Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  ‘Her. See the state of her dress? She’s a slattern. And besides, it’s the least she can do for her poor father, with all the worry she’s caused him for all these years.’

  The villagers follow the finger pointed at the little girl, who, until now, has been standing back, and now, shamefaced, is wiping her mourning dress with the flat of her hand, vainly trying to scrape the mud off one clog with the toe of the other. An angel passes, giving those present time to evaluate the risk of reprisals, mitigating circumstances, the probability that some supernatural force, some vengeful spirit will later come to haunt them, to drag them from their beds in the dead of night. Éléonore finds herself encircled by a rope knotted around her waist, lifted above the grave by Marcel and Brisard and slowly lowered until the tips of her toes touch the lid of the coffin, which rocks under her weight, pitches, sinks and releases a revolting stench. At first she steadies herself against the clayey walls, and has just managed to lay her palms on the coffin, leaving handprints on the polished wood, when the piercing pain splits her again, making her groan and forcing her to release her grip and bring a hand to her belly. Then Éléonore feels something warm trickle down her thigh and her calf. She lifts the sodden hem of her dress and sees the blood stream, following a tortuous path through the downy hair that covers her pale skin, and then dripping onto the coffin lid; a single drop, a tiny crimson dome that gleams for a moment in the half-light before disappearing, soaking into a knot of wood. Éléonore has already seen her mother wash her brown napkins and tip the pinkish water out of the basin, but surreptitiously and as though mortified. Gripped by a dark feeling of shame, she hurriedly wipes herself with the damp material of her dress, then looks up. Still unmoving, the amphibian is sitting on the little effigy of Christ, its sides pulsing, pupils dilated, but so exhausted from hours of swimming that it does not even try to flee when Éléonore cups it in her trembling hands, lifts it up and brings it to her face. She looks at it for a moment, kneeling on the half-submerged coffin in the grave, and just as she sometimes dreams of being buried in the soft, sweet-smelling earth of the forest, it occurs to her that it would be possible for her to lie down on the coffin lid, parallel to the mortal remains of the father, cradling the toad in her hands, and wait, eyes fixed on the sky and the soaring seagulls, for the villagers to bury her alive on the orders of the widow. But Marcel, kneeling on the shingles, pulls the rope that still connects Éléonore to the world of the living and draws her towards him until he can grasp her under the arms, then sets her down on the cemetery ground, in the blinding sunlight.

  The villagers stare at her in silence for a long moment, the dazzled child whose dress, stockings and hair are soiled. She holds the toad before her in her mud-blackened fingers like an offering.

  ‘Are we supposed to kill it?’ someone finally ventures.

  There come no answers, no-one being certain what to do in the circumstances. Already the countryfolk, weary and satisfied, are drifting away and heading back to the village, and the gravedigger buries the blade of his shovel in the trampled hillock and throws a first shovelful of mud into the grave, which lands on the coffin with a muffled thud. Éléonore takes advantage of the adults’ newfound indifference to escape, pushing open the cemetery gates and following the wall until she comes to the thickets below where a small brook runs not far from the foot of the great oak. Here, the voices and the clang of the shovel reach her only distantly, softened by the rustling of the branches of the oak tree and the unbroken song of the birds nesting there. Éléonore crouches down and sits on a root. Pain radiates from the lower abdomen. She half-opens the hands holding the toad again and in its eyes seeks the gentle look of her father’s eyes, because it does not seem to her impossible that something of him has survived and lived on in this creature, not the soul but a vestige, some faint echo. When she sets it on the ground, the toad at first squats on its stubby legs, then, convinced that the child does not represent a threat, calmly disappears into the grass. Éléonore watches it for a moment until she sees it disappear. She huddles against the trunk of the oak as she used to do against the father’s body and lays a hand against the bark rubbed smooth by the rasp of clogs and of bare feet. She feels a great wave of tiredness. The seagulls have forsaken the sky. The branches of the great oak break up the light, scattering it in flashes over the trunk, the ground and Éléonore’s face. Violets are growing in the short grass and in the moss, perfuming the sprawling shade of the tree. She picks one and eats it. A few squirrels, red, furtive shadows, skirt around the trunk, suddenly appearing and disappearing with little squeaks. The mud stains on her mourning dress have dried and exhaustion gradually overcomes the child, whose eyelids close in spite of her, so she can see only the tawny daylight, luminous, flickering lines between her eyelashes. Later, it is a hand that wakes her, then the face of Marcel bending over her. The funeral is over and the father now reposes in eternal darkness. Éléonore grasps the hand Marcel offers and he helps her to her feet.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he says.

  The child nods and together they climb the slope to where the widow is waiting on the road that leads from the village to Puy-Larroque cemetery.

  In the evening, as they are undressing to put on their nightclothes, the widow notices the brown stains on the girl’s underclothes. Immediately, she grabs them, brings them to her nose and sniffs, inhaling in little gulps, savouring the smell of the first period, the irrefutable proof of her sexual maturity. Slowly, she lowers her arms. Her lips tremble and her eyes come to rest on Éléonore.

  ‘You are unclean,’ she says, in a toneless voice. ‘You are sullied now. And you will sin.’

  ‘No,’ Éléonore says. ‘No, I…’

  ‘Shut up. Say what you like, you will sin. Oh, yes. Remember how Eve allowed the serpent to beguile her. He will beguile you too. Don’t forget that we are here on this earth through her fault. And the Lord said: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” And to the man He said: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”’

  The widow lays a hand on the girl’s shoulders, pressing with all her weight until Éléonore’s legs buckle and they both fall to their knees.

  ‘Let us pray,’ she says, ‘for the salvation of your soul and your father’s. Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. And according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. Wash me yet more from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin…’

  In the days that follow the funeral, they wash the house with lye soap to clean away the smell, scrubbing the sheets and then the floors until the skin on their knees and their palms is blistered. The widow opens the old wardrobe fashioned by the father’s father long ago, when she was trundling along in her wedding dress in a cart drawn by a Pyrenean donkey, then she takes out the clothes belonging to the dead husband who rattled along next to her, proud as a peacock, wearing the same suit in which he is now rotting in Puy-Larroque cemetery. She unfolds the shirts and the patched trousers, folds them again and lays them on the table in two piles. In his glory days, the father was much the same build as Marcel, and the widow, who cannot abide waste, could offer the nephew enough to dress himself and supplement his meagre attire, two shirts and two sweaters he wears alternately, changing one when he stinks enough and it has become stiff as a board over his pale torso – it is considered appropriate for a man to smell, as it is from their smell that one can gauge their worth and their efforts – but she takes the old clothes to a corner of the yard, puts some dry branches in the bottom of a metal barrel and burns everything, standing guard in the black, acrid smoke, arms folded, star
ing straight ahead, until there is nothing left but an insubstantial pile of ash carried off by the first gust of wind. She sorts through her own clothes, and packs away the dresses, cardigans and stockings that are not black into a wicker basket. When she is not cleaning or tending to the animals, she sets a chair by the front door and waits, sitting in her widow’s weeds, hands resting in her lap, rigid as a sphinx.

  Several times a year, pedlars set up shop on the village square and, for a morning, offer more or less anything that can be bought in town at the ironmonger’s, the haberdasher’s and the dressmaker’s, sharpening knives and buying up old clothes. The village women eagerly await the market, their meagre savings slipped next to their breast, then hurry to the cart, fighting over the merchandise, feeling the fabrics, engaging in protracted negotiations. The widow, who has no desire to be part of the profligate exhilaration of the other women, watches from her vantage point the road that leads to Puy-Larroque. A cart approaches drawn by a mangy, stubborn mule urged on by a pedlar who has whipped the animal so hard its croup is bald. Very soon, she will die somewhere along the road, bowing her head with a heavy sigh, her body held upright by the shafts, the harness and the weight of the cart, and the pedlar will carry on roaring and thrashing the bare leather of its croup for a moment before climbing down to discover that the animal’s tongue is lolling in the dust and its large, cloudy eye is half-closed. Her old heart will simply have given up after twenty years of drudgery and more lashes of the whip than any beast on earth could endure. Just now, the widow is gesturing to the pedlar, beckoning him over. The hawker lacerates the animal’s mouth, leaning back on the reins with all his weight and brings the cart to a halt in the middle of the farmyard. The mule’s shoes are thin and cracked, its hooves worn down, and she drinks thirstily from the bucket Éléonore has brought. The pedlar is so small he could be taken for a dwarf – he has the same plump hands, the same bandy legs, the same swagger to his gait – but his head is that of a man of normal constitution, so that it looks as though it has been screwed onto this squat body by mistake. As always he is elegantly dressed in a three-piece suit that, Éléonore assumes, was made for a city boy from a well-heeled family, a nine-year-old at most, with a bow tie tightly cinched into his fat red neck, about to garrotte him. Though he is the smallest creature that Éléonore has ever seen, the pedlar is also the fattest, with folds of skin at his wrists and at his elbows. Like those dolls of wood or porcelain she has dreamed about, where the parts are separate but held together by a metal wire, when she sees the pedlar twice or three times a year, she imagines his body is filled with pliable metal wires in place of bones, which – more than his weight – would explain the difficulty he has moving, his manner of turning his flushed, sweaty head without ever nodding to say yes or no as though it is set on a pivot. He jumps down with a curious agility, then removes the oilskin protecting his cargo to reveal wooden crates and burlap sacks containing a veritable bazaar of bowls and pots, china plates stored in hay, small tools, woollens and tanned leathers, bolts of fabric and sundry clothes. The widow stays with the pedlar for a moment; asks to see his wares. When she heads back into the house, she leaves the little man alone with Éléonore and he smiles at her, revealing a few rotten teeth strung out along his bloodless gums.

  ‘Well, now, you’ve grown up a bit, ain’t you?’ he says, sniggering.

  He speaks Gascon, but with an accent she does not recognize and she is careful not to respond. The pedlar casts a quick glance at the house.

  ‘Can’t exactly say as what you’re pretty. Mayhap it’s ’cause you’re dressed in rags.’

  Éléonore feels her cheeks tingle as the blood rushes to them. She considers running off but fearing the admonition of the widow she stands there, dumbfounded. The pedlar gives another nervous laugh, then takes a step back so he is hidden behind the mule, grabs his crotch and rubs the fabric of his trousers.

  ‘Pretty l’il strumpet,’ says the dwarf. ‘You ain’t all dried up like scrawny that ol’ mother of yours.’

  He mumbles rather than speaks as he opens his flies and takes out a limp, livid penis the size of a chitterling sausage, which he jerks roughly two or three times as he licks his thin, tobacco-stained lips. The moment the widow reappears in the doorway, he does himself up faster than a snake can flicker its tongue. In her arms, the widow is carrying the small bundle of neatly folded clothes she will not wear again. She glances at her daughter, finding her pale and ugly, the spit and image of the reflection she takes care not to look at in the mirror. She comforts herself with the thought that black better suits their ghostly complexion. The merchant examines each piece of clothing.

  ‘I’ll not get much for these, dear,’ he says, turning his head.

  Her pride wounded, the widow recoils slightly.

  ‘I’ve always taken good care of them,’ she says.

  The dealer shrugs, then examines the clothes again and says:

  ‘I’ll not get much for them.’

  In the ensuing silence, the mule lifts its tail and defecates.

  ‘What I want is material like that there,’ the widow says, pointing to the cart.

  The pedlar seems to think for a moment.

  ‘Three, four lengths,’ the widow adds. ‘That’s all I’m asking. After all, I have to dress appropriately now that my husband’s dead.’

  The merchant once more pretends to hesitate, then waves his arm to say, ‘Go on, then,’ and with a magnanimous swagger he steps towards his wares, picks up a pair of scissors, unrolls a bolt of black fabric, measuring it against the side of the cart, doubles it, then triples it before cutting under the watchful eye of the widow. He folds the fabric, proffers it to the customer and holds out his doll-like hand, the same hand that moments earlier was tugging his penis in front of the little child, and the widow takes it in her thin, grey, masculine hand.

  ‘There you go, m’dear! It’s a deal, as they say.’

  The pedlar gives Éléonore a wink and, touching the brim of his hat, jumps up onto the cart and whips the croup of the mule, who, roused from her doze, stifles a bray and sets in motion her old bones. The widow and the girl watch as the cart pulls out of the farmyard. Then the peasant woman heads back towards the house, running her hand over the fabric, from which she will painstakingly cut and sew the two dresses that she will wear from this day forward until she takes her last breath. She has always envied the solemnity of widows and mourning is a balm to her, like the pitiable expression that she already likes to affect, suggesting a suppressed, relentless pain, an open wound that both lifts and transcends her. These are the clothes, she thinks, that will safeguard her authority over the child and the nephew, to whose tender mercies she has been left by the husband’s death. Éléonore remains in the yard, seized by a feeling that she has been sullied, a bitter aftertaste in her mouth. Alphonse is lying at her feet, in the dust raised by the pedlar’s departure. For the first time since his passing, the father’s death seems to her real, inevitable, and consigns her to an unbearable loneliness, confronted by the dark forces she cannot name but which are welling within her, stirring nefarious urges. In the pale sunlight that illuminates the farmyard, she shivers like a small prey animal.

  II

  Post Tenebras Lux (1914-1917)

  The earth begins to murmur, the sap to well in the trees, rising slowly through the trunks, and buds swell beneath the bark along the bare branches. Opalescent larvae writhe beneath the layers of humus and in the rotting stumps, woken from their torpor by the thaw, and brown pupae begin to hatch. In the village cemetery, at first light, the grass snakes slither from a vault and rest on a gravestone half-hidden by ferns. The ice from the reservoir, which the more reckless village children cross in the dead of winter, has long since melted and water striders ripple the surface of the water as they scurry. In spring, the women of Puy-Larroque and the surrounding farms gather at dawn around the village washhouse. They come on foot, on carts, on mules, with a barrow or carrying large burlap sacks filled
with the linens they wash only once a year, as though starched with sweat, mud, with the secretions of men and those of animals. All winter, they have collected the ashes from the hearth and protected it from inclement weather in these same burlap sacks. The washing is laid out on the cool, dew-damp grass, in the morning sun and the smell of hay. The washerwomen set out buckets of water drawn from the wash trough, and in them dissolve flakes of lye soap, which gradually scents the air. At the hour when the cocks are crowing and calling to one another, the men are sharpening scythes and setting off, donning their caps, beneath the deep blue sky in which a sliver of moon and a handful of stars still gleam, scythe handles resting on their shoulders, a few dogs trotting at their heels. Since the father’s death, Alphonse will only go with Marcel, but he no longer runs ahead of him or of Éléonore, nor bounds across ditches. He simply walks alongside, head hanging low, and lies down as soon as possible to rest his hind legs, which have grown stiff. His eyes are covered with a bluish pall and his coat has turned white. The washerwomen plunge the laundry into the soapy water, where it disgorges swirls of blackish fluid. In the quiet farms the chickens grow bolder and venture into the houses whose doors stand open to let in a little cool morning air; they peck about under the tables, perch on the backs of chairs, hop up on the beds, where sometimes they lay an egg which they sit on until they are chased off with a broom. Sitting on the grass, in the shade of fig trees heavy with sap, the washerwomen talk. Sometimes one of them will get up to stir the laundry, which is left to soak all day. The blades of the scythes blaze in the midday sun and white flashes course through the meadows. Wearing scarves and armed with washboards, the women trample the grass, which gives off a sweet perfume. The youngest children are sitting or lying at the foot of the trees, watched over by their sisters; from time to time, a young mother lies down, unbuttons her blouse to reveal a swollen breast and suckles a newborn. The air smells of the women’s perspiration, of trampled grass and sweltering cattle. From field to meadow, the farmers call to one another in jubilant voices; the haymaking is good this year and will carry on into July for the late fields. They will have enough to feed the animals and face the harsh winter.