Faced with the wife’s determined silence, he finally decides to step inside, trailing his own stench and the stench of the animals as far as the box-bed, and pulls the door open. He takes off his shapeless hat, revealing a pate already bald and freckled by the sun, holds it in his hands for a moment, perhaps trying to remember what he should do next, perhaps waiting for a command from that same mother, long since dead, swallowed and consumed by the earth. The first vertebra protrudes from between the shoulder blades like a bony cyst.

A neck so bronzed that even in winter it does not pale, but looks as though it is covered by grimy, cracked leather and seems broken. At the nape of his neck, his long, lean body curves and takes a curious angle. He believes that things should remain as he has always known them for as long as possible, as others before him believed they should be, or as custom and wear has made them.Ĭoming home from the fields, he leans against the door frame and removes his boots, carefully scraping the mud off the soles, then stops on the threshold and inhales the damp air, the breath of the animals, the unpleasant smells of the ragout and the soup that mist the windows, just as he stood as a child, waiting for his mother to beckon him to the table, or for his father to come and hurry him along with a dig in the shoulder.

When he sits on this bench, his knees come a quarter-way up his belly and he has trouble getting to his feet, yet he has never considered replacing it, not if there were nothing left but a plank lying on the ground. Regardless of the season, he waits for night here, on the wooden bench where he saw his father sit before him, its moss-covered legs buckled by the years now beginning to give way. Inside, a spluttering oil lamp on the oak table and the fire in the hearth project the bustling shadow of his wife onto walls mottled with saltpetre, shooting it up towards the rafters or breaking it on a corner, and this hesitant, yellow light swells the room then pierces the darkness of the farmyard, leaving the father motionless, silhouetted against a semblance of sunlight.

From the first evening in spring to the last vigils of autumn, he sits on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench, his body hunched, beneath the window set into the stone wall that frames a theatre of shadows.

Animalia book pages