‘This morning we stopped the milk tankers coming from the port of Le Havre … It was Irish and Brazilian milk. They didn’t expect to find themselves face to face with armed men and left without any problems. Except it’s almost certain that they went to the police station immediately afterwards. What are we going to do tomorrow, when they come back with a CRS unit? We’re still at the same point; we’re at the brink.’
‘We’ve got to hold our ground; they won’t dare shoot at us, they can’t do that,’ the red-haired giant pleaded.
‘No, they won’t fire first…’ Frank cut in. ‘But they’ll charge us and try to disarm us; confrontation is inevitable. The question is whether we fire too. In any case, if we resist we’ll be spending tomorrow night at the station in Saint-Lô. But if there are dead or wounded it’ll be a different story.’
I glanced incredulously at Aymeric who said nothing, turning his glass in his hands; he looked stubborn and morose, avoiding my eye, and I said to myself right then that I really had to intervene, or try to intervene, if it was still possible. ‘Listen!’ I said at last, raising my voice, without the faintest idea of what I was going to say next.
‘Yes…?’ This time he raised his head and looked straight into my eyes, with the same open and honest expression that he had had when we were twenty, and which had immediately made me fall for him. ‘Tell me, Florent…’ he continued very gently, ‘tell me what you think, I’ll listen to your point of view. Are we really fucked, can we really try to do anything? Do I have to try to do anything? Or do I have to behave like my father, sell up the farm, renew my membership at the Jockey Club and end my life peacefully like that? Tell me what you think.’
It was inevitable from the start that we would end up there; we had put off this conversation for over twenty years since my first visit when he had just set up as a farmer and I was embarking on a more banal career as an executive, but now the time had come, and the other two abruptly fell silent; it was between the two of us now, him and me.
Aymeric waited, straight-backed and candid, his eyes fixed on mine, and I started talking without even being fully aware of what I was saying; I had a sense of sliding down a slope, and it was dizzying and a little bit sickening, like each time you plunge into reality; at the same time, that doesn’t happen very often in a life. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘from time to time you shut down a factory or you move a production unit, and let’s say there are seventy workers fired, so then there’s a report on BFM, there’s a picket, they burn some tyres, one or two local politicians speak up, it becomes a news story with an interesting subject and a powerful visual aspect: the steel industry isn’t the same as lingerie, and there are pictures to show. Here, for example, you’ve got hundreds of farmers shutting up shop every year.’
‘Or blowing their brains out…’ Frank intervened then waved his hand as if to apologise for having spoken, and his face became sad and impenetrable again.
‘Or blowing their brains out,’ I agreed. ‘The number of farmers has dropped dramatically over the past fifty years in France, but it still hasn’t dropped enough. You still need to divide it by two or three to reach European standards, the standards of Denmark or Holland – well, I mention those because we’re talking about dairy products, but for fruit it would be Morocco or Spain. Right now there are just over sixty thousand milk producers; in fifteen years, in my opinion, there will be twenty thousand. In short, what’s happening in French agriculture right now is a huge social plan, the biggest social plan in operation, but it’s a secret, invisible social plan, in which people disappear individually, in their corners, without ever providing a theme for a news item on BFM.’
Aymeric shook his head with a satisfaction that pained me because at that moment I understood that he didn’t expect anything else from me, and was just waiting for objective confirmation of the disaster, and I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest to him, apart from my absurd Moldovan reveries – and the worst thing was that I hadn’t finished.
‘Once we’ve divided the number of farmers by three,’ I continued, this time sensing that I was at the heart of the failure of my professional life, and destroying myself with every word I uttered; at the same time, if I had had personal success to field, or if I had managed to create the happiness of a woman or at least an animal, but I hadn’t even done that, ‘We still won’t have won when we’ve reached European standards; we’ll be on the brink of definitive defeat, because then we’ll really be in contact with the world market and we won’t win the battle of global production.’
‘And do you think there will never be protectionist measures? Does that strike you as absolutely impossible?’ Frank’s tone was strangely detached and absent, as if he was enquiring into curious local superstitions.
‘Absolutely impossible,’ I cut in without hesitation. ‘The ideological pressure is too great.’ Thinking back to my professional past, to my years of professional life, I realised that I had been confronted, in fact, with a strange cast of superstitions. My interlocutors weren’t fighting for their interests, or even for the interests that they were supposed to defend, and it would have been a mistake to believe as much: they were fighting for ideas; for years, I had been confronted with people who were ready to die for free trade.
‘So there you have it,’ I said, turning back towards Aymeric, ‘if you ask me, it’s all fucked, it’s really fucked, so what I advise you to do is try to save your own arse. Cécile was a fat slut, let her fuck her pianist, and forget your daughters, move, sell the farm again, forget the whole thing – if you do that straight away you still have a small chance of starting your life again.’
* * *
This time I had been clear, I could hardly have been any clearer, and I only stayed for a few minutes. Just as I was getting up to go, Aymeric gave me a weird look in which I thought I could read a hint of amusement – but it was, perhaps, more probably a hint of madness.
* * *
The next day I was able to follow the development of the conflict on BFM – a short report. They had finally decided to lift the blockade without resistance and let through the milk tankers coming from the port of Le Havre for the factories in Méautis and Valognes. Frank had been able to give an interview lasting almost a minute, in which he set out – very clearly, succinctly and convincingly, I found, using few numbers – the ways in which the situation of stockbreeders in Normandy had become untenable. He concluded that the battle was just starting, and that the Farmers’ Federation and Rural Cooperation were together calling for a big day of action the following Sunday. Aymeric was beside him during the whole interview but he didn’t say anything, merely playing mechanically with the firing pin of his assault rifle. I emerged from that report in a probably temporary and paradoxical state of optimism: Frank had been so clear, so moderate and so lucid in his intervention – I thought it would have been impossible to do better in a minute-long interview – that I didn’t see how anyone could fail to respond to it, how in the face of such argument anyone could refuse to negotiate. Then I turned off the television, looked out of the window of my bungalow – it was just after six and the swirls of fog were gradually fading as night fell – and I remembered that for almost fifteen years I too had always been right in summaries defending the point of view of local farmers; I had always produced realistic figures suggesting reasonable protection measures and economically viable short circuits, but I was just an agronomist, a technician, and at the end of the day I had always been told I was wrong, things had always toppled at the last minute towards the triumph of free trade, towards the race for higher productivity; then I opened a fresh bottle of wine. Night, Nacht ohne Ende, had now settled on the landscape – who was I to imagine I could change the course of the world?
The Normandy dairy farmers had been summoned to converge in the centre of Pont-l’Évêque at lunchtime on Sunday. Hearing the news on BFM, I thought at first that it was a symbolic choice, designed to ensure good media coverage for the demonstration – th
e name of the cheese was known all over France, and even beyond. In fact, as the sequence of events would show, Pont-l’Évêque had been chosen because it was at the intersection of the branch of the A13 coming from Deauville and the A13 Caen–Paris.
When I got up early in the morning the west wind had totally dispersed the fog; the ocean was sparkling, stirred by the most delicate waves, far off into the distance. The perfectly clear light offered a range of vivid shades of very bright blue; for the first time I thought I could make out the shores of an island on the horizon. I went out again with my binoculars: yes, it was amazing, given the distance, but one could just make out a soft green lip of land, which must have been the east coast of Jersey.
In weather like this it seemed as if nothing dramatic could ever happen, and I really had no desire to be confronted by the misery of the farmers; sitting down at the wheel of my 4x4, I more or less felt like going for a walk on the cliffs at Flamanville, perhaps carrying on all the way to the Nez de Jobourg; on a day like this it was very likely that you would be able to see the coasts of Alderney; I briefly thought again of the birdwatcher; perhaps his hopeless quest had taken him much further away, to much darker zones; perhaps at this very moment he was crouching in a prison in Manila, where the other prisoners had already given him a going-over, his swollen and bleeding body covered by a flood of cockroaches, his mouth, with its broken teeth, unable to stem the flow of insects sliding down his throat. That unpleasant image was the first hitch in the progress of the morning. There was a second one when, while passing by the hangar where Aymeric kept his agricultural machinery, I saw him going back and forth, storing jerrycans of fuel on the bed of his pick-up. Why jerrycans of fuel? It didn’t bode well. I turned off the engine, hesitating; did I need to go and talk to him? But to say what? What else could I say to him, about our last evening? People never listen to the advice you give them, and when they ask for advice it’s specifically with a view to not following it, and have it confirmed by an external voice that they are stuck in a spiral of annihilation and death; the advice one gives them plays exactly the same role for them as that of the tragic choir, confirming to the hero that he has taken the path of destruction and chaos.
But it was a beautiful morning; I couldn’t really quite believe it yet and, after a brief hesitation, I set off again towards Flamanville.
* * *
My walk on the cliffs was unfortunately a failure. And yet never had the light been so beautiful, never had the air been so fresh and reinvigorating, never had the green of the meadows been so intense, never had the reflection of the sun on the wavelets of the almost flat ocean been so enchanting; neither, I think, had I ever been so unhappy. I carried on to the Nez de Jobourg and it was even worse; it was probably inevitable that the image of Kate would return to me – the blue of the sky was even deeper, the light more crystalline, it was now a northern light – and I saw again her eyes turned towards me in the park of Schwerin Castle, her expression tolerant and gentle, already forgiving me; and then other memories returned to me from some older days, during a walk we had taken together on the dunes at Sonderborg – that was it, her parents lived in Sonderborg and the light that morning was exactly the same – I took refuge for a few minutes at the wheel of my G 350 and I closed my eyes, weird little shocks ran through my body but I didn’t cry; apparently I had no tears left.
At about eleven o’clock in the morning, I headed towards Pont-l’Évêque. The B-road was blocked by tractors parked in the middle of the thoroughfare two kilometres before the entry to the town. There were many of them all the way to the town centre, several hundred; the absence of the forces of law and order was a bit surprising, but that said the farmers seemed rather calm, picnicking and drinking beers near their vehicles. I called Aymeric’s mobile without getting a reply, then continued for several minutes on foot before realising: I had no chance of finding him in this crowd. I went back to my car and turned back towards Pierrefitte-en-Auge, before turning off towards a hill overlooking the motorway junction. I had barely parked for two minutes when events escalated. A small group of ten or so pick-ups, among which I recognised Aymeric’s Nissan Navara, was coming slowly down the access road of the A13. One last car, slaloming a little, had time to get past them with a roar of its horn, before they blocked the road towards Paris. They had chosen their location well: immediately after a straight line of at least two kilometres, visibility was perfect, and cars had broadly enough time to brake. The traffic was still flowing that early in the morning, but a traffic jam formed quite quickly; there were a few more honks of car horns, more and more infrequent, before silence fell.
The commando unit was made up of about twenty farmers; eight of them had taken up position on the back of their pick-ups, training their guns on the car drivers, and there was a space of about fifty metres between them and the first cars. Aymeric was in the middle, clutching his Schmeisser assault rifle. He was relaxed, very much at ease, and nonchalantly lit what looked to me like a joint – to tell the truth, I had never seen him smoking anything else. Frank was on his right – I sensed that he was a lot more nervous – gripping what looked to me like a simple hunting rifle. The other farmers started unloading the jerrycans of fuel stored on the beds of the pick-ups before carrying them about fifty metres back and arranging them along the whole length of the motorway.
They had more or less finished when the first CRS armoured vehicle appeared on the horizon. The slowness of the intervention would be the subject of numerous controversies; having witnessed what happened, I can say that it was really difficult to get through, even though they frantically activated their sirens, and the car drivers (most of whom had braked at the last minute, meaning various cars had crashed into each other on the road) simply had no way of moving; they would have had to leave their armoured vehicle and continue on foot – it was the only option, and that was the sole rebuke that one could, in my view, honestly make towards the commander of the unit.
At the same time, just as the authorities were arriving in the vicinity of the site of the confrontation, the farming machines came down the access road; they were huge great things, a combine harvester and a maize forager almost as wide as the access road itself, their drivers perched four metres off the ground. The two machines parked heavily, definitively, in the middle of the jerrycans, before their drivers leapt from their seats and came and joined their comrades; now I understood what they were preparing to do, and I had trouble believing it. To get hold of the farming machinery they would have had to contact CUMA, the Agricultural Cooperative, probably the branch in Calvados; the image of the offices of CUMA, a short walk from DRAF; the image of the receptionist (an unhappy old divorcee who had never completely succeeded in giving up sex, and that had given rise to no shortage of distressing incidents) briefly ran through my mind. The farmers must at least have shown their ID to get hold of a combine harvester (and what on earth could they have told them? It wasn’t silage season, let alone harvest time), it wasn’t possible otherwise – those machines were worth several hundred thousand euros, and they were legally responsible – they wouldn’t get out of this one now; it was impossible, they had driven themselves into a cul-de-sac, a shortcut to suicide, brother?
Then it all happened at surprising speed, like a perfect sequence repeated at length; as soon as the two drivers of the machines had joined the others, a big, sturdy, red-haired man (I thought I recognised Barnabé, the man I had seen at Aymeric’s a short time before) got a rocket-launcher from the back of his pick-up, and calmly loaded it.
There were two rockets fired in the direction of the fuel tanks of the machines. Combustion was instantaneous: two huge fountains of flame shot towards the sky before coming together, and a huge cloud of smoke appeared, blackish and properly Dantesque; I would never have suspected that agricultural fuel could produce such black smoke. It was during those few seconds that most of the photographs were taken, the ones that were then reproduced in newspapers all around the world – and in
particular the one of Aymeric, which would make so many front pages, from the Corriere della Sera to the New York Times. He was already commandingly handsome; the puffiness of his face seemed to have mysteriously disappeared and he looked peaceful, almost amused, his long fair hair floating in the breeze that had just risen at that very second; a joint still hung from the corner of his mouth, and he held his Schmeisser assault rifle half upright against his hip; the setting was one of absolute and abstract violence, a column of flames twisted against a backdrop of black smoke; but at that second Aymeric seemed happy, well, almost happy – he seemed in his place at the very least, his expression and relaxed pose reflected an unbelievable insolence; he was one of the eternal images of rebellion, and that was what led to the image being picked up by so many daily newspapers around the world. Also – and I was certainly one of the only ones who understood – he was the Aymeric I had always known: a nice guy, nice to the core and even good; he had simply wanted to be happy and had devoted himself to a rustic dream of durable, high-value production, and to Cécile, but Cécile had turned out to be a fat slut excited by life in London with a high-society pianist; and the European Union had also been a fat slut with that business about milk quotas; he certainly wouldn’t have expected things to end up like this.
In spite of all that, I don’t understand, I still don’t understand, why things ended up as they did; various respectable configurations of life were still available as options; I didn’t think I’d been overdoing it with my story about the Moldovan girl – it was even compatible with the Jockey Club – and there is certainly a Moldovan kind of nobility, nobility exists more or less everywhere – well, we could certainly have cobbled together a scenario, but the fact remains that at some point Aymeric raised his weapon, placed it clearly in the firing position and advanced towards the line of CRS.
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