Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  ‘I’m a little worried that I might not be making myself clear… If it did turn out to be lymphoma, which, to be completely honest, I fear it might, we would need to discuss a treatment plan.’

  Henri draws on his cigarette and ponders the irony that he will not die of lung cancer, as he might reasonably have expected.

  ‘There’ll be no biopsy, no treatment.’

  The doctor is silent for a moment.

  ‘Listen. At least come in and see me, if only so we can talk it through. These are decisions not to be taken lightly, and I need to be sure that you fully understand what…’

  ‘I completely understand what we’re dealing with. I’ll drop in when I get a chance. In the meantime, please don’t call me. Oh, Paul, it goes without saying that this information is nobody’s business but mine, and should on no account reach the ears of my sons.’

  Henri hangs up without giving the doctor time to reply, then finishes his cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray overflowing with butts, before taking another from one of the many packs that litter the desk.

  He thinks about Élise, he thinks about the sons. He remembers everything, or almost everything, every past moment, every day gone by. They all telescope, merge, they can no longer be broken apart. Is that all there is to a life? he thinks contemptuously. So little and yet so much. But mostly so little. And what is there to show for it, at the end? Surely a man is supposed to have gained some wisdom, some understanding of things, if only partial and fragmentary? The truth is, Henri no longer knows anything with certainty.

  Every evening, when the men finish feeding the pigs and close the doors of the pig shed, by unchanging ritual they pay a visit to Éléonore. They sit around the table in the kitchen of the former barn, long since converted into independent lodgings. What they talk about, Catherine and Gabrielle do not know; the grandmother is taciturn, the men speak little, accustomed to their solitude, their elective isolation; they have grown accustomed to silence and have learned to read each other’s minds. No doubt, as they sip the beer or the coffee that Éléonore serves them, they offer some thoughts about the pig rearing, the sows about to farrow, those that need to be serviced again, the next delivery to the abattoir, the knacker who is coming to take away two or three moribund animals which they plan to slaughter here. The grandmother listens, she says nothing; sometimes, an expression or a word from Henri or Serge will reawaken memories of Marcel, long dormant now and painless. She remembers the moment when she capitulated, when she realized that she would never be able to shield the boy from the violence of the father, the fits of temper, the hours he went missing, which at first seemed incomprehensible until they found him dead drunk, slumped at the foot of a tree or a cow, in the orchard or the byre. What she does remember is that, one day, Marcel declared that, from now on, the boy would help with the farm work, since he was clearly old enough. She remembers the dread that shuddered in her belly, the feeling of being dispossessed, powerless; Henri, who was taken from her, whom she could not bind to herself. The following day, at dawn, she watched the father take their son with him, their conjoined silhouettes disappearing through the fog that lay over the fields.

  To Jérôme, Éléonore has always been old and fragile, exuding a smell of cold ash and cats. Countless cats lie dozing on every surface that is soft and near the hearth: the corners of a deep green velvet sofa, the crocheted cushion covers, the carpets whose patterns disappear beneath a tangle of matted hair of every colour. Though the fathers vainly try to get rid of the tomcats, one invariably escapes and impregnates a female, who gives birth in some corner of the barn or the hayloft. Kept at bay by the men and the dogs, the cats live in the grandmother’s lap, reigning over a stinking world of three rooms they survey through their gummy eyes like small ataractic gods.

  The massacres of the tomcats by the fathers and a lack of new blood have given rise to a family of incestuous, consanguineous cats. Jérôme loves the kittens’ misshapen faces, he likes their deformities. One day, one of the cats gave birth to a white two-headed kitten, each mimicking the other as they took turns suckling, but the aberration with the immaculate fur was not viable, and Jérôme buried its remains beneath a terracotta pot, near an anthill, and every day he checked the progress of the hardworking ants. Then he removed the skull with its four eye sockets; he keeps it among the relics in his sanctuary, wrapped in a linen shroud.

  Early in the morning, after Gabrielle has set down the breakfast tray on the table in the hall and taken the twins to school, after Julie-Marie has headed off to school, when the fathers are already at work in the pig shed, Jérôme pushes open Éléonore’s door and sits in the rocking chair facing her, rocking as she sips a café au lait. Jérôme looks at the skin of her arms: her sinuous veins seem to have a life of their own, winding around tendons and woody bones. The cats mewl for a little butter, and Éléonore sometimes allows them to lick her tartine and they rub against her elbows, arching their backs. The twins are reluctant to visit Éléonore because they re-emerge from her room with their arms and legs covered with insect bites.

  Every year, during the hot weather, hordes of parasites rise from the wooden floorboards, where larvae have been patiently hibernating all through the winter; the fathers fumigate the rooms, chasing the grandmother and her cats out of the house. Éléonore spends long hours sitting on the wrought-iron bench that replaced the small worm-eaten hobnailed bench with the warped seat on which her father used to sit from the first evening in spring to the last vigils of autumn, and which may now be buried in the earth beneath her, the pathetic relic of an ancient civilization long since forgotten.

  For reasons unknown to Jérôme, even back in the days when she could still get out of bed, his mother never visited Éléonore. Gabrielle simply pops her head around the door and leaves trays of food, while Julie-Marie pays her no more attention than her great-grandmother pays her. The women shun the company of the grandmother, who still reigns over the farm in counterpoint to the business run by the men simply by virtue of her mysteriousness, for though she says little, she always seems to have an opinion.

  Jérôme loves the cats, the rustle of the bead curtain leading into the farmyard that quivers like a downpour when Éléonore pushes it aside with a hand stiff with osteoarthritis, the rickety wooden shelves filled with piles of grey porcelain trinkets, with shapeless, crocheted oddities, the wallpaper blackened by smoke from the hearth… Éléonore never beleaguers him with hugs and caresses like the old women he sometimes meets in the village, any more than Jérôme seeks out the contact of her frail, frumpish body. He simply likes to sit awhile with her, with her cats, knowing that he is bound to her by some tenuous genealogy whose implications are beyond him, one to which he suspects she holds the secrets, which he glimpses when in her presence.

  Three or four boars are sufficient to impregnate the breeding sows. One of them, the one they have nicknamed the Beast, is the result of years of selection and clever interbreeding. Never before have the men managed to breed such a specimen. The Beast weighs four hundred and seventy kilos, stands one metre forty hoof to shoulder, and measures four metres long. When they parade him past the stalls to check whether the sows are in their heat, the huge testicles swinging from left to right in his scrotum are like a sneer at the men’s impotence, while urine trickles from the vulvas of the sows as they smell his sour breath. Aware of his physical superiority, and frustrated by the proximity of sows, his confinement and the competition from other boars, the Beast can be volatile. He has already managed to corner Henri in one of the aisles of the pig shed, pinning him against the bars of a stall, and would have ripped off the hand he was about to bite had Serge not intervened and beaten him viciously. Yet the Beast is the father’s pride and joy. Henri believed in him from the beginning. When he emerged from the womb of his mother, a first-class breeder, he was twice as heavy as the other piglets in the litter, four of which were so puny that then men had no choice but to destroy them.

  ‘We’ll not be
castrating this one,’ Henri said, pointing to the boar.

  When the truck came to take the sow to the abattoir, he took the restraint board from Joël, making it a point of honour to escort the sow aboard. When she finally agreed to get in, he got into the truck with her and laid a hand on the sow’s recalcitrant back, whispering in a low voice. The sons watched in silence, thinking perhaps he was promising it an easy death, thanking it for being consistent, reliable, efficient, an excellent meat machine, for having given birth to the Beast, a boar like no other, one that might easily win them first prize in several categories at the next agricultural show. But Henri has always despised agricultural shows, refusing to perform like a circus animal, talking about ‘exposing himself ’ to entertain those from the outside world for whom his hatred and contempt never ceases to grow, as though he himself would be dragged into a pen, exposed, groped, judged.

  With this exceptional boar, he vows to revitalize the sales of breeding stock to Germany, Spain and Italy, which have declined and affected the overall profitability of livestock ever since the pig-rearing business began to slip out of their control, slowly, as a river reshapes a landscape with a movement that is barely noticeable when measured against the span of a human life, but only when measured against generations, where memory is lost, such that no-one remembers and no-one can say when it began to change its course.

  When he finished whispering in its ear, the sow that gave birth to the Beast and countless other piglets is caged with animals it does not know, as frightened as it is at having been taken from their stalls, herded though the sorting pen into the dazzling light outside, then driven up into the truck before the ramp is taken up. As the motorways, the routes nationales, flicker past, the pigs see the russet, red and ochre earth, the grasslands, sights and smells that reach them through the gaps in the planks. Unloaded at the rear of a squat, silent grey building, they are herded through a narrow chute, where already they smell the stench of blood and death. Some struggle to escape, but it is impossible for them to turn around because of the cramped confines of the passageway and the horde of pigs behind, trampling them, scrabbling over them, biting their croups while the men shout and beat them. Others, bewildered by the journey and the blows, uncomprehendingly move forward towards the waiting men in protective coveralls wielding captive bolt guns. Still others drop dead, brought down by a heart attack, and must be carried out of the passageway to the conveyor belt that will devour them. When the turn comes of the sow which birthed the Beast and dozens and dozens of other piglets, the slaughterman presses the captive bolt gun to her temple. It takes several attempts, three shots to obliterate her brain, before the sow falls to her knees. She is then stuck through the thigh with a hook, hoisted up and bled out. The slaughterman turns to his co-workers, shaking his head: ‘She wouldn’t fucking die, the bitch!’

  In early May, as Serge is heading back into the pig shed looking for the pack of cigarettes he left in his coveralls in the changing room, he sees a light on the control panel indicating that the lights in the boar pen have been left on. He sets off to check the circuit breaker, lacing his boots, cutting through the farrowing house and entering the building reserved for the boars. He finds Henri in front of the boar pen, his arms on the top bar. The father does not hear him come in, does not move. His head is bowed – he is staring at the boar lying in the straw. At first Serge does not dare move for fear that he is interrupting something, a moment of privacy, of confidence or contemplation. Then his father turns.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Serge says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Henri says in a low voice.

  ‘I forgot my cigs,’ the son says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder towards to changing room, ‘and I noticed the lights were on in the boar pen.’

  The father says nothing and turns back to the stall housing the Beast.

  Serge steps closer, hesitantly walking along the aisle. He stares at the boar, which stares back, motionless, indifferent to their presence, then he glances at his father’s profile, the grim face weathered like old leather. He says:

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  Henri slowly shakes his head. He accepts the cigarette his elder son proffers. The flame of the Zippo illuminates the folds of his face and, for a moment, the smell of petrol overwhelms the scent of the Beast. They smoke as they stare at the animal.

  ‘Have you noticed that their pupils always reflect our face?’ Henri says. ‘If you look carefully. It’s just a detail, but sometimes I think there’s more to it than that. It jumps out at you. It’s like looking in a two-way mirror or into the bottom of a well. You see yourself, but you see something else, something moving underneath like… It’s as though you see yourself the way they see you with their dumb, animal eyes.’

  Serge says nothing. Henri is not usually inclined to spouting this kind of nonsense. An animal is an animal, and a pig is not even that. This is what his father taught him, a fact confirmed in the pig shed every day. Let this boar they tend, feed, clean and masturbate look at them with that contemptuous air of an indolent, lecherous emperor; he will end in the abattoir like all the cull boars when one of his offspring takes his place and his balls dry up.

  ‘The eye was in the tomb and stared at Cain,’ said Henri.

  Serge chuckles politely.

  ‘I’m going to go, I’m freezing my balls off,’ he says at length.

  But he waits a moment longer in the hope that the father will follow him, and then leaves him alone with the Beast and goes back to the changing room.

  Serge closes the door behind him, lights a cigarette. In the distance, the fields consume a patch of glowing, tawny sky. What is it with the old man and that boar? Serge walks away, trailing the breath of buildings, the acrid stench of pigs that, despite his coveralls, impregnates every fibre of his sweater, every strand of his hair. Sometimes, he forgets this smell. For long periods, it disappears. Then he rediscovers it, often in his dreams – it comes with the shriek, the wail of a body of animals, a single, convulsive, menacing mass, hidden from view, brooding in limbo, in the deep shadows – just as those who lose their sight late in life see primitive images in their dreams. When it appears in his dreams, he instantly recognizes it and it catches in his throat, this stench that rises from buried worlds as through a rip in the earth, in memory, in time: a smell of mire, of silt, of Archaean lava, of fossil layers, the foul smell of sickly, putrid wombs.

  When he is awake and catches a genuine whiff of the pigs – he barely notices if the smell is subdued, diluted, carried on the west wind, exuded by the jumper he is removing, lurking in the breath he is exhaling – it is superimposed by the dream, and he feels the same innate disgust, the same gnawing dread. Sometimes alcohol can offer him respite, a night with no nightmares, and he suffers the painful hangovers of the morning after with good grace. Puddles of mud lap at his feet as he walks towards the farmhouse, a grey monolith framed by the darkness, a gravestone half-buried in the valley slopes, a foundered, capsized ship whose sails still flutter in the wind; but it is simply the tarpaulins that he and Joël put up last autumn to deal with the sagging roof, the slates dislodged by the first gust of wind, which skitter towards the drainpipes and shatter on the flagstones of the farmyard.

  As he walks, his face becomes expressionless, he stares at the ground, his back hunches under the weight of shame. Like the smell of the pigs, he is sometimes reminded of her; it only takes a small detail: the blue tarpaulins covering the roof, wrecked cars piled up among the weeds, the closed shutters of Cathy’s bedroom.

  The farmhouse has become dilapidated at the expense of the pig units, which have mushroomed since the advent of the common agricultural policy, and must be continually renovated, modernized, maintained at prevailing standards. Previously, breeding meant a rudimentary pigsty with a field of at least two hectares, on which twenty pigs could be raised outdoors. The loan Henri took out in order to construct the new pig units and shift to enclosed breeding were intended to guarantee improved animal husbandry.
The pivotal period was to span only the first few years, when earnings from the sale of pigs were not sufficient for the breeding program to turn a profit, despite the development of long distribution channels. But, over time, Henri has continued to hint that farming is a constant risk. The accounting costs fall to him alone, the sons are allowed no say in expenditure and investment. Besides, they never talk about money, except to tell him what they have spent on grain and water, on vets’ fees, on animals, machinery and materials, repairs and engineers, fertilizers, pesticides and seeds. An expense is legitimate only if it is justified by a potential profit, even if indirect.

  Serge massages his left hand, which often suffers twinges and sometimes trembles. The hipflask is already empty and he is beginning to feel thirsty. Just as the smell of pigs or the weight of his shame are suddenly palpable, so he sometimes has the sudden feeling that there is a disruption to the order of life and the world of the farm. Serge cannot put a name to this sense of deterioration, but what is the tipping point, the source? We would have to retrace the path of the word, of the law decreed by the father, rediscover the first word, long forgotten, but whose echo still secretly resonates within them. Ever since the death of Élise, all they have known has been the slow decline of the farm buildings, which have rotted and decayed even as the piggery seemed to prosper, constantly produced more, proportionally increasing their workload and their violence.

  A pig is there to be slaughtered. Never forget to show them who’s boss.

  Serge believes all the fires of hell smoulder beneath the pig-breeding business, threatening to erupt like Vesuvius and bury them if they should ever stop purging or feeding it. The nature of the piggery is that its walls cannot contain what it needs to constantly assimilate and regurgitate. It is a universe unto itself, perpetually expanding, that they strive to master. As for the memory of how things were in the olden days, it is a fragile, crumbling skin; their sorry state has become familiar, ordinary.