Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  Jérôme wakes on a bed of springy twigs and russet leaves. He returns from among the dead, from a sleep without dreams, without consciousness that, at first, he struggles to shake off, engulfed by nothingness. Through half-closed eyes, the daylight catches on his lashes in explosions of colour and quivering lines. Majestic nebulae of shadows merge and sunder. He feels nothing, neither the weight of his body resting on the vegetal bed, nor the shadow of the ruins. He has no recollection of the preceding hours, nor of a previous existence; he is filled only by a feeling of deep, deafening peace. Then, the diffuse, impalpable world re-emerges as the child returns to his own surfaces. He feels his aching muscles, the envelope of his body. He opens his eyes and sees the treetops, the branches between which the pale sky crumbles and falls, then, leaning one hand on the ground, he sits up.

  The child recognizes his temple, the ruins of walls buried beneath thick ivy, the flagstones displaced by roots, between which grow saxifrage and dry stalks of foxgloves, the powdery remains of timbers and gravel. His pale eyes move over the scene, and then he gets to his feet, reeling a little before finding his balance. Where the choir once stood, the child finds an ossuary, antlers green with moss supported on stones, scattered furs and strips of leather that hang from huge, dry branches like delicate, softly hissing fruits, skeletal remains piled up to create animist ossuaries, where the pale skulls of rodents are cleverly dovetailed with those of small carnivores, greyish skeletons with delicate ribcages, the tusks of wild boars, vertebrae of every kind strung on slender cords, wisps of brindle fur, red or brown, the tails of squirrels, of foxes, of badgers, the remains of toads and hedgehogs squashed on the roads. Against the apse, blurred shapes give up their mysteries in streams of blackish fluid.

  The child bursts from between the thickets of brambles, stumbles between the trees. Arms stretched out before him, he walks like a blind man, bumps into tree trunks, trips over stones, plunges down ditches and falls into the dry riverbeds of brooks and streams. When he finally reaches the edge of the wood, he rushes into the light and walks down the middle of the road, a drunken urchin dressed in rags, scratched by thorns, arms hanging limp, besmirched with mud from the lake, his face hidden beneath a brown mask, from which wild eyes stare out. He moves like an animal, his body shaken by spasms and shudders, his limbs twitching with sudden jerky movements as hoarse, uncontrollable sounds emerge from his throat. He walks past the cemetery, where the gravestones exude the smell of sepulchres and sweet stone. The dead who lie beneath the earth and the marble tombstones nostalgically recall the sun of each day dipping behind the valleys of Puy-Larroque, leaving a sky so crimson and spectacular that it brought a pang of emotion to even the oldest among them to their dying day.

  When he reaches the farm, Jérôme stops in the middle of the yard. Pigs are wailing close by, wild-eyed piglets scurry between the broken cars, the rusted remains of agricultural machinery and washing machines, the gutted sofas on which chickens perch and squawk. An acrid smoke rises from behind the house, a black tombstone against the cloudless morning sky. In the kennels, the dogs are barking frantically, charging the chain-link fence, which bends under the weight of the pack. Spittle sprays from their mouths and gets caught in the mesh of the fence. The child watches as the column of smoke sucks up hot embers that burn and whirl and disappear. The crackling blaze grows louder. A gilt hurtles around a corner of the building, letting out a long, shrill wail. She stumbles across the yard, flanks smeared with soot, bristles charred, flesh raw, trailing a smell of burnt pork rind. Suddenly, a few metres from Jérôme, she slows, then crumples, falling onto her flank, her restless trotters twitching. Her eyes blink as she stares up at the sky. The child crouches down and lays a hand on the gilt’s head. The lashes of her dark, wide eyes tickle the palm of his hand.

  The child walks towards the house, pauses when he comes to the door, then walks on towards the old barn in the west wing of the farmhouse. He taps on the window. The door quickly opens and the old woman appears. She stares at him through eyes reddened by years of sitting by the hearth, and for the first time, the look, which has always seemed to him to be stern, unyielding, is simply that of an old woman who is distraught or perhaps a little mad. The cats dart between her legs and she makes no move to stop them; they race across the farmyard, disappearing under broken engines and piles of scrap iron. Then she sees him, beneath the mud mask, the last of the herd, the boy-so-like-his-uncle, the filthy, mute, unruly bastard. He holds out his hands and she looks down at the open hands and palms the child is showing her, caked in mud like the rest of him. She grabs him by the wrists, flexing her scrawny arms with their pale, translucent skin. The child feels the gentle pressure of her fingers. She gently pulls him towards her and he steps into the dark room. Still gripping the boy’s arm, the old woman closes the door. She leads him into the kitchen, to the sink. She lifts up his T-shirt and takes it off, revealing his pale belly, his skinny torso. The child makes no protest. The walls muffle the cries of the dogs and the pigs; they cannot yet hear the distant wail of the fire truck speeding towards the farm. In the eyes of the old woman, the boy sees a profound weariness, and he realizes that she might have lived for a thousand years before he was born. In her pale eyes, he also sees something else, something to which he cannot put a name. She recognizes him for what he is. She realizes that every second of her life has been leading to this moment, in which she steers the child, one hand on the nape of his neck, bends him over the sink, runs clear water into the hollow of her hands and washes his face.

  The Beast is wide awake, unsettled by the proximity of sows in heat, whose smell reaches him through the porous partition walls of the building dedicated to gestation. With his snout, he pushes against the gate of his stall. The latch is slightly loose – it rattles and jiggles every time he hits the metal bars. He headbutts the gate, grips one of the railings in his jaws, pushes, pulls it towards him, then pushes again, and gradually the screws come loose from their sockets. After hours of patient manipulation, the bolt and the latch clatter onto the bare concrete walkway, the gate swings open and the boar charges, ready to face the wall of men massed against him. He trots past other stalls, he smells four other breeders that wake as he passes, and, beyond the porous walls, the whiff of nervous gilts, of pregnant sows and piglets. His hulking mass moves silently though the darkness.

  He is guided by another smell, one more urgent than that of sows in heat; it is the faint scent of the night, filtering through the chinks and cracks of the building. The Beast trots back along the walkway to the main door. He presses his snout into the gap, and with a fierce jerk of his head slides the door back on its track. He steps out onto the huge concrete slab, looks up and takes a breath. The countryside is dark and still. A shudder of excitement trills through the massive body of the boar. For a moment, he glances at the doors of the farrowing house, where the fertile sows have sensed his presence from his pheromones and his heavy breath, then the Beast turns away and trots towards the chain-link fence that bounds the piggery. Beyond, the countryside rolls away, shimmering and fragrant with the scent of grasses and tubers, of unfamiliar animals and small prey, of damp bushes and ancient orchards that are blue in the moonlight. The boar bites and twists and without much difficulty rips the chain-link fence, creating a hole through which he can slip his head, then he rests all his weight on the mesh, bowing the fence and bending the stakes set into concrete. The opening becomes large enough for him to push his forelegs through. The broken ends of wire sink into his flesh, gouging all along his back and his flanks. His shrill wail pierces the night, maddening the dogs that have already caught his scent in their kennels in the yard. The Beast redoubles his efforts, struggles, and manages to rip from the posts a section of fence that quivers and violently snaps back as he breaks free. Wild with pain, he gallops into the middle of the fallow field. He has never run before. He begins to discovers his mass and the force he must exert in order to move. Blood streams from his wounds and trickles between his bristle
s. He stands, dazed by his exertions, by his new freedom and the quivering night his eyes probe, his pupils dilated. He can make out the dreary pig units that, until now, have been the confines of his world. Beyond them, he can see the dark mass of the main farmhouse, which to him is not more than a shadow that exudes the hostile smell of men and dogs. He does not know that upstairs, behind the thick walls of brick and mortar, the men are plunged into a common sleep. In their dreams, the great formless mass of pigs is closing in.

  For a long time, the Beast runs, bewildered by the night, by the confusion of scents and strange sounds. He is forced to slow, by his breathlessness, his weight, his aching joints. Accustomed to concrete and to slatted floors, at first he avoids the soft ground, the wet grass that hides ditches and perhaps other dangers. He trots along the road, on the hard ground, towards the cloudless horizon, until he is surprised by distant, moving lights and freezes. His heart his hammering hard and fast, his breath condenses into vapour, though the night is warm. The wound along his flanks begins to dry and form long black streaks, clogging his bristles. As the headlights of the car approach, he veers left, clumsily jumps across the ditch, and plunges into the shadowy field, while behind him, headlights flare, lighting up the landscape, and a rumbling sound whips past. The noise of the engine recedes. The Beast turns back towards the road and breathes. The scent of his own kind has faded; he can barely smell it, though he recognizes it among hundreds, perhaps thousands of other scents as unsettling as they are exhilarating. He considers retracing his steps because he is beginning to feel thirsty, his mouth and throat dry, but then he turns away and carries on walking. He takes a rocky path, startling a group of rabbits, and the noise they make as they scamper into the thicket frightens him and makes him start. He stands for a moment, studying the dark vegetation in which unfamiliar animals are rustling. The moon emerges and reveals the bluish landscape to the boar’s eyes. He walks for hours, crossing crop fields and fallow land, here and there trampling young stalks of maize. He warily avoids the farms and houses, the barking dogs, the hovering lights, the rumbling roads. He stops on the bank of a reservoir and drinks, oblivious to the young she-goat watching him from the far bank.

  When the night pales and tinges the fields with blue, he retreats into a grove of sessile oak and digs a wallow, excavating humus and loose soil from between two fallen trunks. He rootles through the undergrowth in search of the roots and feeds on them. This animal, who never made a nest in the cramped confines of the pig shed stall, gathers mouthfuls of leaves and dry moss from under the trees, soft twigs, a tattered old shirt buried among the roots long since left by men that he digs up. He piles everything into the hollow he has created to form a tangled nest, crawls inside and lies down. There, in the comforting darkness, he rests his aching muscles and listens to the creaking of the woods, the screech of stone marten, the hoot of owls.

  Gradually his eyelids fall over his dark eyes. Images come back to him, surfacing from atavistic memory: plains and forage fields, wallows built among the ferns, deep in primeval forests, wild rivers from whose swift current he drinks, packs of threatening wolves, the uncountable herd to which he belongs, with which he travels. Then these are overlaid by the voices of men, by screams and shouts, by blows to his snout, his flanks, his rump, the hands of men grabbing at his ear and twisting, dumping feed into the trough, the hands that make water flow, their hands that guide him towards the motionless sow, grasp his penis, grope and guide him. Finally, the fearsome oval face of men leaning over the railings of the stalls, controlling day and night

  He feeds on acorns, berries, roots, snails, bulbs and chestnuts, sometimes a carcass abandoned by a fox. He grazes on soft grasses, on red alfalfa. His comings and goings create paths through the undergrowth. His bristles grow as the winter cold sets in. His tusks reshape his jaw; the tips raising his upper lip and emerging from the mouth. One day at dusk, he is drawn from his wallow by the barking of a pack of dogs. He bounds from his nest, snuffling the cold air: he can smell the dogs, smell the men moving towards him. He makes his escape, taking one of the paths that lead to the reservoir, where he tries to hide among the withered rushes. Already the dogs are bounding from the woods, where they scented his lair, and are hurtling downhill, cutting through the crop fields, towards the reservoir. The boar moves along the still, black surface, but the dogs continue to race, and they quickly catch him up. They leap down from the bank onto the lake shore, one falls sprawling into the silt and bounds to its feet again. The pig stops, turns to face them. He can see them now: there are three of them, barking and circling around him. Are they surprised not to find a wild boar? None of them attacks. They stand at a respectable distance, yapping. Threads of drool trickle from their chops. They breathe great plumes of vapour. The boar scans the lake shore, studies the positions of the dogs, but he would have to run through them to reach the bank, which is too high at this point of the shore for him to scale. From the edge of the woods come the booming sounds of men’s voices. The dogs turn and bark in response; then the boar retreats into the mud and feels the icy lap at his belly, his throat, leaving him breathless. The dogs bark louder, but do not dare to come closer. The boar runs into the waters of the lake. Suddenly, he loses his footing and disappears beneath the surface. Instinctively, he thrashes his legs and manages to resurface. His vast bulk no longer seems to weigh anything. He swims away quickly, trailing a broad wake. Back on the lake shore, the dogs howl. They consider running to the other side of the lake, but the bank is blocked by the building that houses the pumping station, and two huge metal pipes run down to the lake shore and disappear under the water. One of the dogs dive in, swims a few metres, only to turn back and scramble out, shaking itself dry. It has no layers of fat to protect it from the icy water. When they reach the reservoir, the hunters find the dogs running in circles, yapping incessantly, hindquarters low, wagging their tails. There is still a slight swell in the middle of the lake. The gathering darkness is thicker now. One of the men sweeps a flashlight along the shore. Cornered by the pack, the pig took to the water, so the hunter can see no hoofprints. He thinks perhaps there were some coypu that escaped, then he kneels, grabs the dogs by their collars and, one by one, pulls them back up onto the bank.

  The boar runs through a ploughed field, trips over the hard, frozen furrows, gets to his feet, reaches a thicket of trees and disappears inside. He is cold and shivering, wisps of steam rising from his wet bristles. The men and the dogs leave. He decides not to return to the oak forest, to abandon his nest. He cowers in this grey, withered thicket, which is too sparse to hide him in daylight. When the land is calm once more, he emerges from his refuge and wanders, disoriented, through fields and gloomy orchards. He comes to a wall of stone and mortar and aimlessly follows it. It is the outer wall of a small farmhouse, of which nothing remains but ruins overgrown with thick brambles. Here and there, the wall has crumbled. The boar moves some rubble to clear a path, then a tunnel through the brambles. He comes to a patch of beaten earth, strewn with wooden planks, old broken furniture, roof beams that have fallen and been reduced to powder by time and woodworm. The ceiling and the roof have been replaced by creepers weaving a thick, protective canopy. He smells the scent of men, remote, as though diluted by the years, and it is strangely reassuring. He clears away a corner and lies against a wall. He keeps one eye open, scanning the darkness.

  Thanks

  To the Centre National des Livres.

  To the dear friends who have accompanied the writing of this book.

  To Claudine Fabre-Vassas and to Jean-Louis Le Tacon for their illuminating works.

  To the Archives Départementales du Gers.

  Jean-Baptiste Del Amo was born in 1981 and is one of France’s most exciting and talented young writers. Animalia, his fourth novel, is his first to appear in English. He has won a number of prizes, including the Prix Fénéon, the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Valery-Larbaud. He is also active in the animal rights m
ovement.

  Frank Wynne’s translations include works by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder and Virginie Despentes, and have earned various awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle-Inclán.

  Praise for Animalia and Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  WINNER OF THE 2017 PRIX DU LIVRE INTER

  WINNER OF THE 2017 PRIX VALERY-LARBAUD

  ‘Animalia is stupendously good. This is a novel of epic scope and equally epic ambition, and it is exhilarating and frightening to read. Every page blazes with incandescent prose. After reading Animalia it might be a while before I can return to reading a contemporary novel, I suspect everything will seem tepid and timid in comparison. Del Amo has thrown down a gauntlet: be bold, be daring, be rigorous, be a poet. A stunning book.’ Christos Tsiolkas

  ‘An epic book about family and human barbarity. An astonishing novel. Beyond its thematic richness, the pictorial power of the scenes and the fierce sensitivity of the words in Animalia are worthy at times of the best of Cormac McCarthy. A dark splendour.’ L’Express

  ‘Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s talent is impressive. His writing is both rich and explicit, sinuous and razor-sharp, sensual and surgical.’ Le Journal du Dimanche

  ‘A splendid novel…While tackling the issue of animal rights, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo constructs an intelligent, elliptical story, a meditation on human barbarity, family tensions and history that repeats itself. But Animalia is above all a virtuoso piece of writing that makes us experience colours and smells in a way so few works of recent fiction do—and which, incidentally, may inspire you to reduce the amount of pork you eat.’ Lire

  ‘Radical, violent and disturbing.’ Télérama