They bring the cows from the byre and strap them into a head yoke. The widow grips the twin handles and guides the turn-plough. Éléonore leads the animals. They move the length of the field, shrouded in tatters of pale mist, beneath a leaden sky that seems to touch the earth. They can scarcely see more than a few metres ahead of them. All around, nature makes no sound – only the wheels juddering over the stones, the breath of the cows, and the ploughshare moving through the soil make a quivering that is deadened by the fog. The coulter slices through soil that is dry and thin from overcropping, the ploughshare cleaves the clods like the prow of a small ship, laboriously raising waves of black earth that are turned over by the mouldboard. The women do not talk. Their breath condenses in the chill air. It is just possible to make out the outline of a motionless form through the mist, a roe deer that snorts, then scampers off. In the first days, they manage to cover only a few acres with crude furrows. For many of the villagers, the land they farm lies on the valley slopes and they have to expend great effort to plough the hillsides. When it rains, they continue to advance along the furrows they have already ploughed, rain lashing their faces, slipping in the mud and staining their stockings and underskirts. Once this is done, they attach a harrow, which clatters behind the cows as it breaks up the clods. Éléonore walks behind, pushing a barrow in which she piles the dislodged stones, with which she builds small burial mounds along the edges of the fields. They breathe in the air that steams in the dawn light, the smell of clay and silt, of damp slate and slashed roots, turbid water and crushed stones. In the farmyard, the manure heap, like some sleeping mastodon, sits, exhaling pale wisps of smoke; it has digested the faeces of animals and men, fragile carcasses, the scraps and waste produced by the farm through the year. The widow pushes the slatted cart to the foot of the mound and, armed with shovels, they load the cart with the fecund, oily black sludge, teeming with earthworms and dung beetles. They spread the manure into the furrows carved by the plough. They enrich the overcropped land with lime and marl. They feel a burning in their throats, their noses. They bend forward, press a finger to one nostril and blow hard, expelling grey snot from the other. Like the flocks of seagulls that follow a trawler, flocks of raucous crows fight over the worms they pluck from the shovelfuls of manure tossed by the widow as the cart moves steadily on. Their cawing drowns out the shouts of the women as they urge the cows on, and their feathers swish and gleam like metal. In every crow, Éléonore believes she recognizes Charbon, and sees his multiple presence as a sign: as proof that Marcel has survived.
At that same moment, soldiers are dying in Bertrix, near Neufchâteau, in the Belgian Ardennes, beneath a rain of German shells. Letters continue to arrive, bringing news of the cataclysm, the order to retreat, the hail of fire and metal, the ruined bodies and the heaving earth, the names of the dead and those of the prisoners. A wail goes up and echoes through the countryside; people appear on doorsteps and strain to hear, others rush towards the sound. The dogs bark in concert. It is a woman, a mother, a wife who has just learned that her man has died in battle; her legs cut from under her, she falls to her knees on the hard ground. Small children, many of whom have no memory of the soldier, stand sobbing next to her in unconscious imitation. The women now dread seeing Mayor Beyries emerge from the mairie. They curse him, him and his solemn mask of tragedy. But often a letter from a comrade-in-arms precedes the official death notice. The women stage wakes. They gather together a portrait, a shirt, a shepherd’s crook or a sword, some beloved, neglected relic, to celebrate the memory of those now rotting on the fields of honour, broken, gnawed at by rats, pulverized by cannon fire or burned beneath a layer of quicklime in a rough-and-ready grave. Some fashion burial mounds and tombs, they worship at crosses planted over graves that contain only earth. The postman continues to tour the streets and the byways, a grim harbinger of doom. ‘Nothing for you today, Miss Éléonore!’ he calls as he passes the farm, then later: ‘Still nothing!’, then ‘Nothing!’ or ‘Sorry!’, and after a while he simply shrugs, turns away and Éléonore watches as he carries on, jolting along the path, then returns to her solitude filled with images. Marcel’s silence makes his absence more poignant, more terrible. The memory of him is embedded in every object and she can see the world now only through the distorting prism of his parting, through a reality weighty with this monstrous fact that infects and unsettles her. Every place, every detail reminds her of him: the paths he took, the words he spoke, the bucket from which he slaked his thirst, the mare whose mane he groomed. Éléonore thinks she hears his voice carried on a gust of wind; it is nothing but the sound of the wind, a branch breaking, an old farmer in the distance bringing in his flock. She thinks she can make out his smell beneath the smell of the animals, in their hair, the sickly sweat, their warm folds, their hooves. When she encounters a man, regardless of who he is, she closes her eyes and breathes in the air displaced by this body, a masculine smell that her memory probes in the hope of connecting it to a face that is already distant, vague, tenuous. She talks to the animals. Talks to the pigs, whose brown eyes and long lashes Marcel commented on. She creates a memory from scraps, breathes life into it with another’s breath, the pale torso of a boy seen out in the fields, the distant solemn presence of a buzzard. In the little copse, she wraps her arms around a tree. She caresses the cold, damp trunk, the silken protuberance of a tinder fungus. She presses first her cheek, then her mouth against it and, eyes closed, parts her lips and darts out her tongue, licks the bark. On the roof of her mouth she has an aftertaste of tannins and mosses; the taste of Marcel’s breath. He had a sickle whose walnut handle he carved, sculpting the head of a horse, or the head of a bull, or the head of a pig. She finds the dusty tool in the shed. She slips it between the bed base and the wool mattress. At night, when the widow is asleep, Éléonore takes the sickle from its hiding place and lays it on her belly under the sheet. The cold metal of the blade takes her breath away. She feels the curve beneath the curve of her breast. She sees Marcel in his shirtsleeves, out in the fields, in the blazing sun, his hand holding the sickle as it cuts the swaths. She slips the handle of the sickle between her thighs. She pushes into her the wood worn smooth by Marcel’s palms, blackened by the sweat of his hand. She bites the inside of her cheek as the handle pierces her hymen.
Her faith now is no more than a tangled collection of superstitions. She formulates prayers out of habit, futile exhortations and attempts at bargaining. She sees portents in the presence of Charbon, but also in a burst of sunshine, or the mysterious signs she divines in the twisting of a tree, the arrangement of pebbles on a path, the remanence of a dream, a word that she hears spoken. At times, the death of an animal – the body of a dead bird, the rigid carcass of a cow in a field – seems to her a fatal augury, at times as a distraction. The same is true of men: news of the death of a local boy casts a fleeting, ominous shadow over Marcel, and at the same time Éléonore feels a shocking sense of relief, almost a release, as though Death could cut down only one of them at a time. And yet in the village, too, people die. Old mother Fabre takes a kick to the belly from a cow that bursts her liver, and she bleeds out from an internal haemorrhage, lying alone in the musty straw of her barn. Of the war, Éléonore knows only what is said in the newspapers, and in the letters that the women read aloud, comment on and pass on; she has seen the unreal photographs of the front lines, often touched up, sometimes fake, but what she imagines is the fire and brimstone of Sodom, the barren, ravaged, smouldering lands over which ride the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, stars tumbling from heaven to the sound of trumpets, hail and fire mingled with blood, the waters become wormwood, the great mountain all ablaze, the sea become blood and the perpetual night.
Éléonore toils fiercely, tirelessly. The work makes Marcel’s absence bearable. It is her palms that blister now, as once Marcel’s palms blistered. She knots dolls of cloth on her fingers. If she can suffer, so much the better, perhaps it will relieve her of her anguish. When sown in autumn, w
heat will give five shoots, five stalks, five ears, as opposed to one when sown at the end of winter. The women plant a mixture of wheat and rye, the ingredients that make up the brown bread they bake. Seed baskets tucked under one arm, they walk a few metres apart, moving at the same pace, dipping their right hand in to scoop up the grain and scatter it in a wide, sweeping arc. From time to time, the widow stops and lays her hand flat on the ground, checking the density of the seeds between her fingers, which look like roots about to sink into the earth. She unties the black woollen shawl that covers her head – her hair has recently begun to thin, revealing a bony skull – then races across the field, screaming and whirling the shawl, setting ravening flocks of pigeons, sparrows and greenfinches to flight. They pass the frog of the plough to bury the grain, trample the soft soil, and then pack it down with a roller. Finally they survey the fruits of their labours, the black earth gleaming like corduroy, on which the cloudless sky spills a shifting light. The widow picks up a branch and snaps it. She lifts one foot, then the other, scraping from the soles of her clogs the clumps of seed-filled soil she carefully drops at the edge of the field before handing the stick to Éléonore. They head back to the farm, walking with slow, painful steps, their backs and their legs cramped, aching and stiff as boards. Overhead, a flock of wild ducks passes, red against the fiery twilight.
Autumn gradually settles in and nature grows numb. The trees blaze scarlet, then tan, leaves shrivel and fall to earth. Chestnut burrs strew layers of scarlet leaves, which now and then are whipped into eddies by the wind. Squirrels still scamper along the bare branches, brief explosions of red fur, searching for some last provision. Birds perch, windswept, in the grey, cold bushes. The fallow fields turn russet and, soon, the exposed game will make for the oak groves in search of brown acorns and chestnuts. Migratory birds choreograph their great ballet, come together to form a shifting, turbulent mass, tracing majestic curves, dark sinusoidal waves, only to scatter and fill the vast expanse of sky. They regroup and sit chirruping on the bare branches of trees, making it seem for a moment as though they have reclaimed their rustling foliage. Ultimately, they fly south to other latitudes, leaving the landscape taciturn and silent. Since Albert Brisard is now lying in a mass grave on the Marne battlefield, a black hole between the two eyes that have been plucked out by crows, his mouth filled with quicklime, it is left to the women to slaughter the pigs. With hesitant thrusts, they drive a blunt blade into the throats of fat beasts that are hog-tied and held fast by the strongest amongst them. November shrouds the land with early hoarfrost that glitters in the pale sunlight. Corvids peck at clods of earth as hard as stone, while wild boars rootle and forage in fields and ditches for tubers and shrivelled roots. As winter approaches, hope fades that the men will come home, that the war will be brief. In late September, ninety wounded soldiers were sent home to Auch and admitted to a makeshift hospital set up in the Hôtel-Dieu and Ancienne Préfecture, but still Éléonore has had no word of Marcel. The day before the homecoming, seventeen Gascon soldiers from the 23rd Company of the 288th Infantry Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Alain-Fournier, were reported missing in action. Massacred by the enemy and hastily buried, their bodies lie to the south of Verdun, in the forest of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne, beneath blood-sodden earth crudely tamped down with boots. A prayer group is organized by some sanctimonious do-gooder; despite the absence of men, at Sunday mass the church is filled to bursting. War rekindles their faltering faith. They believe in God just as they believe in Country. They become devout, and even those in the rear pews feel as though they are fighting a crusade, a Holy War against an Evil that threatens them, the Nation and the Earth. War is the Leviathan that must be defeated once and for all, and they submit to every sacrifice. They contrive credos and rituals, light endless candles, fashion little amulets and ex-votos, kiss commemorative plaques and medals depicting saints. They become animists, polytheists, necromancers, they pray to the Blessed Virgin, to Saint Antoine, to Jeanne d’Arc and Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux. All that matters is to believe. Soldiers are dying at the front like martyrs on Golgotha, crucified by pieces of shrapnel and Mauser bullets. My death shall be my last mass and I shall commingle my blood with that which Jesus shed upon the cross. On walls, on dressers, in bedrooms and in kitchens, portraits of soldiers with no known graves take pride of place, like hallowed icons, surrounded by a crucifix, relics, sacred images, floral wreaths and offerings, as though at the heart of a baroque altarpiece. Now, their memory transcended, they reign from their silent eternity over the grief and the gruelling existence of their loved ones.
The cold turns harsh and bitter. It tears at muscles, hacks at faces. The farmwomen dig up the last of the tubers, then the ground freezes. Deprived of shelter, the game seeks refuge in the brittle brown undergrowth. In the morning, a thick fog lies over the land, obliterating all perspective. The widow and her daughter go out now only to draw water from the well, to feed the livestock and bring in firewood. Cauldrons hanging from trammel hooks above open fires clatter all day long. Here, the women make soup of cabbage and lardons, ragouts and stews. Time and again, Éléonore imagines saddling the mare and setting off to see Marcel’s mother, who may have received a letter, a notice; but she knows nothing of this woman, or of that sickly branch of the family tree with which her late father and the widow never kept in touch. Besides, there are times when not knowing seems preferable; Marcel’s absence now plunges her into a sort of torpor, a numbness. She no longer speaks, not even in response to the widow’s rare remarks. She eats little and loses weight, since she no longer feels hunger or thirst, only a joyless intoxication, a stupefaction. In the afternoon, she leaves the farm and walks the fields, following the paths, retracing her steps. She returns in the evening with no memory of the places she has been, the distance travelled, the hours spent, simply dazed with cold and exhaustion. Inanition makes her unsteady on her feet and creates blurred trails in her field of vision. The widow chides her for her behaviour, calls her mad, reminds her that she has a delicate constitution, that she almost died at birth, and how, believing her lost, they had hurriedly had her baptized. In fact, when Éléonore catches her face reflected in the mirror, she sees the widow’s features beginning to appear beneath her own. Forsaking successive moults, she allows the widow’s traits to resurface in her. Éléonore continues to tramp the fields, her face so muffled in shawls that only her dark, expressionless eyes are visible. She inspects the graves, that of the father, those of the animals; she tends them with equal care. She no longer waits for the postman, who, though she does not seem to notice as he passes on the lane to Puy-Larroque, always dismounts his bicycle and turns to watch as she slowly walks away. She no longer listens to idle chatter, and while not spurning the company of women, she gladly avoids it. Soon, the days begin to blur, they are undifferentiated, a long scansion of dreary interchangeable hours varied only by the weather. The quince trees sag under the weight of fruit. Snow falls and lies heavily on the trees, branches break with a crack of gunfire that wakes the women with a start, bringing the phantom of war to their door. Over the fields, the snow drifts into banks, leaving the animals roaming, numb with cold and starvation. It buries the known world beneath flowing lines that glitter when there is a sunny spell. The cloudless nights offer a display of molten stars, electric constellations that shine dispassionately upon the hushed, white fields, and on the cesspit of the front lines, those trenches on the Marne where soldiers lie, sinking beneath the mortar shells in a predatory sleep, and the same moon shines down on both. Éléonore sometimes takes the old mare with her to stretch her legs, leading her with a halter, but the old nag lost her shoes in the autumn and is worn out, despite the oats she is fed and the blankets laid over her every night. Soon, it will be impossible for Éléonore to recall the things she has done, in what order, if not sequence, the weeks, the months. All that will remain is a sense of dense, static time. It feels as though the father died a lifetime since, as though Marcel left just yesterday
and yet an eternity ago. Forgetfulness erodes their memory. Scenes and places fade and disappear. All that remain are vestiges, afterimages that Éléonore turns over in her mind, imperceptibly altered by each new recollection; soon she is no longer sure that she remembers them, them or the other men she does not know. What they experienced returns to her like images from a dream. The pain has dulled. It has not disappeared, but has given way to a cold emptiness, to a pit, bottomless and black, contained within her body, one that she blindly gropes through on her interminable walks through the countryside. Yet outside her body, the seasons continue to pass, and stubborn life springs anew beneath the thaw.
Since last August, essential foodstuffs have been commandeered. In March, the two cows, the calf and the three gilts are requisitioned at a price recommended by the departmental commission and fixed by the military authorities. The mare is examined but deemed too old to join the cavalry or end up in the knackers’ yard. Already, most horses born on French soil have shed their blood at the front and soldiers are now riding mustangs imported from America: stallions that have barely been broken are forced to ride under enemy fire. The widow and her daughter watch an automobile backfiring as it tows a trailer into the farmyard, and strangers in uniform throw open doors, step out and inspect the shabby farm buildings and the wretched farmwomen. They bustle between sty and byre. The pounding of their footsteps sets hens racing and their broods scurrying. Perched on a dungheap that has greatly subsided, the cock crows. The men examine the beasts, lifting an eyelid to check the white of an eye, pulling a lower lip to inspect gums. They talk loudly and easily. They tug at ropes, looping them around the snouts of the sows, tying the legs of the cattle. The calf lows as its mother is taken away. The men shout and whip the animals, herding them haphazardly into the trailer, then they climb back into the car and slam the doors. The engine spews black smoke into the farmyard and the women bring their hands up to their noses. Éléonore has never seen the widow weep, but her face is bathed in tears as she watches her animals being driven away, her hands twisting a wad of small banknotes and Treasury bills that mature with interest in six months. They are alone now with their chickens, coughing from the smoke, alone with their soggy banknotes, beneath a sky streaked with scraps of low cloud. They listen to the silence left by the departure of the beasts. Nothing stirs, nothing lows or grunts. The calf no longer cries. A crane flies past, cleaving the air without a sound.
Animalia Page 13