Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  As a child, she sometimes wondered about the nature of animal time, that of the tick on a blade of grass waiting for a host to pass, of the mayfly with its lacy wings, whose whole life is circumscribed by a few short hours, of the pond turtle, its shell green with mosses and algae, that the oldest villagers claim to have seen sunning itself in the roots of the willow tree on the banks of the reservoir. Éléonore no longer differentiates between months or the seasons. She continues to perform the chores allotted to her, with little enthusiasm or eagerness. She scatters feed for the chickens, fills the drinking troughs in the rabbit hutches. The widow no longer issues orders. She watches the ghost of her daughter come and go, dragging her clogs, performing the same weary, disembodied gestures. A changeable light moves over the farmyard, of dull, slate-grey days, of louring skies, of autumn fires, of bright mornings gilded with pollen. Some men come home, leaving behind at the front an arm or a leg, torn off by a shell or eaten away by gangrene. They go back to the fields and learn to use their tools with one hand. They can be seen limping across the nourishing earth at dawn and at dusk. The women gentle the stumps, the fingertips tracing the pale sutures, the swollen flesh. They overcome their disgust. Slugs have eaten away the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench where the father used to sit from the first evening in spring to the last vigils of autumn. It is now half-buried in the dirt, the nettles and the dandelions of the yard. One morning in 1917, at the end of May, Éléonore stops and contemplates what remains of the bench. It is a crumbling, pathetic ruin, with one blackened slat jutting above the clumps of grass. When she tries to lift it and rips it from the ground, the wood snaps. In the newly uncovered hollow that has served as their world, woodlice and centipedes slink between pale green rhizomes and translucent snails eggs. The smell of mildew and white micellae rises to meet her. For a moment she thinks she can smell the acrid smoke of the father’s old clay pipe, but it is simply the whiff of a brushfire burning somewhere near the farm. She is no longer the little girl who sat leaning against the tall, gaunt, beloved body of the father. What has happened since, she is not sure. It feels to her as though she possesses the memory of another, piled with recollections that are not hers. Logic and the images that come back to her seem to constitute irrefutable proof of what took place; but they are fragile and disintegrate the moment she attempts to make out their contours, with no more substance or value than a dream or a mirage. Perhaps the little girl never really existed. Perhaps she has always been this thin, ravaged adolescent, blindly groping her way through undifferentiated days. She drags the wooden board to the back wall of the farm and, with all her strength, hurls it into the long grass. She stands for a moment, listening to the grass bend and whisper. In the distance, she hears the rumble of an engine on the road that leads to the farm. Red admirals hover over the flowers of dandelions while the clocks rise into the air and drift down, whirling as they float. At times, thick clouds cast pale shadows that scud across the land. A crow is perched on the ridge tiles of the roof, croaking into the brisk air. Éléonore turns away, wiping her palms on her dress. She walks along the windowless wall of the farm. Farther off, in the kitchen garden, the widow is gathering carrot tops. She is small and dark in her mourning veil. Her gestures now are slowed by arthritis. She has the fragile, unexpected grace of an old woman. Standing in the shadow, Éléonore watches for a minute as she goes about her business. Éléonore has turned the corner and is walking back to the farmhouse when she sees a man standing stock-still. Dazzled by the sun, she brings a hand up to shield her eyes, the better to see the figure standing in the cloud of dust from the dirt road. He turns and seems to be looking at the quiet farmyard. He is wearing a pristine soldier’s uniform, a blue woollen tunic buttoned over his jacket. At his feet, he has set a small kitbag. The eye of the crow perched on the ridge tiles offers a convex reflection of the figure. Neither the officer, nor Éléonore, nor anything around them moves. Time seems to have ceased to struggle and has finally stopped in the becalmed light of morning. Then it is he who steps forward, and his slow, loping gait makes Éléonore’s heart burst in her breast. He reveals his horrid face to the light. How does she recognize him? How does she put a name on those ravaged features, this primitive, barbarous mask? Something spills out within her, heavy and cold as a haemorrhage. Marcel has grasped her arm and is holding her against him. His face had been that of a boy; now it is not even the face of a man. A red beard covers part of his cheeks, but the left side is a mass of scar tissue, smooth and livid in patches, withered and swollen in others. The ruined cheekbone has left a depression beneath the sightless eye, for there is nothing there now but an empty socket over which the eyelid has been sewn shut. The cheek is struck through by the line of a scar that runs over the chin and down the throat. He breathes hoarsely. The corners of his mouth twist as a cry comes from Éléonore, a guttural wail, a howl ripped from the depths of a mute grief. He lays a hand on the back of her head and presses her face into the collar of his tunic. The smell of straw, of animals and sweat has given way to that of alcohol and ether, of morphine and oil of camphor, of stale tobacco and hooch. The widow has left the kitchen garden, dropped the knife and the carrot tops, which the wind blows across the flagstones of the yard. Marcel hugs the head that fits entirely within the span of his hand. He breathes in her hair. The white lock of hair runs between his fingers. He holds the motionless body in the light of the sun as it bursts from between two fugitive clouds. His profile is haunted by the solitary, black eye.

  She does not ask a single question. She does not try to discover how he can have returned from among the dead, since she herself is restored to life the moment that his arms enfold her shoulders. His face is the most terrifying thing she has ever seen. His face, whose precise features have blurred with time, leaving her with a memory of gentleness, even beauty, is now ruined, the wounds utterly obliterating the memory she thought she recollected.

  ‘I don’t want you to look at me,’ Marcel says.

  Éléonore turns away. From this moment, she will only ever look at him surreptitiously, a sidelong glance at the hideous eyelid that has been stitched over she knows not what – a void, a hole, a sightless, shrivelled eyeball – over something shocking, over the unspeakable images that compel him to spring from his bed in the dead of night like a jack-in-the-box. She thinks she has found him again, but does not yet know what she has really lost. He is wearing a large hat with a wide brim, which shields his pale scars from the sun and hides his face from others when he bows his head. As they walk towards the farmhouse and he turns his face towards the widow, she sees that the skin on his mutilated face no longer moves in the same way, but forms folds and fault lines. Even his gait and the way he moves his whole body have changed. He adopts positions that hide him from prying eyes. He keeps to the shadows with which he has learned to blend. As soon as they cross the threshold, he takes a step to one side, out of the beam of light that spills into the room. He sets down his kitbag and goes to the former scullery, cleared out by the widow, and now filled with firewood for the winter. Éléonore stands behind him, stiff but unsteady. He takes off his jacket, rolls up his shirtsleeves, then gathers logs into his arms and begins to move the wood into the lean-to shed, crossing and recrossing the main room and the farmyard, where the widow is still standing by the kitchen garden, not daring to approach.

  He puts the bed back in the place where it formerly stood. He lights the fire in the hearth, then goes to inspect the byre. Éléonore follows, urged on by the fear that he will disappear once more, step through a doorway never to re-emerge. She bites the inside of her cheek to make certain she is not dreaming, or that she has not gone completely mad. She talks to him to dispel her fear. She tells him how the livestock were commandeered, all except the mare, who died out in the pasture of old age; she tells him about the death of Alphonse, who has also passed away, and whom she buried over there. Marcel surveys the cold, gloomy byre, the silent, yawning pigsty. He follows her to the little mound of stones, alread
y overgrown with brambles, beneath which Alphonse’s bones have begun to poke through what remains of his tatty fur. He carries on walking towards the fields, like the men who came home before him, to go and see the land, and, as she walks beside him, Éléonore contemplates this landscape as though seeing it for the first time. There, where only death, tedium and despair were lodged in everything, she now sees life again: the flight of the birds, the quivering of the crops, the bray of a donkey, the smell of wet grass. She feels a warm breeze slip beneath her dress, across her bare legs, feels it swell her lungs, and she can smell Marcel as he rummages in his pocket for a pack of the cigarettes that the men learned to smoke while at war and lights one. He stops in front of the fields over which the widow and Éléonore have toiled to grow as much cereal as any man, and she thinks she sees his cyclopean eye glitter with a spark of jealousy or satisfaction. He brings the cigarette up to the right-hand side of his mouth, where his lips were spared, before exhaling pungent smoke.

  ‘The harvest was good. The women of Puy-Larroque… We worked hard,’ says Éléonore.

  Marcel nods brusquely, then he crouches down at the edge of the field and scoops up a handful of soil, as she saw her father do long before him. He weighs it in the hollow of his hand, then crumbles it between his fingers, before saying:

  ‘Everything is good.’

  Only these words, barely whispered, addressed to himself. Then he gets to his feet, his knees cracking, and heads back towards the farm, his strange silhouette walking along the crest of the hill. Éléonore no longer walks behind him, but on his left. The back of her hand, as in the past, occasionally grazing the back of his.

  The very next day, he starts back to work, more ardently, more relentlessly, as though he feels the need to make up for lost time, or to win back an authority over the land. When Éléonore sees him toiling in the distance, in the middle of some field, unable to make out his face as it melts in the light, it feels as though he never went away, that there never was a war, that all this has been an endless nightmare. She works in the kitchen. She throws open the windows and sweeps clouds of dust into the yard. She washes and hangs out the sheets. Alone in the scullery, she breathes in the smell of Marcel’s clothes, to become accustomed to it, bringing his underclothes to her face before stuffing them into the turbid waters of a basin. She continues to work in the fields, like the other women. The demobilized men are astonished to see them carting the tools, swinging a scythe or harnessing a donkey in no time at all. The women earn their respect. Marcel seems capable of anything. He works without fail from dawn to dusk, sweating out every drop of moisture in his body. He rebuilds a dry-stone wall that collapsed while he was away, seals up the hole in the main room where the wind was gusting in from the cold, empty byre, and even paves the floor. He replaces the tiles that have fallen from the roof and shattered in the yard. He mows the fallow land and clears the ditches overgrown with rushes and thorn bushes. In the autumn, he pulls the cart, taking the place of the lost oxen, roaring like an animal.

  There is never a mention of the place where he convalesced, the name of any of his comrades-in-arms; never a detail, a memory, an allusion to the war, and Éléonore can only imagine the vast, bright wards that reek of ether, tobacco and necrosis, the windows overlooking gardens of shrubs and carefully ordered flowerbeds, the white metal bedsteads, the shutters and the white curtains drawn over all the red wounds, the holes in the bodies, spurting and oozing blood, pus and mucus, disinfected, packed and bandaged by nurses in white coats, the tender or harsh expressions these women have learned to mask the horror they feel at the sight of these human wrecks. Work brings him back to his old self. His body is once more the rustic, nervous body she remembers, though driven by a new and mysterious force that both galvanizes and consumes him. The summer following his return, when Éléonore brings him a metal canteen to slake his thirst, he turns away and presses the flask to the more mobile part of his lips, already stained yellow with tobacco, as are the distal phalanges of his thumb and index finger. Often, a trickle of water escapes his lips, dribbles down his chin and into his neck, or drips onto the fabric of his shirt. In the evening, he refuses to eat with the women. He takes his plate into his room, closes the door and eats alone, sitting on the edge of his bed, ashamed of the painstaking way he must chew, the grimaces required by the stiffness in his jaws, the gobbets of food that fall from his mouth despite his efforts and are caught in the bushy red beard, already sprinkled with white hairs that glisten in the light, which he has grown to hide the glabrous ridges of his scars. Éléonore simply leaves a covered plate by the fire for him, waits for him to come home and watches as he carries it away, like an animal she is trying to tame, a feral cat one might give a saucer of milk, a wild dog that races away with a bone to gnaw on it out of sight. She sets a jug of water and a basket of bread on the chest of drawers next to his bed, then clears it away the following morning after he has left. One morning, she goes into the room while he is out. She studies the room: the chamber-pot, the ashes quivering on the embers, the carefully made bed. She notices a bulge beneath one of the goose-feather pillows. Going over, she lifts it up and finds the jaw separator, not knowing what she is holding in her hand, this thing made from rubber, metal and springs that looks like a torture device, a tiny wolf trap. She sets it down again, overcome by a feeling of embarrassment, replaces the pillow and quickly leaves the room.

  They settle into a routine. Life seems to carry on. One day, Marcel reappears with a puppy under his arm. He builds a kennel and sets it in the yard and for a time the animal brings them a little joy, yapping and gambolling around them. She follows Marcel, as Alphonse used to do, but Éléonore never sees him stroke her head. He quickly becomes exasperated by her mischief and her exuberance and chains her up near the kennel. As for Charbon, he continues to visit for a few weeks, fluttering around the farmhouse and hopping along beside Marcel, then he disappears, weary of the indifference of Marcel and that of Éléonore, who had been only too ready to see an omen in the bird’s resolute reappearances after Marcel left and during his absence. Then, the war is over. The bells peal out on a November morning. Éléonore goes out onto the doorstep, her heart pounding, and rushes to find Marcel. She sees him on the far side of the yard; he comes to a sudden halt in the middle of a clutch of chickens pecking and ruffling their feathers. He leans both hands on the handle of his shovel, takes off his hat and holds it against his chest, his head bowed. For a brief moment, he seems lost in meditation, then he dons his hat again before the bells have finished tolling, continues on his way and disappears into the murky shed. Éléonore stands motionless, a bitter joy caught in her throat; and dumbfounded, too, that the war can simply end, as it began, with a peal of bells on an ordinary day of cold and mist. She closes the door and looks at the widow sitting in the inglenook, who says nothing, but stares at the rosary wound around her fingers. Éléonore crosses the room, takes a bottle of Armagnac and three glasses from the dresser and sets them on the table, then she waits for Marcel to come through the door, watching at the window for him. When he finally comes in, she gets to her feet. Marcel sees the glasses and the bottle. He looks at her with such consternation that she is forced to avert her eyes, then he goes over to the table, picks up the bottle and goes out, leaving her with the ailing widow. For long hours he does not reappear while joy resounds in Puy-Larroque and over the countryside. When he comes home again, at dawn the following day, he slips into the house like a vanquished shadow, passing close to her without so much as a look, trailing in his wake the smell of tobacco, sweat and bile. He closes the door to his room and Éléonore hears the weight of his body collapse onto the bed.

  Later, the granite slab of the war memorial carved with the names of the men from Puy-Larroque who fell at the front arrives on a cart drawn by two dray horses with foaming loins. With some difficulty, the villagers hoist it, bearing the weight on ropes wrapped around their forearms, then set it down at the place designated by the local council du
ring an extraordinary meeting. Marcel is chopping wood on a block in the lean-to when, dressed all in black, Éléonore and the widow leave the house. For a long moment they stop and watch Marcel swing the axe with the regularity of a metronome, ignoring their presence, then at last they set off along the road to the village, followed by the sound of splitting wood. He does not show his face at the memorial masses either. The villagers begin to gossip, offended by his indifference, his contempt, his selfishness: do his misfortunes mean more than theirs? Does his pain exempt him from showing solidarity?

  In the year following Marcel’s return, the widow declines markedly. At first she is quieter, then she says nothing, as though reduced to silence. She sits next to the fire or outside the door and spends hours staring at a fixed point in front of her, the beads of her rosary moving back and forth between her fingers. She continues to tend to the kitchen garden, to scatter grain for the chickens, to collect the eggs. Sometimes she stops in the middle of the farmyard and looks around, as though she does not know where she is nor which direction to take. She looks up at the sky, screwing her eyelids, lips parted to reveal her toothless gums. She observes the slow procession of the clouds, then bows her head, blinks, dazzled by the light, and, taking small steps, goes back inside. She mutters unintelligible words and, when Éléonore speaks to her, she cannot suppress a flinch. She thinks before she responds, and speaks in a voice that is restive, frail. Soon, she begins to neglect the vegetable garden and simply kneels in the dirt, the knees of her dress muddy, the sun burning the tanned skin of her neck, or she indiscriminately rips up weeds and vegetable shoots. Éléonore comes upon her one day when she has laid waste to a patch of lettuce. Until now, she has thought of the widow’s errors and lapses as petty tricks, reprisals. She lets go the apron on which she was wiping her hands, rushes over to the old woman, grabs her by the arm and shakes her roughly.