Alphonse appears and sniffs him, tail whipping his trousers. Marcel catches the smell of the dog’s damp coat mingled with that of the night. He follows the dog as he trots ahead, leading him towards the still sleeping animals. He lifts the wooden latch of the stable door and, with his foot, rolls away the stone that keeps it closed. Rats scurry away from the feeding troughs as the halo of light from the lantern Marcel hangs on a nail casts concentric circles on the joists and the laths. The mare is dozing, standing on her left diagonal, neck lowered, mouth slack. Marcel runs a hand over the round, warm muscle of the croup, strokes the flank and feels the veiny skin quiver beneath his palm. Two cows with pearl-grey coats are munching fodder in their stalls; on the wooden bars marked by the ruminants’ incisors, a few chickens have found a temporary perch for the night and are wrapped up warmly in their feathers. Marcel takes a deep breath of the smell of the animals that permeates the shed, his arm resting on the mare’s croup. He savours this magnetic presence, preferable to that of the creatures of his own species, then goes out into the yard and walks over to the well, now silhouetted in the wispy grey dawn light, this well which men to whom he is linked by obscure ties of blood dug with their bare hands at a precise spot designated by the twitch of the forked hazel twig of a local dowser, digging with pickaxes for sixty days, slicing through labyrinthine galleries fashioned by blind animals and shattering shadows of glittering quartz. As he grabs the bucket of coopered wood and tosses it into the silent maw of the well, which explodes with the sound of water, an image surfaces from some ancestral memory: the head of a pickaxe ripping a lump from the muliebral earth and the wound filling with water, then a human face raised towards the light and a triumphant cry. He pulls the rope and the rusted pulley screeches softly as he hauls the bucket to the surface. He grasps it by the handle and sets it on the coping. The water quivers, viscous and black. He plunges his hands in, brings them to his face, gasping from the biting cold, plunges his hands in again and drinks from his cupped palms, ignoring the shooting pains in his rotting teeth. Finally, he goes back to the stable, where the animals, now wide awake, raise their heads as he pours water into the stone troughs so that they too can drink. A cock crows.
The months roll by, and with them the unchanging cycle of the seasons, one year, and then another, the ploughing, the sowing, the harvesting. A bear-leader from the Pyrenees is going from village to village, dragging an animal whose fur has been worn bald by the straps of its muzzle. The residents of Puy-Larroque rush to the village square to see the bear walk on its hind legs, sit on a chair or dance in a frilly dress under the chestnut trees to the sound of panpipes. In July, the farmers harvest garlic and braid it into garlands, which they hang from nails in the rafters. Éléonore knows all the places where the hens go to lay outside the coop; she collects the eggs and brings them to the genetrix. One day, it is a fully formed chick that falls from the broken shell into the frying pan. At the height of summer, the heady air redolent of fig trees and horses is as intoxicating for Éléonore as alcohol. Lying next to Alphonse and the sow that is grazing not far off, she blots out the sun with her raised hand, then, eyes half-closed, parts her fingers one by one and allows the light to gush through. Kneeling on the straw over a goose she holds firmly between her thighs, the genetrix forces a funnel into the animal’s throat and force-feeds it grain. Her dress hiked up over her knees reveals the varicose veins just beneath the skin that seems to twine around her tibias like the serpent around the caduceus. When her legs ache, she compresses them with strips of fabric cut from old bedsheets. When Éléonore complains of toothache, the genetrix takes her to the market to the tooth-puller, who extracts the toothy-peg and leaves the child in tears, her mouth bleeding, feeling the tip of her tongue probing the soft, metallic hole in her gum. At the end of Lent, they go to the village to watch the magnificent bulls, to be sacrificed on the eve of Good Friday, being proudly paraded by the farmers. Life carries on.
By spring, the father no longer goes to sit on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench. Shut up in the box-bed that he leaves only at mealtimes, spectral and emaciated, he has to support his elbow to lift the trembling soup spoon to his lips. Lumps as hard as stones are caught in his beard. His shirts are spattered with dried food. Every Monday, the doctor comes and listens to his chest in silence, under the watchful eye of the genetrix, who has also fallen silent, disbelieving, weary of the list of symptoms, and together they sit at the table while the father offers his scrawny body to be examined, opening the black hole of his mouth, extending his knotted joints, coughing and spluttering when requested. Eventually, the doctor sets his battered leather bag on the table, packs away his instruments as usual, says the same words, gives the same advice, sometimes recommends some variant of the ineffectual treatment, drinks the glass of brandy or vin de noix set out for him, pockets the handful of grubby coins, then stops in the doorway and bids the assembled company goodbye, touching the brim of his hat.
‘See you Monday, then,’ he says.
They do not say a word until the carriage has left the yard and the clatter of hooves has faded, then they all get to their feet and return to their occupations. The genetrix resigns herself: Father Louis, a healer from the neighbouring village, well-known for resetting dislocated limbs, conjuring away burns and treating warts, comes and lays hands on the father’s chest at length. He mutters prayers and traces the sign of the cross with his thumb, leaving an imprint on the skin from his long, dirt-black nail. Finally, he turns to the genetrix and gently shakes his head. Since she has heard that a child can be cured of fever by applying an eviscerated dove to the forehead, she wrings the neck of a white pigeon, thinking it will serve her purpose, slices open the body, parting the immaculate plumage to reveal the warm, bluish entrails, which leave a viscid red stain on the father’s brow. But the father protests, pushing away the tiny carcass, whose head droops, beak open, against his head, then tumbles among the pillows.
One September morning, Marcel takes Éléonore with him. For a long time, they walk through meadows, pass a quarry of dressed stone and aggregate, cross fallow fields, skirt around a small valley overgrown with brambles, from which rises the dilapidated shell of an old barn. As every morning, the diadem spider destroys its web and patiently weaves it anew. The sky is clear, limewashed, the air still hums with swarms of bees heavy with pollen. The earth is round and dappled as the croup of a Percheron. From time to time they stop, look up, shield their eyes with one hand to watch the stately flight of an airship and the aeroplanes passing over the landscape, their majestic shadows gliding over the valley. They climb a hill, cut through a cope of tall trees, stepping over tangled, mossy branches. Marcel cuts a path for Éléonore. Gripping a cane, he slashes at the winding roots, tramples the porous tree stumps that explode beneath his heel, holds back the pliant branches, and the child slides past, along the safe path he is clearing, goes a few steps ahead and then waits for him to catch up. They walk in silence as far as the edge of a little wood that overlooks the valley, the geometric layout of tilled fields, the gentle, greenish meander of a river snaking in the distance. A few kilometres ahead, cavalry and infantry divisions are posted along the roads for army manoeuvres. Éléonore sits next to Marcel on a fallen tree. She does not know what they are looking at, and does not dare ask, but her heart races at the sight of armed soldiers marching over the hills, wearing gleaming leather boots or riding sleek, skittish French horses. For what seems to her like hours, they sit there, Marcel watching the advance of the divisions, the wind from the west bringing occasional bursts of the indistinct voices of chasseurs and hussars, snatches of orders or the whinnying of horses. When, eventually, Marcel grows tired and they turn back, there is a dark, faraway look in his eyes, and when Éléonore, emboldened, takes his hand, he does not seem to notice, but leaves the girl’s hand where it is, her fingers entwined with his.
The genetrix, who has been following the progress of the manoeuvres in the newspapers, reads aloud to the father about t
he news that the Ministry of War has been moved to their département, the parades of artillery regiments, the crowds cheering the heavy guns and the de Bange 120 mm cannon in painted steel. She reads laboriously, running a dirty, broken nail under the words. She buys La Croix du Gers, or La Semaine religieuse, whereas the father reads La République des travailleurs, Le Réveil des communes or L’Indépendance gasconne. From almanacs and newspapers she clips illustrations, reproductions of sacred pictures, religious paintings that buckle and yellow on the walls. She comments on the articles and news stories that reinforce her longstanding and definitive idea of the dereliction of the world. She is fascinated by the ‘African project’, the French army’s advance through hostile terrain brought to her in harrowing retouched photographs, portraits of savages and hellish beasts. She is excited by the Balkan war, the tales of battles, the images of infantrymen, their bodies littering the trenches, or piled at the feet of a chaplain praying over a mass grave. As the father’s eyes become blurred, she is moved by the testimony of those who have witnessed the bronze statues of Pope Martin V in the church of Saint-Jean-de-Latran weeping, thereby portending the imminent death of Pius X. From an issue of L’Illustration she picked up at the market, she reads aloud the horrors suffered by a Bulgarian garrison on an island in the Tundzha, where soldiers are dying in the shade of trees from which they have stripped and eaten the bark: ‘Oh, the torment! A constant hum of moans, of gasps and wails pierces your ears and makes your hair stand on end. Men on fatigue duty and prisoners come and go carrying stretchers bearing corpses, pale skin stretched taut over bones as though mummified, others black, bloated by contagion. Here men are dying everywhere in the open air beneath the glorious spring sunshine, at the foot of budding trees on the sodden shore, by fast-flowing waters that sweep the contagion even farther, everywhere and in the most ignoble positions, wretched beasts with little respect for man, excrete the pestilential evil from every orifice. And yet some use their hands or feet to crawl to the dark hole at the foot of the crumbling tower and creep into the shadows, there to die in peace: every morning, this cesspit is filled with contorted bodies.’ She nods slowly, thereby signifying that she has had her fill, and that this should be seen as the fulfilment of one of her many prognostications about man’s propensity for evil and the inevitable consequences.
The father’s authority once ranged and resonated through his customary toil and labours outside in the fields, in the proximity of the animals. Now it is condensed to the point of nausea in the only room in the house, where it pervades and saturates the dark hours, the furniture, the saltpetre on the walls, and as the father gradually withdraws into himself, so the authority of Marcel flourishes and becomes indispensable, since he now performs the tasks that once fell to the father, that justified his existence, and from which illness has utterly excluded him. The genetrix has complete power over this last agony. No-one but she is authorized to watch over the father, not even his daughter. She who, since their bleak wedding day, has seemed able to bear the presence of the husband only with great difficulty, she who was constantly exasperated and responded to the first signs of illness with revulsion, now cannot bring herself to leave his bedside, redoubling her attentions, her prayers and her care. She is not distraught at the probable death of the father – she recognizes the banality of death and has too much faith in her superstitions – but as she feels her universe gradually teeter, then crumble, she clings to it with the obstinacy of despair, as though it were enough to keep the father alive to safeguard their reality, however impoverished, and preserve it from the inevitable cataclysm. She believes that the father can vegetate like this until the end of time, that he will never actually die if she cares for him with sufficient persistence and conviction, and can thereby maintain the tenuous equilibrium of the farm and of their lives, which the arrival of Marcel has shattered into pieces. She had been opposed to this intrusion, believing that they had no need for a farmhand, even if he was obscurely related to them, of another mouth to feed, and that the father could assume the burden while the last of his strength was not yet completely exhausted. Then, faced with the evidence, she had had to reconcile herself, but the boy’s arrival had coincided with the father’s decline and she believes that this parasitic male presence feeds on the old man’s life force, the latter wasting away to the benefit of the one making himself at home as he becomes accustomed to the farm, the land and the animals. So she can muster no fondness for Marcel, only defiance. Their relationship has no need of words. The genetrix contents herself with simply dishing out his food, heating water for his ablutions, watching him out of the corner of her eye without ever looking at him directly. She has no thoughts of extending her influence over Marcel. She knows instinctively that he is beyond her control, immured in his stubborn silence, his dogged passion for the job at hand. She fears that there is something suspect, something intransigent about him that she cannot name. Time was, when a piglet born with red hair was drowned; its coat indicated an abnormality, a vicious temperament. She sees an omen in Marcel’s flaming shock of hair, his too-pale skin. But he will soon be nineteen, and when he is, she will meekly contribute to the purchase of his leather work boots, in the event that the medical board and military service should pass him fit for service.
Éléonore wanders around the farm, where the cold autumn days extend and entwine their swollen hours, suffused with the father’s twilight. In the company of the animals, she hangs back. She carries out the trifling chores assigned to her, milks the cows, takes the bread to be baked at the communal oven, still takes the pigs to feed on acorns and goes with the genetrix to market to sell late-season tubers, armfuls of leeks, some eggs and a few chickens or rabbits. Without the father’s protection, she fears all the more being with the genetrix, to whom she must nonetheless submit. The genetrix redoubles her prayers and compels the child, knock-kneed from kneeling on the rough ground, to do likewise. Éléonore watches her comings and goings from a distance and, when the genetrix is getting ready to go to church, reluctantly leaving her to care for the father, is careful not to seem impatient. But as soon as they are alone, she rushes to his bedside, twines his long, bony fingers in hers, caresses the tracery of veins on the back of the hand the father surrenders to her. She pushes back the eiderdown, the linen sheets, grasps the withered legs, whose thighs and calves are now no more than folds of skin over the femur and the tibia, then helps him to sit up next to her. She slips an arm around his narrow chest, feeling the girdle of ribs swell beneath the nightshirt with each ragged breath, then she supports him as he tries to take a step or two, steadying himself with a hand on the table, dragging the weight of his bare feet like two lumps of dead flesh. Finally she sits him on the edge of the bed, and places hot coals in a warming pan, which she slides between the sheets to warm the wool mattress. Éléonore takes a battered leather tobacco pouch from the cupboard and hands it to the father. He opens it feverishly, takes out a quid of tobacco and slips it under his lower lip. Hands spread on the mattress, head bowed, eyes closed, he savours the dark, unpleasant saliva, then spits into the palm Éléonore is holding out for him. The child throws the quid into the fire, where it sizzles and shrivels among the logs. As she patiently turns her back, the father relieves himself in the chamber-pot beside him. Finally, she helps him back to bed, tucks him in and lies next to him, pressed against this long, frail, shivering body that looks at her through eyes that are bigger than they were, and roiled by dark currents. By the time the genetrix reappears, Éléonore is sitting at the table, engrossed in reading a missal. The peasant woman silently loosens her shawl, eyes the room with a suspicious glance, lays a hand on the brow of the father, who is now dozing, asks whether he ‘moved his bowels’ and examines the colour and fluidity of the contents of the chamber-pot – sometimes she takes a long stick and probes the pale or bloody stool, jabbing or splitting it as though she might read some augury there – then sends Éléonore outside at the first opportunity. The child goes to find Marcel, w
hose presence is a substitute for the father, and who demonstrates a genuine affection for her. She follows him when he goes to the fields, sometimes lends a hand. She often stays and plays a few metres from him, without their exchanging a word. She scrapes the ground to root out earthworms that she feeds to the hens, or throws a stick for Alphonse. The looks Marcel gives her and his faint smile are a balm to her melancholy soul. She enjoys watching him work, trails in his wake to catch the smell of his body when he pants from the effort, the odour that his thick sweater gives off when he bends down next to her, which must be the strange and exhilarating smells of his milky skin, the hidden folds of his body. In spring, she saw a pair of asps mating in the crevice of the flat, foliated rocks, the pulsing knot of their sinuous curves, and she feels as though there is a similar knot within her, an unknown force emerging, quivering deep in her belly.
Animalia Page 5