Marcel is settling the new pearl-grey heifer in the byre when she comes to find him and stands in the doorway, watching him scatter fodder at the foot of the ruminating animal.
‘Well, come on,’ he says, seeing her wringing the apron between her fingers. ‘Out with it… what’s the matter with you?’
From his nervousness, she suspects he has already guessed what she is about to say.
‘I think I might be pregnant. There, I said it.’
He sets down the pitchfork, turns and, for a moment, observes her from the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat. When he steps forward and takes her hands in his, she stifles a fearful flinch. Marcel says:
‘Well, then, we’ll have to marry.’
Then he asks:
‘Why are you trembling?’
‘Because it’s cold,’ Éléonore lies.
He marries her in the spring, on a day of blazing sunshine, whirling with dust from the hot, strong Autan wind. She finds the dress that the widow wore for her wedding and carefully wrapped and stowed in a box so the clothes moths would not destroy it. Making the most of Marcel’s absence, she takes out one of the mirrors and, setting it on a chair, tries the dress on while the widow watches. There is not enough space for her to step back and she contemplates her fragmented reflection: the face covered by the veil, the bodice and the cuffs of yellowed lace, the folds of the dress. She spins around in front of the widow, who is chewing at her top gums.
‘I’m getting married,’ she says.
‘Oh, I can see that, I can see that,’ the widow replies, nodding reproachfully, before pointing at her swollen belly and adding:
‘Poor thing, given your misfortune, I hope that at least it’ll be a boy.’
When Éléonore asks Marcel why, unlike those men who marry proudly dressed in their uniforms and their medals, he chooses to buy a second-hand suit and have the sleeves and the cuffs taken up, he says:
‘And why would I wear it? Out of pride? Out of patriotism? Out of gratitude for the miserable pension France pays me?’
Many of those who came home safe believe they owe their survival to the divine mercy for which they fervently prayed. He has not set foot inside a church since before the war. As for Éléonore, she is uncertain: should she see Marcel’s return as proof that God does not exist, or proof that he is merciful? Ever since she desecrated His house, she has steadfastly kept her distance. She has not shown her face in the village since the women dragged her through the mud on the square, except for the dedication of the war memorial. There is talk of her in Puy-Larroque, with people saying that she takes after her mother, who everyone suspected was not right in the head even before she really started to lose her marbles. Even so, Marcel and Éléonore bow to the tradition of a religious wedding in a church three-quarters empty, before a congregation that comprises only the widow in her mourning garb, Marcel’s parents, whom Éléonore will meet only this once, a handful of cousins, aunts and uncles, and a few distant family friends. At the altar, when the moment comes to exchange rings – the one the father never wore for fear of damaging it while working in the fields, and the one that fell from the widow’s withered finger one day while Éléonore was washing her by the fire – Marcel trembles as he takes her hand and, since he has allowed her to look at him, she sees his eye well with tears and thinks that perhaps they will find a little peace here on earth.
A fleeting burst of happiness trills through her as they step out into the churchyard. The villagers are loitering on their doorsteps or have found some excuse to be nearby, affronted not to have been invited to the wedding as custom would dictate, and when Marcel helps Éléonore into the cart – the same cart that carried her parents to their wedding, and carried the remains of the father to his final resting place – drawn by the heifer, whose collar she has strung with ribbons, and next to her the widow, who seems to think she is reliving her own wedding since she is smiling and waving at everyone, and looks happier than anyone has ever seen her, the inhabitants, resentful and unsettled, mutter in low voices as the cortège rattles down the road towards Les Plaines, with no other clamour but the clip-clop of the heifer’s hooves and the screech of the wheels. Priggishly, they comment on this dubious union between blood relatives; on the pregnancy she thought she could hide beneath that old wedding dress; on their tightfistedness – why were they not invited if not to spare the expense of a wedding reception? On the drive back to the farm, Éléonore looks at the road, at the fields cloaked in a shifting down of absinthe green, at Marcel’s profile, from which one could believe his face was still whole, and, beneath the brim of the hat he clutches from time to time against a gust of wind, there is something uncompromising in the eye that is staring straight ahead, as though nothing now can hurt him, or deflect him from the goal he has set himself, about which she knows almost nothing. With every jolt, she feels the shoulder of the widow, who is humming next to her, and the shoulder of Marcel. Behind them, the scattered guests are talking. A child runs in front of them. Her joy has vanished with the soar of red kites whirling above, carried on by the updraughts.
They move the widow into the old scullery where Marcel has been living. They take over the box-bed, formerly the conjugal bed, later the father’s death bed, and put away the child’s bed on which Éléonore was still sleeping, her legs tucked up, the night before her wedding. They find themselves lying next to one another beneath the eiderdown, aware of their breathing, of the warmth of their bodies, thinking of all the nights to come. Soon she will be able to touch his body, though only by accident, during the brief couplings, and she will feel the scar on his stiff leg. Even an attempt at a caress seems to upset him. On several occasions, he brushes away the hand she tries to lay on him. One night, she is woken by groaning. Tortured by pain or tormented by nightmares, Marcel moans in his sleep. She tries to lay a hand on his forehead to calm him, but he wakes with a start, grabs her by the wrist and pins her against the pillow.
‘It’s me, it’s me!’ she tells him.
He stares at her with his mad eye, panting like an animal cornered by hunters, then lets her go. The following day, seeing her rub her bruised wrist, he asks:
‘How did you get that?’
She tugs at her sleeve and evades the question.
‘I don’t know. I probably knocked it against something. It’s nothing serious.’
Ever since, she has been on the alert for his starts, his wails, not daring to do a thing, confined to the far side of the bed, careful to leave as much space as possible between them. He sleeps for only a few hours, then pushes open the door of the box-bed and sits on the edge of the mattress holding his head in his hands, sometimes pounding it with his fists, then he gets up, dresses, and leaves the house. His aches tell him what the weather will be like. Without setting foot outdoors, he can simply run his fingers along his jaw and predict that it will rain. As Éléonore’s pregnancy progresses, he worries about the child that is to be born. In his dreams he sees her giving birth to a tiny creature with a disfigured face, an avatar whose mouth is a gaping wound that opens onto the inside of a soft, pitted skull, a creature that inspires in him a nameless terror.
Like the pain, the images and impressions persist. When he closes his eyes, he sees himself marching in a column of men along a country road dressed in their dashing red trousers, their fine blue coats, already sweating in the summer sun. There is something unreal, something intoxicating about marching together under the awed gaze of onlookers waving handkerchiefs as they pass. The sky is a tranquil blue. The birds on the branches are singing at the tops of their lungs. In this light, the war towards which they are marching as one man seems impossible. Their hobnailed boots beat the ground in time, raising an immense cloud of dust that coats their noses and their throats. They exude a smell of new leather, of cobblers’ shops and cattle. The weight of their rifles is already beginning to cut into their shoulders. They march as though they will never stop, straight ahead, even if they do not know where they are going.
They leave behind the towns, the villages of an unfamiliar countryside, and cross endless fields, trampling cabbages and beets. They pass other regiments, telegraph poles lying across the road like trees felled by a storm. Men, already exhausted now that the exhilaration of the farewells has drained away, are resting in the shade of tall walnut trees. Soon, they will see the fleeing carts coming towards them, drawn by horses, their coats dark with sweat. The carts are filled with furniture, mattresses, wooden crates, small livestock, chickens that squawk or gasp, haphazardly stuffed into tiny cages. Often, the convoy is followed by a dog, a mule, a cow and her calf. From the carts, old men, women and children watch them pass, their eyes wild. Marcel sees a horse lying on its back in a ditch. Its four legs are pointed at the blue sky. It looks as though something exploded inside the animal: half its abdomen has been blown away, its entrails are strewn around, and hang from the branches of the trees like garlands at a village fête. The wound, teeming with swarms of blow flies, is a great dark hole whose stench is unendurable. The men have fallen silent. Then comes the waiting, the boredom of being confined to camp, the routine and the fear. The carts that transport the wounded laid out on stretchers sticky with blood. The dirt roads turned to quagmires by the feet of men, the hooves of animals, the wheels of cars. They tramp through the mud, a sole sinks down and blood oozes from the earth. Their uniforms are heavy now with sweat, with dirt, with rain from the downpours. When the sun blazes at midday, wisps of steam rise from their shoulders. Beards encroach on their cheeks; when they polish the blades of their bayonets, they look like savages. There are distant thuds, as of someone walking over dry, brittle twigs. It is the sound of the breechblocks before the whistle of the bullets, the whine and then the roar of the shells, the constant tat-tat-tat-tat of the machine guns. They no longer know where they are headed. They crawl through the debris, amid the bursts of gunfire, in the shadow of airships that look like vast, sluggish beasts that are watching over the battlefield, guiding the aim of the cannons. A mole unearthed by a blast attempts to scurry away before it is crushed by a boot. The men try to sleep, staring into empty skies that stink of gunpowder. A huge farmhouse blazes ceaselessly, setting the night aglow. The black roof beams are still holding out against the flames. The soldiers shiver in their uniforms, wet and stiff with cold. They smoke to warm themselves, but their tobacco pouches are damp and the cigarettes sputter. They sip broth, its surface floating with gobs of grease and lardons. A soldier greedily sucks marrow from a bone; his lips glisten obscenely. Dysentery spares no-one; the drop their pants and, with no regard for modesty, hunker down and shit next to each other, staring at each other, then get up without wiping their arses. When on furlough, the men go off to meet up with a son, a wife, a mother. As he is about to board the train, Marcel stands motionless on the platform and looks at the engine panting like an asthmatic draught horse. The next image hurls him into the front lines: he is digging the earth as fast as he can, clawing the wall of the trench with his bare hands to make a hole in which to shelter. He is shivering and his teeth are chattering so hard that he spits a gobbet of his cheek into his hand. Other men have already dug themselves in, hugging their knees tightly, adopting a foetal position, like bulbs that someone has planted. A chaplain is wandering through the labyrinthine trenches, his face smeared with mud and other, unspeakable things. Hands stretched out before him, blinded by the smoke that has burned his eyes, he gropes his way along, droning an unintelligible prayer. He crashes into the mud walls, causing them to collapse, trips over the body of a solider, then collapses and blacks out or falls asleep – either way, he does not move. All around are the corpses of men, of horses, of mules, twined and tangled, the corpses of centaurs half-swallowed by the earth. Infantrymen crawl through the mud beneath a sky that now looks nothing like a sky, streaked with clouds of unearthly shapes and colours, behind which the sun broods, like the eye of some drowsy beast, or the very heart of hell. In the evenings, to cheer themselves a little, they play cards by the light of an acetylene lamp and pick lice from each other’s hair. One soldier has managed to tame a rat, now cleaning its whiskers while perched on his shoulder, and hiding the crumbs of stale bread the men give it in his collar. Bright plumes of smoke soar into the sky, then suddenly clods of earth rain down around them. One morning, during an advance, Marcel’s detachment happens on a little clearing that seems to have been spared the madness of war. The grass is green and lush; there are even flowers. A stream snakes through it. The men stop, spellbound by this preternatural beauty. Are they dead? Is this the enchanted garden offered them despite their bloody hands? No: the strangeness of the place is in the colour of the brook, which is crimson, because upstream, hidden by a copse, the bodies of dead German soldiers have been tossed into the river and are slowly bleeding out. As the men approach, a horde of birds rises from the corpses, causing their hearts to stutter. They laugh quietly, a little embarrassed. While they are billeted on a farm, Marcel detects an acrid smell. He follows the trail and finds a pile of mouldering hutches in which the rabbits have died of thirst and starvation. Their silken fur is moulded to their bones. Some of the wounded are prescribed morphine to dull the pain from their deep wounds. Carried off in ambulances, they whimper in an artificial sleep from which they hope they will never wake. A corporal’s leg is eaten away by gangrene and vermin: he plugged a gash in his thigh with a fistful of mud. Marcel thinks about the farm sometimes. He remembers his native soil. In spite of his club foot, Albert Brisard enlisted. Since he knows how to stitch up pigs, he is sometimes asked to suture the wounds of the men, of those who fell on a piece of metal, those bitten by rats, those with flesh wounds from shrapnel or from bullets. Louis Bertrand – a soldier in the regiment whose nineteenth birthday they celebrated – falls to his knees beside him, his tunic and his shirt cut clean through. His sac of entrails spill from the wound in his belly, falling into the cradle of his arms, like those of a mother who finds herself lulling the baby ripped from her belly. He says:
‘You got to sew me up, Brisard, would you look at this fucking mess?’
With his muddy, calloused hands, he vainly tries to stuff the intestines back inside his abdomen. Brisard takes the spool of thread and the needles from his leather pouch, intended for spaying sows, not for patching up men. He has Louis Bertrand lie on his back, rips off his tattered shirt and tries to sew up this gaping wound like a mouth laughing at the sky mottled with black and yellow smoke and suspended clods of earth.
‘I think I might have shit myself,’ the boy says, his eyes wide.
‘Shut up, lad,’ Brisard says. ‘When you get home, you can get your mother to wipe your arse, like in the good old days.’
The young soldier giggles, and in a dreamy voice repeats:
‘Would you look at this…’
Then he says nothing more. Albert Brisard continues to sew, despite the needle that slips between trembling fingers slippery with blood, fat and mucus, before a bullet hits him directly in the forehead and he too crumples, lying top to tail against the body of Louis Bertrand. Sometimes, a fragment of shrapnel will rip a man’s head off, leaving his body to carry on running, just as the ducks the widow used to decapitate would run towards the little pond full of feathers and droppings at the back of the farm. When a German soldier raises his head above the trench opposite, Marcel trains the rifle on him. He is thinking, It’s like an animal, he’s nothing more than an animal, an animal. Then he fires. He is trembling so hard that the barrel swerves. The bullet hits the Boche in the neck. He is still alive when Marcel crawls over. Bright-red blood spurts between the fingers clutching his throat. Marcel would swear that the soldier is no more than seventeen. His eyes are a deep blue, ringed with dark-purple circles. He has a wispy adolescent moustache, and his cheeks are pale and beardless. The skin of his hands looks soft. Marcel thinks, He’s obviously a city boy. The little Boche looks at Marcel; he tries to say something. His lips part to reveal a mouth filled with blood. Is he apologizing for this sad spectacle, fo
r his incompetence as a soldier, or for the memory that the Frenchman will henceforth have to live with? He reaches out to Marcel with the hand that was compressing the wound, but Marcel’s hand hangs limply by his side, unable to grasp it. He watches the boy bleed out, still murmuring something, then his eyes mist over and gutter out.
Animalia Page 17