Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  I attached the halter to Bagatelle’s harness, stroking her neck all the while. She didn’t budge. I pulled. Nothing. I pulled again.

  Anni pressed up against her ear, smoothing her muzzle, and whispered: “Kopf hoch! Graduus u gueti Reis!”1

  Bagatelle’s neck tensed. The rest of her arthritis-crippled body followed suit, as she came back to life, bit by bit, until walking became possible. The moment she took her first step, she urinated and defecated copiously.

  This was supposedly one of the benefits of our walks. As we went along, Bagatelle would periodically empty herself, like some kind of manure-making machine. My father insisted that I gather up this precious material with a little shovel and bag, since it was the ideal fertilizer for our vegetable garden. I found it humiliating to bend down behind the withered rump of our old mare, and tried to get out of this chore whenever I could.

  It was only half past seven, but the morning was already hot. We were roasting under the arid sky. A thick mist of sweat hovered over Bagatelle’s back. I walked along beside her, seeing only the landscape to my left, half of my field of view obstructed by her voluminous paunch. Without any moisture to carry them through the atmosphere, noises no longer sounded the same. The horseshoes made only tiny clicking sounds as they struck the asphalt. Our world was being reduced to the essential, was becoming a mere sketch of reality. The roads and paths on which a tiny, colourful dot sometimes passed by; the dark line of the river, its steep banks overhung by black, motionless trees; the fields of wheat and the yellow-streaked pastures, their borders neatly marked by thickets and hedges. Everything was as clear as pen-strokes on a white page. The sun had wrung the landscape dry, worn nature down to the bone.

  Bagatelle stopped on the patch of grass at the edge of the village, near the fountain in the shade of the big lime tree. For the old mare, this wasn’t just some grass under a tree: it was a magic square, the goal of all her walks, a horizon beyond which she could not pass, the place her steps always led her. There wasn’t a single flower, as if they had all decided to stay underground until next year. Not a breath of air passed through the branches, motionless and silent above us. I sat down on a rock. My dove began to beat its wings frantically, so I moved it onto Bagatelle. It made a few dance steps on her rump before settling calmly into the hollow of her back, looking as proud as an ox-pecker on a rhinoceros. I went back to my rock and took out my sketchpad and pencil.

  A little orange Renault 5 passed by on the road. I watched it drive alongside the trees. When it began the curve to descend towards the fields, it stopped, as if my gaze had cut its power. I distinctly heard the grinding of the gears, then a high-pitched squeal as it reversed to draw level with me. A woman in her early thirties emerged. She closed the door gently, as if to avoid waking someone inside, then glanced at Bagatelle, before heading towards me.

  “Is that your horse?”

  “Well, it’s Bagatelle…”

  “Bagatelle! What a great name. Is he a bit of a womaniser then?”2

  “Oh… no… she’s a very old mare… I’m just…”

  “Are you Gus?”

  “You… You know who I am?”

  “Of course I know. You are Auguste Sutter. Also known as Gus…”

  “… by people close to me.”

  She bent down in front of me, her chest a few centimetres from my knees. She smiled.

  “My name is Cécile.”

  Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by the dense mystery of her eyes. Stripped of all personality, I might as well have been an animal – a kitten you could give a name to and stroke right away, without having to get to know it first. Her face was very close to mine. I breathed in her perfume. It was a sweet, flowery perfume; the smell of dew-covered meadows waking up under the morning sun. Because of the drought, our minds were full of dreams of coolness and moisture: of lush prairies, cascading waterfalls and ploughed fields transformed into rice paddies by rain. Rudy would sometimes stand motionless while he stared at the horizon, blinking his eyes in his own special way, his features hollowed out. When you asked him what he was staring at, he’d reply, in all seriousness, that just over there, between the fields, was a big lake he had never seen before.

  Cécile wore a full-cotton patchwork dress that came down to her ankles, with a brightly-coloured plaid pattern in cranberry and tobacco brown. It narrowed at the neck, which only served to thrust her chest further forwards. A belt made of large pearls, the golden colour of amber, floated loosely around her hips. Her tanned breasts, close together and shining with sweat, were a living echo of the dead stones that adorned her waist.

  “It’s nice here under the leaves in this heat, isn’t it? Look how still they are – as if they’re trying not to move so they can give us better shade… So… You know, I’m a friend of your mother’s.”

  “Oh!”

  “You have a handsome little face. She wasn’t lying… It’s incredible, the silence here. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a breath of wind. Anyway, it’s quite pleasant. We could stay here not talking and there would be nothing in our ears. As if the air were dead. Don’t you think? What are you drawing? Can I see?”

  “Well…”

  “Go on! I’m not going to eat you.”

  I showed her my drawing.

  I had reduced Bagatelle to a bare minimum of swift lines, while adding three of four vertebrae to her neck. I had faithfully rendered her powerful hindquarters, but made her head and mane smaller, to transform her into a young Appaloosa with a dappled coat. It was mounted by a young Nez Perce Indian girl, who was looking behind her with one hand resting on its rump. On her wrist was a bird of prey. You could make out some movement in a thicket, but I was the only one who knew that the girl’s attention had been caught by the fearsome cougar concealed there.

  “Wow, that’s amazing! There must be something special about your eyes, inventing things that don’t exist. Amazing. I mean it! You’re right – it’s boring, always having to look at the same things. We should imagine other colours, extra bits and pieces everywhere, so we can keep up our sense of wonder at just being alive. Of course, there are people who swallow things for that… Here, look – why don’t you colour in the fountain? And you could decorate the tree and the horse…”

  “The horse is an Appaloosa. A prairie horse…”

  “You’re a wizard. I mean it. You really know what you’re doing. Indian stories are my favourite.”

  The woman turned her attention to Bagatelle. “Hey, look – there’s a bird on your horse! It’s a turtledove. Is it yours too?”

  “Yes! It’s a dove. It’s trained,” I replied quickly, before her mind leaped on to something else.

  “Can you show her to me? I love birds. You know they’re directly descended from dinosaurs. If you watch them carefully, you’ll see they still have something dinosaur-like about them. The feet, the long neck, the mobile head, and so on. They come from primeval times. They survived because they learned how to fly. That’s a great lesson, don’t you think? Now might be a good time for people to start learning it too. Imagine! Birds are the only animals that sing. They really sing, complete melodies. That’s because they know how to fly. They still haven’t got over being able to go up in the sky, so they can’t stop singing!”

  Cécile clasped my dove in her hands as if to press it and extract its juice, then lifted to her lips and kissed it on its beak. Unfazed, the bird gently pecked her mouth, stretching out its neck.

  “Oh, poor thing! It’s all shaved at the back! You didn’t tear out its feathers to stop it flying away, did you?”

  “No. I found it like that. It’s wounded… It was probably a cat.”

  She turned it over and caressed its pink, naked flesh, as repulsive as the fatty, thick, slightly sticky skin of a plucked chicken. All of a sudden, the dove tensed up, as if being touched on this denuded part of its anatomy had triggered its flight reflex by reminding it of its predator.

  “Calm down, my pretty little thing!”

/>   We were interrupted by Bagatelle who, monumental under the sun, emptied herself noisily and without the slightest quiver. A multitude of smoking little balls dropped one on top of the other to form a perfect cone behind her.

  “Well! What a joyful process! I love the smell of manure, don’t you? It’s very strange because it doesn’t smell bad, just of horse. It makes me think of the Knie circus where I used to go with my parents when I was little. A horse eats nothing but grass. That’s why the manure smells good. It’s the smell of the fields. Not like all those animals that eat meat, that eat corpses, in other words putrefying matter, corruption… Well, there’s another side to life too… I have to go.”

  She set my dove carefully on Bagatelle’s rump, and ran her hand through my hair as if to ruffle it. Looking straight into my eyes, she gave me a big, loud, slow kiss on each cheek. I inhaled her breath. It smelled of honey and liquorice.

  * * *

  I spent the first part of the afternoon helping Dad with Rudy at the hen-house. It was on the edge of the forest, in the only field that actually belonged to us. For most of the day it remained in shadow, and my grandfather had only been able to buy it because no one else in the village had wanted it.

  Before installing the first brood, Dad had invited Anni to come and admire the long, flat building with its wide triangular roof, like a house buried in the ground with only its uppermost three metres protruding. Anni had arrived on foot, having walked from his place because he refused to travel in any other way. He had toured the site in silence next to Dad, while he very proudly explained the system of aeration and automatic feeding, and pointed out the grain as it flowed through various aluminium tubes into suspended dishes, with a noise like Indian maracas. I remember seeing how Dad, at least twice Anni’s size, waited for a word of congratulation or encouragement, kicking little pebbles with the tip of his shoe against the metal wall. But my grandfather only lit a cigarette, then sighed noisily amidst a cloud of smoke, without uttering a single comment.

  Our gigantic incubator had no windows. Once inside, we felt like adventurers exploring a mysterious planet far from our own solar system, a planet whose atmosphere might be made up of harmful gases or mutant bacteria with the power to penetrate our tissues and take over our bodies. And perhaps we really weren’t quite ourselves in this extra-terrestrial environment, due to the strict hygienic measures needed to keep out the germs that, if introduced to the main nesting or feeding areas, could transform a healthy chicken into an unsellable, raddled carcass in a single day.

  First, we would enter a disinfection chamber, a narrow room with tiled walls, where we would get undressed and shower. We would always have to call Rudy several times to get him to leave the stream of hot water beneath which, abandoned to pleasure, he would forget everything, above all the reason he was taking a shower. Then we’d put on special boots, white overalls, gloves, and a ridiculous cotton hat to cover all our hair, before going to work among the thick cloud of hens shuffling in all directions over the concrete floor, around the lines of pipes and the dishes hanging from the ceiling by long metal wires reaching almost to the ground. Large ventilators fanned the air to keep the temperature constantly between 20 and 25 degrees.

  On that day, we extracted a dozen or so dead hens, some of them pecked to death by fellow hens seized by a cannibalistic urge. After collecting them in a huge bag, Dad loaded them onto the little trailer behind our Toyota. He wasn’t happy. It was getting too hot in the vast hen-house, dulling the appetite of the birds, which weren’t fattening up quickly as he’d hoped. The buyer from the supermarket negotiated the price according to the quality of the merchandise, and he might refuse to pay for scrawny chickens or for birds whose flesh was too dense and tough.

  On the way back, Dad glanced behind several times to check that our load was stable. Whenever he took off his white jumpsuit, I thought a part of his soul remained captive in the little pile crumpled at his feet.

  We drove over a pothole that shook the car. The tow-bar made a loud cracking noise and our trailer flew into the air. The bag flew open, and the dead hens were ejected. As he stepped on the brakes, Dad watched in the rear-view mirror these pitiful attempts at posthumous flight, ending with heavy falls into the grass on the side of the road. I felt a pang in my heart at the thought of my dove with its useless wings. The corpses were scattered in grotesque positions. Rudy picked up the empty bag. Dad stood with his arms at his sides. I saw his eyes were full of water, like two big sponges, and quickly looked away. Rudy didn’t know what to do either, and for a while the three of us stood, silent, upright and motionless in the middle of this open-air cemetery.

  The border between the human and the animal world was thin and fragile, Dad would frequently tell us, and because of that we had to respect it. Sometimes, on summer nights when the daylight kept us working late, or on winter nights when our heated, well-lit farm seemed despite its solid foundations to sway a little in the wind, Dad would wax lyrical about the Celts and the Illyrians, the first occupants of these still-virgin lands. They had worshipped as a god each hill, glade, forest, mountain, waterfall, lake, tree and plain; but they had viewed the animals as independent peoples, with whom they had to make pacts. One day my sister, when she was little, had talked about a cow “giving birth”. Dad had taken her shoulders firmly in his hands and, staring straight into her eyes, made her repeat several times, like a lesson that had to be learned by heart: “A cow calves. When a cow has a calf, it calves!”

  The dead hens in the dry grass looked as though they had never been animals. The stunted, twisted, pale bodies were no longer part of nature; they were no different from the assorted colourful rubbish at the municipal dump. The ancient pact had been broken.

  Maybe it was pity – or else the sun beating down on our heads – that finally shook us out of our inertia. Rudy, trotting along behind us with tiny, mincing steps, held the bag open as we gathered up the corpses for a seond time. Back in the car, Dad said nothing, but as he wiped away with a forearm the drops of sweat from his shining forehead, it seemed to me that they were a substitute for tears.

  1 Head up! Off you go and bon voyage!

  2 The primary meaning of bagatelle is “trinket”, but it is also an informal term for sex.

  III

  Rudy was showing me a gaping crack he had found in the ground. We were in front of the barn, where the earth, pounded by the daily comings and goings of the cows, was smooth as stone.

  “Look, you can put all your fingers inside!” Rudy stared at me urgently, his hand buried in the fissure. “Try!”

  I bent down opposite him, and inserted my hand up to the knuckles. “It’s deep, isn’t it?”

  “Yes! Very.”

  “And warm.”

  “Yes. Even at the bottom it’s warm.”

  Rudy’s features had arranged themselves in a way I had never seen before. They conveyed a mixture of incredulity and anxiety. The complexity of the situation far exceeded his comprehension, so that his face could express only an elementary, naked fear that made me think of the very first men on earth. It was the fear of Rahan, hero of my comic books, who strove to survive in an age when nothing that happened could be explained, among erupting volcanoes, shaggy, sabre-toothed monsters, and giant birds capable of lifting into an electric sky prey as large as buffalo. Rudy was closely related to this very ancient humanity. There was no doubt that he imagined that this first, small cleft could at any moment start to spread rapidly, branching out like the cracks made by an impact on glass. The whole known world – for him, the village and the fields around the village – might be torn asunder beneath our very feet, to be hurled into the planet’s flaming core. I knew that he had the imagination to generate such thoughts.

  “Look, Rudy,” I said, tapping the ground with my foot. “The earth is hard as a turtle’s shell. That’s why it’s cracking.”

  This image of a living creature opening up like an overripe fruit made Rudy’s mouth gape in horror. I had used
a bad example.

  “It’s like a stone! A stone can’t change shape. When it freezes, it just cracks open…”

  This didn’t put his mind at rest either. If mere cold could make a rock as brittle as a wafer, there was definitely nothing certain beneath our feet. Rudy stared at me.

  “Look, the earth is bare here. But in the fields, there’s grass, trees… It’s the plants that hold the ground in place… There’s no danger,” I added finally.

  Rudy looked around at the threadbare fields and bushes, shrivelled as if after a fire. My explanations were not helping. How could this dying vegetation, with its feeble roots, possibly stop the ground from tearing apart?

  It turned out that the best way to rescue Rudy from this mental maelstrom was to distract him. The buzz of Léa’s moped as it climbed the road, then its noisy, sputtering arrival in the yard, instantly dissipated his geological anxieties.

  Sheriff rushed furiously over to meet my sister, who was returning from a musical rehearsal. Her teacher had persuaded her to play as second violin in a collaborative performance between our own musicians and an orchestra from the German Democratic Republic. It was an honour, and a heavy responsibility. Léa was living only for this moment. It was the big event of her summer of 1976 – to play before an exclusive audience as part of an important cultural exchange which would symbolise the recent normalisation of diplomatic relations between the two states.

  Sheriff’s tail unrolled, a sign of ardent affection. He leapt into the air, shifting the weight of his body from one paw to the other, to try to get Léa to play with him. Ignoring him, she rode straight past, raising a long snake of dust behind her. Hopping and barking madly, Sheriff followed for a few metres. All of a sudden, he lurched and sank to the ground, as soundlessly as a drop of oil.

  “Oh!” said Rudy.

  We stared at the place where the dog had fallen, as if we were at the cinema, and the frozen image would simply start up again after a brief technical hitch. When it became clear that Sheriff wasn’t about to get up, we ran over. Rudy knelt down to feel the air all around him, in search of the invisible wall against which he must have just crushed his muzzle. He massaged the dog’s body, took his head in his hands, then finally laid him down again to touch all his extremities in turn. Terrified, he turned to me.