Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  Jérôme surrenders himself to the expert hands that for eleven years have cared for and cosseted him. His mother rubs the back of his head, the whorls of his ears, each hand mimicking the gestures of the other; she gazes at him with that same air of resignation and melancholy, without saying a word, a half-smile playing on her lips. She says:

  ‘When you were little and I used to bathe you in the sink, you… You were so tiny… I’d hold your head in the palm of my hand… And you’d float, your whole body floating… and you’d curl up in the warm water and fall asleep… as though you were back in my belly… and you looked so happy… and I was paralyzed with fear… And so, sometimes… Sometimes I thought I could just let you go… Take my hand away… Leave the bathroom for a minute, close the door… That you would be better off that way… That you wouldn’t even suffer, you’d just drift off to sleep… And I’d pull you out of the water so quickly you’d start wailing… So I’d wrap you in a towel and I’d sit there on the floor… holding you against me and sobbing with you.’

  Hearing the sound of children’s voices reach him, Jérôme gets to his feet. He walks to the edge of the clearing and stands, speechless, in the shade of a tree. A little way away, some boys from Puy-Larroque who look about twelve years old are playing football. They are stripped to the waist and Jérôme can make out their damp skin, their sunburned necks and shoulders, their sweaty foreheads, the locks of hair plastered to their temples. He watches their enigmatic game. He can sense their excitement from their shouts, the way they spit on the flattened grass, the loud backslaps and friendly thumps they exchange in their feigned masculine camaraderie.

  Jérôme knows most of them; he was in nursery school with them before he was taken out. He remembers days that dissolved in the late-afternoon sunshine, the silence of the hallways before the bell rang, the muted voices of the pupils behind the doors of the three village school classes, the smell from the school canteen that permeated everything, the yellow light that slipped through the dusty fanlights of toilets that smelled of damp paper, stale urine and juvenile sweat, the metallic taste of water so cold it makes your teeth ache and seems to explode in your stomach.

  To mark out the pitch, the boys have lined up their T-shirts along the ground. One of them, a blond, tough-looking boy who goes by the name Lucas Campello, goes back towards the goalposts when he spots Jérôme. He pauses, then turns to the other players and shouts something, hands cupped around his mouth, and points at Jérôme. In a single rush, the seven boys abandon the ball and follow after Lucas at top speed. Jérôme sees the band of half-naked children running straight at him. As they come closer, they do not swerve to avoid him. A dull thud knocks the breath out of him and he is pitched backwards, crushed beneath Lucas Campello, who leans all his weight on him, his crimson face framed by the blue of the sky. The boy pins Jérôme’s arms above his head, pressing his wrists into the grass.

  ‘Grab his feet,’ Lucas says.

  The other boys immediately grip Jérôme ankles; one grabs a fistful of his hair.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing staring at us like that? Are you spying on us?’

  With a look of disgust, he pretends to sniff Jérôme’s face.

  ‘Fucking hell, he stinks to high heaven!

  ‘It’s because he’s a redhead,’ one of the boys says, and the rest of the gang laugh.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lucas says, ‘and he lives with pigs. Maybe he is a pig; maybe his father fucked a pig! We should check and see if he’s got a wiggly tail.’

  The boys laugh raucously. Jérôme makes no attempt to struggle free. The boys’ faces radiate sheer cruelty.

  ‘He’s soft in the head,’ one of them says, trying to explain Jérôme’s unresponsiveness.

  ‘Just like his mother,’ Lucas Campello says, then, turning to Jérôme, ‘It’s true, isn’t it, your mother is crazy? Everybody in the village says so. My mother says she’s not right in the head.’

  Jérôme gazes at the blue eyes that are boring into him, inhales the sweet breath the boy blows into his face.

  ‘Your whole family is crazy. Like your sister, always playing the whore. I heard she gives free blowjobs…’

  The gang of boys all whoop.

  ‘Really, really?’ one of them asks, a boy with dark green eyes that Jérôme has always favoured.

  Lucas nods:

  ‘She’ll fuck pretty much anyone and she doesn’t even charge. My brother told me. Last month, at the village fair dance, he screwed her in the community centre car park. What have you got to say about that, Fuckwit?’

  Jérôme lowers his eyes and looks at Lucas’s puny torso, the boy’s small oval breasts, the jutting ribs of his heaving chest. He can no longer feel his hands. The sun appears over the boy’s shoulder, dazzling him. His brother is a red-faced teenager with chronic acne who drives around the district day and night at breakneck speed on a motorbike with the exhaust pipe sawn off. As Lucas presses his weight down, Jérôme feels his brother’s body over Julie-Marie, his hands slipping under her dress, stroking her hips, her belly, her breasts. He pictures the boy jerking down his sister’s pants, leaving them rucked over her pale thighs, then sticking his fingers or his acne-swollen face into Julie-Marie’s willing vagina.

  He pictures Julie-Marie kneeling in the dry, sun-scorched grass around the Puy-Larroque community centre, sees her pull down the teenager’s fly, undo the single button of his boxer shorts, and later sees her get to her feet and smooth down her dress against the imprint left on her knees by the grass and pebbles. Jérôme feels a shudder in his groin and his penis harden against Lucas Campello’s thigh.

  ‘He doesn’t even say anything, the dumb fuck. You call his sister a slut, and he doesn’t say anything.’

  ‘You’re the dumb fuck. I just told you, he can’t talk. He’s mute.’

  ‘What do you mean, he can’t talk? Grab his arm.’

  Lucas releases one of Jérôme’s wrists and grabs his jaw, pushing his thumb into the boy’s right cheek, pressing the others into the left to force him to unclench his teeth.

  ‘Fetch a stick,’ he orders, as Jérôme resists.

  One of the boys runs off and quickly returns with a broken hazel branch. Lucas takes it and shoves it between Jérôme closed lips, gouging the gums as he forces it past his teeth. When Jérôme finally gives in, Lucas inserts the stick crossways like a bridle bit, then leans down and examines the tongue covered with flecks of bark and bloody drool. He tosses the stick away and Jérôme runs his tongue over his swollen gums and swallows.

  ‘Anyway, it’s not his tongue he needs cut off, it’s his balls. I mean, we can’t have him fucking his sister, can we? What do you think, Fuckwit?’

  From the back pocket of his shorts, Lucas takes out an old Opinel knife and carefully unfolds the blunt blade.

  ‘Give me a hand getting his pants off, take care of it,’ he says.

  Jérôme remembers watching as the fathers simultaneously grabbed squealing piglets from suckling at a sow’s teats, gripped them between their tensed thighs, made an incision in the scrotum with a scalpel, pressed the edges of the wound, squeezed out the tiny glands and severed the spermatic cord, then cut off the cartilaginous tail with a flick of the wrist as the piglets shrieked and vainly struggled, milk foaming around their mouths and gushing from their snouts. The fathers dabbed the wound with a wad of gauze soaked in hydrogen peroxide, gave the piglets an intramuscular iron injection before setting them down again, trembling and bewildered, next to their mother. Tiny testicles and scraps of tails littered walkways of the pig shed, clung to the hairs on their hands and their arms, exploded beneath the soles of their boots.

  ‘Just let him alone,’ one of the boys in the gang says finally, a boy whose pale skin and dark, silken hair Jérôme has always loved.

  ‘I’m out of here. C’mon, guys, let’s get back to the game. Bet we beat you two–nil!’

  Relieved, the other boys nod and release their grip on Jérôme’s limbs. The blood rushes back. They
get to their feet and walk away, leaving only Lucas, who closes the blade of the Opinel with an affected expression of disappointment and slips it back into his pocket.

  ‘Pity. The fun was just starting.’

  He bends over, once more blotting out the pale sky, and allows a long thread of spittle to dangle from his mouth towards Jérôme’s face, and just as it is about to touch his lips, Lucas noisily sucks it back into his mouth, wipes the lips with the back of his hand and jumps to his feet. Leaning his weight on his aching hands, Jérôme sits up, dazed, half-blinded by the blazing sun that makes him wince. Lucas Campello sniffles, clears his throat and hawks a gob of spit that catches on a dandelion, then turns away and runs back to join the other boys.

  Jérôme rubs his wrists and gazes up at a distant hot air balloon drifting. By the time he gets to his feet, the boys are once more chasing their ball again, and pay no more heed to his presence. Jérôme turns and walks back towards the village.

  ‘You know that way you’ve got of looking at your sister, well, I don’t like it one fucking bit,’ Henri says, and sets down the last of the piglets he has just castrated and docked, and it staggers across the bare concrete, twitching, the tiny stump of the tail topped by a crimson droplet.

  ‘You’d do well to watch your step, lad, or I’ll do to you what I did to him,’ Henri says, jerking the tip of his scalpel towards the piglet. Jérôme feels his scrotum shrink and his testicles retract into his abdomen.

  He feels Julie-Marie’s hands when she is the one to bathe him. She quickly learned to do as Gabrielle and Catherine did, to take on the role of little mother in order to support her aunt. Jérôme gazes at the curly, silken hair, grasps a lock, winds it around his finger and smiles. He can smell her as she moves around the cramped bathroom beneath the fan from the small electric heater, the vanilla perfume she borrows from Gabrielle, spiced by that of her sweat as they mingle. Her attentions are still focused on him alone, and he has no doubt that Julie-Marie belongs only to him, that her love is his and his alone.

  He brings her the animals he manages to flush out, hunt and capture, in the way the cats bring the remains of voles and fieldmice to the grandmother’s doorstep. She never deviates from the ritual: Jérôme will bring her a creature – often a butterfly, because he knows that she loves them, sometimes a stick insect or a praying mantis – that he has placed in a jam jar, having perforated the lid with a corkscrew, and wrapped it in a kitchen towel. Every time, Julie-Marie lights up in amazement and exclaims:

  ‘A surprise! I wonder what it could be?’

  She sets the precious gift on her lap and, with infinite care, unties the knot in the dishtowel, simpering just to please him. Then, just as carefully, she lets her eyes grow wide and her mouth gape to signal that words fail her. Then she lifts the jar to eye level, gazes at the creature scrabbling or fluttering against the glass.

  ‘It’s magnificent.’

  She holds it for a moment or two, sometimes claps it against her belly while she takes Jérôme’s hand, pulls him to her and kisses his forehead or ruffles his hair, allowing him to nestle for an instant in her familiar, reassuring smell, then says:

  ‘Why don’t we let it go again, what do you think?’

  And Jérôme takes her by the hand, leads her to the long grass behind the clothesline on a patch of ground the fathers no longer cultivate. Julie-Marie unscrews the lid of the jam jar and they both watch the butterfly flit away or some nameless insect gracelessly scurry into the bushes. As they pass the great oak, does Julie-Marie see, as Jérôme does, the body of the altar boy, Jean Roujas, swinging from the lowest branch, turning around and around as he has for decades, sometimes clockwise, until the rope becomes twisted, sometimes anticlockwise?

  By the side of the road, a baby rabbit is wandering through the grass. Jérôme goes over and crouches down. The animal sniffs him but makes no attempt to run away. It is blinded by myxomatosis, its eyelids glued shut by yellowish rheum. The young rabbit fitfully jerks its head, probing a world crushed by sweltering heat, dissolved by a light that, to its eyes burned by conjunctivitis, appears only as a dazzling, diffuse glow.

  Jérôme reaches out and strokes the animal’s twitching fur. He knows this man-made disease. He has seen countless rabbits dying in ditches, lying in the middle of fields or roads. He brought them back to the ruined chapel. Now, he looks around, sees a large half-buried rock and begins to dig it out, exposing the tunnels of an ant colony. Sterile worker ants flee indiscriminately, carrying eggs in their mandibles.

  Jérôme hugs the stone to his body and carries it back to the rabbit, which seems to take advantage of the shadow he casts to lie quietly in the grass. The boy kneels next to the animal, raises the stone high, and brings it crashing down. The rabbit is killed instantly, its chest crushed, its pink tongue protruding from its mouth, a gaping wound in the fur of its belly, from which spill the viscera in a whitish sac. One of its paws twitches.

  She’ll fuck pretty much anyone and she doesn’t even charge.

  Jérôme raises the rock and the brings it down again, and again, and again, and again, until the rabbit is an amorphous mass of bloody fur half-buried in the scutch grass, then Jérôme lets himself fall back onto the hot tarmac, staring at the pathetic remains.

  What have you got to say about that, Fuckwit?

  When he is finally calm again, he scrapes up the remains of the rabbit, takes off his T-shirt, lays it on the road, places the little body in it and wraps it up. The sun quickly begins to burn his back and his neck, but he pays no heed and keeps walking down the middle of the road, the T-shirt crumpled into a ball against his stomach.

  Reaching the shade of a fig tree, he takes a stick and digs a narrow trench. Here he buries the remains of the rabbit wrapped in its makeshift shroud, then replaces the disturbed earth and covers the burial mound with small stones he finds among the tree roots. For a long time he remains motionless, haggard, staring at the little grave. His gums are still sore. His saliva tastes like iron.

  We have to give them the injections to prevent anaemia, see? They’re born with weak blood, bad blood, pigs these days, they grow too fast and the sows don’t have enough iron in their milk, so we have to help out.

  Sometimes the injection site becomes infected despite the hydrogen peroxide swab, sometimes the piglet has an allergic reaction and dies from anaphylactic shock. In such cases, the fathers register the animal’s number in a log.

  Perhaps the rabbit lying now motionless beneath the clay is waiting for Jérôme to leave before it returns to its former shape and digs a burrow that will lead it to moles, as blind as it is, who can guide it? Or perhaps, in its burrowing, it might find its way to the old washhouse, to the pool in whose depths lies the body of little Émilie Seilhan, and she might try to tame him and the days might not seem so long?

  Jérôme gets up and heads back towards the farm.

  Julie-Marie no longer watches over his games or those of the twins as she once did, when she was happy in their company, happy to follow them in their walks and join in the babbling conversations of Pierre and Thomas. Now she seems more distant, as though preoccupied, offering only vague responses to his invitations, and usually to decline them. She continues to help Gabrielle out with the daily chores, but she is more sluggish, more lethargic. She still hangs out the laundry every morning. Jérôme gets up so he can watch her from his bedroom window; the sheets dripping onto the tall grass, the red admirals alighting to drink, probing the fabric with their feverish probosces, the dogs that often scamper around and jump up at her as she calls them by name, throws sticks that they bring back and lay at her feet, and Jérôme confusedly feels that the fragile equilibrium of the world depends on the recurrence of this moment, these repeated actions, now that all the others have begun to fade, now that she no longer opens her door to him at dawn so he can lie down next to her, come on, you’re a big boy now, it’s not right, now that she hides her nudity from him, the strange sex she used to show him as a little gir
l, lying in the grass and hiking up her dress, then parting the lips to reveal… – he hesitates, what he can see is both a flower with pale pink petals, like the pale pink petals of the magnolias in the fallow field, and an animal lurking between her thighs, a terricolous animal – no, we can’t do it anymore, we can’t do it anymore.

  ‘It’s magnificent,’ she says for the umpteenth time, staring at the insect in the glass jar, before enveloping Jérôme with her arms, her caresses, the kisses that leave the damp, cool feeling of her saliva on his neck, his forehead, but now she accepts his gifts with barely disguised lassitude, hurriedly unknotting the dishcloth, setting the jar down on the nearest piece of furniture with barely a smile (another one, you shouldn’t have, thanks, but you really should leave these poor little creatures in peace), and immediately forgets the insect, no longer worrying about setting it free, and if her brother does not do so, finds it lying on its back, legs curled up, shrivelled at the bottom of the jar.

  Jérôme pushes open the farm gate and goes into the yard, which is quiet at this time of the afternoon, when the dogs doze in the shade of the barn, in their kennels or in the rusted shells of old machinery, and the twins are taking their nap. On the days when Catherine returns from among the dead and sets about spring cleaning, the windows are thrown wide and sometimes left open so that the heat can dry the floors scrubbed down with bleach.

  The whole house stinks like a pigsty – is it really too much to expect you to wash as soon as you get back from the pig sheds?

  He inhales the scent that rises from the tiled floor, darker where the mop has just passed. There is nothing that Jérôme likes more than the silent, somnolent house at two o’clock in the afternoon; the empty rooms, their shutters closed, plunged into a darkness, cut through by a single beam of light that moves from wall to wall as the hours pass; the quiet, dusty rooms, suspended in time by a summer day, balmy with the scent of wallpaper and bedspreads warmed by the sun. He climbs the stairs and listens intently, resting a hand on the banister. He pushes open the door to the grandfather’s room, crosses and sits on the bed. From the battered picture frame, the young woman gazes out at him; he knows they are related from the name carved on the marble stone of the family vault. The weather seems to have changed to stormy, because the photograph is darker, the branches of the hazel seem to sway in the wind. A patch of sky in the left corner lowers while the blurred figure of the boy forever running in the background seems to tilt the face with its indistinct features to watch the huge rolling clouds massing just beyond the confines of the photograph. Élise’s eyes seem more anxious than usual, she is frowning slightly, her lips parted, as though about to speak, to give him a piece of advice, a warning, and, looking closely, it seems to Jérôme that she is pulling the fabric of her dress taut over her rounded belly.