Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  On a July afternoon in 1921, Éléonore gives birth to a healthy boy that, in honour of the dead father, they decide to name Henri. Marcel stares at the newborn, his umbilical cord tied off by the midwife, lying on the belly of his mother. When the nurse hands him the child so that she can wash Éléonore, and he walks off with the baby in his arm, a tear traces a furrow down his cheek: the child’s face is intact. The widow is led in by the midwife to sit beside her daughter, whom she seems to recognize. She looks at Henri, then at Éléonore, and she reaches out a trembling, twisted hand and strokes the baby’s cheek. In a short space of time, she has rapidly declined. She confuses names, faces, times, day and night. She has difficulty speaking in sentences, her voice grows hoarse and trails off. They no longer try to understand what she is saying and ask only questions, to which she sometimes answers yes, sometimes no. She eats only small mouthfuls of food, which have to be mashed to a puree and fed to her because she chokes when she tries to swallow. She is shrinking, stooping forward, drawn by the earth. She soils herself; her clothes reek of urine. Éléonore feeds and changes her as she does the baby; she is a mother twice over.

  Éléonore quickly realizes that she will have to intervene between the father and the child. One night, because the pain is tormenting him, and Henri has been crying incessantly, Marcel asks her several times to pacify him.

  ‘I’m begging you, keep him quiet.’

  She paces the room with the baby on her shoulder, patting his buttocks. She massages his belly, runs a finger over his gums, gives him a carrot to suck, but nothing calms him. Sitting at the table with a glass of hooch, Marcel takes his head in his hands, digging his thumbs into his ears. The baby’s wail bores into his eardrums, sets his teeth on edge like the sound of nails scratching a blackboard. As Éléonore tries to put Henri in his cot, the child howls even louder. Marcel gets to his feet, strides over to the crib, deals three loud blows to the side of the box-bed, bellowing:

  ‘SHUT-THAT-FUCKING-BRAT-UP!’

  Éléonore bends over Henri. She stands motionless, shielding him with her body. When she looks up, Marcel has retreated several steps. He stares at the splintered side of the box-bed, looks from the congested face of his son in his crib to the ashen face of Éléonore. He walks away, grabs his jacket and leaves the house. Much later, in the early hours, he watches them through the window, not daring to cross the threshold: Éléonore has dozed off on the bed, the child is lying next to her, and Marcel goes off to sleep in the hayloft.

  One night the following winter, the widow leaves her room and passes close to them, a spectral presence in her nightgown, whose soiled fabric clings to her scrawny thighs, but they are asleep and do not see her pause and look at them for a long moment. Images, fragments surface and are superimposed over her ruined consciousness. She sees Éléonore and Marcel in the box-bed and thinks she sees herself lying next to the father. She leans over the Moses basket in which Henri is sleeping and it is Éléonore that she sees. But things are not as they should be. The room has changed, the opening into the byre no longer exists, the arrangement of the furniture is completely wrong. The widow goes out into the yard and stares at the farm, strange and blue in the moonlight. The cold cuts straight through her, and she wraps her thin arms around her shoulders. Taking small steps, she walks barefoot over the frozen ground to the well and leans against the coping stone. She suddenly hears a breathy sound from inside the well. The rushing wind sounds like a voice calling to her. Trembling, she leans over, and sees her face appear on the surface of the still, black water. She recognizes it: it is the father calling to her from the far end of the tunnel, it is the father speaking to her from his long exile, across time and space, inviting her to join him. She breaks her neck in her fall, striking the stone wall. When her body hits the water, a faint splash drifts up to the yard and is immediately whipped away by the wind. The rippled surface is soon still again and the moon is reflected there once more.

  They realize that the grandmother is missing at first light. Since her recent escapades, her physical health has markedly deteriorated and they are surprised that she could make it beyond the farmyard. They search everywhere for her, but she cannot be found. Marcel knocks at the doors of the neighbouring farms. Since he is loath to go into the village, Éléonore leaves him to look after Henri and goes to talk to the inhabitants of Puy-Larroque. No-one has seen the old woman. They begin to worry that she might be roaming the countryside wearing only her nightdress. How could she survive the bitter cold for more than a few hours? By late morning, a search party has been organized. With the help of a group of villagers, they scour the surrounding fields, search the henhouses, the byres, thinking that the widow might have sought shelter there. After nightfall, when they need lanterns, they abandon the search. At home with Henri, Éléonore paces frantically, holding her child in her arms. She already knows that it is too late to hope that they might find her, but when Marcel appears in the doorway, takes off his hat and shakes his head, she chokes back an anguished sob. In the days that follow, they continue to search the countryside with the help of the local policeman, expecting only to find the widow dead, frozen in a ditch or behind a hedge. She seems to have vanished. By the end of the week, they begin to lose heart and the searches become less frequent. There is farm work to be done. There is much talk in the village about this mystery. The widow’s name is on everyone’s lips. Jeanne Cadours, the grocer, is the first to insinuate that ‘something unexpected might have happened’. On the twenty-first day after the old woman’s disappearance, however, the mystery is resolved. Éléonore is alone with Henri, who has just dozed off. She is sitting by the bassinet, staring out the window at the first snowflakes falling in the yard. She gets up and pours herself a glass of water. She notices the smell before she tastes it. A sickly, nauseating smell. The glass slips from her hand and shatters on the floor, waking Henri with a start. Éléonore rushes out into the farmyard.

  The men tie a rope around Marcel and lower him into the well. Waist-deep in the water, he has to scrabble blindly to attach a rope around the sodden remains of the widow. Overcome by the stench of carrion and stagnant water, he coughs and splutters into his fist. He rolls up his shirtsleeves and, sounding the depths, manages to grasp the body and lift it above the water long enough to pass a rope under the stiff arms. The men then haul him up and, while he is catching his breath, they pull on the rope tied around the corpse, which proves surprisingly heavy and scrapes against the stone sides. What they haul out into the drab daylight and set down on the flagstones looks like a rag doll abandoned by a little girl that ends up mouldering in the corner of a damp attic. The head is dented and misshapen. They have dropped the water bucket onto her many times in the three weeks since she went missing, drawing from the tainted water in which the widow lay submerged, drinking it and giving it to the animals to drink. Mosses have begun to spread a silken green over the nightdress, which was once loose-fitting and now clings to the body bloated like a sponge filled with water. Éléonore quickly takes Henri away to spare him the sight of this ruin. They bury the remains of the widow two days later, after the policeman concludes it was an accidental death; two days of bitter cold, during which the corpse, encased in a pine coffin, froze solid in the church presbytery. They have to abandon the idea of dressing the body, but before the lid of the coffin is nailed down, Éléonore asks that the mourning dress the widow loved be laid on top of her remains, that a rosary be placed in her hands and the missal with the battered cover be placed next to her. The gravedigger reopens the tomb in which lie the jumbled remains of the father. He collects together the bones he finds and discreetly covers them with a layer of earth. Excited by the affair, and forgetting the contempt the widow felt for them, the villagers throng outside the church doors, eager to attend the funeral. When Father Benoît asks Éléonore to read a passage from the First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, she remains seated in the pew, head bowed, unable to get to her feet, despite Marcel elbowing her in the
ribs, and a murmur ripples through the congregation before the priest himself begins to read:

  ‘But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption…’

  Thawed by the heat of the candles and warmth of the flock, the coffin, its timber still beaded with holy water from the aspergillum, drips onto the catafalque and all the way down the aisle when Marcel and three men from the village lift it onto their shoulders, bear it from the church and place it on the cart standing in the churchyard. Éléonore holds Henri in her arms and, as the funeral cortège sets off for the cemetery, where the gravedigger is smoking, leaning on his shovel as he contemplates his handiwork, Marcel lays a hand on her back, encouraging her to walk next to him behind the coffin. The villagers who left the church before them join the procession. As they cross the village square, Éléonore hears someone mutter as she passes:

  ‘Well, she’ll not have a clear conscience, let me tell you…’

  She recognizes the voice of Marie Contis, the same woman who, two years earlier, kicked her as she was being dragged along the ground on this same square and muttered threats against the widow. She grits her teeth, holds her sleeping son against her breast and, for a moment, she carries on walking. Then she turns to Marcel, presses the child into his arms and pushes her way back through the cortège. She finds her at the back, with Jeanne Cadours and some other gorgons. Marie Contis seems surprised to see Éléonore striding towards her and glances back at the church, thinking that perhaps she has forgotten something, but Éléonore walks straight up to her and deals her a vicious slap that knocks her against Jeanne Cadours’ shoulder. Voices are raised, a circle quickly forms. Blood from Marie Contis’ nose trickles over her lips and drips onto her dress.

  ‘She hit me! She hit me!’ she splutters, trembling and holding out her crimson hands before the eyes of the witnesses.

  ‘You dirty viper,’ Éléonore replies. ‘You think I didn’t hear you? You think I don’t know the lies you peddle about me, you bitch?’

  She looks at the men and women around her and points to them one by one.

  ‘Let this be a warning: the first one of you who dares spread your poison about me, my family or the memory of my mother will also wind up dead at the bottom of a well.’

  Marie Contis whimpers and falls to her knees, supported by two women who press their handkerchiefs to her face. No-one dares move until someone takes Éléonore by the shoulder. It is Marcel, who has come to find her. He looks at Marie Contis, at the face of his wife and at the dumbstruck onlookers, and says:

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Together, they return to the head of the procession and the cortège sets off once more. The mortal remains of the widow are lowered into the cold earth of Puy-Larroque and laid atop the debris, boards and bones of the father, who is crushed by the weight of the coffin. As the congregation disperses, Éléonore stands for a long time watching the gravedigger toss shovelfuls of earth into the pit until it is once more filled and he need only tamp down the earth with the flat of his shovel.

  A few days after the funeral, they empty the wardrobe that contained the widow’s belongings. Éléonore discovers that the clothes are covered with a fine layer of sawdust. They shine a lamp into the wardrobe and see the holes bored into the timber by furniture beetles. Marcel takes the doors off their hinges.

  ‘It’ll need to be taken apart, sanded down, treated and repolished,’ he says.

  As they remove the shelves, they discover that one of the rear panels is loose, and was held in place only by the bracket of the shelf they have just removed. Éléonore tilts the board to reveal a dark recess in the wall where a brick has been removed, and in it, a rusted metal sugar tin. For a moment they stare at it without saying a word, then Éléonore reaches out her hand and grasps the box, whose contents jingle as she pulls it towards her. She sits on one of the chairs, sets the box on her lap, opens the lid and gazes at the few gold and silver coins and the handfuls of copper coins neatly stacked and tied up with raffia; the savings patiently collected by the widow over almost forty years from the sale of products from the farm in anticipation of rainy days, famine, penury, apocalypse, or perhaps for the simple satisfaction of saving, since, even during the war, she could never bring herself to dip into her nest egg. They lay the money on the table.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Marcel breathes, causing the cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips to glow.

  The following day, he goes in search of the owner of the farm, a docile, blind old man whom he persuades, in return for a derisory life annuity, to sell him the farm buildings and the seven hectares of land they farm. Soon, the fields are once more filled with livestock. They purchase a Mérens gelding that has been broken to harness, a few geese from Toulouse. While wandering through the pig market in Miélan, he sees a huge boar, a ‘Large White’ imported from England. He buys two young sows and puts them out for fattening.

  III

  The Herd (1981)

  You little devil! What have you been playing at, to get yourself covered in mud like that? Come here so I can hose you down. Take off the T-shirt, hold out your arms, tilt your head. Where have you been? What have you been doing, you filthy little animal, you devil? Don’t you think things are bad enough as it is? Can’t you see what’s going on outside? The end that’s coming, that’s already here? Why do you have to get involved in all this? Couldn’t you keep yourself to yourself, hide out in one of those holes you’re so fond of? Come here and let me dry you off, and wipe that savage little face of yours. You look like you’ve got older. Not like you’ve grown up, just like you’re suddenly older, like an old man trapped in child’s body. That happened to me too, I ended up growing old overnight, a long lock of white hair across my forehead appeared just like that. But I thought they’d spare you. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought it was possible that you’d avoid it, escape all this madness. Don’t they say “Happy are the simple-minded”? But not you, you’re different. You don’t fool me, you know. You never did fool me. I’ve had all the time in the world to watch you, to see you in action. Obviously, there’s a screw loose in that little head of yours, and God alone knows what goes on in there, but it’s not empty. It might be the opposite, maybe it’s full to bursting, full of coils and strange things, things we couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Go on, sit down – sit down, I said, what else do you want to do? There’s nothing for you or me to do here but sit down and wait. Someone will show up eventually… All this smoke, all this screaming, all the chaos will eventually alert the outside world. Then they’ll come and they’ll see. I can’t tell you what will happen after that. I’m far too tired to try and work out what will happen. All I know right now is that we have to wait here, sitting opposite each other, on this chair and this sofa; you, the child, facing the grandmother I’ve become, with no dreams, with no hope, none of the things that usually keep a human being alive, but with a heart that goes on beating, in spite of me, let me tell you, because I’d rather have seen nothing and known nothing about all this… And yet there’s no doubt about it, here I am to witness it, here alone, with you, still standing in the middle of this hell realizing what we’ve done, seeing with my own two eyes what we’ve been reduced to. This is my penance: to have seen it coming, power
less, useless, the time of this baleful harvest. Not that I’m surprised. You won’t see astonishment on my face. Or what you might see as astonishment is nothing more than fear. The fear of a fragile, pitiful old woman, the fear of old Éléonore, unable to defend herself against anything, unable even to defend herself against her own family. It’s something I’ve known for so long that I might have known it forever but, from time to time, I’ve forgotten, because, with habit, everything, even the most subtle and familiar threats, come to seem less frightening. And yet when it’s revealed, this veiled threat, this violence you think you have tamed, you recognize it as an old enemy you thought had become a confidant. It leaps at you, instantly breaking free of the chains you’ve spent a lifetime crafting to shackle its manifold, monstrous paws, the muzzles carefully placed over the countless jaws bristling with fangs, and everything explodes, even the leaden silence that seemed thicker than the thickest lead. Fear, oh yes, there is terrible fear, but no surprise, because deep inside I have always known that a person cannot sow so much discord, so much grief, so many secrets, so much hatred and go unpunished… I just thought I wouldn’t live to see this bitter harvest, that I would be long dead, tossed into a pit with what remains of our lineage, buried deep in the earth of Puy-Larroque.

  I clung on, in the teeth of everything, despite myself and my desire to die young, because I soon realized that there was nothing left for me to live for but a life sentence surrounded by my cats, surrounded by all of you, though at a distance, in the old skin of an old woman you feed and care for out of a sense of duty, all the while hoping that the end will come to spare us the spectacle of her infirmity. Oh yes, I survived for all this time without really knowing why – another thing I’ve done out of habit – the comforting reduplication of hours, through moments when time felt unspeakably long, begging death to come and take me in my sleep, for there to be no tomorrow, only to wake with the feeling that one more day would not be so terrible, might even be desirable… Until now. Until this moment that sees me sitting here with you, my great-grandson, uncertain as to what is really going on beyond these walls, but not needing to know to realize that things – and when I say things, I don’t just mean the years, the events, but every action, every detail, every word, every gesture, all those trifling moments of which no-one has the slightest memory – have begotten what they were bound to beget, have led our family to its ruin, have led farming and the world around it to the brink of collapse.