If given the opportunity, Jérôme seeks out the company of animals rather than that of the father. He trails after him, watching his movements, leaning over the stalls to pat the flanks and the snouts of the pigs, immured in his permanent silence. When he is alone with the boy, Serge feels no awkwardness, No embarrassment. He enjoys the furtive presence of the boy, who is attentive to the work they are doing together. He is not troubled by his silence, in fact he sees it as respectable, as an act of resistance, of defiance. The doctors they took him to see in the early years never diagnosed any physical disability, any deformity that might explain his aphasia, and eventually ascribed the boy’s mutism to a form of autism. After four years of preschool classes at Puy-Larroque Municipal School, faced with the teachers’ helplessness and Jérôme’s increased distress, Serge and Catherine, on Henri’s advice, decided to take him out of school. Since then, the boy has grown up in a parallel dimension to theirs, joining their reality only now and then.
He is touched by his son’s strangeness, the manner he has of baulking at orders, of only accepting suggestions. Serge will hold out a bucket of grain for him to pour into the feed trough, and Jérôme will look at the father’s face, at the proffered bucket, and may take it or may turn away. He is the only one never to tremble in front of him, never to submit to his authority, or even the supreme authority of Henri, but to meet it with unvarying apathy. When Serge and Jérôme are alone in the pig shed together, the father feels as though he has rediscovered the original link that bound him to the child as a babe in arms. But such moments are rare and, despite himself, whenever Henri is in the vicinity, Serge feels the unspeakable prickle of shame, which destroys the complicity he believed he had established with the boy. He is suddenly impatient again, his tone curt, he imagines and anticipates Henri’s irritation, the shadow that looms over them by virtue of his mere presence, one that the brothers have learned to fear, to forestall, to avoid; suddenly he finds him bombarding Jérôme with reprimands, with unnecessary warnings, don’t touch that, shift your arse, move out of there, get out of my way, and finally shoos him away, not so much to be rid of the boy as to appease the imagined irritation of the patriarch.
Henri shows no consideration, no affection for his grandson, any more than he shows any empathy for Catherine. To him, illness of whatever kind is a weakness, an indulgence, and Jérôme’s strangeness is a defect. Though he does not openly accuse his daughter-in-law of conspiring against them, does not criticize his son’s decision to let his wife shut herself away behind a bedroom door she has long since closed to him, forcing him to sleep on the sofa, his silence says much about his contempt, his disapproval and his determination to singlehandedly keep up the struggle to manage the farm.
When I think I’ve spent my whole fucking life slaving away, bleeding myself white for that ungrateful shower of brats.
Serge would like to tell the father that he does not give a damn about his opinion, that he has no right to criticize Catherine, Jérôme, his choices or Joël’s, but he says nothing; even if he dared challenge the patriarch’s authority, he would be lying, since nothing matters more to him than the father’s approval, since he would not know how to free himself from the yoke that he and Joël share, to which they willingly submitted in order to evade the father’s anger and his disapproval.
They grew up fearful and desperate to please him, to measure up to the expectations he has had since they were born. While Joël has managed to slip the leash, and in return to gradually accept the mockery and the humiliations, to slide into docile, listless servitude, Serge has never managed to break free of Henri’s power. Deep down, does he truly want to? He is the anticipated success, the perfect product of his upbringing and his heritage, he is what a son should be: a faithful declension of their father. Perhaps things would have been different if Élise had not died…
As Serge continues to walk past the crop fields, he sees Henri in the distance, his back turned, standing stiffly at the edge of the ditch that overlooks the Plains. He slows, pauses for a moment in the shadow of an oak tree, and wonders what would happen if the father were to simply disappear, swallowed by the earth he loves more than he does them, devoured by his pigs, buried in the pig shed. Henri turns a haggard face towards him and waves. Serge walks over to him and stands in silence, gazing at the curved and geometric fields of rye and maize at their feet stretching out northwards, over which irrigation sprinklers suspend fluid orbs and rainbows. The father and the son have never seen anything like it: it looks as though a herd of animals has stampeded through the maize. Furrows of plants have been churned up, there is a gash in the soil almost fifty centimetres wide, the clods of earth systematically pushed aside, the maize stalks trampled and the roots exposed.
‘It’s him,’ Henri says.
Serge looks at him and see his face is flushed and dripping with perspiration, his shirt collar sodden by the sweat streaming down his neck. He follows the father as he moves between the furrows. Henri lifts an uprooted ear of maize, then crouches down and lays his broad ruddy hands, his fingers splayed, on the warm, damp earth next to a hoof print.
‘It’s him,’ he says again, his voice tremulous, and he gets to his feet.
When Henri turns, Serge can see excitement spread over his sombre face, one pupil curiously dilated.
‘He can’t be far. Take a couple of dogs with you and go let your brother know what’s going on.’
‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ Serge says.
‘What the fuck kind of question it that?’ Henri says, spitting out the cigarette stub dangling from the corner of his mouth and wiping his face with his hand. ‘I’m fine, it’s just this bloody heat… Now shift your arse, we’ve no time to waste. I’ll catch you up.’
IV
The Collapse (1981)
Behind the pig units, Joël stubs his cigarette out in one of the sand-filled barrels that serve as ashtrays. Despite the ventilation system, the heat inside the pig shed is already unbearable. He drinks from the standpipe and ducks his head and face under the water before going back inside to clean the stalls.
Occasionally Joël wonders whether it was the piggery that made monsters of them, or their monstrousness that infected the farm. Joël has never really liked the pork they have eaten all their lives, more for the sake of thrift than for the taste; the pork that fills their freezers to overflowing – you’re not leaving this table until you clean your plate, here, let me give you another ladleful, you need to eat if you want to grow up to be a man, rather than the weedy runt you are now – whereas Serge has always made it a point of honour to wolf it down, licking his plate, gnawing on the bones, sopping up the gravy and asking for second helpings just to please their father. This is probably the moment in their childhood when their difference was established: the determination of one son to consume the flesh of the pigs, to literally conflate their existence and that of the piggery, and the reluctance of the other son, that primal, visceral revulsion at the idea of being merely a masticating cogwheel, accepting the flesh tipped by the pig-units into their proud, grateful, sated, gaping mouths, then chewing, digesting, shitting that flesh so it can once more be spread on the lush meadows of the Plains (with the sludge carefully transformed by the local sewage treatment plant, mixed with the slurry from the animals, contaminated by the products they feed to them, inject into them, and which they ingest with the meat) to serve as fertilizer for the grain they grow to provide fodder for the pigs, thereby creating a virtuous or a vicious circle in which shit and meat can no longer be dissociated.
Joël pushes the wheelbarrow in the farrowing house, where the nursing sows lie on slatted floors, held in place by straps, restraints and steel bars. Squealing piglets press against their teats or doze piled up on each other, shivering in a corner of the stall. Although the sows are isolated to prevent them crushing their litters, it is also to save space, since large, roomy stalls would be needed for them to safely suckle their litters. The nursing sows form lines of flesh,
red from the glow of the heat lamps, crushed by the steel bars, unable to turn over, reduced to merely standing up and lying down to offer their teats to the piglets, to eating, defecating and sleeping.
What do they dream of? Fluorescent lights, scalpels, sticks beating, voices shouting?
Joël sets to cleaning the walkways, scraping the shit away with the blade of the shovel, loading it into the barrow, scrubbing the concrete with a brush, but his movements are automatic, he is no longer in the barn, he is riding his Caballero TX 96 through the countryside, leaving the farm far behind. The tattered late-afternoon sky blazes and creates large bright enclaves in the valleys. Joël has his helmet hooked over the crook of his elbow, and as he cleaves the air, it draws tears from his eyes and drags them across his temples. Small insects get caught in his thick red beard. He feels the thrill, the fear gripping his belly, making his mouth water, Under the denim of his jeans, his testicles are cramped, almost painful, crushed against the leather of the seat, ready to retract into his abdomen, as they do when he castrates piglets – you make a quick incision with the scalpel, two to three centimetres, no more, you squeeze the testicle out and grab it, keep your finger hooked, yeah, like that, you hook the testicular cord and pull it out – feeling that dread course through his body that the blade might slip, fall from his hand and plant itself in his own balls.
Then you cut the cord, and do the same with the other testicle.
He no longer knows whether he is predator or prey, he can no longer distinguish between the fear and the excitement, which meld into a single feeling that numbs his mind and leaves him panting for breath, his heart hammering, just as the boars pant for breath, their hearts hammering when they are led into the sows’ pen to see which ones are in heat, snuffling at the vulvas of the sows, forcing their snouts inside, biting their croups (meanwhile, the men palpate the sows, assess the colour of the vulva, checking it against the sort of swatch card you might use to pick out wallpaper, then lean all their weight on the sows to ensure they remain still, ready to be serviced), then, when the boar mounts them, in a stall or in the walkway, Joël, Henri and Serge heave the male onto the sow’s huge body, half-lying across her back, so they can reach out one hand and grab the already ejaculating penis and guide it into the sow, as though it is they who are coupling with the animal instead of the boar, at the same time as – there’s nothing more disgusting than mating, soon we’ll be able to shove a syringe full of cum into them and there’ll be no need to get it all over our fingers – the boar, and the stench, the nauseating smell of the mating animals, clings onto their hands long after they have been soaped and scrubbed, that smell of animal sexual organs they come to think might be their own, their own pricks thrusting into the warm, hairy, shit-smeared flesh, the acrid smell of spilled secretions…
It is a thought that flares from time to time, one that Joël dispels, sickened, as the rolling ribbon of motorway and the green-grey ditches seem to dissolve as he speeds by. He dutifully carries on filling the barrow in the farrowing house. Because he is not riding his Caballero, he cannot feel the rain on his face, the eyes being dragged across his temples, the tingle of excitement and fear that sometimes makes his hands shake. He is in one of the pig units, surrounded by livestock, scraping shit from concrete, and it does not matter that he would rather be anywhere but here. It is to the pig shed that he belongs, not to the strangers who lay their hands on him behind bus shelters graffitied with illiterate tags and with terrible, heartbreaking poetry, or in the toilets of motorway service stations, it is to the pigs that he comes home, to their pale skin, to their eyes faded from the half-light.
They look like huge troglodytes, like gigantic, hairless moles moving through the silt at the bottom of a cave. Sows give birth three months, three weeks and three days after the mounting, which has been carefully noted in the breeding record (date – boar ID – sow ID – number of services: one, two, three, four, five, six – total of live births, stillborn piglets), then, as soon as the piglets have been expelled from the womb, the men take away the placentas so that flies cannot lay their eggs there, so germs cannot breed that might contaminate the livestock. The extreme prolificacy of sows achieved by careful selection and crossbreeding also produces ‘parchment’ or mummified foetuses. Having died in utero, they become desiccated and hard and are born fibrous as scraps of leather. At farrowing time, the men lubricate their forearms and insert them into the sow’s vulva and rummage around to make sure that a dead piglet is not obstructing the birth canal. Then there are the ‘false stillbirths’, the piglets that do not ‘meet required standards’, which they dispatch, wringing their necks or smashing them against the concrete floor because they are sickly or deformed.
In two seconds the whole place can be crawling with worms, it’s a breeding ground for infections, you need to keep in mind that any slippage in hygiene standards has an immediate impact on productivity.
Henri has talked to them until they are sick and tired of hearing about hygiene, sanitation, fear and disease, about the countless looming epidemics whose shadow hangs over the livestock like the sword of Damocles, about the microbes and the bacteria ready to fall upon them like the plagues of Egypt…
Of course, they will never succeed in making the pig shed – it’s a fucking biosphere, a self-contained ecosystem, the slightest thing could screw it up – a sterile environment, but they need to keep it below an invisible threshold that can only be measured by the fertility of the sows.
What would the father say if he knew that Joël goes out roaming the countryside in search of men, their caresses, their unfamiliar breath, their familiar pricks, not caring whether the sunset is dismal or blazing, beneath steel-grey skies, and always after a day’s work, trying to purge himself of this desire to which the father has denied him the right, to shake off some of the apathy that pig rearing creates in him, to feel alive, if only for a brief, hollow moment? What would the father say if he could see Joël wandering amid the nervous, predatory shadows of strangers watching, sizing each other up, groping each other in the stench of public toilets?
Would he feel disgust? Would he, like his son, feel fear coursing through every fibre of his being? Would he feel an excitement unfamiliar to him? Would he warn Joël about viruses, as he does about the countless viruses that threaten the farrowing house? Would he worry that the ‘urogenital region’ of his youngest child might also be tainted by some germ, some venereal disease, some purulent pox, or would he simply disown him, walk him to the farm gates, to the boundary of their lands on the Plains, and warn him never again to step across that line? The constant dread of hearing the contempt in the father’s voice, of feeling like a little boy who has shat his trousers, the constant humiliation of being relegated to the position of a son, an illegitimate son; never the feeling that Henri is speaking to him man to man…
Three months, three weeks and three days.
The sows farrow, and their litters are left with them for thirty days before being taken away to be weaned.
Nine piglets per sow and per litter, and at least two point five litters a year, that’s what you need for the farm to be profitable. You wait and see, in ten, fifteen years, sows will be averaging fifteen piglets a litter.
The female is moved to a pen with a group of unfamiliar sows. Food and water are reduced and they are fed only erratically in order to exacerbate the anxiety caused by being separated from their litters and confined in the pen. The bewildered sows strive to create a hierarchy. They fight, they jostle and bite each other. Their flanks and rumps are quickly covered with wounds, bruises and scratches. Eventually, their stress levels rise so much that it triggers a rush of hormones, putting them prematurely on heat again. The men then lead them back to be serviced, then to gestation and the farrowing house, a cycle that is repeated five or six times before they are sent to the slaughterhouse, or to the knackers’ yard in the case of those that are drained by successive litters, those suffering from oedema, purulent mastitis, prolapse, or
those that have broken a leg between the bars of their stall.
Serge climbs into the Lada Niva, keys the ignition and reverses the car towards the pig shed, weaving between the rusty skeletons of cars and the boneless engines, the washing machines with wonky drums, the children’s bicycles buried under weeds and the rotting wheelbarrows. The dogs bound when they see the four-wheel drive approaching. Serge fumbles in his pockets for his hipflask, throws his head back to drain the dregs, then tosses it on the passenger seat.
He is thinking about the Plains, the hoofprint in the dirt, although he can no longer picture it, he can remember only the father’s hand laid flat on the soil, that broad hand with those long, blackened nails, as though the father is determined to keep some crumbs of nourishing earth with him at all times, some proof of his labours as a reminder to the sons – when I think of all the sacrifices… – that same hand, with its stubby fingers, its fleshy, grey knuckles, its liver spots, that completely enveloped their own hands, as children, when he was training them at farm work.
Take a good look. It’s your fault that he’s in pain.
And yet, did he not pass on to them everything necessary for a man’s honour, for his survival: courage, strength of character, determination, discipline? Obviously, he was not always fair, but what parent is, what father, what mother, what adult could possibly embody justice to a child and never fail? Serge himself has failed. Serge has variously proved himself cowardly, inconsistent, dishonest and shameful towards Julie-Marie, towards Jérôme; what right, then, has he to blame Henri (but is this not what he is doing right now, focusing his memory on Henri’s failings, on the most appalling moments, Stop that right now or I’ll belt you one! That’ll give you something to cry about, as though there was nothing else worth remembering?), and what right has he to criticize Henri for failing to live up to the expectations that he put on a father condemned to loneliness, to raising his sons single-handed?
Animalia Page 27