Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  Serge cannot help but think that the Beast, which the father thinks of as a sign of the success of the breeding business, is actually the stumbling block. Like the Beast, the pig business has become bigger than they are. Do they still control it? Henri, obsessed with the boar, is now talking about overhauling the breeding program, reorganizing the pigs, creating new buildings, putting more animals on slatted floors, hiving off the management of the gestation unit, all this in order to make constant improvements in efficiency, productivity… Serge pauses and turns, and stares for a long time at the pig shed.

  Once the men leave for the pig shed and the dogs stop barking, Catherine is left in the silence of the empty house. Maybe Jérôme will open the door to her room and slip under the sheet next to her, or maybe he will change his mind, and she will hear him hesitate at the door, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, lower the handle, toy with the key in the lock, before deciding to obey the orders given him by Serge or Gabrielle and go to his grandmother, who is responsible for looking after him when the adults are absent. Catherine knows nothing of the bond between the boy and the grandmother, who reminds her of those spiders in shadowy haylofts that weave webs so cunning that it is impossible for the unfortunate prey caught in them ever to break free. They seem to be indestructible – they are still there a year, a decade, even a century later, the web a little dustier, a little thicker, a little more forbidding. This is probably why Éléonore resents Catherine, for displacing her at the centre of the funnel web, from where, as the only representative of her sex, she kept a watchful eye on her men, for forcing her into exile in the old byre with all her belongings. But Catherine’s warnings to Jérôme about this ancient harpy have been futile, and he does exactly as he pleases. Éléonore seems to have existed since time immemorial, rotting in her house filled with hideous cats, and perhaps continues to reign as dowager queen over the farm. And to think that she is only seventy-eight! Good God, she might well live for another thirty years… And besides, what difference would it make? None. The grandmother could drop dead; nothing would change. The damage has long since been done, so long that it is as deeply rooted in them as it is in the soil of Puy-Larroque. Catherine tripped over those roots, she is trapped in this web, and the more she struggles, the more she is trapped. Often, she would rather not think about it, rather not remember: the mistakes, the dreams of long ago, the hopes she had for her life; she would rather stuff it all into a sack and bury it deep in the mud that is now her consciousness.

  The sickness has been around for so long, since well before the first breakdown, that it sometimes feels as though she has been living with it forever. As far back as she can remember it was there, at first a white noise, as though she were constantly trying to find the right frequency on a radio, to somehow calmly comprehend the world; but at the time, she still had the feeling that there were possibilities lying dormant beneath the surface, the belief that there existed a thousand possible lives, and the conviction that she had simply to want it in order to live them. She was born on these lands that she desperately wanted to leave; she will probably die here. She remembers 14 July 1967: the stage that was built in the village square of Puy-Larroque, the paper lanterns strung between the branches of the chestnut trees, suspended haloes, the refreshment stall set up near the war memorial, the casks of wine and beer, the huge sacks of coal the men tipped into metal barrels cut lengthways and mounted on legs that served as barbecues… The plumes of black, acrid smoke that rose whenever they poked the embers, and which hung in wisps around the church steeple.

  At seventeen, all she wanted was to run away from home, from her wretchedly miserable parents, her father breaking his back lugging sacks of cement on building sites or working as a farm labourer, her mother staving off boredom in front of the television – a brand-new Sonolor for which they had patiently saved, and of which they were so proud that, when it arrived, the whole family gathered and sat on the sofa while the father turned on the set and adjusted the screen, nodding vehemently during the commercial breaks.

  Climb behind the wheel of a Renault 4CV, and you are instantly at ease. No car in the world is more feminine, more effortlessly driveable! Just look at how easily it handles! Feel the acceleration! Appreciate the safety!

  That night, the two brothers were standing next to each other, propping up the makeshift bar, frantically glancing around as though wondering what they were doing there. Serge was dark-haired, stocky; everyone knew he was mean, a brawler. Then there was Joël, a quiet lad, or perhaps simply insignificant, his shoulders hunched, his red hair slick with Brilliantine. Were their faces not tarnished by the light of swaying lanterns? They exchanged not a word, not a look, as though they had never met, had ended up here by chance, elbows pressed together, in the smell of barbecued meat, stale smoke and aftershave. From a distance, Catherine watched them. It was this that had first seduced her, she seems to remember: their dissimilarity, their strangeness, their defiance in the face of the world. Like them, she felt nothing but contempt for this village fête, this awkward, foolish jubilation; like them, she wanted only to be drunk. Bats fluttered between the branches of the chestnut trees, devouring the swarms of mayfly buzzing beneath the paper lanterns. Serge came over to her, and Catherine could smell his thick breath as he leaned over her shoulder to talk to her; his open shirt exuded the sour smell of sweat from a bronzed torso, like the body of animal.

  ‘I should have avoided you like the plague, you and your kin; it would have been the best decision I took in my life.’

  Yes, she would have been better advised to flee, to abandon her glass, her friends, the band, the dangerously bucolic village of Puy-Larroque. But that night, she knew almost nothing about the bond between the two brothers, about the shadow of Henri, their shared history, the future that was already conspiring against them, and she wanted them, wanted them with a huge, cannibalistic desire, she wanted both of them, because alcohol made it impossible for her to distinguish between them, because she had sensed Serge’s brooding violence, which at the time she mistook for desire, a desire to do battle with life that rivalled her own, and Joël’s sullen, intense reserve.

  She let herself be carried away, and the three of them wandered away from the village square, through the alleys and the crumbling walls of the château. Serge would grab Joël by the back of the neck, jostled him, punched him in the shoulder, and the teenager allowed himself to be manhandled without complaint, a vague smile playing on his slips. Propping each other up, they went down the steep, slippery steps. The darkness as they moved through it was heavy, muggy, filled with the croak of frogs, and icy breezes. The water in the washhouse reservoir seemed stagnant and murky. On the far side of the cemetery wall, the gravestone crosses were barely visible against the blue, languid backcloth of the landscape. They followed the path leading to the old oak and lay down in hollows between the roots beneath the dark mass of leaves. Inebriated, they lay for a long moment without speaking, listening to the distant clamour of the fête, to the cry of some animal in a thicket, the unceasing rustle of the oak. When Serge leaned in to kiss her, Catherine let him. He slipped a hand under her shirt and cupped her breast, pinching the nipple between thumb and forefinger, then let the hand slide down her stomach, up her thigh, under her skirt to her crotch and the swelling of her sex.

  ‘Kiss her,’ he said to Joël, raising his head.

  She reached out to his shoulder and pulled him towards her, bit his lower lip and let his tongue slide between her teeth, before Joël backed away, leaned against the trunk of the oak and got to his feet.

  ‘I need to piss,’ he said.

  He walked over to the edge of a field, where Serge quickly joined him. Though they spoke in low whispers, the brothers’ voices reached her:

  ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘Nothing. I ain’t got a problem.’

  ‘Is she not you type? Don’t you fancy her?

  ‘Leave me to piss in peace.’

  ‘Or maybe y
ou’re queer?’

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ Joël said, buttoning his fly.

  He shot a glance at Catherine before walking away and disappearing into the darkness.

  Why had she stayed with Serge that night in the shadow of the ancient oak, why had she allowed him to come back to her, to lie down next to her, to take her in his arms, his trousers around his knees, gripping the roots of the tree to brutally thrust into her, to come inside her with a drunken groan? When he withdrew, she had lain there, motionless, her skirt rucked up over her stomach, her dark, glistening vulva like a beast’s lair, staring up into the swaying branches of the oak, its bark like the hide of some fearsome animal in the darkness.

  And why must the images keep flooding back? She would do better to sleep, though she cannot know they will not follow her into the depths of sleep, into the dreams where she is often plagued by the smell, the wail of the pigs, a stench that cannot be masked by that of flowers rotting in the mud, by the smell of Serge that first night, a miasma of alcohol fumes and cheap aftershave, a stench she has come to loathe but one that she can smell even with the windows and the shutters closed, the house double-locked, as though the pig shed is determined to seep into her room by any means. And these squeals that are sometimes carried in the wind, and which the walls do nothing to muffle, the shrill wails of a newborn or a soul in pain…

  When she had no choice but to marry Serge and to move to the farm, she quickly realized that he would have to ruthlessly fight the piggery that was all but knocking at their back door, that the brothers and the father carried with them, talked about incessantly. She saw the men lead the cull sows into the truck, some suffering rectal prolapse, dragging a sac of entrails forced out through the anus from years of farrowing, others unable to walk, crippled by arthritis, by forced immobility, by their own weight, which their legs can no longer support. They beat them with sticks, kick them to make them move, and the animals squeal in pain and fear, drag themselves across the concrete, their flesh red-raw, their eyes rolled back in their heads.

  ‘How can you do that?’

  ‘Do what? I don’t understand,’ Serge said, panting for breath, wiping his hands on his shirt.

  Catherine jerked her chin at the animals. Serge shrugged.

  ‘Oh. That’s how it goes… Sometimes you have to put them out of their misery. You get used to it, you’ll see.’

  But she refused to see, or even to know. She stripped the house of everything that could remind her of pig rearing, even indirectly, packed the knick-knacks, the little pigs in porcelain and blown glass, into boxes, the old cast-metal piggybanks, the medals won at agricultural shows. Like her mother before her, she begins to dream of a mundane happiness, a little house in the suburbs, a little car, travelling during the school holidays; everything suddenly seemed preferable to the never-ending agony in this crumbling farmhouse, surrounded by the stench, the squealing pigs and the cruelty of men.

  A few days later, they find the gate of the boar’s stall wide open. Joël goes to find Henri and Serge, who are working in the feedlot.

  ‘He broke out,’ he yells from the doorway of the hangar. ‘The Beast has broken out, the stall is wide open, and the door to the building. I can’t find him anywhere!’

  The father and the elder brother join him in the search. Henri leans over the gates, stops outside the boar’s stall. With his foot, he lifts the bolt and the padlock that are half-buried in the manure flowing into the drain. Both sons follow him down the aisles until they reach the front door, then they emerge from the building and find the surrounding fence trampled, the chain-link fence ripped open. Serge runs a hand over the metal studs the Beast has bent, next to the sign that reads PRIVATE PROPERTY NO ENTRY. He lets out a short, astonished laugh, and quickly stifles it. Henri retraces his steps as far as the main door to the boar pens. He feels the weight of the chain, inspects it, then bends down and picks up the padlock and shows it to his sons before viciously hurling it at their feet. It was Joël who made sure to lock up the pig units the day before.

  ‘I swear, I…’ he stammers.

  ‘Get the fuck out my way,’ Henri cuts him off.

  Joël steps aside and the brothers watch the father stalk off and head back towards the farmhouse. Standing back, Serge lights a cigarette, trying to control his trembling hands.

  ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ Joël says, his voice ragged with emotion. ‘Don’t fuck around, Serge, you know I’d never have forgotten to lock up! How the fuck could he break out of his stall?’

  Serge turns away, shrugs his shoulders, then jerks his head towards the trampled ground beyond the chain-link fence, the mark of cloven hooves on the soft earth. He fishes out his hipflask, takes a swig, then wipes his mouth on his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I believe, I believe what I’m looking at with my own two eyes.’

  They decide to leave the gates open and to set out buckets of grain near the pig units and the straw barn. When the new units were first built, it sometimes happened that an animal would escape while being moved from one building to another, and they know from experience that although the pigs find the primal sense of freedom exhilarating, they have only ever known captivity, their pigswill served at regular times. So the fugitive, quickly overcome by fear, by the cold of unfamiliar nights, by hunger, would end up coming back and the men would find it lying in the straw in the hangar, or standing nervously next to the doors behind which his life and those of his kind have been lived out.

  ‘A boar that size is hardly going to stay invisible for long,’ Joël says as the brothers leave the pig shed.

  All around, the woodlands are bounded by tilled fields that offer scant hiding places. Hunters easily flush out game and the boar population in the département is strictly regulated. Henri and his sons are the only pig breeders for almost thirty kilometres. Most of the other farmers in the area grow cereals and have long since stopped rearing livestock. Some still keep a few animals, one or two pigs for fattening, but nothing remotely comparable to the Beast. With a single glance, they would immediately know where he had come from.

  ‘Unless one of them fuckers has already killed it,’ Serge says, biting down on the filter of his cigarette.

  ‘Yeah. And what if there’s an accident?’ Joël says. ‘Imagine if he runs out onto the motorway in front of a car, and ends up injuring someone?’

  ‘That’s not going to happen. We’ll catch him. We have to catch him.’

  But the Beast is not tempted by the buckets of grain. For three weeks, until mid-June, Henri and the sons organize nightly patrols around the pig units, then beyond the fences, without happening on anything other than two wild boars, a fox and a few stray dogs. They follow the animal’s tracks, starting from the field next to the pig sheds, but the trail quickly comes to a road and disappears.

  ‘It’s like the fucker deliberately trotted along the tarmac to put us off the scent,’ Joël says.

  They organize hunting drives, extending the perimeter of the search area every day, taking the hounds with them, but all they manage to flush out are some hares and a few young roebucks. As for those living in the neighbouring farms and houses, no-one has seen a half-tonne boar crossing their lands, destroying a crop field or even a vegetable garden. The night patrols and the drives prove futile, the weeks pass, and summer settles in.

  The Beast seems to have vanished into thin air.

  After closing the gate behind him and going down the flight of flagstone steps fractured by snaking tree roots and the convulsions of the village dead, Jérôme lies down, arms folded across his chest, at the foot of the statue, beneath the merciful gaze of the Virgin, whose lips, cheeks and nose have been eaten away by a plaque of rust. He waits. The lizards sent scurrying by his shadow listen intently to the renewed silence, and when the chirping of sparrows perched in the cypresses quickly begins again, they leave their shelter, they keen eyes darting in syncopation, and stretch out on the marble, eyes half-closed, their striped flank
s swelled by short breaths. A crow flies over the graves; their shadows scud over Jérôme, a small, motionless form on the concrete slab. He allows the minutes and the hours to wash over him, sometimes half-opening his eyes to watch the confused ballet of the swallows, the treetops of the cypresses swaying gently in the breeze, the cones falling, bouncing and skittering over the steps. When his neck begins to ache, he sits up and lets the sunlight warm the back of his neck. As the sun reaches its zenith, the shadows of those crosses still standing over graves gradually wane and the shadow of the Virgin slowly withdraws to the plinth from which she watches over the eternal rest of the dead lying in the graveyard clay.

  The sun now is beating down on the slabs of marble and concrete. The bark of the cypresses oozes amber sap. A few metres from where Jérôme lies is a pink-granite gravestone, a corner of which has sunk into the earth. From the hole exposed by the tilting slab, the broad, olive-coloured head of a grass snake emerges. Jérôme holds his breath, sits utterly still. From time to time, the black tongue of the snake, sleek and sinuous, darts out, probing the apparent tranquillity of the cemetery, then it slithers from the grave, tracing broad curves, revealing its verdigris colouring, and seems to flow like water between the stones, a gently hissing rivulet moving through the dry grass.

  A shudder runs through Jérôme’s neck, for this is the same snake he saw last summer swimming on the surface of the lake as Julie-Marie was paddling beneath the branches of willow trees that swayed and whispered in the breeze, brushing her shoulders, water rising to her bare, broad waist, moving through the shifting shadows and flashes of light that tumbled, whirling with yellow leaves, and settled on the watery surface, leaves and flashes of light that she crumpled and pushed away with her hands. She walked silently through the soft mud, through the algae, watching the splintered reflection moving ahead of her through the roots of the willows. Shoals of gudgeon brushed against her pale legs, warped by the distorting mirror of the lake, chasing away the pond-skaters and the tadpoles wriggling in the warm, turbid shallows. Blinded by the glare of the sun, the grass snake did not see her as it calmly swam towards Julie-Marie’s pale breasts in graceful convolutions. The same snake is now slithering amid the gravestones, between the bones which the earth, sated and gorged with the village dead, now regurgitates: greenish molars, patinated vertebrae, porous coccyges. The snake pauses as a sparrowhawk glides over the cemetery, the shadow of the bird briefly flickering over its bulging pupils, then it resumes its delicate winding until it reaches a shapeless block of granite, the remains of an ancient tombstone that lies in a pool of light, where the snake curls up.