Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  I felt like asking her which father she meant. The father who had conceived her then abandoned her? Or the father who had taken her in but cared about her no more than the mangy cats with worm-filled ears who squatted in his barn? But my malicious thoughts failed to blossom into speech, and I only said, “You’re getting on my nerves!”

  She gazed at me with a mixture of surprise and irritating tenderness. We stopped at a grey bush with no shade.

  “What’s the matter, Gus?”

  “I told you. You’re getting on my nerves.”

  “It’s because of that woman. The one we saw at the river.”

  “Shut up!”

  “My father says your mum has left.”

  “She hasn’t left.”

  “Oh really?”

  “She… she went on holiday. For a few days.”

  “On holiday?”

  “Yeah. She’s coming back.”

  Her stupid, shapeless face creased into a disbelieving smirk. No one in the village ever went on holiday! She nodded. I felt sure that she pitied me.

  “Your bird looks sad,” she said, pressing herself against me. I felt the firmness of her breasts against my chest. “It looks like he’s shrunk. His tail is all shrivelled up.”

  She wanted to stroke the dove. I tried to cover it and our hands touched. It took me a moment to realise that, having failed to reach my bird, she was attempting to entwine her fingers around mine. It seemed like a gesture of tenderness. I shoved her violently, extending my arms fully to get her as far away as possible. She fell backwards, into what remained of the grass at the side of the path.

  Alarmed, my dove had jumped off my shoulder. After a pathetic attempt at flight, it lay in a ball about a metre from Maddie, who was flat on her back. I looked at Maddie, motionless on the ground, her legs spread, her skirt hitched up to mid-thigh; I looked at her underwear between her legs, the same colour as my bird. I went over to her. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t unconscious. She was breathing normally, gently, as though she were having a mid-afternoon snooze. She was deliberately keeping her eyelids shut so as not to see me. I kicked her lightly in the hip to wake her up. She didn’t react. I began to kick harder, then harder still, until I was kicking her inert body with all my strength. “Dirty little wicked beast!” I said. My head and all my thoughts were filled with anger – a wholesome, satisfying anger that diffused though my body something sweet and calming. Maddie no longer existed. Mum no longer existed. I no longer existed. I could have killed her and simply gone on my way, without turning back, because we were no one anymore.

  “Stop! Stop!”

  I saw my dove in a ball, a few feet away in the grass, saw Maddie’s mouth between her dirt-covered arms, raised to try and protect her face. One of her legs seemed strangely bent, its knee at an odd angle. I kicked again and again and again, harder and harder.

  “I’m hurt! Stop, Gus. Please stop!”

  “What?”

  “I’m hurt,” whispered Maddie.

  I began to strike her more softly. I looked around, at the grey hedge slowly turning to charcoal in the sun; at the airless, cloudless sky without a single bird or insect flying through it; at the path, sharply outlined in the nearby dark fields, but hazy and blurred at the horizon; at the black line of distant mountains that framed us.

  Maddie’s eyes were full of tears, but you wouldn’t say that she was crying. It was more like a tensing of all the muscles in her face.

  “I’m hurt.”

  An immense, dizzying distance still separated us.

  “What’s the matter, Gus? You’re crazy!”

  She struggled to her feet, and made a preliminary inspection of her body, massaging herself gently to check that the various layers of her being were still in place. She passed her hands over her face, as if she wanted to erase it. I wasn’t sorry. How could such an act, without any motive or reason, be wrong? Maddie looked at me, without hostility. She took a few limping steps. One of her legs buckled under her weight, as if it might collapse at any moment. I watched her recover, little by little, as she walked around me. She was like a wounded animal. Her body had betrayed her, but she had not lost the desire to function normally. I thought of my dove, hopping about with its neck outstretched, straining to take off.

  “Good! I’m not too hurt,” she said finally, with scientific detachment, after several trips back and forth.

  It was as if we had played a game, and she had lost; as if she were used to losing, and games always went wrong for her.

  “What should we do now?” She came up to me, and pressed against my stomach. “We’re quite near the reservoir.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know how to get into it.”

  “So?”

  “The water’s clear. And ice-cold… Come on! I’ll show you.”

  The village had had its own pumping station since the end of the war. At that time, after the famers had heroically and single-handedly fed the nation for the past six years, it was anticipated that everyone would want to live near fields. As a result, the rural population would naturally increase and villages like ours would prosper. Our ambitious pumping station, built under such post-war expectations, was eight metres deep. Tapping into the secret, subterranean streams that flowed into the surface river, it had a theoretical capacity of several thousand cubic metres per hour, and fed every pipe, hose and tap in the village. To this day, it stands at the edge of the forest, like a real house in miniature, with a pointy roof, a door and a window.

  I took Maddie’s arm. She was having trouble walking straight. As she leaned against me, I smelled her hair in my nostrils: dried grass mixed with old apples, burnt earth and sweat. She had been spying on the station attendant, and now, after taking five long strides, then seven, then five more, each time changing direction at right angles like a pirate returning to a desert island to recover buried treasure, she found the key, hidden under a stone.

  We entered a tiny room with four walls covered in white tiles. Opposite us was a large electronic console bristling with pointers, dials, and red and green indicators. I was starting to feel a little disappointed, when Maddie pointed gleefully at a round trap-door at our feet. I could hear the sound of drips far below, each one with its own musical identity. We had found it. The passage that led to the water buried in the depths of the earth. Maddie opened the trap-door. I put my dove down. Evidently not fired by any intrepid desire to explore the underworld, it made itself into a placid little ball on the top of the control panel.

  It was a damp, black hole with a very narrow ladder, whose rungs plunged into the darkness. Maddie pointed out that you could sense the watery presence at the bottom, because there was a coolness that rose up, like smoke out of a chimney. She took a little torch hanging from a nail, and slipped it into my mouth. We’d need light, she said. She was very excited. I couldn’t speak. The beam from my lips illuminated her freckled face.

  Her excitement made up my mind. We took off our shoes. I entered the narrow tunnel first, my back against the sticky wall. It had been wet for so many years that I was afraid it had been eaten away by invisible mould, and that my contact with it might make the stone instantly crumble, hurling us both to the bottom in a huge din of rubble. The rungs grew more and more slippery. When I looked up for reassurance, my beam illuminated Maddie as she descended fearlessly just above me. The angle and lighting were somewhat unusual. With each step, her buttocks parted a little, and a hollow formed under her white panties, which, aided by Maddie’s twisting movements, rolled up until they were nothing more than a thin strand of cloth with the sole function of highlighting the two luminous spheres on either side. It was no longer Maddie. It was a part of Maddie. A part that could make me change my view of Maddie as a whole.

  “Wuhuh…” The flashlight between my teeth made consonants impossible. I stopped. I couldn’t see Maddie’s face, only the curves and creases of her looming rear end.

  “What did you say?”

  “Wuhuh
!”

  “…?”

  “WUH-UH!”

  “We’re there?”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “Keep going! It’s not very deep.”

  I dipped a foot into the freezing water, and let myself fall.

  “Is it cold?”

  “Yeah.”

  I was in up to my stomach. My trousers stuck to my legs like a second, ill-fitting skin. I took off my shirt and draped it from the ladder. Illuminated by the circle of light emanating from my mouth, Maddie took off her T-shirt, which she carefully rolled around a rung, then slipped off her skirt, lifting each foot in turn, and put it in the same place. She removed her underwear, hung it next to the rest of her clothes, and leapt in beside me. The vaulted ceiling was sweating. Drops fell all around us: drip-drip, plock-plock.

  “Do you think there are any animals in here, like salamanders?” she asked.

  She launched herself forward to swim. The water in the little underground lake came to life. The waves created by her breaststroke bounced off the walls, and merged to form other, larger ones. Maddie gradually came closer and closer, calm in the midst of the stormy waters, staring at me whenever she crossed my beam of light. She was incredibly naked under her gleaming liquid robes. Never had I seen her so tall, so long, so well-made. The cold water had cured her of all earthly pains. She began to brush gently against me, as if she wanted to wind herself around me.

  “Come on…” she pleaded.

  I mimed to her that the flashlight had to stay dry. She leaned over, took it from my mouth, and put it in hers. Dazzled, I closed my eyes. Maddie put her cheek against my shoulder; when she caressed me, I pressed my lips against her wet hair. We were very far from the other human beings struggling and sweating on the surface, and when her hand went lower and opened my trousers, when she rubbed her crotch against my thigh with an uneven, whistling breath, I had the strange, slightly terrifying feeling that we had left the world above our heads behind us forever. I leaned over towards a breast made stiff by the cold, and straight away it filled my mouth. The beam of light came and went on the wall like a distress signal. I squeezed her hard, too hard, without understanding why it didn’t hurt her, without understanding how she could continue moving, why she wasn’t suffocated by my embrace.

  We hadn’t noticed that the water level had perceptibly lowered. The pumps had begun to throb. We stayed still for a long while, clinging to each other amidst the gurgling and bubbles, prisoners in the belly of the earth, which now seemed to want to digest us. Maddie slowly detached herself from me, with a serious look. Neither of us was the emotional type. All she said was: “You do realise, Gus, now your sperm will come out of all the taps in the village!”

  * * *

  The sky had changed. We couldn’t see the sun anymore. It had finally merged with the atmosphere, which was dark yellow, saturated with microscopic particles, and as dense as caramel.

  Maddie, having carefully locked the station and returned the key, looked up. “What’s happening? The air has gone all hard.” She passed her hand back and forth in front of her face, as if to push away a viscous fluid.

  “Everything’s electric.”

  “Maybe it’s the end of the world.”

  “The sky’s looks like it’s going to burst.”

  It was at that precise instant that the first drops crashed onto the ground, with the violence of missiles hitting their targets: one, then three, then ten, then countless more, raising the dust all around us. The rain had picked up the dirt that had been suspended in the air for months, and painted long, black lines on our faces. At the first rumbles of thunder – impossible to tell whether they came from above or below – followed immediately by flashes of lightning that for a split second transformed reality into a white screen, I began to run towards the village. I was vaguely aware that Maddie was behind me. We were both running through curtains of water so solid they seemed to contain iron filings.

  As we passed the round field, I paused, and tried to spot Bagatelle below. I thought I could make out her impassive silhouette under the deluge, but the next instant a gust of wind heavy with beating rain made everything darker. The huge maples made terrible cracking noises. I thought of my grandfather, perhaps still in the woods near his horse. My mouth full of water and dust, I saw the vague outline of Maddie, still running, disappear around a bend. Everything was a strange, greenish tint, until there was a sharp crack and for a fraction of a second everything was very bright and clear. Then the rain redoubled in intensity. I had to find a shelter as quickly as possible. I began running again, my dove balled up under my T-shirt. My feet were floating in their inundated shoes, and I had the feeling that I was no longer on firm ground, that I was lost in an in-between world.

  Arriving at our yard, I almost ran into the Toyota. Rudy was standing on one side, Dad on the other. They didn’t move when they saw me, as if they had been immobilised by the water that drummed down on their heads.

  “Where have you been?” shouted Dad.

  I wasn’t sure if it was a real question. Dad was the only person who from time to time concerned himself with my whereabouts, but he had been in his room for days without taking an interest in anything. Also, it was hardly the ideal time or place to discuss the matter, so when he held open the door of the Toyota, I slid wordlessly onto the back seat.

  At last, I had a chance to extract my dove from its cramped refuge under my soaking shirt. It looked as if it had been through a vigorous cycle in the washing machine. Not that the experience seemed to have caused it the least distress. I placed it on my shoulder. The bird’s easy-going nature was beginning to really annoy me. Its indifference to the external world, even in its most unpleasant or dangerous aspect, made it seem more like an object than an animal. I was starting to understand how this creature could be a magician’s accessory, no different from a deck of cards, a set of beakers, or a top hat.

  We were all dripping, so that it seemed to be raining inside the car. Rudy beamed at me from the seat next to me. He had rediscovered his unconditional trust in things. The machinery of the world was once again whirring smoothly; everything was back in normal working order. He would have liked to see me share his joy at Dad taking matters firmly in hand like this. No doubt it would have done him good to give vent to the euphoria that was filling his head, to share the happiness that was overwhelming hism and overflowing from his pores. But he was not capable of making words to express these complex feelings, only the saliva that streamed from his half-open mouth. I didn’t share his optimism about our future, but I stretched out my arm to squeeze his knee briefly, as a sign of empathy.

  The roads leading the hen-house had been transformed into torrents of mud. Apart from the distant lines of trees visible behind the clouds of vapour, everything seemed to have dissolved into formlessness. We drove very slowly. My father gripped the steering wheel, with the muscles in his neck and arms tensed, as if he were participating in the car’s exertions, its tyres skidding this way and that, flinging up gobs of mud to mark the windows with long, brown streaks.

  We pulled up a few metres from the hen-house entrance. There were gaps in the roof, where Dad had removed the panels to lower the temperature inside the building. The wind had massively widened these openings, crushing and tearing whole sheets of corrugated iron. We got out of the car. The storm had abated. A heavy but unhurried rain fell, as though, having done its duty and filled the heavens with violence at the height of the storm, it was now free to pour down at its ease. We stood for a while under the shower, looking at the decapitated hen-house. Rudy and I stayed a few feet behind Dad. We were waiting for him to make the first move. He didn’t want to discover the truth too quickly, and neither did we.

  When Dad pushed open the door, the water came up to his calves. Reluctantly, we entered the changing room. It was flooded with over fifty centimetres of dirty liquid. Our white jumpsuits hung absurdly and uselessly from their pegs. There was no longer any point in taking sanitary precau
tions. The rain was falling though the gaps in the roof. The food trays, suspended by ropes, were waterlogged, filled with a thick, stinking soup in which grains of corn, whitish traces of excrement, and corpses were floating. The livid, bloated carcasses of the hens undulated on the water, stirred by waves created by the few survivors, who, necks craned to keep their heads in the air, despairingly waved their wings like oars. Dad remained still. His face showed no emotion. I knew this was a sign of extreme agitation, of a profound and paralysing pain that had stopped up the usual channels of feeling.

  It must have seemed to Dad that a cosmic shift in the natural order had taken place during his brief absence. One world – the lower one, that you hoped to master through work, though daily care of your animals and plants, that you could almost understand because it was almost human, and part of a universe subject to our human will – this world had yielded to another, different kind of nature, lofty, distant, often incomprehensible, yet always imposing itself on us. Sometimes this higher nature would show itself by signs that Dad knew how to interpret: a shift in the wind or in the colour of the clouds. Every morning, he would stop in the hall in front of our barometer’s round dial to inspect the tiniest expansion or contraction of the mercury column.

  It was Mum’s departure that had marked the start of the high world invading the low one. She was the cause of the sudden catastrophic rent in the membrane of the universe, and everything was very directly her fault. I wanted to throw up from the stench.

  Dad suddenly remembered that he knew what to do in every situation. “We have to get the live ones out,” he said.

  He pushed open the glass door, and all three of us were engulfed in water up to our knees. The technique was to catch hold of the birds by their frail necks, just under their tiny heads, and pull them gently upwards, like reeds from a marsh. They were sticky. You had to be gentle, or you might squeeze out the last breath they still had. From time to time, one would slip through our hands and fall back in, sinking straight down, and we had to hurry to recover it, stirring the disgusting liquid blindly in the hope of catching hold of a claw or a wing and lifting it out of the death-trap. Dad walked about in big strides, and, without bending, seized all the chickens within his reach, carrying them in clusters of three.