Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  “His paws are wet!”

  How could Sheriff have wet paws when he hadn’t been splashing around in the rain? Rudy began to get upset. He stood up, knelt down, then stood up again, in an effort to allay his anxiety. For him, anything out of the ordinary threatened disaster.

  “Calm down! Calm down! It’s nothing serious. Look, Rudy, his eyelids are closed!”

  Compulsively, Rudy continued to bend down and get up.

  “He’s still breathing. If he were dead, his eyes would be open. His eyes are closed. He’s sleeping. Rudy. Sheriff is sleeping!”

  I caught hold of his hand, and made him kneel down to place it on our dog’s stomach.

  “Look. Eyes closed. He’s calm. He’s breathing. He’s sleeping…”

  “…”

  “See! I’ll say it again. He’s sleeping!”

  “…”

  “If he were dead, his eyes would be open.”

  “He’s sleep… sleep… sleeping,” stammered Rudy.

  “Yes, yes. That’s good, isn’t it? He’s breathing.”

  Léa propped up her moped in front of the house, and strolled over to join us, holding her violin.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sheriff fainted!”

  “Dogs don’t faint. He’s either alive or he’s dead.”

  Rudy stood up rapidly.

  “Shut up, Léa!” I shouted.

  She was standing a few feet away, in her close-fitting black dress that left her shoulders bare and showed off her modest chest. She always wore this dress to her music lessons, as if she were already performing in front of an admiring audience. Léa was as thoroughly indifferent to Sheriff as she was to all the other animals on the farm. This had begun soon after she turned eleven, the moment she had felt inside her the first premature stirrings of her femininity. Since then she had not touched a single one of our animals, as if they were suddenly taboo because they were secretly linked to the forces of nature at work within her own body.

  Or maybe she was just putting on airs and graces. If a chicken had the impudence to come too close while Léa was reading one of her magazines on the deck-chair in the garden, she would scream at it. No doubt the creature reminded her all too vividly that she wasn’t sunning herself in Deauville, but on a patch of grass between the slurry ditch and the barnyard.

  It was terrible to see Sheriff sighing after Léa. Somewhere in his faithful-companion brain must have been a memory of the time of her innocence, when she would throw him sticks and he would bring them back in exchange for an armful of cuddles. Now, she either ignored him, or else she actively avoided him. If she shoved him away to stop him jumping onto her legs, he would always linger a few feet off, in the hope of some further encouraging gesture. His persistence filled me with despair. Sometimes he would suffer for hours on end at Léa’s feet, emitting occasional soft whines, or sighing like a rejected suitor.

  My sister made a clear distinction between culture and nature. Since I spent a lot of my time with Rudy and sometimes fed the pigs or walked Bagatelle, I belonged firmly in the second category. It didn’t make a difference that I devoted most of my free time to drawing. Rudy and I were too much part of the material world that she was trying to reject.

  “Just wait a moment, you imbeciles!”

  Léa took her violin out of its case. Shiny black on the outside, burgundy velvet inside, it always reminded me of a small coffin. She flourished her bow in the air like a magic wand.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Simple. I’m going to wake him up.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Shut up! You don’t have a clue anyway.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  She began to play, swaying her upper body rhythmically, as if she were rousing a snake from a basket. During one allegro con fuoco passage, she almost started to leap up and down on the spot, attacking the strings with abrupt, staccato blows. Pigeons flew up from behind the barn and headed for the shelter of the woods. Sheriff, wholly insensitive to the music of Dvořák, didn’t budge.

  Léa stopped playing. She packed away her instrument with exaggerated respect, thus signalling the scorn she felt towards us. I think she sincerely believed that she now had an important role in East-West rapprochement and the brotherhood of all peoples.

  “It’s not my problem – you sort it out!” she said, as she flounced off.

  Rudy looked at me in consternation. Then he turned his attention to Sheriff. He felt his nose, which was dripping.

  “We should put him in the shade.”

  Rudy gathered him up with a ease and a gentleness that surprised me, and carried him under the big elm.

  “What if we poured cold water on him?”

  Rudy ran to the shed and came back with a full watering can.

  “Go on, then!” I said.

  He couldn’t make up his mind to do it.

  “Go on, Rudy. Like we do for lettuce…”

  Still Rudy hesitated, unable to make the connection between vegetables in the ground and Sheriff lying on its surface.

  “Give it to me, then! I’ll do it.”

  I poured a fine, delicate rain onto Sheriff’s body, keeping the watering can’s large nozzle raised up high. The dog opened one eye, and gazed up for a moment in astonishment at our two worried faces against the background of the sky. Twice, he tried and failed to stand up, like a boxer after being flat-out on the canvas, before he finally rediscovered the muscles he needed to rise and shake himself. He stood there, a little unsteady, before Rudy gathered him up again and carried him off to the barn.

  * * *

  That night, I took my bird outside, in front of the house. The stars were shining with extra vigour, having moved closer to the earth. They were like a multitude of little campfires above our heads. I could just hear, behind the surface of the calm, motionless, burning night, an infinity of faint, dry cracks, as if the fields beaten all day long by the sun were still slowly frying.

  I walked along the wall of the vegetable garden, hoping to stir the air around me into motion. With my dove’s claws gripping my shoulder, I began to run, thinking to give my bird the sensation of flight, but I soon became exhausted in the excessively close air. I lay down in the short grass; it felt like a bare mattress.

  I would have liked to be inside the frame of a cartoon depicting a night-time scene, in which all the moonlit elements were represented in blue. The hero would pass through this landscape in silence: the dark blue trees, the light blue meadows, the dark blue lamp-posts, the light blue street… Even the depths of the shadows would be blue. But there were no cold colours anywhere near me. In the heart of this false darkness, reds and yellows smouldered on, and those summer nights were in reality only faded versions of our days.

  The strains of my sister’s violin emerged into the night from the open window of the living room. She was practising the staccato, with such force that this vaguely Indian melody sounded like a series of whiplashes. I could see her writhing silhouette under the lamp, and my mother’s profile too, as she sat listening for the hundredth time to Léa going through Dvora’s obsessive notes. They often had long discussions from which I was excluded, and during which my sister would sometimes stroke Mum’s arm. I was confused by this gesture, ordinarily deployed to reassure or to calm its recipient, yet which in this case must have a quite different aim, since neither of the two ever seemed particularly agitated. Mum would always listen to my sister playing her violin with her eyes wide open, as if paralysed by some idée fixe, at the mercy of a tempestuous inner life whose intensity and violence dazed her. She would sometimes say that the music Léa played had the same colour as her instrument: mahogany brown with lighter streaks that reminded her of the gleaming skin of a newly-shelled conker.

  My dove suddenly grew animated on my stomach. Its eyelids fluttered erratically over its protruding eyeballs – far too large to fit inside such a small head – and it began to march and strut about, as if thousands of people were
applauding from the bushes. All of a sudden, I felt overwhelmed by too much reality. Under the protection of the night, a black beetle scuttled along, like a plump musical note that had fallen off its score onto the ground, and was now trying to find its way back. I stretched out my leg and crushed it gently with my foot until it burst, telling myself that our destiny on this planet was merely the result of a giant lottery, presided over by a heartless and whimsical creator.

  Once a month, Mum would sit at the kitchen table and do the accounts. She would line up the bills, receipts and the two big government ledgers covered with marbled paper, before opening a voluminous black notebook to fill it with numbers. The light from the lamp would fall on her frail neck, making her look like a studious schoolgirl, and a cold silence like that of an empty church would fill the house.

  Meanwhile, Dad would bustle to and fro in an attempt to hide his nerves. As if he had just remembered a little task requiring his presence elsewhere, he would tiptoe out of the room, closing the door behind him with infinite gentleness. A few minutes later, he would return just as discreetly, slipping behind Mum’s back to look over her shoulder. At last, she would straighten up and give him a smile that squeezed his heart. Then they would talk for a long time about the two columns of figures, and about our precarious financial situation, always in undertones, as if to speak too crudely or concretely about such matters might bring bad luck.

  I belonged to this fragile home, in which each person was struggling in their own small, enclosed space. My back was pressed against the hot earth, my eyes looking up at the sky. I told myself that our dreams were like a train entering a station: first glimpsed from afar in a dazzling, dusty light, the train grows ever more solid as it approaches, then glides slowly in front of us for a long time before we know if it will actually stop, and we’ll be able to get on.

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep. I padded across our vast kitchen in my underwear, with the vague idea of drinking a glass of milk. There was a full jug at the back of the fridge. The cold had thickened the liquid, and a layer of wrinkled skin covered its surface, as if, unobserved inside its plastic and aluminium incubator, the milk was slowly re-assuming an animal form. Dad always filled a bucket for our personal use during the early-morning milking. It was un-homogenised, and each day he presented it to us as having come from the udder of a specific cow. He believed that each beast produced a particular vintage, detectable at the first mouthful. He liked to tell us that cows, like humans, are gourmets and have their own food preferences – one never grazing on purple clover, another mad about meadow grass, a third with a taste for cat’s-tail.

  The fridge hummed in the empty room, from time to time emitting a few chugs followed by a brief, electric shudder of exaltation. Then it would snort like a weary old animal, before settling again into its regular pattern of respiration, each time a little more laboured. The large family dining table, gleaming in the moonlight, was bathed in a strange, somewhat unnerving silence. It looked like an altar awaiting ritual sacrifices.

  I opened the fridge door. The coolness of a miniature Arctic paradise, with its blocks of ice, its powdery snow and its steel-grey sky, enveloped me. In an effort to keep its temperature constant, the machine started up again, giving a friendly snort. I moved closer and rested my chest against the freezing metal edge. Exerting more pressure, I let the cold penetrate me and spread through me from my stomach to my extremities. I began to rub myself against every part I could reach, until I disappeared almost completely inside. I wanted to shrink, to squeeze between the jug of milk and the eggs, to rest my neck gently on the slab of butter, to be slowly buried beneath artificial snow as my muscles gradually stiffened.

  “Gus! Are you making love to the fridge?”

  I jumped back. The yellow light of the fridge cast a long beam that crossed the room to meet the almost equally intense light coming from the window. These two brilliant lines drew an immense X, in the far triangle of which I now saw Cécile, shining with unreal illumination. Her gauzy nightdress clung to her body as though it had been glued on.

  Unable to control the torrent of my thoughts, enfeebled by a sudden blast of tormenting heat, I didn’t even try to hide the bulge in my pyjamas. A strange connection arose in my head between this woman, lit up amidst the surrounding darkness as on a theatre stage, and the animals that loomed unexpectedly through the mist as you rounded the bend of a forest path. But all these were just fleeting apparitions, figments of my imagination… I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Cécile reappeared exactly in the same place. Coming forward, she said quite naturally, as if she had always occupied our kitchen and I were the one who had improperly established my headquarters there, that she had come downstairs for a drink because she was dying of thirst.

  She brushed past me. I breathed in the air displaced by her motion: the odour of her body, a mixture of Indian patchouli and night-time sweat. It was the fragrance of bed. She found the pitcher of milk, turned it the right way, and carried it to her lips to quench her thirst. As she tilted her head back, her breasts rose a little beneath the cloth of her nightdress. They seemed both substantial and strangely airy, almost transparent in the feeble light. A stream of liquid flowed down her chin. Before it broke up into droplets and disappeared inside her nightdress, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand – a rather manly gesture – looking me straight in the eyes. I think she asked me if I wanted some too; I must have refused. She said she was in search of a little coolness in these apocalyptic temperatures. A paralysing stupor had come over my face. When she was done, she walked up to me, patted my cheek as if to bring my features back to life, and said, “Your mum invited me to sleep here. It was too late to drive back last night.” She gave me another smile before leaving the room. I watched her as she moved towards the hallway door, trailing an infinitely long shadow behind her. Without turning back, she called out, “Sleep well, sweetie!”

  I stood for a while in the kitchen, looking at the cupboard, the imposing table and chairs, the massive bread bin, before returning slowly to my bedroom, like a snail in the midday sun. I was carrying on my back my parents’ farm, a shell much too heavy for my small body. When I threw myself on my sweatsoaked bed, my dove stirred. It didn’t seem be able to sleep either, and was nodding back and forth as though it hoped to defeat insomnia by means of this rocking motion. Perhaps it was no longer using enough energy to tire itself out during the day. Or did these anxious little creatures never really rest? The poor thing was always in a state of alarm. Its tiny brain couldn’t grasp that it no longer possessed feathers on its tail to help it escape predators, so that it remained forever pointlessly on guard, as if it were still capable of launching itself high into the sky.

  I couldn’t sleep. I knew that I had a future, because all thirteen-year-old boys who are leaving their childhood behind them must have a future. I was at the age when you’re immortal, with a whole life before you. But now this destination, hitherto distant and unreal, was beginning to acquire clearer outlines. I felt like a comic-strip character advancing towards a far-off landscape that becomes with every frame less vague – and less appealing.

  I got up and went to stand at the window. Just after four o’clock, I watched Cécile cross our yard quickly, before disappearing around the scorner. A few moments later, the hoarse engine of her Renault 5 coughed angrily. I listened as she took the main road to the village, before veering left onto the road to Possens. The car’s stubborn roar traversed the hillside, then faded slowly and was absorbed into the nothingness.

  IV

  “Mum…”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is Cécile?”

  I was sitting at the table. Dad and Rudy were busy, probably in the barn. My sister was still sleeping, and Mum was cooking the rösti with her back to me. She didn’t answer right away. Wiping her hands on the front of her apron, she lowered the heat under the frying pan, and turned to face me.

  “Cécile…” she whispered, then fell silent
.

  She was wearing a little blue dress tied at the waist with a wide belt of the same colour. This light clothing made the body it contained seem almost immaterial. She kneaded her fingers, still wet and a little red, as she looked at me. I had the disturbing thought that I didn’t know much about her. I could describe every minute of her days, yet I had no access to her secret thoughts. There were times when I felt truly alone on earth.

  “You know Cécile?” she finally asked.

  “Well… no, not really.”

  “So which Cécile are you asking me about?”

  Not daring to mention our night-time meeting in front of the refrigerator, I evoked the daytime Cécile. “I was with Bagatelle in the old high-school courtyard, and a woman who told me her name was Cécile came and talked to me.”

  “And?”

  “She knew my name, and she said she was a friend of yours.”

  “A friend.”

  Mum seemed to struggle briefly against an invisible current of air. She took her handkerchief from her apron and blew her nose gently into it. Before folding it, she examined it closely, as if it might reveal some part of the mystery of her being.

  “What did you talk about?” she asked, sniffing.

  “Nothing much… stuff about birds… because of my dove.”

  “She didn’t say anything about me?”

  “No. I showed her my drawing and she chatted to me for a bit… Then she left. Do you know her?”

  “Cécile… is a friend.”

  “From before?”

  By that, I meant before her marriage to Dad and her move to the farm.