Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  Henri hesitates, glances around, feels his feverish forehead, then follows the animal, skirting copses and thickets. With an astonishingly agile bound, the Beast leaps over the ditch that separates the path from a field ground that looks like tillage, an expanse of fallow land covered with tall grasses through which the boar lurches, leaving a large breach in its wake. Henri in turn steps over the narrow ditch and takes a route that runs parallel to that of the boar, making sure to stay at least ten metres behind and to make no sudden movements. Henri kneels, opens the rifle breech, gripping it tightly to muffle the click, loads the chambers and gets to his feet again. He raises the barrel and attempts to get the animal in his sights, but his hands are trembling too much to hold it steady, and the sweat streaming from his forehead into his eyes blinds him.

  The Beast begins to move off again, changing its course, and Henri walks on, closing on the animal obliquely. Slowly, they reach the peak of the valley, from which they dominate the strangely tranquil countryside. Henri takes a few steps and surveys the landscape. From here, he should be able to see the Lada Niva, the scattering of farm buildings that circumscribe the Plains, the main road, the village of Puy-Larroque… But whichever way he turns, he sees only a vast expanse of wilderness that looks as though it has been stripped of the presence of men, given up to the ebb and flow of autumn light, vast wooded plains and grasslands on which there is not a single house or village, only the tops of ancient trees. Henri bites the inside of his cheek to make sure that he is not dreaming; a metallic taste washes over his palate.

  The Beast has stopped some twenty metres in front of him. Henri is not sure he recognizes the animal. The boar is thinner, sleeker. Its body is covered with a bushy coat. Its bristles are claggy with earth, leaf mould and dry grass. Curved, yellow tusks protrude from either side of the snout, and on its flanks are the white scars left by the chain-link fence. Henri raises the rifle, rests the trembling butt against his shoulder, and takes aim.

  Suddenly he recognizes what is in front of him, directly in his sights, the patch of worthless land in the middle of the Plains, this accursed strip of land where the father took his own life the day after general mobilization was declared. And now it is not the Beast but Marcel that he sees; Marcel who walked all this way, carrying the very same shotgun; Marcel who unlaced the heavy leather boots he waterproofed with lard, took them off and carefully set them next to each other, tucking his heavy woollen socks inside; Marcel who, bare feet planted in the earth, placed the rifle barrel under his chin and pressed the trigger with a toe slipped through the trigger guard, without a flicker of hesitation, spraying half of his skull into the warm air of a late afternoon, forty-three years ago.

  The first thing the sons find is the pickup truck, doors open, hazard lights blinking. They search for the father, they call out to him. The dog they brought with them eventually picks up his scent and, yapping, dashes off down one of the furrows of a field of maize, closely followed by the men. They find Henri, half-conscious, sprawled on his side next to his rifle amid the ears of corn. The sons wrap the father’s arms around their shoulders and easily lift him to his feet. This man who for so long they thought of as a colossus, heavy-set, imperious, is almost weightless now, and he lets himself be dragged back to the Lada Niva and laid on the back seat. When they get back to the farmhouse, Gabrielle rushes out to help them get him out of the truck, into the house and up the stairs. While Joël telephones the doctor, Serge and Gabrielle set about undressing Henri, whose trousers are stained with earth and urine, and whose shirt is drenched with sweat. Only then do they see his chest, his stomach, covered with black scabs, red patches, and yellowing bruises caused by his constant scratching.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Serge whispers.

  They manage to sit him up and pull on a T-shirt. Henri watches them, his eyes half-closed; he looks like one of the pathetic, shrivelled, worn-out old men in hospices who it is impossible to imagine were ever anything other than these pale imitations of human beings.

  An hour later, when he leaves Henri’s bedside after his examination, the doctor joins them in the kitchen and sets his briefcase on the table. Gabrielle pours him a cup of coffee, but he waves it away.

  ‘You should have called an ambulance straightaway,’ he says. ‘We need to get him to hospital.’

  ‘Have you seen the marks on his body?’ Serge says. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Lymphoma. Your father has cancer, it’s very advanced. He didn’t tell you about it?’

  The brothers glance at each other and say nothing.

  ‘He came to me a number of months ago complaining of fever, swollen glands…’

  ‘So what did you prescribe?’

  ‘Nothing. We did tests, but he refused treatment. He forbade me from saying anything to any of you. It’s not for want of trying, on several occasions. I warned him of the risks he was running… But he refused everything: no treatment, no additional tests, he wouldn’t even come to see me at the surgery… You know your father.’

  ‘So, if he goes in to hospital now, is there anything that can be done? Is there a chance he might go into remission?’ Joël asks.

  The doctor shakes his head.

  ‘I don’t think you understand. There is no chance of remission. At this stage, treatment is not even an option. The fact that he has survived this long without treatment is a miracle. All anyone can do now is try to alleviate his suffering.’

  When the paramedics carry him out of the house, Éléonore, who saw the ambulance drive into the farmyard, opens her door and steps out onto her porch. Joël goes over to her, takes her elbow and leads her to the stretcher. The grandmother looks at her son. She brushes his cheek with her dry palm, runs her fingers through his grey beard. She clasps Henri’s hand in gnarled fingers with raddled veins and tendons sharp as blades. She has not seen him for weeks, perhaps months; she barely recognizes him. Henri brings her hand up to his chest, squeezes it briefly, then lets go. The paramedics carry the stretcher across the yard and carefully load it into the ambulance, and the clan gathered in the farmyard watches as it drives away, taking the patriarch with it. For a long time, Éléonore stands there, swaying in the light, leaning on Joël’s arm. She says:

  ‘Help me,’ and he walks her back to her home and settles her in her chair in the living room.

  ‘He’s very sick,’ he says. ‘He didn’t say a word to us. We didn’t know… I’m sorry.’

  The grandmother looks at him with her pale, stern eyes.

  ‘For a mother, even one as old as I am, even one who knows she’ll soon be dead, to see her son die, it should be… I’m the one who is sorry… Sorry for losing him … I lost him so long ago now that I feel nothing.’

  She beats her narrow chest with the flat of her hand, then beats it again.

  ‘Don’t you understand? I don’t feel anything. I don’t even feel grief anymore.’

  Serge steps away from the farm, losing himself in the local bars. Now he rarely gets up before midafternoon and spends hours slumped on the sofa with the television on in the background, chain-smoking, drinking endless coffees and bottles of Johnnie Walker that quickly strew the floor, before disappearing again until dawn the following morning. Soon, Joël is the only one to take the path to the pig sheds. One morning, he finds that the infection has spread to all the pig units. He sends a first set of samples to the laboratory, but the test results that come a week later are all negative. When he gets them, Joël walks back to the house, goes into the kitchen and tosses the papers on the table, where Serge is sitting.

  ‘Look at them. There’s nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing! No sign of pathogens in the blood samples, nothing in the miscarried foetuses. No bacteria, no antigens. They found a small amounts of mycotoxins in the feed, but not enough to explain the miscarriages.’

  Serge stares vacantly at the papers.

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ he says.

  Joël suddenly spreads the papers in front of him.

>   ‘This morning, I found two more dying sows… We’re getting more and more deaths in the feedlot, sick sows in the farrowing house and there’s no end to the miscarriages… None of it makes sense…’

  Serge lights a cigarette. His hands now tremble visibly, the large purple circles under his eyes eat into his cheek. He says nothing, but takes a deep drag on his cigarette, stifling a spasm of pleasure or disgust.

  ‘If you could see him,’ he says, blowing a plume smoke, ‘if you could see him in his hospital gown, with his arse hanging out… He’s completely pathetic… I sat next to him for hours, waiting for him to wake up, you know… And when he opened his eyes and he saw me sitting by his bedside, he waved me closer… I could tell it took him every ounce of strength just to wave me over… So I got up from the chair and I leaned over to listen… and d’you know what he said? He told me to leave… Yep, told me to get out of his sight… So I wouldn’t have to see him in that state, reduced to… Told me to let him die alone, with dignity… What kind of son would do that? What kind of son would leave his father to die alone… I didn’t move, I wasn’t sure I had heard him right, or maybe I wanted to reason with him… He grabbed me by the shirt and yelled at me to get out… He managed to scream at me to get out… He spat in my face like he never wanted to see me again… and jerked his finger towards to the door so roughly he pulled out the IV drip and started bleeding all over the sheet and he didn’t even notice… Me – after everything I’ve done for him, after I sacrificed my whole fucking life for the man… that’s how… that’s how he treats me … And d’you want to know what I did? I said nothing, Joël… I didn’t say a fucking word… I did what I’ve been doing ever since I was born… I obeyed, I put my head down, gave up and left the hospital room…’

  He stubs the cigarette out in the bottom of his coffee cup. At first, Joël is silent, then he gets to his feet and says:

  ‘We’ll take things in hand. I’ve told Leroy to come take another set of samples from the sows. We’ll have more tests done. Sooner or later, they’ll find out what’s going on. I counted more than thirty miscarriages in the past month. You have to help me, Serge, otherwise the animals are going to die in droves.’

  ‘You really don’t get it, do you? All this… The units… the pigs… We’re not up to it, you and me, it’s… We’re never going to solve anything, fix anything…’

  Serge grabs the bottle of Johnnie Walker and is about to pour another glass, but Joël snatches it and hurls it against the wall, where it shatters.

  ‘You’re as much to blame as me, you get that? As much as me, and as much as the old man.’

  Serge shrugs.

  ‘Yeah, sure, fine. So what?’

  Joël jabs an accusing finger at Serge, then gives up and storms out of the house, slamming the door so hard he splits the frame.

  Jérôme looks at the dolls. He and Julie-Marie went on holiday with them countless times. Whenever she decided, it was holiday time; then she would haphazardly stuff a few things into a suitcase, a pair of shorts, a few T-shirts, some underwear and socks, and she would lead Jérôme to the rusty carcass of the Renault 4CV propped up on breeze blocks in the long grass at the back of the farmhouse.

  Julie-Marie would settle him next to the dolls in the back seat and tell him to keep an eye on his sisters and not to bother them, because it only takes a second for an accident to happen, a momentary distraction and, bam crash wallop, you’ve got a tragedy on your hands, you end up in a ditch or wrapped around a tree, your body broken and tangled with the arms and legs, the hollow heads of the dolls… She would slam the creaking door, whose windows had long since turned green, and, for the time it took her to walk around the car, she would leave Jérôme alone inside the car that smelled of rust and hot metal, of rotting foam seats soaked with the piss of the cats who took shelter here, crawling in through one of the many gaps made in the bodywork by time, rust and humidity.

  Then Julie-Marie would settle into the driver’s seat, facing the missing steering wheel – the fathers stripped the wrecked cars and sold the pieces for spare parts – adjusted the rear-view mirror, on which the silvering is pitted, made sure that the imaginary siblings were sitting quietly; then she would announce their destination – which was never anything other than ‘the sea’ or ‘the mountains’, the only places they knew existed in the outside world – before slotting the invisible key into the ignition, cursing when the missing engine coughed and spluttered, and then finally sat back in her seat with a satisfied air, arms outstretched in the empty space, when she heard it purr into life.

  They would drive off, leaving behind the farm, Puy-Larroque, the familiar fields, and Jérôme would listen as Julie-Marie described the landscapes they were passing through, harbouring curious treasures, troglodyte villages, volcanoes that belched clouds of ash and spewed glowing lava down their slopes, lakes from whose still, shimmering surface leapt flying fish with metallic scales, vast grey cities which rose up into the sky, fashioned by the hands of men, while steep granite cliffs crumbled into the roiling seas as they drove past, risking their lives along the winding ribbon of road. Jérôme would listen, staring at the overgrown garden through the green windows of the Renault 4CV, seeing nothing but the wrecks of cars, vans, washing machines, and his head would begin to nod and he would doze off. He would wake up a moment later: Julie-Marie was no longer in the car, the door was open. When the sun blazed, the battered car was like a furnace. Sometimes it was one of the fathers, sometimes Catherine or Gabrielle who would call to him from the yard and wake him, sweating, from his daydreams. At such moments he truly had the impression of having travelled through space and time, through infinite dimensions and other universes.

  When Julie-Marie was driving, Jérôme would sometimes grab the dolls, pull their hair, bang them against the windows or the seats, or twist their arms and legs, while Julie-Marie scolded and threatened that if they carried on misbehaving she would pull over on the side of the road, get in the back and give them a good thrashing, something she would promptly do, suddenly jerking the invisible steering wheel, braking as hard as possible, getting out of the car and throwing open the rear door. She would climb into the back or order Jérôme to take down his pants and knickers and get over her knee so she could give him a spanking, muttering you’re-a-very-naughty-boy in the same tone she used to scold the dolls when they refused to eat the mud porridge she gave them, and Jérôme would wriggle voluptuously as she slapped his bare buttocks, pressed against Julie-Marie’s thighs, able to feel all the prickly, translucent little hairs under the indifferent eyes and half-smiles of the dolls.

  You’re-a-very-very-naughty-little-boy.

  Julie-Marie used to go everywhere wearing the tutu of pale pink tulle that Catherine bought at a garage sale because Julie-Marie dreamed of learning ballet like other girls at school; but that would have meant someone driving the few kilometres separating Puy-Larroque from the little town where ballet classes were held twice a week after school, and no one ever found the time.

  Lying on Julie-Marie’s bed, Jérôme presses his face into the pillow and remembers her dancing around the farmyard, performing pas de chat and sauts de biche with the dogs yapping and scampering after her: delirious with joy, she would rehearse the steps she taught her dolls, quick to scold them or slap them with a ruler if they were inattentive, or their pointe work was sloppy. She would invite Jérôme to attend these performances, creating an ambiance by artistically draping old sheets over curtain rods and covering the lamps to create a muted glow, and the boy would watch her ceremoniously repeating the same movements in her little makeshift theatre.

  She looked like the little ballerina in the great-grandmother’s music box, which she used to wind up so that he could watch the dancer pirouette on her minuscule stage, but the clockwork mechanism had broken and the box now sat on a shelf between the little bone-china cats and, like them, was covered with a layer of grey fluff and dust. Maybe Julie-Marie’s cogs had finally jammed too, and what
had become of the tutu in pale pink tulle? It had probably been relegated to the back of a wardrobe or to the toy box.

  Isn’t this what is happening to him, too? Hasn’t he, like the dolls lying dead on the carpet, become superfluous, redundant, like all the things Julie-Marie now seems ashamed of and dismisses as childish? Toys fit for a baby or a little girl, while she now prefers the boys from the outside world… Does she put on shows for them, perform sexy dances? Has she played make believe or only pretend the way she used to with him, when she would make him kiss her closed fist, squeezing her fingers tight and pressing her hand to his mouth?

  ‘You stick out your tongue and twirl it around, keep your eyes closed. Close your eyes, I said!’

  And Jérôme would practise on his own fist, and later on a hole in the bark of a tree, a hollow in a misshapen stone, the mouth of one of the dogs, which would joyfully lick his face with its pink, soft tongue.

  ‘What are you doing, you filthy little pig?’

  Julie-Marie had popped her head around the door of one of the kennels where Jérôme used to go, back when he was still small enough to crawl inside and lie down entirely on the straw and smelly old blankets. He looks at her without even thinking about taking his hand from the sheath of the dog he is masturbating for the very good reason that the dog enjoys it. Julie-Marie shakes her finger under her nose and frowns. She scolds him now, and drags him from the kennel by his feet.

  How can he know what is good and what’s bad? The dog likes it, doesn’t he? Is it really more wicked than sticking a tongue into his fist, or even between the silken thighs of Julie-Marie when she lies down in a makeshift bed in the middle of a wheatfield and pushes her knickers down to her knees covered with scabs and grazes?