‘What the hell is your problem?’ she screams. ‘Are you planning to make my life a misery to the bitter end? Why can’t you just get it over with and die?’
The widow falls on her backside and seems dazed. She looks at the upturned earth and stammers:
‘I wanted… I wanted…’ before dissolving into tears and burying her face in her blackened hands.
She forgets the eggs abandoned by the chickens and they rot. She wanders around with her wicker basket on her arm under the listless eye of the few remaining farm animals. When it comes time to wring the neck of a chicken, she botches it. The animal slips from her grasp and runs in circles, spraying the yard with blood, raising clouds of dry dirt and provoking shrieks from the rest of the flock. When she comes face to face with Marcel, her eyes grow wide and she lets out a terrified whimper.
‘Crazy old bat,’ he says.
The widow retreats to the inglenook, trembling and muttering snatches of prayers.
She grows even thinner. She is now no more than skin and bone. She confuses the days of the week, the months, the seasons, the years. Éléonore washes her, dresses her, brushes her hair, and the broken little creature accepts this without a word. The flame of the oil lamp is reflected in her balding scalp. Then, she recovers the power of speech; she no longer thinks of resisting, of remaining silent. She who was always so miserly with words now blathers all day long. She takes Éléonore’s hand when she crosses the yard, then turns to her and says:
‘Excuse me, I don’t suppose you’ve seen my daughter? My little girl?’
‘I’m your daughter,’ Éléonore responds.
The widow shrugs her shoulders and giggles:
‘Yes, yes, of course you are.’
When Marcel comes through the door, she sometimes mistakes him for her late husband and says:
‘Oh, there you are. Where have you been? You need to look after that chest of yours in the cold weather.’
Then, when he takes of his hat, she shrieks:
‘Oh, dear Lord, what have they done to you?’ or, failing to recognize him, sighs, ‘Poor devil…’ before returning to her contemplation of the doily she is holding, unable to crochet a single stitch.
She gets lost in the countryside and they have to scour other farms in search of her. Or farmers bring her home and Éléonore finds her covered in scratches, her clothes and her hair tangled with goose grass and spikelets. She talks to herself, mumbling words, talking in turn to her mother, her father, her husband, as though they were in the room, recounts stories about saints, about curses, about the pigsty and the voracious sow; a long, rambling, unintelligible prattle. One winter afternoon, while Éléonore is peeling vegetables at the kitchen table and the widow is sitting next to her, she hears her say:
‘… course I know he’s not dead… told me he was badly maimed but that he’d be back… she’s happier that way, like the rest of them… better a cripple than a corpse… he’ll not set foot in my house again, let me tell you! Never!’
Éléonore sets the knife down on the cutting bard. She remembers Marcel’s mother, his brother whose features she recognized and who was driving the cart, the two women talking in hushed tones, the widow going back into the house and picking up her sewing, the needle clicking against the thimble. Got himself killed just like all the rest. I warned you. Maybe now you’ll stop pining for him.
‘What did you say?’ she asks.
The widow turns her bony face towards her daughter. She seems to recognize her.
‘What did you just say?’ Éléonore asks again.
The old woman shakes her head slowly, uncertainly, then says:
‘She devoured him… That animal devoured him, she didn’t leave a thing… Not a crumb…’
The pain gives Marcel only rare moments of respite. At best it fades to a dull ache that quietly throbs to the rhythm of his pulse somewhere in his devastated nerve endings. Even in his sleep he feels it lodged within him like a separate organism, a parasite, sometimes at the back of his patched-up jaw, sometimes deep in the empty eye socket, sometimes in his cervical vertebrae, patiently sinking its jaws into his bones, his tendons, his marrow, to feast on them. When it subsides, the absence leaves a void, an aura as fearsome as the recurrence it heralds. He remains alert to this queasy lack of pain, and to the first signs announcing the new wave of pain that will engulf him. It seems to be not in the nerves, but a boring pain in the bones, a sort of caries that is eating away at the maxilla, the zygoma. He refuses to give ground, he battles against this pain that would see him infirm, helpless. By sheer strength of will he pushes the boundaries of his tolerance, he digs, he hoes, he reaps, as though with each swing he is dealing a blow to his pain, and though a brusque movement, a sudden jolt, may make it worse, he will never submit, never surrender. Sometimes, in the solitude of the fields or the shadows of the lean-to, he falls to his knees and takes his head in his hands, feeling as though it might explode. He presses the head of his hammer or the blade of the scythe against his temple in the hope that the cold metal might bring a moment’s relief. His salivary glands work overtime, as they did when the wounds were still raw. At such times he has to swallow litres of saliva, or spit constantly and sleep with a basin next to him. With his tongue, he feels the redefined shape of his gums, the swellings, the protuberances where the bone and periosteum taken from his tibia were grafted to rebuild his jaw. Smoking slightly dulls his mucus membranes; some days he smokes three packs of cigarettes. Pain infects the rare hours of sleep he allows himself. It seeps into his dreams and constantly brings him back to the same places. He finds himself eyes wide, staring at nightmarish visions. It wakes him with a jolt, radiating through his whole skull. He gently massages the skin of his cheek, vainly commanding the nerves, the tendons and the muscles to relax. He bangs his head against the bedstead. He leaves the room and goes out into the cool of the night. He draws water from the well and plunges his face into the pail. He prowls the yard, the pathways and the fields, his hat perched on his head, his nightshirt half-tucked into a pair of baggy trousers, like a scarecrow descended from its stake, like the camo cruso of children’s fairy tales. Sometimes men encounter each other in the dead of night; at such times they do not speak, but simply bow their heads and walk on, the one crippled by his pain, the other hounded by his ghosts, maintaining a respectful distance between their twin solitudes.
Alcohol is treacherous: sometimes drunkenness eases the pain, sometimes it exacerbates it tenfold, warps and multiplies it. He falls asleep in his own vomit leaning against a tree, against the bark he punched until he flayed his fingers raw. The surgeons removed his shattered molars. He remembers shards of tooth against his tongue. They dug into the gums to pull out the slivers of enamel, the severed roots. At times, he feels as though the teeth were replanted, sown into the ploughed, refashioned flesh of his face. In the privacy of his room, he takes cloves from a box and chews on them, embedding the sharp points in his gums. Éléonore finds the dried buds sticky with blood and spittle in a dish slipped under the bed. She sits on the mattress, a hand clapped over her mouth so as not to cry out. At five in the morning Marcel leaves the house, waking the cock on his roost, who ruffles his feathers. He loads the first tool that comes to hand onto his shoulder. He heads out to make the earth atone. When, in winter, he unearths a cold, round pebble from the clay, he rubs it against his trousers and slips it into his mouth, between his soft gums, and savours a moment of reprieve. He did not have to ask for her to remove the few mirrors from the house. Éléonore took them down, wrapped them in a sheet and placed them in a drawer in the wardrobe. She has kept only a small metal-framed hand mirror, its silvering tarnished, in which she sometimes looks at her reflection. She finds herself staring at a young woman of seventeen who looks as though she is twenty-five, a spare farmwoman whose features have already thickened. Two fine wrinkles furrow her skin and the corners of her mouth. She no longer sees her naked body except when she glances down at her small breasts with their la
rge, brown areolas, her pale stomach, rounder below the navel, then her black, bushy sex, the pubic hair flaring out onto the inside of her thighs; this sex whose desire, though never satisfied, is never spent. Marcel’s ugliness has not deterred her. On the contrary, she has come to respect this ruined youth and love him all the more. Of her sanctimonious education, she retains only the taste of sacrifice, of guilt, of devotion to lost causes. In this suffering she finds an infinite wellspring of self-abnegation. She chooses to embrace everything: the broken body, the lack of understanding, the silence.
He no longer shows her the same affection he once did. He no longer takes her hand. His eye turns away or passes over her without seeing. They speak now only to exchange sterile phrases. She consoles herself, deludes herself that they know each other too well to still have need of words. She believes that her devotion brings her closer to him when in fact she is keeping him at a distance, indeed repelling him with her attentions, her servile eagerness. He despises what she has become. When they work together in the fields and he looks at her, even briefly, he feels a flash of anger directed at her, a blind, instant hostility towards her gestures, her ragged clothes, her peasant manner, her flat figure, her stubbornness, her deference, everything that shapes and animates her; then there are moments when he is aware of his own apathy, as though pain in the body leaves no room in the heart and the soul for anything but indifference, as though it is an acid patiently eating away at every emotion that is not anger or bitterness. He has touched only one woman and he has forgotten her. A blonde Alsatian prostitute, barely of age, whom the soldiers passed around and he in turn entwined in a hayloft stinking of rats’ urine on a small farm so badly gutted by a German shell that, amid the shards of stone, the splintered roof beams and broken, upturned furniture, there remains only the barn where the soldiers slept, attested by the blackened circle of a small campfire ringed by stones. When it comes his turn, he climbs the ladder of worm-eaten wood, rusted nails and broken rungs he must step over to reach the loft through a pair of shutters that rattle in the cold wind, onto the powdery wooden boards set on joists rotting from the damp. At first he stands motionless, head tilted over his right shoulder because the roof is too low for him to stand upright, his hair tangled in cobwebs, while the girl lies down on a bed of straw laid out for others before him. She hitches her dress up over the farm girl legs covered with downy hair, up over the pale veined thighs dotted with bruises spanning the spectrum of every possible colour, which she may have got knocking against the corner of a tavern table, the shafts of a dog cart or the buckles of soldiers’ belts, up over her pubis, where the bushy hair fringing the lips meets at the centre to form tufts like the dry wheat on the hillsides quivering in the breeze, ash blonde, in the sombre dawn or at close of day. She reveals her heavy breasts, the nipples purple, almost blue, the skin completely pimpled with gooseflesh and, keeping her thick woollen socks pulled up over her ankles, flaunts herself, then beckons for him to join her. He lies down next to her on the bed of musty straw, allows her to undo the buttons of his trousers, to pull them down over his woven, grubby, stinking undershorts, over his thighs bitten by parasites, then she blows into her cold hands to warm them before grasping his timid penis and kneading it, all the while silently looking into his eyes. He sees his reflection in her black pupils, the still-undamaged face of a frightened youth, cornered by the violence of men, while on the breeze comes the sounds of a dog barking, the voices of soldiers on sentry duty in the neighbouring hamlet, and the distant crack of gunfire. Bored, the girl straddles him and slips his half-limp penis inside her. She thrusts against his groin. Their mingled breath mists on their lips. She does not trouble to simulate pleasure. She applies herself to making him come quickly and silently; to exciting this grimy body worn down by long marches, by combat, by unforgiving nights; to bringing pleasure to this life that no longer even hangs by a thread, and whose survival is now a matter of probability. He comes inside her, a shameful, involuntary ejaculation. She climbs off him, freeing his glistening penis which immediately falls against his thigh, and wipes away the useless semen with a handful of straw, before quickly dressing, because it’s cold as a witch’s tit. Marcel arches his shoulders, lifts his buttocks and pulls up his trousers, his whole body trembling now, his teeth chattering, for this is what he has done, lost his virginity in the bitterest cold he has ever experienced. Yes, he has only ever been with one woman, then he forgot the urges that sometimes thrilled through him before the war, the seed he spilled onto his belly, under the sheet, in the glow of the little fire.
Fear, pain and shame have snuffed out desire. The sight of gaping bodies on the battlefield. How could anyone desire them, knowing what is contained inside? Everywhere, Marcel sees ambulatory sacks of skin filled with steaming blue, yellow, green entrails, with excreta, sludge and biological fluids. The nurse who bends over him to bandage his face, her breasts constrained in her white blouse, and sometimes presses herself against his shoulder. The revulsion inspired in him by the thought of the heart beating, the spasmodic convulsions beneath her ribs. The revulsion inspired in him by the sight of his own face when the surgeon hands him the mirror and he contemplates his deformed reflection. And yet he is one of the least worst, the most handsome of those in this gallery of monsters who still seem human, unlike the droolers, those of whom all that remains are wounds that gape even though they have scarred, chasms and rifts that will never close in the centre of their faces, open to reveal exposed glottises, throats that twitch like sphincters, the honeycomb of sinuses. Desperate attempts are made to cover these grotesque masks with malleable prostheses, which the patients must learn to shape with their own hands so that each day they can refashion a counterfeit face, but the prostheses melt or bleach in the sun and the rain, and within days the feel of the paste and the glue quickly becomes intolerable. He can ‘consider himself lucky’, says the surgeon who took the bone and periosteum from his tibia to rebuild his lower jaw. The doctor removed the ruptured eyeball from the left socket and, from deep inside the cavity, picked out a sliver of bone. This had probably came from another soldier. Not one of those ‘blown to kingdom come’, those whose limbs were reassembled and their remains patched together so they could be stuffed into a coffin with a new uniform sacrificed for the occasion, and shipped back to their families. (Though there are no confirmed incidents, it is not impossible that such soldiers might end up with an arm, a leg, even the head of another.) Instead it had probably come from one of the soldiers who were blown to smithereens and scattered all around, pieces of their bones piercing the bodies of other men like shrapnel.
And yet he sees her hovering around him, seeking out his company, the proximity of his body. At first he does not understand what it is she wants, her constant touch, her consideration, her habit of suddenly shaking off her rustic manner to become languid, sighing and allowing her blouse to fall open over the sharp angle of her shoulder, her collarbone, her flat chest. At the height of summer, she mops her brow, revealing a dark, odoriferous armpit. She ties her hair into a chignon at the nape of her neck. She hitches her skirt up over her purple, calloused knees. As he is bathing one morning in the tub he has installed in the barn, out of sight, he feels a presence at the back of his neck. It is Éléonore, watching him through the gap in the door. Marcel turns his head and sees her shadow take flight. He remembers an evening before the war, on the feast of Saint-Jean; the bonfire they lit at the top of a fallow hill near the village. Surely, in that moment, he saw in her something more than a little girl, more than the cousin he was fond of, who kept him company? If it is not simply pity, her attraction seems to him to conceal some perversity – what can she still want from him, from this mutilated body? – but from this point he beings to feel the sexual tension, the nervousness that underpins their conversations. He looks at her with fresh eyes; he now sees her sex.
One morning in early November, he is digging out potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes from the claggy earth in the kitchen garden. É
léonore crosses the farmyard and goes into the still empty sty, where the chickens sometimes lay their eggs. She shoots him a furtive glance before disappearing inside. Marcel drops his hoe and stands upright. He moves quickly, taking long strides, rubbing his black hands on his trousers. He follows her into the sty. Éléonore is waiting for him, sitting on the mildewed straw, beside a nest built and then abandoned by a hen, in which lie two warm eggs, their shells dirty. They stare at each other for a moment, then Marcel steps towards Éléonore, who lies back. He helps her hike up her skirt and take off her stockings. He tries to unbutton the collar of her blouse. His numbed fingers become tangled in the buttonholes and he pulls on the fabric until it rips. The buttons roll away in the straw bedding. She makes to caress him, but he grabs her wrist and pushes her away. For a moment, he breathes in the smell of her breasts, then, raising his head, sees that she is looking at him. He grabs her hips and forces her to turn over. She can feel his cold hands on her thighs, his sex as it hesitantly pokes against the lips of hers. He spits in his hand to lubricate himself and enters her so roughly that it elicits a cry. He rucks up her blouse, grabs her hips, her sides, her shoulders, the back of her neck. She feels the rough fabric of his jacket chafe at the small of her back. She claws at the ground, dislodging a nail on the hard-packed earth beneath the thin bed of straw. With a loud grunt, Marcel shudders inside her and collapses onto her back, forcing her to bend under his weight, his ravaged cheek, whose bulge she feels for the first time, resting against her own. She is now breathing his breath. She sees a patch of the yard appear and disappear through the slowly swinging gate of the sty. There is a faint, insipid smell of eggs and dry chicken droppings from the abandoned nest beside her face. On the low ceiling, the cobwebs quiver from their conjoined breath and the heat radiated by their bodies. Marcel gets back onto his knees. He sees the crimson blood on his pale sex. He tucks the tail of his shirt into his trousers, buttons his flies, adjusts the hat he has not taken off, leaves the sty and heads back to the vegetable garden. Left to herself, Éléonore slips a hand between her thighs. With some difficulty, she straightens her clothes, then picks up the two eggs. She kneels for a moment, one hand resting on her groin, before leaning against the wall and wincing as she gets to her feet. As she leaves the sty, she sees Marcel smoking next to the kitchen garden. He gives a little wave. She waves back and heads towards the farmhouse. She brings the eggs up to her nose and inhales.
Animalia Page 16