Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

Author:Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

At dawn one April morning, it is a rolling verdant valley through which a departmental motorway snakes like a slow worm through moss. Day is only just breaking, radiating a mauve spring sky speckled with sparse clouds. In the distance, the smoke from a late fire rises vertically from a rooftop, and thin wisps of fog still linger here and there in the branches of the trees.

Henri wakes to the mansard ceiling of the room. His eyes follow the line of the joists, the ridge of the hangar visible through the mullioned window. He watches a couple of rooks who have perched there, their raucous croaking deepening the baleful feeling he had on waking.

For several weeks, the fever has not abated. At first fluctuating and bearable, it now burns day and night. His dreams no longer have any form, but are simply a tangle of hallucinatory visions, a scansion of enigmatic words, places and faces. His T-shirt and his pyjama trousers are drenched with the night sweats that leave him parched.

He runs a hand over the cold, damp mattress, then shivers. He gropes on the bedside table for the boxes of ibuprofen, aspirin and paracetamol he alternately takes to ease the crippling headaches. The back of his hand knocks against the framed black-and-white photograph, from which Élise, the dead wife, stares out at him, as though haloed by the yellowing paper.

Sitting on a bench beneath the velvet-leaved walnut tree that grew not far from here, she is wearing a dress blackened by the years. The tree casts shadows on her bare arms. Serge, their eldest son, runs past, a grey blur behind her. Élise’s hands – Henri remembers her close-cropped fingernails – are resting on her swollen pregnant belly. He believes he remembers a moment of tranquillity in midsummer, even the weight of the camera in his hands, the pressure of the leather strap against his neck, his clammy skin.

It is the last image of her that he possesses, and one of the only ones he took with the Artoflex he had just bought, suddenly eager to create and record a family history. Through the viewfinder, things seemed more beautiful – the kitchen, with light bathing the sink against which she was leaning, the mane of her flaming hair in the blazing sun. The light and shadows seemed more real, life seemed innocuous. He remembers her amused indulgence, her embarrassment faced with this device intended to immortalize her through a face, a body, an expression. The following autumn, when Élise died giving birth to Joël, their second son, Henri set aside the camera, and the thought that all that would remain of her were a handful of 6x6 snapshots seemed unbearable, just as the urgency he had earlier felt to leave some trace of the past, of them living that past, suddenly seemed pathetic. He bashed the camera, snapped off the lens cap, pulled the last roll of film out into the light, thereby destroying the last shots of Élise,

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