Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  Mum couldn’t take her eyes off Cécile. Her fingers ran lightly over her cheeks as if she were re-acquainting herself with her own physiognomy. I had the strange impression that her face had become larger, and that with these discreet caresses she was attempting to soften and relax it even more. The sides of her nostrils, usually roughened and red, had rediscovered a lost freshness. I suddenly realised that she was no longer suffering from allergies, even though asthmatic allergies were an inseparable part of Mum. Perhaps the swim with Cécile in the river had cleaned out her sinuses. I hated the air that she breathed, because it was the air Cécile was breathing next to her.

  Then Mum said, in a very clear voice: “I’m going to get a job.”

  She looked at Dad, who remained inscrutable, then at my sister, who smiled back in a way that gave me the unpleasant feeling that they’d already plotted this together. As if no one had heard, Mum repeated: “I’m going to get a job.”

  Dad had always refused to let her do any extra activities, even if they were only to “make ends meet”, as she put it. For him, any occupation outside the farm was a distraction from what really mattered. There had been the motorway, whose distant roar you could sometimes hear on the westerly breeze; there had been the biscuit factory, where many children of the village had gone to work; there had been the new road, cutting the trip into town by almost half an hour. A web was weaving itself around our countryside. It was a web in which he didn’t want us to get caught.

  “I’m telling you I’m going to get a job!”

  Dad slowly turned his head towards Mum, and we all watched this turning of his head as if it were a very special event of unprecedented importance.

  He said nothing. Mum continued, in a voice that was a little less definite: “Cécile has found me a job at the post office. It’s ideal for me… part-time. Three afternoons a week in Possens, the last shift at the counter… Sorting out the letters…”

  Dad remained silent. Was I the only one who noticed the shudder that went through the taut skin of his forearms?

  “The pay is pretty good,” added Cécile.

  “That’s great!” my sister exclaimed. “You’ll get to have new experiences, meet people…”

  Dad got up slowly and gripped the edge of the table. Filling his lungs with air, he rushed at Cécile, flattening her against the wall and gripping her neck with both hands to throttle her. Mum, who had stepped aside to let him pass, hovered near the door, as if she might flee at any moment.

  “Jean! Jean! Stop it! Stop it!” she shouted.

  Rudy and I exchanged glances. He was very calm, his fork suspended in the air with its cargo of beans as green as the first shoots of spring. In his eyes was a malicious glint; it was the yellow glint of pleasure at a violent but liberating shock. He smiled at me. Was the glow in his eyes mirrored in my own?

  “Jean! You’re crazy! Stop it! Stop it! You’ll kill her!”

  That did, in fact, seem to be Dad’s goal, and there could be no doubt he would succeed. He was possessed with a strength that was no longer his own.

  “You bunch of idiots! What’s wrong with you? Do something!”

  My sister shoved my chair, slamming my head back against the wall, and leapt over me. She grabbed hold of Dad’s back and pulled, but without managing to move him a centimetre. She was like a little carnivorous raptor clinging with its claws onto an enormous diplodocus.

  “Dad! Stop! Let go!”

  She shoved her knee into him again and again, pulled his hair, pummelled his sides with her fists. He continued methodically to strangle Cécile, whose short, hoarse breaths had started to sound like those of some tiny mammal. The shells around her neck were no longer clinking. All I could think was “Go! Go!” Not for a moment did I imagine the inevitable consequences of a murder in our kitchen: Cécile’s lifeless body at our feet, Dad thrown into prison, our family broken up for ever. Instead, I savoured the panic in the eyes of our mother, as she stood there, powerless, voiceless, her mouth open, holding her cheeks as if to keep her head from exploding. I couldn’t have cared less about Cécile; I was watching Mum’s face, deformed by fear. She was only getting what she deserved. This horrible scene would sort everything out. She would finally understand. She would finally understand that we loved her more than anyone in the world. Above all, she would understand that I loved her more than that girl could ever love her. During those endless-seeming moments, I think I believed that Cécile would simply vanish from our lives, like the enemies my comic-strip heroes blasted out of existence. Jeering and mocking, Rudy was clearly of the same opinion.

  “Fuck! Stop it! Dad! Let her go!”

  Suddenly, Dad stepped back. He examined his hands. Cécile straightened up. Her face flushed, she looked at him incredulously, her mouth limp, her lips dead. Dad took a few more steps backwards, with Léa still hanging onto his back. The ordinary commotions of the outside world returned: a tractor rumbling in the distant fields, the indifferent hum of the refrigerator, the sizzling of insects on the lamp, the despairing song of the crickets. We were all there in that room, but it was as if none of us existed.

  Dad left the kitchen unhurriedly and in silence, as he did every night. His mind was already on the chores waiting for him outside. Once the door was closed and the sound of his footsteps had faded away in the depths of the hallway, Mum threw herself into Cécile’s arms, joined immediately by my sister, who embraced them as if she were trying to bring them even closer together. They repeated over and over reassuring little phrases – “Everything will be fine! Everything will be fine!” – like soft, magical incantations. After a while, Rudy followed Dad. Léa turned from stroking Mum’s back to glance at me. Alone at the big table, I felt like an intruder. I stayed there for a minute, hollowed out, not crying because there was no one to witness my tears, before I too abandoned the scene.

  VI

  The next morning we ate in silence, as if nothing had happened, except that Mum wasn’t there. She was still asleep in the bedroom above our heads, no doubt in the arms of Cécile.

  The sky took on a weird colour. As the dawn slowly diluted the night, the air turned dirty-yellow. It was as if the sun had decided to travel millions of kilometres closer to the earth, to descend into the lower layers of our atmosphere, and dissolve there. Deep in the oven below, we continued to bake like biscuits. Rudy was sweating a lot, but only in certain places; his glands seemed to be unevenly distributed under his skin. Big drops streamed from his nose and his chin while his forehead, cheeks, and prominent cheekbones remained dry. From time to time, he would try to empty his overflowing pores with a downward swipe of his hand, which had left a vivid red stripe on his face.

  We were in the car on the way to the hen-house. Dad hadn’t opened his mouth. There was nothing to say. Speaking would only have deposited a useless layer of words on top of things. When reality showed its ugly side, when it refused to abide by the normal rules of fair play, Dad would just shove his fists into his pockets, and wait in silence for it to pass.

  My dove, perched on my shoulder, was tense, braced against the wind rushing in through the open windows as the car sped along. With every lurch, the bird’s claws buried themselves in my flesh, and I held it tightly to stop it from being sucked outside. I could feel the hard bristles at its rump, announcing the imminent regrowth of its feathers.

  Dad was very worried about the hens. The customer who was supposed to buy the whole lot was due to visit in two weeks, and the birds weren’t getting any bigger. They ate their grain without putting on weight, their organisms exhausted by the struggle against the heat. The fans were functioning normally, but they weren’t designed for an apocalyptic heat wave. Their motors, spinning at full throttle, as loudly as the engine of a Jumbo Jet, gave the impression that they were raising the temperature. The death rate was high. As we gathered up the ragged little bodies, the truth stared us in the face. Our investment was doomed. The sparse rows of survivors, their flesh as dry as if it were already cooked, could n
ot possibly give us any profit. All we could do was save what could still be saved.

  Rather than going straight to the hen-house, we made a detour to visit Bagatelle. We felt mysteriously drawn to her. Our old mare, who had once paced tirelessly up and down our fields, who had learned to recognise a few simple instructions that helped her pick her way between the delicate crops, had left her stable to die outside. Somehow this act had lodged her firmly at the forefront of our minds, even though none of us was quite sure why she’d done it.

  I looked at Dad’s hands on the steering wheel, which jumped at every irregularity in the road. The hands that had tried to strangle Cécile. Rudy was in the back, all his concentration on the shifting landscape. He would settle on a detail and track it with his eyes until it disappeared behind him. Then he would follow another one, until that too disappeared, so that he kept turning his head from side to side, his forehead pressed against the window.

  I closed my eyes, and was engulfed by a vast nothingness, gradually losing all purpose as torpor vanquished every part of my body. The yellow sky, the yellow fields, the car splitting the yellow air on the yellow road… They were all unreal. The winter mornings, when the cold hardened the ground and squeezed things together. Dad’s broad, bent back as he crossed the yard to begin the daily struggle. Mum, whose joints almost seemed to come apart when she tried to run. The windows in the roof of the barn, shrouded with dusty cobwebs that let though no light. Sheriff, resigned to his destiny, and yet afraid of everything. The doors of our house, always closed as if each room contained priceless treasures; doors that we spent our lives opening. Léa, whose awareness of her own beauty meant that she was always waiting for something marvellous and unexpected to happen. Spring, when the north wind blew, and everything became very cold and very colourful at the same time. Maddie’s cool, indifferent-seeming hands when she touched me. My grandfather, Annibal, carrying the burden of his past, not knowing what to do with himself. Rudy, who was my friend because he never asked himself or the people around him difficult questions. Bagatelle, who had transformed herself into an ominous shadow in the middle of the fields… It was all inscribed forever in my nervous system. Groggy and half-asleep on the battered seat of our car, I felt that I’d been sentenced to lug around my entire reality with me at all times… No doubt this reality would only disappear when I died.

  “What the hell is this?!”

  The Toyota had stopped abruptly in the middle of nowhere. Dad got out, slamming the door violently behind him. With his shoulders squared and his fists swinging, he set off towards the line of tractors parked in the burnt meadow. They looked like a procession of big grasshoppers. Dad knew their owners.

  “It looks like something’s going on.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll go and have a look.”

  “Yes. We’ll go and have a look,” said Rudy, who was satisfying an urgent need to clean out his nose very thoroughly, a finger in each nostril. He was waiting for a reassuring sign before he would venture out of his quiet self-sufficiency into this rather unusual situation. I put my dove down on the headrest and climbed out of the car. Rudy followed. “We’ll go and have a look. We’ll go and have a look,” he repeated, still trying to calm himself down before this encounter with the unknown.

  Bagatelle hadn’t moved from her spot below the road. I was relieved to see her silhouette, which had already acquired the status of a landmark. A small crowd had gathered around her. Anni was standing next to her old head. He seemed to be arguing with three men, arranged in a half-circle around him. Dad joined them.

  “Hello, Jean!” they said, one after the other, as if they had made a prior agreement to echo each other.

  Ignoring this greeting, Dad addressed Anni. “Is there a problem with Bagatelle?”

  “No. She’s just waiting,” replied my grandfather. Then, in the ancestral language he reserved solely for his horse’s ear, he whispered, “Myni Schöni! Du bisch jitz alt, bald muesch du stärbe… Aber es git es Paradies… o für Ross.”1

  Dad paid no attention to the other men. There was Dind, who owned thirty hectares and rented ten more; Pellaux, not far behind, with a big farm after a lucky marriage; Grin, whose ancestors had hauled themselves over the years into the ranks of the gentry. It was several days since Dad had seen anyone outside the family. He seemed to have decided that only objects and animals were worthy of his consideration. He would carefully examine each tool he picked up, as if a pitchfork or a shovel could bring some answer to the problem of suffering. He had taken to sitting down in front of Sheriff and staring at him, which made our dog uncomfortable, unused as he was to being treated as anything more than part of the furniture. He would hang his head to the side quizzically, tongue hanging out, as if waiting for an explanation. The truth was that Dad was training himself for solitude.

  The men of the village seemed embarrassed. They studied the tips of their shoes. A heavy silence descended. The grass was audibly cooking beneath our feet and all around us.

  Dad walked around Bagatelle, stroking her.

  “She should drink something.”

  “In this heat.”

  “She’s roasting alive.”

  “What have you given her to eat, Jean?”

  “She’s constipated – there’s no manure.”

  “Her insides must be rotting.”

  “We should get out of here. Look at her belly. She’s swelling. She’s going to explode. I wouldn’t like to be around when that happens.”

  “That would not be a pretty sight.”

  Dad paid no more attention to their words than to the flies massing on Bagatelle’s coat. There was a tense atmosphere. The three men seemed unable to leave, yet at a loss what to do with themselves. They looked over in my direction, in search of support. Rudy and I had stayed a little back. I said nothing, as befitted my junior position in the hierarchy. Finally, Dad stopped massaging Bagatelle’s sides and, without bothering to turn his head, said, “This is none of your business.”

  “Of course it isn’t our business. But still, you have to admit it’s quite comical! She could become an attraction.”

  “I can already see the article in La Feuille.”

  “Lots of people would come, that’s for sure. You could charge for admittance.”

  “Shut your mouths, you morons!” yelled Dad. “And get the hell out of here!”

  “Whoa, now, take it easy! You shouldn’t talk to us like that.”

  “Yeah, you can’t speak to us like that!”

  “For a start, this isn’t even your field.”

  “Yeah. Your Bagatelle happens to be on my land,” said Grin.

  There was a long silence, while Anni slowly added fourteen centimetres to his annual cigarette consumption. During those moments, this act seemed to acquire an immense significance.

  “I could ask you to move her.”

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “You look exhausted, Jean.”

  There was another silence.

  “I guess now that you have two women at home…”

  “Must be a bit too much at your age…”

  Dad grew perfectly still. He gazed at a point somewhere in the immense, featureless sky.

  “They say it isn’t quite like that, though…”

  “Yeah. No need to mow the lawn anymore, right?”

  “We heard your wife is eating nothing but grass…”

  “A vagitarian!”

  This last insult came from Grin, a large, greasy man in dungarees. He was knocked down first, then Pellaux, then Dind. They were flattened like bowling pins after a “strike”. Dad seemed about to keep walking, into the distance, but then he turned, as if he had just remembered something important. Looking straight ahead, without so much as a glance down at the men on the ground, he strode confidently back towards them. I thought he was coming to take me and Rudy back up the hill to the Toyota. But when he reached Grin, who was trying painfully to get to his feet, he kneed him i
n the face, knocking him back down and making him yelp in pain. Dind, on all fours, grabbed at Dad’s ankle as he passed, and received a powerful kick in the jaw. Pellaux had managed to stand up and was trying to run away, but Dad tripped him and sent him sprawling. No one made a further attempt to get up, knowing that anyone rising higher than a few centimetres off the ground would be pitilessly mown down by steel-tipped shoes. Dad was all-powerful. He had the strength of someone who no longer had any use for caution, someone indifferent to all things. He contemplated Bagatelle. He looked at the sky. He surveyed the crest of big maples, whose crowns of leaves were melting into the pale yellow of the horizon. He was breathing calmly. It wasn’t an act. He had genuinely moved on. Anni smiled and shook his head.

  “Jean! Stop this bullshit!” growled Dind finally, his blood-filled mouth gurgling like a blocked pipe. “You’ll pay for this! This… you’ll pay for it!” said Pellaux, trying again to get up.

  I distinctly saw a red-tinged thread of saliva arc high into the air, as Dad’s foot brutally returned him to below the decreed twenty centimetres.

  “You’re completely insane!” shouted Grin.

  All three were now prostrate, like soldiers ducking machine-gun fire on a battlefield. Dad continued to take his time. I looked at Rudy. He was so delighted by this spectacle that frothy saliva was erupting from his parted lips. He was laughing inside. You could see it in his eyes, which squinted like those of a Tatar chief contemplating the infinity of the steppe. I had the feeling that this moment would never end. Dad seemed to be looking for something to hold onto. Anni smoked through another seventy centimetres.

  “Okay, okay! I’m sorry, Jean. I shouldn’t have said it…” stammered Grin.

  This was his way of making it clear that he still thought it, that everyone in the village thought it, and said so in Dad’s absence, and that saying it just now had been a matter of mere clumsiness, nothing more than a faux-pas.