Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  You can’t say I didn’t warn you. You know how this is going to end.

  He wakes up howling, opens the door of the pickup, falls into the ditch, gets up and stumbles aimlessly through the fields before he comes to his senses. The drugs can no longer alleviate the fever that is making him delirious. Soon, nightmarish figures begin to encroach upon reality. He sees Marcel in the distance, standing at the far end of the road on which he is driving, shimmering like a mirage he can never reach; he sees him on the edge of a coppice of trees or standing in the middle of a field, always frozen, impassive.

  He recalls impressions he believed had vanished forever: his mother’s protection, even if sporadic, the sense of her presence, her firm, enveloping body, and the cold, mysterious authority of the father. These are his first memories walking the fields next to that sturdy, imperious body. Marcel sometimes lays a hand on his head, gripping the whole skull between his fingers. Henri can smell the stale tobacco smoke that stained the tips of his middle and index fingers yellow, mingled with that of soil, of the metal tools, of the breath and the droppings of the animals.

  His is accustomed to his father’s monstrousness; he sees it only through the prism of others, those they encounter in the village or at the market, through their eyes as they linger or turn away, pitying or patronizing, or the eyes of children as they widen in terror. For the first time he feels the sting of shame as he walks among them, his hand in the intractable grip of the father. He learns to prefer their comparative solitude, which shields them from strangers, from those in the outside world. He applies himself to demonstrating to Marcel his obedience, his devotion, in counterpoint to the savagery of the world.

  ‘See that line of oaks, way over there? Right up to that line. One day you will own all of it.’

  Marcel took him to the edge of the Plains, laid a hand on his frail shoulder and with a sweeping gesture takes in all the fields that Henri will gradually buy as the piggery expands, sometimes at the cost of acrimonious negotiations, striving to recreate the precise territory designated by the father that day as the ultimate accomplishment in his life, even buying this useless plot, purchased by bribing a family in Puy-Larroque, this strip of land tainted by the blood of the patriarch, spilled like a curse upon the Plains.

  He goes back to the pickup to find the door still open, the hazard warning lights still blinking. He presses the dashboard lighter, takes a cigarette from a crumpled pack and chews on the filter. The first puff heaves his heart into his mouth, then he slumps back in his seat, closes his eyes and tries to drive out the voices, the figures, the impressions. Cars honk their horns as they overtake him.

  His condition is inexorably deteriorating. Before long, his face is covered with a shaggy beard. Whenever he goes home and encounters one of the sons, the grandchildren or Gabrielle, he finds some excuse to avoid them. He can see his reflection in their silence, in the worry and the pity they can no longer hide, the reflection he cannot bring himself to look at in the bathroom mirror or in the rear-view mirror. When even he cannot bear his own stench, he resolves to take a shower. Looking down at the jutting ribs of his chest, at the bruises covering his stomach and his thighs, he surveys the state of his ravaged body. He has lost some fifteen kilos over the course of the summer. The scalding water pulsing from the showerhead onto his skin is soothing, and for a long time he sits, exhausted, in the bathtub, eyes closed, hugging his calloused knees, dozing. Then he wakes and clutches the edge of the bath. The Beast or Marcel have once against appeared in a wisp of dream, reminding him of his quest. He manages to extricate himself from the bath with great difficulty, dries his scalded back, drapes a rough towel around his bony shoulders, his lumpy vertebrae.

  He no longer takes a dog with him. He spends some nights sleeping under a blanket in the back of the Lada Niva, parked on some dirt track near the Plains. One day in mid-September, as he painfully clambers out of the truck, Henri discovers another field of maize destroyed, the earth ploughed up in broad furrows as before. He walks over and kneels down. The animal’s hooves have left deep marks in the damp soil.

  ‘I was right!’ Henri whispers as he gets to his feet.

  A stabbing pain in his chest doubles him over. He groans, brings his hand to his heart and stumbles into the field beneath a sky in which a few faint stars are still holding out.

  ‘I was right!’ he roars, before being overcome by a coughing fit which sends him sprawling and puts a flock of pheasants to flight.

  The field extends over a coomb. Farther off, on the other side of the valley, framed against the bourgeoning light, stands the shadow of Marcel, ringed by a purple halo.

  ‘What d’you have to say to that, you old fucker?’ Henri shouts, jabbing a finger at the father’s ghost.

  He stares at him for a moment.

  ‘Say something! What do you want? What are you waiting for, you rotting bastard?’

  The only response is silence. Henri coughs again, a harsh, painful cough, then hawks a gob of spit, and a thread of blood-streaked saliva trickles down his chin and into his beard. The pain eventually subsides and he manages to stand up. He lights a cigarette, smokes, scans the horizon, then heads back to the car, muttering to himself, swearing and panting for breath. When he reaches the pickup, he leans for a moment on the bonnet, wincing. The fever has left his lips chapped and split. His mouth and his throat are burning. The rash that has spread over his belly is now a single raw wound, a constant burning with little variation. His heart begins to beat irregularly. He feels it spasm beneath his ribs like something with its own life, something barely hatched. The sun rises over the fields and the sky is now pure blue, almost white. He no longer sees Marcel in the distance, simply a gnarled dead tree covered with ivy and tinder fungus.

  The torpid silence of the house is troubled only by muted mumbling from the television in front of which the twins are sitting, bare-arsed on the carpet. Near the grandfather’s bed, on the nightstand, the still-warm sun of early autumn is no longer able to comfort the woman in the photograph. Standing in the doorway of Julie-Marie’s bedroom, Jérôme breathes in his sister’s smell, the fragrance of the incense paper she burns in the saucer on the shelf that is filled with the remains of the perforated cut strips that have been reduced to ashes and crumbled to dust, which rises in whorls if he breathes on it or makes a sudden movement close by – I know that you’ve been in my room again – but also the plastic smell of the hands and faces of the dolls, their bodies stuffed with rags, that lie abandoned in a corner of the room, relics lined up on top of a wicker trunk in serried ranks, shoulder to shoulder, like the soldiers who lie beneath the war memorial, when they go to sleep at night, exhausted at having spent all day crawling through the tunnels they have bored beneath the village square.

  The dolls are still intact, their hair coarse from being brushed too often. Their eyelids, rimmed with lashes like the eyelids of the pigs, are open and reveal eyes of glass, porcelain or plastic, which can close when the doll is tilted, and the mechanism makes a rattling sound inside their heads, click-click-click-click. Jérôme loves their sweet smell, the soft fabric bodies that once were white and are now grey, sometimes brown, stained with the carefully cooked mud pies that they pointedly refused to swallow.

  ‘You’re a naughty little girl! Take that! And that! I’ll teach you to behave!’

  Are they bored sitting on the trunk, their eyes somewhat opaque since a veil of dust has settled on them like the cat’s cataracts or the rabbit’s myxomatosis? Jérôme liked to watch Julie-Marie playing with her dolls, sitting them around a stone transformed into a table, with a handkerchief or a dishtowel and a tablecloth, bathing them the way she bathed him.

  Then, suddenly, nothing; a brutal indifference that nothing and nobody could have predicted; at first the dolls lay, forgotten, on the bedroom floor or amid the grass in the yard, left out in the rain, torn limb from limb by the dogs, their cloth bodies eaten by mildew – that one there has no hands, simply a mess of mangled plasti
c, that one’s face was melted by the sun into a terrifying mask – until finally Julie-Marie gathered them all up again, out of loyalty or nostalgia, and created a small pointless shrine to their former glory or to their memory. But they are crude and ugly now, with their faded features, the dresses that were knitted for them by the grandmother or the mother with poor-quality wool, back when they knitted, knitted, knitted as though their lives depended on the number of woollen articles they could produce, and the whole family walked around in sweaters, scarves, socks, hats, while the needles endlessly clicked on…

  These days, Jérôme needs to tug on his sleeves so that they grow with him, unless Catherine decides to burst from her room in an attempt to restore order to their lives and the whole farmhouse, and takes him – as she usually does – to the flea market in the village to kit him out from head to toe in mismatched clothes that belonged to other people and smell of unfamiliar washing powders, other wardrobes, other bodies than theirs.

  ‘Look at this! Five francs! It’s a bargain! Do you like it? No? You don’t think it’s cool? Oh, you can be such a difficult boy. We’ll take it anyway.’

  Jérôme goes into the room and closes the door behind him. What has happened? Where has the Julie-Marie he knew gone? Why does she not let him follow her around as she used to, when they roamed the country roads. He would pick blackberries from the brambles and bring them to her, and she would wait, sitting under the magnolia tree in the fallow field, whose flowers, when they rot, give off a sickly fragrance, and soon Julie-Marie’s fingers and her lips would be purple with the juice of soft, ripe blackberries.

  Why does she push him away now when he tries to hug her, you’re a big boy now, we can’t do that anymore, and why will she not release the moth from inside his head the way she did when he wanted to listen to the hum of a hawkmoth caught in the heady perfume of a privet hedge? He captured it in one of the baby food jars Gabrielle uses to feed the twins, but when he brought it to his ear, the moth, desperate to escape, flew inside his head. There was a sudden roar, a shooting pain, and he could feel his eardrum thrum with the butterfly’s wings; Jérôme had screamed at the top of his lungs, rolled on the floor, beating his head against the wall until Julie-Marie managed to calm him, to get him to lie down with his head on her lap, and she removed the hawkmoth from his ear canal with a pair of tweezers, but only in stages, because the cornered insect was tenacious, refusing to come out, and now avoided the tweezers, and seemed ready to burst into Jérôme’s skull, where it would be impossible to reach, and would flutter against the roof of his skull until the end of time.

  There’s nothing in the lad’s head, it’s an empty shell; his mother’s gone and passed on her madness.

  Meanwhile, Julie-Marie, using a flashlight to work, blindly shredded the wings, the legs, the thorax of the moth, until she could finally remove the remains of the insect, the thorax, head, the tip of a wing, and then: silence was restored, Julie-Marie stroked his hair to soothe him, her fingertips caked in the dust of the hawkmoth’s wings, her jeans wet with snot and tears…

  Perhaps he should listen to other butterflies, allow them to flutter into his head, maybe then his sister might come back to him, never mind the pain, which she will eventually take away with a pair of tweezers. But the bedroom is empty, gloomy in the yellow light and…

  She’ll fuck pretty much anyone, she doesn’t even charge. My brother told me.

  … Julie-Marie is gone, passing him over for other boys that she covers in kisses and caresses, whom she allows to cover her in kisses and caresses, insensible to the pain that Jérôme feels in his belly, in his throat at the very thought of her forbidden, naked body being offered up to hands, to eyes, to lips other than his.

  He goes over to the shelves laden with objects he does not recognize, frivolous things alien to the world of the farm, and, suddenly, he sweeps everything from the shelf with the back of his hand. The saucer crashes to the floor and shatters, reducing the perforated strips of charred incense paper to dust. From the wall, he rips a jigsaw puzzle in which white horses, yellow with age, have forever been running across a beach without reaching the end, then tears down the posters pinned over wallpaper peppered with holes over the years.

  Jérôme stamps on the slot-in record player until the red plastic shell cracks and shatters from the kicks. He takes Julie-Marie’s few vinyl records from their cardboard sleeves, grips them with both hands and snaps them over his knee. One by one, he grabs the dolls and rips off their arms, leaving gaping wounds in their torsos. Then Jérôme spots the schoolbag that has been tossed under the bed for the summer holidays. He sits down on the carpet and catches his breath. He crouches down, reaches in, grabs a strap and pulls the bag towards him. He opens it and pulls out the exercise books filled with careful cursive handwriting. He shreds the pages one by one, takes out the pencil case from the bag and opens the zip. A rain of little notes falls over his lap. Dozens of scraps of paper torn from the squared pages of exercise books and neatly folded. Jérôme unfolds them and lays them on the carpet in rows, the same letters, the same words, written by different hands, clumsy scrawls he manages to decipher with difficulty –

  SLUT

  DIRTY PIG

  WHORE

  – while the dolls pour onto the floor a bloodbath of stuffing.

  Henri rummages in the car for a bottle of water and drains it in one gulp. When he turns back towards the old oak, he catches a faint glimpse of the animal, standing motionless on the boundary of their lands where the figure of the father stood. Henri closes his eyes, runs a hand over his face, but when he opens them again, the boar is still there, in plain sight. A light breeze is blowing in the opposite direction and the Beast has probably not sensed his presence. Henri reaches his hand through the rolled-down window, gropes along the seat, never taking his eye off the animal, he feels his fingers close around the barrel of the rifle and pulls it towards him. He glances back towards the road. He has no time to warn the sons; it would mean letting the boar escape again.

  Henri walks perhaps a hundred metres along the edge of the maize field. From the road, he is now looking down over the coomb over which the crop field extends. The ears will soon be harvested, and right now are almost two metres tall. They sway gently in a light breeze, obstructing Henri’s view as he struggles to gauge his distance from the boar. To reach the animal, he must either skirt around the field or walk through it. Either way, the dense barrier formed by the maize means that he will lose sight of it. The brambles on the edge of the crop fields would hamper his progress and make it difficult to get close, so he decides to cut across the field. If he heads due east, he should come to the spot where the boar is standing. Henri sets off through the maize, pushing the heavy ears aside with the back of the hand. Although he leans on the rifle butt for support, every step requires a considerable effort. He moves silently along the furrow, staring at the dry, cracked earth beneath his feet. At this hour, the damp twilight still hovers over the field, exuding the sweet smell of maize mingled with that of the soil. From time to time, Henri looks up. As the sun bursts over the horizon, he is forced to close his eyes – the pupils abnormally dilated by his fever – against the blinding glare. On his closed eyelids, he sees an afterimage of the blazing sun and the moving shadow of the Beast.

  He advances painfully. The field seems to become more impenetrable as he progresses, the ears of maize standing stiffly as though to block his path. The chalky leaves slap against his arms, his face. Feeling himself suffocating, Henri pauses, hunkers down and lays one hand on the ground. All around, the field is rustling softly, a gentle hiss like a sea swell, and it feels as though the earth itself is beginning to sway, as though he can suddenly sense its perpetual motion. He feels drained by an exhaustion that is age-old, as old as the earth and its forlorn rotation. Henri lays the rifle on the ground, curls up like a hunting dog, and whimpers, his teeth chattering, and eventually he dozes off.

  He wakes to see a golden ground beetle, its shimmer
ing wing cases a metallic green, scuttle across his hand, drop to the ground and disappear between the tangled, adventitious roots. Henri gazes up at the sky towards which the ears of maize are pointing. He does not know whether he has been asleep, in a dreamless, formless sleep, or whether he passed out. He grabs the rifle and hauls himself to his feet using the butt. Many hours have clearly passed, because the sun is now high in the sky. Henri no longer knows which direction to take. He looks around to find his own footprints on the tamped, dusty ground and then continues his groping progress through the reddish ears of maize, pushing them aside with the rifle barrel before quickly moving forward, slashing at the stalks, which bend and break under the weight of the ripe ears.

  Suddenly, he finds himself on the edge of field, by a stony path. He glances around, struggling to catch his breath. He does not recognize anything, not even the field from which he has just emerged, which now seems to be a meadow of wild grasses, or the surrounding hills, which are melting from the light and his blurred vision. Henri does not recognize the topography, the crop rotation, or even a single tree that might confirm that he is still somewhere on the Plains. A flock of ducks passes overhead and he looks up, shielding his eyes with his hand, watching them fly away, expecting to see them suddenly disappear. He takes a few steps along the path, stumbling over the stones. Surely that is the boar he can suddenly see straight ahead of him? It looks to him as though the animal has raised its head. Is it possible that the Beast has been waiting for him all this time, while he was wandering lost in the field of maize? Henri dares not move, and the animal casually trots off along the stone path, stopping now and then and turning its head towards Henri, as though gauging the distance that separates them, making sure that the man is definitely following.