Human Nature E-Book

Serge Joncour

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 470

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Farmers use ammonium nitrate, and so do eco-terrorists...When his three sisters escape to the city Alexandre is left to run the family farm. Though reluctant, he commits himself to honouring the traditional methods that prioritise the welfare of his cattle, and produce the highest quality meat.But the world around him is changing. The insatiable appetites of supermarkets and fast food chains demand that standards be sacrificed for speed. As Alexandre struggles to balance his principles and his livelihood, he is drawn to the beautiful Constanze, part of a group of environmental activists keen to draw him into their cause. Selling over 100,000 copies in France, Serge Joncour's vibrant, ambitious novel calls us to open our eyes to thedamage done by modern hyperconsumerism, both to our planet and to our collective humanity.

Leseprobe

Serge Joncour is a French novelist and screenwriter. He was born in Paris in 1961 and studied philosophy at university before deciding to become a writer. His first novel, Vu, was published by Le Dilettante in 1998. He wrote the screenplay for Sarah’s Key starring Kristin Scott Thomas, released in 2011. His 2016 novel Repose-toi sur moi won the Prix Interallié. Wild Dog (Chien loup), also published by Gallic Books, won the Prix Landerneau des Lecteurs.

Louise Rogers Lalaurie is a writer and translator. She is based in France and the UK.

Human Nature

Serge Joncour

Translated from the French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

This work has benefited from the support of the Institut français’ Publication Assistance Programme.

First published in France as Nature humaine

Copyright © Flammarion, 2020

English translation copyright © Louise Rogers Lalaurie, 2022

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Gallic Books Ltd

12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805334279

Typeset in Fournier MT by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

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For Lewis John Rogers (d. 1993),Hubert Lalaurie (d. 2006)and their farms:Red Hill, near Monmouth, south-east WalesPech’ d’Ancou, near Monpezat, south-west France

Friday, 24 December 1999

For the first time, he found himself alone at the farm. There was no sound whatsoever from the livestock, nor from anyone else, not the slightest sign of life. And yet, within these walls, life had always won through. The Fabriers had lived here for four generations. It was here on the farm that he had grown up with his three sisters. Three straight-talking bright sparks, utterly unlike each other, who illuminated everything.

Their childhood had burnt out long ago. Years of laughter and games, of family gatherings, and the high points of summer when everyone came for the tobacco and saffron harvests. Then the sisters had all left for new horizons in the city, and there had been no sadness or bad feeling at their departure. Once they were gone, just four souls remained on the whole hillside: Alexandre and his parents, and the other one, the crazy old guy in his shack by the woods that he owned. Crayssac, whom the family had always kept at a distance. But now Alexandre was the only person living up here, beside the high meadows. Crayssac was dead, and their parents had quit the farm.

That evening, Alexandre dragged the sacks of fertiliser from the old barn to the new equipment store. Then, sticking carefully to Anton’s plan, he checked the mortars, and the fuel. Now everything was ready. Before returning to the farmhouse, he glanced down the valley, alert to the slightest sign, the tiniest sound. The wind was strong, so he walked out further. Blasting from the west, the din echoed snatches of sound from the blasts in the bedrock, the racket of the trenchers and diggers. In the loud gusts tonight, it seemed he could hear them again for real, rising from hell, barely five kilometres away. The noise was hideous. Each time it resumed, it sounded like a great drill spinning furiously from the depths of space, an ear-splitting asteroid ready to crash to earth and shatter before his eyes.

He set off once again towards the farmhouse and wondered if the police were hiding somewhere on the other side of the valley, beyond the expanse of razed ground. Perhaps they had been watching him since yesterday, waiting to intervene. He peered into the darkness but could see not the faintest speck of light, nor the tiniest movement – nothing. Yet he was sure he had been spotted—not by the camera at the top of the tall white pole, but by the little one over the barrier across the site entrance. He’d been so careful, though, when he took the detonator: he’d stuck sackcloth to the soles of his shoes, just as Xabi had told him. The concrete plant was far out on the limestone plateau, but he would have to go back. With these high winds – which were set to last, according to the forecast from Météo France – the site would be closed for another whole week, giving him ample time to take the tape out of the camera, or check the angle and calm his nerves. Time enough to see to that, coolly and calmly. Alexandre sat down at the big kitchen table, resting on his elbows as if someone had just poured him a drink. But the only thing in front of him was the fruit basket with its sad-looking winter stock. He took two walnuts and squeezed them one against the other in the palm of his hand, crushing their shells effortlessly, with a loud crack.

Every life stands looking, from a distance, at what might have been. How close things had come to working out another way. Alexandre thought about Constanze often, of what his life might have been if they’d never met, or if he had followed her around the world, always on the move. He wouldn’t be here now, for sure. But he had no regrets. And anyway, he’d always hated travelling.

1976–1981

Saturday, 3 July 1976

It was the first time that nature had thumped an angry fist on the table. There had been no rain since Christmas; the drought had hardened the soil and brought the country to its knees, not to mention that, in June, the scorching heat had cracked the enamel of the tin-plate thermometer on the wall. All along the hillside, the meadows were gasping. The cows grazed their own shadows, casting frightened, sidelong glances.

The heatwave was wringing their bodies of moisture, and at Les Bertranges the eight o’clock television news became more important than ever. For Alexandre, the endless reports of record temperatures were a chance to see the massed bodies of young women in short skirts and bikinis. The clips were filmed mostly in Paris: bare-legged girls walked the city streets, others lounged in squares or on café terraces, and some were even topless at the side of a lake. A dream-like prospect for a young man of almost fifteen. His sisters gazed at a world they longed for, too: the busy streets, pavements lined with cafés, every terrace like Saint-Tropez – the very opposite of boredom, so they thought. If nothing else, the heat had united the nation in a great throwing-off of clothes: no one, in town or at Les Bertranges, was afraid to unbutton their blouse or bare their torso.

Many thought the furnace-like temperatures were the result of nuclear tests, and the atomic power stations springing up across England, France and Russia, boiling the rivers and steaming up the sky like great, demented kettles. But their father reckoned the fiery heat had been caused by the space stations the Russians and the Americans were firing up through the atmosphere, factories floating around up there, disturbing the sun. The world had gone mad. Their mother trusted no one but white-haired Captain Jacques Cousteau, the doom-laden Father Christmas who blamed progress and industrial pollution, when frankly, it was hard to see what smoking factory chimneys had to do with the sweltering nights they endured at Les Bertranges. On television, as everywhere else, superstition was rife, and the only practical solution to the heatwave were the mountains of Calor fans piled up in the entrance to the Mammouth hypermarket, with the added attraction of Tang orange-juice sachets (‘just add water!’), and Kim Pouss ice pops which rose magically from their cardboard tubes – there was hope for this world after all.

Their grandparents, reluctant ancestral sages, remembered that during the great drought of 1921 the farmers in the valley had arranged for a special mass to be said. Back then, they had all roasted through a two-hour service celebrated in full sun, out in the fields. Say what you like, but three days later the rain returned. God had brought the cracked earth back to life. Except that now, in 1976, there was no direct line to God: the church at Saint-Clair had lost its curate, and in the absence of an intercessor, the candles lit for St Médard on 8 June had no effect whatsoever: not a drop of rain fell. The nightly weather forecast showed a huge sun symbol over the entire map of France, and yellow zig-zag cartoon lightning – storms that no one ever seemed to see for real, proof of the extraordinary disconnect between the television, in Paris, and the rest of the world, out here.

Sunday, 4 July 1976

Their father had taken the animals down to the lower pastures, on Lucienne and Louis’s land. It was never a good idea to let the cattle drink from the river: the cows’ hooves would slip on the banks, or they would get fluke, or spread TB by mixing with other herds. But from their small, newly built house, the grandparents could keep a careful eye on the beasts. Lucienne and Louis had just left the old farm on the high ground above the valley to the children. They had reached retirement age, but they had not given up farming altogether. At sixty-five, they declared themselves perfectly capable of working the silt-rich valley soil and keeping a market garden, especially now, with the new Mammouth and its vast self-service vegetable section.

That Sunday, 4 July, marked a turning point at Les Bertranges. They were planting saffron for the last time. In this heat, the bulbs were guaranteed not to rot, and once they were in the ground, the crocuses would be unaffected by damp; on the contrary, they would slumber, tucked up warm, and wake with the first rains on the other side of summer. To the Fabriers, this last crop felt like the end of an era. The red gold was imported now, ten times cheaper, from Iran, India and Morocco. Growing it here was no longer profitable. In France, the labour costs for a half-hectare of the flowers were too high, even as a family. There was no point spending days at a time picking the flowers, then stripping them, seated around the table. Up at the farm, Alexandre’s father and mother knew what they were about: the bulbs lived for five years. They could plant them now in the certain knowledge that their children would be around for another five years, that things could stay as they were for another half-decade. This last planting of the crocuses would ease the transition for Lucienne and Louis. They were keeping on with the walnut oil, and the blackcurrants – activities that had filled the long evenings before television – for the same reason.

For the last time at Les Bertranges, three generations worked side by side. Caroline, the oldest sister, had turned sixteen. Already, they could see from the way she constantly dusted herself down that she was distancing herself from their world. At just eleven years old, Vanessa was never without her Instamatic camera, worn cross-wise on a strap. She looked through it every couple of minutes to check the picture she would take if she pressed the shutter. Which meant that she was not much help. From time to time, she would stare at a bulb clasped between the tips of her fingers, then hold it further away and frame the image. Hers was an expensive hobby – it cost a lot to develop the films, so she would always think twice before pressing her finger down to take a picture. Six-year-old Agathe was the baby girl. Her parents reprimanded her every time she put a bulb in upside down or peeled it inquisitively before planting it in the ground. But Alexandre was busy everywhere at once. He had hoed and raked the soil the day before, and now, as well as helping with the planting, he fetched new boxes of bulbs while everyone emptied out and planted the ones he had already brought. Lucienne and Louis had come up from below for the occasion, leaving their brand-new three-bedroom house with steps up to the front door, a fitted bathroom, and a lingering smell of paint. As country people, custodians of practices handed down over a thousand years, they knew that, tomorrow, those same practices would cease.

The land at Les Bertranges had been in Lucienne’s family for four generations, but now the future looked uncertain. Caroline was talking about teacher training in Toulouse, Vanessa dreamed of one thing only: becoming a photographer in Paris. And Agathe would follow her sisters, no doubt about that. As luck would have it, Alexandre had no such plans. He studied farming and land management at the agricultural college, and he loved the soil. Save for him, the family’s days at the farm would be numbered. The absence of anyone to take over would have spelled a death sentence for the land, the cattle, the woods. And the entire estate – fifty hectares, plus ten hectares of woods – would have been abandoned. Alexandre never spoke about it, but he felt a great weight of responsibility on his shoulders. If the girls felt free to dream of a life elsewhere, they owed it to their brother, the sacrificial son, preparing to take up the burden and carry on.

Alexandre was fetching a fresh load of bulb crates when he heard the blare of sirens in the distance. Strange, because the police never showed their faces around here, least of all in an emergency. From the end of the field there was a view right across the valley, but the big trees were in leaf now and obscured it. Through a gap, he saw his grandparents’ small new house down below, and the narrow road that followed the river. He ran his hand over his face, which was streaked with sweat. Just at that moment, he spotted two police vans emerging from a tunnel of overhanging trees, sirens howling as they sped around a bend in the road, a sure sign that they were heading for Labastide, unless they had taken the turning to come up here.

His father called to him: ‘Hey! Alexandre! What the hell are you doing?’

‘Strange, down there, there are two—’

‘Two what?’

‘No, nothing …’

‘Bring us some more boxes! Can’t you see we’re running out?’

Alexandre said nothing about the police vans. Two of them. That meant something serious. He wondered if they were headed for Crayssac’s place. Last week, the old Red had gone up to the Larzac plateau – he was an activist in the struggle against plans to extend the military camp up there. Thousands had attended the protest, it seemed, and caused a fair bit of trouble. The militant rebels had broken into the army buildings to try and tear up the deeds expropriating the farmland, and that same evening the police had thrown them all in jail. But the very next day, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac had infuriated the cops by ordering the farmers’ release: their flocks were dying of thirst in the drought. The Fabriers never discussed such things, but Alexandre knew Crayssac had taken part in the protest. Without admitting it, even to himself, he was fascinated by the struggle – a kind of Woodstock closer to home, with girls and hippies travelling there from all over, and tons of weed, so he’d heard. It must be a wild scene up there, for sure.

‘Get a move on, for goodness’ sake!’

Alexandre hurried back and forth, fetching crates full of bulbs and placing them beside each of the team of planters out in the field. They were down on all fours, planting the bulbs one by one. Alexandre passed close to the viewpoint a second time, and saw a third van racing along the road. Impossible, surely, that a whole company of gendarmes would turn up just for Crayssac.

‘Don’t stand there dreaming, bring us some bulbs!’

This time, he knew he had to go. He had to find out.

‘I’ll be back in a minute!’

‘What the …?’

‘I’m thirsty, I’m going to fetch some water.’

‘There’s some Antésite cordial here.’

‘No, I want fresh water, not that stuff. And I need the toilet. I’ll be right back …’

‘The toilet?’ Jean stared at Angèle in bemusement. ‘The heat’s affected that son of yours.’

Alexandre’s mother shrugged.

Sunday, 4 July 1976

Alexandre walked back up to the farmhouse, but rather than fetch a drink of water, he jumped onto his Motobécane scooter and raced over to Crayssac’s place. When he got there, the police were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps the track was blocked, or the vans’ narrow tyres had got stuck in the deep ruts that had hardened to concrete in the drought. Alexandre found the old man sitting indoors, pouring with sweat, his gun across his knees.

‘Jesus Christ, Joseph, what’s going on?’

The old man sat immured in ice-cold rage. ‘This is all your fault!’ he spat furiously.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You and your blasted telephone.’

‘Did the PTT technicians call the police? You haven’t shot at them, have you?’

‘Not yet.’

Alexandre was bewildered. Lately, in their conversations, the old goatherd had talked of nothing but non-violent protest.

‘Joseph, the gun … What happened to the spirit of Gandhi?’

‘Well, you know what? You can stick your non-violent resistance. Because it doesn’t work, does it? Non-violence … The Corsicans, the Irish, they know … Only way to make your voice heard is to blow it all sky-high.’

‘But you didn’t shoot at the guys rigging up the telephone cables, surely?’

‘We’ve lived for two thousand years without the telephone. I won’t have it here, I tell you.’

Old Crayssac sank deeper into his rage, accusing Alexandre. He was a landowners’ brat, and it was their fault the rubber cables were being strung along their lanes. His parents were materialist good-for-nothings who wanted it all for themselves, two cars, new fences, aluminium feeders, a television set, two tractors, shopping trolleys crammed full of stuff from Mammouth … And now the telephone. Where would it all end?

‘So did you shoot at them, or didn’t you?’

‘Don’t you go spreading shit about me all over the neighbourhood, boy. I just sawed through their blasted poles, fucking great tree trunks laced with arsenic. No one’s sticking arsenic round the edge of my land! Same fucking wood as the Americans used in the forties that brought us the canker. Their munitions crates were infested with it. Those tree trunks are death …’

‘But the gun?’

‘My father’s old rifle. It’s what we do here. Resist! Your grandfather was a prisoner in the war. But me, my father was a maquisard. Not the same thing at all.’

‘That’s ancient history.’

‘Ha! Well, no point counting on you to stand up for anything, that’s for sure. I’ve seen you with your green tractor and your Motobécane. That modern world will eat you up, you’ll see, eat you alive like all the rest.’

‘What’s that got to do with the telephone cables?’

‘The telephone, Larzac, nuclear power, it’s all the same. The nuclear plants at Golfech, Creys-Malville. All that. And the mines and the steelworks? They’re closing them down! But people are taking a stand, can’t you see? Everywhere, people are rising up against that world. You can’t just take it lying down, like your lot do. You’ll see, one day, if no one protests, they’ll put a fucking motorway through your fields, or build a nuclear power plant right here.’

Alexandre was sitting in front of the old man now. Was seventy really as old as all that? He looked at Crayssac. Was he what his father would call an old fool, or some prophet of doom, a communist Christian, the sort dismissed locally as fadorle, wrong in the head, a goatherd to whom a world of change had not been kind?

It was plain to Alexandre that they needed the telephone, just as they needed their sleek Citroën GS, the John Deere tractor, the television set. If nothing else, they needed a direct line to Mammouth on the main road to Toulouse, so they could sell their vegetables, and perhaps meat one day – why not? But old Crayssac didn’t want black rubber cables hung along the sides of the roads. The electricity pylons were enough of an eyesore already.

‘The state wants us on its leash. In ten years there’ll be so many wires along all the roads, they’ll have to cut down the trees.’

‘But you’ve got electricity and running water here.’

‘Running water! Ha! The wells are dry, the tap dribbles darkbrown piss, that’s all. Take a look if you don’t believe me.’

Alexandre picked up a glass and turned on the tap. Sure enough, Crayssac’s water was a dirty brown colour.

‘The wine’s under the sink, mix it with that. Help yourself.’

It was so hot everywhere else that the bottle felt cool. Alexandre poured the vin de soif – cheap, thirst-quenching stuff, but a fine ruby red, nonetheless.

‘Time was, you could drink from the springs, but now they’ve cut off the aquifers to make cretins like your lot buy their water in bottles at Mammouth. They sell water at the price of wine and you all buy it. Fools.’

Crayssac’s hunting spaniel had lain motionless under the table since Alexandre’s arrival, sprawling with its nose pressed against the cool tiles. But now it sprang to its feet and began to bark, standing right in front of its master, staring him straight in the eye. Then the dog tore outside, baying as it did so when it caught the scent and gave chase. The greeting was well in advance of the police vans that the dog alone had heard. Until now.

‘I know they’re going to give me trouble. They’ve got me in their sights over at Saint-Géry, even at headquarters. Heh, what d’you think? We scare them, people like me, d’you see? Even up there in Paris. They’re frightened we’ll blast this world off its tracks.’

‘Joseph, get rid of the gun, quick! Or this really will go all the way to Paris …’

Soon, the three vehicles came into view at the far end of the lane. Alexandre and Crayssac peered through the window, watching their slow advance. Three Renault vans, bizarrely tall and narrow, lurched wildly – pathetically – along the deeply rutted track. Dizzied by the sight of them, and his gulps of cool wine, Alexandre waxed philosophical:

‘Best you can do is apologise. The gendarmes are military men, they command respect.’

‘You sound like Michel fucking Debré.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? They’re here to protect us.’

‘Against what? The Soviets, is that it? Are you like all the rest, scared of the Russians?’

Outside, the van doors slid open. Almost before he had time to think, Alexandre grabbed the gun from the table and slipped it out of sight, on top of the kitchen cupboard. The gendarmes appeared in the doorway, and though Alexandre could tell they were surprised to see him, he felt incapable of extricating himself from the situation, assuring them he had nothing to do with it. He remembered the words Crayssac had breathed on his return from the very first protests with the guys at Larzac: ‘If ever the gendarmes get you in their sights one day, you’re screwed. They never forget, never give up …’

Sunday, 4 July 1976

At mealtimes, Alexandre was the audience for his three sisters. Outside, on the farm, he was the one who felt most at ease, but indoors it was the girls who took the lead, filling the farmhouse with their laughter and fun, united by a bond of glee while he watched from the sidelines. The girls were closer to their parents, too. They were chatty and opinionated, and they could talk about absolutely anything. They discussed every possible subject, from the deeply serious to the frivolous, while Alexandre and their father and mother talked about nothing but the farm, the livestock and his studies. They wanted him to stay on at agricultural college, but he told them he already knew farming inside out, so there was no point in carrying on with his studies. His relationship with his parents was strictly professional.

They sat down to eat every evening at eight o’clock, when the television news started. It wasn’t planned that way, that’s just how it was. The presenter presided at the head of their table – Hélène Vila, Roger Gicquel or Jean Lanzi with his widow’s peak, aviator glasses and friendly grin. Mostly, the reports were drowned out by their conversation. No one ever really listened to the ‘high mass’ of the eight o’clock news, except when their father or mother hissed a loud Ssshhh! – the unmistakable signal that something bad was happening in the world, or beyond, in space, because people were more and more interested in that too, now that the Russians had developed a rocket that could take them to Mars.

Most often, Vanessa would talk about someone she had seen while out and about, one of her best girlfriends, or a distant neighbour whom they scarcely knew, while Caroline, in her teacher’s voice, loud and voluble already, would tell them all what she’d done that day, or was going to do tomorrow, when she wasn’t holding forth about some book she’d read, or a lesson she’d just finished revising. When she warmed excitedly to the subject of a film, they knew they’d be driving her to Villefranche or Cahors, or dropping her off at a friend’s so the parents of Justine or Alice, Sandrine or Valérie could take their turn and drive them all to the cinema. When Caroline spoke, she expanded their world far beyond the periphery of the farm, and yet here they had everything they needed to make a life for themselves. Agathe enjoyed watching her two older sisters, eager to catch up with them. Meanwhile, she borrowed their shoes, their sweaters and their dresses. She was impatient to grow up, and ringed with the unmistakable light of the favourite, the baby of the family.

The television news was still showing footage of the protest against the Superphénix nuclear reactor in Creys-Malville, far north and east of Les Bertranges, in the opposite corner of the Massif Central. Activists from France, Germany and Switzerland had come together to camp at the site. The hippies had quickly established a second Larzac, of sorts, but the riot police had chased them out in a series of violent clashes. Alexandre seized the moment. Now it was his turn to shine. He would be the one to grab their attention, as the bearer of sensational news. He launched into an account of the incident with the three police vans at old Crayssac’s place. For once, the others listened in disbelief, amazed to hear him speak at such length. He might almost have been on the news! For once, events on their stretch of hillside rivalled the reports on TV.

Alexandre relived the scene, holding their attention all around the table. Caroline listened, doubtless comparing the story to a chapter in one of her books, or an episode in a film. Vanessa imagined, regretfully, the shots she could have taken, of the sabotaged poles, the old man with his gun, and the platoon of gendarmes, ready to pounce. Agathe took it all in, sceptical and wary like her parents, and fundamentally alarmed, if the truth be told.

Alexandre was forced to admit that the old man had lashed out and called him the spoiled son of a pair of arsehole landowners, reiterating over and over that this was all his parents’ fault. After all, they were the ones who had followed the will of President Giscard d’Estaing, like sheep, and ordered a telephone!

‘So, did he shoot at them, or not?’

For once they were hanging breathlessly on his every word. Alexandre would have loved to embellish the story, add a spectacular shoot-out, with the gun dog tearing at the gendarmes’ throats. But he stuck to the facts.

Since joining the struggle for the Larzac plateau, Crayssac had achieved a modicum of fame. Whenever the TV news reported the protests, the family would peer at the screen, hoping to pick him out. Crayssac was among his own kind up there, siding more with the communists than the hippies, fighting the fight alongside the union firebrands, the Lutte Occitane, the Catholic Young Farmers, and the arty types down from Paris. He had fasted with the bishops of Rodez and Montpellier. Even François Mitterrand had joined them on hunger strike, for about three-quarters of an hour, but the gesture had made its mark. The socialist leader had sworn that if ever he got into power, his first act would be to secure justice for the Larzac farmers. The protest was no small affair, and in a world mesmerised by modernity and progress, it gave solid proof that nature lay at the heart of everything.

‘So go on, did they take him away?’

Alexandre didn’t want to brag, but he was careful to point out that he was the one who, at the very last minute, had instinctively hidden the gun on top of the kitchen cupboard. He said nothing, on the other hand, about the look the gendarmes had given him when they appeared at the old man’s door. A look you don’t forget in a hurry. He chose his words carefully, but he made sure that everyone around the table got the message: Crayssac disapproved of their management of the farm, the expansion of the herd and their purchase of more land. It was their fault if the lanes were lined with poles of contaminated pine that would poison them all.

He read the disapproval in his parents’ eyes, and his sisters’ too. The family kept out of trouble with the gendarmes, or anyone at all. They had pumped water from the river lately, and that had aroused quite enough hostility, even without doing business with the hypermarket. In remote, sparsely populated country like theirs, there were still a thousand ways to provoke the dislike, even the hatred, of your nearest neighbour. The Fabriers had nothing against the gendarmes, still less against the military proper – on the contrary, since the start of this damned drought they knew full well that without the infantrymen from Angoulême and Brive, and their Berliet trucks, farmers like them would have been short of feed. For the past two months, the military had been bringing feed south from the Creuse, the Indre and the Loire, while the tanker trucks of the Seventh Marine Infantry Regiment brought water up to the drought-stricken countryside, to fill the animals’ drinking troughs, and the wells. Without them, the cattle would be parched and cracked like the mud in the dried-up ponds. Larzac or no Larzac, everyone acknowledged that, since June, the army had done everything it could. Now was not the time to pick a fight with the gendarmes, or go shouting about the army camp. People needed the military – they were doing a fine job.

Monday, 5 July 1976

July was a month of fire, endured by all. The drought was neverending, and the heat beat down across the high causse. Even the wild animals were behaving strangely. At night, the deer came close to the houses to drink. They lapped at the dregs of water left out for them in tubs, but often the boars would tip the containers over to roll in the thin layer of mud that resulted. In the fields, the cattle clustered around the drinking troughs. Cows detest the heat, so they would wait until evening to drag themselves over to the mangers, knocking the galvanised metal bars with their horns to vent their bad temper. On the hillside, the springs had all run dry, and the rainwater dams were reduced to expanses of cracked earth.

At night, every window in the farmhouse stood wide open. At two o’clock in the morning, with the others doubtless all asleep, Alexandre felt the need to take a walk outside. A breeze stirred the hot air. In places, along the paths, there was a smell of death – the heady stench of a carcass, some poor beast that had strayed. He thought of old Crayssac, spending his first night in police custody. His goats would need feeding tomorrow, and milking. He didn’t like taking care of the goats. When you’re used to working with cattle, goats seem tiny, like keeping chickens. Sometimes he was afraid he would end up like the red-faced old man, that he would come to look like him, little by little. Perhaps that’s where he’d be in fifty years, distrusting everyone and everything, living in his own small world, as they had always done here.

That night, in the light of the half-moon, he could see the suffering of nature: the trees slumped as if struggling to breathe, haunted by the dread prospect of the sun rising one more time, and the close embrace of the suffocating air after the relative cool of the night. Old Crayssac loved to predict the very worst, and perhaps he was right; perhaps progress had brought nothing good, as that politician in his roll-neck sweater had said, brandishing a glass of water to show that we would all be faced with water shortages by the end of the century and that the solution was for everyone to go back to riding bikes, like they did in China. Perhaps the crackpot prophets were right. Perhaps one day the sun would never set.

Saturday, 10 July 1976

A trip to Mammouth was even better than a trip into town. In the belly of the great, ever-changing megastore, you no longer walked from shop to shop, but penetrated to the very heart of things, the stuff of life itself. On Saturdays, breakfast was a hurried affair and the farm buzzed with activity all morning. Ahead of the grand outing, Alexandre took charge while the others got ready: he would take the Citroën GS out of the barn and warm the sixty-eight-horsepower engine, revving it for that distinctive deep, velvety hum. Each time he drove it secretly along the lane, he would put his foot down a few times, just to frighten the cows. He never ceased to marvel at the hydraulic suspension.

At the other end of the little valley, Crayssac’s goats were bleating fit to burst. Alexandre had milked them, but their udders were full once more, so gorged that their teats were inflamed. The signal that the gendarmes still had not let Crayssac go.

When it was time to set off, everyone complained that Alexandre had left the car out in the hot sun. The seats were scorching, but it took more than that to spoil the excursion to the hypermarket, and their teatime treats at the Miami Café. Saturday shopping was a ritual, a cruise on dry land, the only time when the whole family crammed into the Citroën to drive the twenty-five kilometres to Cahors. Today, the expedition had a special urgency because Angèle was worried about the tap water. It was running brown, just as it had when they were first connected to the mains. As a responsible matriarch, she declared they would pick up half a dozen packs of Vittel, the water that coursed through your body as if it was turning a millwheel (so it said in the television advertisements), eliminating toxins as it flowed. Vittel’s other great advantage was its plastic bottles which, once empty, were endlessly useful around the farm: they would cut off the bottom sections for use as protective covers for the fenceposts, or paint pots, or for storing nails. Plastic bottles were better in every way than old tin cans, which rusted after six months.

Alexandre always drove from the farm to the nearest main road – a good five kilometres. After that, he would hand over to his father. His sisters had no interest in learning to drive, but Alexandre kept one date firmly fixed in his mind: 18 July 1979, his appointment with destiny, the day he would turn eighteen, the day he could take his driving test at long last. Meanwhile, it was he who drove the car along the track at Les Bertranges, and the narrow lane beyond. He said nothing, but he dreaded coming face to face with the gendarmes. They had never come around here before the incident with Crayssac’s gun, but now it paid to be cautious.

No one ever objected to Alexandre’s taking the wheel. On the contrary, Angèle and Jean had pinned their hopes on their son passing his test, so that he could share the burden of shopping and deliveries alike. He could take the animals to slaughter or fetch equipment and machinery, make any of the frequent, essential trips to Villefranche, Brive or Cahors. Not forgetting the girls, who were constantly in need of a lift to one friend’s house or another, and had to be fetched home when the party was over. The sisters declared that, thanks to Alexandre, they could skip the school bus in the mornings. There would be no more hanging about in the rain at the end of the track. They could go to the fairs and fêtes in the other villages, even the Sherlock pub, without asking their parents, without even telling them.

Where the road came out at the top of the hill, they turned right and skirted around old Crayssac’s fields. They saw that twenty telegraph poles had been put up along the edge, but that was all. Two large, empty trailers were still parked on the grass verge, though no one was sure why. What they noticed above all was the state of the drystone walls. Whole sections had collapsed. The vibrations from the diggers must have shaken them to the ground. The breaches were big enough in places for Crayssac’s animals to get out easily.

The farm track was deeply rutted, but driving on the main road was a different matter altogether: they floated through the countryside, borne aloft on the hydraulic suspension. Alexandre drove the next five kilometres clasping the wheel in a kind of ecstasy. Their father turned on the radio, the soundtrack to this free-flowing modernity. A song by Michel Sardou came on, and he turned up the volume. With his tumbling dark locks and wounded pout, Sardou was the darling songster of the right, always on the radio, especially his new hit, ‘Ne m’appelez plus jamais France’, an unlikely anthem to the transatlantic liner La France that Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had sworn to keep afloat, during his presidential campaign, but which had since been declared unprofitable, and speedily decommissioned just a couple of years before. Whenever their father heard the song, he would turn up the volume and holler the defiant refrain, especially since, in this case, singing along to Sardou no longer marked you out as a right-winger: even the leftie trade unionists at the CGT had recognised the single as an anthem of the labour movement. In the back seat, Caroline and Vanessa would clap their hands over their ears and plead with their father to turn it down, then lunge through the gap in the front seats, trying desperately to reach the knob on the dashboard radio. This was 1976; in the era of Pink Floyd, Clapton and Supertramp, even a couple of bars of Sardou were too much to bear. Alexandre concentrated on his driving but refereed the squabble by placing one hand over the volume button, at which point his father saw that he had not fastened his seat belt and reprimanded him. The two older sisters took advantage of the distraction to dive forward, but their father pushed them back and burst into song again immediately. And through it all, the hydraulic suspension smoothed the occasional bump in the road and muffled the commotion, while his sisters jumped about in the back.

While their mother gazed placidly out of the window, the peaceful journey became a bare-knuckle fight. Feeling a rush of premature nostalgia, she pictured what would become of her riotous family just a few years from now, when all the girls had gone. She knew already that it would end as it had for their neighbours the Jouansacs and the Berthelots, farmers whose children had left for the city and visited their parents only at Christmas and Easter, Bastille Day and All Saints’. Inevitably, sooner or later, family life was reduced to the high days and holidays of the Catholic Church, and the Republic.

The great advantage of Mammouth was that it took away any anxiety about parking. On the other hand, the large expanse of bare tarmac was hot as hell. No one had thought to plant trees. People walked across it as if it were a great, scalding pan, its surface melting in places, but the moment you passed through the glass doors, the cool, fresh air enveloped you like the waters of a lake, and the feeling was ecstatic. Perfect happiness. Inside the concrete and steel cathedral, it was as cool as the village chapel or the caves at Pech Merle. Calor electric fans were stacked either side of the entrance, each in its box, on special offer – a highly suspicious gesture of benevolent concern. The pile had been smaller the week before. The hypermarket had restocked. Vanessa and Agathe stopped to look, as they had every Saturday for the past three weeks, and this time their mother relented.

From there, they set off along the aisles, like explorers on an expedition. Alexandre walked behind, pushing the trolley. Up ahead, they seemed the embodiment of the ideal family. He followed them through the different departments, never losing patience in the clothes sections, or household goods, just going with the flow, released from desire or impulse, floating free and light, especially as there was air conditioning throughout the vast space. He felt a sense of unparalleled well-being. With gentle music playing in the background, the aisles were lined with objects of interest, like some endless enchanted cavern. In town, reality intruded every time you crossed the road. And while the air shimmered and burned over the arid hills outside, here people and merchandise alike were cool and serene. The whole thing seemed unreal.

Living as they did, on a hill farm far from anywhere, it heartened their parents to show the children that they were part of the modern world, the life of the TV adverts, the life of steam irons, electric coffee machines and carving knives, carousels of T-shirts, and yoghurt makers.

At four o’clock sharp, their father left them and made his way to the administrative offices – he had arranged a meeting with one of the head buyers to negotiate Lucienne and Louis’s contract to supply fresh vegetables, but above all to talk about meat. Here, the meat counter had its own cutting room, and they were sure to be able to make a deal. The head food buyer wanted fresh, local produce, and though breeders were never in a position to name their price, their father knew that working with a giant like Mammouth would ensure regular orders.

Inside the hypermarket, everyone walked on the flat. After a week at Les Bertranges, going up and down the stony hillside tracks, it was restful to feel the smooth floor underfoot. At the meat counter, their mother inspected everything but bought nothing. Two men dressed up as butchers were shrink-wrapping pre-cut portions in plastic. At the next-door counter, two women were slicing cold meats and cured sausage. Twenty metres away, a Breton fisherman in a striped top and yellow rubber boots spoke in the gravelly, landlocked tones of Gers. Alexandre observed the scene. He envied his sisters’ excitement. Their chorus of pleading carried more weight than he could ever muster to secure packs of Mamie Nova desserts or Chocolate Fingers. Backstage, in the offices, their father would be talking time frames and bulk orders, making commitments, saddling himself with constraints. It was a risky business: he had to stand his ground and not settle for anything under fifty francs a kilo. Their mother guided her flock onwards around the store, casting a wary eye over the food offers, certain that the flaccid, drab-looking steaks (not a trace of marbled fat) had come from dairy cows at the end of their working lives. She recoiled at the sea bream held out to her by the fake Breton fisherman. She had been tempted at first, but the poor fish had clearly suffered on its long journey to the point of sale. And besides, her instinct told her that the real bargains were elsewhere, on the stands at the ends of the aisles. Five packets of Grand-Mère coffee for the price of two, all bound together with thick red tape.

At five o’clock, everyone met at the cafeteria as planned, for the unmissable treat of a peach melba or a banana split. Agathe flew round and round in a helicopter amid the flashing bulbs of the miniature fairground ride – ten turns for five francs. A perfect afternoon. In this land of promise, the heatwave and the drought ceased to exist, and anyone who dared to complain about the air-conditioned atmosphere was a killjoy, like old Crayssac.

Back at the farm, they hurried to unload their new purchases. Alexandre gave it some muscle, carrying the five packs of water all at once and basking in a heady mirage of adolescent omnipotence. The splendid new fan was lifted from its box and plugged in immediately. The three sisters tried it out, sitting down to face the miraculous blast of air, as they were watching a film. Their mother was unconvinced. The fan created a draught, for sure, but it was very noisy. The sisters thought it was perfect. Already, they each wanted to keep it on all night in their room. Except they had a bedroom each, and there was only one fan.

When everything had been put away, Alexandre and his father went out into the yard. The unbearable heat knocked them back straight away. Late afternoon was the very worst time: when the sun had beaten down relentlessly since morning, the earth could take no more, and nature sank into a complete, exhausted silence. The cows clustered at the bottom of the field, the two dogs had taken shelter in the barn, no birds flew. Alexandre sensed defeat. His father seemed tense and nervous, which was unlike him. He kept rubbing his forehead with the flat of his hand.

‘So how did it go with the buyers?’

‘Not sure. We’re going to have to choose.’

‘Oh? Choose what?’

‘I’ll be frank with you, Alexandre, from now on. Like a business partner. If you’re sure you want to take over the farm, it’s probably going to be worth your while extending the cattle shed or building a new one.’

‘Why?’

‘Mammouth aren’t interested in taking one beast every few months. We need store cattle if we want to make this work, even dry cows, cull cows. Buy them in, fatten them up. We’ve got the space, we just need to double the arable, grow corn instead of the tobacco. We’ve got the river, so water’s never going to be a problem. If we put three beasts a month their way, it’ll be worth it.’

Alexandre had sensed his father’s renewed ambition for some time now. He was thinking big, ready to move Les Bertranges out of the old-style polyculture practised by Lucienne and Louis. Alexandre would benefit from his father’s ideas, but he could be a hostage to them, too. He would have to commit to working with his parents, and his grandparents down in the valley; he would take over in twenty or thirty years, and that meant spending his whole life in the same place, right here. No small decision. All so they could supply Mammouth with beef. And not only Mammouth – everyone swore that more hypermarkets were coming; there was already talk of a Radar, and Euromarché, because in the future, people would do all their shopping in vast cathedrals like these, with parking facilities and trolleys right next to the car. The silence around them felt heavier still, like lead. And then Alexandre remembered.

‘Notice anything?’

‘No. What?’

‘The goats, they’ve stopped bleating.’

‘Roasted alive, like the hedgerows.’

His father glanced up at the sun, its intense glare still high in the sky, radiating heat like a flow of lava.

‘Another eight days of this and we’ll all be roasted alive, for sure.’

Monday, 19 July 1976

The rains returned, borne on the west wind. From now on, summer could proceed as usual. The fan was put back in its box and consigned to the barn, forgotten about that very evening, as cool, fresh water filled the troughs and welled up from the springs. The cattle emerged from the shade and felt the grass beneath their hooves. Life went on.

For weeks, the nation had been united in dread. Town and country had suffered alike in the catastrophe. City dwellers endured temperatures of 59°C aboard crowded buses, while country folk watched their harvests and forests wilt. For weeks, city dwellers and farmers were united in thirst, and now it seemed the experience had sealed their fellowship for evermore. The townies had taken Larzac to their hearts. At last, they understood the militants’ cause. More than a protest over an extension to a military camp, the struggle opposed the forces of modernity that were disfiguring the planet as a whole. The government sought to appease all sides, and the court nearest the site, in the town of Millau, released the last few activists who had been awaiting sentence. This new compassion for Larzac was a sign: city dwellers no longer denied their rural roots. The natural world was close to their hearts, and the French nation felt a profound respect for rural life. Or a deep-seated nostalgia for the land.

And yet, just a few weeks later, in the middle of August, the government voted in a ‘drought tax’ (a clumsy phrase coined by the Ministry of Finance). It was decided that 2.2 billion francs would be raised from the taxpayer and distributed to the farmers, and to them alone, as if they were the only ones who had suffered in the heat. In the middle of the nation’s summer holiday, Giscard decided to open the veins of the workforce, blue-collar and white-collar alike. The CGT was furious at the right-wing government’s decision to clear the farmers’ debts by siphoning off employees’ pay, and to do it in mid-August, when the workers were on holiday. The exceptional one-off tax provoked outrage, and the resignation of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. The angry backlash extended to the farmers themselves: the sums proposed were pathetically inadequate set against the damage they had suffered. The summer of fire had thrown everything and everyone out of joint. Nobody knew which way to turn, including Crayssac. Communism coursed through his veins, and it sickened him to feel more kinship with Giscard d’Estaing (the ‘Baron’ himself) than with his fellow countryman Georges Séguy, the Toulouse-born union leader and hero of the Resistance. Truly, the summer of fire had turned everything on its head.

Saturday, 10 May 1980

It was four years since the arrival of the telephone. The girls had wanted an orange one, but their parents chose grey, alarmed, so they said, at the prospect of a bright-orange device that might ring at any moment. And anyway, coloured telephones were for Paris. In the provinces, you’d wait weeks for anything other than the standard-issue concrete-grey Bakelite model. The girls had got used to the grey in the end. But it was a big, ugly thing, with its hollow casing and rotary dial, like a moulded plastic breeze block.

Most irritating of all, everyone had the same grey colour: Monsieur Troquier the bank manager at Crédit Agricole, and the vet, and the shop at the Antar service station – all with the same ring. Enthroned on its small stand in the hallway, the telephone looked more like a piece of office equipment than a link to the rest of the family. Still, the phone meant that Caroline’s absence was less of a wrench. It was good to know they could get in touch. The sisters called her at least twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, and each time they fought over the handset, though the sound was like pressing your ear to a door or listening in from the boot of a car.

Caroline came home every other weekend from Toulouse. As a rule, she would arrive late on Friday afternoon at the station in Cahors, or be dropped off by the Chastaing girl’s parents (she was studying there, too). The rest of the time, it was strange to see the empty place at the end of the table, their big sister’s chair, silent now. Caroline had occupied that spot because she was the eldest, but also because she would get to her feet throughout the meal to help. Caroline took an interest in everything, led the conversation on every possible subject. Of the four siblings, she was the family’s very own talk-show host, the sister-in-chief. She took her place every second Friday now, and she had more to tell than ever. About her studies, of course, and life in Toulouse, all the new friends she had made, not kids from around here, but foreigners. She told them a thousand things about the big city, and the big apartment they all shared in an old townhouse in Saint-Cyprien, the working-class neighbourhood that faced the historic city centre, on the opposite bank of the Garonne. People were always coming round. Usually, the apartment was crowded with far more than the five housemates. Caroline told them everything: she had nothing to hide, and no subject was taboo. She’d got a room in the commune (which was basically what it was) by sheer luck, and she talked constantly about the crowd of students who hung out there – Diego, Trevis, Richard, Kathleen and two or three others. Most of all, she talked about the girl from Germany, Constanze. Provocatively, on purpose. Each time Caroline pronounced the tall, blonde girl’s name, she would glance at her brother. She had seen all too clearly, on the Sunday evenings when he drove her back to Toulouse and stayed for a drink before heading home, how sometimes he hung around late into the evening too, but only when Constanze was there. If not, or they knew she wouldn’t be there later, Alexandre would leave much sooner.

‘It’s true, admit it!’

‘Shut up! You’re talking rubbish. I leave earlier sometimes because I’m tired, that’s all.’

‘No! Absolutely not. Don’t listen to him, he’s so secretive! I swear, whenever Constanze’s around, he’s never in a hurry to come back here.’

‘Is she really that tall?’ Agathe reached a hand high above her head.

‘Thing is, little brother, she’s a high-flyer, she works hard – biology and law, she’s out of your league.’

‘Those German girls are very sporty …’ their mother added. ‘They won everything in Moscow, they were faster than the men in the swimming.’

‘Yes, but those were the East Germans,’ their father corrected her. ‘Built like fridge freezers, and necks as thick as a bull’s.’

‘Not all of them,’ said Caroline, slyly. ‘Proof: Constanze’s from Leipzig.’

‘So?’

‘So Leipzig is in East Germany!’

‘Watch out, Alexandre,’ their mother laughed. ‘You’d better get into training!’