Animalia Read online

  She walks back to the farm through the lashing rain, following the ditches, under the stoic gaze of cattle that stand unmoving in the downpour, her clenched fists pulling her cardigan over her flat chest. Head sunk between her shoulders, she drags her muddy clogs along the road, droning an Ave Maria to the rhythm of her breath and the sucking of the wooden soles in the soft ground. As she crosses the farmyard, she sees the figures of two men standing at the gate of the sty. She stops, checked by a primitive fear. Her heart, having faltered, is now pounding in her throat. The driving rain streaks a sky of slate; the air seems filled with a million needles. The figures seem to dissolve, to merge with the brown expanse of the sty wall, so that, at first, she cannot tell whether the men are turned towards her or away. Finally she makes out the gesticulating hands, the clouds of vaporous breath, the fitful snatches of raised voices. She risks a step, a movement of the leg, but it is involuntary, or ordered by some unconscious impulse, before racing into the farmhouse, where she quickly undresses, throws her underclothes and skirt onto the fire, where they hiss like a nest of vipers before bursting into flame under the indifferent eyes of the two cows. She sluices herself with dishwater, wipes herself with a rag she slips between her legs, before putting on clean, dry clothes.

  She sits on the bench at the table. She stares out the window, at the torrential rain outside, splashing on the muddy farmyard. She sees the figures of the men appear in the frame and recognizes the hobbling gait of Albert Brisard, a local man with a club foot who works as a day-labourer. She does not move as they approach. In her lap, her white knuckles grip a rosary and she intones in Latin:

  ‘…Thou who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us, Thou who takest away the sins of the world, hear my prayer, Thou who art seated at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us…’

  When they push open the door, she quickly gets to her feet and stands stiffly by the table. A gust of wind sweeps through the farmyard and into the room, bringing with it the drizzle and the smell of the men as they take off their gabardines, catch their breath and mop their faces. The husband says:

  ‘So there you are.’

  They stand for a moment in the damp, smoky half-light, then the husband gestures for Brisard to pull up a chair and they sit down at the table. She walks over to the dresser, on which she places the rosary, and takes the bottle of Armagnac and two glasses that she sets before the men and fills to the brim. The neck of the bottle is clinking so loudly against the rim of the glasses that she has to steady her forearm with her other hand.

  ‘Where did you get to?’ the husband asks.

  ‘I went into the village,’ she says.

  ‘With the gilt there about to farrow?’

  ‘I strawed down the sty, but there was no sign it was coming anytime soon.’

  ‘She ate the litter, and there’s nothing now can be saved,’ he adds.

  ‘Fraid not,’ says Brisard, plunging his thick moustache into the brandy.

  The men drain their glasses, she pours again, they drink again and then she pours two more glasses, corks the bottle and puts it back in the dresser. She sits off to one side on the wooden flour chest.

  ‘Not even that sow of yours,’ Albert Brisard says, his cheeks flushed from a belch. ‘You can be sure she’ll do it again… She’s got the taste for it, as they say… It’s in her blood now. If you spare her and mate her again, even if you hobble her so she can’t get at the litter, they’ll be infected and the sows in the litter will eat their young the same way. It’s like a weakness, a vice… I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. There’s nothing to be done but slaughter her.’

  He nods and snuffles, wipes his nose with the back of his hand, leaving a streak of snot, and brings the empty glass to his lips, lifting it high, tipping his head back in the hope of savouring a last drop of Armagnac.

  He says:

  ‘Fraid so.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind but we feed ’em well, our beasts,’ the husband says.

  Brisard shrugs.

  ‘Maybe it’s to make up for the blood she lost. Or maybe it’s the pain that does it… Best to pick up the afterbirth and change the straw when it’s soiled. Once the litter have suckled the sow of her first milk, there’s not much to fear.’

  Then he glances over his shoulder and gets to his feet.

  ‘Well, the rains seems to have eased off. We’ll talk soon.’

  The husband nods, gets up in turn and walks Brisard to the doorstep. They watch as he puts on his coat, wrings out his beret, which sprays brown liquid onto the gleaming grey flagstones of the farmyard, puts it on, and walks off after addressing them a curt nod. Surly, the husband pulls on a leather jerkin, a pair of hobnail boots and heads out to the sty. The genetrix closes the door. She watches the broad back of this man she must think of as her own, his long, slow gait beneath a sky now smudged with black ravelled clouds, then turns away, goes to the bed and lies down, trembling from head to toe, and immediately sinks into sleep.

  By evening, the happening feels remote. All that remains is a vague recollection, an impression of the kind left by a dream that flares after waking and is all the more confusing; a nebulous feeling rekindled by some chance detail that contains the dream or the memory of the dream, a thread that snaps when one tries to draw it towards consciousness and, though for a time she recalls a particular physical sensation, a bottomless void, it fades with each passing day until it effaces everything, or almost everything, about this parturition on the floor of the sty. The infanticidal sow is fattened for slaughter and a boar is brought from a neighbouring farm to service the other sow, who farrows down three months, three weeks and three days later. On the advice of Albert Brisard, as a precaution, the newborn piglets are smeared with a bitter concoction of sour apple and juniper. The incident is forgotten.

  At the end of every week, after he has smoked his pipe and drunk his glass of eau-de-vie or mulled wine on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench while watching the day wane behind the mossy rooftops of the farm buildings, on which pairs of woodpigeons doze, the husband goes back to the conjugal bed. In the glow of the lamp, he undresses, slips on a nightshirt, slides under the sheet, closes the door of the box-bed, and tries to embrace the body of the wife, who is lying on her side or on her stomach, feigning sleep or unreceptive oblivion. There is nothing to suggest that she participates in these couplings beyond stoically enduring the clumsy gestures with which he feverishly rumples their nightclothes, grabs her small breasts or encircles her shoulders, fumbles between her legs with scant ceremony and slips in a penis that is long, hard and gnarled as a bone or the beef tendon dried in the sun to make whips. Eyes closed, mute, she listens to the grotesque creaking of the box-bed, whose walls seem about to split. She is aware of the weight of this body, the contact of this skin, the pungent smell of rancid sweat, of soil and dung, the fierce, repeated intrusions of this excrescence into her, the musty stench as he lifts the sheet and spits in his hand to lubricate the knotty penis, the rancid breath from the mouth as he moans into her ear, rubs his soft moustache against her cheek before burying his face in the bolster with the guttural wail of a wounded animal dragging itself through the brush after being shot, in a final shudder that could be a death spasm, then rolls onto his side. She waits until he is asleep before she gets up and washes, hunkered over a basin of water, her crotch smeared with cold semen, then she kneels down at the foot of the bed, calloused knees pressed into the beaten earth, hands joined high on her forehead, and murmurs a prayer.

  Whenever she comes upon two rutting dogs, she rushes at them with a broom, a pitchfork, a cudgel. She furiously beats the male with the handle, and the dog, at first unable to detach himself, takes the blows, yelping, while the bitch struggles to break free, sometimes fracturing the penile bone. Then she stands there, panting, foaming at the mouth, and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. She despises all animals, or almost all, and if, by chance, she seems to soften at the sight of child, it is only beca
use he is dragging a stunted, muddy, half-dead puppy by a length of string attached by its paw, or tossing a pigeon held captive by the same string into the air. Alphonse, whose spirit she has broken, avoids her like the plague. She has a soft spot for the cows, however, because she milks them, squeezing the teats with dry hands she smears in butter. The end justifies the means, and she attaches little importance to the sexual appetites of animals destined for fattening or breeding. When the gilt, the cow or the filly is brought to be serviced, she assesses the colour, dilation, the swelling of the vulva, stimulates the sire if necessary, retracting the sheath, masturbating the corkscrewed, lanceolate or sigmoid penis and guiding it towards its destination, restrains the balking female and the reluctant sire, then wipes the thick semen coating her hand on the animal’s croup, into her skirts or onto a handful of straw. All around, animals fornicate and copulate: the ducks with their coiled penises frantically mount the females with their tortuous vaginas, ganders ejaculate into the spiral folds of geese, the peacock spreads its tail and covers the alarmed peahen with its weight, sperm pearls, drips, oozes, explodes and spurts between hair and feathers, bringing forth cries and clucks of a brief or enviable climax. While a handful of men watch a boar mount a sow, Albert Brisard, who knows his subject, remarks in Gascon:

  ‘The spasms in them bastards can go on for half an hour.’

  Then, to himself, in a low voice:

  ‘Half an hour…’

  And the men, engrossed in their thoughts, slowly shake their heads, never taking their eyes off the rutting animal.

  The year following the incident with the sow, in the crushing heat of a summer night, heavy with the scent of broom and wool in the grease, the wife is wakened by an ominous feeling. She sits on the edge of the bed, lays a hand on her belly, her eyes feverish but unseeing, sounding the strangeness of her flesh, the subterranean river that seems to spring from this alien body and spill onto the mattress, streaming down her calves and dripping onto the floor. She gets up, crosses the room unsteadily, goes into the scullery, closes the door behind her and gives birth in the same basin where, every week, she washes away the opalescent semen of the husband while he snores in the next room, behind the walls of the box-bed. The thing is quick and there is almost no pain, only a single shooting pain as though she – her body – were relieving herself of a weight, ridding herself of the mute, motionless encumbrance she now contemplates, gripped by a terror that annihilates all thought, before she drapes a shawl around shoulders, grabs the basin and crosses the farmyard to the sty, where the pigs are sleeping under the piles of straw and twigs with which they furnish their nests.

  The following morning, just as, in the distance, dawn rends the sky with a slash of ultramarine blue that delineates the distant black line of the Pyrenees, she takes the bicycle, rides into the village and crosses the quiet square where tall chestnut trees, their topmost branches invisible, form hulking shadows. She throws wide the doors of the church, which exhales a breath of cold stone, of myrrh and frankincense. She moves pews and prie-dieux, sweeps and, on her knees, scrubs the floor of the nave with black soap. She polishes the confessional, the retable and the woodwork, dusts the candles and the iridescent body of Christ. She rubs the scarlet wound in his right side. When finally she sits down on the church steps, bathed in sweat, day is breaking over the chestnut trees, inscribing the crenelated outline of the leaves. Three Charolaise cows with disproportionate hindquarters, with faltering calves clamped to their udders, are grazing on the square, their flanks beaded with dew, their grinding jaws and the gentle tinkle of cowbells punctuating the chirruping of the sparrows. Their misty breath carries to the genetrix the smell of the cud and the methane they belch and fart at regular intervals into the pale air, and these mingle with the smells of dough and of bread baking in the boulangerie. She gets to her feet, ignoring the cracking of her joints, walks across the square to the lavoir, where she splashes her perspiring face with water from the huge pool. She dries herself on her blouse and, from her cupped hands, drinks the cloudy water as one of the cows listlessly wanders over to slake its thirst, steam rising from its flanks and bony rump. Between its legs, a trembling calf that smells of whey observes the farmwoman with a dull, feverish eye, in whose pupil she contemplates the convex reflection of herself and the square behind, where the remainder of the herd is still calmly grazing.

  When the husband falls ill for the first time, she hopes at first for some reprieve. But like those ephemeral insects whose sole purpose, once they have metamorphosed, is to procreate and lay their eggs in fresh or stagnant waters, the frequency and violence of his desires intensifies. Perhaps he senses the seriousness of his illness and is instinctively trying to pass on the defects of his stock and of his blood. When he impregnates her again, in the spring of the following year, she believes that her self-abnegation and her countless acts of contrition have found higher grace because her menses stop. Her belly swells, though not much: what she is carrying must therefore be a human child and not one of those creatures expelled from her flesh, one of the Devil’s runts she can now hardly believe were ever real. And yet it is with a certain detachment, with that now familiar sense of alienation, that she watches herself transformed into a gravid, doleful creature, carrying her pregnancy as though it were the weight of the world.

  By the time Éléonore is born, the black fields have hardened, it is cold enough to split the stones and the animals wander, lost souls, over the hostile moors in search of tufts of grass frozen by the wintry weather. A fire is burning in the hearth, but the father is waiting outside in the cold, on the little worm-eaten wooden bench, draped in blankets. He keeps a firm distance from the midwives bustling from scullery to bed, from bed to scullery, brewing infusions of cloves and raspberry leaves that scent the rooms, rinsing the bedlinen, pouring hot water into copper basins, raising their voices to encourage the parturient woman to push harder or to bite down on a strip of leather slipped between her teeth. With their expert hands they knead the swollen belly, pushing the flesh with each contraction of the womb. Éléonore is born, blue and silent, with the cord around her neck, and the women cut it with a knife, shake the baby by her feet until they extract a howl, then wash her before laying her on the stomach of the genetrix, who is still as a gallows, watching her newborn reach towards the breast. One of the midwives goes out to the farmyard and speaks to the father, who gravely gets to his feet and stands in the doorway, not daring to cross the threshold. Tiny flecks of frost turn to liquid on his shoulders and are instantly absorbed by the fleecy wool of the blankets. He looks at the wife and the ruddy child.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she says.

  He nods and replies:

  ‘I’ll go feed the animals,’ then goes out into the darkness to piss.

  The midwives hang the sheets to dry in front of the fire. They rearrange their shawls and their faces, and, one hand clutching the knotted fabric under their chins, they head back to Puy-Larroque. The parturient is left alone with the infant, so puny it can fit in the hollow of one hand, but driven by a form of prescience, balled fists struggling with the breast to extract the colostrum, suddenly eager to exist. For weeks, the baby languishes in her swaddling clothes, now and then managing to shake herself from an anaemic torpor to pose her grey, seemingly sightless eyes on the forbidding face of the genetrix, who vainly tries to slip a brown nipple between the small, pale lips.

  They hasten to baptize the baby, whose days, they say, are numbered. Made unclean by childbirth, the genetrix refuses to leave the house and makes a point of honour of no longer preparing the soup or drawing water from the well. She simply sits, dazed and sombre, with Éléonore on her lap or in the wickerwork crib next to her while the father stirs a pot-au-feu or cornmeal porridge prepared according to her instructions. When neighbours from the surrounding farms come to visit, she disapproves of the gifts they bring to celebrate the child’s birth. Under the eye of the painstakingly polished Christ, swaddled in a crocheted white cotton gown
trimmed with lace, Éléonore is presented before God in the presence of the reticent father dressed in his Sunday best. He is contemptuous of religious sentiment and silently disavows the wife’s sanctimony. Like sailors, farm folk are superstitious and attend church out of a sense of propriety. But he finds a mysterious beauty in the act of worship, in the gestures repeated since times long forgotten. He stands next to the baptismal font and responds to the exhortations of Father Antoine, the wheezing priest, who blows his nose on his alb and preaches in the Gascon tongue so he will be understood by his flock:

  ‘Do you reject sin?’

  ‘I do reject it.’

  ‘Do you reject the path which leads to evil?’