Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Farther on, in the last pen, pale, immense, long-loined adult hogs were dozing. They looked like so many small boats. They all lay on their sides, panting through open snouts, and wallowing in black mud as thick as molasses. Some of them watched us with great weariness. One might have thought them giants changed into beasts, creatures condemned to a fearful metamorphosis.

“The ages of life,” Orschwir murmured. I’d nearly forgotten his presence, and the sound of his voice made me jump. “First you saw innocence, then stupid aggression, and now, here, wisdom.” He paused for a while and then began speaking again, slowly and very softly. “But sometimes, Brodeck, wisdom’s not what we think it is. The creatures you see before you are savage beasts. Truly savage, however much they look like beached whales; brutes with no heart and no mind. With no memory, either. Nothing counts but their belly, their belly; they think of one thing and one thing only, all the time: keeping that belly full.”

He stopped talking and looked at me with an enigmatic smile that contrasted sharply with the heavy features of his dirty face. Bread crumbs adorned his mustache, and his lips still glistened a little with bacon fat.

“They’re capable of eating their own brothers, their own flesh. It wouldn’t bother them at all — to them, it’s all the same. They chew it up, they swallow it down, they shit it out, and then they start all over again, indefinitely. They’re never sated. And everything tastes good to them. Because they eat everything, Brodeck, without question. Everything. Do you understand what I’m telling you? They leave nothing behind, no trace, no proof. Nothing. And they don’t think, Brodeck, not them. They know nothing of remorse. They live. The past is unknown to them. They’ve got the right idea, don’t you think?”

—

’m trying to return to those moments, to get as close to them as I can, but what I’d really like to do is to forget them and run away, run far away, on light feet and with a brand-new brain.

I have the feeling that I’m the wrong size for my life. I mean, I feel that my life is spilling over everywhere, that it was never cut to fit a man like me, that it’s full of too many things, too many events, too many torments, too many flaws. Is it my fault, perhaps? Is it because I don’t know how to be a man? Because I don’t know how to sort things, how to take what I need and leave the rest? Or maybe it’s the fault of the century I live in, which is like a great crater; the excesses of every day flow into it, and it’s filled with everything that cuts and flays and crushes and chops. My head — sometimes I think my head’s on the point of exploding, like a shell crammed with gunpowder.

That famous day, the day after the Ereigniës , wasn’t so long ago, and yet, in spite of everything, it’s slipping through my fingers. I remember only certain scenes and certain words, very exact and very clear, like bright lights against a deep black background. And I also remember my fear, my fear above all, which I’ve worn like a garment ever since. I can’t cast it off; in spite of my efforts, it’s grown tighter and tighter, as if it shrank a little more every week. The strangest thing is that back in the camp, after I became Brodeck the Dog, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Fear no longer existed for me there; I had moved well beyond it. For fear still belongs to life. Like hyenas circling carrion, fear cannot do without life. That’s what nourishes and sustains it. But I–I was out on life’s margins. I was already halfway across the river.

After I left Orschwir’s farm, I believe I wandered the streets. It was still quite early. My memory focused on the image of the pigs, lying on their sides and looking at me with their glaucous eyes. I tried to banish that vision, but it was tenacious. It planted roots I’ll never be able to destroy. Those animals, their enormous faces, their swollen bellies, and their eyes, their pale eyes, examining me. And their stench, too. Good God … My thoughts joined hands and did a dance together inside my skull. Everything — the hogs, the Anderer’s calm trusting face — spun in a saraband, with no music but the solo violin of Orschwir’s appalling serenity.

I found myself in front of Mother Pitz’s café, which stands against a wall of the old washhouse. I had no doubt headed there because I wanted to be certain I wouldn’t meet anyone, or at least not any man. Only old women frequented the café. You could see them there at any hour, but especially toward evening, drinking cups of herbal tea or little glasses of marc mixed with geneva and a bit of sugar. We call such drinks Liebleiche , “charmers.”

To tell the truth, that café isn’t altogether a café. It’s part of a house, a room adjoining the kitchen. There are three little tables covered with embroidered tablecloths, a couple of chairs around each table, a narrow chimney that draws badly, some green plants in glazed ceramic pots, and on the wall, a severely faded photograph of a young man, who smiles at the camera and smoothes his mustache with two fingers. Mother Pitz is over seventy-five years old. She’s bent in half, as though folded at a right angle. When kids pass her in the street, they call her Die Fleckarei— “the Bracket.” The young man in the photograph is her husband, Augustus Pitz, who died half a century ago.

I must be the only male villager who occasionally sets foot in Mother Pitz’s place. Sometimes she helps me, and that’s why I go there. She knows all the plants that grow on the plateau, even the rarest ones, and when I can’t find them in my books, I go and ask her, and we spend a few hours talking about flowers and grasses, about footpaths and undergrowth, about pastures grazed by sheep, goats, and cows, and also by the hungry wind, which never stops; about all the places where she can’t go anymore and hasn’t seen for a long time.

“My wings have been clipped, Brodeck,” she says. “My life was really up there, with the flocks in the high stubble. Down here I suffocate. The air’s too low. Down here it’s like being a worm, you creep along the surface of the earth and eat dust, but up there …”

She has the finest dried-plant collection I have ever seen: an entire armoire, filled to bursting with large books between whose dark-brown cardboard covers she’s pressed examples of flowers and plants from the mountain for years and years. She’s recorded below each specimen the place where it was collected, the day, the appearance of the sky, the scent of the plant, its exact color and its orientation, all in her careful handwriting, and occasionally she’s added a brief commentary that has nothing to do with the specimen in question.

That day, when I pushed open her door and the little bells jangled, she asked me at once, “So, Brodeck, you’ve come to see the Great Book of Dead Things again?” To be more precise, since she spoke in dialect, she called her herbarium De Buch vo Stiller un Stillie , which sounds softer and less tragic.

I closed the door as though someone were following me. I’m sure I was making a ghastly face and acting like a conspirator. I went and sat at the table deep in the corner of the room, the one that looks as though it wants to disappear. I asked Mother Pitz for something very strong and very hot, because I was shivering like an old wooden ratchet in the Easter wind. Although the fully risen sun was now reigning over the sky uncontested, I was freezing.

Mother Pitz returned quickly, carrying a steaming cup, and with a gesture bade me drink. I obeyed her like a child, closing my eyes and letting the liquid invade me. My blood grew warmer, followed by my hands and my head. I loosened my jacket collar a little, and then my shirt collar, too. Mother Pitz watched me. The walls moved gently, like poplar leaves, and so did the chairs, approaching the walls as though wanting to ask them to dance. “What’s wrong with you, Brodeck?” she asked me. “Have you seen the devil?”