‘Got it,’ says Serge.
The two men talk for a little while as they move along the walkways before Leroy takes his leave. Once he is gone, Serge, feeling nauseous, goes out to the back of the farrowing house to get some fresh air. He paces around the huge flagstone beneath which the drains seething with black water from the pig shed flow towards the slurry pit. He takes a swig of whisky from his hipflask and it trickles over his chin, onto his neck bristling with a three-day beard peppered with grey hairs, then he suddenly falls to his knees and spews alcohol and bile onto the concrete. For a long time he stays on all fours, racked by convulsions, hands pressed against the ground, long after he has nothing left to vomit, belching air and groaning with each spasm of his diaphragm. When, finally, he manages to regain his composure, he rolls onto his side, then onto on his back, drained of all strength, all thought, eyes filled with tears, gazing at the tattered sky. Hearing a door slam behind him, Serge struggles to his feet. Joël walks towards him.
‘Give me a cigarette,’ the older brother says.
Joël takes a pack from his pocket and grimaces, glancing at the yellowish puddle of bile.
‘Jesus, you really look like shit…’
‘Thanks,’ Serge says, cupping the lighter to shelter it from the wind.
‘I talked to Leroy as he was leaving. Why didn’t you tell him?’
‘Tell him what?’
‘The truth. About the sows. About everything.’
‘For fuck’s sake, I’ve told you, I’ve got everything under control! I hope you didn’t snitch.’
Joël shakes his head and says nothing for a moment.
‘I don’t understand why you tried to play down the symptoms…’
Serge sighs and once more begins pacing the flagstones, sucking greedily on his cigarette.
‘If Leroy has all the relevant information, he could probably tailor a treatment plan…’
‘There’s already a treatment plan, you know that as well as I do. All the sows are on antibiotics – what more do you want?’
‘I don’t know. Run some tests, run an antibiogram, talk to the old man, put our heads together. Doing something rather than sit on our arses, turning a blind eye, waiting for things to sort themselves out.’
Serge sneers.
‘You don’t think we’re struggling enough as it is? Go on, then, go find him! Go! He’s spent the past two months combing the fucking countryside for miles around. Have you seen the state of him? He’s scrawny, filthy, he’s talking to himself. He’s gone completely mad!’
‘We should call the doctor.’
Serge says nothing for a moment, but stands swaying and smoking next to the slurry pit.
‘There’s something I need to tell you… It was me who went back to the barn that night… It was me who left the door of the boar pen open and the bolt on the stall drawn back… I don’t know what the fuck was going through my head… I wasn’t sure… I knew the Beast could do it, but I didn’t think he’d smash his way out or that he’d be able to get past the fence…’
Joël says nothing.
‘I just couldn’t stand seeing the old man so obsessed with that fucking animal, you know? It was all he talked about… His plans for the pig units, extending the breeding program, increasing the livestock, when everything is already fucking falling apart…’
‘I’ll go and sort out the farrowing house, then I’ll look in on the gestating sows, then I’ll move on to the rest,’ Joël says.
Serge steps forward and takes his brother’s face in his broad hands. He looks up at the scar that snakes across Joël’s forehead and his temple, then traces the ridge with the tip of his thumb.
No-one has forgotten the day when the elder son burst into the feedlot where Joël was finishing feeding the pigs. Seeing him barrel-ling down the aisle towards him, Joël set down the feed trolley and raised one hand as a sign of appeasement before Serge punched him in the face, sending him slamming against the bars of one of the stalls. Joël had no time to get to his feet before Serge rushed at him, grabbing the bars with both hands, taking a run up and kicking him in the stomach. Joël scrabbled through the pigshit, trying to escape, but Serge was relentless, lashing out viciously at his hips, his thighs, his testicles, at a body strangely numb to the rain of blows. Far away and yet so close, the terrified pigs were squealing. A protruding nail gashed Joël’s forehead and blood streamed into his eye, over his shit-smeared cheek and into his mouth. Joël tried to breathe but could only moan. Then the blows ceased. Joël painfully rolled onto his back, spitting blood and shit. Overhead, he watched the strip lights whirl, merge and explode. He tried to get to his feet, to lever himself off the ground, but slipped in the pig shit and once again found himself sprawled in the aisle. Serge had stalked away but, turning his head, Joël saw him marching back with a shovel raised above his shoulder. Instinctively, Joël curled into a ball and put his head between his knees. He squeezed his eyes closed, waiting for a blow that never came. In the endless seconds, he thinks about the games they played as children whenever they managed to escape the father, roaming the fields, building treehouses, shooting birds with catapults, forcing frogs to smoke. Warily, he opened one eye and saw Henri grab Serge by the throat and slam him against one of the stalls. The father had wrested the shovel from him and it lay at his feet. Finally, Joël could breathe. He sat up, crawled across the concrete floor and propped himself against the feed trolley…
Now, almost twelve years later, Joël is staring at his pale face, his bushy beard, the whites of his eyes yellow from alcohol. He can smell the sour breath, feel Serge’s hands tremble against his cheeks. He fears the worst. He grabs Serge’s wrist.
‘I let him blame you,’ the elder son says. ‘But what if it was my fault that all this happened… What if I’m the one who hasn’t lived up to his expectations, the one who failed him?’
‘You’re completely pissed. You need to go sleep it off. Let me handle things today. Now, let me go.’
Serge nods repeatedly, still stroking his brother’s forehead insistently, as though trying to erase the scar.
‘Yeah, you’re right… You’re probably right…’
He pulls his brother’s face towards him, plants a loud, wet kiss at the corner of his mouth, then lets him go, pats him on the shoulder and walks away clutching his belly.
The dogs are barking and Catherine cannot manage to sleep. How many times has she thought about throwing open the kennel doors and the farm gates? Maybe the dogs are not as servile, as domesticated as she is, maybe they would run, abandoning the farmyard to silence and leaving her to stew in her servile, animal resignation. Or maybe she would run too, take off with the dogs, run from the farm as fast as her legs could carry her and never look back …
She has to stay, for the children. To stay for the children. Hah! Now that is a pathetic charade. Who is she trying to convince? How can she try to justify herself in other people’s eyes when Jérôme has learned to live with a mother who can vanish overnight, who barricades herself in her room and who no longer offers the slightest display of affection, of interest – to say nothing of protection, love, those things a mother is supposed to provide for her child?
Perhaps after all she should take the advice of Gabrielle, who, for years now, has been suggesting that they run away together? Take the twins, Jérôme and Julie-Marie, fling some clothes into suitcases and simply disappear, leaving the men and the pigs far behind. But then what reserves of energy she would need to draw on simply to get out of bed first… And even if she were able to, after the breakdown, even if she recovered her senses, she would simply think she was being melodramatic, that things were not so terrible after all, certainly better than being hospitalized again; and besides, where would they go, with their brood…?
And then again, Catherine cannot be sure that Jérôme is actually unhappy. He seems beyond reach; what right has she to tear him from the only world he has ever known?
Just take away my hand, leave the�
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Sometimes she would threaten to end it all, to throw herself out the window, swallow all the pills she has and down the bottle of whisky that Serge thinks no-one knows about in one of the kitchen cabinets. Serge promptly burst into her room with a hammer to nail the window shut, and she simply lay there, stunned and speechless he would use such force, shattering nails, smashing a pane of glass, and then swing a sledgehammer at the whole window, sending glass raining down into the farmyard, then turning back to her, his face trembling, his eyes puffy and bloodshot from too many drunken binges, too many sleepless nights on the decrepit sofa, as Gabrielle and Joël raced into the room to stop him.
‘If I stay alive, it’s for the children.’
She addressed him with this grandiloquent heroism, this brazen cheek, and Serge dropped the hammer on the ground before his brother could grab his wrist, and he said:
‘Just look at yourself. You’re incapable of looking after them. Whether you’re alive or dead makes no fucking difference.’
He left the room, head bowed, utterly drained. When he came back late that night (that night, and a hundred more), wreathed in an alcoholic, animal smell, it was to try to get into the bed, and crush her with all his weight, to kiss her lips and grope her body. He covered her chin with spittle and tears, spluttering drunkenly:
‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean what I said, I can’t bear the thought of you leaving me, I don’t want to be alone.’
She managed to break free of his grip and push him off the bed. She cowered against the wall, pulled a blanket over her, while he stood at the foot of the bed like a castigated child, moaning please and then turned on his heel and left the room to spend the night slumped on one of the sofas, without even bothering to take off his trousers.
And yet there are times when she remembers old sensations, and, seen through that prism, everything does not seem so black, so tainted in advance. She remembers the birth of Julie-Marie, for example, remembers being alone with the newborn baby in a bright hospital room. She did not want this – how could she want to be a mother at the age of seventeen? – but as she holds the baby in her hands, this naked creature fashioned by her own flesh, so vulnerable, so dependent on her, she has a realization, a sudden internal flash, that the baby gives her a reason to live, ensures a future, if not a destiny. She will grow accustomed to this presence next to her, she will manage to make a decision, she will give up on Joël and finally choose Serge.
Or perhaps the mere existence of this child will transform her own and there will be nothing to choose, nothing to give up, events will conform to logic rather than simply to her free will, she will be relieved of all this anxiety, all these doubts, all the regrets she feels for those things (she cannot say exactly which) that she has not experienced or will never experience. The vast immensity of desires, of possibilities, now seems insignificant compared with the existence of the child, all the things the child will give her, those things that, until now, Catherine has despised: a relationship, a family, being a parent, watching television, doing homework, the school, the supermarket, a respectable life.
But this feeling, this immense reassurance, lasts no more than a few days, and is reduced, in fleeting time, to no more than an instant, a vague epiphany, before she even leaves the clinic and moves into the farmhouse, with her mother in the back seat sobbing all the way, blowing her nose into a handkerchief on which she has probably embroidered her initials, not because she is sorry to see her eldest daughter leave home so soon, condemned to take on the same role she did at that age, but at the thought of being alone, of being thrust onto the gentle slope of old age; after all, Gabrielle too will leave, such is life, and she will be left with nothing but the presence of their father and tedious afternoons spent daydreaming in front of the television, brooding over her life, over the dim past, or cleaning the house to prevent it turning into a mausoleum.
Then came the mundane years devoted to Julie-Marie, thinks Catherine, a life shut away with three men, having to suffer their snubs, their mistrust, albeit unintentional, and the arrogant silence of the grandmother, who watched her slightest gesture and only ever spoke to her when compelled.
It was like landing in the middle of a pack of wolves.
The monotonous routine, the days spent caring for the baby, vacantly wondering what can have happened for her to end up alone in this huge ramshackle house that she loathes, how there came to be such a yawning gap between her dreams and her reality. How can it be that Serge falls asleep next to her every night, and how can the child sleeping in the Moses basket at the foot of the bed be theirs?
During those early years, she struggles to take part, to make sense of this life. At her insistence, and only after protracted machinations to get Henri to allow Serge time away from the farm, they occasionally go on holiday. They go to Mimizan-Plage, not even to Cap Ferret, where they rent a two-room self-catering unit in an aparthotel. They do what they feel they are supposed to do: they eat in cheap restaurants along the seafront, they go to the fun fair to see the merry-go-rounds and the flashing lights and eat candyfloss. In a souvenir shop, they buy a postcard to send to Catherine’s parents, a few sea shells and dried seahorses for Julie-Marie’s bedroom, which they are planning to decorate…
But as they are walking along the beach one windy morning, with Serge striding ahead, Catherine stares at his back, his neck which is nearly as thick as his head. He is indifferent to the sea, to the waves flecked with white caps crashing onto the shore. He smokes silently, sullenly (suddenly he has gone from smoking not five or ten cigarettes a day, but a whole pack, and then two packets, like his father), and he seems to have momentarily forgotten Catherine with Julie-Marie sleeping on her shoulder. If she were to stop now, he would probably carry on walking, never looking back, until he reached the far end of the beach, and she would see him gradually vanish into the sea spray. Or she could walk towards the ocean, paddle into the water with the child in her arms and be swept away by the waves without him noticing.
The sheer vastness of the beach that stretches out before them seems like the years ahead. She has barely turned eighteen, Serge is twenty-one. How will they ever be able to fill the time, this breathtaking boredom? And what came next, what happened after this memory of the day at the beach? Everything is so tangled and confused: the months, the seasons, the years, the routine. Time no longer exists. Past, present and future have been obliterated.
Then, the first breakdown comes. They are all gathered around the table for dinner one evening and Catherine suddenly has the feeling of being swallowed up into herself, the way sometimes tectonic activity will open up a breach in the bed of a lake and drain it of its water. Sounds and images still reach her, but she perceives them with a body that is not her own. At first, she thinks it is just a dizzy spell, and under the table she jabs the tines of the fork into the skin of her wrist. The pain spreads through her arm, or rather the impression of pain, coursing along faltering synapses. She feels panic rising in her belly, she is overwhelmed, in freefall. Can she instruct her body to stand up? She knocks over the chair and rushes out into the yard and begins to pace in broad circles, carrying with her this bottomless abyss that threatens to engulf her. Serge comes outside, but she waves him away.
‘It’s nothing, I’ll be fine, I just need some fresh air.’
The voice that comes from her mouth is unfamiliar to her. She thinks she sees Éléonore watching from the living room window. How did she manage to say these words without even thinking them? She paces for a long time, until the feeling slowly subsides, leaving her exhausted. Serge takes her hand and leads her back to the house. In the kitchen, Joël and Henri are still sitting at the table, dumbfounded; they watch her walk past, as pale as death. Serge takes her up to the room and puts her to bed. She sleeps for more than fifteen hours. When she wakes, she no longer really remembers what happened. Didn’t she think she was dying, or that something worse was about to happen? How can she describe this feeling o
f dying, of being annihilated? And yet, in time, she forgets. For a time, life reasserts itself. The solitude of the men, their strangeness, the crumbling farmhouse all come to seem familiar. The barking of the dogs no longer wakes her in the dead of night. It slips into her dreams: she imagines packs of rabid animals chasing her, she cannot say whether they are pigs or dogs, but they are close behind, their jaws flecked with spittle, snapping at her.
Henri comes back to the house only now and then, filthy, sullen and unkempt, his eyes blazing with the fire that is consuming him. He seems to haunt the farm and the surrounding lands. He spends his days and nights driving along the byroads at a snail’s pace, the rifle lying on the passenger seat. He no longer goes to bed and sleeps only when overcome by exhaustion. More than once, he almost kills himself when he loses control of the pickup. At such times he quickly parks by the road and slumps over the steering wheel.
The Beast appears in his every dream. Lurking in the shadows, it leaps out and charges. In a recurring nightmare, he finally collapses from his illness in one of the pig sheds. Back when hungry pigs used to roam the countryside and the villages, they would sometimes eat a child. He remembers his father’s warnings: never crouch down or play on the ground if there’s a pig nearby. In his dream, he is sprawled on the ground, lying in liquid manure that trickles into his mouth, his nose. He cannot move an inch. All around, animals are moving beyond the circle of light that illuminates him. He remembers that he has been neglecting them, has forgotten to feed them for so long that they are probably feral and emaciated. At first he cannot see them, but he can sense them in the shadows, twitching, at first fearful, then driven by hunger. Gradually, they become bolder, they move towards him and snuffle. He can feel their warm breath on his cheek, their snouts pressed against his neck, his hands. He tries to call to the sons, but no sound comes. Then one pig, more daring than the others, bites his face. Though Henri feels no pain, he can sense the hunk of flesh that the animal has ripped away with a powerful jerk of its head, gradually arousing the instincts of the other pigs, and they too begin to gnaw at his face, devouring the nose, the lips, their molars grinding through cartilage. Through their massed bodies, he glimpses a figure standing in the doorway of the pig shed, a silhouette that looks on impassively. It is his father, hiding his own mutilated face in the shadows, shaking his head almost imperceptibly and saying:
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