Hunting Party

by Agnes Desarthe

The three hunters surround him. Farnèse gives him a friendly punch in the shoulder. Peretti deals a light smack to the back of his skull. Dumestre stares at him.

  “Did you see something? Why’d you shoot?”

  “The shot went off on its own,” says Tristan.

  The three others have a good laugh.

  “Premature ejaculation?” Dumestre asks.

  Farnèse and Peretti laugh louder than ever.

  Tristan laughs with them.

  3

  Hunting was Emma’s idea. A good way to fit in, she had said to him. We’ll never make it if you don’t fit in. The men around here have certain habits, pleasures you must share. The women will reject me, no matter what I do. But you, you have a chance. You could make it. Do it for us both. Do it for me. I can’t live alone. Even alone with you. Our love will die of it. We need other people. I need them. For us, so that you can go on loving me.

  Tristan knows that if he were now brandishing the moribund rabbit, he would’ve won.

  Beginner’s luck, the other three would laugh, but they’d grant him respect. Tristan would fit in and Emma would be reassured.

  “In another time, I could’ve gone to church on Sundays,” she says. “That would have been enough. But no one goes anymore. So…”

  “So fine, I’ll go hunting with them.”

  “You’ll see, it’s nothing, it’s easy.”

  “Easy to kill an innocent animal?”

  “You won’t have to kill anything. You’ll go along with them, that’s all. You imitate them, you speak like them. You laugh at their jokes. You congratulate them. You ask their advice. They’ll take you under their wing.”

  “They’ll treat me like a queer.”

  “No! They don’t even know what that is. Trust me, my love. Go on. Straighten your shoulders. There. Make your manly face.”

  He furrows his brow.

  She bursts out laughing.

  “Even you don’t believe it.”

  “Yes, I do. I could eat you up…”

  She kisses him. The scent rising from between her breasts, at once piercing and dull, intoxicates Tristan, hardens him, thrills him.

  “Okay, fine, you win. I’ll go on Sunday.”

  “Not to Mass, to the hunt. Hunting,” she says, “will always exist.”

  4

  Emma is taller than he is. Heavier as well. She looks like an Indian chief, he says to himself sometimes. He adores her body. It’s his domain. The only territory where he’s ever felt at home. He has become its cartographer, its expert.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “I’m looking at you.”

  “Again?”

  He nods.

  5

  Tristan doesn’t take the rabbit out of the gamebag. He waits for the dogs to calm down, pick up another scent. A hen pheasant flutters out of a thicket. It slowly moves forward, in a cautious, stupid way. Farnèse takes aim, his finger quivering on the trigger. He shoots.

  “Shit, Farnèse!” Dumestre shouts. “You busted its head open. Talk about carnage!”

  The bird runs around, decapitated, for a yard or two, a fountain of blood on two legs.

  Tristan suppresses the urge to vomit. He slips his hand into his bag. With the tips of his fingers, he strokes the rabbit’s back, feels a tiny vibration under the pad of his middle finger. Don’t die, he thinks.

  I’m not dying, answers the mute rabbit. I’m persevering. I’m starting a new life, a surplus. I see our encounter as a miracle. I don’t know how you did it, you clumsy young man, friend to animals, but you didn’t touch a single vital organ. The proof: I’m thinking. I’m persevering. I’m focusing on healing as quickly as possible. I promise not to lose any blood. I’m commanding my veins to preserve their wholeness. The bullet only grazed my muzzle. I was knocked out. I’m swallowing the trickle of scarlet saliva staining my chops. You are my chance of a lifetime. I’m not hungry anymore. You’ve freed me from any sense of urgency. Now I’ve been removed from my destiny. Young man, you’re full of kindness. I adore you.

  The dogs sniff the pheasant’s remains. They growl; they yap. Farnèse stares at the ground between his feet. He’s ashamed. Tristan doesn’t understand why.

  “Good shot, in any case,” he ventures.

  “This kid’s funny,” says Dumestre. “You’re funny,” he repeats for Tristan. “That’s some sense of humor, huh? I love humor, but it’s not easy. You have to work at it.”

  Tristan nods in agreement. He’s not sure whether he’s passed the test. He’s labeled “the joker.” That’s not what Emma had in mind. She was thinking Ulysses, she was thinking Jason, Achilles, even. What trophy will he be carrying when he crosses the doorstep of their house?

  “Anyone want some coffee?”

  Peretti’s treat. He brought a thermos. The four of them use the same cup. The coffee is very strong and very sweet. It has an iron aftertaste.

  “That hits the spot,” says Tristan.

  “It’s hot, that’s why,” says Peretti.

  “It’s ’cause we’re here,” says Dumestre. “Everything you eat in the forest, everything you drink in the forest, is better. It’s the air. Especially in the morning, like now. The leaves sweat during the night. When you breathe, the air that goes into your lungs is different. It’s filled with the leaves’ sweat. The coffee is different too.”

  “That’s all in your head,” says Farnèse.

  “You’re a dick,” says Dumestre.

  “No, you’re the dick.”

  Tristan wonders how an argument ends when you have a loaded gun in your hands.

  6

  “You’re sure the woman has to be cut open before being burned alive?”

  “Yes. Why? Don’t you like it?”

  Tristan sets the warm pages on the kitchen table as they come out of the printer. Emma stares at him, a look of defiance in her eyes.

  “That’s how it is now,” she explains. “You have to say everything. Stretch the limits. People are numb. They have to be shocked, woken up. We’ve seen everything, heard everything. Blasé—know the word? That’s what we are. Blasé. Take the most inventive geniuses of our time, you know where they are? In prisons and psychiatric wards. They’re serial killers who’ve used mathematical models, philosophical models. We’ve worked so hard to prolong our lives, to improve them, that the last refuge of creativity lies in destruction. Art has to plant a bomb. If you don’t plant a bomb, you’re dead.”

  Tristan can’t think of a response. Emma is always right. And he’s always trailing a little behind, as if he doesn’t want to see things as they really are. She writes novels. But no one’s heard of her. They don’t talk about her in the newspapers. Her photo isn’t published anywhere. In the village, people think she knits, because of the scarves, long and heavy like boa constrictors, that Tristan wears around his neck.

  When he met her, he didn’t know she was a writer. She was working as a waitress at a pub in southeast London where he sometimes went to have a Sprite after class.

  “French?” she had asked him one evening, even though he hadn’t said a word.

  “How’d you know?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  “And you?”

  “Me too. Isn’t it obvious?”

  Laughing, she went back to the bar without taking his order. She jabbered something in English to the manager—bald with glasses, pocket Bible in hand, standing straight as a totem pole behind the counter—and brought Tristan a beer.

  He had never drunk anything like it. But then again, was this even a drink? It was heavy in his mouth, thick, slightly viscous, like porridge.

  “You have to adapt, kid,” she said, straddling a chair she’d turned around to face him, like at the cabaret, he thought. “You have to fit in. Sprite, that’s American crap. In Marseille, you drink pastis; in Paris, coffee; in London, it’s Guinness. Get it? And not timid little swallows like a granny sipping her tea. You knock it back, and afterward you lick the froth off your
lips. What brings you here?”

  “I come after class.”

  “What’re you studying?”

  “Russian Symbolist poetry.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know. When I was a kid, my mom took me to the Opéra Garnier one evening. It was Eugene Onegin. ‘Te-bya lyublyu Tatyanu’—I remember the words.”

  “Pushkin wasn’t a Symbolist.”

  “No.”

  How did she know that? he wondered. Who’s interested in Russian poetry? Even he wasn’t that passionate about it. He had been sent to London to study and, when the time came to choose his classes, he had remembered that evening with his mother. The tears on her face. He had often seen her cry, in despair, in rage, in drunkenness, in turmoil. That time, it was something else. He hadn’t understood what, but he had felt infinitely relieved.

  He didn’t get the chance to ask the waitress what she knew about Russians and the rest. She’d jumped up to serve other customers.

  Sometime later, she had confessed: “I was so ashamed.”

  “Ashamed of what?”

  “Of my way of doing things. Approaching you, completely hysterical. Like a bull in a china shop. I have a hard time controlling my emotions. That’s the problem incredibly shy people have. I’m not talking about you. You’re not shy. You’re lots of things, but you’re not shy. But I’m really shy. So, when I make a move, I overdo it, all hell breaks loose. I’m ridiculous.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Bastard.”

  “I’m being honest,” he declared, sounding both knowledgeable and ironic.

  “You’re a misfit. That’s what I’d say. A total misfit.”

  They were sitting on a bench in Brockwell Park that was dedicated to the memory of Linda B. Delaweare by her loving husband.

  “Misfit,” she repeated.

  Then she leaned toward him, abruptly, like the incredibly shy person she was, and kissed him for the first time. Tristan was floored. If someone had cut open his stomach, he couldn’t have been more surprised or more touched. There was so much vulnerability in that gesture, so much awkwardness. The desperation of her lips. She kissed like an ugly girl, as if she were apologizing.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he told her, caressing her temples, her forehead.

  “In the end, I actually do appreciate your honesty.”

  The wind picked up at that moment, hurling a huge purple cloud down to the level of the lush grass, which was bent over by the storm. The hail fell, a shower of transparent pebbles beating down on the paths’ warm asphalt, imitating a stampede of a thousand tiny horses.

  They ran to the garden flat where Emma lived, without holding hands, without touching each other, saving their own skins, terrified by the power of the air pressing down on their backs, the violence of the diamonds being fired down from the sky, and the certainty that they had found each other, that this was for life, forever, true love, the real deal, even though they were still so young. What a waste! they thought. What a waste! Cast down by the weight of their destiny, the new, eternal responsibility, the frightening solemnity of their passion.

  7

  “We’re not taking it?” asks Tristan, pointing to the decapitated hen the dogs were attacking.

  “No,” replies Dumestre. “It’ll get shit all over everything. Apologize, Farnèse.”

  “Why should I apologize?” retorts Farnèse, chin thrust out, rifle pointed at Dumestre.

  “Say sorry to the hen.”

  Peretti laughs softly. He says, “Come on,” in a voice so low that no one hears him.

  “It’s my fault,” Tristan asserts, trying to interfere.

  The sun, which has just risen above the horizon, poses a golden accusative finger on Farnèse’s face. He squints.

  “Sorry, hen,” he mumbles, the barrel of his gun pointed toward the ground. And then, after a moment, “Sorry, Mother Nature. Sorry, Diana the huntress, goddess of the forest. Sorry—”

  “That’s enough,” says Dumestre. “Stop your nonsense. You fire like a barbarian, you say sorry. That’s all. We’re not pigs. We’re not criminals. There are rules. We’re not monsters. We’re not maniacs.”

  “We’re nice guys,” Peretti concludes, his smile glued on his face.

  Tristan feels like something has gone amiss in his initiation. He had dreaded killing, but the spectacle he’s watching now is more complicated than death.

  “What do we do now?” he asks.

  “We keep going,” Dumestre answers.

  They all follow him. No one speaks. The dogs, their muzzles covered in blood, rub up against their masters’ legs and perform carefree, risky slaloms, just short of causing the firm-jawed hunters to stumble.

  The ice melts little by little and their boots slip on the muddy leaves. The forest opens and closes, from clearings to leafy tunnels. Nothing more can be heard other than the men’s jerky breathing and the birds’ disorderly and harmonic racket—trills and whistles, cackling and cooing. Do they understand each other? Tristan wonders, listening to the babel in the tall trees. He sticks his hand into his gamebag, strokes the rabbit’s belly, feeling reassured by the touch of his fur, thinking that once the sun reaches its zenith, everything will be over, he will go back home, leave the mysterious world of virile fraternity for one much more familiar: the couple.

  Living with a woman—isn’t that what he has always known, after all? With his mother when he was growing up, and now with Emma. He knows too much about women’s bodies and too little about men’s. But he’s going to learn. His determination is strong; it carries him with each step. He watches Dumestre, imitating his gait.

  After a few hundred yards, the four hunters come to a halt. They’ve reached the overhang. They squat, kneel, and lie down in the undergrowth. Before their eyes, a green valley, similar to a vast pool of mist. They release the dogs. Without yapping, stealthy like their fox cousins, like their wolf brothers, they sink their delicate paws into the earth without disturbing a twig, without lifting a leaf. They start to encircle the area. Tristan dozes in the suspension of the moment. Nothing to do but wait.

  And if the world stopped there, on the verge of killing, but without firing a bullet? Isn’t this moment the best, the most fruitful? The perfection of the act in its conception. Doing inevitably means failing. Doing is destroying. For him, the idea is always preferable. That’s what Emma criticizes him for. It’s the reason she wants to leave him. I’m done, she says. With you, nothing is possible, we’re not going anywhere. Love isn’t enough. You have to fit in. She repeats this continuously, from morning to night, sometimes gently, often with cruelty. Fitting in, what’s that?

  It’s living according to the laws of your species, the rabbit answers. It’s doing what your instinct dictates. Take me, for example. I have three responsibilities: feeding myself, reproducing, escaping from predators. For you, it’s more complicated: your lives are longer, as are your loves. I don’t understand how you do it.

  Me neither, thinks Tristan. But I haven’t always been this lost. As a child, I used to soar along a clearly marked trajectory, a ball thrown into the air, with a clear kinetic gift.

  You were following your instinct.

  Exactly. When I was hungry, I’d eat; when I was tired, I’d sleep.

  Did you want to break free?

  No.

  You should have.

  Why?

  Psst. Psst. Slowly, the rifles settle in the crooks of their shoulders. Suddenly, the dogs spring out from everywhere, barking. Immediately, the misty grass valley is lacerated with furry and feathered projectiles, chased out of their shelters, terrified. The deafening shots rip through the air. Tristan clamps his hands over his ears and watches the little bodies snatched up by nothingness in midflight. A few minutes later, the ground is strewn with the remains. The dogs fulfill their duty as undertakers. Docile, calm, hypnotized by their mindless domestic loyalty, they carry the carcasses to their masters, without licking up
a drop of blood.

  They’re full, Tristan says to himself. The headless hen must’ve been fat.

  No, says the rabbit. It’s not that. They’re trained. Trained to devour the scraps and bring back the catch. They never confuse the two, afraid of being beaten. For us, these are very strange creatures. They’re not really animals, and yet not men either.

  The hunters pat their doggies, congratulate themselves, smile, rub their hands together in satisfaction. Tristan imitates them.

  It’s time to uncork the wine, cut the dried sausage. Everyone chews. Tristan dreads conversation. Dumestre brings up public road maintenance, criticizes Peretti, who’s on the town council, for not speaking up enough, for letting himself be bamboozled. The topic moves on to the mayor’s secretary, her chest, then her handicapped son, which puts a damper on things. It takes four seconds for them to jump from this awkward subject to a banal one.

  “Hey, this wine’s not too bad!”

  “Yeah, it’s some good shit.”

  Tristan rolls himself a cigarette.

  “Those things’ll kill you, you know,” says Farnèse, drinking straight from the bottle.

  “Hey, boozer, nobody asked you,” says Dumestre.

  This is going to end badly, thinks Tristan, sticking his cigarette in his gamebag. He doesn’t light it. The rabbit sniffs the tobacco, wrinkles his nose, sneezes. No one hears.

  8

  “You’re scrubbing hard, right, sweetie? You do it like Mama told you. You know how Grandma likes when it’s clean.”

  I’m scrubbing, thinks Tristan, rag in hand. His mother has never shown him how to scrub, but he understands this word. Thanks to context. Thanks to the imminent visit of Grandma. Grandma who is like Mama, but more… less…

  At age six, he knows how to do everything in a house, and he does everything. The shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. This goes in cold water, there’s blood on it. This goes in hot water, there’s grease. Their little apartment sparkles. Mama is lying on her bed. The ashes from her cigarette fall slowly onto the covers, drawing black halos, snags with burned borders like parchment that fascinate Tristan. He holds out an ashtray for her. She puts it on the nightstand and lights a new cigarette, its ashes falling on the bedspread. She swallows a pill. Takes a little drink. That’s how she says it, “Just a little drink, to forget, so it hurts less. Do you want some candy?”