They are silent for a long time, the only sound the crackling of logs in the stove and the rain pattering on the sloping roof of the presbytery. At length, there comes a knock at the door. It is Raymond Carrère, the verger, who stands on the threshold, wrapped in an oilskin cloak.
‘The boy’s not with you?’ says the priest as the man steps inside and looks at Éléonore.
‘His mother says it’s not fit weather for a dog to be out abroad, says he’s already caught his death tramping out in the rain,’ the man says.
The clergyman dismisses the response with a scowl and an irritated flick of his wrist. Carrère removes his beret and greets Éléonore with an affected nod of the head, while Father Antoine drags himself as far as the sacristy door, which he unlocks and disappears behind. He rummages for a moment, then reappears, tangled in his surplice and a purple stole, the parish cross tucked under one arm, the sacramental oils slipped into a fabric bag and a brass bell in one hand.
‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ he says, pushing them towards the door.
The procession sets off. Éléonore leads the way, lighting the road as best she can, holding before her the oil lamp whose light fractures and fades in the ruts. With the other hand she shakes the little bell, muffled by the rain. Alphonse walks on ahead of them, skirting the puddles. Raymond Carrère carries the parish cross, the base tucked into the crook of his left elbow, the body leaning against his shoulder and resting against his cheek. The rain plasters the mourning veil that surmounts the cross against the wood and the gaunt, dripping face of Christ so that the radiant visage lifted towards the night becomes that of a corpse in a winding shroud. As they cross the square, the villagers gather at their windows in a halo of candlelight and make the sign of the cross. The women they encounter lift their muddy skirts and, unable to kneel, bend their legs and bow their heads. Since they pass by the smithy, where the furnace is blazing, the blacksmith stops beating the anvil and quickly blesses himself. In the embers, a horseshoe glimmers lazily beneath the lava. From the shelter of barns and storehouses, dogs bark and tug at their leashes as Alphonse passes. From doorsteps, children watch the black, silent procession as it moves away from the village beneath the ragged sky, stinging their cheeks with driving rain. Soon, the barking of the dogs dies away, Puy-Larroque disappears behind them and there remains only the deep, electric twilight, the grey-green recesses in the hollows of the hills whose curves their eyes can barely make out. Convulsive thunderbolts, silent and simmering, light up the higher strata, illuminated domes. Hen pheasants run through the brambles; small game, blue, furtive, soundless, scurry around the edges of the fields. A gust of wind lifts the black veil from the mourning face of Christ, then, with a crack, whips it away and the procession pauses for a moment, helpless and shivering, and watches the funeral veil fly off into the chilly night, scamper along the lane, caught up in the eddies of dead leaves, rise into the air and then disappear, as lithe and capricious as a noctule bat. They resume their laborious march. Father Antoine staggers along the side of the road in the tufts of springy grass, trying his best to lift the soutane trampled by his muddy clogs. He is shouting words at them which reach them only in snatches. The purple stole slaps his face and he pushes it down, then stops, half-bent, his hands resting on his thighs. They are coming to the roadside cross at the foot of which they agree to stop for a moment, and the priest sits down, breathlessly muttering:
‘Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’
He rummages in the bag containing the sacramental oils, takes out a flask of eau-de-vie and brings it to his lips while Éléonore and the verger wait, she still tinkling the bell, he struggling against the wind blustering around the parish cross, whose weight is digging into his shoulder, and taking one step forward and two steps back trying to keep his balance. The night is coal-black now, pierced only by the turbulent flame of the lamp being held by the frozen little girl. A sudden lightning flash reveals them, fixing them like dazed fallow deer before returning them to the darkness, leaving on the disc of the sightless pupils a negative afterimage of the roadside cross and their outlined silhouettes. Father Antoine carefully packs away his flask and they help him up, each pulling on one arm with all their might, then they set off once more. In an enclosed field, forgotten, invisible cattle stand in the shelter of the trees, and all that is visible are the pale eyes reflecting the glow of the lamp. As they near the farm, which is still only a vague shadow, a deep rumbling rips the heavens and, despite Éléonore’s calls, Alphonse bolts straight ahead and disappears. The lightning strikes close by, hitting the topmost branches of the hundred-year-old cedar and, from behind her, Éléonore hears the asthmatic voice of the priest:
‘Yea… though I walk… through the valley… of the… shadow… of death, I will fear no… evil: for Thou art… Thou art with me; Thy rod… and Thy staff… they comfort me…’
A fresh gust of wind sweeps along the road, lifting the parish cross, which escapes the slippery hands of Raymond Carrère; the verger tries to regain his footing, racing behind the cross as it lifts itself upright for a moment, as though raised into the night by some higher power, then it bends, dragging him through the ditch, where he falls, sprawling, in a fallow field. Father Antoine and Éléonore watch dumbfounded as Raymond Carrère, his mouth filled with dirt, painfully tries to get up, slips, falls again, struggles and finally manages to get to his feet, spits and wipes his muddy face with his hand. The verger looks at the priest, the child looks at the priest, the priest looks from one to the other and says nothing, then the verger pulls the parish cross from the mud, heaves it onto his shoulder and steps across the ditch. By the time they arrive at the farm, the rain has washed his face and that of Christ, and the verger, panting for breath, sets the cross down against the front wall. Marcel opens the door to them. They go inside and all three stand motionless on the threshold. The genetrix is sitting next to the father. She lifts her gaunt, trembling face towards them. The body lies in the bed. The father has died before receiving Extreme Unction. His limbs, contorted by a final spasm, raise the sheet. His head is thrown backwards such that they cannot see the eyes trained forever on the bedhead, but the gaping mouth, the anaemic palate, the loose teeth, the scrawny neck, the skin stretched taut by the Adam’s apple, as though the father had swallowed something much too big, too angular. Éléonore rushes to embrace the still-warm body and kiss the beard, a handsome grey with occasional white tufts.
At dawn, the bell tolls over the silent, sodden landscape. The widow has covered the few mirrors in the house and turned the lone photograph of the father to face the wall. Before the body stiffened, she slipped a hand under the neck and laid the head back on the pillow, closed the eyes and the mouth, then tied the head with a strip of fabric that will leave a fine mesh pattern on the temples. On a shelf at the head of the bed she places a crucifix and a bowl of holy water in which there is a sprig of boxwood. With silent and contemplative gestures, the widow and Marcel bathe the body one last time. The closed shutters let in only a wisp of blue dawn and their bowed faces blaze in the glow of lighted candles. They have doused the fire and cleaned away the ashes from the hearth. Marcel lifts the body of the father, light as an armful of kindling. With lukewarm water, they rinse the hard, pallid, waxen flesh, then the widow snaps the huge white sheets in the half-light of the room and painstakingly smooths them out over the mattress with the flat of her hand. They dress the father’s body in his formal suit, the one he wore for his wedding and for Éléonore’s baptism and which now makes him look like a scarecrow. Marcel forces the arms; the joints crack and break. He folds them over the shroud in which they have wrapped him, and the widow kneads and with great difficulty entwines the fingers around her rosary, brushes the father’s hair and his beard, which will continue to grow even in the grave. With the aid of a sewing needle, she cleans the father’s fingernails, removing the remnants of soil and dried excrement, then delicately pushes back the cuticles. Sitting next to the bed, she pats the worn cover of her
little missal and, in a low voice, murmurs indistinct litanies, vague psalms. Soon, the barbarous horde of villagers arrives on foot, by bicycle or cart, and crowds into the room. The widow now affects a tearful expression. They approach the body, bless it, shaking the sprig of boxtree over the forehead. The beads of water lie, motionless, on the sagging skin of the face. They sit on the benches lined up along the walls and, not knowing what to do with their coarse hands, place them on the angles carved out by their knees beneath the fabric of the trousers or their mourning dresses. In the little hillside cemetery, beneath the first spring sunshine, a gravedigger buries the blade of a shovel between two graves and lifts out a clod of soft earth veined with rootlets. Farther off, the carpenter Jocelyn Lagarde planes timbers and crudely assembles the coffin in which the father will lie, and the hammer falling on the heads of the nails echoes through the streets of Puy-Larroque and far beyond. So, the widow thinks, he’s gone now, gone for good. The proof, if it were needed, is that people he scarcely knew and had no desire to welcome into his house while he was alive are now gathered around his deathbed; and why are they are here, if not to ensure that it truly is the father who has been taken by the grim reaper, to remind themselves that they, the villagers, are still very much alive, and to read in the face of the deceased some sign, some answer to the question men have asked themselves since the dawn of time? But no, the father, or what remains of him, eludes, demurs, offers nothing to their avid gaze but his pitiful and grotesque remains. So all her care and her attentions have been futile – he died in the end! The widow feels relief that she will no longer have to change, wash, wipe and force-feed a dying man, but she also sees opening up before her the void that will be left by his absence, one tempered for the time being by the presence of the mortal remains. The prospect of living without a husband, and with only the antagonistic presence of Marcel and of Éléonore for company, is not exactly pleasant. She is alone now; those two will join forces, there is little doubt of that. Not that the father was an ally, but at least he spared her from persecution. The widow knows she has been deposed. Nothing now stands between her and Éléonore, a child she has never known how to handle, now a thin, taciturn girl of eleven, whose resentment the genetrix has only succeeded in fuelling since the moment she came into the world. The widow must be wary of her; still waters run deep. The gravedigger is now buried to the waist in cemetery clay. He splinters the planks of an old coffin, then brings back to daylight a shovelful of grey, porous bones, molars with sinuous roots, scattered phalanges, cranial plates denticulated and concave as ivory bowls, which he sets down on a muddy hummock.
In a corner of the hayloft, Éléonore hugs her knees, draped in her little mourning dress. A black cat that has found shelter here rubs its lice-infested fur against her. Back arched, tail erect, it lets out a guttural purr. From the yard, she can hear voices, the snuffling of the horses and the clink of the harness when they snort. Her hands are numb with cold and she slips her fingers between her thighs. She thinks about the father’s body, on display for all to see. Although something inside her throbs and threatens, for a long time she sits stock-still, staring at the floor, where silverfish race in the dust. The cat continues to come and go, rubbing itself against her leg, pushing its nose into the folds of her mourning dress, and at first she does not move. Then she directs her gaze to the scrawny, friendly animal, whose pale green eyes are ringed with sleep. Éléonore reaches out her right hand and the cat rises up on its hind paws to press its head against the outstretched palm. From the lips raised by two worn incisors, a drop of saliva pearls and falls onto the wooden floorboards. As it soaks in, it leaves a tiny brown halo. Éléonore grabs the cat by the scruff of the neck and gently pulls it towards her. She extends her other arm, grips the throat of the animal, which at first continues to purr, half-closing its eyes, then swallows with difficulty and sticks out the tip of its pink tongue. Éléonore tightens the vice and the cat begins to struggle to escape her, shows its claws and tries to push away her hands, scratching her skin so that she has to pin the animal down on the ground between her legs and crush its head against the floor using her whole weight. The cat bristles, convulses, lets out a frantic mewling, then she lets go and it scampers to the far end of the hayloft, where it coughs, mouth open, as though about to vomit, then is still. Éléonore’s wrists and the backs of her hands are covered with thin slashes that pearl with drops of heavy blood, which merge and slide over her pale skin. She watches as they trickle the length of her forearms, then she brings them to her lips. She licks the blood and sucks the painless scratches, staring at the cat, which has also begun to carefully wash itself, still keeping a wary eye on her. Eventually it stops, eyes half-closed. Éléonore calls to it. She gently drums her fingers on her legs. The cat freezes. It hesitates, crosses the hayloft with slow, loping strides, recoils when she extends her hand again, then accepts the caress and makes its irrepressible purring heard. Éléonore picks it up, sets it on her lap, where, after turning around a few times, it curls up, and before long Éléonore too is dozing, one injured hand resting against the warm, vibrant body of the animal.
All day the body lies, august and imperious, between the panels of the box-bed. Beneath the immaculate shroud, beneath the sheet smoothed by the widow’s calloused hands, inside the formal suit fitted over the limbs purpled with lividity, secretly, yet in full view of everyone, the ruins of the father roil and begin their metamorphosis. In the faecal magma of the abdomen, a silent army emerges. The commensal bacteria toil, proliferate and transform the guts into a primordial sludge. Discreetly, the corpse egests into the flannels with which the undergarments have been carefully stuffed. A greenish discoloration has appeared on the epidermis, in the region of the iliac fossa, above the already putrefying maggot of the caecum. The pancreas is already reduced to a formless slick that leaches between the other organs. Cells break down and self-digest. The now permeable linings make all barriers obsolete. The remains are nothing more than a Great Whole in which bacteria flourish and course through the maze of atrophied vessels. The father is beginning to smell. Not that pungent stench that poured from his every orifice in the last throes of death, but the sickly, nauseating perfume of swamps in whose stagnant waters floats the bloated carcass of some barely recognizable animal, of the pungent black humus teeming with larvae at the roots of huge rotting trees. The widow, the villagers and Marcel say nothing. From time to time, they burn small bunches of dried sage while they cough politely. The room is cold as a crypt. Now and then a sound rises from the deathbed, a rumbling noise softly escapes the closed lips, a fetid gas is released into the sheets and spreads through the room in the awkward silence. The glow of the candles casts a sickly yellow fresco on the walls, the faces and the shadowy corners. The wooden table gradually piles up with earthenware cups stained black with coffee grounds, plates of biscuits and balls of wool as the women continue to knit to kill time and relieve the torpor of the wake. Mourners whose tears have long since run dry, elderly women worn out by life, by childbirth and tilling the land talk in low voices, get up to offer their seat to some woman who is older, more broken, or to bustle about the scullery, tramping their muddy clogs across the floor, their legs blotchy with varicose veins and swollen from standing around.
Her name reaches her from some far-off place and Éléonore wakes, numb with cold, in the hayloft. Only a few hours have passed, but the day is already waning over the land, the low-angled sun sets the hills ablaze and the rooks, perhaps attracted by the smell of death, perch in the trees all around, smoothing their purple-tinged feathers and calling to each other. Their cries ring out in the pure air. The gravedigger has long since completed his task. Now the grave is an unfathomable chasm into which the shadows of the crosses fall. Earthworms and lucifugous insects emerge from the mound of earth, slither back to the grave and let themselves fall. In the quiet of the now empty workshop, the crude coffin of rickety planed planks exhales its sweet smell of sawdust and the veins of the wood ooze a little
sap. A small cross carrying the Christ is screwed to the coffin lid. Again, a voice from the farmyard calls Éléonore’s voice. The cat left the hayloft while she was asleep, and if her dress did not bear the imprint of its body and her hands the coagulated traces of its scratches, she would doubt it had ever existed, for she has only a dazed memory of the past hours. She gets up and leans against a beam until the feeling returns to her algid limbs, then she climbs down the ladder. Marcel spots her, runs to her, wraps his arms around her shoulders and cries:
‘Hours we’ve been looking for you!’
He lays a hand on her face, on the nape of her neck, then grabs her wrists and see the scratches on her hands and her forearms. Surely this is the first time he touches her in this way, lavishes on her the care she longed for from the father?
‘What happened here?’ he asks.
Éléonore cannot answer and Marcel slips an arm around her shoulders to lead her back to the farmhouse. The father’s face is a death mask draped over the contours of the skull. The room reeks of decay and sour sweat, of the fumes of hooch and of soup served to warm people up, of the breath that mouths of rotting teeth and ulcerous stomachs have been spewing all day, endlessly rebreathing the same musty air that mists the windowpanes. When they see Éléonore finally come through the door, everyone falls silent. The child is inert, dishevelled, her little mourning dress rumpled and smudged with dust, wisps of hay and tufts of shed hair; her arms scratched.
‘She fell asleep up in the hayloft,’ Marcel says.
The assembled company lets out a murmur of relief. Dumbfounded at first, the widow stares at her daughter for a moment, then gets up with a crack of vertebrae. She carefully sets the missal with the worn cover on her chair, crosses the room so slowly that everyone has time to follow her progress and wonder what her intentions are, then she slaps Éléonore with all her strength. The little girl staggers and falls against the wall, knocking over a chair whose back shatters on the floor before Marcel has the time to catch her. The child gets to her feet, stunned, falls and gets up again. The widow grabs her by the hair and drags her to the father’s bedside, where, twisting her neck, she forces her to sit on the bench. Then she goes back to her chair, picks up the missal with the worn cover and sits down. In the embarrassed silence, someone picks up and tries to mend the chair. Hands gripping her knees to hide their trembling, her eyes clouded with tears, Éléonore stares at the floor. She has bitten her tongue and can feel the wound throb against the roof of her mouth to the rhythm of the muffled beating of her heart. She swallows mouthfuls of blood, thick and metallic as black bile, as poison, determined to hold it all in. Soon, willingly or reluctantly, conversations resume and dispel the awkward atmosphere. Éléonore senses the presence of Marcel at the far end of the room, his eyes on her, but she does not dare look up for fear of meeting the triumphant gaze of the widow and allowing her to gloat at her humiliation. When, stiff-necked, she finally decides to lift her face, the black cat has cut a path through the room and is looking at her with pale, indifferent eyes from under the box-bed, phlegmatic psychopomp or a sombre omen visible only to her.
Animalia Page 7