Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  At dawn one April morning, it is a rolling verdant valley through which a departmental motorway snakes like a slow worm through moss. Day is only just breaking, radiating a mauve spring sky speckled with sparse clouds. In the distance, the smoke from a late fire rises vertically from a rooftop, and thin wisps of fog still linger here and there in the branches of the trees.

  Henri wakes to the mansard ceiling of the room. His eyes follow the line of the joists, the ridge of the hangar visible through the mullioned window. He watches a couple of rooks who have perched there, their raucous croaking deepening the baleful feeling he had on waking.

  For several weeks, the fever has not abated. At first fluctuating and bearable, it now burns day and night. His dreams no longer have any form, but are simply a tangle of hallucinatory visions, a scansion of enigmatic words, places and faces. His T-shirt and his pyjama trousers are drenched with the night sweats that leave him parched.

  He runs a hand over the cold, damp mattress, then shivers. He gropes on the bedside table for the boxes of ibuprofen, aspirin and paracetamol he alternately takes to ease the crippling headaches. The back of his hand knocks against the framed black-and-white photograph, from which Élise, the dead wife, stares out at him, as though haloed by the yellowing paper.

  Sitting on a bench beneath the velvet-leaved walnut tree that grew not far from here, she is wearing a dress blackened by the years. The tree casts shadows on her bare arms. Serge, their eldest son, runs past, a grey blur behind her. Élise’s hands – Henri remembers her close-cropped fingernails – are resting on her swollen pregnant belly. He believes he remembers a moment of tranquillity in midsummer, even the weight of the camera in his hands, the pressure of the leather strap against his neck, his clammy skin.

  It is the last image of her that he possesses, and one of the only ones he took with the Artoflex he had just bought, suddenly eager to create and record a family history. Through the viewfinder, things seemed more beautiful – the kitchen, with light bathing the sink against which she was leaning, the mane of her flaming hair in the blazing sun. The light and shadows seemed more real, life seemed innocuous. He remembers her amused indulgence, her embarrassment faced with this device intended to immortalize her through a face, a body, an expression. The following autumn, when Élise died giving birth to Joël, their second son, Henri set aside the camera, and the thought that all that would remain of her were a handful of 6x6 snapshots seemed unbearable, just as the urgency he had earlier felt to leave some trace of the past, of them living that past, suddenly seemed pathetic. He bashed the camera, snapped off the lens cap, pulled the last roll of film out into the light, thereby destroying the last shots of Élise, of whom there remain only a few photographic negatives buried in mouldering boxes consigned to oblivion, and the enlarged print in the little frame that Henri picks up this morning and brings to his face.

  He has no photographs of his two sons. Their shared family history is no more than a series of fleeting instants left to their fragile, uncertain memories. Of his own father, Henri has not a single image. Only Éléonore still preserves one of the retouched portraits in a trunk, in which he is captured in three-quarter profile so that his ruined face melts into the shadows. Henri runs a finger over Élise’s face. In fact, the eyes staring out at him seem troubled by a disquiet he does not recognize, of which he has no memory, and the figure of Serge, in short trousers, has imperceptibly reached the edge of the frame, trailing a shadow that stretches out to touch his mother’s cheek. Henri is sixty years old, Élise will forever be twenty-eight; can he say that he still knows her, can he say that he ever knew her? He lives with a memory that is scarcely even that now, yet it haunts him, as might the memory of another man. He turns the frame and lays it on the bedside table.

  He sits on the edge of the bed, presses two fingers to his carotid artery and assesses the beating of his heart. He massages a painless swollen gland that has appeared beneath his chin overnight, checks the size of those that run from groin to mid-thigh. He breathes slowly to dispel the panic gripping him. The wardrobe mirror returns the reflection of his hulking, half-naked body. He sees the salt-and-pepper beard that covers his cheeks, his arms, still brawny, though the triceps are slack, his legs, now hairless, the potbelly that rests on his legs. There are scratch marks on his legs, his buttocks, his forearms. Hands resting on the mattress, head bowed, back arched, Henri is attentive to the cawing of the rook, the creaking of the roof beams, and the silence of his long solitude.

  He gets up, glances into the children’s room, the door left open so that the twins can fall asleep to the glow from the lights in the hall. They are sleeping soundly, tangled in their blankets.

  Jérôme’s bed is empty, the sheet twisted. God alone knows where the boy can have gone prowling. Perhaps he should consider double-locking the doors. The boy is not disobedient, but simply indifferent to authority. He shuns the presence of adults, though he does not seem to prefer the company of other children. Henri has never felt any affection for his grandson, only mistrust and antipathy. He thinks the boy is malicious, sly, calculating, as children are wont to be. He feels that his mutism marks them out, accuses them. Jérôme can barely tolerate his cousins, the twins, and he can be seen trailing behind his sister like a shadow or a barely tamed animal, the only person whose contact and affection he constantly seeks out. Henri closes the door and walks away without a sound.

  When he steps into the kitchen, Serge is already up and about. Henri sees him finish filling a metal hipflask with whisky and slipping it into the pocket before quickly putting the bottle back into a cupboard. Father and son do not acknowledge each other. Serge already has a stovetop coffee pot standing on the gas cooker. He strikes a match and lights the burner before sitting at the kitchen table.

  Soon, Joël appears. He takes a cup from the draining rack, cuts a slice of bread from the loaf sitting on the countertop and sits down. The men wait in silence while a wisp of steam rises from the coffee maker. Outside, a cock crows. Joël stares at the oilcloth, collecting crumbs of bread on his fingertip. When the cafetière begins to whistle, Henri turns off the gas, fills his cup, sits at one end of the table and sets the coffee maker down in front of him. He feels exhausted, wiped out by the night, electrified by his fever, but is determined to let nothing show, and if the two brothers notice his pallor, his eyes ringed with dark circles, the slight trembling of his hands, they do not dare say anything.

  When Henri wipes his mouth on his sleeve and puts his bowl in the sink, the sons, as one man, immediately get to their feet.

  In the hall, they pull on their parkas, put on their shoes. Their bodies stir, close and indifferent. Henri opens the door and steps out onto the porch, followed by his sons. The pack of dogs, a dozen Gascony Braque pointers, bark and jump up at the mesh fence of their kennel.

  Joël is holding a pail filled with scraps and dry dog food. He crosses the yard, opens the gate to the kennel. Accustomed to parrying shouts and blows, the pointers usually keep their distance from Henri and Serge. They dart around nervously, heads bowed, yapping and slavering excitedly on Joël’s shoes as he pats their heads, scratches their necks and their thin flanks. Outside hunting season, the dogs languish on the concrete kennel floor filthy with their excreta, or wander around the farmyard.

  Joël steps into the kennels and pours the contents of the bucket into the old stone trough once used to feed pigs. The pointers greedily pounce on the food. Joël takes a crumpled cigarette from his pocket and smokes, watching as Henri and Serge walk side by side across the yard to the pig shed, their shoulders hunched, their hands buried in their pockets. Their manner is so similar that, sometimes, and increasingly convincingly, Joël sees the figure of his father in his brother, in a gesture, a facial expression, the inflection of his voice. Both men have a forbidding, muscular physique, born of labouring on the farm.

  Joël can just make out the figure of Gaby behind the lighted kitchen window. For an instant their eyes meet, then he looks up
towards Catherine’s bedroom. The shutters are still closed today. Gabrielle turns away.

  Those who have eaten their fill slip between Joël’s legs and out of the kennels, lap water from a basin left under a drainpipe, piss against the derelict cars and the tyres of the tractor parked in the hangar.

  Joël notices that one of the bitches has dragged a blanket into the shadow of the tractor, and is suckling a litter of newborn pups. He goes over and kneels down. He looks at the bitch, her coat sticky with sump oil, and the dog stares back at him, her head lowered. The animal wags her bony, balding tail, beating the dirt floor. Joël leans against the tractor wheel and, grimacing, stretches out his hand. He feels the still-viscid mass of pups, counting them with his fingertips. The bitch licks feverishly at his hand. The man remains hunkered next to her, arms folded over his knees, and finishes his cigarette as he watches the animal lick her pups clean.

  ‘You’d do well to be discreet,’ he says.

  He spits on the ground, stubs the cigarette butt out in the spittle, gets up, and herds the dogs back into the kennel, closing the gate on them. Far ahead, downhill from the farm, his brother and his father are walking along the path deeply rutted by farm machinery.

  Joël catches up with Henri and Serge. As every morning, they pause for a time beneath the overhang of the corrugated-iron roof of one of the rectangular buildings below the pig shed, fish packs of cigarettes from their pockets and smoke without looking at each other, watching night fade over the fields and the dense crops.

  There is nothing to suggest the presence of the pigs, nor the tumult to come. Each of them stares at a fixed point on the ground, or into the indiscernible distance, but always in different directions. They might seem engrossed in some profound reflection were their eyes not fixed, empty of all thought, all volition. Then Henri says, ‘Come on,’ and the sons instantly toss their cigarette butts and crush them under the soles of their boots.

  In the changing-room next to the building, under the fluorescent lights, they take off their boots and undress. They put on blue coveralls, pulling the zips up to their chins with no other sound than the rustle of fabric, the clearing of throats, the hiss of breath and the squeak of rubber boots on the cement floor. The father walks ahead of his sons, unbolting the door that leads into the pig shed. Joël and Serge drag metal trolleys under the feed hoppers. The grain rumbles down the pipes and pours out, instantly triggering a chorus of squeals, the shrill, discordant grunt of a single voice, that of the mythological beast the rumbling silos have woken from centuries of sleep.

  Henri pushes open the sliding doors in a gust of acid, steamy condensation. Pale light spills from the sputtering ceiling lights onto the pigs as they press against the bars of their stalls, clamber onto the feed troughs, climb over each other, scratching their backs and their flanks, using their heads as battering rams, hunger foaming on their snouts. Pushing the feed trolleys filled with grain in front of them, the brothers set off down the two aisles of the pig shed, plunging into the stench, breathing through their mouths, shallow gulps of ammoniacal emanations; a smell of urine and faecal matter, animal sweat, grain liquefied by salivary juices, bitter as bile spewed by the pig shed into the pale dawn.

  They move along the aisles, through the liquid manure leaking from the stalls, from which they must extricate their boots at every step. Then, in a series of mechanical gestures, they dip pails into the trolley and throw the feed over the stall barriers into the troughs to the ravening pigs. Before long, the air in the pig shed is thick with a cloud of grain dust, which settles on the sweaty faces of the men, the hairs on their forearms, enters their sinuses, their throats, their bronchial tubes, and powders the bodies of the animals.

  As they move down the aisles, squeals give way to grunts of satisfaction and mastication, but still the noise is deafening. The men fall silent, since they cannot hear their own voices above the guttural growl that bores into their eardrums, whose phantom echo sometimes wakes them in the middle of the night.

  Only the voice of Henri, standing in the doorway of the building, manages to carry above the squeals of the pigs. His watches his sons as they work, fumbles nervously in his pockets for his pack of cigarettes, then, feeling suddenly dizzy, leans against the wall of the barn, out of sight. The fever makes his eyeballs throb. He presses his damp hands to his eyelids. The shriek of the pigs is becoming increasingly unbearable to him. He feels an itch again, in his thighs this time, and frantically tries to scratch himself through the thick coveralls.

  He decides not to smoke, and steps into the pig shed.

  ‘Straw down, now,’ he shouts to one or other of the brothers.

  As one, Serge and Joël push open the two doors at the end of the aisles, at the far end of the building, stoop so they can pass through, and emerge into a concrete yard behind the pig shed.

  They stand motionless some ten metres apart, their silhouettes framed against the light. They press their fingers to each of their nostrils in turn and expel jets of grey snot, then take deep lungfuls of air. Serge takes out his hipflask and drinks. In front of them steam rises from the slurry pit, static, toxic, black, its surface floating with clots of excrement. Oblivious to each other, Serge and Joël walk along the building to the next hangar in which the bales of straw are stored. They load barrows, then plunge back into the pig shed, which is stifling from the heat of the pigs. Into each stall they toss armfuls of straw, which the animals immediately trample and rootle. Henri heads down one of the aisles, checking each of the stalls. Joël sees him stop in front of one, climb over the barrier, bend over a group of sows, then stand up and furiously beckon him over.

  When the son draws near, separated only by the gate of the stall, already resigned and servile, head bowed, hands balled into fists at his thighs, Henri says:

  ‘Would you like to explain to me what this boar is doing here with the gilts?’

  Joël glances at the pig, standing as far from the men as the space within the stall allows, amid a group of young females, moving with them as they hurl themselves against the planks of the pen in a desperate attempt at escape. He does not know how the young boar, which should be in one of the pens in the boar enclosure, has managed to end up here, in the feedlot, but it would be futile to try to apologize and any attempt at justification will simply stoke the father’s anger, so he remains silent.

  ‘How can you be so bloody careless…? It’s like you don’t give a tinker’s curse about anything, or maybe you’re just incompetent… It’s not exactly brain surgery, what I’m asking, is it? Is it…? A little care and attention, that’s all… Fuck sake, even your brother can manage it… That’s what it means to do a good job, do you understand? No, of course you don’t fucking understand… I’m the idiot here! I’ve told you time and again. But no, you’re happy being mediocre, even though you know there’s no place for that on my farm. Not here, Joël, you know that… Go on, shift your arse, get that fucking animal out of here…’

  Henri’s face turns purple. He looks as though he is trying to dislodge something stuck in his throat, and his lips twist into a rictus. A sinuous vein pulses in his temple and his neck.

  You stick the blade in here, cleanly, restraining the animal with a knee to the shoulder.

  As Henri clambers back over the barrier, projecting his thickset frame, Joël takes a step back and waits until the father has left the barn before going back to work. His heart is hammering against his ribs, just as it is in the gilts and the young boar.

  From the kitchen, Gabrielle sees Joël feeding the dogs in the kennel and, as always when her eyes linger on him, he seems taller, thinner, swimming in his baggy trousers. She imagines the gangling, quiet teenager he probably was, reduced to silence by the coalition between father and elder brother, always trailing in their shadow, trapped in this body that is strangely youthful yet already ravaged, which he drags through the muddy farm with his long, loping strides. Joël lifts his bony, freckled face towards Catherine’s bedroom. His forehead is m
arked by two deep furrows near the scar that extends from his right temple to his eyebrow, and his pale, grave eyes are sunken by dark purple circles. Then Gaby leaves the kitchen.

  Upstairs, she goes into the children’s room, runs a hand over the tousled heads peeking from beneath the blankets. Thomas wakes and looks at his mother with sleepy eyes.

  ‘Do you know where Jérôme’s gone?’ she asks, touching the boy’s cold mattress.

  The twins shake their heads. A few of the grandmother’s cats have curled up at the boys’ feet, or between their legs, purring in their sleep.

  Gabrielle leaves the room, heads down the corridor and knocks on the door of Julie-Marie’s bedroom. She waits for a moment, knocks again, then walks away as she hears the teenager stirring. She lays a hand on the handle of Catherine’s door, takes a breath before stepping inside, walks over to the window and opens it, pushing the shutters, which thud against the outside wall, allowing a gust of salutary air into the room.

  In the bed behind her, her elder sister moans and buries herself beneath the sheet and the blankets. Gabrielle looks around the room. The floor is strewn with clothes, dirty sheets and dust. The bar of the electric heater at the foot of the bed glows red, making a regular clicking sound.

  ‘It’s like a furnace in here,’ she says, turning off the heater.

  In the bathroom next door, she flushes the toilet filled with stagnant urine, turns on the light and turns on the hot water tap for the bath. She rubs the back of her neck, then goes back into the bedroom and sets about clearing the floor of the dirty clothes that Catherine sheds like old skin, often unable to bear the touch of them, and which she pushes under the bed.