The Son of Man E-Book

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 334

Beschreibung

After several years of absence, a man reappears in the life of a woman and their young son. Intent on being a family again, he drives them to Les Roches, a dilapidated house in the mountains, where the man grew up with his own ruthless father. While the mother watches the passing days with apprehension, the son discovers the enchantment of nature, savage and bewitching. As the father's hold over them intensifies, the return to their previous life and home seems increasingly impossible. Haunted by his past and consumed with jealousy, the man slowly sinks into madness and his son has no choice but to challenge his father in an attempt to save something of their humanity. Written in flawless, cinematic prose and brilliantly translated by Frank Wynne, The Son of Man is an exceptional novel of nature and wildness that traces how violence is inherited from one generation to the next, and a blistering examination of how families fold together and break apart under duress.

Leseprobe

3‘The Son of Man is an astonishing book. Beautifully written, devastating at times, and relentless, but unforgettable.’

— Michael Magee, author of Close to Home

‘The Son of Man is an explosion, a shout. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is a storming talent; here are words which are forged rather than written, smeared with blood.’

— Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

‘An exquisite and mesmerizing novel, in which violence constantly threatens to break the surface. The precision and detail of the prose imprints on the mind like a photograph.’

— Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

‘The Son of Man demands a fearless kind of reading. It combines the impassive eye of a naturalist regarding their object of study, with the fierce revolt of that which is scrutinized, and resists being catalogued and known. Del Amo reaches into atavistic territories of impulse, desire, violence and repetition, and refuses to domesticate through conclusion. I was mesmerized by this formidable tale of a son and a mother who come up against both the law of the father and the lawlessness of nature.’

— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug

‘A wandering insane grandfather casts a shadow and bad luck ricochets on his descendants. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo does not shy away from showing the atrocious. He has several strings to his hunter’s bow; an art of careful framing, of scenic observation. A taste for the primeval drive mixed with intuitions and perceptions.… Brief moments of light amidst the darkness and a fear so intense you could cut it with a knife.’

— Le Figaro Littéraire

‘A deep and subtle novel.’

— Télérama

4‘With The Son of Man, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo focuses intensely on the imperceptible tipping point in violence.... [A] horror reminiscent of The Shining in this huis clos with an open sky.’

— Elle Magazine

‘In The Son of Man the simple plot becomes as complex as the psychology of these human beasts. The writing is never precious, always precise. As the tension mounts, the sentences become longer and meandering, elusive like erupting violence. Rarely has a 39-year-old author hit the right notes so perfectly in the way he stretches his fiction.’

— Le Monde

‘Jean-Baptiste Del Amo signs here a story of rare power that does not let go of the reader until the last page. The writing is dazzling. One of the most brilliant authors of his generation.’

— RTL

Praise for Animalia

‘If EM Cioran, the great Romanian philosopher of the bleak, had been a novelist, Animalia is the kind of novel he would have produced ... [A]n important reminder that literature’s task is not necessarily to uplift, but to help us to attain a true understanding of our predicament.’

— Ian Sansom, Guardian

‘This is an extraordinary book. A dark saga related in sprawling sentences, made denser still by obscure and difficult vocabulary … I was spellbound.’

— David Mills, The Sunday Times

‘Del Amo has Flaubert’s flair for performance … His prose leaps out at the reader, gleaming with perfection.’

— Ankita Chakraborty, New York Times Book Review

5‘Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s writing positively reeks of pathos, and of rage.... Ever-resourceful, agile and ingenious, Wynne’s translation proves equal to every twist.’

— Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

‘[A] lyrical powerhouse, a sophisticated portrait of a fucked-up feedback loop of familial cruelty and disappointment, and a story that, for all its brutality, also reveals something more.’

— Emily Nemens, Paris Review

‘Animalia is a disturbing and profound book. Del Amo builds such a realistic, richly textured world that by the novel’s close, despite its horrors, it feels a real wrench to leave the landscape.’

— Katie da Cunha Lewin, Literary Review

‘Gruelling but magisterial … Del Amo’s novel is a massive sensory experience; no detail is too small to let ferment.’

— Cal Revely-Calder, The Telegraph

‘Animalia is stupendously good. This is a novel of epic scope and equally epic ambition, and it is exhilarating and frightening to read. Every page blazes with incandescent prose. After reading Animalia it might be a while before I can return to reading a contemporary novel, I suspect everything will seem tepid and timid in comparison. Del Amo has thrown down a gauntlet: be bold, be daring, be rigorous, be a poet. A stunning book.’

— Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap

‘Animalia is a book about sex and violence, but it has unusual sobriety, and a story with a deep pull. The way it senses the natural world, in seed, vein, hair, grain, pore, bud, fluid, is like nothing I’ve read.’

— Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency6

7

THE SON OF MAN

JEAN-BAPTISTE DEL AMO

Translated by FRANK WYNNE

89

‘Let the feverish rage of fathers live on in sons through every generation.’

— Seneca, Thyestes

10

Contents

Title PageEpigraphThe Son of ManAbout the AuthorsCopyright

11The leader stops, looks up at the sky and, for an instant, the black disc of his pupil aligns with the white disc of the sun, the star sears the retina and the creature crawling through the matricial mud turns away to contemplate the valley through which he is trudging with others of his kind: a landscape whipped by winds, sparse undergrowth dotted here and there with shrubs that have a mournful air; over this bleak terrain floats the negative afterimage of the day star, a black moon suspended on the horizon.

For days now, they have been marching westward, into the biting autumn wind. Thick, unkempt beards erode the hard features of the men. Ruddy-faced women carry newborns in tattered pelts. Many will die along the way, from the blue bitter cold or from dysentery contracted from stagnant watering holes where the feral herds come to drink. For them the men, with their gnarled fingers or their blades, will dig desolate hollows in the earth.

Into these pits they will place the shrouded bodies, more piteous still in the darkness of the grave; they will drop in useless trinkets, the fur in which the child would nestle, a doll of plaited hemp, a necklet of bones that will soon be indistinguishable from those of the dead child. Onto the lifeless face they will toss fistfuls of earth that seal up the eyes, the mouth, then they will place heavy rocks upon the burial mound to protect the remains from carrion feeders scavenging for sustenance. At length, they will set off once more, and only the mother will perhaps give a last glance over her shoulder at the glittering pile of stones quickly consumed by the shadow cast by the hill.

An old man drags his emaciated body beneath a thick pelt whose fleece moves with each gust of wind. Time was, he led the group through plains and valleys, along the banks of waterways towards more nourishing earth, more clement skies. Now,12he struggles to follow those younger and more robust than he, those who walk ahead, who decide where to pitch camp at dusk and strike camp at daybreak. Sometimes, at the mouth of a cave where they break their journey, they may light a fire that slashes the darkness, its flames illumining sketches of creatures that others before them have daubed onto the walls by the flickering glow of a tallow lamp.

In the crushing darkness, they huddle together, their rude bodies buried beneath great pelts from which only their faces emerge. Their breath condenses, their eyes remain open, while mothers attempt to soothe their babes, brushing a breast against their lips. Some of the men talk in low voices, stir up the embers which blaze and send out sparks whose reflections orbit the irises of those keeping watch and soar and whirl as though they would rejoin the firmament where other stars gutter out and die, engulfed by the ravening heart of night.

The enforced closeness beneath the covering pelts enjoins them to couple. Sometimes ignoring the child she is warming against her belly, the male will seize the rump that the female offers or listlessly denies him, and, taking the sex he has lubricated with a thick gob of spittle, will thrust until he comes inside her. Before trickling down her thigh as she drifts off again, the seed may fecundate the female, who, three seasons later, biting down on a piece of wood, will be delivered in the shadow of a hedgerow, a few steps from the camp the group has pitched to allow for the birthing.

Crouching on the ground, her arms gripped by other women who sponge her brow in turn, her calves, her sex, she will expel the fruit of this siring onto the bare earth, or into the hands of a midwife. The umbilical cord will be cut with a sharp flint. The thing thus dragged into the light and laid upon the empty skin of the belly will crawl in order to drink colostrum from the teat, thereby initiating the cycle necessary to its survival that will13see it tirelessly ingurgitate the world and excrete it.

If the child survives the first summers and the first winters, if his remains do not go to join all those they have already lost along the way – of one of these, snatched by a marten and carried to a nearby pool, there remains only the ribcage, half-buried in the mud where, beneath the vault of ribs that will soon crumble to dust, a bone-white sprig of common horsetail rises – he will soon walk beside others of his kind, be welcomed among them, learn to read the map of the stars, to strike flints to produce fire or fashion knives, learn the secrets of plants, bind up wounds and ready the bodies of the dead for their ultimate journey.

Perhaps the child will know a reprieve, survive to reach the fateful hour when his already weary flesh issues the order to reproduce. At this, he will tirelessly seek to mate with another of his kind, blindly fumbling and groping another of the miserable creatures in the cold of the blazing darkness, as the Milky Way punctures the sky above their heads. Then, having trodden the earth awhile, having known a handful of pallid dawns and twilights, the searing intensity of childhood and the body’s inexorable decay, he will die in some fashion or other before he has attained the age of thirty.

But, for now, the child still belongs to oblivion; he is but a minuscule, incongruous probability as the horde of humans advance, heads bowed against the windstorm, an upright, stubborn, tatterdemalion herd. Upon their shoulders or on sleds they carry tanned hides and earthenware pots fashioned by their own hands containing stores of fat. In these they preserve the roots, nuts and berries gathered along the way on which they feed, chewing the shrivelled flesh, the fibre rendered edible by fat, sucking out the juices sweet or bitter.

After a trek of many weeks, they come to the bank of a river teeming with fish, whose sinuous bed unfurls as far as the eye14can see across the plain stalked by the shadows of the clouds that scud from east to west. The shadows race ahead, cloaking vast stretches of land in darkness, deepening the hollows, levelling the peat bogs, adding a density to the forests that turns their greenish-brown to carbon black and transforming the stagnant waters of the marsh into vast sheets of glass bristling with reeds that rustle in the wind like insect wings. The clouds wreathing the pristine peaks move on, light bursts through again and sets the earth ablaze. A glean of herons rises from the marshes; the arrow of their necks cleaves the air, the furled wings shimmering against the electric blue.

The humans stop and pitch camp. Some who are skilled fishermen wade into the current that foams around boulders and the tree trunks carried here by floodwaters. The fishermen move along the banks, peering into the depths. The surface reflects their ape-like faces and, beyond, the nebulous sky floating above the dappled pebbles worn smooth by the river. The roar of the torrent and the effort required to see through the surging, shimmering water quickly plunge the fishermen into a kind of trance. Bodies bowed, arms hanging by their sides, the roiling water rising to thighs or waists, their hands lightly skimming the surface, they advance, like dusky wading birds formed by the river.

One of them bends lower and plunges his arm into the current. In a pool of calm water, near a tree trunk lying partly on the bank, the fisherman has spotted the ghostly form of a salmon swimming against the current, its steely reflections merging with the constantly shifting waters of the stream. With infinite slowness, he moves closer, ensuring that his shadow does not go before him. He lets his arms dangle just below the surface, which so distorts his vision that his hands look as though they are no longer part of the fisherman, but belong to the hermetic world of the river – and he stares fixedly at the salmon’s15eye, the iris speckled with gold, the opalescent periorbital scales.

With boundless caution, the fisherman brings his hands together beneath the salmon’s belly and, for an instant, it looks as though he is holding a sacrifice, that he is offering the salmon to the river, or that he is buoying it up in its precious delicate stasis. As his palms brush against the pelvic fins, the fish starts and swerves, though makes no attempt to escape. The fisherman waits, motionless; his palms now holding nothing but shifting flashes of light. Once again, he moves his hands so that they are under the salmon; this time the fish allows him to stroke its belly, even lift it, and it is only as its dorsal fin breaks the surface of the water that it violently twists and turns in an effort to escape.

But the fisherman’s hands have closed around it; with a powerful flick, he lifts the fish out of the water and tosses it into the air towards the bank, where a number of children are waiting, armed with hazel wands whose ends have been sharpened to a point. One of them, a hirsute little girl who is blind in one eye, rushes towards the salmon, which is floundering on the gravel. Crouching down, she holds it still with one hand and thrusts the pointed stick through its gills until it emerges from its mouth. Vainly it opens and closes its lower jaw, as the little girl holds the impaled fish at arm’s length, its body gleaming in the sunlight.

Hunkered on the gravel bank, the women gut the salmon caught by the fishermen. The dark skin of their hands is spangled with fish scales as they insert a sharpened flint into the anus, make an incision along the abdomen, hook their index and middle fingers into the opening to clean out the cavity. They pull out a small pile of reddish-brown entrails which they toss onto the ground with a flick of the wrist. The little one-eyed16girl standing near them is watching intently. From between two stones, she picks up a swim bladder, gazes for a moment at its iridescent whiteness, then bursts it between her fingers.

From a framework of branches, the women suspend an animal hide which they fill with water and large pebbles that they have heated in the glowing embers of the fire. To this, they add freshwater mussels collected by the children, some tubers, herbs that were gathered and dried the previous summer, and lastly the fish whose flesh quickly begins to flake. Before long, the fragrant steam from the bubbling broth pervades the placid, blue-tinged riverbank.

At night, they eat their fill, and the youngest, exhausted by the long walk and their frantic games in the rushing waters, fall asleep around the fire to the sound of an incantation sung by the former leader. It is a song that predates song, that predates voice itself, a guttural cadenced lament composed of dissonant modulations and vibrato, deep booming exhalations in which the old man’s body serves as a resonance chamber. At times it seems that secrets from the deepest night, from the invisible plain, from the black riverbed and the very heart of the stones issue forth, not from the old man, but from somewhere beyond him – secrets summoned by this body as dry and gnarled as a tree stump, for in that grizzled face nothing moves or flickers save the luminous orb of flames.

The lips barely move beneath the beard, the eyes are closed, the gaze turned inward. The threnody brings with it a torrent of images, of sensations, and deep within their flesh, all gathered here feel a profound melancholy, one that speaks of their wanderings over the earth, aimless and devoid of all meaning, of the endless cycle of the seasons, of the dead who continue to travel by their sides and are conjured in the anteroom of night by a furtive shadow or the howl of a wolf. And when the old man falls silent, when the chant within him dwindles, they17hold their breath; something of their insignificance and their majesty has been expressed.

In the wan light of morning, the world unveils itself, glittering in its winter shroud. Their men’s breath condenses in the icy air as they rekindle the fire. Here and there, they have dug holes and stretched hides between tall posts, erecting a few huts beneath which the women and children are sleeping still, huddled together beneath other hides.

Jackdaws wheel above the camp, perch on the branches of a tree a short distance away, their jet-black plumage silhouetted against the hoarfrost that has settled on the bark. They watch these men who might well discard something they can eat; the men watch the jackdaws knowing that, from time to time, they might lead them to carrion, circling and squabbling over a carcass that the men can steal and bring back to camp and eat.

Before long, their reserves run out. They feed on nuts, on acorns that they crush and boil again and again to remove the tannins before moulding them into biscuits and cooking them over coals. They dig into dead tree trunks in search of larvae, pull up the roots, peel away the edible bark and mosses.

At the dawn of a new day, they see a herd of deer grazing on the edge of a forest. They arm themselves with spears whose shafts of stripped pine are armed with shards of flint and fletchings of falcon or barn owl feathers. They set off in utter silence: a woman and three men. Behind the last of them tails a gaunt-faced boy who looks barely pubescent. His limbs are scrawny, his movements awkward, downy hair covers his cheeks and upper lip. He looks in wonderment from hunter to hunter with dark eyes that are deeply sunken in sockets chiselled beneath the prominent brow ridge. He shoots glances at the man bringing up the rear – his genitor – whom he follows closely. He tries to understand the hunters’ movements, and consciously emulates their stillness.

18At first the party seems to veer away from the calmly grazing deer – one of them, a roebuck that shed his antlers last autumn, raises his head and looks around, stiffens, sniffs the air, exhales, the white cloud of his breath hovering over his head as though he has just brought forth his soul – moving in a wide arc heading west, through the brushwood where night still lingers, their silhouettes barely visible as the moon pales and sets while dawn, a sudden pink and purple, comes and splits heaven from earth.

The hunters stand stock still as the roebuck surveys the terrain and move on only when the animal lowers his head. As they wait amid the tall, bleached grass, the adolescent sees his father take a leather pouch from beneath the tangled hides he wears. He lifts it up and, pressing with his fingers, produces a small cloud of ash that drifts towards their huddled bodies as it disperses, indicating that a gentle breeze is blowing in their direction.

The father nods and the hunters set off once more. They reach the edge of the forest and step into its shadows just as, in the east, the great fire rises, spilling its fulvous light across the plain.

The hunters advance, careful as to where they place their feet on the bed of leaves and twigs covered with frost. Soon, they have a more detailed view of the herd which comprises the roebuck, three does and a male kid, doubtless born in spring since already he has an adult’s slate-grey coat, beaded with dew. The pale gorget patches at the base of their throats are visible when they raise their heads; their white lower lips sharply contrast with their deep black muzzles, and they have pale oval patches on their rumps.

With rapid hand gestures, the father signals for the other two hunters to skirt around the herd and head off. The boy watches as they disappear, engulfed by the shadowy trunks, the19blackness of the forest. The man lays a hand on his shoulder and directs him to a fallen tree. Together, they hunker out of sight and survey the grassland, the drifting patches of fog, the distant smoke of the camp, the deer framed against the light of the rising star, the mass of their bodies reduced to a silhouette while the contours are blurred by the light such that they look fragile, insubstantial, as though at any moment they might dissolve.

Their bodies ache from the cold and their crouched position. In their fists, they grip their spear shafts. The eyes of the son never leave his father’s face. From the distance comes a sound, like the shrill cry of some bird of prey; the man slots his spear into the bow, the son emulates his actions. They hold their breath until the grassland is pierced by a second cry. They watch as the deer suddenly bound, leave off grazing and run straight towards them. The two beaters burst from the undergrowth and race towards the herd, spreading out as they advance.

Led by the roebuck, the bevy attempts to break for the wide expanse of grassland, but the female hunter moves to block their path. Bringing a hand up to his chest, the father signals to his son to stay motionless. The son watches as the deer bound towards them in a silence broken only by their exhalations and the muffled thud of hooves between each majestic leap.

The father lowers his hand and, as one man, father and son stand, surging from behind the fallen tree. They see the roebuck’s head jerk back. Its eye wide with fear, the animal deploys the whole weight of its body to wheel around and head towards the undergrowth.

In that instant, all the hunters launch their spears, which rise into the pale morning. Everything is suspended; their weapons tracing their arc over the plains, the deer hovering above tufts of grasses, the roebuck’s muzzle almost touching the shadow beneath the trees where dead leaves continue to20spiral down even as the boughs begin to bud, the dark mass of the humans pursuing them and, farther off, a flight of white birds flushed from a thicket by the bolting deer.

The spears simultaneously launched by the father and the female hunter come to earth in the wake of the fleeing deer, the sonorous thud quivering through the long shafts. The one thrown by the second beater glides into the long grass with the hiss of a snake, while the spear thrown by the adolescent soundlessly embeds itself into the shoulder of one of the does.

The animal lists to the right, collapses onto its forelegs in the bed of leaves and frost-covered branches which crack beneath its weight. In a convulsive spasm that shakes the deer’s whole body, it manages to get to its feet and, with a leap, disappears into the forest. The hunters gather up their weapons and plunge into the forest in pursuit of the herd, but already the roe deers’ coats have merged with the infinite procession of tree trunks; only the pale oval patches on their rumps make it possible to follow their fitful leaps into the tall ferns scorched by the cold. Once again, the hunters spread out as they begin a second advance, their progress hindered by the dense undergrowth and the sweet-smelling peat bogs.

Beneath the trees, everything is bathed in a cold light that flattens shapes and leaches colours. When the father bends down and presses his hand against a powdery tree trunk, the blood that stains his fingertips is strangely dark; he has to thrust his arm into a well of daylight formed by the bare branches of a beech before the stain reveals itself as startling crimson. Wiping his fingers on the hide that covers his chest, he studies the forest floor and, in a patch of bog, discovers hoofprints of the stricken doe that clearly indicate that she is limping and can no longer put her weight on her left foreleg.

The hammering of a woodpecker against a hollow trunk is21heard at regular intervals. A bough falls onto a bed of leaves with a muted crunch. Farther off, unseen by his father, the adolescent is looking up into dark treetops. Over him, his breath clouds and dissipates. He studies the knotted tangle of vegetation they must conquer in order to advance, the glistening trunks, the sinuous snarl of roots that emerge from the humus. The intoxicating forest smell leaves him disoriented. He is no longer aware of the presence of the other hunters. He feels as though the forest has propelled him into its vegetal depths, that murky, mucilaginous terrain where it produces its secret fermentations. Leaning against the sodden bark of trees, he extracts his foot from water-logged holes, from tangles of liana, from the vast putrefaction that feeds the earth and that, come spring, will cause relentless life once more to burst forth from its womb. Mute daylight shimmers beyond the trees.

Walking on, he comes to a clearing strewn with winter heather. The wounded doe is lying amid the shrubs dotted with purple flowers. Turning her head, she licks the flank that is pierced by a spear whose shaft now rests on the ground. The adolescent stays out of sight, hidden by the trees. He watches the young roebuck fretfully trot back and forth along the edge of the forest. The doe leaves off licking her flank and looks up at the kid. Resting her weight on her hind legs, she attempts to stand upright but manages only to raise her rump before falling again heavily. Stretching out her neck, she lays her head on the ground and does not lift it when the young hunter emerges from his hide. A brief shudder courses through her body at the idea that she could flee; meanwhile the kid darts into the cover of the trees and stands there, motionless.

The adolescent walks over to the doe, stands next to her, his shadow falling on the chest and flank that rises and falls with her rapid, ragged breathing. He breathes in the sweet smell of game and the ferrous tang of blood that mats her coat. He22senses the beating of the heart beneath the visible arc of the ribs. The eye, with its oval pupil at the centre of a brown iris, offers a distorted reflection of the world, the young hunter, the convex lines of the pines with their coppery trunks, the vaulted sky above the treetops. From it flows a translucent liquid that clings to the lashes and darkens the short hair of the cheeks. There is the sound of footsteps from the undergrowth. The young hunter turns his head and sees the shadow of his father approaching through the trees.

He turns back to the roebuck, still watching warily from the half-light of the trees, he bends, pulls a half-buried rock from the ground and hurls it towards the animal with all his strength. The projectile hits a tree trunk, the young roebuck lopes off, pauses to take a last look at the clearing and the prostrate doe, then, with a bound, he vanishes.

The father bursts into the clearing and lumbers over to the son, gripping the shaft of his spear. When he reaches the young hunter, he looks down at the doe, then, cupping his hands around his mouth, he lets out a brief repeated sound that rises in the quavering air. As the man crouches next to her, the doe lets out a husky breath. The sun has just soared above the treetops and now bathes all three – the man, the child, the doe – with a blazing light that causes steam to rise from their dew-covered skin. The other two hunters emerge from the forest and walk towards them.

The father sets his weapon down on the heather, lays his left hand on the deer’s shoulder and grips the shaft of the spear thrown by the boy. His hand slides up the polished wood to get a higher grip. Then, with a forceful thrust that causes every tendon in his neck to bulge, he drives it into the animal’s chest. The sharpened flint cuts a path through the complex network of muscles, nerves and blood vessels, pierces the heart of the doe, whose body is racked by a single shudder which is held in check 23by the hunter’s hand pressing on its shoulder. With a jerk of equal force, the hunter removes the spear. The shaft and the head fly out; crimson blood runs down the deer’s flank and drips onto the ground.

The father thrusts his hand into the open wound in the doe’s flank, gets to his feet and daubs a vertical red line on the young hunter’s cheek. Then he lays his hand against the child’s face, grubby thumb pressed against the cheekbone, fingers resting beneath his ear. He lingers for an instant, in a caress that leaves the boy’s skin prickling with the sensation of the cold, calloused hand long after it is withdrawn.

Grabbing the doe’s legs, the father lifts the carcass off the ground and hoists it onto his shoulders. The animal’s neck rests against his arm; the eye is dull and veiled, it no longer reflects anything, while the wound continues to trickle blood. As the father sets off through the forest, heading back to the camp, the deer’s head lolling against his arm, the other hunters follow. The child stands, motionless, in the middle of the clearing. He gazes up at a falcon as it hovers, his face flooded with light. When he returns his attention to his own kind, he sees the female hunter stop and glance back at him before leaving the forest. He is alone now in the hushed heart of the wood. The birds have fallen silent. He seems to consider staying here, amid the winter heather, the murmur of the trees, and abandoning the group. He would lie down in the still-warm hollow left by the body of the doe and, staring up into the sky, let himself be buried beneath the dead leaves, the fertile humus.

The falcon lets out a shrill cry and swoops down on a small beast of prey somewhere on the grasslands. Then, the young hunter bends down and picks up his spear.24

25In the early hours of morning, they leave the town behind them.

In the back seat of the battered old estate car, the son is dozing. Through half-closed eyes he looks out of the window at the succession of suburban houses, an industrial estate and the floodlights that spill into the night.

They pass the former goods station, the freight cars cloaked in rust and darkness, beached among the brambles, the silos of a farmers’ cooperative haloed in a mist that glows blue in the beam of the spotlight trained on the huge concrete slab suddenly crossed by a raw-boned dog.

The child watches the animal disappear into the shadow of a dump truck. He drifts off and the dog reappears in dreams punctuated by the lights that pulse through the window. The dog is trotting along beside him on a path somewhere deep in the forest – unless it is a tranquil, untamed prairie, he cannot tell. His hand brushes the dog’s head, he rests his palm there. The two are walking at the same pace, their breathing perfectly in sync, and now they are a single creature, the bodies of animal and child fused into one, launched into the boundless night, the infinite space that opens up before them.

The mother glances up, looking at him in the rearview mirror. Even in sleep, he feels the familiar balm of her brown eyes on him. Often he has lain down on his mother’s bed, the two of them curled up facing each other, heads resting on their folded arms, and in the coolness of the bedroom ablaze with light, he has studied his mother’s face, her eyes, marked by something inexpressible, an infinite sadness or a resignation, as though, face to face with her son, she found herself helpless and ashamed.

In the distance, a fire smoulders beneath the starless sky, a dragon’s breath, or an oil refinery. The mother stares 26at it for a moment before it disappears behind a line of barren trees, then she glances at the father who stares at the road, impassive and unblinking, his left hand gripping the steering wheel. Only the muscle in his jaw tenses from time to time beneath the skin of a cheek darkened by a stubbly beard.

Later, they stop at a service station and the child is woken by the slam of doors.

‘Pass me a cigarette, could you?’ the mother asks.

The father nods to the glove compartment and walks around the car. Through the back window, the son sees the clouds of breath in the crackling glow of a neon light. The gauge whirls as the humming petrol pump fills up the car’s belly.

The mother has wandered away from the car, tugging the collar of her parka. She lights a cigarette, exhales a first plume of smoke – she holds the filter between the distal phalanges of her index and middle fingers, close to the nails – walks down the central reservation of yellowed grass, then retraces her steps. She brings the cigarette to her lips, darting brief glances that linger on the shadows nesting in the branches of trees and in privet hedges.

The child opens the car door, gets out and breathes in the smell of diesel. He stretches, walks towards his mother, who, seeing him, tosses the cigarette butt on the ground and crushes it with the sole of her shoe. As it falls, the butt traces an arabesque of tiny embers that blaze more brightly as they are consumed. The boy comes and huddles against her.

They do not speak, dimly illuminated by the light from the petrol station, which, in the fog, looks like a ghost ship from the merchant navy. The child inhales the perfume of detergent and tobacco from her parka. The mother runs 27her hand over the child’s red hair, lingers at the nape of his neck.

‘Time to go,’ says the father.

She nods and her hand slides from her son’s neck to his cheek.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ the child asks.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘A few more hours.’

They get back into the car and set off again. Before long, as they drive along the main road, there is nothing but the darkness that is slashed by the beams of the headlights only to instantly close up over them. Patches of fog appear, pale spectres that hover above the tarmac and are slain by the car and devoured by the night.

They drive through a valley glimpsed only in fragments by the light of the headlamps: coniferous forests, hedges of barbed acacias guarding barely visible meadows blanketed with frost, hulking farmhouses of freestone with slate roofs, sometimes huddled together in small hamlets where the buildings are so close-set they seem like blockhouses or the last remnants of a lost civilization.

As the valley closes in, sleeping colossi rise up before them, limestone crags whose summits are invisible, dark looming shadows more impenetrable than night; it feels as though the car is hurtling towards an impassable wall that could only have been built by a god.

The car hurtles into a tunnel, and the beams of the headlights are swept up so that they reflect off the brute concrete curves and back into the car as a yellowish radiance that outlines the faces of the father and the mother. Above their heads, the unimaginable mass of mountain flashes past, tens of thousands of tonnes of igneous rock, layer upon layer of granite, quartz, mica and sedimentary rock. The child lying on the back seat holds his breath, 28wondering how the tunnel can hold up such a weight by itself. Could the mountain suddenly collapse and bury them alive?

As they emerge into another valley, the halo of the headlights hits a wall of dense fog that forces the father to slow down.

Road signs briefly appear – beacons in this becalmed sea – a roundabout, a string of identical villages with dark, vertiginous streets, reduplicated village squares next to identical churches flanked by plane trees with branches marbled by pigeon droppings, the churches, sinister and solemn as dolmens, each with its gothic arch and the steeple piercing the darkness.

In turn, the villages disappear and the car heads up a winding road of hairpin bends, past unexpected fields in the middle of which are dozing herds that cling to the stony ground, large bales of hay, some piled beneath tarpaulins, others carelessly abandoned next to a feeder or an old enamel bathtub that serves as a drinking trough, the ties broken, the hay bale sagging and sodden; here and there are other buildings, new-build houses, dairy farms or one-time sheepfolds built against the slopes, fashioned from the mountain itself, with pale rubblestone, mossy roofs and windows as wide and gaping as chasms.

Along the road, the child sees a wayside cross supporting a pallid Christ cast from metal, his body covered with patches of lichen or rust. The last wisps of fog suddenly dissolve and the hard lines of the massif emerge. The darkness now carries within it the promise of dawn, that almost imperceptible shift that frames the contours of the world that cannot yet be grasped, offering only varying degrees of darkness. A veil that was invisible until that moment rends itself; all the things that were cloaked in the 29wings of night are suddenly bathed in a bluish glow that does not seem to come from without, but to emanate from within them, a silvery phosphorescence leaching from the rocks, the asphalt, the trunks of the pines and the foliage.

The father turns the car onto a dirt track that disappears into a small valley thick with beech trees, sessile oaks and conifers. A little stream snakes silently below, dark water ripples around the rocks that break the surface and, in the unmoving undergrowth, something else is in suspense, a quivering impatience; night withdraws, creating vast shadowy hollows beneath the branches of the trees where clouds of birds twitch and chirrup.

‘Shit,’ says the father, stamping on the brake.