We’re not supposed to do it anymore, we’re not supposed to do it anymore.
Why is it not wrong to hit the animals, to rip away hunks of flesh, to smash their heads against a wall or drown them in a bucket, and why is it wrong to give pleasure to the animals or to Julie-Marie? Even Gabrielle lectures him when she catches him playing with his own penis or those of the twins.
‘Stop tugging on it or it’ll fall off. Don’t do that in front of other people. And leave the twins in peace.’
Jérôme sees Henri set the piglet down on the duckboard and point the scalpel in his direction; one of the testicles he has just cut is still stuck to the side of his hand.
‘You know that way you’ve got of looking at your sister, well, I don’t like it one fucking bit.’
Don’t the fathers masturbate the boars to multiply the pigs ‘like the loaves and fishes’? His body is not distinct from those of animals, of plants, of stones. He desires them all equally.
What can he do to hold on to Julie-Marie, to make sure things do not change and disappear? Little Émilie Seilhan, who drowned in the washhouse pond she had been forbidden from playing near, has never changed. The cameo photograph set into the marble headstone has simply faded with time, the glass has been covered by greenish moss, but she is still the same little girl with the same faraway stare, the same pale skin, wearing her dress with crocheted collar and cuffs; she will never tire of the games Jérôme plays with her, she will always be waiting at the bottom of the old washhouse pool, ready to listen to the stories he makes up, to follow his snake hunts, to swim beneath him amid the shadows and the algae. Does she play, or does she simply remember, making vague, weary gestures out of habit, mere memories of games? It hardly matters, since she will forever be little Émilie Seilhan, his one and only friend, frozen in the memory of Puy-Larroque when she drowned in the washhouse pool – around which the villagers erected stakes and a chain-link fence that has quickly rusted – and who is mentioned in warning to children, don’t you go playing near the old washhouse or you’ll end up like little Émilie, or like the little Seilhan girl, though most of them are not sure she ever truly existed.
This is what it would take to keep Julie-Marie: for her to sink to the bottom of the washhouse pool, or the bottom of lake. She would probably go willingly if she was aware of the insidious changes taking place in them, of the discord, the tensions caused by her. And if Catherine or the fathers should forget, Jérôme will always be there to remember his sister as she was, as she should always be.
He could bring her back to life whenever he wanted, as he does little Émilie Seilhan, and she would spend the rest of her time partly in the alluvial mud of the lake, partly in the earth of Puy-Larroque cemetery. To make sure that time did not drag for her, he would slip the dolls into Julie-Marie’s coffin, having persuaded Gabrielle to refill and sew up their bellies. He would line them up around the sides, pressed against the pleated silk padding, and Julie-Marie would wear her tutu in pale pink tulle so she could pirouette at the bottom of the lake and teach little Émilie Seilhan to do pas de chats and sauts de biches.
Or, after he drowned Julie-Marie in the lake, Jérôme would carry her body to the old ruined chapel and lay it on the altar sometimes dappled with coloured light from the last stained-glass window. She would remain perfectly unscathed, like a photograph beneath a glass cameo set into a gravestone, like the princesses in the fairytales she used to read, who lie in castles buried in dark forests or in glass coffins.
Has she been asleep for days, for weeks, for months? She feels as though she has woken from an unfathomable bottomless night where time has been abolished, from a narcotic limbo in which images and voices were projected onto the vortex of her ruined consciousness without her being certain that she could distinguish between them.
She sits on the edge of the bed. A dull blue line behind the curtains, through the gap between the shutters. Catherine gets up and walks to the window and opens it. She pushes back the shutters and they bang against the outside wall. Dawn is diluting the darkness of the farmyard. She breathes in the scents of autumn, the smell of the brimming earth, the rotting trunks, the layers of leaf mould. She surveys the chiaroscuro of the bedroom. The things, the objects appear to her exactly as they are, static and pathetic: the limescale-streak vase next to the bed, the picture Julie-Marie drew long ago on the bare plaster, the dressing table whose mirror traps the diaphanous reflection of the room and her dried-up body in her nightdress.
When Jérôme was born, her mother, knowing nothing of the cancer growing in her own breast, spent all day sitting in the plastic hospital chair next to her. This is what Catherine remembers, this, and the impression of a determinism she can never escape: she will one day be forced to sit by a hospital bed, to sit by her own daughter, and though old and disillusioned, she will be forced to rejoice at the birth of this child, this grandchild, to see the lineage, even if corrupt, carried on, or perhaps be satisfied that there is a place in the world for this child, that there is meaning and legitimacy to this new life, to this continuation, that there is truth and beauty in all this.
Catherine takes off her nightdress, folds it and sets it on the rush seat of the chair. She feels a chill course through her and runs a hand over her arm, her breast, her side. The sensation is no longer one of pain; she feels the presence of this body that had become alien to her, that she once more incarnates, as though she has breathed new life into herself. She observes with a new acuity its gestures, its feelings, its contours, the downstrokes and the upstrokes. She walks over to the dresser, opens a drawer and randomly chooses the clothes she will put on. Did she not wake up one morning after Jérôme was born, crushed by a baleful sense, a vast shadow, that left her for dead, as though expelled from herself, unable to care for the child, unable even to care about him?
A bright spring day, when the feathery buds of the magnolia in the fallow field split open to reveal soft, white petals and the body of her mother, ravaged by chemotherapy and by surgeries, is laid to rest, she cannot even get out of the car unaided. Gabrielle and Serge have to support her every step of the way as she moves through the small cemetery following the funeral procession, so deathly pale that it seems that it is she they are about to bury. The daylight sears her retinas, and the cawing of crows that keep their distance, perching on the tombstones, bores into her eardrums. In fact, she feels no grief, nor even sympathy for her father, lost among all the people, all this ritual, glancing around for his daughters’ approval – am I sitting in the right place? Am I behaving appropriately? Am I saying the right words? Am I going in the right direction? Catherine would like to hide him from her view, to blot out the light and the voices, the feeling of Serge’s hand on her arm, the black hole of the grave, the sympathetic mourners and the cawing of the crows. As soon as the ceremony is ended, she begs Serge to drive her home. The death of her mother, the solitude of the father she sees less and less, her own divagation, punctuated by periods of remission in which she finds the children changed, grown up, more distant and more alien, before she is once again engulfed by her private shadows; this is the story of the next eleven years, until this damp, chill autumn morning at daybreak when she makes her preparations, knowing nothing of the plight of the pig farm, of the long-supressed violence now unleashed and about to swoop on them. In the silence, she dresses, filled with a sudden realization: there is nothing now to keep her prisoner. Not these walls, nor the men. Not even the children, whose presence she somehow senses beyond the walls. What has she ever had to offer them?
She takes nothing with her. She leaves the room and walks along the corridor. As she passes the sepulchral bedroom of the patriarch, she sees the door has been left ajar, and she stares at the bare mattress, at the elastic straps of the mattress protector hugging the corners. On the nightstand, the photograph frame lies in shadows. The photograph looks as though it has been blackened with a magnifying glass, as though the storm brewing in the background has reached the branches o
f the hazel tree, has reached Élise, engulfing her completely. All that remains is the figure of a child, still running, never reaching the edge of the frame, who now seems to be fleeing the ominous darkness pursuing him. Catherine goes down the stairs as quietly as possible. As she heads for the front door, she sees Serge slumped on the sofa in the living room that reeks of smoke, stale sweat and the alcohol fumes he exhales as he sleeps. She goes over, stares at him for a long time, before bending down and laying a hand to his forehead. He whimpers in his sleep and then falls silent; Catherine turns away. She opens the front door and leaves the farm. She walks past the dark ditches, sometimes running jerkily for a short distance, and with each step she breaks the invisible ties that bind her. The scutch grass on the verge crunches beneath her shoes. Further off, towards the Plains, as the sun rises, migratory birds take wing from the powerlines and the trees where they perched for the night, forming vast ink blots in the sky. When Catherine eventually glances back over her shoulder, the farm is no longer visible, a huge sleeping beast, mired beyond the valleys of the Plains.
Joël works like a man possessed, alone among the pigs, breathing the putrid miasma of the pig sheds. His muscles are sapped, his arms ache with tendonitis. Every day, the ritual is the same. In addition to the daily maintenance, he inspects the stalls, tosses the stillborn piglets and the placentas into buckets, washes down the animal pens with a pressure hose and tirelessly scrapes the concrete.
The acrid stench of Cresyl and slurry attacks his bronchia, burns his sinuses and his throat. Sometimes, he still believes that he might manage to contain the epidemic, that he might find favour in the eyes of Henri, perhaps even of Serge. He will prove his worth to them. Perhaps he might even bring the news to his father dying in his hospital bed, explain to him how he saved the piggery. A moment later, the very notion seems stupefying. Why should he break his back to save the pig units everyone has abandoned? Is he not the one who has dreamed that the family business, the farm, the clan would collapse? But does he not owe it to Serge, to Catherine? And, after all, to Jérôme?
He tries to push back the tide of the excrement produced by the pigs, and the slurry pit relentlessly continues to fill, but it is a task he cannot achieve, one that would require two or three men. The phone in the office rings all day long, but he never has the time or the energy to answer. Because the shit continues to collect in corners, quickly forming stinking, infectious little mounds where flies come to lay their eggs, the same flies that swarm around the pigs, clustering around their eyes, the snouts, around every orifice. Soon, pale larvae begin to hatch, millions of them slithering through the mud that overflows from the drainage channels and over the walkways as slowly and inexorably as a lava flow.
By the end of September, the contagion has spread to every building in the piggery. Joël begins to dread that he too could be infected. Does he, too, not breathe in this miasma? Does he not spend all day handling the pigs? When he showers, he washes himself with bleach, and the smell soon begins to trail after him, though he never quite gets rid of the stench of the pigs. Before long, superficial burns cover his eyelids, his lips, his genitals. He rubs his skin with surgical spirit, whimpering in pain.
He continues to tip the waste behind the pig units, but all too quickly there are the bodies of the stillborn piglets, then the gilts, then the fattening pigs to be loaded onto the barrow and removed from the units. Almost all the sows are now suffering from purulent metritis. Thick, blood-streaked pus flows off their vulvas and collects in large pinkish pools that mingle with the shit on the floor of the pens. Joël tries to help them to stand. He pushes at their rumps, desperately beats them with a stick. They try to stand in order to get away from him, but collapse under their own weight. They shriek, and he begins to shriek with them.
Joël loses all track of time. An hour spent in the pig units feels like an eternity. After a time, he no longer leaves. He sleeps in the father’s office, on a bench in the changing room, or sometimes on the floor. He eats the grain intended for the pigs. He pisses and shits like them in the middle of the walkways. Behind the bars of the stalls, the dying animals crawl through a sea of slurry. He decides to slaughter them, with all his strength, with a pickaxe buried in their skulls. Seeing him kill one of their own, the sows no longer have the strength to try to flee; they crumple and wait for their turn to come.
The lighter carcasses he manages to pile up on the flagstone over the pit, then he douses them in petrol and sets them ablaze. Columns of oily smoke rise in the stagnant air. The stench of the contaminated crimson flesh makes him puke his guts up so he decides to simply toss the bodies into the slurry pit, where they float, swell with the gases released during putrefaction, and eventually explode.
Because he can no longer find the strength, Joël stops feeding the animals. Starving and sick, the pigs become aggressive. They begin to attack each other. When one of them suffers a prolapse, the others sometimes eat the organs, leaving the pig disembowelled and half-dead. The rats no longer hide. Hundreds of them swarm into the pens, swimming through the faecal sludge Joël can no longer contain, leaping from one dead body to another, feasting on the bodies, devouring the cartilage first, the ears, the snouts, before starting on the thick layers of fat. As he is trying to haul the carcass of a young boar from one of the pig sheds, Joël hears a cracking sound in his back and crumples to the ground, felled by the pain. He has to crawl over to the railings of the stall to pull himself to his feet. Ever since, he simply leaves the bodies to rot.
One morning, he is woken from sluggish sleep by the telephone ringing. He finally answers.
‘Jesus Christ, I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for over a week!’
‘I’m sorry – who is this?’ Joël says, hoarse from his constant shouting and from the acid of the pig sheds.
‘It’s Leroy. That you, Serge? How are things there?’
‘It’s Joël… Things are… well… it’s pretty complicated, here… Is there any news?
‘Yeah. I had the lab run more exhaustive tests on the last round of samples. Something about the haematologic profiles didn’t add up, so I wanted to double-check. The leukocyte count was off. The count had been fine up until now, that’s what misled me and cost us valuable time. The samples show an increase in monocytes and…’
‘Can you be more clear?’ interrupted Joël.
‘It’s a sign that the pigs’ immune system is out of whack, that there’s a chronic infection in the livestock. I asked for more tests from a specialized laboratory. Turns out that twenty-two of twenty-five sows and five of the six stillborn piglets tested positive to brucellosis…’
‘It’s not possible,’ Joël says.
‘I grant you it’s pretty rare, especially with enclosed breeding. The usual cause is contamination by a wild boar, or sometimes through contact with carrion…’
‘With carrion?’
‘From small animals, for example… Though it’s not impossible that a carrier was brought in with the last replacement gilts.’
Joël says nothing for a moment but stares at the livestock planner on the wall opposite.
‘How do we deal with it?’ he says at length.
‘There’s only one way, I’m afraid: all the animals will have to be destroyed. An abattoir will be requisitioned by the Veterinary Services Directorate, sealed trucks will come and collect the animals from the farm. They’ll be counted in and counted out to make sure that there are no escaped animals. Listen… there’s something else I need to tell you… This type of epidemic is considered to be the responsibility of the breeder… There is no question of there being any compensation.’
After he hangs up, Joël wanders, dazed, among the pens. The pigs behind the barriers are no longer squealing. A strange silence hovers over the piggery. From time to time, a cloud of flies, disturbed by a rat or the convulsions of a dying pig, rise to reveal a carcass, and the air is filled with buzzing, then they settle again, drape the carcass with a quivering metallic shr
oud. Here and there, a healthy half-starved boar or gilt can be seen wading through the putrid sludge of a pen, avoiding the half-buried carcasses. Their pale skin covered by layers of excrement makes their eyes, wide with terror and hunger, seem clearer, more penetrating. They see the man pacing the walkways, taking small steps, gripping the planks and railings of the enclosures so he can extricate his boots from the slurry. His face, his neck, his hands, his arms are also spattered with shit and pus. His eyes move sightless from one pig to the next. He draws back the bolts, raises the latches, opens the pens. Some of the pigs burst from the stalls into the walkways, looking around wildly. Joël pushes open the great sliding doors, allowing sunlight and fresh air to sweep the pestilence from the buildings.
He goes out to the back of the pig units, followed by young, blinded animals, weaving their way across the large flagstone, not knowing which way to run. One of them runs into the boundary fence and falls into the slurry pit. Stock-still, his arms hanging limp, the man watches as it floats among the corpses for a moment before it sinks, disappearing in viscid swirls. Joël goes around the pig units to the storeroom where Henri stores the jerrycans of petrol, loads them onto a barrow which he pushes to the hay barn. He unscrews the cap of one of the canisters and pours half of it over the ricks and the bales. He then goes into each of the pig units, moving down the walkways, holding a jerrycan high above the pens and stalls, splashing the wooden partitions, the piles of carcasses, the feed trolleys filled with grain. Swarms of rats escape across the roof beams. The healthy pigs bolt as he approaches, letting out an endless wail. Others, half-dead, lie on their flanks, and from their open mouths there comes only a deep groan as Joël douses them with petrol.
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