Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  * * *

  “No, Mr. Sutter isn’t here. It would be preferable if he were, of course, but his presence is not indispensable. We can go ahead with the sale perfectly well in his absence. Are you family?”

  “I’m his son. And the lady with me, over there, is my sister.”

  Léa is standing some way behind me. The auctioneer and his sidekick glance at her, dive for a moment into the paperwork spread out in front of them, then look back at her with interest, as if needing to confirm the impression that has fleetingly excited their neurons. Léa is lost in the centre of our yard, where she hasn’t set foot since the day she left to go to business school. She smiles at them, and they smile back, respectfully bowing their heads.

  The legs of the bailiffs’ little trestle table are wedged between our shiny round paving stones, glossy and golden-brown in the yellow light of the sun on this morning in early June. With an ache of sadness, I recognise several of the stones, their particular texture and curvature, especially one that is much darker than the others and looks like black jasper. In my childhood fancy, it had been a fragment of meteorite, lonely and out of place amidst its vulgar, terrestrial companions.

  A dozen men in shirtsleeves, jackets in hand, wander through our farm between the stable, the barn and the house. The smoke of cigarettes and cigars follows their somewhat aimless meanderings; when they get together for a whispered conference, the cloud thickens, until it casts a shadow over their heads. I’m relieved that no one I know is there. There are a few Swiss Germans, some men from Berne and Fribourg, and some Frenchmen – but, out of propriety or superstition, no vulture-like neighbours.

  The farm tools are exhibited along the outside wall of the barn. I recognise the barrel used to treat grapes with copper sulphate, the harvester, the muck-spreader, the milking machine, the metal posts tied into bundles, the potato planter… No one dares come too close. They all pass by at a decent distance, sizing up at a glance the condition of whatever might interest them. They almost seem afraid that one of the objects might suddenly leap at their faces.

  The old Hürlimann tractor, the two wooden ploughs, the harrows, and the other large pieces of machinery are all lined up inside the barn, as if they are on parade. Without putting out their cigarettes, some buyers hurry instead into the stables, to inspect the surviving cows: two Simmentals and four red Holsteins. The vegetable garden has been abandoned, and is overrun with weeds. With nothing to keep them in check, they have grown as tall as the stakes around which our green beans once climbed.

  I go into the house, hoping to find that Dad has taken refuge there. Ever since he started living alone, he has slept in the little bedroom, now empty of all its former clutter, which he has simply moved to another room. He lives only in the bedroom and the kitchen. His body is a worn-out machine whose moving parts have all seized up. His backbone is stiff and twisted, so that he walks bent almost double, as if he were constantly seated on a chair. His frozen joints make movement difficult. The slightest physical effort gives him pain, but he perseveres without complaining. His mind refuses to accept his bent body.

  Half of his income comes from the sale of milk at a guaranteed price; the other half from the occasional sale of a calf, a cow, or beets at the end of the year. He also sometimes sells a few eggs to the inhabitants of the new cluster of villas built at the edge of the village. It must give them a sense of gratification to pay over the odds for these precious, elliptical shapes, and to have some contact with this blue-clad farmer who looks like the sole survivor of a remote era. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Dad barely greets them, and makes no attempt at conversation. He works ten hours a day, but it is ten hours at a loss, and all the attempts my sister and I have made in the last few years to persuade him to accept a professional restructuring of the farm have been in vain.

  Dad has developed a permanent siege-like mentality. Whenever I visit, he talks about looming cataclysms, the chaotically changed climate, investors speculating wildly on turning vegetables into fuel, land abandoned by farmers and reconquered by the forest, nine billion inhabitants on a planet that is getting smaller and smaller… He is proud to continue to produce a little milk, a little meat, a little sugar. It’s as if he believes that the future nourishment of the entire human race depends on small-time farmers, scattered over the surface of the globe, resisting change – and he is one of them, with his few hundred square metres of crops.

  * * *

  “Everything looks so pathetic!”

  Léa’s sudden presence at my side takes me by surprise. I glance at her shoes, which have been ruined by the rough paving stones. Red and expensive-looking, with high heels, they are now dirty and stained. For some reason, it touches me to see her tottering like this, on her heels.

  “Yup.”

  “Everything seems smaller, don’t you think?”

  “Yup.”

  “It all looks older too.”

  “It’s like everything’s dead.”

  I look at her in despair. The furniture of our lives was disappearing before our very eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’ve never been able to hide my feelings from her. Léa doesn’t believe me. She looks hard at me, as if she is trying to inject some of her own strength into my soul.

  “Where’s Dad?” she asks.

  “Not inside, apparently.”

  She examines the house, window by window, then the barn, the half-open door of the shed. “What if he’s lying in ambush somewhere, like a sniper?”

  “Come off it.”

  “Some people resist,” she says.

  “He’s probably just hiding.”

  “I heard a story about a farmer who left with his cows before his farm was liquidated. A farmer with his animals but no home… He wandered through the countryside for a few weeks, squatted in meadows, was taken in here or there by other farmers.”

  Behind us, one of the bailiffs shouts that the auction is starting. Patting their trouser pockets to confirm that the bundled wads of notes are still there, the buyers gather round to watch the proceedings. They still don’t dare come too close to the little table.

  “Come on,” I say, taking my sister’s hand.

  “What?”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the café.” I give her a tug to get her moving.

  “The café?”

  “Dad might be there.”

  We take the Passage of the Bees, empty of pollen-gathering insects; then the Street of Gaiety, empty of gaiety. Léa walks slowly, teetering on the uneven village paths. Her eyes are fixed on the ground, as if she is crossing a minefield, though in fact she is only trying to avoid stepping in a cowpat. The physical effort flushes her face and covers her in a film of sweat that looks strange on her. Suddenly she seems younger, and I have the feeling she is becoming the former Léa again – the Léa who was always out of place. Do I love her? I’ve never really asked myself the question. Perhaps it’s something brothers and sisters rarely ask themselves, or at least only if there’s a problem. I wait for her, then take her arm and help her along.

  “Thanks, Gus. It’s so hot!”

  “You’re wearing far too many clothes. It is summer.”

  “But not like that summer… Do you…?”

  Léa leans gently against me for support. An overdressed woman can be as immobile as an elderly person. Her irises seem to have distilled an essence of green from the surrounding meadows. In her gaze is a sliver of soul that is not her own, that she has inherited from our mother, and which gleams more or less intensely, depending what she is looking at. It could be the reason I feel uneasy when she stares at me too long.

  In the café, there are only three customers. They are seated at a single table, but a good distance apart on the benches, giving the impression that they don’t know each other. As if tied to an invisible wire, they raise their heads simultaneously to look at the ne
wcomers. I recognise Grin and Pellaux, a little greyer with the years but otherwise unchanged. I don’t greet them because they don’t greet me. They can’t take their eyes off Léa, and begin to whisper amongst themselves. They seem astounded to discover that Time, which drags their own monotonous existences implacably towards oblivion, is not always so cruel, and can transform a simple village girl into a woman of the sort who appears on TV or in magazines.

  “I don’t believe it! Gus!”

  “Hi, Maddie.”

  She sets her cigarette down in an ashtray behind the counter, and comes towards us.

  “Madame!” she says, by way of a greeting to my sister, then turns her full attention to me.

  “Gus! Gus! It’s so good to see you.”

  She takes firm hold of me, to kiss me on both cheeks. Maddie has been a waitress at the Bellevue ever since she left school at sixteen. Her eyes are magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses. She gives me a knowing smile, as if trying to draw me back to the times when we would wander through the village together on rainy days. The times when we would gather up snails – from under leaves, from hedges and walls – to place them side by side. “It’s just that they move so slowly on their own,” Maddie would say, convinced that it was our duty to facilitate their trysts. And, in fact, they would end up mounting each other, joining their long sticky feet together like suction cups, in twos, threes or fours, merging into piles of soft flesh that we watched as though they were orgies.

  Maddie has never left the village. No one has come to whisk her away. The café’s silent customers are her only company.

  “Are you looking for your father?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve just missed him.”

  She points to a table in a corner under the dusty showcase displaying the trophies of the shooting club. A half-litre carafe and a glass testify to his presence.

  “Damn.”

  “He was drinking white wine all afternoon. You know… about the auction… I’m sorry.”

  “Me too, but that’s how it is.”

  “Yeah. That’s life.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No. He didn’t say a word the whole time he was here… Can I get you both something to drink?”

  “I think I might know…”

  “A lemonade, perhaps?

  “The round field! He must be there.”

  “A coke?”

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” says Léa.

  “Come on! At least drink a glass of water before you leave.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “How about you, Gus?”

  “Okay. Quickly.”

  She moves behind the counter with surprising agility, like an acrobat after years of repeating the same moves, and fills a large glass from the tap. She hands it to me, then stays close to make sure I drink the clear, cool water she has offered. As I bring the glass to my lips, her face takes on a mischievous expression.

  “It’s fine to drink. It’s village water,” she says.

  I swallow a mouthful.

  “It comes from the reservoir…”

  I swallow another mouthful.

  “No one swims there anymore.”

  I swallow a final mouthful, looking Maddie straight in the eyes. Under the too-tight, shiny black dress, the flesh-coloured stockings, the low-necked, slightly-too-thin white blouse that lets her bra show through, there is so much flesh, so much accumulated fat, that is not really part of her, but is a shroud that has gradually enveloped her, the product of a stubborn and endless boredom, an invisible and silent unhappiness, falling slowly and unobtrusively, from morning to evening, like warm summer rain. The lithe, strong body of the little animal I once knew and loved has disappeared.

  “Thanks.”

  A veil passes over her eyes.

  “I think I know where he is,” I said.

  “Your father?”

  “Yeah. He must be in the round field. You know… the big maples.”

  “You could be right.”

  “We’ll go and look.”

  Léa, impatient to get away, nods her agreement. As I hold the door for my sister, I meet the gaze of the little trapped animal, who smoothes down her dress, holding back tears. I remember the days of my own depression.

  We cross the fields. Under the fierce sun, the last scraps of fog are drifting towards the outer edge of the forest. The path consists of slabs of white concrete, held together by black asphalt, which contracts in the winter with the frost and expands in the summer with the heat. They look like the pieces of an immense domino game, whose dots have been erased by time.

  “We won’t be able to avoid selling the buildings and the farm and all the land,” says Léa.

  I don’t reply.

  “According to Grégoire, it’s worth a million, a million and a half. He says these properties are in demand these days. It’s not so far from town, and with a little refurbishment…”

  “We can’t. Dad would never agree.”

  “Would you rather wait until he’s forced to have another auction? If we did that, the price would go down. Look, with the money, we could buy him a flat in the village, in the new neighbourhood…”

  “Stop! Shut up! Just think about what you’re saying.”

  “Listen, Gus! We have to be realistic. Dad won’t be able to go on for long. It’s finished. And with the money that’s left over, you… Well, it seems to me that you could use it, couldn’t you?”

  I stop walking, and look at Léa.

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “What do you mean? Yes, it’s a problem.”

  “I don’t need that money. And you’re getting on my nerves.”

  “There’s no other way. You don’t live in the real world, Gus.”

  “You don’t live in our world, that’s for sure.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  Her distressed face glows. She’s strangely flushed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her looking so foreign. The problem is that we didn’t have the same childhood.

  The meadows are in a state of utter disorder. They have been overrun by fescue grass, a plant scorned even by animals, which will eat it only as a last resort, and take days to digest it. Not a trace of alfalfa or cock’s-foot remains. The lush, green hay-grass and the clover have gone, suffocated by more aggressive species of grass and dandelions. Along the side of the path, where the earth is crumbly, blue sage and rust-coloured sorrel are growing.

  “We’re there,” says Léa.

  “Yeah.”

  There seems to be a tacit agreement between us that we should be able to find our father without calling his name. We hear a high-pitched, whirring sound behind us. Two cyclists, like multi-coloured beetles in their carapace-like gear, are heading in our direction. They stop alongside us.

  “Hello. Do you know where the cyclocross track is?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Strange. We thought…”

  “No.”

  They push their feet back into the tight pedal-straps. As they set off, I shout “idiots!” but they pretend not to hear.

  “Gus! Look!”

  Léa gestures towards a narrow strip of trodden grass. Tracks lead to the slope next to the big maples, where Dad is seated on the ground. His head and shoulders are concealed by the tall grass. His thick, chestnut-coloured velour jacket is speckled with yellow pollen seeds. Sensing our presence behind him, he trembles, but he doesn’t turn around. Neither does he look at me, when I sit down wordlessly next to him. Léa, who has followed me after a short delay, takes a cloth handkerchief out of her handbag and unfolds it on Dad’s other side, before sitting on it. We all stare at the same imaginary point, beyond the dark barrier of the woods below, which barely hide the new villas.

  We stay there for a long time, staring into the dusty, early-summer light, trying to make ourselves a little absent, to find in the distance something solid and definite, despite our splintered lives. I know for sure that we will nev
er talk about this tenuous, shared moment.

  We are sitting in the exact spot where Bagatelle died, struck by lightning during the storm that destroyed the hen-house. It had been a few days before we remembered where she was, with her strange, sudden determination never to move again. We’d found her lying with all four legs in the air, animated one last time from head to hoof by a massive electric current, connected for a fraction of a second to the power of the cosmos.

  Dad had got out of the tractor first, followed by Sheriff. With his muzzle to the ground and his eyes raised to sky, our dog described a wide circle around the swollen corpse, emitting long whines, not daring to approach. Bagatelle’s belly was swollen by gas, making her limbs look like ridiculous appendages. Flies came and went freely from all her orifices, lingering over the wettest parts. They seemed to delight especially in the blue tongue that showed between her pulled-back lips and her limp lower jaw.

  “She must have been toasted on the spot!” said Dad.

  We had to hurry to hoist her up to the road in time to meet the slaughterhouse truck. Dad unrolled the rope attached to the hook on the back of the tractor, tied Bagatelle’s forelegs together in a noose, and climbed back into the driver’s seat. The engine and the immense carcass juddered to life at the same time. Falling sideways in a black tornado of flies, Bagatelle was dragged wretchedly along behind the big wheels, ploughing one last furrow in the waterlogged earth. On the road, we waited together in silence for half an hour. Sheriff, pressing himself against us with his tail between his legs, was inconsolable. From time to time, Dad gave him a pat, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  The truck, with its steel-jawed crane attachment, drew up alongside us. The man from the slaughterhouse greeted us from his window, before turning off his engine and climbing down. He looked at Bagatelle’s remains.

  “How did she die?” he asked Dad, as if it had some bearing on the job ahead.

  “Lightning.”

  “Eugh.”

  They didn’t exchange another word. Their only meetings had been when an animal had died, circumstances not conducive to the growth of cordial relations. We watched the manoeuvrings of the articulated arm. The metal claws opened above Bagatelle, then dropped to close around her and lift her up. Suddenly, all her valves opened, releasing the gases that had built up in her stomach. The instant the pestilential stench reached us, I had to run off to vomit. Sheriff raced off in a dead straight line, until he disappeared around the bend in the road. With a hand in front of his nose, Dad alone remained stoic in the midst of the flies, which flew in ever more frenzied acrobatic formations through the vapours that, for them, must have been what we humans call an earthly paradise.