Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  ‘Don’t delude yourself, my girl,’ the widow says from behind Éléonore’s back. ‘He’ll not be coming back. They’ll send him to the front lines. He’ll be sent into action, like all the lads who haven’t done their military service.’

  Éléonore tilts her head towards the widow.

  ‘You think I haven’t noticed you hanging around him like a bitch in heat?’

  At that moment, Marcel pushes the door and bursts into the room.

  ‘I’m going to take the mother home,’ he says.

  His lips quiver a little. The widow does not respond.

  ‘Right, then,’ Marcel says, and he turns around and leaves, but Éléonore catches up with him in the yard and grabs his elbow.

  ‘You’ll come back,’ she says.

  ‘I won’t be able to finish the harvest,’ Marcel replies.

  ‘Will you write?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ he says, a little distraught. ‘I’ll write.’

  He lowers his gaze to the hand gripping his elbow. He looks up at the widow standing in the doorway, black and grim as a bird of prey, a buzzard preparing to swoop, then at the fragile, pitiful mother waiting for him by the cart.

  The gradual departure of the reservists who are to join the Régiment de Gascogne and the 288th Infantry Regiment is accompanied by a general fervour. Surely they should be thrilled to experience something so exceptional, something that will transcend their ordinary lives? Every day, a group of them pile their kitbags – two flannel shirts, one spare pair of underwear, two handkerchiefs, two jerseys, a sweater or a thick jumper, a flannel belt, two pairs of wool socks, a pair of wool gloves, a woollen blanket, to be reimbursed immediately after they arrive – onto a cart driven by an old man, a father, a grandparent, who sometimes drives one or two or three of his own sons, and they wave goodbye to the sister, the mother, the lover sobbing on the square of Puy-Larroque, the villagers cheering them, the children and the dogs who run along behind in the cloud of dust raised by the wheels of the convoy, yelling and yapping, until they give up in exhaustion, then the shouts and the tears and the feverish, heart-rending goodbyes give way to the quiet of the countryside; the tranquil serenity of the uncaring, unchanging countryside, the chatter of magpies and crows, the stealthy race of a hare in the field, the cool shade of the trees and the smell of mignonettes that tugs at their brave patriotic hearts. Their elbows and their knees knock together, and they seek out the touch of a thigh, an arm, a familiar, reassuring body.

  In Puy-Larroque, life is frozen in the bewilderment left by the departure of the men, their removal from the landscape, the palpable void felt everywhere that gives rise to new superstitions: the empty armchairs where they used to sit when they came home from the fields and where no-one now dares sit, the plates and the cutlery laid against all common sense to ward off evil, the closed door of the forge and the blacksmith’s sign, where they bless themselves as they might when passing a roadside shrine, the suit of clothes that for a few hours, perhaps a few days, retains the smell of a body and becomes a shroud on which they sleep. In a lean-to shed, a clutch of chickens find a perch for the night atop a mechanical reaper. Bats wrap their young in their dry wings and the delicate silhouettes quiver in the warmth of the barn. The branches of the walnut trees rustle and a butcherbird impales the remains of a silver-bellied shrew on a hawthorn bush. At nightfall, mothers step out onto their porches and call to their offspring. A gentle breeze blows over the land, carrying with it the braying of a forlorn donkey, the acrid smoke of brushwood fires, the smell of soup, the cry of a child. A sad, ineffectual old man roams the croplands, beating the verges with his cane, flushing hen pheasants from the ditches and dusty hedges. In the depths of the first nights that follow the soldiers’ departure, lights roam about, flames quaver along the dark roads. These are women torn by doubt from restless sleep who reach out and touch the cold sheet, the empty side of the bed, then get up and wander about the countryside, lantern in hand, making sure that they did not forget to close the horse’s paddock, flick the latch on the byre, or that the fields themselves have not gone, vanished, just like the men.

  The charred skies of mournful evenings are followed by the steel-grey skies of listless mornings. The women wake and dress at the hour when the men used to wake and dress. They learn to whet the scythe blade, then head out into the fields wearing their grey dresses, scythe handle resting on their shoulders. They reap, they hoe, they dig, redoubling their strength and their determination. They drive the carts and the drays, lead the mules and the geldings. They tie up the swaths, haul up the bales of straw. They fall asleep at twilight over the piece of fabric they are darning, the needle whose eye they can no longer make out buried in a calloused thumb. On 20 August, Pope Pius X dies. The widow does not have time to get upset. The absence of men opens up a rift, another possible reality. The exhaustion brought on by the women’s new tasks reveals a new image of the world, one in which they appear as free and responsible. For the moment, it is merely a sensation, a fleeting, indefinable impression which looms suddenly in the night. In their dreams the men come home from war, but nothing now is the same; an outmoded world seems to have disappeared with them.

  The women look on those men who have stayed behind in the village, the old, the adolescents, the hunchback, the blind man, the simpleton. A time will come when they burn for them with a fierce desire, oblivious to their flaws, and to the fidelity they pledged at the altar. Some they will deflower, others they will reanimate in the corners of barns, in shady hedgerows, on beds of straw, hiking up their skirts to get it over quickly, kneeling on the ground and holding their hair up, hunkering in the tall grasses so they can keep an eye out. They will wrap their arms around old men, enfolding bellies as flabby and wrinkled as elbow skin. They will swallow semen, wipe it from their petticoats, let it trickle translucently down a thigh to the seam of a stocking, where it is soaked up. They will collect it in their hands and throw it on the ground, with a quick disgusted flick, like snot. Much later, some will compress their swollen bellies beneath tight bandages and, in hushed rooms, give birth to tiny, misshapen bastards. They will drink potions by way of purges. They will visit ‘women who know’. Many will remain chaste, faithful, cherishing a mental image of their husband long after those albumen print portraits have faded. According to the day, their mood, their forgetfulness, shifting memory will obscure and rearrange features, infinitesimal changes that will create a whole gallery of other faces, other bodies, other characters. Soon, even their personalities will no longer be fixed; drunkards will become bons vivants, brutes will be passionate and skinflints will seem thrifty. The women will speak reverentially to their children about their absent fathers, brothers, uncles; they will praise their courage and their self-sacrifice. In the gulf opened up by war, morality and common sense will undergo a shift. To kill and to die will be glorious and make heroes of ordinary men. Some credit is always accorded to the dead, all the more so if one dies on the front lines. War will carve their names in history long after they have faded from the stone monuments in Puy-Larroque cemetery. Their whole lives will be summed up by a single fact, ‘He died a soldier,’ and there will be nothing else to say.

  The government, the Council of State and the Banque de France are relocated to Bordeaux. News from the front arrives via the press, and the women adapt to the vacuum left by the absence of the men. The widow once more reigns supreme on the farm. The morning after Marcel’s departure, when Éléonore sets off to bake the bread in the communal oven, she goes into his room and grabs the little crow, its head tucked into its feathers, dozing on the handle of the wicker basket that serves as a perch. She goes out into the yard; she hesitates. She feels the fragile wings quiver in her hands, struggling to unfurl, feels the beak push between her fingers. She looks at the well, at the block on which the father and Marcel used to split wood. With a sudden movement, she tosses the bird into the air. It spreads its wings, glides in circles over the yard and then comes back and lands on the g
round, a few metres from the widow. She bends down, picks up some pebbles, then throws them at the bird. The first misses its mark, and the little crow watches, head tilted to one side; a second pebble hits it on the beak and it flutters up onto the roof and totters along the ridge, cawing. The widow goes back into the farmhouse, into Marcel’s bedroom. She throws the mattress onto the floor, tugs at the slats, raising the bed base and leaning it against the wall. She clears out the room, carrying the furniture out into the shed, then leans against the cob wall, panting for breath. When Éléonore returns, she finds the room bare, a simple square of beaten earth, and the sight is like a knife in her throat.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asks the widow, who is preparing the pigswill, her back pointedly turned.

  ‘I need the space, I need it to stock firewood for the winter. What business is it of yours?’

  Her tone is curt, rasping, exasperated.

  ‘The crow, where’s the little crow?’ Éléonore says.

  The widow spins around. Her daughter is standing before her in the middle of the room, pale but defiant, arms tense, fists clenched against her thighs. Something has changed, something they did not realize until now. At thirteen, Éléonore is now as tall as the widow. The mother no longer has any physical advantage over her daughter. But she slaps the girl, the tips of her fingers just grazing her chin, a formal, soundless slap that leaves Éléonore frozen, then she turns away again and says:

  ‘How would I know where it is? And don’t speak to me in that tone of voice.’

  A thread of spittle sprays from her mouth. She is aware of the controlled hostility of the girl standing behind her, of the precision of her own movements as she stirs the pigswill. Éléonore steps forward, soundlessly, just as she stole into the scullery as a child to take a ladle of cream from the churn. She grabs the widow’s left wrist so tightly that she drops the wooden spoon, which clatters to the ground, and stifles a cry, a barely audible moan.

  ‘You listen to me,’ Éléonore says, suddenly perfectly calm. ‘If you ever raise your hand to me again, I swear I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you, do you understand?’

  The widow studies the girl’s impassive face. She tries to move the wrist held in Éléonore’s vice-like grip, then says:

  ‘Time you went out and fed the animals.’

  Éléonore relaxes her fingers and the widow slowly presses her forearm against her chest. She runs a thumb over the tender skin on the inside of her wrist, where the marks of the girl’s fingers are still visible.

  ‘It’s late enough as it is,’ she says.

  Éléonore nods, takes the pot of pigswill and goes out.

  The women continue with the harvest. The swaths stand in sheaves along the windrows in the blazing afternoon sun. Overhead, the buzzards trace wide circles in the pale sky, watching for voles scampering away, then they disappear, melting against the glare of the sun, only to reappear and swoop. The women and the children trample the wheat stubble on the threshing floor, accompanied by a little donkey, its hooves cracked. The war has taken the blacksmith. The livestock begin to cast their shoes in the meadows, to leave them embedded in the dirt. There is no-one now to trim the hooves that crack and split. Soon the fields are bare and reddish-brown. Clouds piles up in layers in the dying day. Alphonse searches for a quiet corner away from human sight. He finds one in a board leaning against a wall, scrabbles at the dust, turns around one or twice, then lies down with a groan. As Éléonore passes the fields on her way home, he recognizes her smell and wags his tail, but she does not see him and the dog dies alone, in his animal silence, as the girl’s footsteps fade. Late that night, having called to the dog from the porch, she sets out with a lantern and finds him. His white eyes stare sightlessly into the night. Éléonore twines her fingers through the rough fur and pulls the already stiff corpse towards her. She sits on the bare ground and hugs the dead dog, her tears falling on his head, heavy as a stone, then she fetches the barrow, places the body on it, and pulls the funeral carriage while the widow watches from the doorway. Near the place where she buried the cat, she digs a grave for Alphonse in the stony ground. She rolls the corpse and it falls into the hole, then she tosses the first shovelful of earth over the dog’s open eyes. The next day, she makes a small cross of wooden slats and plants it by the mound covered with smooth stones. Clouds accumulate to form a thick, ink-black mantle. Flashes of heat lightning illuminate them as they roll heavily over the countryside, plunging it into an electrical darkness. The air is heavy and muggy, cows stand motionless beneath the oaks and the chestnut trees. In a fallow field, split plum trees ooze sap. Suddenly, the rain begins to fall in torrents, bowing the branches of the trees, dislodging roof tiles, sending animals racing for their nests, their burrows, their lairs, causing brooks and water troughs to overflow, lashing the croups of the horses still out in the pasture. Drenched children splash through vast puddles, their feet raising huge sprays of water. A willow sways its long tonsure in the twilight.

  It is the oldest of the parish priests, Father Benoît, who now officiates at mass once a week, the other priests having quickly enlisted and gone to the front lines to serve in the groups of porters or stretcher-bearers. Faced with a congregation of weary women and placid children, he gently preaches about the value of work, the riches of the earth, the omniscience of God:

  ‘O, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgements, and His ways past finding out!’

  The tragedy of her widowhood having been swept away and supplanted, the widow pretends to mourn the absence of Marcel and adds her voice to the chorus of those who plead, who worry and who pray. Soon, the first letters arrive from front. They are read and reread, carefully tucked into a bodice, sometimes until the ink leaches from the paper, imprinting itself on a clammy bosom. Every morning, Éléonore, like all the other women, races to the edge of the field as the old postman slowly makes his way from the village to deliver letters to the farms. But from Marcel there is nothing. She watches those who rush to tear open an envelope, unfold a letter and walk away, eagerly reading the lines traced by the hand of their man. Some sentences have been struck through by the comité de contrôle and are illegible, others have escaped the censor. The women whisper the words to themselves to make them more real, fragments of war that blossom into images – the weather was fine yesterday… marched for so long some of the men’s feet were bleeding… please don’t worry about me… we leave Monday, though we don’t know our destination… we cut a fine figure in our handsome uniforms… we will probably pass through Champagne and help out with the harvest… we have no choice but to sleep in the straw and the cold like pigs… ate our fill and drank good wine along the way… my darling wife… dear father… have you finished bringing in the wheat… how is my petite maman… things we never imagined we would see that will probably haunt our dreams to our dying day… my dear parents, I… the aeroplane flew over us like a gigantic bird… give our son a kiss from his father and tell him to be good and to be brave… I am writing to you lying here in the grass in a clearing where I picked a little bunch of flowers… sleep piled on top of each other… a few days in the trenches, a few days in reserve… and transporting the crates of supplies… impossible to sleep without suddenly jolting by the fear of a bombing raid… before being sent to the front lines, I wanted to send you my last wishes… I will soon have a furlough and may come home… my darling Sylviane, never forget that you and I are gazing at the same stars… that comforts me… the rain is never-ending… fingers as pale and wrinkled as an old man’s… at least it washes our clothes, which are caked in mud… pray for us… pray to God that He might deliver me from this suffering… a sunny spell… silence over this unfamiliar, ravaged landscape… nothing else seems to exist… as though peace were suddenly restored to the world… the long, long wait for your letters… how many more months of days that never seem to end… I think about you and I no longer write about sad things that will serve only to rek
indle bad memories later, the hours of terror of physical and mental exhaustion of despair followed by exhortations to yourself to react… farewell, my dear parents… affectionately… your loving son – reciting the words for those who received no letter that day, allowing them to vicariously experience the anguish, the relief; anything is better than the despair of silence. The first death notices arrive from the regiment by courier or by telegram, addressed to the mayor of Puy-Larroque, I am writing to request that you notify the next of kin promptly in a dignified and understanding manner appropriate to the circumstances, who solemnly sets about his duty, accompanied by a member of the municipal council, walking through the village on a September day filled with birdsong and the scent of the trampled fruits and the foot of the fig trees, of the death of soldier Lagrange, Jean-Philippe, regimental number 8656, 67th Infantry Division, 3rd Company, 288th Regiment, which occurred in the following circumstances, stepping into a sunlit farmyard where a cock crows, removing their berets, knocking on a door that stands wide open, most grateful if you would convey to the family the sincere condolences of Monsieur le Ministre de la Guerre and report back to me as to the date when this was done.

  Already, August is fast approaching its end. The school in Puy-Larroque will not reopen in September; everywhere, teachers have laced up their hobnailed boots; more than one hundred and thirty in the department have been called up. Children scratch their hands and arms on brambles heavy with blackberries, their fingers and their lips are purple. Carefree, they carry on with their games, and their shrill cries echo over the fields. Éléonore sometimes sees the little crow perched on the roof of the well, the edge of the cart, the branch of a tree. He calls to her, a single caw, in the early morning, but he no longer dares approach her and disappears as soon as the widow appears. Éléonore digs earthworms from the compost heap and leaves them in a clay pot for him. A scarecrow stands guard over the ripened grain, corncobs hanging from ochre, brittle stalks. Yapping dogs chase the wild boars that venture from the undergrowth to plunder the fields. The evenings are warm, later cool, always crimson, smouldering with the distant, hellish fire of war. After eating cornmeal porridge or fired offal with bread dipped in chicken broth, the women sit around the fire, in the inglenook, and Éléonore returns to her reading of the Scriptures. Nothing fascinates the widow more than the book of the Apocalypse. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. At twilight, in the walkways of the cemetery, sparrows tremble on branches of blue cypress. In the father’s grave, as in that of the altar boy Jean Roujas, nothing now remains but powdery, white bones held together by their formal suits.