measure the pigs now with our length of string and make the calculation, we find that they’ve put on 20kg each – in fact Little Pig has outstripped Big Pig with something of a growth spurt and has added nearly 22kg of bulk since he arrived. When we track the measurements on a graph, the rise of a blue and a red line – blue for Big Pig; red for Little Pig – indicates a sure, inexorable progress towards the moment when these two live animals become only a weight of meat. Pigs for meat, that’s what I remind myself. Special pigs but not pet pigs. Lovable pigs that must not be loved. Or not too much. Because too much would mean I could never kill them, and what would happen then?
The hedgerows and verges are clotted with violets and cowslips, the scrappy land beyond the pig orchard is spiked with grape hyacinths and clusters of early purple orchids. On fine days, there are butterflies now flitting across the enclosure – orange tips and the occasional swooping swallowtail – and we can hear the stags baying in the woods during the rut. The place shimmers green: the grass, the hedges, the new leaves are all a luminous, unreal shade like unmixed gouache, the fields filled with sturdy calves lying curled alongside their mothers: several mornings in a row, when I walk with Mo, we come across a newborn calf in a slither of placenta being licked clean and trying, shakily, to stand.
With the settling in of warmer, drier weather, we have to collect water for the pigs more often from the fontaine in the village. This requires a short journey in the car: the steep slope back to the enclosure is too difficult to attempt on foot or bicycle loaded with sloshing containers. But it’s a free supply of natural spring water – the house has a meter to measure consumption – which makes it worth the journey. The fontaine sits in a dip of land opposite the mairie and the church, alongside the old convent building, with a large pale weeping willow to one side and a stately pine to the other. There’s a stone wash house fed by the source, a low, open-sided building with an ornate tiled roof, not unlike some kind of monastery cloister. Inside, the water pools; around the basin there are wide washing plinths, poised like open missals. This is where the women used to come and do their laundry together. Today everyone has a washing machine, although Solange, my neighbour, prefers to bring her laundry outside in a bucket and scrub it on a similar washing plinth set by a sink alongside the garage wall and fed from rainwater collected from the guttering. I doubt she’s alone in resisting or ignoring modern changes. On a misty winter’s morning, with smoke rising from all the chimneys and the tiled roofs shimmering with frost, the view of the village from the brow of the hill must be much the same as it was very many years ago. There’s an occasional parked car by the wash house but little other evidence that this is, apparently, a twenty-first-century community. It seems as though it might be asleep, Rip Van Winkle-like, so old and settled that it’s simply waiting for the past to catch up with it.
But this, of course, is an illusion. Change here is slow – it sidles quietly under the more obvious alterations of the season – but even in the years we have been here, the nature of this place has shifted in small but significant ways. The boulangerie has moved from premises in the heart of the village to a purpose-built shop on the main road, with new ovens and a car park to allow lorries to pull in. The other businesses that were once here – a charcuterie, a butcher’s, hardware stores, garages, cafes – have all long since closed, leaving only the intimation of commercial life in remnants of wide display windows or ornate doorways or fading painted advertisements on roadside walls. We live in a commune of four villages but there’s no way of getting between them without a car, and only the boulangerie and a small tabac survive to serve the daily needs of the six hundred or so residents. Even the parish priest, recently such an important figurehead in the village, now has charge of twelve churches and takes the opportunity provided by weddings to complain to the congregation about poor attendances. Our French village is no different to rural villages across Europe – a place of incremental loss, unromantic hardship, isolation.
But for now it manages to cling on, just about. In the face of all the evidence that suggests this should long ago have ceased to be a viable, animated place of any kind, this is a village that comes together for fêtes and funerals and to clear the footpaths each spring, where neighbours keep in touch despite the expanse of fallow fields between them, and where very old rivalries and jealousies still prosper. And as some sort of metaphor for the tenacity of such a community, the spring that feeds the fontaine bubbles on, lively and reliable, in all seasons and weathers. It’s drawn from deep under the causse, from the meandering system of streams and caverns that tickle the limestone belly of the land. On one side of the wash house, under the shade of the willow, it’s piped out at shoulder height and falls into a long deep trough, a massive stone sarcophagus that runs the length of the building. The overflow seeps away to sustain the modest village rose garden. All the local farmers take advantage of this free, natural supply and bring hefty metal tanks on trailers, like the bodies of old steam engines, and fill them with water, taking them directly into the fields for the cattle. All I’ve got are three white plastic containers, each holding about twenty litres, but I stack them up on the top of the trough and flip the length of pipe like an old hand and lean against the wall while they fill.
The first time I came with my bidons I felt a fraud. I thought I sensed everyone in the village watching me, peering from behind their shutters and tutting at the temerity of this strange Englishwoman stealing their water. I was awkward; I fumbled the pipe and the containers, soaked myself and sloshed the paving, struggled to heave the filled canisters into the boot of the car. It was a simple act: collecting water for animals. But coming here to the fontaine felt completely different to filling a bowl from the tap for Mo. This felt like a moment of significance, like stepping into the shadows of the past. It was not just the watching eyes of the present but the glances of a receding history that I felt over my shoulder: this source had rescued livelihoods during the wretched drought of 2003, preventing the death of whole herds; here the resistance Maquis had gathered during the occupation of the Second World War and talked in low voices as they filled their pitchers; during the long identical summers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children came to the source to cool off after toiling, hungry, in the fields for hours; in the distant, unknowable past of the Middle Ages this source had spirited a village to life.
I could have drawn comparisons, I suppose, with other watery rites of passage drenched in ancient ritual, like baptism. But this wasn’t a religious experience.
‘I hear you’ve got pigs,’ a middle-aged man said, pausing on his way to the school.
We talked for a while; the water overflowed the container.
‘We always used to have a pig,’ he said.
I nodded. That’s what everyone says: we used to have a pig.
He went on: ‘And I’ll tell you a good story. You know you starve a pig before you kill it, so you have nice clean guts?’
I’d been reading about this so, yes, I knew that for the day or so before slaughter you weren’t supposed to feed your pig.
‘Well, you see, when she came to kill it, my mother put the pig in a pen next to the chicken run the night before. It was round the side of the house, out of the way. But the pig, well, you know what they’re like –’
I’m getting to know, I wanted to say; I really a
m. But I let him speak; he seemed to be enjoying his story.
‘– and so, of course, the old pig got hungry and when my mother went back the next morning, it had got through into the chickens and eaten one.’
I said I’d never heard of a pig eating a chicken. I wondered how a pig would even catch a chicken.
He shrugged, smiled. ‘No, well, the thing is: when they came to split it open, its insides were full of feathers. Stuck everywhere, on all the intestines, everywhere. Full of feathers. My mother was furious. How were they supposed to make sausages with that?’
Pigs. That was enough. People understood, approved; they treasured the connection to their own history, their family, this place. Pigs, I’m coming to understand, have the ability to provoke an odd nostalgia; they romp through memories of all kinds of pasts, both real and imagined. So here at the fontaine taking care of my pigs, I was not intruding, not overstepping. Quite the opposite – I began to realize just how much my pigs were helping me consolidate my place here. Drawing water from the village source, I was reiterating old gestures and old connections and in so doing becoming part of the community. And I felt a pang, a stab of melancholy, because just at the moment when I grasped that precious sense of belonging, we were talking, again, about leaving: Ed’s journalism work, the slender backbone of our domestic economy, was drying up and in the faltering freelance marketplace, there was nothing much to succeed it. We’d managed to find a few hours’ work each month making ‘secret shopper’ calls in French to high-end hotels around the world, testing their booking services and customer care. We were already adept at arranging phantom reservations for bespoke meeting rooms with buffet lunches, video projectors and scribbler pads. But while this was a good way of honing our language skills, it was, in the end, like all such jobs, poorly paid, tedious and insecure. It would not do for very long.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 6