Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  She is indifferent to the bodies of boys. She takes them inside her, takes their virginity, milks their sperm from them like whey. Julie-Marie also takes what she demands, what they give her without demur: a couple of cigarettes, a small banknote, a dented silver bracelet, a bottle of perfume filched from their mother, their sister. The more vile, the more pitiful the object, the more it secretly pleases her. She displays her trophies on a shelf. She has sometimes envied Jérôme his freedom, but midsummer reminds her how tiresome are the days spent only in the company of her brother, the twins and the ghost of her mother. So whenever she manages to escape, she wanders the byways, the village streets. When she meets the gang of teenage boys who meet near the bus shelter behind the village hall, next to the water tower, she dawdles, she flirts. Sometimes one of them peels away from the group and leads her away; sometimes, they wave for her to join them and they all head off together towards the edge of the woods, the shade of a hayloft, the back seat of a car.

  I’ll not have you wearing make-up like a slut when you’re only fourteen, get back up them stairs, wash your face and change your clothes right this minute.

  All this for a little eyeliner that Catherine had applied one morning, when she had allowed her daughter to do her make-up, opening up the lacquered wooden box, pretending that this was a sign that that she would feel better tomorrow, and even better the following day… and Julie-Marie said nothing, but trudged back upstairs, went into the bathroom, washed her face and stared at her dripping reflection… The little-girl face that is no longer that of a little girl who no longer has to meekly obey, to allow herself to be treated like a child, a girl who Serge expects to assume the role of a mother and look after Jérôme and take care of Catherine.

  ‘I really need you, you understand, the pigs take up all my time, so in a sense you’re the head of the family.’

  She finds her father pitiful, with his blue coveralls stained with engine grease and things so foul she prefers not to think about them. Pitiful, with his breath that reeks of cigarettes and the booze he drinks in secret, thinking no-one knows.

  ‘Oh, he always drank, boys around these parts have always been partial to a drink or two, they want to enjoy life, though I have to say he didn’t drink quite so much before your brother was born… And then when your mother really got sick, it was a bitter blow.’

  Pitiful, for the preposterous authoritarianism he vainly tries to use to hide his weakness – it’s Henri’s fault, it’s Jérôme’s fault, it’s Catherine’s fault; not that he would ever say such things aloud, but it’s clear from everything about him that this is what he means – and lastly, the pathetic way he shirks his responsibilities and simply turns a blind eye, tends to the pigs and goes out to bars to get drunk. Then there are the flashes of violence, of fury, of cruelty he no longer knows how to channel or towards whom…

  The grandfather, the father, the uncle continue to impose unjustifiable rules that no-one is allowed to challenge, even though Julie-Marie would rather not have to bathe her brother, or dress her mother anymore, but would rather go out, like any other teenager, aimlessly riding a moped along country roads, chatting and smoking joints behind the bus shelter, even if it means coming home, as agreed, by eleven o’clock at the latest.

  Her father is contemptible, coming home with his face covered in bruises – fewer now, but increasingly frequently as he gets older – turning away, ashamed that he cannot hide the fact that, for the umpteenth time, he has been brawling outside some bar at closing time and probably ended up, as usual, with his face pressed into the pavement and a mouth full of blood because he is no longer as light on his feet as he was, and besides his heart is no longer in it (the men, the nightly violence, politics as an excuse, the arguments over a wrong word, a look, the brawls, even the booze), though he feels that it is better to get himself beaten up than one day beat one of his own children.

  He has never laid a hand on them, despite all the anger she knows he is holding inside, the fury that sometimes wells up and bursts. He has probably made a deal with himself, and Julie-Marie sometimes finds him asleep in his car, the windows misted over, parked in the farmyard when she is on her way to school, and she is convinced that on certain nights, when he does not go to bed, it is not because he passed out from exhaustion and whisky as soon as he came through the gate and turned off the engine, and it is not because Catherine’s bedroom door is closed and she has barred him from entering, but because he is terrified of what he might be capable of. He is terrified of himself.

  Perhaps the punches he takes from some other drunk are enough to rid him of his hatred, his blind resentment for a time, to absolve him and leave him lying peacefully on the pavement or lapping water from a gutter, or perhaps the reason he still gets into fights is simply habit, routine, reflex, nostalgia. Maybe even boredom, who knows? Julie-Marie no longer cares anymore, this girl who used to trace his bruised, swollen face with her fingertips as he winced; this girl who felt that Serge was taking on the hostile world outside, keeping the barbarians at the gate, who would feel her father’s biceps when he used to flex them for her, to prove his incontestable strength, while Catherine looked on, disappointed.

  It’s as though you’re my little wife now.

  She who was never supposed to grow up, never supposed to betray the love of father and brother, never have desires other than those that farm and family could meet and even forestall. And yet she does; she has desires, fierce longings, and they are no longer those she once had, they can no longer be sated by nature, by the animals Jérôme took her to see, by the trees oozing sap, by the reservoir pervaded by the perfume of thickets of broom and ripe wheat, nor even by the little girl’s body, naked and still undeveloped, that Jérôme would stare at, filled with desire and dread.

  She can no longer be satisfied by the pure love of a little boy to whom she offered herself, graciously, knowing that she was doing nothing wrong, but simply responding to the burgeoning excitement, the extraordinary unsated ardour within them, that anything could allay for a short while: the goosebumps from the chilly waters of the reservoir, the fur of animals, their lewdness and their couplings, the sweltering summer nights and the straw fires along the roads, their clammy hands and their secret embraces in the bluish bramble thickets; everything that could see, feel, touch, everything that poured into them without ever filling, ever sating them, as though together, the two of them could encompass the whole universe of the farm and countryside beyond. Julie-Marie grew bored of it. What she wants now, what seems to her more interesting that anything else, is the violence of the world outside.

  Julie-Marie has always envied other children, their frivolousness, their laziness and their savagery, but without ever truly being one of them, one of the groups that form fortuitously. She would stand outside, unable to finding the slightest crack through which she might become part of their gang, penetrate their inner circle. In the playground, she learned to pretend to be having fun, because obvious boredom or stasis seems suspicious to schoolchildren, who are attentive to every slight deviation. For years, she played vaguely in their vicinity, attempted to blend in, copying their gestures, following them as they raced around, chanting their incomprehensible catcalls. Their games are so different from those she and Jérôme shared in the world of the farm…

  A long time ago, a sow died during farrowing. Julie-Marie still does not know why her uncle attempted to save one of the piglets, not by placing it with another sow’s litter, but among a litter of puppies in an isolated kennel. Obscured by the smell of the pups, the piglet suckled and grew up like another little dog, sleeping with them, playing with them, running after balls, even learning to growl like them, perhaps believing it was one of them. Then, suddenly, it disappeared. One morning, Julie-Marie and Jérôme, who loved the little piglet, could not find it in the pen reserved for nursing bitches, or anywhere in the yard. Now that the pups were weaned and the bitch’s maternal instinct dulled, she had spotted him, and seeing among her litter
one of the little pigs that the grandfather sometimes threw to the dogs as food, she had killed it and shared the carcass with her real pups.

  The other children learned to tolerate the satellite, commensal presence of Julie-Marie, and sometimes allowed her to join them; accepted her for the space of a game, a breaktime, an alliance or a scheme. Then they lost interest in her and instinctively sent her back into orbit. They are the same age, speak the same language, but they are separated from her, distanced by a fundamental difference, one perhaps inculcated by their parents. At first, as they grew up, they became indifferent to her. They no longer noticed her, she floated among them, attaching herself to those who were prepared to accept her colourless presence for a moment, only to drift towards other groups of children when they made their annoyance or their irritation clear, rejected with scant ceremony.

  So when her classmates started to insult her, it seemed to Julie-Marie as though they finally expected something of her, that they were offering her a way of existing in their eyes, nor did she mind that it was the polar opposite of what Serge, Jérôme and even Catherine expected of her. What had suddenly, inexplicably prompted the children’s interest in her as the focus of their savagery? They had never accepted her as one of their own, at least not until she willingly accepted the role they seem to discover in this girl they used to mock: the loose woman, the village bicycle, the slut; until she agreed to kiss them, feed on their mouths and drink down their spittle, caress their hairless skin, open herself to their clumsy bodies.

  In the days that follow the discovery of the hoofprints, the men do not find the Beast. Until mid-August, they continue to make their rounds under Henri’s command, alternately taking a few hours off. But the boar is not to be found and the track marks at the edge of the Plains quickly disappear. Work on the harvest is delayed and the father has no choice but to allow the sons to go back to the fields and the pig shed to deal with the harvest and the silage even as his fixation sets him steadily adrift, taking him far from the farm work, whose management he leaves to them.

  Over the summer, there are other miscarriages, although initially they are sufficiently infrequent that Serge and Joël simply record the fact without becoming alarmed. Then one morning in the first week of September, when the brothers are inspecting groups of pregnant sows, they discover numerous stillbirths. Working in separate pens, they glance at each other over the railings.

  ‘There’s something seriously fucked up going on here,’ Serge says.

  He scribbles the number of miscarried piglets in his notepad.

  ‘How many have you got?’

  ‘Seven in that one, nine in that one. Another nine in that pen. Eleven in this one,’ Joël says.

  ‘This is not good. Not good at all. We need to search all the pens, make sure we haven’t missed any… You deal with that, I’ll be right back, I just need to check something.’

  Serge strides to the door of the pig shed and goes straight to Henri’s office. He pauses for a second, pats his pockets in search of his keys, and slots the spare key into the lock. He pushes open the door; the cramped room is musty and smells of stale cigarette smoke. He flicks the light switch several times before realizing that Henri has not replaced the fluorescent bulbs. Serge walks over and turns on the desk lamp, broken glass cracking under his boots. The aluminium grille is still dangling over the battered leather office chair and there are drops of dried, black blood on the corner of the desk. Pinned to the wall is the livestock planner that once reminded him of the Kabbalah, of a mandala whose esoteric interpretation was known only to the father. The planner determines the day-to-day running of the farm according to the cycles of the sows, matings, farrowings; it presides over the life and death of the pigs. Serge is comparing the information he has jotted in his notepad with the predictions on the planner when Joël appears in the doorway.

  ‘Maybe its time we sorted out this shit-tip,’ he says.

  Serge simply glances over his shoulder at his brother.

  ‘We’re looking at about thirty per cent stillborn mortality on the early farrows when in normal circumstances it shouldn’t be more than five per cent. We’ve never had anything like this…’

  ‘We need to talk to him,’ Joël says.

  Serge lights a cigarette and for a long time he is silent, nervously tapping his foot as he studies the arcane mysteries of the planner, as though waiting for them to reveal something.

  ‘No,’ he says, turning to his brother. ‘We don’t tell him anything just yet. We check the feeding troughs and take the sows’ temperatures morning and night.’

  ‘What about the thirty animals due to go to slaughter tomorrow?’

  ‘We ship them as normal. Besides, the feedlot hasn’t been affected. Call the abattoir and confirm.’

  They leave the office and go back to the pig shed.

  ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ Joël says, walking next to Serge. ‘If the old man finds out we’ve been hiding things from him…’

  ‘You want to go look for him? Go ahead. I don’t even know where the fuck he is! Can’t you see we can’t rely on him anymore? He wouldn’t be able to deal with something like this, and in the end he’ll blame us as usual.’

  Joël says nothing as they disinfect their boots before going back into the farrowing house.

  ‘Listen,’ Serge says, ‘between the two of us, we can deal with the situation. Let’s start by clearing away all this shit and systematically isolating any sows that present with symptoms… We clean our boots before we enter every pen, and put on new boots when we go to another unit…’

  Joël nods and the two men set about picking up the bloody remains of piglets and the placental sacs, then wash away the pools of amniotic fluid with a pressure hose. When they fill the troughs with grain, only two of the sows do not come to eat. They stand off to one side, apathetic.

  ‘This one is running a fever. Forty-one degrees,’ Joël says, taking the mercury thermometer from the animal’s rectum. ‘We need to contact the vet and ask him to run some tests.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll do that, yes… In the meantime, hose them down with cold water before isolating them,’ answers Serge.

  In the days that follow, they disinfect the farrowing house from top to bottom. Joël isolates all the ailing sows in a single pen away from the other pigs. Serge eventually agrees to contact Leroy, the vet, but he carefully erases a number of the matings and miscarriages that have occurred in the past two months from the livestock planner. Early the next morning, just as the brothers are getting ready to leave the house, Michel Leroy pulls into the farmyard.

  ‘I’ll deal with this,’ Serge says. ‘Where’s the old man?’

  ‘No idea. Still asleep, I think,’ Joël says. ‘The pickup is still parked outside and I thought I heard him come in late last night.’

  ‘You stay here. If he wakes up and asks what’s going on, tell him it’s just a routine visit.’

  Serge dons his parka and goes out. Joël watches as he goes over to Leroy, and from the way he is walking he can tell that Serge is still drunk from his bar crawl the night before. Leroy is a tall, skinny guy with thinning hair, wearing a raincoat that is much too big. The two men shake hands, exchange a few words, then head towards the pig shed.

  ‘How is your father?’ the vet asks.

  ‘Tired. He’s coming down with something. We don’t know what. That’s why I’d rather we keep this just between the two of us. We don’t want to worry him,’ Serge says.

  ‘Tell me everything. You were pretty cagey on the phone…’

  ‘We’ve noticed some problems in the farrowing house. Sows that are lethargic, feverish… Loss of appetite… We’ve also had a number of miscarriages in the first litters…’

  ‘When did you first notice the symptoms?’

  ‘The first thing we noticed were the miscarriages. A few weeks ago? A month at most…’

  Having reached the pig shed, they put on protective coveralls and boots, and go into the b
uilding. Leroy examines four of the sick sows, asking questions to which Serge barely replies, as though stubborn or distracted, staring at the backs of the animals. Then they inspect the rest of the pens.

  ‘Well,’ the vet says finally, shrugging, ‘all things considered, I don’t think you have much to worry about. I’d say we start by trying a broad-spectrum antibiotic…’

  ‘We already test a large number of the breeders every year to screen for infections, and we treat the rest of them with antibiotics as prophylaxis.’

  ‘That’s why I’m not too worried. Still, we’ll take some samples and run some tests. If there are any more miscarriages, send everything to the lab, the stillborn animals, placenta, everything. You’ll also need to check their food. I’ve seen a case where ergot in the wheat affected sows in pig. At first it didn’t occur to us, but then the pigs became crazy, and the sows repeatedly miscarried…’