Can he even be truly sure that he ever experienced that moment outside the old pigsty? Is he absolutely convinced that he saw Joël trembling under the father’s threats, his eyes welling with tears, his hand smeared with the blood of a piglet the father had forced him to slaughter? What evidence is there today that might constitute irrefutable proof that this incident ever took place, or any other incident for that matter, other than these memories, scattered, fragile, ready to shatter and doubtless distorted by time? There is no proof that he experienced any of these things. He should draw a line under his childhood, wipe it off the map, and yet here it is re-entering the fray, determined to do battle, reappearing when he least expects it, like the Beast on the Plains…
Serge gets out of the car, slams the door, goes around to the back of the Lada and opens the boot. He goes over to the kennel and inspects the dogs, chooses two, herds them into the back of the four-by-four, and leaves the boot open. He is crossing the yard towards the farmhouse when Julie-Marie steps out onto the porch. She no longer wears a bra under her white T-shirt and the slight sway of her breasts is visible through the neckline.
‘Where are you off to?’ Serge says spitefully.
‘Just going for a walk…’
‘At this hour of the morning? What’s with this new obsession of yours for spending the whole day wandering around?’
‘There’s nothing for me to do here…’
‘What d’you mean, nothing for you to do? Have you been in to take care of your mother?’
An exasperated expression flickers over her face. Serge is a mean drunk, easily riled, and he knows it, but for some time now Julie-Marie has been treating him with a barely disguised hostility that he cannot simply put down to adolescence. She used to be a secretive, melancholy child, but she constantly showed her affection, mingled with fear and adulation. Is this rebuke he now sees in her dark eyes, under which there is a shadow of eyeliner she has failed to remove?
Should he let her know that he is not duped by her deviousness, rather than allowing her to accuse him, even tacitly, of being to blame for Catherine’s illness, or at least of being unable to help her, of unloading the burden of care onto her or Gabrielle, of having fallen into disgrace, of having been banished by his wife – rightly or wrongly – and of meekly accepting his banishment without protest? Perhaps Gaby has turned his daughter against him, accused him behind his back of letting Catherine waste away and refusing to let her go to hospital for fear she might escape him, or because he is trying to control all of them?
He sometimes thinks about telling Julie-Marie about the clinic where her mother languished, slumped in a chair, surrounded by headcases, lunatics, pariahs, the sort of people who never recover; about how he had to take her out of there, how Catherine herself begged him; about her pitiful hand gripping his arm, her pained, strangely serious voice, the flecks of spittle at the corners of her mouth, the plastic bracelet marked with her name and patient number, like a body in a morgue, or the identity tag of a stray dog.
‘How do you think she’s doing at the moment?’ he asks.
‘I dunno… same as always… not any better, I mean.
‘Oh,’ Serge says. ‘Try not to worry too much. You know how these things go… I’m sure she’ll get better soon.’
She turns her face away when he speaks and Serge realizes she is avoiding the stink of alcohol on his breath, just as she avoids his eyes, staring fixedly at the patch of ground under her feet, digging at the dusty yard with the tip of her battered flip-flops. In that moment, he is devastated by the knowledge of his failure, his utter futility. Julie-Marie is being torn from him by some higher force, carried so far, so fast into the space that lies between them, those few scant metres that expand to become an infinity, the farmyard as an expanding universe, carrying her away without giving him the time to do something to hold her back. She briefly looks up to him as a petition for him to let go now.
‘Okay, well,’ Serge stammers, ‘be careful… I don’t like… I don’t like to think of you wandering around…’
Julie-Marie immediately walks away, a little too quickly, and he sees her reach the gates before he steps into the house. He goes into the kitchen and quickly takes down the whisky bottle, also empty, tosses it into the sink, thumps the countertop and swears. He searches the other cupboards, pushing aside the bottles of cooking oil and vinegar, the cartons of UHT milk, until he finds a bottle of pastis. He has never seen his father touch a drop of alcohol, on the pretext that his own father, a complete bastard, apparently, was handy with his fists… Something to do with terrible war wounds, from what Serge understands, though Henri and Éléonore have always avoided the subject, and said little about their shared past, their history, as though to say anything was to twist the knife in the gaping wound of their memory. Serge grabs a glass, pours pastis until it is three-quarters full, barely diluting it with a trickle of water from the kitchen tap, then downs in one gulp. He stares through the window for a moment at the farmyard, white-hot in the blistering sun. He listens to the silence of the house, senses the spectral presence of Catherine upstairs. Is she asleep? Is she too watching his every movement? Did she hear the words he and Julie-Marie exchanged on the threshold? Surely he should at least try knocking on her door, try to get her to talk to him, to acknowledge his existence? Like this house, their marriage – if they ever truly had one – is a ruin. And yet Serge has borne it all: the outbursts, the complaints, the unfounded accusations, the petty tricks, even the unforgiveable betrayals. A sudden creak on the stairs makes him turn sharply. One hand on the banister, Jérôme is standing at the foot of the stairs, watching him. Neither father nor son move an inch. Jérôme and his unbearable stare, his smooth, pale face, framed by a shock of hair as red as wildfire, Jérôme and his deafening silence. How Serge wishes he could have spared him all this… He stumbles towards his son, his steps lumbering and uncertain, he seems about to say something, then sighs, turns away and plunges back into the sweltering farmyard.
Joël is checking the pens of the gestating females when, in the midst of a group, he notices the remains of misshapen piglets on the floor and the sows snuffling them anxiously. It sometimes happens that a gilt will miscarry, as a reaction to stress or to a particular vaccine. In such circumstances, the men are told to remove the bodies and write up the incident. But with sows that have farrowed before, like the ones Joël is inspecting, miscarriage is a rare occurrence.
A sow miscarrying is a symptom of a dysfunction, a cog in the system gone awry, there’s always a reason, you’ve just got to know where to look.
Joël shoots back the bolt and steps into the pen. The pigs scurry towards the far railing, leaving one sow that struggles to its feet, then goes over to blend into the herd. A purulent whitish discharge trickles from her vulva, down her hocks, forming a pool on the concrete floor in which the aborted foetuses lie, small sacs of pink, blood-smeared skin with undeveloped limbs, some still encased in the placenta like –half-hard dicks in latex condoms – formless things, neither human nor animal.
With his bare hands, Joël picks up the piglets, their bones still soft, as limp and warm as entrails, tosses them into the bucket and leaves the pen. In the next stall, the sows also seem anxious: they can probably sense that one of their number has miscarried.
He is thinking: what if Henri did banish him from the farm, from the family, wouldn’t that be the best possible outcome, a deliverance? Has he not spent all these years doing everything in his power to show his father he has no interest in pig rearing? Not that he did so deliberately… he simply could do nothing else. The moment he sets out for the pig units, he is overwhelmed by a wave of apathy. Perhaps the father’s contempt for him is merited; Joël has never proved himself to be good at anything and would never have been able to make a life for himself beyond his supervision.
Joël moves to the third pen and pulls back the bolt. Here, too, a sow has lost a litter. He retraces his steps, takes a notebook from his coat pocket an
d jots down the numbers of the pens and the number of dead piglets, seven in the first stall, nine in the last. He fetches a thermometer from the medicine chest and a handful of cotton wool he soaks in rubbing alcohol. He finds the sow in the first pen, isolates her, using a restraint board to press her against one wall, and slides the thermometer into the animal’s rectum. To calm her, he whispers to her in a gentle voice, but she seems resigned, and makes no attempt to struggle as he pushes the restraint board against her flank.
Her temperature is thirty-eight-and-a-half degrees centigrade. Normal for a pig. He grabs the sow’s ear and checks again, then sterilizes the thermometer and goes to the third pen.
As Serge enters the pig shed, Joël is just picking up the last foetus.
‘The old man sent me to get you,’ the elder son says.
Joël closes the stall behind him and sets the bucket down at his feet.
‘What the fuck happened?’ Serge asks, looked at the miscarried foetuses.
‘I don’t know…’ Joël says, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. ‘Two sows have miscarried. One of the gilts in the first pen, and a sow on her second farrowing in the third pen.’
‘Are they running a temperature?’
‘No, I checked both.’
‘In that case, it must be a coincidence.’
‘We have to tell him, though, don’t we?’
‘Absolutely not, not right now. I don’t think it’s anything serious,’ Serge says, staring at the bucket. ‘One of the crop fields on the Plains has been destroyed.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s been ploughed up. Looks like it’s been trampled by a fucking herd of wild boar. We found a hoof print. It could be the Beast. At least the old man seems pretty convinced.’
‘You’re shitting me?’
‘I came back to fetch a couple of dogs. He wants you to come with us.’
‘And what am I supposed to do with this?’ Joël says, lifting up the bucket.
The sows snuffle the puddle of amniotic fluid, and the pile of pink flesh into the bucket.
‘Burn the lot and keep your fucking mouth shut. This is really not the time, take my word for it… We’re heading off in twenty minutes. Go get ready.’
They will say nothing to Henri. Why give him another reason to worry? It is not as though an epidemic is going to decimate the herd in the next couple of hours… For a while now – a few weeks? months? – the father has not simply been volatile in a way Serge has learned to anticipate, as he might the outbursts of an old, cantankerous animal. He has been much more unpredictable, so the reappearance of the Beast – assuming it is real – is not a good thing. How is it possible that the damn animal could prowl around the farm unnoticed for months? Serge would have sworn the Beast was gone for good, that they would never find it.
After the boar escaped, Serge and Joël meekly carried out Henri’s orders, made the rounds of the farm, lighting their way with flashlights, a dog running on ahead, never for a moment believing they would encounter the Beast. Serge cannot say that this animal is possessed of intelligence – the very thought that pigs possess anything more than instinct is something he finds repugnant – but to be able to elude the packs of hounds, the hunters, the pilgrims walking the route to Santiago de Compostela, to say nothing of the locals, at the very least the animal must have solid instincts… Maybe they have been too hasty in coming to their conclusions. Surely Serge should have studied the hoofprints more carefully, instead of allowing himself to be swayed by the father’s assertion? Yes, he had seen the track mark in the soil, but it had been Henri’s hand, that terrible, obdurate hand, that had held his gaze far more than the hoofprint. And what did it really prove, in any case? A track mark in a patch of sodden earth, one that might seem bigger, broader because a foot slipped. It has been barely half an hour since he saw the damage to the field, and what proof has he that the print they saw is that of a farm-reared pig, a Large White, and not simply that of a fair-sized wild boar? Serge has seen wild boar that would almost tip the scales at two hundred kilos. Henri is claiming that all the damage was caused by a single animal, but they did not take the time to check for other hoofprints.
But no, Serge had immediately nodded, as always, accepted the father’s sacred pronouncement and rushed back to the farm to pile a couple of dogs into the pickup, without taking a moment to consider the situation, without even walking to the edge of the Plains looking for other track marks, for damage or animal droppings. He had meekly followed the father as he marched, like a man possessed, his boots sinking into the soft, cold mud, ‘It’s him,’ picked up a clod of earth, ‘It’s him,’ pointed to a freshly dug hole, excitedly saying over and over:
‘It’s him!’
By the time Henri arrives in the farmyard, the dogs have been loaded into the back of the pickup and are lying on an old blanket, panting. There is no sign of Serge. He has probably gone looking for his brother in the pig units. The other hounds, eager to be part of the hunt, are yapping, and leaping up at the chain-link fence of the kennel.
‘Down!’ Henri roars, and the dogs scurry away as he strides off.
He too can feel the excitement that has stirred up the hounds. The adrenaline coursing through his veins. Unless perhaps this is another symptom of his illness? It hardly matters, at least it allays the terrible dread that now wakes him in the night, has him whispering, ‘I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die,’ because in a dream he could feel something swoop on him, something too dark to be a shadow, perhaps a bird of prey come to perch on his shoulder, a vulture come to tear him to pieces, or the thing that lurks behind closed doors in every nightmare, a thing so fearful, so terrifying, we do not want to find out what it is…
At other times, the knowledge of his own mortality leaves him indifferent. When he stands on the border of the Plains at five o’clock in the morning, and night yields to day, it does not pale, but founders, cracks like a piece of royal blue enamel, behind which swell the veins of clouds the colour of wild roses; at such moments, death seems less fearsome, as though it simply means becoming one with this forever, the versicolour lands, the light pouring out to form great, hot pools, the timorous song of the birds, the warm breeze scented with the smell of the fields.
If only it would appear here, now, cut me down with its scythe, I would crumple to my knees, fall to one side or facedown into the dirt, and all would be well.
But in the silence and solitude of night, when everything is blue, ominous and cold, when the shadows of spectres move in the darkness, nothing seems to him more terrifying than dying. Or is it simply the prospect of the suffering, the agony, that is to come? The thought of shitting himself, desperately clutching the rails of a hospital bed, just like a cull sow, like one of the half-dead beasts they have to dispatch with a captive bolt gun? The thought of having to have his arse wiped by his own sons, of being fitted with an incontinence pad by some compassionate nurse practitioner? Because obviously they would force him to accept treatment, would suddenly see him as an old man, a dying man on whom they have a duty to lavish their care, their compassion, would take over decisions as to what is best for him. Better to die like a dog. Better to load a cartridge into the breech, put the barrel into his mouth and get it over with.
But he lacks the courage. This man who has spent his whole life striving to appear proud and strong in the eyes of his kith and kin lacks the courage… He is paralyzed by fear. The fear of a lonely, frail, vulnerable child. The same fear that would grip him when his own father, drunk and mad with grief, would come home and wreck the living room, forcing him to cower in a corner in Éléonore’s arms, convinced that his father would one day kill them in a fit of fury. And he finds his fear all the more humiliating because Élise died right before his eyes, without a whimper, without a protest, not even clutching at the sheet to try to cling to this world, as though, in the end, dying were merely a detail, a minor formality, but one that did not require an ounce
of courage from her, while he tosses and turns in the night, choking and groaning, unable to breathe, leaps out of bed like a jack-in-the-box, hurtles down the stairs and goes out into the farmyard, barefoot and dressed only in pyjamas. He stands there, trying to catch his breath, grunting like a worn-out animal, like a boar being herded into the abattoir truck. Not knowing where to go, he runs towards the pig shed, thumping his chest, stepping in the muddy puddles, staining his pyjama bottoms. In his mind, he sees his father’s remains as they were, laid out in a wooden coffin over which he leans, the face carefully draped in an immaculate white sheet; he remembers extending his hand to stroke the cheek through the fabric, then balling it into a fist and, angrily, viciously, bringing it down on the stiff chest; he remembers the body echoing hollowly, like a tribal drum beating a funeral march. Is it not the same grave, hollow sound he hears when he thumps his own chest? In the moonlight, he looks like a disarticulated puppet, like a lunatic escaped from an asylum, like a man already dead, a cursed soul vainly, blindly groping its way through limbo, on the banks of the river Styx, constantly colliding with shadows.
True, there are moments when the thought of dying seems bearable, even comforting, but only for a fleeting instant, before he resumes his bargaining with Death, addressing him as a confidant, an old and fearsome friend with whom he has spent his whole life coming to terms and whom he now asks to take him a little later, when he has had a chance to talk to the sons, when he has had time to settle the matter of his estate – of course he will include Joël, though he needs to make sure that the sons will not tear each other apart, destroy his life’s work – when the harvest has been gathered in… When they have brought the Beast back to the boar pen.
Animalia Page 28