Turned towards the cemetery gate, a cast-iron Virgin bows her face eaten by rust as though by smallpox and spreads her hands to welcome the deceased villagers to their final resting place.
We have been what you are and you will one day be what we are.
The rubiginous folds of her robe smell of small change. By the plinth of the statue, from among the thistles that have grown up through the cracks, Jérôme picks up the shed skin of a snake that has been softened by the dew. He delicately removes from it fragments of leaves, thorny twigs and quartz gravel, then uncoils it between his fingers and lays it on the coping stones surrounding the pockmarked Virgin, at whose feet troops of ants march, busying themselves at clever tasks. He takes care not to tear the fragile, translucent sheath still marked by the imprint of scales, then he stands up and studies it.
The skin is that of a grass snake almost two metres long. He has placed a stone at the head and one at the tail and measured, placing the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other. Jérôme sits down on one of the steps. The sun on his face is pleasantly warm.
At this hour, the father and the uncle will have finished feeding the pigs. Jérôme likes going into the pig shed and walking past the stalls, looking at the animals and helping the men at their work. He holds a hand, palm open, towards their snouts and the pigs nuzzle it, sniffing his scent, sometimes licking his hand, then he runs his hand over their foreheads, their white bristles, their ciliated eyes. At this point they are silent and stand motionless as he strokes them. He brings strange tastes to them from the world outside: handfuls of fresh grass, acorns, chestnuts, an earthworm, a piece of carrion. Sometimes, in spite of the fathers’ warnings, he slips into the farrowing house. He walks soundlessly past the gestation crates, where the sows lie on their flanks, confined by metal bars, suckling their litters. He takes some of the bodies of piglets unable to avoid being crushed by the painful convulsions of the sow in labour; those too weak to fight for a teat, those deformed and unlikely to survive, which the fathers coldly pick up by their hind legs, raise above their heads and slam against the bars of the stall, or against the floor, leaving long bright-red trails on the concrete floor, and slam again just to be sure, shattering their fragile skulls. Some of the piglets literally explode under the force of the blows. They then toss the swollen carcasses into buckets or into a barrow, where some spasm and eventually bleed to death, while others, already dead, spill forth the tiny delicate ribbons of their entrails.
‘There’s always spoilage, it’s like any form of production.’
When the fathers’ backs are turned, Jérôme takes one or two little bodies from the barrow and slips them into his backpack or into the pockets of his trousers.
‘This sow’s producing too much spoilage, she’s worthless, transfer her to the feedlot.’
Rather than incinerate them, Henri often feeds them to the dogs. He tosses the piglets into the air and they fall back to the sound of snapping jaws.
‘It’s good for their hunting instinct.’
Jérôme, for his part, takes them to the old chapel.
Serge leans the pitchfork against the wall, lights a cigarette and smokes, staring vacantly at the pigs he no longer sees, and who now make little noise besides the occasional satisfied grunt, the rustle of skin as they sprawl against each other in the cramped stalls and a few squeals of protest. He slips a hand into the pocket of his coveralls and strokes the metal hipflask.
For some years now, he can only bear to work in the pig shed when inebriated with alcohol; a mild intoxication but constant, necessary, a threshold he must maintain, and he can get to sleep only when half-drunk. The strip lights crackle, their glow dulled by the dusty webs of tegenaria spiders.
As silence returns to the building, the rats emerge from their shelters and scurry between the pigs, over the metal bars, along the beams until they come to the feed troughs, where they pick off and nibble the pre-chewed remains of food.
Often, one of their number is lost, venturing too close to the men, who crush them underfoot, or hack them with the blade of a shovel, then grab them by the tail and toss them onto the manure heap; but, by sheer force of numbers, the rats reign in the hidden world of the pig shed that is revealed only when the doors of the barn are closed and the ciliated eyes of the pigs are plunged into darkness. If from time to time the men kill one of them, it is only for the sake of form, perhaps out of instinct, since they have long since accepted their tacit defeat. The rats grow bolder, appearing from shadowy corners, taunting them by scurrying away under their very noses – their fur grey, their bellies white, their tails proud. The pig shed is no longer the territory of men, nor even of pigs: it is theirs. The rats have overcome their resistance, prevailed over their sovereignty.
Serge no longer sees the rats any more than he sees the pigs. He turns away, leaves the shed, grabs one end of a coiled hose mounted on the wall, heaves it onto his shoulder and pulls it as far as the aisle, where Joël, gripping a beater, is climbing into the stall enclosing the young boar. Serge lays the hose on the ground, grabs a restraint board and walks towards him.
‘Wasn’t fucking me that put him in there,’ Joël says.
‘Yeah, and I’m not the one you should be telling,’ Serge replies, lifting the latch on the stall.
The pigs scatter, eyes wide, and huddle together in a corner. Joël hits them on the back to separate the boar from the sows, backs him against the railings and shoos him towards the stall gate. The young boar bounds towards the aisle, slamming into the board that Serge is holding, trying to butt it out of his way. Joël leaves the stall, closes it behind him, and, with shouts and lashings, the two brothers goad the animal to a stall where they can isolate it.
‘I’ll go take care of the farrowing house and the boar pens,’ Serge says.
Left alone, Joël watches the breathless boar press against the metal bars, watching him with a feverish eye. He puts a hand through the bars, lays his palm against the boar’s back and breathes with the animal until it is calm. Then he goes back to the far end of the aisle and grabs the Kärcher hose. The high-pressure jet gets rid of the excrement encrusted on the gratings, the concrete floors of the stalls and the aisles, the droppings in the corners, on the walls and on the bars.
The pigs piss and shit all day in stalls so cramped they can only just move, forcing them to relieve themselves, to wade through their excreta, to lie in it, wallow in it, until the urine that noisily splashes from the vulvas and the sheaths liquefies the clumps of turds, the droppings they expel, creating a mire in which they wade and instinctively dip their frantic, useless snouts. This diarrhoea spills out, seeping through the small chinks, the narrowest cracks, trickles over the slightly sloping floor, pools into thick, black puddles in crevices and hollows.
The men are engaged in a constant battle with shit every day. At the beginning of every week, using pressure hoses, hard-bristle brushes and scrapers, they repel the faecal tide created by the pigs, soaking the concrete floor, which swells, blisters and explodes under the pressure of the Kärcher, breaks off into small islands that hurtle downstream on the black torrent and disappear into the slurry pit outside. The liquid manure gradually eats away at the piggery buildings, and they would probably collapse if the men did not constantly plug the holes like an ancient ship that is taking in water through the hull and has to be bailed out by the crew.
To counter the shit, cement mixers churn and pour out cement into the anus mundi that is the pig shed, but it is a waste of time since, every night, the shed secretes what the men have managed to wash away by day, and by morning the same pestilence awaits, the same unspeakable mire laps at their boots, spatters their bare hands and faces, spills into their dreams; a deluge of shit sweeping them away, drowning them, spurting from their stomachs, their arses, their cocks, spewing or oozing from every orifice, as though it has a life of its own, whose only goal is to spread over them, beyond them, filling their nights with mudslides, waking them with a start, their hands
clutching at the sheets, holding on lest they fall into a bottomless pit of slurry, their throats prickling with the familiar taste, their foreheads drenched with sweat and their ears ringing with the phantom squeal of pigs.
Henri’s voice echoes in Joël’s mind: We manufacture meat here, not shit, and he brushes, sweeps, scours, pushes the black tide into the drains, tips barrowloads of manure into the slurry pit, the never-sated belly of the pig shed that calmly waits for the next purge, while black continents, faecal nebulae, drift slowly over its fathomless surface. It is an ordinary day.
Henri steps into the cramped room next to the pig shed that serves as an office. Originally conceived as a junk room, it has no windows. A fluorescent light casts a bluish glow over the formica desk, the shelves filled with box files, their spines carefully marked, the livestock planner on the wall: the esoteric heart of the piggery. Henri closes the door, breathes in the familiar smell of stale cigarette ash, dust and grain. For a long time, he alone was allowed in here, forbidding his sons to set foot in the room. He opened the door to them only after Serge came of age, deciding that the time had come to induct him into the family business and the responsibilities of breeding.
‘You do realize that what I’m doing for you? I wouldn’t do for your brother, not anytime soon. That’s proof of my trust. The trust I’m placing in you, you get me? Up to now, you’ve proved yourself worthy of that trust. I hope you won’t disappoint me.’
As he pushes the initialled contract across the shellacked desk to Serge, and sits back in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face, he pretends not to notice his son’s palpable unease, the curiously clumsy signature he scrawls at the bottom of the last page.
He believes that he brought up his sons in a manner that is firm but fair, refusing to tolerate weakness or cowardice, two unforgivable defects in a man. He is secretly proud of having raised his two boys single-handed, even if Joël has never quite lived up to his expectations. After Élise’s death, Éléonore supported him, but it was he and he alone who moulded his sons.
Henri steps around the desk, sits in the chair and lights a cigarette. And yet, can he truly count on their devotion, their loyalty, their ambition? Now that his sons are adults, can he congratulate himself on having succeeded in passing on to them more than just a farm: this conviction, this faith in the land? He would like to believe in Serge, the more solid and dependable of the two. For a long time, the boy has followed in his footsteps, hung on his every word, looked at him with that mixture of admiration and respect, that desire to one day equal the imagined power and respectability of the father; then, as a teenager, he had treated him with a manly, unspoken respect. Yes, he believed in Serge; at least until Catherine burst into their disciplined, well-ordered, conventional lives, prompting the long-heralded but, from that point, definitive estrangement between the two brothers.
What has he managed to pass on to his sons? He feels as though he could count on the fingers of one hand the moments that sum up, if not their story, at least their relationship. When he used to run the boys’ bath and the steam condensed on the mirror above the washbasin, when he undressed them and put them in the water, then stayed to watch them play, taking toy figures and galloping them along the edge of the bath, walking them across the water, or having them dive into the depths between their legs. Had he not wondered at the time how to preserve the memory of his love for his sons, of their perfect, radiant bodies in the grey, muddy bathwater, of the misted mirror and the water sporadically trickling down the shower curtain blotted with mould? Or had he felt nothing at all, but simply imagined how Élise would have felt had she still been alive? Had he ever mentally formulated the promise not to fail in what she would have wanted for them, to find the right words, the right gestures, but also to protect them for as long as possible, unable to imagine that it would be from himself that he would need to protect them?
On that rainy spring day in 1952, when even the sky and the fields seem sad and dirty, he walks behind the hearse carrying the remains of Élise, holding Serge’s hand. He boy is not yet three. Dressed in a little grey mourning suit, he constantly tugs at the collar of the shirt that is pinching his neck. A few paces behind, Éléonore is carrying Joël in her arms, wrapped in a blanket the mother crocheted before she died giving birth to the son. Élise’s family are walking behind them, coughing from the exhaust fumes of the hearse. The weeping mother-in-law, whom he will never see again except by chance, and who will always shoot him the same bitter look, is being supported by the eldest of her sons, the one who, when he heard about his sister’s death, showed up in the farmyard drunk, reeling and screaming up at the windows:
‘You’re going to pay for this, you fucking bastard! You knew she couldn’t survive it! You killed her! You fucking killed her! Come down here, you son of a bitch! Come out and fight if you’ve got the balls!’
Henri walked him back to his car, the barrel of a rifle pressed into his flabby belly.
‘Get back in your car and don’t you ever set foot on my land again, or I swear on her grave I’ll kill you.’
When he turned, having lingered for a moment to see the car disappear around the corner of the road leading to the farm, his elder son was watching him from the kitchen window.
Henri also remembers the pig shed, the working practices drilled into them, those instilled in him by his own father. The work ethic he instilled in them. The day when Serge, face a rictus of pain, teeth clenched so as not to cry, showed him his hands covered in blisters, the skin peeling away, and the father said, ‘You’re finally getting the hang of it,’ and jerked his chin towards another stall to be shovelled out. He has come to believe that the pigs are a bulwark between them and the outside world, that it is simultaneously a rite of passage – though one that can only lead back to the piggery in a vicious cycle – and a last resort. Of course he would have wanted something else for them, but what? And who could tell what their lives might have been if Élise had not died?
Time was, he could easily call her to mind, remember her gestures, the way she moved, the tone and tessitura of her voice, refashion snatches of conversation, whispered words, brief scenes. Then her voice had grown fainter before disappearing altogether, diluted in time. Since then, it is in his own voice – muted, externalized, in fact inaudible – that her words come back to him. For there must surely have been a day when she confided that she was pregnant again. He can recall no date, no place, not even a quality of light, a time of day. Did they rejoice, did they make a pact, deciding to allow the child to live regardless of the price, or did they simply say nothing? There remains only a single instant, when the photograph was taken, one afternoon by the walnut tree, and Élise captured, an insect trapped in a droplet of amber. Henri has never spoken of it to the sons, but before the body of their mother was taken away to the hospital morgue, he took a lock of her hair, cut it with his pocket knife and slipped it into the pocket of his shirt. He placed it in the only jewellery box he possessed and never opened it again, superstitious about what alchemy might be wrought by the passage of time, what the box might now contain – a nest of vipers, a pile of dust, a tiny, funereal effigy of Élise?
The telephone ringing makes him start.
‘Henri? Paul Vidal here. I’m calling because I’ve got the results of your most recent tests. Could you come see me? I think we might need to do a little more exploring.’
Henri pats his pockets for his pack of cigarettes. He knows the doctor, watched him grow up. A spineless, sententious man who used to attend the local school, was in the same class as Serge, and now speaks to him in a tone dripping with feigned condescension.
‘Okay, thanks for calling back, but I don’t really have time for that right now.’
He glances at the unopened envelope from the medical laboratory lying on the desk, then he opens one of the drawers, slides it under a pile of papers and closes the drawer. Henri hears the little cough the doctor muffles with his fist.
‘The th
ing is… I’d rather not have to talk to you about this over the phone, but the results seem to confirm my fears. I am going to have to order a biopsy of one of the swollen glands and…’
Henri lights another cigarette and, for a moment, loses the thread of the conversation from the receiver. His gaze moves over the shelves, the line of box files. A different colour for each year, blue, green, yellow, black, red, and how many hundreds of thousands of pig lives recorded therein.
Seven million piglets, that’s what a sow and her issue would be able to produce within a lifetime.
‘No,’ he hears himself say, coughing a cloud of smoke towards the strip light. ‘No, there’ll be no biopsy. Seems to me I told you that the last time the subject came up.’
When, plagued by exhaustion, pruritus and fever, he had made an appointment and visited the doctor’s surgery in the village rather than having him come to the farm, so that the sons would not know – they have never seen him ill, and on those rare occasions when flu or some other virus should have laid him low, he carried on working, even more fiercely, more determinedly – he had sat in the waiting room, suffering the sidelong glances of other patients, their smug bonjour-au-revoir-messieurs-dames, he had vacantly leafed through stupid magazines for housewives, unable to decipher a single word, until the doctor appeared in the doorway, gestured for him to extricate himself from his chair, to follow him into the consulting room, to take a seat, to enumerate his symptoms, nodding sagely from time to time, then asked him to undress (he who has not been naked in front of anyone, not even a woman, for years, now compelled to take off his clothes in front of a man, to sit in his underpants on the soft, cold leather of the examination table, to show, to entrust his body to the doctor’s hands, which are also soft and cold; and the disgust he had felt at his own shudder as the doctor placed the bell of the stethoscope on his chest), then to remove his underpants so that he could palpate the swollen glands, roll his testicles between his fingers with a suspicious air of concern.
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