Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  ‘I do reject it.’

  ‘Do you renounce Satan, father of sin?’

  ‘I do renounce him.’

  ‘Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth?’

  ‘I do believe.’

  The villagers, sitting in rows, squeezed into darned or threadbare suits, and dowdy dresses with pockets bloated by mothballs whose smell overpowers that of the candles and the incense, intone in unison:

  ‘This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. We are proud to profess it, in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

  The care of the animals falls to the genetrix, just as, since time immemorial, tilling the land and slaughtering the cattle has fallen to the men. She crosses the farmyard as the flagstones are beginning to blue, the wicker basket in which Éléonore lies hanging from the crook of one elbow, carrying a pail of grain and stale bread in her other hand. The baby emerges from her night to the smell of poultry litter, dust from the hay, the powdery heat wafted by the chickens’ wings, as the genetrix sets the warm, perfumed eggs at her feet, in the folds of the blanket, then goes to the sty, padding over the soft ground, one hand hiking up her skirt, toes gripping the broken wooden clogs. In the sty, a sow lying on her side in the straw is peacefully suckling a drift of piglets that have scrabbled for one of the bristly teats, a privilege acquired only after an initial battle, and are squealing contentedly, eyes closed. Their greedy snouts spew a white foam. The genetrix watches them for a long moment, then remembers an old wives’ tales that is still told around the fireside. She picks up one of the piglets, which wriggles in her hand and lets out shrill squeals, and she lays it in the wicker basket on the blankets warmed by Éléonore’s body, where it rummages for a moment and falls asleep. She takes her daughter and lays her on the straw against the belly of the sow and, with two fingers, brings the sow’s teat to the mouth of the baby, who immediately starts to suckle greedily. Her hands knead the milk sac, swelling the teat that she is sucking, and the piglets warm her pink, hairless body. The genetrix slips a hand into the wicker basket, grips the neck of the sleeping piglet and twists violently until she hears a sharp crack. As she re-crosses the farmyard, she makes a hole in the dungheap with the tip of her shoe, pushes the body inside and covers it over.

  They rear only one or two pigs, since they cannot afford to feed more. The first they keep, the second is reared to be sold. Every year, for the Marché au Gras, they take a wooden crate and load the pig they have been carefully force-feeding for several days, and take it to market in a cart. Sitting next to the crate on the slatted trailer, the genetrix feeds boiled potatoes between the planks that serve as bars so that the pig will remain calm and not lose weight by defecating as they ride along the bumpy road. If the animal is of sound constitution and they take good care of it, it can weigh two hundred kilos, sometimes more, and they can makes a thousand or even fifteen hundred francs, with which they buy two young porkers from a rubicund pigman who wears a thick cardigan, velvet breeches and a pair of leather boots. The man makes a fortune from pigs bought elsewhere, often in Ariège, that he transports and resells. If it is a bad year and the farm is not producing enough cereals and tubers, they fatten only one pig and pay the pigman in ham the following year. Then they choose one of the piglets the merchant has rubbed with vinegar and red ochre to make them look handsome and gorged with blood. And thus, no sooner has it died than the pig – a vulgar phoenix – is endlessly reborn from its ashes; there are only a few scant days in which the sty is not occupied. In prosperous years, they have a sow and manage to get it serviced. The litter is sold off as soon as they are weaned so they do not have to feed them. The pigman comes and collects them.

  Then comes the day of the churching ceremony. The genetrix gets up before dawn and ceremoniously performs her ablutions in the light of a candle. She brushes her hair and pins it at the back of her head. She pours a few drops of oil into her palm and carefully smooths it. She places a white cotton scarf high on her forehead and ties it at the throat. She slips on a blouse and a wool dress, then looks into the mirror at the reflection of her face drawn tight by the scarf. Over the years, the mouth has been reduced to a line of lip, the cheeks have atrophied against the zygomatic bones, the skin has thickened and is covered with translucent down. It looks as though she is wearing the death mask of her poor mother, whose bones lie in the graveyard of a neighbouring village mixed with others’ bones that are not hers, with slivers of wood and rotted taffeta. She turns away. From the wooden flour bin, she chooses the largest cob loaf and wraps it in a cloth, then leans over the crib, picks up the babe in swaddling clothes and lays her next to the loaf in the wicker basket. As the genetrix passes the little wooden bridge on the road to Puy-Larroque, Venus is still pulsing, a blade of daylight pierces the sky and carves out the confines of the world. Coypus disappear between clumps of bulrushes and the razor-sharp sedge leaves. The humidity of night, transferred by the grass, darkens her skirt and her heart grows lighter as she moves farther from the farm. In the basket, Éléonore has woken but says nothing; her misty eyes are fixed on the blurred, oblong face seen from below, and the leafy branches that extend beyond in dark veins. When she begins to cry with hunger, the genetrix walks over to the roadside crucifix, whose plinth is covered with silvery lichen. She sets down the wicker basket, unfastens the buttons of her blouse and offers her scrawny breast to the baby, who has now learned to suckle from it. She sits there in the cool, humid dawn, the smell of mosses, of ditches, of the plane trees that circle the roadside cross. Silhouettes of roe deer glide through the fog that lies over the fields and she might be the only person in this world. A scraggy dog passes, something black and shapeless in its jaws – perhaps the remains of a crow – and trots away, leaving behind the smell of carrion, then, later, as the sun rises between two small valleys of warm earth, a cart drawn by a mule led by a child appears at a bend in the road and comes up the hill towards her. As he passes, the child turns his apelike face towards her, his nose blocked with nuggets of green snot, his jutting jaw, and she recognizes the Bernards’ inbred boy. He moves off, then disappears, using a hazel rod to wildly whip the mule, which lifts its head, snorts and rolls its eyes as it pulls the cart laden with beets or potatoes.

  Éléonore drifts off to sleep and the genetrix lays her back in the wicker basket, takes her scarf and wipes the drool from her breast, the baby’s chin and her neck dotted with flecks of milk, rebuttons her blouse, then gets to her feet and sets off again towards Puy-Larroque. When she reaches the church, she kneels before the door, in the shade of the portico, indifferent to the invariable comings and goings of the women with pitchers, drawing water from the spring, of the men setting off for the field on foot or on bicycles, spitting the brown juice of their first quid of tobacco. When someone notices her and waves, she is careful not to respond and seems to plunge more fervently into prayer, averting any approach. For a long time she waits, wearing her bony knees out on the stone, until finally the door opens and Father Antoine looks at her, then surveys the portico.

  ‘You came on your own?’

  His breath reeks of communion wine and poor sleep. She looks up and nods and the priest says:

  ‘Where is she, t’other one, the woman that was meant to come with you?’

  ‘There’s no-one with me,’ says the genetrix, painfully getting to her feet.

  Father Antoine irritably whistles through his teeth, then, noticing a chubby, pale young woman passing, calls to her:

  ‘Suzanne, come here to me for a minute.’

  The girl comes over and mounts the three steps to the porch. She looks at the genetrix, the sleeping baby in the basket and finally the priest.

  ‘Go on in,’ says the man of the cloth, ‘and bring her out the Holy Water.’

  The young woman goes into the church after Father Antoine, who strides down the nave, his alb rustling, then she re-emerges and holds out her cupped hands in which the holy water pools between folds of calloused skin, the life
lines short and deep as crevasses. The genetrix sets the basket on the ground, dips her index and middle fingers into the leathery font, crosses herself twice. Then the young woman opens her hands and the rest of the water drips onto her clogs and the dull flagstones of the porch. She crosses herself in turn, wipes her palms on her skirts and goes into the church. Her forehead gleams and the sanctified water trickles along the curve of her snub nose. Father Antoine is waiting beside the side chapel, a stole embroidered with gold thread draped over his shoulders. A thin, pasty altar boy, stiff as a church candle, is standing next to him. The priest holds out one end of his stole to the genetrix.

  ‘Enter thou into the temple of God, adore the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who giveth thee fruitfulness of offspring.’

  She hurries now and kneels at the foot of the altar, hands clasped at her forehead, and recites the act of thanksgiving, her exhortations mingling with those of the priest, who declaims:

  ‘Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy… And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. O Lord, save Thy handmaiden. O my God who putteth her trust in Thee. Send her help, O Lord, from Thy holy place…’

  They pray together, Suzanne mumbling in turn, and he blesses the genetrix, who quivers beneath the holy water he sprinkles on her.

  ‘Pax et benedictio Dei Omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, descendat super te, et maneat semper. Amen.’

  Then he blesses the bread and the genetrix stands up, sorrowful, exalted. She blows out the candle she has been holding. She tears the loaf and gives a piece to the altar boy. Overcome by a wave of gratitude, she reaches out to tousle his hair, but the boy shies away.

  With a walnut cane in one hand, and Alphonse following behind, Éléonore leads the two pigs down the dirt track to the grove of pubescent oaks. She sits among the mossy roots or the bare branches of a fallen tree while the pigs gorge themselves on acorns, chestnuts they extract from their burrs and snails. Shimmering blue dung beetles crawl up her wool stockings and jackdaws spread their iridescent wings to keep their balance in the treetops. They give a cry and once again take wing into the steel-grey sky. Éléonore lies on a bed of leaves that smells of rotting vegetation, burst puffballs and worm casts. She finds a moment of respite, far from the farm and the presence of the genetrix. As a light drizzle begins to fall, she remains motionless, staring at the branches from which whirling russet leaves fall. She allows the tiny droplets to bead on her face and the fabric of her dress and imagines disappearing, little by little, covered over by lichen, the insects and the invertebrates that would bore galleries through which she could continue to breathe, to drink and to perceive the world from her mineral stillness. The old pointer keeps watch for her, circling the pigs and keeping them in line with a yap. His halting, arthritic gait stirs up the leaves, from which, as from an ossuary, branches emerge, split or burned by time, and the first January snowdrops. On the coldest days, she feels a numbness in her fingers, in her nose, a stabbing pain in the cartilage of her ears, but she does not allow herself to move and would not go back early for anything in the world. She loves the calm of the oak grove, the feeling of profound solitude, the presence of the pigs, their grunts of satisfaction, the calls and the rustling wings of invisible birds, the outline of the chapel she can just glimpse through the ferns and the trees, a wall covered in thick creepers and fringed with ivy. When the rain is heavy, she walks up the old path now overgrown with brambles, though which she has cut a path. With the animals trotting on ahead, she enters through the gothic portico, the rotting wooden doors, one of which has fallen from its hinges and now lies on the cracked flagstones, where tufts of grass sprout in spring from seeds blown in by the flurries of wind that fill the chancel with drifts of dead leaves in which farandoles of shrews nest. The pigs forage for larvae in the debris where generations of pigeons and raptors have defecated, covering the broken timbers of the ancient pews with guano then taking off, with a coo and a rustle of wings, to perch among the pitted rafters slowly eaten away by weevils that send a shower of sawdust swirling through the light cast by the remaining stained-glass windows, encrusted with dust, with sap and pollen. The ancient chapel smells like an open wound in the earth: the musty odour of a cave, of quartz and clay and silt. Flares of shifting colour glide over the rubble whenever the sun manages to pierce the tangle of branches. From the floor, Éléonore picks up the regurgitated pellets left by barn owls, which she will later soak in warm water so that she can extract the white, delicate bones of rodents, and slips them into the pockets of her dress, then, finally, she heads back to the farm, reluctantly followed by the gorged pigs. On fine days, using a billhook, she cuts roadside nettles for them, thistles and wild spinach in the fallow fields, the stalks and bulbs of onions, dandelions and sorrel, sprigs of sagebrush and the poppy flowers that thin and invigorate the blood of animals. Éléonore carries the foraged plants in the fold of her raised skirt and the genetrix chops them on the kitchen table before cooking them with the slop intended for the pigs.

  The first years pass between caring for the animals and days of boredom spent in the classroom of the local school adjoining the town hall, heated by a wood-burning stove, its windows overlooking a dirt playground that turns into a mire with the first rains. When the local distiller sets up his still on the village square, alcohol fumes fill the schoolyard and intoxicate the pupils’ playtime. Though barely six years old, the skin on her hands and her feet is grey and scored with deep fissures, from which, using a needle in the candlelight, she extracts the small pebbles and blades of grass that sometimes cause her to bleed. Her thumbs are also cracked and her fingernails are black. Nothing is more appealing to her than the sweaty flank of the mare she curry-combs and rubs with a handful of straw when she comes back from the fields, in the quiet stable stall where harvest mice scurry along the rafters. And nothing seems more pleasant to her than the half-light of the scullery, to the sourish smell of potatoes cooking in cauldrons, of vegetable peelings and curdled milk, the bones tossed onto the hard dirt floor raised by the roots of the walnut trees around the schoolyard, nor the crudely drawn hopscotch courts on which the little girls in uniforms wear out the soles of their clogs.

  On a windy day, she walks across a field to where the father is working with two oxen, their horns tethered by a head yoke. The father is guiding the ploughshare using the handle and whipping the bony hindquarters with a holly switch, letting out cries that come to her in snatches. Éléonore stumbles over the ridges and furrows; the wind whips her heavy knotted hair against her face. She sees the father stop the yoke, bend down and pick up a glistening clod of earth, bring it to his nose and inhale the scent, then turn the clod in his large hand, gently crumbling the clay between his brown fingers. Specks of dry ochre soil are trapped in the hair on the back of his hands. The little girl registers this moment of intimacy between the man and the land, its obscure sensuality, and she freezes some distance away in the father’s furrow. Later, at the edge of this same field, after the rain and in the absence of the farmer, she in turn takes a handful of this cold, black, malleable clay, which she fashions into the semblance of a phallus, then hikes up her skirt, crouches down and touches it to the bare, delicately rimmed lips of her vulva.

  The genetrix ties the hind legs of the rabbit she has just stunned with a sharp blow to the back of the neck, its pulse still beating, and hangs it from a hook on the wall above a bowl of hammered copper. As its dying spasms set the rabbit whirling, the brown eye with its dilated pupil alternately reflects the farmyard, where large puddles of water shimmer, then the lowering autumn sky and the face of the genetrix as she busies herself whetting the blade of a knife on the barrel of a rifle before using the point to remove the eyes with a sharp jerk of the wrist so as not to damage the fur, before tossing the little eyeballs into the dust, and the rabbit bleeds out from the cerebral haemorrhage through the empty sockets, the black, clotted blood dripping into the copper bowl with a regular plop-plop-plop, a
nd when she removes the receptacle in which the black pool quivers, the blood continues to drip onto a block of granite as burnished as a sacrificial altar. The genetrix cuts the fur around the hock joints and skins the rabbit with a quick jerk, as though undressing it. She sets the pelts out in the sun to dry, with the tails that bring good luck whose cartilaginous vertebrae glisten between the tufts of hair and are sometimes carried off by the cats, who chew them in some dark corner away from prying human eyes. The genetrix has her own beliefs: whenever she comes across a garden spider, its back marked with the sign of the cross, the blesses herself. She hangs dried pigs’ bladders from the kitchen rafters to protect the family from the evil eye. Some she will use as flasks. On stormy days, fearful of the lightning bolts that people say can decimate a clutch of chickens, she slips old horseshoes under the laying hens. During the storms, the chickens take refuge in a cage made of interwoven branches covered with broom, as the lightning bolts freeze the landscape in flashes of white. In the August heat, the animals seek out the shade of the trees, lazily shooing swarms of gnats and horseflies. The father has built a small pen attached to the sty. A young piglet is pressed against the cool water trough from which it is drinking. A sow is preparing to farrow down in the shade of a wall. During a trip to find acorns she mated with a wild boar and her litter is born covered with velvety striped hair. When a sow is suckling, Éléonore still takes a secret pleasure in lying in the straw, pressed against her flank and sucking a little of her milk, her forehead pressed against the soft, warm, delicate scented skin of the udder. When they sell the piglets, it is the responsibility of the langueyeur – the tongue inspector – to examine them for taenia solium, that strange illness that afflicts pigs, though few people could say exactly what it is. Ringed by children and onlookers, under the watchful eye of both breeder and buyer, in a corral teeming with piglets, the inspector picks up each shoat by the hind leg and holds it still in his lap. The animal squeals, struggles, then surrenders. Then the langueyeur forces its mouth open with much earnest shouting and swearing. Using pliers, he extracts the needle teeth from the gums, then pulls out the tongue, twists it, looking for the mucus and the white spots that indicate the presence of the parasite. Sometimes he lingers a little, hesitant, exasperated. He scrapes the tongue, applies himself diligently, but always gets up and says: