John Berger - Pig Earth

Some calves drink straight away, some have to learn. She would push with her nose against the side of the bucket without opening her mouth. She was two days old and her tongue had not found a way out of her mouth. Hubert stuck his finger into the milk and put it into her mouth. She sucked it. The third time he did it, her tongue came out to lick.

At dawn the cold intensifies. The apple trees had been black in the white mist. There was no colour anywhere, and beyond the yard no sounds. The north-east wind was blowing. It penetrates the thickest clothing and blows in one’s very bones a reminder of death. It causes the cows to give less milk. It makes the earth hard as rock. “There is nothing sadder than a death,” said Marie, “and nothing forgotten more quickly.”

The wind could not penetrate the stable directly. The stable had the banked, three-month-old heat of one large horse, eleven cows, five calves and a dozen rabbits. But Hubert took no unnecessary risks: he tied a large piece of sackcloth over Moselle, the cow who had just calved, and gave her hot cider with sugar.

Before that, he had given her salt. Powerfully, with her enormous tongue, Moselle licked the coarse brown salt from his hand. Cows’ heads are the size they are to contain their tongues. With their tongues they harvest, fork, bale and deliver to their stomachs.

There is a story about a distant ice-age and a cow who was called Audumla. She licked an iceberg in which a man was imprisoned. She licked it like a pillar of salt, until the man was free. And then she offered him four streams of milk.

The calf’s first taste in life had been salt. Hubert rubbed some against her muzzle. Then he covered her with straw and she fell asleep.

Mucus is a protection, a kind of love. The calf lay there exhausted, like a leaf when it first comes out. Her hair was matted with mucus. Faintly she had the smell which once preceded — for all of us — the first smell of air. Hubert rubbed the calf down as if he were a second in a ring. His happiness was without excitement; it was a drawn-out pleasurable response to something occasional but familiar; a response to an event which gave itself to the stillness which now followed it, like the last note of a fanfare still hanging in silence, the trumpeter’s arm still raised. His happiness took the form of a small drawn-out feeling of pride which lasted all day.

Before rubbing the calf down, he had separated its hind legs to discover its sex. Female. Perhaps some of the rabbits were bucks, otherwise all twenty animals in the stable were female.

Marie had turned Moselle’s head round towards the tail, towards the birth. With one hand she held a horn and with the other she pressed with fingers and thumb in the animal’s huge nostrils. “There Moselle,” she repeated, “there Moselle!” Holding the head like this made it impossible for the cow to get up on to her feet. Moselle was lying on her left side. Two of the calf’s hooves were already visible. Hubert made slip-knots at either end of his rope and passed them over the hooves on to the forelegs. Then, with his boots wedged against the gutter, he lay back on the rope and pulled. He saw the calf’s head, an eye with its long lashes still closed, come out. He pulled harder on the rope until he was almost parallel with the floor. The vagina yawned, and the entire calf emerged like a sound, accompanied by two little rivulets of blood.

Hubert had called Marie half an hour before. Moselle had been kneeling on her forelegs, searching low down with her mouth and pointing her rump at the sky. She licked the air beyond her mouth, and her mouth itself was drawn back in pain. Her lower flanks shrank and expanded irregularly; waves of uncontrollable energy filled and emptied them; most of the waves broke in her chest before they reached the uterus. A calf’s hoof, brown and white, smeared with a little blood as if it were being eaten, pointed out of her vagina and was sucked back in again.

It was dark. Hubert lay on a bale of straw which he had brought down in preparation for the birth. Muguet pissed. Marquise, next to her, waited and then pissed too. It went like that for four cows down the line. The cocks were not yet awake. Hubert got up to piss in the same gutter. He was anxious. The year before, when Moselle calved, she had a twisted uterus and he was obliged to call the vet which cost money.

On all four legs Moselle moved backwards, arching her back and raising her tail. She did not lift it straight up as she did when pissing; it was curled so that it made a kind of tail halo above the swollen distended vagina. The way she moved backwards was not as if she yet needed to push something out of her, but because, vaguely, she sought something behind in the dark air to push into herself, to rid her of discomfort. Hubert had not turned on the light because he believed calves were born quicker in the dark. Through the window at the end of the stable he could see the moonlight. The mist which would thicken at dawn was not yet thick enough to hide the moon. He felt his way into her with his hand. She spread as easily as a haversack. He felt the head between the two forelegs in the opening where it should be. This was the first time the calf had been touched.

Marie had stayed in bed. It was 2.00 a.m. Crossing the yard his boots had struck the ice as if it were metal. Perhaps somewhere in another valley a neighbour was also getting up for a calf. But in the colourless night there was no sign of it. A dribble of viscous uterine water hung from her vagina.

He sat on a milking stool in the dark. With his head in his hands, his breathing was indistinguishable from that of the cows. The stable itself was like the inside of an animal. Breath, water, cud were entering it; wind, piss, shit were leaving.

Often he dozed off. He thought of how each week now a little more light entered the hayloft above, as the great stacks of hay diminished and the sun shone a little brighter through the cracks in the planks. In three months’ time he would let the cows out into the fields which would be green, sprinkled with white and blue flowers and dandelions. The cows can smell the green grass even in the stable. And their shit would become green. Sometimes he lurched, almost falling off his stool.

The unborn calf already had the capacity to see, and this developed capacity, along with others, predicted an end. The calf’s capacity to see was waiting for the darkness to be broken.

Hubert had slept, his head fallen forward, his chin on his chest.

In the darkness, which precedes sight or place or name, man and calf waited.

Pewter pock-marked

moon of the ladle

rising above the mountain

going down into the saucepan

serving generations

steaming

dredging what has grown from seed

in the garden

thickened with potato

outliving us all

on the wooden sky

of the kitchen wall

Serving mother

of the steaming pewter breast

veined by the salts

fed to her children

hungry as boars

with the evening earth

engrained around their nails

and bread the brother

serving mother

Ladle

pour the sky steaming

with the carrot sun

the stars of salt

and the grease of the pig earth

pour the sky steaming

ladle

pour soup for our days

pour sleep for the night

pour years for my children

ALL THE DEAD are remembered at La Toussaint. Some say it is the day when the dead judge the living, and that the flowers placed in the cemetery are to make their judgement less harsh.

A week after La Toussaint Hélène came down to the cemetery to remove two pots of chrysanthemums, one from the grave of her husband and the other from her father’s grave. For the last two nights the sky had been exceptionally clear, the stars as hard as nails, and the frost had nipped all the life out of the flowers. If she took them now, before the frost entered the roots, she could plant them out next spring, and in the late summer they would flower again to appease the dead.