Animalia Read online

  About the Book

  Animalia tells the confronting and compelling story of a peasant family in south-west France as they develop their plot of land into an intensive pig farm. In an environment dominated by animals, five generations endure the cataclysm of two world wars, economic disasters, and the emergence of a brutal industrialism. Only the enchanted realm of childhood–that of Éléonore, the matriarch, and Jérome, her grandson–and the innate freedom of the animals offer any respite from the barbarity of humanity. Animalia is a powerful novel about man’s desire to conquer nature and the transmission of violence from one generation to the next.

  For Sébastien.

  For my parents and my sister.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  I. This Filthy Earth (1898–1914)

  II. Post Tenebras Lux (1914–1917)

  III. The Herd (1981)

  IV. The Collapse (1981)

  Thanks

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  I

  This Filthy Earth (1898-1914)

  From the first evening in spring to the last vigils of autumn, he sits on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench, his body hunched, beneath the window whose jambs frame the night and the stone wall in a small theatre of shadows. Inside, on the solid oak table, an oil lamp sputters and the fire in the hearth projects the bustling shadow of his wife onto walls mottled with saltpetre, shooting it up towards the rafters or breaking it on a corner, and this hesitant, yellow light swells the room and pierces the darkness of the farmyard, leaving the father motionless, silhouetted against a semblance of sunlight. Regardless of the season, he waits for night here, on the wooden bench where he saw his father sit before him, its moss-covered legs buckled by the years now beginning to give way. When he sits on this bench, his knees come a quarter-way up his belly and he has trouble getting to his feet, yet he has never considered replacing it, not if there were nothing left but a board. He believes that things should remain just as he has always known them for as long as possible, as others before him believed they should be, or as custom and wear has made them.

  Coming home from the fields, he leans against the door frame and removes his boots, carefully scraping the mud off the soles, then stops on the threshold and inhales the damp air, the breath of the animals, the unpleasant smells of the ragout and the soup that mist the windows, just as he stood as a child, waiting for his mother to beckon him to the table, or for his father to come and hurry him along with a dig in the shoulder. At the nape of his neck, his long, lean body curves and takes a curious angle. A neck so bronzed that even in winter it does not pale, but looks as though it is covered by grimy, cracked leather and seems broken. The first vertebra protrudes from between the shoulderblades like a bony cyst. He takes off his shapeless hat, revealing a pate already bald and freckled by the sun, holds it in his hands for a moment, perhaps trying to remember what he should do next, perhaps waiting for a command from that same mother, long dead now, swallowed and consumed by the earth. Faced with the wife’s determined silence, he finally decides to step inside, trailing his own stench and the stench of the animals as far as the box-bed, and pulls the door open. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, or leaning against the carved wood, he unbuttons his rancid shirt between fits of coughing. At day’s end, what he cannot bear is not the weight of a body which illness has meticulously stripped of fat and muscle, but his own verticality; at any moment it looks as though he might collapse, might fall like a leaf, fluttering in the musty air of the room, right to left, left to right, before settling on the floor or sliding under the bed.

  On the fire, in a cast-iron cauldron, the water has finally begun to boil and the genetrix hands Éléonore the pitcher of cold water. The child takes slow steps, fearful of tilting the jug, which, despite her intense concentration on her hands and forearms, splashes, soaks the rolled-up sleeves of her blouse, as she ceremoniously advances towards the father. She feels a shiver run down her spine beneath the reproachful gaze of the genetrix, who is following close on her heels, threatening to spill the basin of boiling water over her if she does not hurry. Framed in the half-light like a great brig, elbows on his knees, hands hanging limply before him, the father is lost in contemplation of the knotted wood of the wardrobe, or the taper burning on the washstand whose flames struggle against the shadows. The oval of the mirror nailed to the wall offers a distorted, barely visible reflection of the room. Heads poking through an opening cut into the cob wall at waist-height, two cows are chewing the cud. The heat from their stationary bodies and their excreta warm the people. The little scenes played out in the glow of the hearth are reflected in bluish pupils. At the sight of the wife and the child, the father seems to return from some vague daydream to this puny, deep-veined body. Despite himself, he summons the strength to move, stretches his pale back, straightens the torso where grey hairs sprout like rye grass in the furrows of ribs and collarbones. His belly is gaunt, yellow in the candlelight. He extends the arms with their calloused elbows and sometimes gives a faint smile.

  The genetrix pours hot water into the bowl set on the washstand. She takes the pitcher from Éléonore and sets it on the shelf before returning to her kitchen without so much as looking at the father, keen to avoid the sight of this man, bare-chested and raw-boned as the Christ nailed to the wall at the foot of the bed. From high on the cross, He watches over her as she sleeps and appears to her in her late, drowsy prayers, the crucified, funereal effigy of the father sleeping next to her, outlined by a glimmer of moonlight or the guttering stub of a candle whose glow slips through a chink in the door of the box-bed, the man she carefully keeps at arm’s length, since she cannot bear his sweat, his sharp bones, his ragged breathing. But at times she thinks that, in turning away from this man who married her and made her pregnant, she is betraying her faith and turning away from the Son, and from God Himself. At such times, moved by guilt, she turns to this man, the husband, with a half-look, a faint, grudging gesture of compassion, and gets up to empty the basin of blood-mottled gobs of spittle he hawks up during the night, prepares a poultice of mustard seeds or an infusion of thyme, honey and brandy, which he sips, leaning against the head of the bed, propped up on his pillows, almost moved by this solicitude, taking care not to drink too quickly to signal his gratitude, as though he savours these bitter, ineffective decoctions, while she paces the room. For already the image of the crucified father has faded and with it her guilt, and now she longs to return to bed as soon as possible and lose herself in sleep. She comes and goes, cup or basin in hand, grumbling about his sickly constitution in a voice so low that he takes her words for lamentations, against this chronic infection that has been eating away at his lungs for almost ten years, turning a once hale and hearty man into a haggard, spent creature fit only for a sanatorium; then grumbling about her own misfortune or the cruel fate with which she is forced to contend, she who has already cared for an invalid mother and buried both her parents.

  As the father bends over the steaming basin, draws water in his cupped hands and brings it to his face, Éléonore stands back, attentive to every gesture of these ablutions, performed every evening in precisely the same order, the same rhythm, in the pool of light cast by the lamp. If the genetrix tells her to sit down, she watches out of the corner of her eye, observing the curve of the back, the rosary beads of the vertebrae, the soapy glove passing over the epidermis, the aching muscles, his movements as he slips on a clean shirt. Animated by a fragile grace, his fingers race along the buttons like the tremulous legs of a moth, the death’s-head hawkmoths that eclose from chrysalides in the potato fields. Then he gets up, comes to the table and, when the genetrix in turn sits down, raises his
joined hands to his face, his proximal phalanges interlaced, his gaze lost somewhere beyond the ridges of the fingers and their bony knuckles, the grubby fingernails. He says grace in a voice made deeper by his cough and finally they eat, with no sound but their mastication, the grating of cutlery against the bottom of their plates and the buzzing of the flies they no longer shoo from the corners of their lips, the genetrix swallowing hard to choke down the stone lodged against her glottis, the irritation caused by the slavering grunts and grinding of molars that escape the husband’s lips.

  Of all bodily functions, ingestion is the one the genetrix truly abhors. And yet this woman has no qualms about hiking up her skirt and petticoats and spreading her legs to relieve herself wherever she might find herself – in the middle of a field, over the gutter in a village street, even the dung heap that dominates the farmyard, her urine streaming along the ground, mingling with that of the animals – or, when the call of nature is different, scarcely ducks behind a bush to hunker down and defecate. She consumes only meagre rations, niggardly mouthfuls, reluctantly swallowed with a pout of disgust or immediate satiation. She finds the appetite of others more abhorrent still. She chastises the child and the man, who have learned to eat with their heads bowed, and whenever the father piteously pleads for another glass of wine she reminds him – glancing warily at the girl – how Noah when in drink revealed his nakedness before his sons, or how Lot committed incest. She practises self-imposed fasts that last for days, for weeks, allowing herself only a few sips of water when racked with thirst. In summer, she vows to economize and eat only blackberries or fruits from the orchard. When she finds a worm buried in the heart of a plum, an apple, she looks at it, shows it, then eats it. She finds in it the taste of sacrifice. She has shrivelled until she is no more than a sheath of bloodless skin stretched taut over knotty muscles and jagged bones. Only during the Eucharist, at Sunday mass, when she receives communion at the altar rail, does Éléonore see the genetrix take pleasure in eating. She rapturously sucks the Body of Christ, then walks back to her pew with a haughty air, greedily eyeing the pyx in which Father Antoine jealously guards the consecrated hosts. As she leaves the church, she pauses on the square, imperious, while people around her chatter, as though she needs to rouse herself from a daydream in which the communion, received by all but only truly by her, conferred on her a singular importance, marking her out from the throng of villagers. With her tongue, she detaches the last crumbs of unleavened bread from the roof of her mouth, then sets off along the path into the hills without exchanging a word with anyone, dragging the girl by the arm while the father, profiting from the rare hours of freedom she allows, goes off to drink in the company of other men. Once a year, she feels the need to make a pilgrimage to Cahuzac, in Gimoès, where she prays to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, Beata Maria Virgo Perdolens, whose statue, discovered by a farmer in the middle ages, is said to work miracles, and to which she feels connected by some mystery. But when, in Advent, young men come to her door to sing l’Aiguillonné, which promises health and happiness, she is reluctant to open the door, complaining at having to squander a little eau-de-vie or a few eggs in exchange. She alone knows what distinguishes faith from superstition. At the market, she sometimes encounters fortune tellers: on such occasions she jerks the child away with such force she might dislocate her shoulder, while over her own shoulder she shoots the soothsayer a look of mingled envy, anger and regret.

  Once the meal is over, the father pushes back his chair, gets up with a heavy sigh, pulls on his wool coat again and finally goes to sit on the bench, where he fills and lights his clay pipe, which quickly begins to glow, reddening the sharp bridge of his nose and accentuating the dark recesses of his eye sockets. At this point, Éléonore brings him mulled wine spiced with cloves, a glass of eau-de-vie, or Armagnac, then she sits next to him on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench, breathing in the bitter smell of tobacco that rises into the twilight or into the pitch darkness and mingles with the perfumes of damp clay sodden by the rains or, on torrid evenings, the smell of baked earth and sun-scorched thickets. In the distance, a herd of sheep moves slowly through the gathering dusk in a tintinnabulation of bells. The genetrix remains by her hearth, winding flax thread onto a distaff. Although the father does not speak, he accepts the slight, delicate presence of Éléonore, her arm brushing against his. She strives to share his contemplation, to scrutinize the darkness and the silence of the farmyard, the purple backcloth of the sky, cerulean, beyond the black line of the ridge tiles on the outhouses, the tops of the towering oaks and the chestnut trees, then the muffled sound of the animals, the meagre livestock dozing behind the doors of the henhouse or the byres, the grunting of the pig in the sty and the clucking of the hens. On cool nights in late summer, when the cloudless sky forms a majestic, constellated vault, she shivers and slips her feet under the quivering flank of the dog lying in front of them, presses herself against the father, and sometimes he lifts his arm so that she can bury her head in the hollow of his armpit.

  This body is as alien to her as the being it incarnates, this sickly, taciturn father with whom she has not exchanged more than a hundred words since she came into the world, this wretched peasant farmer who is working himself to death or hastening his end, as though eager to be done with it, but only after the harvest, after the sowing, after the labouring, after… The genetrix shrugs and sighs. She says, ‘We’ll see,’ ‘God willing,’ ‘From your lips to God’s ears, may He take pity on us.’ She is consumed by the fear that he may not be with them indefinitely, for what will she do then, orphaned of mother and father, and with a child to feed? She also talks of the agonies of childbirth and the misfortune of having given birth too late, already old at twenty-eight. And not even a son who, when he reached adolescence, might help the father, this brave, stubborn man who lacked ambition and will leave nothing behind but a patch of hard and stony ground, one of those small family farms that yield little. Time was, the husband’s family owned a vineyard, but the plague of phylloxera did not spare their few scant acres and the forebear, the father’s father, passed away from one day to the next without a word. Dropped dead beside his ox, which was found grazing in the ditch where it had dragged the cart, while he lay sprawled between the furrows, dried and shrivelled as a withered vine stock. Nothing, or almost nothing, seems to have survived the agricultural crisis and the plummeting wheat prices. Fallow land has increased, young people are leaving the land, the girls to seek positions as wet nurses or maidservants for middle-class families in the town. The boys can parlay the muscular arms made strong through working in the fields for greater reward in the quarries or the building trade. She sometimes says that soon they will be the only people left to this hostile, implacable land, tilling the intractable earth that will one day be the death of them.

  Éléonore sits motionless, enveloped in the smell of the father, his breath that stinks of tobacco smoke, the camphor and the tinctures he inhales and sprinkles on the kerchief he slips up his sleeve all day. She feels the hard swelling of his ribs beneath his shirt whenever he inhales deeply, or when he is taken by a coughing fit and hacks gobs of spit onto the floor. The child droops a little, half-dozing. One by one the stone outhouses in the farmyard sink into darkness, then the ground beneath them, and all that remains is the girl, the father, and the invisible hunting dog at their feet in the thick, aqueous darkness that seeps into her nostrils and fills her lungs. They alone, suspended in a hieratic space-time in which the calls of the insects and the raptors seem to come from a distant bygone era, like the glow of the long-dead stars above. Finally, when his clay pipe has gone out, the father draws on his last reserves of strength to lift his own weight and that of Éléonore, whose legs immediately encircle his waist, his arms, his neck, and her chin rests on his shoulder. He lays her on a small bed like a trunk next to that of her parents. He tucks her in with such care that she never remembers coming back into the house and wakes the following morning unsure whether she shared these
moments with him.

  The genetrix, a lean, cold woman, with a ruddy neck and hands that are ever busy, affords the child scant attention. She is content merely to instruct her, to pass on the skills for those chores that are the preserve of their sex, and the child quickly learns to emulate her in her tasks, to mimic her gestures and her bearing. At five years old, she holds herself stiff and staid as a farmer’s wife, feet planted firmly on the ground, clenched fists resting on her narrow hips. She beats the laundry, churns the butter and draws water from the well or the spring without expecting affection or gratitude in return. Before Éléonore was born, the father twice impregnated the genetrix, but her menses are light, irregular, and continued to flow during the months when, in hindsight, she realizes that she was pregnant, though her belly had barely begun to swell. Although scrawny, she had a pot-belly as a child, her organs strained and bloated from parasitic infections contracted through playing in dirt and dungheaps, or eating infected meat, a condition her mother vainly attempted to treat with decoctions of garlic.

  One October morning, alone in the sty, tending to the sow about to farrow, the genetrix is felled by a pain and, without even a cry, falls to her knees on the freshly scattered straw, whose pale, perfumed dust is still rising in whorls. Her breaking waters drench her undergarments and her thighs. The sow, also in the throes of labour, trots in circles, making high whining sounds, her huge belly jiggling, her teats already swollen with milk, her swollen vulva dilated; and it is here, on her knees, and later on her side, that the genetrix gives birth, like a bitch, like a sow, panting, red-faced, her forehead bathed with sweat. Slipping a hand between her thighs, she feel the viscid mass tearing her apart. She buries her fingers in the fontanelle, rips out the stillborn foetus and flings it far from her. She grips the bluish umbilical cord attached to it and from her belly pulls the placenta, which falls to the ground with a spongy sound. She stares at the tiny body covered in vernix caseosa, it looks like a yellowish worm, like the grey and golden larva of a potato beetle ripped from the rich soil and the roots on which it feeds. Daylight filters between loose boards, streaking the sour, dusty air, the bleak half-light that reeks of a knacker’s yard, and falls on the lifeless form lying on the straw. The genetrix gets to her feet, split in two, one hand under her skirt touching the swollen lips of her sex. She steps back, horrified, and leaves the sty, careful to latch the door, leaving to the sow the afterbirth and its fruit. For a long time she leans against the wall of the sty, motionless, gasping from breath. Bright blurred shapes float in her field of vision. Then she leaves the farm and takes the road towards Puy-Larroque, limping through a heavy drizzle that washes her face and the skirt stained brown with lochia. Without a glance at anyone, she crosses the village square. Those who see her notice the soiled skirt she is gripping in one fist, the pallid face, the lips pressed so tightly that the mouth is white as an old scar. Her brown hair has escaped her scarf and is plastered to her face and neck. She pushes open the church door and falls to her knees before the crucifix.