Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  Rudy had begun to follow Cécile wherever she went. I looked at the greasy moon. It hung heavily over the trees, as though it wanted to make its own contribution to the oppressive heat.

  “Rudy! Stop!”

  Mum was over by the water tap, opening and closing it to regulate the flow into the hose. In the middle of the garden, Rudy grabbed Cécile and pressed himself against her. Still holding the hose, she was trying to free herself, crying out:

  “Stop it! Get your hands off me! Shit! You’re hurting me!”

  She struggled, hitting him with the fists of her free arm wherever she could reach – on his head, his back, his neck – but Rudy wasn’t remotely bothered by these rough caresses, as they must have seemed. She didn’t have a chance. Usually gentle and easy-going, Rudy was nevertheless endowed with almost super-human strength. Only a single idea occupied his skull at any one time, so that there was nothing to restrain the pure power of his muscles, forged by daily labour. This captive strength, always ready to free itself, helped to explain the instinctive fear Rudy inspired in some people.

  “Pervert! Take your hands off me! Filthy pig!”

  There were tears of rage in Cécile’s voice, but Rudy was not going to give up easily. He knew that letting go would immediately break the spell.

  Mum turned the water up to maximum and ran towards them, shouting as I had never heard her shout: “Let her go! Rudy! Let her go!”

  She aimed the jet at Rudy’s back. Sprays of water, gleaming in the moonlight, rose towards the sky. Little by little, under the effect of the cold shower, and because Mum had over him the unquestioned authority of a mother over a child, he began to let go. Cécile finally managed to shove him back and free herself. Trapped within an enormous cage of water, Rudy fell onto his back in the midst of the leeks. Mum went calmly to turn off the tap, then returned to help Cécile re-adjust her opened blouse as well as she could, tenderly caressing the back of her neck and whispering in her ear what must have been words of comfort.

  Rudy stayed on the ground. I was ashamed. Mum too, perhaps, because she went to help him to his feet. She gave him a harsh dressing-down to put him in his place, before Cécile made a gesture of reconciliation. Covered in mud, his head full of something heavy that made his tearless face look swollen, Rudy walked past me to take refuge in his bedroom. He no longer smelled of essence of vetiver, only of earth and solitude. I watched him slink away like an outcast, with no one to console him, and I hated those two women.

  * * *

  Some instinct of survival had pulled me violently out of sleep. I was bathed in sweat, as though plunged in a tub of warm water, and stars danced before my eyes. I slowly came to, with an anguished sense of having lost something for ever, a feeling that even the coloured spines of my cartoon albums, arranged neatly in order of publication on my shelves, couldn’t dispel. The window was open onto an infinite sky, empty and menacing; a black rectangle that seemed on the point of sucking up the matter of my body as though it were as fluid as water. My dove wasn’t on its perch. All of a sudden, I felt certain that it had been pulled into that realm of darkness.

  I leaned out of the window, resting my hands on the sill. My dove’s unhappy attempt at night flight had ended with a fall into our yard. The moon illuminated the bird with strange clarity, as it trembled between two large, round paving stones; it was as though the dead star had sent out a special ray of light, brighter than all the others, to fall exactly upon it. It looked as smooth and brilliant as a bird from the first days of Creation. Every predator in the neighbourhood must have been watching, held back only by the suspicion that prey offered in this way, with its very own robes of light, must be a trap.

  “Whoa! Slow down! Where are you rushing off to?”

  I had to halt my mad flight down the stairs as I came up against the mass of Dad, blocking the way, his shoulders touching the walls. He too was on the way down, and as he turned, I caught a whiff of straw, rancid milk and sweat. His face was a little blurred. The door to the little guest room was open. He had slept there! He looked exhausted, as if he was carrying the entire house on his back, to try to move it to a more favourable spot.

  “My bird went out of the window!”

  “Auguste…” sighed Dad.

  “It fell out… I have to go and get it!”

  “A bird that can’t fly…”

  “I don’t want it to get caught…”

  “You should leave it… A bird without a tail… It wanted to kill itself, that’s all.”

  “Dad… did you sleep in the little room?”

  His body seemed to grow larger, and the passage narrower. “Mind your own fucking business,” he growled.

  “But…”

  “Shut your mouth!”

  “Okay, okay!”

  I felt that he might easily punch me, just like that, for nothing. It was an odd sensation when he placed his back against the wall to let me pass. I went by in silence, brushing against the metal of his belt, afraid he would grab me suddenly by the neck and pick me up like the dying chicken in Rudy’s sack, the one whose neck he had broken. I breathed the outside air with relief, suddenly aware of the still vastness of the night above my small body. My dove hadn’t budged. It quivered in the hollow of my hands when I stroked the top of its head. I was sure now that it had accepted me as its rightful owner.

  Dad crossed the yard slowly, with his head low, as if he had decided once and for all that he would carry on living just as calmly as he had always done.

  * * *

  Maddie often came and sat next to me on the school bus. As she passed down the narrow aisle, the other children would avoid meeting her eyes, and begin to talk with false animation. They would put their bags on the free seats, so as not to have to spend time with her during this journey through landscapes so familiar that they had long since lost all interest. Alone in my corner seat, I would read my magazines, with Maddie cuddled up against me. From time to time, she would glance at me in silence. We were like an old couple pickled in decades of collusion, no longer needing to exchange anything, least of all words.

  Perhaps the reason I didn’t feel uncomfortable in Maddie’s presence was that she had once shown me how to resuscitate drowned flies. We were standing in front of the stable door. Insects were pouring out, in a state of intoxication as they emerged from shit-smelling darkness into the sunlit, infinite azure. Maddie intercepted them with what must once have been a milk-skimming net, and trapped them in a large glass jar. When the harvest was over, and twenty or so flies swarmed in confusion inside, she opened the lid a fraction and slowly filled it with water, before shaking it to create a violent storm. The flies waggled their feet uselessly, to try to free themselves from the fluid that sucked them towards death. “Look!” said Maddie urgently, moving her face within a centimetre of mine. This was her way of strengthening her argument, while at the same time making any escape impossible. Later, I learned that she had bad eyesight and that, out of negligence or meanness, her parents never bought her glasses. “Look!” she said. “They’re pretending to be dead.” She took out a fly and placed it on a sheet of newspaper sprinkled with a thick layer of salt. At this contact, the fly at once began to roll frantically over and over, before stretching itself out segment by segment, and at last flying vertically upwards away from this earthly horror. After the same rough awakening, all the captured flies lit off like rockets, in various directions, but always in a straight line, so that a few crashed violently into the nearest obstacle, this time falling dead for real.

  One day, I was hanging about near the old high school with my sketchbook, caught in a trance-like state of lethargy, when Maddie, seemingly trying to break free of the same spell, persuaded me to walk with her through the fields to the stream. Its ancient, wooded banks, cut deep into the earth, might still hold a little coolness and shade despite the angry sun, she said.

  “Do you recognise it?”

  “Eh?”

  “Can you hear the tune?”

>   “What are you talking about? What tune?”

  We were crushing the heat-shrivelled grass beneath our feet. In some places, it had completely disappeared, to reveal a black, smooth, beaten earth that looked as if it had been slow-roasted. Beside me, Maddie was moving forward in an odd way. Lifting her right leg very high, she would bring it down forcefully on the hard ground, then do the same with her left leg. The rhythm had more in common with a tribal dance than with normal walking. It reminded me of island-dwelling cannibals, covered in warpaint and waving their totems around some immense fire, before setting off, light at heart, to battle.

  “My feet are making music.”

  She made five or six leaps, as if she were treading on hot coals. The dry grass under our feet was like crackling paper, and each one of her steps, according to how much force she used, and exactly how she set her foot down, produced its own sound, drum-like or high-pitched, long or short, solemn or frivolous.

  “Do you recognise the song?”

  “No. Not really…”

  “Oh, What A Night!”

  “Eh? What night?”

  She repeated the same sequence of leaps, her knees almost reaching to her chin, before concluding, with five or six feverish little steps, while chanting, “Oh, what a night. I felt a rush like a rolling bolt of thunder…” She looked at me, out of breath, her eyes wide: “It’s The Four Seasons!”

  “Oh yeah. That’s it… You’ve got it!”

  Full of gratitude, she rubbed up against me, her hair tickling my face.

  The trees clinging to the slope along the path that snaked down towards the river, with their curled-up leaves, scarcely deflected the rays of the sun. But as we neared the bottom of the valley, a heavy, flat shade came over us, offering little relief. The stream hadn’t dried out. It was flowing silently, the pebbles visible under the water, as brilliant and smooth as agates. Maddie pulled up her skirt and jumped into the middle of the current, splashing wildly in all directions, all music-making forgotten.

  “Come on! Let’s walk along the river. We can go to the pool under the waterfall.”

  Fifty metres downstream, surrounded by humps of earth covered with leafy shrubs, a thin flow of water filled a slightly deeper section of the stream, from the centre of which rose a flat rock. Wet to the tops of our thighs, we climbed onto it and sat down. The coolness of the river, reflected by the overhanging branches of the trees, enfolded us. A few river plants shaped like large, flared ears – we called them wild ginger – seemed to have miraculously escaped the heat wave. We shivered with pleasure. We felt like Robinson Crusoe on his island, survivors far from all other humans. I wished I had brought along my bird. Trapped beneath its quilt of feathers, it would have appreciated this light, cool air.

  Maddie snuggled up to me, slipping her arm around my waist. Her ribcage rose and fell against my torso. She had a slightly rough way about her; there was a nervous energy and a bluntness in her movements and gestures, a self-confident way of walking and running that reminded you of a boy. Her adolescent body seemed to be inhabited by a small, virile, stubborn being. I found its presence very reassuring. I also liked Maddie’s smell. I will always associate her with the delicate odour of grass fermenting in the sun.

  “I hear voices.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Voices. In the wood… Can you hear?”

  I strained my ears for a sound beyond that of the diminutive waterfall, like a tap slowly filling a sink.

  “People are coming.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The voices are getting closer.”

  Disentangling our arms and legs, we climbed down from our rock. Thighs stinging from the cold, we hurried through the water towards the bank, then pulled ourselves a few metres up the steep slope, clinging to branches, before slipping behind a trunk whose base, surrounded by wild ginger, hid us perfectly. Maddie took my hand in hers. I let her, only to regret it a moment later when Mum and Cécile came into view, arm in arm by the river’s edge, in the very spot where we had been a minute before. They scanned their surroundings to check they were alone, then examined the ground and the bank. When they discovered our tracks, they turned their attentions to the opposite shore, thinking we must have crossed the ford. I hunched deeper behind our hiding place, crushing the over-inquisitive Maddie against the trunk.

  “Ow! Who is it?”

  “I… I dunno.”

  Satisfied they were alone, their movements became freer and more relaxed. Cécile was the first to take off her dress, drawing it over her head in a single, fluid motion that seemed to make it magically disappear. She removed her underwear and crumpled it into a ball, while Mum stood motionless in front of her. Cécile drew Mum tightly to her naked body and kissed her on the mouth for a long time, a very long time. Then she grasped the two straps of her dress, the same little blue dress Mum often wore at breakfast time, and slid them down her arms…

  “Isn’t that your mother? The small one?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Who’s that with her? Oh wow! Oh wow!”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut your mouth, or else!”

  “But…”

  “Come on! We’re getting out of here.”

  We climbed up the bank, emerging into the treeless fields. From here, we had to make a wide detour to go back to the village; it was uphill too, which made it seem even longer. The concrete of the path was burning hot. With each step, the heat shot up through my body and jolted into my skull. Maddie walked two metres behind, annoyed by this brutal expulsion from our gentle, shaded, watery paradise. She dragged her feet, kicking pebbles in my direction. My head was full of the loud splashes and the laughter of the bathers behind us as we fled. Maddie understood nothing. She was like some kind of small animal, dumb and contemptible. Go back to your hole, I thought as we parted without a word at the crossroads near the dried-up fountain.

  * * *

  Dad was sitting at the end of the table. He looked as if he didn’t have enough air to function normally. When he exerted himself, for example by lifting a heavy sack of feed, his creased, red face would metamorphose into a strange landscape of hollows and humps. Now, he was at rest. Staring straight ahead, he seemed to want nothing more than to reduce the world to the space between his nose and the coffee-pot on the stove. Yet even a reality of these shrunken proportions was too large for comfort.

  “Music is breath. Nature breathes. The water of the river swirling around the rocks breathes. The wood that creaks with the changes of weather breathes. The earth becomes wet, dries out, closes, opens up, breathes… It’s an exchange, always an exchange between the inside and the outside… We don’t just breathe with our lungs. We breathe with our skin too, with our bones… with everything! We’re much more permeable than we think. Out… in… out… in… That’s the real rhythm of the world. That’s why each inhalation is… is like a prayer… and music is a cosmic breath… a breath that links us to the earth, to the sun, to the moon… the stars emit pulsations because their temperatures vary… pulsations that are acoustic waves, that can actually be heard by the human ear.”

  Every time Cécile turned towards Léa or Mum, her necklace of coloured pearls and shells, with its swirling orifices shaped like big nostrils, moved against her breasts, clinking against each other. This sound was alien to our kitchen. We were all acutely aware of it, perhaps even more than we were of Cécile’s words.

  “Neil Armstrong had a recording of Dvořák with him during the Apollo mission. He was listening to the New World Symphony before he set foot on the moon,” said my sister.

  “That’s crazy,” replied Mum, a bit lamely.

  Cécile was sitting abnormally close to her. There was a lot of room around our big table, but their chairs were almost touching. Each time they moved, their shoulders rubbed against each other, and they would remain stuck together for a few seconds by the sweat of their naked skin, as if to permit the exchange of some mysterious fluid.

  “The spring that gurgle
s and breathes, the grain that cracks and whose seed makes a passage for itself to the open air, the tree that contracts its leaves, then dilates them when the wind cools down… that’s what it means to be natural. A lot of people are shrivelled inside… closed up… their vital organs are shrunken… their lungs become stiff and dry… the body is no longer illuminated … it’s not open … it becomes coated with miasma. As if living were nothing special, just a necessary evil! That’s because of unhappiness… Not feeling accepted by what surrounds us…”

  Cécile looked at Dad, who ignored her. He was still absorbed in the space between himself and the coffee-pot.

  “Good breathing calms the nerves, calms fears… It’s like when wind blows on fire, scattering the ashes and reviving the flame that was suffocating underneath.”

  Dad emptied his glass in one gulp and turned his head away from all of us. There was a long moment of silence, during which I could hear the liquid descending into his stomach.

  Mum and Cécile had cooked together that night. I remember it was a Berne speciality of dried beans, potatoes and bacon. It had, however, been adapted somewhat from the original, the beans being fresh, bright green and crunchy, the meat replaced by cubes of white cheese… Rudy grew even more focused on his plate than usual, inspecting each forkful in disbelief. From time to time, he would throw an angry glance in Cécile’s direction, but she just kept on talking, and talking, and talking, while Rudy looked at her with the same expression of loathing he’d once given the sharp stone he’d finally found in his boots after it had been tormenting him all day.