Nor am I surprised that this toxic legacy has converged in you, the last of the herd, the just-like-his-uncle, a mute bastard, filthy and uncontrollable; that the countless poisonous rivulets that course through the veins of each generation of our family now course through your slender, delicate veins, perhaps even more poisonous and more lethal. Pushing you to do what cannot be undone, that thing that you have committed with the hands of a child that are no longer those of a child, and indeed never were, for there is nothing innocent about them, they have been forever tainted. And how can I reproach you, how can I blame you, when I am right here in front of you, the eldest of the guilty? The one who brought about the catastrophe. We need to scrabble in the mud of memory, the silt of this family tree, to drag into the light of day the roots I’m telling you about, roots as difficult to rip out as broom – and what does it matter now whether the blame lies with me or with others who came before us? I am the one who is here today prepared to explain, to answer for our actions. Not that I am expecting absolution, not that I expect your forgiveness or even your compassion, but simply because it is the least I can do: to try, always assuming it is possible, to piece together the story, our story, and therefore yours, for you, who has not asked anything and yet whose life and whose actions are guided by some invisible hand – why not call it fate, since everything had been decided for you – to try to reconstruct that collective memory, instilled in each of us and yet elusive and illusory.
And what matter if I don’t know whether you will understand; I believe that to say these words, to say them out loud in front of you, will offer you some semblance of justice. All you have to do is sit there and listen to me just as you have done for days on end, over all these years, when you came and sat in that exact spot and we did not talk, in some sense foreshadowing what we assumed was bound to happen one day, you questioning me with your perpetual silence and me entrenched in mine, yet knowing that I should speak, on my own behalf, but not only, to speak for the others, for so many others, saving my voice, firmly convinced that the day would come when you would knock at my door as you did today, signalling that the moment had come for me to speak, to give vent to these words that will surely leave me for dead, or drained of the very last of my strength.
I don’t know whether it is possible to survive such a thing, a confession that is not a confession but rather a purge, an emetic. Let me say again that I don’t expect anything from you, no forgiveness, no blessing; I have only the vague hope that my words might ease your conscience rather than mine, for which it is much too late. I’m not even sure that I am equal to the task. Obviously I am capable of speaking, though it will pain me because, long ago, when I realized the ineffectuality to which I was reduced in the age of male domination, the futility of my attempting to influence the course of our family’s fate, the fate that is finally fulfilled in you, I chose to save my breath, and with time it has waned, my voice has become tremulous and broken, a querulous old woman’s voice that reaches my lips as though buried beneath an avalanche of stones.
Yes, I will be able to speak, even if it means forever losing this voice and being once more reduced to silence. But how do I go about it? How do I reconstruct this story, so simple, so commonplace that it is almost banal, yet simultaneously complex and nebulous? How to depict what needs to be perceived so it can be understood at a glance, not horizontally, like the line of the story that I am about to tell you for want of any other, but simultaneously, like a point? It needs to be possible to take in all the moments it comprises at a single glance. Perhaps all of this will radiate some truth about what we are, about what you are, though I cannot swear as much, and it may prove impossible, because I have only my voice and my timeworn memory, treacherous and full of holes, and the time unfolding before us.
So, in a sense, everything I will tell you, this whole enterprise, is doomed to failure. I can only do my best and hope that something of it reaches you and eases a little of the weight that rests on your frail shoulders without your even knowing, for you came into this world and have grown up bearing this terrible legacy, but if we can experience, you and I, a little respite, a little peace, even for a brief moment, I suppose I can consider myself satisfied. I will at least feel that I have done something with my sad existence.
In the darkness traversed by a sliver of moon, coiled in the hollow of a coomb on the slopes of a valley, on the edge of a rustling oak grove, the farm buildings are just visible by the line of the roof, the reflection of the tiles, the russet of the façade. The windows are black holes in which curtains of grey cotton hang, frozen. Thick earthenware plates are piled in the sink. Flies doze on the spattered oilcloth spread over the table. On the main building of the pigsty, sheets of fibrocement quiver like murky water. Quartz from the flat stones half-buried in the black earth glitter faintly. Shards of flint cut through the humus on the edge of the woods, while woodlice and snails glide through the moss and the peat. A fox slinks between roots and brambles, its chops red with the spittle-slick hare it is gripping in its jaws. It stops, sniffs the east wind. Its eyes are two bronze spheres. Fur trembles on its flanks, and it disappears beneath a blackened stump. The raw-boned shadow of a dog crosses the farmyard. An owl hoots in the topmost branches of a tree, then silently takes wing. Inside the pig shed, where the opalescent night does not penetrate, the pigs lie on a grating. The sows are crowded next to each other in stalls, their hips, flanks and hocks smeared with their own faeces. The wind whistles between the sheets of fibrocement. A few boars doze in their pen. Under the infrared lamps, piglets squeal and suckle the teats of the nursing sows held in place by straps and metal bars. The sows are stupefied by exhaustion; their eyes roll beneath thick-lashed lids. Gestating sows lie sleeping on their taut, swollen bellies, twitching to the kicks of litters yet unborn. Their dreams are haunted by the shadows of men.
Jérôme wakes from a dream of mythological snakes, pits filled with dark water from which he flushes out insects with hairy, threadlike limbs that he picks up only for them to scratch his face, of roaring animals, shifting chimeras. He pushes off the sheet, sits on the edge of the bed, feet dangling above the floor, in the darkness of the bedroom. The twins, his cousins, are fast asleep; Thomas with the wheezing, laboured breathing brought on by his asthma and his permanently blocked nose, Pierre curled up beneath the eiderdown he takes with him everywhere. From this shapeless, grey rag, which is like a physical part of him, as though he trails an appendage, an unsightly prolapsed intestine around the farm, he pulls at the hollow shafts of the goose feathers poking through the fabric, using them to tickle his nose and upper lip as he drifts off.
Jérôme lies motionless, the only member of the family awake, his body suspended on the mattress, surrounded by the chirring of insects and the croaking of toads. He looks at the sleeping twins. They used to cry as babies when Jérôme stroked their soft skulls, their bulging, fluffy foreheads, and their mother would take them from him and press them to her breast. Now when they sleep next to him, once the light has been turned out and Gabrielle has kissed those same foreheads, now smooth and warm, Thomas talks to himself, muttering under the folds of a sheet stiff with snot, and Pierre waves his little hands full of goose feathers. The twins fill Jérôme’s unending silence with their whispered words.
He is alert to the sounds made by the house. It shows its true face only at night, pitching its framework like an old-fashioned ship, its hundred-year-old worm-eaten skeleton, expanding its cold rooms, stretching its cracked roof beams, turning its hallways into a tapestry of shadows. Beneath the heartbeat pulsing in his eardrums, Jérôme can make out the breath of a gentle breeze in the loose tiles, the crack of the tarpaulin stretched over the roof, the scampering of a stone marten across the beams, the squeaking of a litter of baby rats in the hollow cob wall, the mother in her nest carefully fashioned from stolen boar bristles, fibreglass and wisps of straw, lying like the sows, offering her teats to ten pink pups, whose translucent skin reveals their purple veins and bell
ies gorged with milk.
The child slips out of the bed and the soles of his feet touch the grimy floor covered with dust, with the specks of clay, gravel and straw they bring into the house on their socks, between their toes, under their unclipped nails, in the tangles of their hair and the cuffs of their trousers, trailing it into the bedrooms and even onto the sheets, which they impatiently brush every night before they climb in. He picks up the clothes strewn around the bed, pulls on his green corduroy shorts and the thick woollen jumper he has stretched out of shape, tugging at the sleeves to make them longer as his arms grow. For some time now, his body has been growing in a fitful, disharmonious way, his limbs thrusting him higher. Something inside him is stirring, insidiously reshaping his organs, his bones and his cartilage. Often, faced with his naked body reflected in the washhouse trough or the pond, he catches a glimpse of the barely perceptible change in his appearance.
He knows the creaky boards in the floor, where to place his feet to move soundlessly; he knows, without having to look, the location of the hole caused by damp, over which a board has been nailed for safety. Jérôme walks over to the window, opens it and inhales the scents of the night and the mustiness of the animals. A cool breeze caresses the bare skin of his legs, his arms, his neck. He runs his palms over his scrawny thighs, feels each tiny hair bend, slips his hand under his vest and runs his fingertips over his smooth belly, the depression in the ribcage near the solar plexus. Having shaken off sleep, the dreams now float above him, somewhere between the ceiling and the crown of his head. Jérôme rediscovers the familiar strangeness of his waking body. The open window casts out a rectangle of shadows onto the wall, whose flower-patterned paper is tattered and peeling. Crane-flies flutter in and are flying above the beds, around the room, brushing against Jérôme’s cheek and his eyelashes.
He walks to the door. His eyes fall on Pierre. The little boy is awake and the two stare at each other for a moment without blinking. The child’s eyes are puffy with sleep. A feather is stuck to his cheek with a thread of spittle. Jérôme reaches out, lays a hand on the boy’s damp forehead and the fine hair plastered to his temples in kiss-curls. A smell reaches him of night sweats and the filthy eiderdown, the breath heavy with the night and the bowl of milk the boys drink before they go to bed. He remembers the depression of the fontanelle beneath his fingers, takes the feather from the boy’s cheek, then runs a hand down his back to feel the damp sheet and the mattress cover.
Every day, pairs of sheets laundered by Julie-Marie or Gabrielle are hung out on the washing line behind the farm. In summer, when they play out in the meadows, they suck the tiny florets of clover, carefully plucking them from the capitulum. Jérôme will hold a buttercup beneath the chins of Pierre and Thomas. The reflection colours their smooth pale skin, letting him know that they are not going to stop wetting the bed anytime soon. His elder sister will have to carry on washing their sheets and hanging them out beneath his bedroom window, and he will still be able to watch her, bare-shouldered and in a loose blouse in the hazy morning light, adjusting the clothes pegs on the nylon washing line. He pulls of the sheet and takes off Pierre’s pyjama trousers – heavy and drowsy, the boy allows himself to be manoeuvred before instantly drifting back to sleep – then covers him with the eiderdown, turns and leaves the room.
He walks along the corridor and stops in front of Julie-Marie’s bedroom. He brings his face close and smells the wood of the doorframe. He presses his cheek to the door, straining to catch a breath, a rustle, the cloying smell of the unmade bed, but everything is silent. Jérôme could go in, as the twins sometimes do in the early morning; as he used to do once, before the grandfather forbade him, slide in next to Julie-Marie’s warm body so she would wrap her pale, heavy arm around his shoulders and kiss the back of his neck. He would feel the firm curve of her breasts and her belly against his shoulderblades, against the small of his back.
The kitchen is a huge space off the living room, furnished with a gas cooker, a solid wood table and a formica dresser. A layer of cooking grease, ash and dust covers the extractor hood and the walls of indeterminate colour. The room smells of cooking, small livestock and wet dog hair. The nights are still cold and the farmhouse poorly insulated; a fire glows in the stove set into the old fireplace.
If, every evening when they get back from the pig shed, the father and the uncle undress in the bathroom with its clawfoot bathtub and its cracked porcelain washbasin; if they exposed their nakedness to their indifferent phlegmatic gazes, revealing the startling contrast between their bodies – the one colossal and broken, the other broad and heavy-set – then take turns soaping and shampooing themselves behind the white plastic curtain as they did as children, when their father told them to, taking on the role of their dead mother; if they splash their necks from the same bottle of aftershave, it is no longer in an attempt to mask the smell of mildewed cereal and skatole, but as though they are performing and perpetuating a ritual whose meaning has long since been forgotten. From the twins to their grandmother, they all carry on them, in them, this stench that smells like vomit, that they no longer smell since it is theirs, embedded in their clothes, their sinuses, their hair, impregnating their skin and their sour flesh. Over the generations, they have acquired this ability to produce and exude the smell of pigs, to naturally smell of pig.
Jérôme scoops up a ladle of cold stock and greasy clots from the surface of a large stewpot on the gas stove, brings it to his lips and slurps. He stuffs crusts of stale bread into his pockets. He slips his bare feet into rubber boots, then carefully depresses the handle of the back door. Jérôme crosses the yard and goes into the kennel next to the barn. The dogs are sleeping, curled into balls. Some open their eyes as the boy approaches. He offers each a piece of bread, which the pointers grip with their teeth and chew.
All along the dirt road rutted with two-wheel tracks, thickets of brambles and rushes create shadowy masses and lines. Jérôme breathes in the scent of grasses bowed by the dew, of the ditches in which the croaking of copulating frogs suddenly stops as he approaches, such that it seems as though he is accompanied by a block of silence or by an aura that reduces the vibrations of vocal sacs and the quivering of wing casings to silence, moving with him and around him in the dense, deep space, preceded by an explosive concert of nocturnal animals. Jérôme has no fear of the dark, of the creatures and the mysteries it hides. On the contrary, he feels assured, concealed from the eyes of his own kind, aware of the tension of every muscle as he walks, of the movement of his body as it is propelled through the deafening landscape.
A whiff of slurry carried on the breeze reaches him. The distant purring of an engine reminds him of nights spent spreading manure, sitting next to the uncle, the father or the grandfather, on the back of machines whose mechanical bellies he can feel growling, proud to be among the men, permitted to stay up with them in the cramped cab pervaded by the smell of diesel, and of the fertilizer being spread on the tilled fields. The windows are misted by their sweat, their breath, the smoke from their cigarettes.
The path dips and runs along the fields of soft wheat. Fieldmice scamper as he walks, while the dew pearls on the stalks of the plants, on the silvered fur of rodents and on Jérôme’s skin. The silent forms of bats flit to and fro before his face. In a few months, glow-worms will glisten in the hedgerows, lighting up small patches of darkness, and Jérôme thinks about his sister, about her pale, immaculate skin, on which he would like to place these glorious glimmers, and the fleshy curve of her belly, beneath which there is now a dark, bushy growth that Julie-Marie hides from him.
He senses, knows without being able to name it, that she is inexorably evolving into another state, leaving the world of childhood; this world into which they threw themselves, reigning over the farm, over nature and the animals. He walks instinctively. The black, dilated pupils devour the irises of his eyes, giving his face the wild air of an animal in heat. He cuts through a fallow field, up a hillside towards a copse of aspens
and black elders.
Here, created by his comings and goings, a path, almost a tunnel, runs through the thick, impenetrable brambles besieging the trees, forming a rampart, an almost impenetrable wall, behind which, held up by the creeping ivy and boxwood, are the ruins of an ancient chapel which even the oldest of the locals have long since forgotten. For obscure reasons of inheritance, or divisions in the land registry, the fallow land Jérôme crosses no longer belongs to anyone, and children of his own age have long since stopped following him on his peregrinations, weary of his silence, of the games he plays that they do not understand, of his stench, like an invisible finger pressing on their windpipe, of his habit of ferreting around under every little stone, every piece of corrugated iron, every mossy, rotting tree trunk in search of animals that they find disgusting, and which the Idiot – sometimes, they mockingly call him the Happy Fool – immediately shoves into one of his jamjars.
Jérôme stops for a moment to catch his breath. Stretched out before him, the landscape seems unreal, a succession of small valleys and dark hollows, frozen, pale and indistinct in the moonlight, from which rises a scent of crops that have gorged on water and manure, the musty tang of dungheaps behind farms. The child stands, motionless, a young lord, panting for breath, inhaling the scents of his lands, then disappears into the undergrowth.
Animalia Page 19