Once in Europa Read Free Page B

the cow next to her. If he showed Myrtille a stick, this was usually enough to deter her. She glowered at him with her insolently tranquil eyes, and he brandished the stick in the air and said: The bow of the violin, eh! Is that enough or do you want some music!
    On the evening in question he forgot the stick and Myrtille knocked him off his stool whilst he was preparing her neighbour’s teats before plugging the milking machine onto her. Seizing a rake, he beat Myrtille across the haunches with the handle. She put her head down and he beat her harder. He was beating her now because she had reduced him to beating her. She lay down on the floor and he beat her out of the fury of his knowledge that he could not stop beating her.
    In the name of God! he spat out the words as if they were his own broken teeth. Nothing! Nobody!
    The shock of each blow was transmitted to his shoulders. Then the handle of the rake broke.
    It seemed to him that the animal never forgave him.
    Towards the end of March the giant bedspread of packed snow began to slide down the roof of the house a few centimetres each day. After a while, a border of packed snow overhanging the roof would crack and fall to the ground in a thousand pieces. In the cellar, despite the darkness and the thickness of the walls, the potatoes were putting out pink-violet shoots. The force of theseshoots is so strong that they can pierce canvas or denim as if they were thin air.
    A week earlier the doctor had asked him: Are you still vomiting? Do you want some more pills?
    Félix had replied: No, Doctor … what I need is an extra pair of hands. Can you give me a prescription for that? Preferably a woman’s hands, but I’ll accept a man’s or even a boy’s.
    Thus he confirmed one of the doctor’s favourite dinner-table dissertations: namely, that the dearth of women in the valley—the best men having left with the women following them—was pushing the idiots who remained towards homosexuality and even bestiality.
    In twenty-four hours a well-fed cow shits a wheelbarrow of dung. The winter had lasted a hundred and fifty days and Félix had seventeen cows. He recalled the time, before they bought a tractor, when all the winter’s dung had to be forked into a tip-cart, hauled by the horse and unloaded in heaps, to be spread out again with a fork over the fields. Now he had a mechanical shovel and a spreader. And now he was alone.
    Albertine had been right: there were fewer mole hills. Many moles must have died, the strongest eating the weakest. In the morning when he started up the tractor it was freezing. By midday on the hillside with the spreader, he was sweating. This year he refused to take off his sheepskin jacket. If he caught cold and fell ill, there would be nobody else to milk the cows. His solitude had strange ramifications. His trousers caked with cowshit went on stinking until he himself put them in the washing machine. Sometimes the solitude of the house smelt acrid like cowshit.
    Every evening, sitting at the table beneath the clock that was always half an hour fast so that he would not deliver the milk too late at the dairy, he decided what to do the following day. Shit till Sunday, Mick, or shall we do the wood?
    During the winter it had been a question of killing time. Now time was resurrected. He forgot obvious things. He fed the chickens and forgot the eggs. He hadn’t collected eggs from the hen house since he was seven when his father went away for the second time. The first time his father went away was for his militaryservice, the second time was when he went to Paris to earn the money to re-cover the roof of the house with tiles; it took him four winters to earn enough.
    How often had he heard his father tell the story of his time in the army. Soldier Berthier! Why did you not obey the order given to you? Replied his father: One of you tells me to do this, another of you tells me to do that, another of you tells