Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  This, now, seems more important to him than anything else. The reappearance of the boar must surely be a sign of Providence, an unexpected opportunity to finally put things in order, to restore balance, to get to the root of the problem? Maybe when these things have been settled, Henri might find a little peace; maybe the thought of what comes next will seem less terrifying.

  He heads towards the pig shed. All around, the bleak, grey stubble fields suddenly seem ominous, funereal.

  Your test results confirm that you’re suffering from lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system… We have very little information on the subject right now, but some recently published studies indicate a possibility that the use of agricultural pesticides may be a contributing factor to…

  Of course, he knows. Of course, he has thought about it. Although men in these parts are loath to talk about illness, Henri knows others who have been plagued by the same disease for years: those forced to take on a labourer in order to help out, only to have to hand the reins over to him; a man he has known all his life, built like a brick shithouse, who can now be seen shuffling across the village square, his muscle melted away, sapped by cancer or chemotherapy, his face waxen, still raising his glass in his trembling hand, still propping up the bar, though his heart is no longer in it, and then suddenly gone…

  They have long suspected that the things they have been sprinkling and spraying on the land over the years – DDT, Chlordane, PCBs – are poison; they see the warning symbols on the bottles, feel the burning in their eyes, their throats, the nights of itching after days spraying copper sulphate, machines belching hundreds of thousands of litres into the air and onto the land. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they think, and over time they stop thinking about it at all. Their yields have grown exponentially, everything pushes them towards using pesticides: Europe, farming associations, common sense. They believe in progress, technology, science.

  And besides, Henri thinks, maybe people are making too much of the whole thing. It might just as easily be the cigarettes after all… Or simply the work, the backbreaking work. And the stress, all these misfortunes big and small that mark out a life must surely end up lodging themselves somewhere and crystallizing, and then fucking everything up. Isn’t it possible to simply die of loneliness, boredom, disappointment? Who knows…? But, yes, the backbreaking work, definitely. How long has he been telling them that he is working himself to death for them? They have broken him, the bastards. His own children. Henri shoots a vicious glance at the fields, the vast monochrome expanses where wheat, barley, corn or rye stretch out as far as the eye can see. Around the edges is a band of dead land ten metres wide, where nothing grows but brambles and nettles.

  And all that shit you pump into the pigs, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? What do you have to say to that, you old bastard?

  The Lindane, which they spray the animals with to combat scabies, and which apparently makes meat unfit for human consumption for three years – What the fuck are you on about, like someone is going to come round here to check! Chuck it into the next shipment – the antibiotics to which pigs have become increasingly resistant, such that new strains have to be constantly developed. Then there are the injections and oral treatments, flukicides, deworming solutions, anticoccidials, neuroleptics, vaccines and hormones… Where does it all go if not into the slurry pit – the heavy metals: zinc, copper, arsenic, selenium, iron, manganese – only to be spread on the land? And what has it become, this land handed down to him by the father he so loved and hated, sometimes in the same instant? What has he made of it? Has his greed, his negligence, his blindness left the sons vulnerable? Has he sacrificed himself, and his family with him?

  Jesus Christ, when will you learn to shut that big fucking mouth of yours!

  Is it possible that all these things that he has built with his bare hands, for himself, for the family, are an impossible lie, and that he, the father, the patriarch, is no more than a pathetic impostor?

  When he reaches the pig shed, Henri goes into the office, closes the door and rummages in the desk drawers for his contacts book, leafing through it frantically to find the phone number for Dr Vidal. It takes him three attempts before he manages to dial the number on the rotary telephone. After several ringing tones, there is a click.

  ‘How long?’ Henri says bluntly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I want the truth. How long have I got?’

  ‘Henri, is that you? Look… that’s not a question I can easily answer, certainly not over the phone… You can’t just refuse to come in for a consultation and then demand that…’

  ‘Tell me. Please. I have to know.’

  Henri hears the doctor sigh and reposition the receiver.

  ‘I can’t say anything for certain. There are too many variables…’

  ‘Give me an idea, an educated guess.’

  ‘I would say… If you refuse treatment, I’d say two to six months.’

  Henri lights a cigarette and takes a long drag. To give up smoking. Never to smoke again. To never again be able to light a single fucking cigarette.

  ‘And don’t overestimate your own strength,’ the doctor says. ‘Take it from me, it’s all too easy to end up dying alone. Like a beast. With no-one. Even for you, Henri. So for once in your life, forget your pride. Obviously, you’re free to refuse treatment, but there are ways we can alleviate the fever, the pain…’

  To die like an animal, this is precisely what he would like: animals die quietly, with no drama, no fuss, they seek out a private place, embrace their solitude, and then perish.

  ‘Thank you,’ Henri says, and slowly replaces the handset in its cradle.

  He gets up and goes over to the cabinet where they keep the hunting rifles, two sixteen-gauge shotguns and a twelve-gauge doublebarrelled shotgun that belonged to his father, a gun Henri has always forbidden the sons to touch, the same gun that Marcel took with him forty-three years ago, on 3 September 1939, when, even before the broadcast of President Daladier’s speech had finished, he pushed his chair back from the radio, got up without a word and left the farmhouse for the last time. Henri takes a rifle and lays it before him on the desk. The reappearance of the Beast no longer seems an opportunity to put things in order on the farm, but a threat, a backlash, a punishment. Is it the fever that is making him rave like this? He is becoming superstitious; everything seems so… intensified, quivering with hidden meaning.

  He opens a drawer and takes out a box of paracetamol, bites his tongue to make himself salivate and swallows three tablets, which scrape his gullet as they make their way painfully to his stomach. Even the sound from the fluorescent light is unbearable. An insect drone, like a swarming anthill. Even when he puts his fingers in his ears, the drone persists as tinnitus. And this cold, ashen light… Mortuary light. He tries closing his eyes for a moment, then jumps to his feet, jabs the shotgun at the ceiling, using the barrel to shatter the aluminium grille and the two fluorescent tubes, which rain down in shards over him. The room is suddenly plunged into total darkness, but still ghostly fluorescent tubes float before his sightless eyes. Battered by overmedication, his heart begins to pound in his chest as blackness closes in on him, the fear of this darkness, a visceral fear – how do the pigs live in the harsh fluorescent glare they cannot avoid, he thinks, and what shadows do they languish in when they, the men, leave the pig shed, switch off the lights, and close the doors? – and he wails and lurches forward, arms outstretched, trampling the slivers of glass, knocking against the chair, the corner of the desk, feeling along the surface for the desk lamp, the flex, the switch. Light bursts forth once more.

  In his haste, Henri has gashed his hand. Blood drips from his palm and trickles onto his shirt cuff. He leans against the wall, slides down onto the floor, taking his head in his hands and trying to regain his composure. He lights a cigarette and smokes, occasionally sucking on the wound, his eyes never leaving the shotgun. He will track down the Beast, no matter wha
t it takes, no matter whether there is any sense to the idea; then he will put his affairs in order, the piggery, the inheritance. He will talk to Joël, give him his fifty per cent stake in the business, just as he gave the other fifty per cent to Serge. Then it will be time to decide, to put an end to this looming infirmity. Henri gets to his feet and picks up the shotgun, slides back the breechblock, checks the barrels, then loads two cartridges and cocks the gun. Short of breath, he mops the sweat from his face and sets the gun down on the ground. He is stubbing his cigarette out in an ashtray when Serge knocks on the door of the office. The son looks up at the ceiling, where the aluminium grille is dangling, then looks at the father, at his bloodstained shirt sleeve.

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘Nothing. One of the fluorescent tubes exploded. Here, take this,’ Henri says, handing him the rifle.

  Serge immediately realizes his intentions.

  ‘I thought you wanted to bring him back alive for breeding.’

  ‘This has gone on too long. Just do what I say and take it!’

  The elder son grabs the butt of shotgun. He has come to despise this animal, has convinced himself that the Beast was the personification of the father’s obsession with pig rearing and the overcrowding of the pig units, but as he watches Henri load the other rifles, the back of his black shirt stained with sweat, accidentally smearing blood across his temple, Serge feels an ominous dread twist his stomach. Even if Henri is not mistaken about the hoofprints in the field of maize, are they really going to search the countryside again, armed this time, day and night?

  ‘Where’s your brother? Henri says, turning to him.

  ‘On his way.’

  ‘Right, then, let’s go.’

  They leave the office and the father slams the door behind them.

  After incinerating the piglets in a bucket around the back of the hangar, Joël leaves the pig units. Along the way he sees Henri and Serge, their figures quivering in the midday heat haze, one behind the other, the barrels of their shotguns resting on their shoulders. As he comes closer, Serge shoots him a long, meaningful look and shakes his head, to indicate that perhaps they should challenge the father, try to make him see sense. When they reach the farmyard, they put the shotguns in the pickup. In the boot, the dogs whine, heads bowed, overcome by heat and thirst. Joël fills a bucket with water and, while they are drinking, Henri leans his hands on the scorching body of the truck. He is deathly pale, his neck covered with red blotches and scratches. Serge and Joël look at him, and neither now is in any doubt that the father is dying, that he is lost, that Death has swooped right before their eyes, and they did not notice, did not do anything to save him. And although Joël has hated him with a passion, has dreamed a thousand times of the liberation that his father’s death would one day bring, has imagined every possible situation, every conceivable death, he now feels his legs buckle under him.

  The farm, the pigs, this world that he abhors, but that they built with their own hands, this world that is theirs in spite of everything, is the only one Joël knows: how can it possibly carry on without Henri, without the father, even if he is old, wiped out by his illness, haunted by his madness, able to stand on his own two feet only because he is swept along by his deep-seated rage and his ingrained suffering, which in this moment are entirely focused on tracking down the Beast?

  The uniform brown of the landscape soon gives way to myriad shades of green. Nocturnal animals fall silent and the song of the Lemures quavers and gives way to the chirrup of birds shaking themselves in the branches of the trees. An eagle owl gives a last hoot, which is quickly answered by a rooster, the sated fox returns to its lair as a strip of sky purples then flames at the edge of the land, and the day finally breaks, scattering the last pockets of shadow, burning away the mist lying on the fields. Jérôme walks towards the lake. His knees and thighs scratched by brambles, blistered by nettles. He is in no hurry, and stops to inspect the ditches. All along the main road, he has found countless hedgehogs, weasels and martens, sometimes even a badger or a dog; three times roebucks that have been hit by cars, which took every ounce of strength for him to drag to the old chapel. When he reaches the edge of the lake he waits, nibbling on some biscuits, a piece of bread, while the sun rises and warms the stones and willow fronds. Then he takes off his T-shirt, throws it against the trunk of a tree and steps into the warm lake water. He feels mud squelch between his toes as his feet sink, and he carefully lifts them out, arms stretched wide to keep his balance, so as not to stir up the mud. Long strands of algae caress his ankles and fingerlings dart from the calm pools where they shelter from carp and disappear into the depths. The quicksilver leaves of the willow rustle in the flickering light reflected from the lake, and roots bristle from the crumbling edge of the bank, where coypu shelter in the deep, cool hollows. The air is pervaded by the smell of parched ditches where brown rushes grow, and the milky sweet perfume secreted by the leaves and tender shoots of fig trees.

  In the shadow of the roots, in the hollows of their curves, beneath the fallen, buried branches, crayfish lie in wait for small prey, and all that is visible are their tapered pincers, their delicate antennae. In the decades following the excavation of the reservoir, long before Jérôme was born, it is possible that someone drowned here and has ever since been a prisoner of its cold, watery depths. Ever since he learned about the water tables and underground lakes that feed the country’s water supply, Jérôme has imagined a vast network of rivers, streams and invisible channels through which little Émilie Seilhan, whose faded photograph he has seen on the gravestone dedicated to her memory in the cemetery, might come and go as she pleases, drifting in her moss-green dress, the winding algae of her hair trailing behind like a bridal train, watching the world from below, a bubble of air between her parted lips.

  Gripping a supple branch, he moves forward, careful not to cast a shadow over the crayfish. From his pocket, he takes a piece of ham wrapped in tinfoil that he stole from the fridge. He cuts it into tiny pieces, which he drops on the surface of the water so that they sink to the bottom, mere centimetres from the frantic pincers of the crustaceans.

  Jérôme waits for a crayfish to emerge from its hiding place, drawn by the bait, then, carefully aiming for the middle of its shell, he jabs with his branch and pins the crayfish into the mud, grasps it between thumb and forefinger, fishes it out of the water and deposits it in his net.

  Last year, he took them to Éléonore and watched as the grandmother deveined the crayfish on a board on the kitchen table – the threadlike black intestines clinging to her fingernails – and cooked them in a sauce of tomatoes, shallots and white wine that perfumed the whole house and, for a brief moment, dispelled the smell of cat litter. This year, she does not want them, claiming that her fingers are not as agile as they were, nor her eyesight as keen. She no longer uses the gas cooker, which sits gathering dust, and Jérôme no longer smells the acrid sulphur matches or the gas burners, the onions sweating. Unbeknownst to the grandmother, he stole the electric gas lighter and took it to the ruined chapel, where, sometimes, in the dead of night, he lies in the ossuary and watches the blue arc illuminate his fingers like a minuscule lightning bolt.

  He feels Éléonore’s decision to stop cooking is a bad omen, because he has seen animals that are old and weak refuse to hunt or to fight for their food, watched their flanks grow thin, the gleam in their eyes slowly dwindle and fade, until they, like the grandmother, only leave the confines of their nest or their territory reluctantly, fearfully. Éléonore strokes her cats with her gnarled, veiny hand, the palm and fingers stiff, the hesitant caress with which the old stroke the back of a child or an animal.

  Jérôme sits on a stone warmed by the sun and dries off as he watches the ripples on the surface of the water, the bubbles that rise from the depths where little Émilie Seilhan builds playhouses from roots, fallen branches and pieces of driftwood. He gets to his feet, pulls on his T-shirt again and wanders away from the reservoir,
past towering sunflowers with their brown, perfumed centres. He studies the cobwebs, the burrows created by crickets, mentally recording their locations. Drunk on pollen, bees reel from flower to flower. Jérôme cuts across a fallow field, in the middle of which are a few old magnolia trees, whose flowers, as they decay, exude a sweet smell. He stretches out on the long grasses, creating a little burrow, and watches the gliding buzzards and the vanishing trails left by airplanes. Ants run across the downy hair on his bare legs. A green lizard with a blue throat basks in the sun on one of the walls of the old fortifications, and quickly vanishes when a red kite lands on top of a telephone pole, its shadow gliding across the wall.

  Jérôme dozes in the muggy heat of the fragrant grasses, as he does in the bathtub, when the skin on his fingers is as pale and wrinkled as the skin on Éléonore’s fingers, pinching his nostrils and allowing himself to slowly sink below the surface. Under the water, he can hear his heart beating, the muffled sounds of the plumbing, the clatter of dishes in the sink, indistinct mutterings from the television or the deep voices of the fathers. When he opens his eyes beneath the murky water, he sees the face of his mother bending over him, talking to him, but he cannot make out her words. Jérôme holds his breath and Catherine sits patiently on the edge of the bath until the boy’s heart is pounding in his chest and he is forced back to the surface to catch a breath.

  ‘You’ve been in there for more than an hour, the water’s stone-cold,’ she says, rippling the surface of the water with a fingertip.

  Jérôme gazes at her beautiful face, the long mane of auburn hair she never combs but leaves tangled and pins at the back of her neck with a barrette or sometimes simply a pencil.

  She picks up a bar of soap – one that smells of honeysuckle, which she bought especially for him – makes a lather in her soft, dry hands, and Jérôme gets up and stands in the tepid water while Catherine, or Gabrielle or Julie-Marie, soaps him, since care for his body falls to the mothers who blow his nose, scrub, wash, shampoo and dry him, clean between his toes, drop his pants and wipe his arse, cut his nails and his hair when they decide they are too long, dust him with talcum powder, with nit powder, splash him with lavender that leaves his skin soft and fragrant, and lastly, smear him with sunscreen to protect his delicate skin.