Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  Its head nestled in the hollow of its shoulders, heavy eyelids descending at regular intervals, my dove was calm again. Its white plumage reflected the moonlight with unearthly clarity.

  Now, Mum was standing in front of her mirror. Arms raised, she slowly undid her hair, fluffing it up in expansive gestures to revive it. Leaning to one side, she brushed it carefully, then stayed still for a while. Framed by the window, she stood exactly beneath the lamp, whose yellow-orange glow lit the nape of her neck, her bare shoulders and her dark armpits. It was as though she were communing with her nocturnal aspect, so different from the one imposed by her mundane, daytime tasks. It had been years since I’d seen her even a little undressed. Even when I was sick and she had to give me medicine in the middle of the night, she would put on one of the dresses she wore during the day.

  Mum disappeared. The light remained lit for a long time before it was extinguished. I swallowed. More and more overcome by sleep, my dove was visibly shrinking.

  The dark, empty window was like an orphan on the house’s façade. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, as I imagined, incomprehensibly jealous, my mother beneath the sheets, next to the powerful, heavy body of my father.

  II

  There were two mornings at home. The first belonged to the cats and to Dad. Always the earliest out of bed, he’d go downstairs and get to work. He would find Rudy in the barn, the pigsty or the shed. The floorboards in the house would creak a little, a door would scrape, and in the winter there would be the weak light of lanterns from the outbuildings.

  Some time later, Mum would get up to prepare the first meal, initiating a second phase of general awakening. I would go and join her in the kitchen. Then Dad would come back in, flanked by Rudy, who would immediately take his seat at the end of the table, a little apart from the rest of us. With them, a gust from the outside entered the room, the smell of straw and animals mixing with the steam from the coffee. In my memory, this aroma was something powerful, that instilled goodwill in all of us. My sister, Léa, was always last to arrive, because she went to school on a moped, because she often slept late and didn’t eat in the mornings, and because she could always find good reasons not to take part in our shared life.

  Breakfast was always the same. Large enough to banish our early-morning fatigue and set us up for the day, it consisted of rösti and very milky coffee. Rudy would cut his share into slices, before soaking them and gulping them down, with his head just a few centimetres above his bowl. This dish was a relic of our Bernese origins, imported by the ancestor who, having been chased from his own lands on the other side of the Sarine river, had bought the farm at the beginning of the last century. Ever since this founding act, three generations of us had grown up speaking French with the local accent, yet without adopting the local breakfast of buttered bread and jam.

  As I came into the kitchen, Mum would look quickly over her shoulder from her position at the stove. She knew from my footsteps that it was me, but it made me happy to receive this little glance that allowed me to say “Hello, Mum,” and her to reply without having to interrupt her work.

  That morning, Mum put down the frying pan in which the potatoes were browning, wiped her hands carefully with a kitchen towel, and walked over to where I was sitting.

  “Is it a dove?”

  “Yes.”

  She stretched out an arm to stroke its belly. “Where did you find it?”

  “Rudy found it.”

  “Have you given it a name?” she asked, brushing her fingers along the bird’s smooth, round back.

  The dove began to coo, a faint but deep sound that made its feathers vibrate.

  “You should give it a name.”

  “Um… I don’t know.”

  “It looks wounded.”

  “Yeah. A cat.”

  “Are you planning to keep it?”

  “Yes.”

  Mum took out a tiny square of crumpled cloth from her apron pocket. She blew into it carefully and delicately, as if it were an avant-garde musical instrument and she hoped to bring forth a beautiful melody. Her nose was always slightly pink, irritated by the constant friction of handkerchiefs, and its own internal secretions. In the dusty summer heat, her breathing was wheezy and encumbered, as though the air were reluctant to pass in and out of her. In any case, there wasn’t a lot of room in her frail chest, which seemed too small to contain lungs. She went back to attend to her pans, sizzling on the hob.

  Incredibly tiny in her light-blue dress dotted with pale flowers, my mother wandered adrift in a world of giants. Everything around her – the stove, the stone sink with its complicated taps, the stoneware pots lined up on the shelf, the beams in the ceiling, the big wooden table at which I sat – was on a different scale. When she bent forward, a rosary of vertebrae would appear on her straining neck, just below her black hair wrapped carefully in a bun. That I had lived inside her womb for many months, that I could have emerged from such a slender being, seemed nothing less than a miracle. Mum looked like a little girl.

  I was glad that she had petted my dove, accepted its presence without argument. Mum was always busy with a multitude of tasks that no doubt helped to keep her from feelings of despair. I would have liked to be in the bird’s place. I would have liked her to set down her towel and dry her hands, to come over and kiss me, stroke my hair, tickle my neck with the tips of her fingers. When I left for school, she would give me a dry peck on the cheek, a kiss from the very tip of her lips that echoed in the cool morning. Lingering on my skin for less than a millisecond, her mouth imparted no sense of its moistness. She never gave me a tender pat of encouragement to send me on my way. Handing me my lunch-box, she would wish me a good day. As I walked past our big elm tree in the garden, I knew without needing to check that she was not watching me go, but had already returned to her chores.

  We knew, because she had told us, that Mum dreamed of an easier, less narrow life for my sister and me. Although I felt sure she loved me, I had to go back to when I was very little to remember her arms around me – the times when she would take me down from a hay-ride and hold me up in the air, pressing me against her for an instant before putting me down.

  Then, without wanting to, I grew up. The moment I began to look vaguely like a man, all physical contact between us stopped. This did not happen gradually, but from one day to the next, though I have forgotten precisely what prompted the transition.

  Dad came in, followed by Rudy, bringing with them the odour of the stable to mingle with the indoor smells. They sat down in silence.

  “Where did you find that bird?” asked Dad.

  “Rudy gave it to me. I don’t know – near the barn…”

  Dad lifted his head and glanced at Rudy, who didn’t react. He was wholly absorbed by the meticulous ingestion of his food, which required him to take control of each morsel with his mind in order to guide it successfully into his stomach.

  “It’s a dove.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It doesn’t have any tail feathers.”

  “Yeah.” I fixed my attention on the back of my mother, who was washing dishes in the sink.

  “It was lucky.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If the bone had been damaged…”

  “The bone?”

  “Yes, the bone. If a bird breaks a bone, it’s a goner – it slowly dies of asphyxia… Their skeletons are full of air to help them fly. One tear and they empty out.” Dad’s face disappeared behind his raised bowl.

  “Of air?”

  “That’s right. They have air-filled skeletons. So… you’re planning to keep it there on your shoulder, are you, like Robinson Crusoe’s parrot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Its leg muscles look all right. The feathers will grow back. It’ll fly again.”

  “Really?”

  “What are you planning to do with it?” he asked, soaking a forkful of rösti in his coffee.

  “With the dove?”

  “Yes, with the dove!
You’re not really going to lug it around on your shoulder all day, are you?”

  “I found a perch for it… a hat-stand from the guest-room.”

  “Hmm!” Dad gulped down the rest of his dunked rösti, tilting back his head, then looked at me. With the back of his hand, he wiped away the brownish stream of coffee that snaked down his chin, and that, on countless occasions, I had watched dribble down his neck, before falling onto his chest and disappearing into the wide-open collar of his checked shirt. I knew he was thinking about the holidays that had just started. The holidays that the authorities, in their immense wisdom, had conceived so that sons could help their fathers in the fields throughout the busy summer months. As far as he was concerned, I was at his service.

  “You can take Bagatelle for a walk this morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “She hasn’t been out for two days.”

  “Sure. I’ll get her moving again.”

  “Then you can come and help me with the chicks.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re suffering in the heat. We’ll have to remove the dead ones…”

  Dad’s dream was to live with his family on an isolated farm amidst meadows and fields surrounded by dense forests. He was fond of saying that civilisation was born with agriculture. When nomadic groups stopped chasing after herds of game and settled in one place, they had started to treat nature as something that belonged to them. All humanity’s progress, he would say, had been made possible thanks to the perseverance of the early farmers. Historians had always undervalued these stubborn labourers, who moulded the landscape and nourished others so that they could devote themselves to more visible and prestigious jobs. It was these men of the land who had fed Charlemagne and Napoleon, and countless other kings and emperors. Without a good square meal on their plates, they would never have had the strength to rule over their vast empires. As for their castles and cathedrals, they too were built by workers who relied on farm produce to give them energy for their exhausting tasks.

  The early farms, he would say, had been like little universes exempt from external influence, self-sufficient places where all the necessities of existence could be had. It was farmers who had cultivated the idea of liberty – liberty being just another word for independence. Was it any wonder that these same proud breeders and farmers had one day risen up from their pastures in central Switzerland, to slough off tyranny and plant the seeds of a democracy that would change the face of the world?

  Dad was convinced that roast chicken, at that time rarely served except at the ceremonial Sunday dinner tables of the bourgeoisie, could not long escape the forces of democratisation. With people earning more and more, meat consumption would naturally increase, and poultry would become a daily habit for the expanding middle classes. On the back of this logic, he had borrowed several hundred thousand francs to invest in a new hen-house. He would buy ten thousand downy chicks at a time, all female, fatten them up, and sell them five months later to a buyer who would kill them, skin them and chop them up, ready to grace the shelves of the supermarkets. We all knew that our future depended on the efficient force-feeding of this vast multitude of fowl.

  “Then what?’

  “What?”

  “Then what are you going to do with yourself?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some drawing.”

  Dad pushed his plate and bowl into the middle of the table and stood up, muttering to himself. He seemed to expand a little when he was annoyed, like a cat with its fur sticking up, as if his large, muscular body physically absorbed his anger. Before the events of that summer of 1976, I had never seen him get cross. Maybe he had never learned, or it just wasn’t in his nature. He would merely blink a little as he took whatever blow fortune had dealt, then cast a mocking look over the world with his lightblue eyes, before resuming one of the hundred chores that always needed to be done on the farm. He called that “taking charge”.

  As he was leaving the room, Dad made a detour to touch Mum lightly and kiss her quickly on the back of her neck. We heard the door slam at the end of the hallway, then the muffled yaps of Sheriff, who was always transported with joy at the sight of someone putting on his boots.

  * * *

  Bagatelle lived alone in a stable at the top of the village, opposite what we called the castle. This was actually a tall, pot-bellied house with massive walls that had protected the lords of the region in the Middle Ages. The owners, from the minor nobility, must have felt somewhat insecure, since they’d thought it advisable to fortify not only the house, but its adjoining barn, too. My grandfather, Annibal – called Anni by everyone in the village – lived in a tiny upstairs flat in its old hayloft. A cousin barely younger than he was, Rose, came to do his cleaning and cooking. I glanced up before I entered the stable, but his shutters were closed.

  “Hey, Bagatelle! It’s me!” I announced.

  My greeting wasn’t enough to shake the mare out of her apathy. Was she lonely? Or had years of inactivity brought about a profound and absolute emotional indifference? I stood next to her head to give her a chance to recognise me. My deformed reflection, as if from the curve of a spoon, gazed at me from her big black eyes, from which a thick yellow liquid streamed constantly, hardening at the edges and sticking to eyelids she could no longer close. Bagatelle was very short-sighted, having spent much of her working life in blinkers.

  I stroked her white muzzle for a while, and something began to awaken in her immense, stiff body. Muscles quivered under her skin. Her breathing grew a little stronger.

  “Yes, yes! We’re going out!”

  She would soon be twenty-seven. My grandfather, unable to imagine a farm without a horse, had bought her in the early 1950s just as the rest of the village was equipping itself with up-to-date tractors and it was becoming easy to rent machinery. In his day, he had always worked with Bagatelle to break up the earth with the harrow, or to turn over the hay where the land sloped steeply. Now the big, four-pronged pitchforks leaned against a wall in the stable, gathering dust.

  Unable either to close her eyes or lie down to sleep because she wouldn’t be able stand up again, Bagatelle seemed to be awaiting her own death. She stood stiff and straight, as if cast in bronze, alive yet strangely frozen. I wondered if her head were full of nostalgic images of flowering meadows and wild stampedes. Bagatelle’s static existence seemed to have abnormally stimulated her sweat glands; she gave off a powerful odour that permeated everything. Each strand of straw in her litter, each stone in the wall, each board in the stable – they all smelled strongly of horse. Depending on the direction of the wind, these acrid emanations were noticeable even on the road several dozen metres away. Not at all put out, my dove remained calmly perched on my shoulder; birds, I reasoned, probably didn’t perceive smells as we did. Or maybe this particular specimen, during its long career as a magician’s assistant, had worked in a circus amidst a ring of horses? Or with other wild animals whose smells were even more pungent and alarming?

  My eyes hadn’t yet adapted to the darkness. As I groped mechanically for the halter on its hook, I stepped on something unfamiliar in the straw, something solid that immediately shrank back. For a fraction of a second, I imagined that some wild animal, a lion or a panther, was hiding in the litter, about to pounce on me. But only for a fraction of a second, because then my grandfather slowly emerged, covered in straw and dust, like a stick of caramel rolled in sugar.

  “That’s not nice! You shouldn’t step on people like that!”

  “I… How was I supposed to know you were there?”

  “Ow! You hurt me, you know! Not very nice at all!”

  “I’m telling you I didn’t see you. Anyway, why were you hiding under the straw?”

  My grandfather looked me up and down. His pale, grey eyes were surmounted by thick, bushy eyebrows that were always mobile, and expressed the whole gamut of his emotions. Ever since he had handed over the farm to Dad, it had been a point of honour for him not to get involved, to le
ave his son in absolute control. When he stopped by our house, he never said anything about the running of the business, as if it had never belonged to him. He would walk up the yard with long strides, sometimes follow Dad into the pigsty or the barn, but he would never pick up a tool or carry a milk can or give any advice. Not that Dad asked him for any. Looking back, it seems to me that Anni, the only grandson of the ancestor who had migrated from the German part of Switzerland, was rejecting his own past as a farmer, that he didn’t want to think about how he’d spent his entire life. Almost all of his utterances were in the negative.

  He ran his fingers through his short white hair, which made him look like an old American senator, and extricated a handful of straw and manure. Over the years he had lost every ounce of spare flesh. He could have been made of wood, or some other fibrous material, so completely had his skeleton taken over his person. At the same time, he gave an impression of toughness and durability: not many diseases could take root in a being thus stripped of all its soft parts.

  “It’s too hot upstairs.”

  “So you slept here?”

  “It’s much nicer – moist and quite cool. It isn’t doing anyone any harm.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’re not going to take her out, are you?”

  “I’m taking her for a little walk. Like every morning.”

  “Ah yes. We wouldn’t want her to forget how to wiggle her bum, would we?” He noticed my bird. “You’re not taking that dove, are you?”

  “I am.”

  He took hold of it firmly by the wings, turned it over as if looking for a label with some product information, then returned it to my shoulder. It gave no reaction. Maybe it was scared stiff at the prospect of being crushed by hands as horny as a raptor’s claws? Still, I would have preferred it to be less docile. It was a little too happy to be approached by strangers.

  “Okay, I’m going now. Do you need anything?”

  “No. Rose will be here soon. I’d better not forget to go back up to my rooms.”