Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  “Auguste!”

  “…”

  It was a long time since she had called me Auguste. Over the years, the name had come to seem too stately and formal for daily use. I remained silent. I wanted to look harsh. She was running away and that made her guilty. She would only regret it. So much the better if she realised that straight away…

  “You… Auguste.”

  She walked towards me to take me in her arms. I stepped back quickly. For a brief moment, she stayed suspended on one foot, before regaining her balance.

  “Gus?”

  She no longer knew who she was talking to. Auguste, who had been her baby? Or Gus, the boy who had earned this nickname with his independence? I think it was her confusion that made me smile then: a small, tight grimace which I imagined was cruelly superior. I felt that I had taken the right tack.

  “I have to do this, Gus! Gus… your father…”

  I remained impassive. I didn’t want to hear anything, especially not anything about her and Dad. Mum’s face moved rapidly through one expression after another, before the tears welled up.

  “Gus! I’m leaving. I’m leaving, but…”

  She came forward to hug me. I couldn’t entirely avoid her, but then I broke away, and shouted, “Leave me alone!”

  She looked at me, incredulous. She contemplated the ochre sky, like clay above our heads. She stiffened, then she walked backwards like a robot, without taking her eyes off me. She bent her knees, grasped the handle of her suitcase, and gave me a sad smile that had almost the same value as a kiss. Mum, who was an only daughter. Mum, whose father had died four months before she was born. Mum, whose mother had never managed to get over that death, and had never tired of listing everything she lacked in order to be happy. Mum, whose mother had died a few years later from an advanced form of Paget’s disease. Mum, who had been half-heartedly studying at business school when she’d met Dad. Mum, who had followed this man because she was yearning for change and loved the company of dogs, cats, all animals…

  Finally turning her back to me, Mum walked calmly towards Cécile, who had already opened the car boot.

  I was satisfied with myself, as I listened to the rumble of the engine fade away and disappear into the dead countryside. I felt bigger, weightier, as if something hard had expanded inside me and given me courage. My feet even seemed to make more noise than usual when they hit the ground.

  I had become a man. The final image of me Mum had carried away with her was not that of her child. Very soon, little Gus would grow up and everyone would have to take him – me – seriously. From now on, I would strive to be nothing but my soul. Nothing but my pure soul, rid of all useless appendages. A powerful, polished soul, without rough bits, reduced to the essential.

  * * *

  A long, dismal moan, broken by an occasional shout of terror, woke me in the middle of the night. At first I thought a fox had wandered into the barn in search of mice, which happened often enough. But this noise didn’t stop. I got up and went downstairs. As I crossed the yard, I almost trampled on one of our hens. A clutch had wandered astray under the bloated moon, ruffled by the warm breeze coming down from the Jura. Rudy hadn’t locked them up. Now, out for a stroll together as if foxes had never existed, they were taking advantage of their unprecedented freedom. On the ground, even the tiniest fragments of seeds were brilliantly illuminated by the metallic rays of the dead planet. The hens had lost all their common sense, not their greatest asset at the best of times. Sheriff was watching over them anxiously, trying to keep them together, dashing to and fro like a sheep dog around his flock. I sensed the bewilderment in his gaze when I stroked the top of his head as I went by. A wind of madness was blowing over our heads; a feeling of dread was in all of us.

  In the barn, dimly lit by three bare lightbulbs, Rudy stood motionless, arms hanging at his sides, petrified with fear in the midst of the cows. They were pulling at their tethers, stomping violently on the floor and mooing for help. I came closer to his face, which was gleaming with sweat.

  “What’s going on, Rudy?”

  He was somewhere else, a far-off place to which I had no access. I grabbed his arm and squeezed it, calling out his name again and again, before his mind re-entered his body.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The hay hadn’t been changed for several days, and gave off a powerful ammoniac stench. The cows were knee-deep in a seething mass of bacteria that was beginning to inflame their teats. I noticed their swollen udders, the veins bulging.

  “Haven’t you mucked them out? Or milked them?”

  “No.”

  For someone used to everything always being the same, who never had to make a single decision, the events of the last few days had been a cosmic upheaval equivalent to the disappearance of the dawn. The automatic movements of Rudy’s daily labours were linked by invisible threads to my father, always by his side. In the absence of external forces, he was paralysed. He no longer knew what to do.

  “It’s okay! Calm down, Rudy!”

  “They’re going to explode!”

  “No, they’re not.”

  The animals were stamping their hooves, upset by our presence. It was as if they believed we had come to transport them to the slaughterhouse. Its eyes rolling upwards, one cow twisted to catch hold of her own teat with her mouth, freeing herself of her pain by sucking like a calf. Rudy began to sweat in big drops. Nothing was normal.

  “It’s okay, Rudy, it’s okay.”

  “They’re going to explode!”

  “No, they’re not, Rudy! They’ll dry off.”

  “It’s a catastrophe!”

  “They’ve stopped making milk,” I said, seeing that he hadn’t understood what was meant by “dry off”. It was too late. The prospect of our animals literally desiccating had plunged him into a bottomless abyss of terror.

  I tried again. “They’re full. We’ll milk them. Then everything will go back to the way it was before.”

  “… was before.”

  We started milking. Rudy worked next to me, his jaws clenched in disapproval because I was much slower and clumsier than Dad. He didn’t take me seriously as a boss. His opinion of me fell even lower when he realised that I had no idea what to do with the filled buckets. The dairy wasn’t open yet, and in any case I wasn’t allowed to drive the tractor on the main road. The milk would heat up and slowly spoil in the aluminium containers. Rudy’s cheeks were shining like two polished apples. He was lost, more lost than anyone in the world. His mind, with nothing familiar to cling to, had simply abandoned him, left him alone, like a shipwrecked man drifting on a raft tossed by the inscrutable ocean. His head down, he looked compulsively in all directions, from time to time raising his eyes as if he was trying to work out where the next almighty blow would come from. I took his hand. His palm was soft and his fingers limp.

  “Rudy! Rudy! Calm down. Calm down. Everything’s fine. Everything’s fine,” I murmured, drawing out the vowels.

  He looked right, then left, then at the cows, who had rediscovered their natural placidity; then again right, left, and back at the cows, who were still placid. This seemed to surprise him. Finally, he stared at me with his small, wet, drowned-man eyes. I couldn’t leave him alone. I went to fetch my mattress and dove.

  Rudy began to make a careful inventory of all the objects in his room, located between the pigsty and a narrow corridor that led through the farm buildings. He moved each item a few millimetres in one direction, before returning it exactly to its original position. He checked the configuration of all the drawings he’d pinned up, which covered an entire wall. I regularly presented him with new pictures, and they had come to form a collage of everything that made up his daily environment. Then, he verified the precise coordinates of each one of the treasures that were lined up on his shelf: the flask of vetiver, the china dogs that Mum gave him for each birthday. Gradually, this ritual calmed him down, confirming each thing in its immutable place. At last, he undressed, r
earranging his clothes several times on the back of his chair before getting into bed. We wished each other good night at regular intervals, until we decided that we’d hit on just the right intonation. Plunging his head into his pillow, Rudy threw himself into the task of sleeping, as if this wasn’t something that took care of itself, but required serious commitment. With the zeal of a wise man who has come to view slumber as the highest form of human activity, he began to snore.

  Stretching out on an old mattress I had placed at the foot of his bed, I opened my cartoon book. Immediately, I became Time’s master, free to race through the whole strip, or else to linger over each frame to savour a multitude of exquisite details. After a first swift reading, greedily turning the pages to see what would happen, I would go back at my leisure, re-reading certain passages several times, pausing over a vignette, entering the book as you would enter a room in a museum. I drifted lazily around the landscape sketched in the background: the trees, the purple-roofed village, the strands of mist in the distance, the carefully positioned flowers and butterflies, the grassy molehills in the foreground, and the little animals – they all hummed together in a harmonious ensemble.

  I set myself down at a street corner. There was a square, some pigeons, two lovers on a bench, a few scraps of litter floating in the wind, a single patch of grass protected by parapets and pruned hedges, and a bronze sculpture turned green with age, its head and shoulders covered with bird droppings. Here was a reality where everything was motionless, separated from before and separated from after. I would have liked to live in a drawing the whole time.

  1 “My beautiful one! You’re old now, soon you’ll have to die… But there is a paradise… even for horses.”

  VII

  The army finally showed up at our farm.

  I saw the Jeep roar into our yard at top speed. I saw our hens, who were becoming ever more arrogant in the sun, decide collectively that there was no point taking evasive action. I saw the Jeep plough through them, then stop abruptly and reverse in a cloud of feathers, leaving three bloody victims horribly squashed on the stones. Two soldiers jumped out to assess the damage, whereupon Sheriff, who must have been dozing in some shady corner, deemed it necessary to rush at them, barking madly. When he saw the little corpses, he first veered towards them, then stopped in his tracks. His barking turned into yapping, then into strange, sounds, like the creaking of a rusty door hinge, that seemed as if they couldn’t have come from a living creature. Finally, he fell silent, and flattened himself against the ground. The two soldiers, berets in hand, scanned the surroundings for another living soul. I decided to emerge from the shadow of our big elm.

  After weeks of combat against a relentless enemy, the men had a defeated look. Their bodies, marinated in sweat, had expanded within their uncomfortably tight uniforms. One of them, poking a finger into the dirty collar of an outfit too thick for any summer, let alone this one, fixed his gaze on the dove on my shoulder. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Are your hens suicidal or what?”

  Not having considered this possibility, I was at a loss how to answer. Besides, he seemed to be expecting a response from my bird as much as from me.

  “Usually they keep away from cars, don’t they? We’re sorry. Still, we’ll fill out a form and you’ll be recompensed.”

  “…”

  “The pigeon…”

  “It’s a dove.”

  “The dove, then – is it tame?”

  “Yes.”

  They were looking for Dad. I told them he wasn’t around. They asked where my mother was. I said she wasn’t around either. They asked me where they could find one or the other. They were growing insistent, so I said my father was very ill, and I didn’t know where my mother was. This information upset them. The truck was on site and ready for action, but they needed someone to help with the task – and to sign the government forms. At this point, the one who seemed to be the leader said, “It looks like your dog is dead.”

  “Watering can!” I shouted.

  The two soldiers recoiled towards their vehicle as Rudy arrived at a run, holding the overflowing can high in front of him at arm’s length. Open-mouthed, they watched as he distributed water from the spout in careful, precise streams, starting with the tips of the dog’s paws and ending with his nose. With his stuck-out tongue pointing the way, Rudy applied himself with supernatural concentration, as if the efficacy of the cure depended upon his leaving no single part of Sheriff dry.

  “It’s just the heat,” I explained.

  “No. It was when he saw the squashed chickens. Your dog is too emotional.”

  “… too emotional,” Rudy repeated.

  “That’s possible,” I agreed.

  “Yup. It’s not just the heat. It’s the emotion that made him faint,” said the other soldier.

  “The emotion that made him faint,” echoed Rudy, as he attempted to absorb this new idea. I knew that from now on he would repeat this intriguing phrase whenever our dog’s name was mentioned.

  Sheriff got up and calmly shook himself. He was a creature of habit, and passing out in the heat before waking up under a cool shower had become part of his normal routine. I even suspected him of feigning his fits in order to receive the benefit of our attentive and refreshing care.

  The soldiers eventually agreed that I could come with them. They needed to make sure they watered the right field, and in the end, nobody gave a crap about the paperwork.

  I climbed into the back of the Jeep, and we drove across the land towards the theatre of operations. They were carrying rifles, which clashed with every jolt, making a noise like clanging saucepans. Perhaps, in this desert-like terrain, they thought they might actually have to use their weapons to defend their precious cargo of water.

  The water truck and three more soldiers were waiting for us in the middle of the road. I greeted the leader, a tall, moustachioed man with very white skin. Instead of a beret, he had a cap on his head, and he seemed to be suffering much less from the surrounding heat than his men. His cold hand was that of an animal capable of adapting its temperature to its circumstances. He showed me a rough map, on which our holdings were highlighted, then pointed to our stretch of corn. I confirmed that our land did indeed correspond to what was marked on his map. He gave the order, and after a delay of a minute or two, the men got to work, unfurling the hose and turning on the pump, which began to hum.

  The truck moved slowly over our field, as two soldiers in the back operated the hose. The first plants collapsed as soon as the powerful jet of water struck them. A few cobs of corn were flung skywards, narrowly missing our heads as they fell back to earth. The men adjusted their aim, spraying at a point above the target, so that a dense rain poured down on the crop, which crackled like wood in the fireplace. When they had finished, I signed in place of my father at the bottom of the paper the officer held out to me. The soldiers left in a hurry, returning to the lake in order to refill their tank for other urgent irrigations.

  The field was in ruins. The water had done nothing but slide in little streams over the black earth, as hard as a reptile’s skin. It had accumulated in dirty, dust-covered puddles in the hollows, from where it would evaporate without ever penetrating the earth to work its magic. The long stems of the plants were still crackling. It sounded as if a fire were slowly consuming them from inside. The desiccated leaves and the beard around the corn husks looked like oakum on the verge of spontaneously combusting. The ground was strewn with little white fish, some of them still flapping their tails. They had been sucked from their habitat, to be tossed about in an immense, dark aquarium, before ending their lives with their bellies in the air, floundering in despair on the bare earth.

  * * *

  I met Maddie on Queen Berthe’s way, just past the Susten, the highest point in the commune. There was a sort of monument there, made of a few stones, which commemorated the major land redistribution that had taken place from 1941 to 1943. As war raged through the rest of the world, and armies
carved out vast new empires over heaps of corpses, our villagers had peacefully negotiated various land exchanges to improve their lot and aid their work in the fields. In the centre of this modest, sepulchre-like edifice stood our Tree of Liberty, planted in 1903 to mark the centenary of our independence from French occupation. I was walking under the tree’s hot and not very refreshing shade, when Maddie appeared from behind a thicket, where, she told me without embarrassment, she had been relieving an urgent need.

  “Everything’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “I said everything’s dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It seems like nothing is held together anymore. The hedge isn’t connected to the meadow. The road doesn’t go with the sky. That tree over there – it looks like it’s floating. There’s too much distance between things, don’t you think?”

  I’d have preferred to walk along this white path by myself. I was finding Maddie’s closeness very unpleasant. She couldn’t resist cleaving to me, so that her thigh brushed my leg at every step, and her shoulder rubbed against mine. She was looking up at me with her big blue eyes, which always gave me the sense of an unfinished soul. They were the vacant eyes of a calf discovering a world it cannot understand.

  She talked to me about crawling insects that had roasted in the depths of their holes as in an oven; about flying insects that had fallen from the air like withered fruit, exhausted from beating their wings through a furnace; about all the little mammals – shrews and field mice, hedgehogs and weasels – that had died of thirst. According to her, these modest, almost-invisible life-forms were what stopped the whole of nature from unravelling and splitting apart. Their disappearance was a bad omen. Even the butterflies had departed for far-off places where flowers still grew.

  “Did they water your field?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My father says it’s too late.”

  “Hmm…”

  “My father says the roots are already burnt from below.”