‘No sign of tapeworm.’
At which point the animal, unsullied and restored to life, gambols off to join his siblings. The deal is done.
Around the fire, on winter evenings, when the puddles of mud have frozen in the farmyard, which they have to cross with care, scattering coarse salt in front of them, Éléonore sits next to the gaunt-faced father, who turns the crackling logs with the aid of a wrought-iron poker. He plunges his hand into the embers, grabs one with an abstracted air, bounces it in the palm, then replaces it in the hearth. From the perforated pan, he takes and peels for her the scalding chestnuts, whose wrinkled flesh gives off a subtle aroma. The genetrix prepares inhalations for the father and he disappears under a sheet as the vapour of herbs and roots perfumes the whole room. The doctor comes and sets down on the table the leather bag which exhales a smell of ether; then the father unbuttons his shirt and sits, bent as a reed, tensing his back as the doctor moves the stethoscope over his milky skin, and breathing painfully when asked. A wheezing sound comes from his trachea, as though some parasitic animal were living in his ribcage and breathing in his stead. Then the doctor digs into his bag and takes out a reflex hammer, which he uses to tap the knotty joints, occasionally triggering an involuntary jerk, then slips a tongue-depressor into the father’s mouth. Sitting at the table, a scarf around her head, her hair parted in the middle and plastered to her forehead, her hands folded around a rosary as she tells her beads, the genetrix observes the doctor’s every gesture and searches for meaning in his murmurs of approbation, his sighs, the glances he directs at the floor or at the hollow stone sink as he listens through the stethoscope. Insistently, she interrogates him, comments, offers answers to questions the doctor has not asked. She says:
‘He coughs, all night he coughs, can’t get a wink of sleep, and in the morning too, and his spit, yellow it is, and sometimes green. He’s bound to have an infection. He complains about aches, show the doctor where, in his chest and his back, his legs are all swollen, see that, like varicose veins. Ah, and he’s running a fever, night and day…’
The father sits motionless, paralyzed, as though each of the genetrix’s words is raining on his back, forcing him to bend ever further to ward off the blows. The doctor gets to his feet, puts away his instruments, and the father slips on his shirt, his cardigan and the work trousers he holds up with baling twine. The genetrix takes the bottle of plum brandy from the dresser and pours a single glass.
‘He needs a change of air,’ the doctor says, draining the glass, ‘a trip to the mountains.’
The genetrix and the father sit frozen, silent.
‘At the very least, he needs rest,’ the doctor adds, setting down the glass and donning a felt hat.
The couple are speechless.
‘Try not to exert yourself too much,’ he goes on. ‘Take on a farmhand.’
When he puts on his coat, the genetrix disappears into the scullery and comes back a moment later and offers the doctor a handful of small change that she can hardly bring herself to let go. No sooner has the door closed than the father once more takes his place in front of the fire and the genetrix watches, fuming, as the doctor’s carriage moves off, drawn by a bay gelding, jolting over the potholes and disappearing behind the pigsty.
When people in the village suggest she send for a healer, she becomes indignant and quotes Leviticus:
‘Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.’
She suggests a pilgrimage to Lourdes, but the father refuses, muttering – who would look after the farm and the animals in their absence? Every night, she enjoins Éléonore to pray for his recovery, giving her a detailed litany of the misfortunes, the privations and the sufferings to which his death would condemn them, and the child falls to her knees next to the genetrix at the foot of the cross, imploring God’s mercy, then nestles even closer to the father on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench as nightjars claw the air and swoop on moths.
Éléonore sticks her thumb between the lips, into the warm, acrid saliva, the breath steaming in the chill dawn, and slides the bit into the horse’s mouth and the animal bites, its eyes half-closed, lying on its left flank, then she passes the bridle and adjusts the blinkers while the father fits and adjusts the harness by the light of a lantern set on one of the guard stones of the well, whose glow deepens the mare’s saltcellars and gilds her neck. Snowflakes fall heavily into this halo of light, landing on the black mane, lingering on the leather, and melting on the blue lips of Éléonore, whose numbed, purple fingers bury themselves for warmth in the animal’s winter coat. Their wooden clogs smeared with pine tar crunch across the snow fallen during the night. The pointer frisks through the snow, tracing wide circles around them, and when the father, wrapped in a twill cloak, climbs into the dogcart, whips the mare’s hindquarters, and as horse and cart move off down the stony track, with the dog bounding ahead, the little girl races along the ruts left in the snow and the mud by the metal cartwheels, shouting the father’s name as the cart fades into the distance, and she finally stops, panting for breath, her throat burning, her hands pressed to her thighs, her angular face upturned, her teeth and her eyes made grey by the night as it pales to a deep blue, restoring to the hills their materiality.
As she retraces her steps, their sinusoidal curves appear, arcs of amplitude, while motionless, insubstantial layers of mist appear in the depths of the valleys. The horizon breaks free of the snow-covered earth, as though the former brusquely gives birth to its converse, shaking off its muddy taint, then swells with an expectation that bows the sky with a purple halo, with a ribbed vault in which the stars still shimmer. Each lungful of icy air she inhales stings her sinuses and her chest. Alphonse bounds from one side to the other of ditches iced over with hoarfrost, slips his leash and races after a hare that disappears in the middle of a field, then trots back and jumps up to lick her snotty face. As she reaches the farmyard, now lit by the pale, grey dawn, Éléonore grasps the dog’s collar. Through the frosted windows of the house she can see lamps burning and the shadow of the genetrix moving over the limewashed walls. She leads Alphonse to his kennel and persuades him to lie down amid the straw and the burlap sacks, then, casting worried glances over her shoulder, she climbs the ladder to the hayloft, her clogs slipping on rungs jagged with icy stalactites.
Hanging from the beams of the hayloft, pipistrelles shiver, shrouded in their delicate wings. Tegenaria spiders have woven and rewoven dense funnel webs, frozen by the sediment of time, swollen and made heavy as oriental hangings by dirt, sawdust, the husks of insects and the translucent chitin moulted by distant generations of arachnids. In a corner of the loft, between two piles of hay, a feral cat has produced a late litter. Éléonore is feeding it, unbeknownst to the genetrix, taking bones from Alphonse’s bowl or stealing a little buttermilk from the scullery. As the little girl approaches, taking care to avoid the loose and broken boards beneath which the cattle are beginning to wake, to stir, to piss and defecate, the cat growls, then decides to run, or – when Éléonore sets a bowl down next to her – to abandon her litter and gorge herself. The little girl has heard that kittens and babies born, as she was, at the onset of winter have a delicate constitution. She sits down next to the nest made by the queen and, one by one, picks up the newborn kittens, their eyes still rheumy, their bellies round and still connected to a brown shrivelled nub of umbilical cord, she lifts them to her face, cradling them in the hollow of her hands as they try to suckle on her fingers, and she breathes in the scent of their warm, still coarse fur, which smells of saliva and teat. The hayloft, like the bed of leaves and humus in the oak grove, is a closed, parallel world in which it seems to her possible, and even preferable, to live, one that she can tear herself from only with much effort.
She carefully climbs back down the ladder and flinches when she finds herself face to face with the genetrix, who stands stock-still, hands on her hips, her gaze stern and suspicious.
&nbs
p; ‘What have you been up to up there?’ she asks, with the bilious breath of an empty stomach.
Then, since Éléonore bows her head and remains silent:
‘I hope you’re not still feeding those confounded cats. Get into the house before you catch your death.’
She makes no move to step aside and offer a clear path, so the diffident child is finally forced to walk around the genetrix, tracing a wide path, a feverish escape route in the snow, while the farmwoman stands at the foot of the ladder, eyes raised, ear cocked to any sound from the hayloft. She is all too aware of Éléonore’s pilfering, of the pride and the determination she takes in disobeying her with that artfulness particular to children that makes them flout rules without seeming to. Excepting the leftovers they feed to Alphonse, nothing can afford to be wasted that might provide sustenance for their meagre livestock and can thereby be immediately transmuted into meat in a cycle of constant renewal. She is as loath to throw out radish tops or beet greens as she is to think that a ladle of buttermilk has gone to feed stray cats rather than to fatten pigs, she who every morning carries out the chamber-pots and empties them onto the manure heap, since nothing is too vile for the nourishing earth. And besides, she thinks as she walks back to the farmhouse, that way Éléonore has of trying to cosy up to the father, and of giving her a wide berth whenever he is around, of perceptibly shifting and favouring the closeness of the farmer, as though anticipating some protection, some respite from him. As she has grown, Éléonore has ceased to seem a stranger to her – she has become accustomed to the existence of the child, even to the idea that they are bound by blood ties – and while she is polishing the pots or scrubbing the flagstones, washing the bedsheets with the other women in the village washhouse or feeding slops to the chickens and plucking them, Éléonore is constantly avoiding her and taking advantage of the slightest inattention, the slightest slackening of her authority, like the young of carnivores, whose instinct prompts them to steal food from their parents and to anticipate their moods and fits of temper so that they can slip away.
And so, those periods when the father is absent – a few days that seem to her like weeks – take place in a climate of mutual defiance, a stilted atmosphere, a habitual silence, broken only by the sound of the wind, the cries of the animals and the orders of the genetrix, who notices Éléonore hovering around the scullery where she churns butter every day, and, as soon as she turns her back, quickly taking a ladle of cream from the churn and disappearing up to the hayloft at the first opportunity. Every evening, she insists that Éléonore read aloud from the Holy Scriptures, because it is important to her that her daughter be pious and literate, and Éléonore applies herself to the task, one finger on the page, following the sentence, stumbling over syllables and words as the genetrix listens to her laboured pronunciation, eyes closed, hands joined, as though her interminable labour added to the mystery of the Book. And yet the genetrix never goes to confession, nor does she send her daughter; the very idea of confiding her most inoffensive thoughts, her most venial sins, to Father Antoine, that discreditable priestling who is not even sober for All Saints’ Day, is repellent to her. There is no intermediary between her and God, and she considers herself the best channel between Éléonore’s words and the Lord’s mercy. So she persuades Éléonore to confess to her, to make her act of contrition, recount all her most shameful thoughts, and the little girl, feeling she must satisfy the genetrix’s curiosity if it is to be done with as quickly as possible, babbles childish sins, swearing, covetousness, trivial lies, which delight and scandalize the genetrix, who then compels her to recite:
‘Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.’
One snowy morning, taking advantage of the fact that her mother is at her toilette, Éléonore takes a bowl of food to the kittens. She finds them lying stiffly in their nest, the mother a few steps away, next to another bowl that still contains a few balls of poisoned bacon fat. Blood has trickled from her mouth, her nose, her anus, and darkens on the floor. Her teats, still sticky with saliva, are stiff and purple. Éléonore picks the kittens up one by one, slips them under her dress and holds them against her belly for a long time, hoping she might bring them back to life, then she lays them on top of the body of the cat in a burlap sack she ties with a length of string. She climbs down the ladder, walks far away from the farm to the outskirts of the forest and, with her bare hands, digs a hole, throws in the canvas bag and fills the hole, stopping now and then to blow on her aching, blackened hands. Alphonse appears as she is covering the burial mound with smooth stones and holly branches to serve as a wreath, then he looks up, sniffs the icy air and races down the road that leads to the village.
Éléonore is watching him run off, yapping, when in the distance she sees the mare and the cart appear, and she rubs the palms of her filthy hands on her dress. She raises her arms to wave, then changes her mind. She has just spotted a figure whom she first thought was the father, since he is holding the reins, and a quivering bundle next to him, but as the cart approaches, she realizes that the figure is a stranger and what she took to be a bundle of old rags bumped about by the potholes is the father. As they pass close to her, he does not even seem to notice her and she sees his gaunt, grey face turning slowly in her direction. She stands for a moment without moving before following the cart into the farmyard. The stranger has stepped down and she keeps her distance as the father painfully clambers down in turn, shattered from the journey, accepting the support of the sturdy arm the boy offers him, before the boy unharnesses the mare and leads her to the stable the father signals with a weary gesture. She can see the boy’s face now, red with cold, still babyish, the cheeks invaded by patches of downy, red beard, the bulging muscles in his jaw and his forearms as he tows the cart into the shade, the small piercing eyes beneath his eyebrows, brown irises so dark that it is almost impossible to distinguish the green pupils, ringed with pale circles, that contrast with the shock of his filthy hair. When he sees Éléonore, the father gestures for her to come to him and the stranger stares at the child’s calloused, muddy hands, though nothing in his eyes or his face betrays his interest. The father lays an icy hand on Éléonore’s head in a vague caress.
‘This is the cousin, Marcel,’ he says. ‘He’ll be living with us from now on. You’ll show him where to find the hay and the kindling. Tomorrow, I’ll go fetch a mattress.’
Behind them, the kitchen door has opened and the genetrix is standing on the threshold, pulling her shawl up over her throat and the lower part of her face. The father walks over and she stands aside to let him in without saying a word, then she scornfully weighs up the young man exhaling plumes of thick breath, and the child next to him hiding her dirty hands behind her back. Marcel follows Éléonore into the kitchen, where the father has taken a seat by the fire. With a jerk of her chin, the genetrix indicates the former scullery, and Marcel, his burlap sack over one shoulder, bows his head to step through the doorway. The room is a square of beaten earth into which the grey day interferes through holes in the knots of wood and gaps in the joists. The floor is littered with rusted scythes, a cartwheel, a few sacks of charcoal and basins of stagnant water. Opposite the fireplace, its hearth an ogre’s mouth, a narrow sash window peers out onto the yard. The room smells of rat urine, worm-eaten timber, the slurry that trickles down the wall from the adjoining stable. Marcel looks at the scrawny, grubby child, whose breath as she exhales creates fleecy clouds around her nostrils. He follows her up to the hayloft, carries down armfuls of dry hay, which he scatters to create a thick, compact mattress, then he unties his pack, spreads out the burlap sacking, stands up and looks around the room with a satisfied air. He says:
‘Go fetch me some water; I need to
hose myself down.’
When Éléonore reappears, carrying a pitcher of hot water, there is a fire crackling in the grate and Marcel has taken off his shirt and his vest. She stops and watches, just as she watches the father wash when he comes in from the fields, but this body is sturdy, the skin, puckered by the cold, hugs ligneous muscles, the knot in the navel is the globe of a small, perfectly round eye beneath a delicately rimmed lid of flesh with a line of red hairs running down the lower abdomen and disappearing beneath the worn leather belt. Freckles cover his back, his neck and his cheeks. He plunges the washcloth into the basin, wrings it out into the hollow of his hand. Streams of water trickle along his forearm and drip onto the floor from his elbow. He vigorously scrubs his face, his torso and his armpits, leaving large red blotches on the back of his neck and his sides, then drops the cloth into the basin of water, which is now grey and soapy. Éléonore steps forward to take the basin and their eyes meet. She blushes, turns away, and rushes out of the room.
Marcel wakes before dawn in the cold room where his breath condenses. He stretches his numbed limbs, then blindly gropes at the foot of the bed for the coarse patched trousers, the vest, the cotton shirt, the thick-knit sweater and pulls them on, his eyes open yet sightless. A shudder runs along his skin. Arms outstretched, barefoot on the icy floor, he walks as far as the fireplace. He stirs the black coals in the hearth, roots through the ashes for a still-glowing ember, blows on it and sets a handful of dried twigs on top. As the flame catches, hesitates, then flares, his face appears, blazing in the flickering light, hollowed by the shifting shadows, and he makes out his hands, grey with ash. In the main room, where Éléonore and her parents are still sleeping, the flyspecked glass shade of the oil lamp casts a dappled yellow light on the walls. Several weeks have passed since he arrived at the farm. As usual, he gulps down a bowl of groat gruel, and a hunk of bread dipped in wine or simply a bowl of reheated coffee. He runs his tongue along the uneven line of his teeth, dislodging coffee grounds from between the gaps, from the rim of his gums, using the tip of his tongue to push the saliva on the edge of his lips and wiping it away with the back of his hand, leaving a trail of grounds through the thick blond hairs. As he steps through the door, he peers into the darkness but can see nothing. Night rests, unfathomable, coal-black, reducing everything to silence, and for a moment it seems to him that he can make out a breath, the panting of an animal hidden in the darkness; it is his pulse beating in his ear or the flame of the lantern he is holding, the wick hissing softly. He can sense that is it going to snow, there are no stars to be seen, the bracing air bites into his face and at his sinuses when he inhales. He rubs his palms together, then brings his fists up to his face to warm them with his breath.
Animalia Page 4