In the evening, Marcel drags over the bench, sits close to the father and gives a detailed account of his day in a low, deeply respectful tone that he does not use at any other time. The father listens to him talk about the importance of developing the livestock, which now brings in much more than the crops and is less labour-intensive. The father sometimes nods but does not say anything, as though the business of the farm is now so remote that it is beyond his reach. Since the patriarch is no longer able to wash himself, it is Marcel who takes care of his ablutions. The women keep their distance from this ritual, where, in the privacy of their sex and their contemplation, the young man undresses the farmer, settles him on a stool in the inglenook next to the fire, plunges a washcloth into a basin of hot water then carefully soaps the pale, sickly skin, one hand massaging the atrophied muscles, the bloodless flesh, the other gripping the acute angle of a shoulder, an arm, an ankle. His shirtsleeves are rolled up to his elbows, the grey foam that wrung from the washing mitt trickles heavily over the translucent skin of his wrists, and the father surrenders, feeling no shame that his ravaged body is given over to the care of the boy. Of these moments that are shielded from her view, Éléonore conjures up ceremonial after-images whose aura envelopes and crowns Marcel. As the father declines, this body, like a ghost ship inhabited only by a faltering breath, seems hallowed. Their every gesture, their grave, solemn movements, serve only to sanctify it, bringing a flood of liturgical images, and when, to relieve his numbness, the genetrix washes the father’s feet, for an instant she embodies the sinful woman who, in the Pharisee’s house, washed the Son of God’s feet with her tears and anointed them with ointment. Then the Gospels become confused in her memory, and Éléonore imagines the words of Christ in the father’s closed mouth: ‘She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.’
In a corner of the pigsty, four dry-stone walls form a cramped pen, built for fattening animals, where no daylight ever enters. A low door of thick oak planks allows access to a trough, into which every morning Éléonore, who is charged with the task, pours the brown water from the boiled dirt-caked potatoes mixed with flour and kitchen scraps. The animal is fattened behind the low door in almost total darkness. A slit between the timbers sometimes lets in a streak of light that slashes the inky darkness of the enclosure, but the pig, whose eyes are constantly probing the darkness in which he lives, flees the light, hurling himself into the farthest corner of his universe. When Éléonore lifts the latch and half-opens the door, through the warm, acrid cloud she sees a flickering, feverish eye, a spittle-flecked snout, a patch of grubby skin where the bristles are caked in crusted slops. She hastily pours the contents of the bucket into the trough and shuts the door and the latch while the animal greedily gobbles the swill with loud sucking and swallowing noises. She is intimately acquainted with the pig – no animal is more familiar to her; from some remote time on the fringes of memory, she feels a sense of comforting closeness – but she also knows she should be wary of their cunning, their insatiable appetite and extraordinary strength. And yet the pig sent for fattening, screened from the eyes of men, seems to her shrouded in mystery, a rampant, nameless beast, sprung from legend or mythology, that never truly dies, even when its blood is shed, but endlessly reappears, as though born of the shadows of the sty. When it is time to scrub out the pen, where layers of excrement quickly build up, the animal is evicted by force, jabbed in the flanks or beaten with a switch until it appears, like the meadow crickets that Éléonore flushes out on long, hot summer days, poking long twigs into their burrow, hiking her skirts and dousing it in urine until she sees the insect hop out, dazed and vulnerable, exposed to the dazzling light of the world. The pig is like other animals, but wilder, more unpredictable, almost savage, and Éléonore prudently seeks out the protection of the men who control it with cries and jabs.
To neuter a sow that is to be fattened, the father sends for Albert Brisard, because, left to her cycle, the animal turns nasty, no longer fattens, and ‘in a week loses all the weight she’s gained in a month’. The man introduces the tip of a metal cone into the animal’s vulva, and into the flared end pours some of the lead shot used for hunting. The metal pellets become embedded in the uterus and the ovaries, and the sow no longer goes into heat. Only Brisard can determine the best method of neutering a particular animal, and sometimes he decides to ‘open up’. In such cases, the sow is restrained in a wooden cage with gaps between the slats large enough to introduce a hand. Brisard sets a leather case next to him and takes out a blade, then makes an incision in the flank as the animal squeals and struggles vainly, confined by the walls of the crate. The man with the club foot pushes his forefinger into the wound, runs it along the peritoneum until he feels the swollen surface of the ovaries, which he pulls towards the incision, pressing his thumb against the flank for leverage. Then he takes a bobbin of thread from his leather case, snaps off a length, and ties off the ovarian vein and artery before excising the organs, pushing the stumps into the abdominal cavity and suturing the belly of the sow.
Each year, a few days before All Saints’ Day, the animal is slaughtered. In the early morning, there is a great commotion. Mother and daughter, joined by women from the neighbouring farms – old mother Fabre and her daughter-in-law, Madame Roque, and her brood of children – set to boiling large quantities of water, and ready the basins and a large barrel of tarred wooden staves. Brisard, summoned for the occasion, sharpens the blade of his knife on an oiled whetstone. With a new lease of life, the father demands that they get him up and dress him, and the protestations of the genetrix do not succeed in dissuading him. The shirt they dress him in is baggy now, and the trousers are held up by a length of twine threaded through the belt loops. Like a tattered, jerky puppet, he manages to walk, with Éléonore’s hand supporting his elbow. Once on the doorstep, he stands for a long moment without moving, his face bathing in the cold sunlight. He breathes deeply, inhaling the comforting smells of the manure heap, of the dead leaves beginning their slow decomposition beneath the black, bare trees that ring the farm, and his daughter feels the life-giving shudder that courses through his body. Dragging his feet, he reaches the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench with its warped seat and sits on it one last time, while the genetrix drapes two thick blankets and his cloak over his shoulders.
‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you,’ she says.
The father does not seem to hear her and turns towards Alphonse, who comes over to sniff him. He reaches out a hand to stroke the greying head, but the dog scurries away, his tail between his legs, under the misted eyes of the father. Soon, shrieks can be heard from the sty. Alphonse stands in the middle of the yard barking and Brisard gets to his feet, running the sharpened blade of his knife against the pad of his thumb, leaving a shallow gash in the hard skin. Marcel suddenly appears, dragging behind him, into the daylight, and using every ounce of strength, the pig he has hog-tied and muzzled with a length of rope. He drags the still struggling animal on its side, as a long guttural squeal comes from its snout in a spray of white spittle. The mother brings over a basin and, in the instant when the ‘sticker’ approaches and the sun reflected on the knife’s blade casts a fleeting flicker onto Marcel’s face, the pig surrenders and freezes in the vice of hands restraining it. Its eye fixes on the blue of the sky streaked with wisps of low fog. Its breath condenses, its bladder empties onto its hind hocks. From the bench, the father approvingly gauges the size of the pig. Albert Brisard plunges the blade into the throat up to the hilt, severs the artery in a trice, withdraws the spotless blade as the animal’s heart pulses fitful spurts of blood into the bucket pressed to the lips of the wound, and the stern face of the genetrix and the top of her white blouse are spotted with a fine mist that splashes from the bucket. Éléonore slips between the adults and lays a hand on the animal’s back as its breathing diminishes and dies. When the genetrix straightens up and hands the bucket to the neighbours who carry it away, she does not bo
ther to wipe away the drops caught in her eyebrows and the downy hair on her cheeks. The men grab the now pliable carcass and lift it up so that the last of the fluid can drain out. They lift it into the vat and the women bring the pans of boiling water from the kitchen and pour it over the remains, creating great clouds of steam that force them to retreat, making little cries, then the men, armed with knives and razors, roughly scrape the scalded skin, ffft, ffft, ffft, and soon the bristles are floating on the surface of the turbid, stinking water, clinging to their skin around their wrists. Then they hoist the gleaming pig onto a ladder, spread its limbs and lash them to the rungs. Brisard buries the knife into the wound he has already made and cuts away the neck muscle until he sees the trachea, which he cuts, and the discs of the cervical vertebrae, which he separates to reveal a corolla of red marrow. There is a clamour of voice, and the farmyard is filled with the cries of children, who, already bored by the spectacle, run and scatter the chickens. The pig’s trotters are also cut off, the cartilages broken, the bones disarticulated. The abdomen is sliced open and the mass of entrails, from which rise soft tendrils of steam, is deftly detached by Albert Brisard, working his knife blade in a patient sawing motion, plunging his hands deeper to support the intestinal circumvolutions. He excises the anus, separates the pinkish mass of the lungs, sections the nerves, and finally pulls out the sagging, stinking load and lets it drop into a tub, which the women take away. Now sitting next to the father, Éléonore stares at the genetrix, astonishingly genial, surrounded by women armed with little blades, their hands smeared with bile and excrement as they cut and squeeze the innards, which they rinse thoroughly then roll out in front of them in long, translucent ribbons. The enucleated pig’s head is boiled and then picked clean of every morsel of meat to make pâté. The trotters are also boiled with herbs and spices. The ham hocks are salted and hung from the rafters to dry. The melted fat is decanted into jars. The children nibble on little pieces of fried pork rind that crunch between their teeth. Their hands and faces are glossy with lard. The farm is fragrant with the smells of excrement, acrid smoke, metal and cooking. A few hours later, sitting at the table, they gorge themselves on hot blood sausage and offal simmered in a sauce of wine and blood, which they sop up with large hunks of bread, and which even the father eats hungrily. That night, Éléonore dreams of a cliff towering above the Sea of Galilee, from which thousands of pigs are hurling themselves, then of black water, where thousands of their floating carcasses drift towards bottomless abysses.
In the same time, the same space, men and beasts are born, struggle, and pass away; the father survives, whether by miracle or misfortune, until mid-March, then finally dies. For days on end, he lies wailing in the box-bed, whose doors ooze with the putrid stench of death, a constant howl that is not that of a man, but rather of a small child or an animal caught in a trap. From time to time he is shaken by a violent fit of coughing, expectorating onto the sheets thick bloody gobs of spittle and flecks of bronchioli. He is now no more than an arrangement of jutting bones and protruding cartilage. In a few short days, large bedsores form at the pressure points, purulent lesions on the buttocks and the heels, which the doctor lances to remove the necrotic tissue, then meticulously cleans, disinfects and fills with gauze. He is caught unawares by severe diarrhoea, but no longer has the strength to ask for the chamber-pot. Besides, no-one knows what it is he is shitting, since he cannot eat, or only scraps, half-choking as he tries to swallow. His urine is rank and smells medicinal. He is dissolving right there on the bed even as the genetrix changes, washes and boils the sheets as quickly as she can. On the wool-stuffed mattress, after the father has died, a large stain of uncertain colour will remain and, prudently, the farmwoman will turn it over to sleep on the other side. The air is fouled by the unbearable excremental stench. Feeling nauseous, they sit down to eat in the acidic miasma given off each time the father moves or opens his mouth to gasp something, his breath betraying the alchemy already at work inside him. It is no longer possible to get him out of bed to wash for fear of breaking him. Marcel sponges him as best he can, eliciting howls of pain despite his carefully controlled movements and, if the mother and the daughter continue to avert their gaze, the father no longer has any modesty and kicks off sheets and blankets with his bandaged feet, the spindly, yellow legs, unable to bear the weight, the feel of them, exposing a body like a daddy-longlegs, his limp penis in the thatch of still-black pubic hair. The mother no longer leaves his bedside. She talks of maledictions that have surely struck them and curses the faith healer for failing to lift them and turn them against those who, somewhere and without a shadow of doubt, are casting them.
The dog no longer runs on ahead of Éléonore, no longer splashes in the ditches, but walks to heel, his coat prickling with drizzle, and they walk the ravaged fields bristling with clumps of brown, broken stalks from last year’s crop, while harriers glide far-off in the bloated grey sky, then swoop on a young rabbit or a shrew and carry it off with a cry. Tufts of wool and horsehair quiver on the barbed-wire fences, and rain-sodden sheep watch her from afar. When she reaches the village, Éléonore raps on the door of the presbytery, but the only response is the muffled echo of her knocking. So she sits on the step, pulls the shawl down over her forehead, beaded with raindrops, while Alphonse presses himself against her. She puts an arm around the dog, buries her hand in the warm, damp hair of his belly and feels the animal’s heart beating behind his ribs. The rain, the trudging men and animals have turned the village square into a mire. The cuffs of trousers and the hems of dresses have hardened into a black crust. The passing dogs have knots in their fur as hard and heavy as stones. Cartwheels and hooves spatter faces with a foul sludge like that which the father’s belly seems to produce inexhaustibly. Villagers approach Éléonore, question her: she tells them she has come on the mother’s orders to fetch the priest. They realize that her father is going to ‘pass’ and that soon the bell will have to sound the knell. But Father Antoine is in the neighbouring village for a service; he will certainly not have passed up a tour of the cafés and is not due back for several hours. Éléonore declines the offer of taking shelter in a kitchen to wait for him, even though she would have a view of the presbytery and the main road leading to the church. They give up trying to persuade her, bring her a bowl of scalding milk, and though she has no appetite she eats the cream, then gives the rest to the dog, who burns his lips. The hours pass, the day wanes, painting the façades of the houses a livid blue. The tops of the chestnut trees have been swallowed by the twilight by the time Father Antoine finally appears, juddering along on the back of a little donkey led by the last of a long line of altar boys, who looks as though he too has survived the flood, a boy whose name the priest cannot for the life of him remember, just as he could not remember the names of those who came before him, carefully avoiding addressing them as anything other than ‘my son’ or ‘my child’, while fond of constantly stroking their soft napes bristling with downy hair. Éléonore watches as the country priest comes towards her, old and potbellied, sleeping off his drink, slumped over the donkey like a wineskin, mumbling a slurred oath or muttering ‘maman’ whenever the animal stumbles over a pothole or a stone in its path, before slipping back into his torpor. As the altar boy leads the donkey closer, the priest finally wakes up. He registers the little girl sitting there, then painfully slides off his mount, brushes down the back of his soutane, covered with grey hairs and splashes of mud, laying a hand on the animal’s croup to steady himself, then he climbs the two steps of the presbytery, puffing and blowing, his boozy breath condensing in the air.
‘Is it your mother that sent you?’ he says, fumbling in his pockets for his key.
Éléonore nods, her teeth chattering. The altar boy with the blank expression ties up the donkey, stoic and lashed by the rain.
‘And it can’t wait?’ grumbles the priest.
Éléonore shakes her head. The priest studies this scrawny, sodden little scarecrow, then heaves a sign o
f resignation and slips the key he has found into the lock:
‘For crying out loud… Go fetch Raymond Carrère,’ he says to the altar boy. ‘And go round to your house and let them know.’
The boy walks off. Father Antoine opens the door and beckons Éléonore to follow him. The apartment rented from the municipality for a derisory sum comprises two cramped rooms adjoining the sacristy, which, like the church, smells of damp stone, wooden pews, dusty vestments, but also the sour smell of the disembowelled mattress wedged into a corner between the few pieces of furniture, on which are piled small wooden effigies, candlesticks and bowls caked with congealed soup. The priest lights an oil lamp, then pokes the fire in the cast-iron stove. He rummages in the cupboard, brings out a bottle of alcohol, pours a glass and sits down on the trunk next to the stove, elbows resting on his knees, face bowed over the glass he is holding in both hands. Éléonore stands mute and motionless by the door with Alphonse lying at her feet, and at first she thinks the priest has dozed off again, but he sighs and gives a little cough, then brings the glass to his lips and sits up.
‘Well, sit down, girl!’ he says.
Éléonore remains standing and he studies her, before asking in a laboured voice:
‘Were you very fond of your papa?’
Then, since Éléonore does not respond, he adds: ‘That’s good, you’re a good child, a good child, good child,’ before lapsing back into contemplation, then he sits up again, brings the glass to his lips and declares:
‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’
Animalia Page 6