The men who worked in the factory smelt of sweat, some of them of wine or garlic, and all of them of something dusty and metallic. Like the smell of the lead in a pencil when it’s sharpened. For my work at school I had a pencil sharpener in the form of a globe, it was so small you couldn’t tell the countries, only the difference between land and sea.
White the page of the world below. Like the traces of tiny animals in the snow, the scribbles of what I knew as a child. Nobody else could read them here. I can see the roof, the pear tree by the shit-house, the byre we stored wood in with hives on the balcony — the basin where I washed sheets for Mother is filled with snow, for there’s no trace of it — the garden beneath the windows, the little orchard, and surrounding all, as a floor surrounds a cat’s saucer, the factory grounds. Every year a man came to the school to explain to us children why the factory was built where it was and why it was the pride of the region. Men had come from New York, he said, to visit it! Then he drew on the blackboard the course of the river. His was white on black and the one below is black on white. The river goes through the factory. The factory squats on the river like a woman peeing. He didn’t say that.
Around the beginning of the century, he told the schoolchildren, men everywhere in the world were dreaming of a new power which was the power of electricity! This new power was hidden in our mountains, in their white waterfalls. They called the waterfalls White Coal! He made it look simple on the blackboard. Engineers canalised the water in cast-iron pipes which were two metres in diameter. They let the water, once captured, fall vertically until it acquired a pressure of 100 kilos per square centimetre, and with this pressure the water of our waterfalls turned giant wheels in turbines, which, turning, produced nine million kilowatts of electricity per hour. The beginning of electrometallurgy in Europe! he cried. Vive la République!
Its work done, the river rejoined its course and made its way to the sea. Do the fish go through the turbines? a child asked. No, no, dear, answered the man. Why not? We have filters.
Our house had three rooms. The kitchen where everything happened and I did my homework. The Pele where my two brothers slept. And the Third Room where my parents and I slept. In the summer, after we’d brought the hay in, my brothers sometimes liked to sleep in the barn. Then I’d move into the Pele and sleep there alone. Opposite the bed hung a mirror with a black-spotted glass. When I couldn’t sleep I lay there and talked to myself. I talked to my little finger. What was in the Beginning? I asked. Silence. Before God created the world and there was no earth, no manganese, and no mountains, what was there? The finger wagged. If you see a spider on a table and you brush him off, the table’s still there, if you take the table outside, there’s still the floorboards, if you take up the floorboards there’s still the earth, if you cart the earth away there’s still a sky with stars on the other side of the world, so what was there at the beginning? The finger didn’t reply and I bit it.
Seen from the height I’m now at, Father’s refusal to sell his farm to the factory looks absurd. We were surrounded. Every year Father was obliged to lead his four cows through an ever larger factory yard over more railway lines. Every year the slag mountains were growing higher, hiding the house and its little plot more effectively from the road and from its own pastures on the other side of the river. The owners first doubled, then trebled, the price they were prepared to pay him. His reply remained the same. My patrimony is not for sale. Later they tried to force him out by law. He said he would dynamite their offices. Now the snow covers all.
My job was to feed the rabbits. In the early spring it was dandelions. Father said there was no other valley in the world with as many dandelions as ours. Dandelion millionaires, he called us. Rabbits eat with such impatience, as if they are eating their way towards life! Their jaws munching the dandelion leaves was the fastest thing I’d ever seen and their muzzles quivered as fast as their jaws munched.
There was a black buck rabbit I hated. He had something evil in his eye. He was always waiting for his evil moment to come and he nipped me with his teeth more than once. Mother stunned the rabbits and strung them up by their hind legs and gouged out their eyes with a knife and they bled to death. When she did this it was always on a Friday, because a rabbit, roasted in the oven with mustard, was a feast to be eaten on Sunday, when the men could stay at the table drinking gnôle after lunch and not go to work.
You can drink two litres of cider and never piss a drop — it all comes out in sweat, Achille my boy, on the furnaces.
I tried to persuade Mother to kill the black rabbit. He’s our only big buck, she said. Eventually she cooked him. And to my surprise, I couldn’t eat anything. She must be coming down with something, Father said. I couldn’t eat because I couldn’t stop thinking of how much I hated him.
The moment the snow disappeared, Mother started to nag Father. They’re digging their gardens up at Pessy, she’d cry. It’s too soon to plant, he’d say, without looking up from his newspaper, the earth’s not warm enough. We’re always the last! she complained. And our cauliflowers last year? My cauliflowers were as big as buckets, he boasted.
It took Papa three days to turn the earth of the garden and to dig in the manure. I helped him by forking the manure out of the wheelbarrow. The lilac trees were in flower and a cuckoo was singing in the forest above the factory. It was as hot as in June. Father had his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and when he was too hot, he removed his cap and he wiped his bald head, but he refused to take off his black corduroy waistcoat. Every spring he said the same thing: Do the opposite of the walnut tree! I knew the answer to his riddle: the walnut is the first to shed its leaves and the last to come out in leaf.
The garden was almost dug. Its brown earth was raked and drying in the sun. The first green shoots would soon be appearing in straight rows without a fault, because, just as at school we drew lines in pencil in our exercise books to write our words on, so Mother made a line on the earth with a string when she planted her rows of seed.
My fork had three metal prongs like any other pitchfork, but its wooden shaft was shorter so it was easier for me to handle. Father had made it for me. All the year it leant against the wall by the tap in the stable, ready for when I helped him clean out the stable after the evening milking, my homework done.
Often he complained about my handwriting, and it’s true it was not as good as his. He wrote with loops and curlicues as if the whole word were a single piece of string.
The rain does better on the window pane, Odile, write it again!
In the garden he straightened his back, looked at me slyly and said: When you marry, Odile, don’t marry a man who drinks.
There isn’t a man who doesn’t drink! I said.
Fetch me a glass of cider from the cellar, he ordered me, from the barrel on the right.
He drank the cider slowly, looking at the mountains with snow still on them.
I’d give a lot, Odile, to see the man you’re going to marry.
You’ll see him all right, Papa.
He shook his head and gave me back the glass. No, Odile, I’ll never see the man you marry.
He said it smiling, but I couldn’t bear him saying it. I couldn’t bear the silence of what it meant. I said the first thing that came into my head: I won’t marry a man unless I love him, and if I love him, he’ll love me, and if we love each other … if we love each other, we’ll have children, and I’ll be too busy to notice if he drinks, Papa, and if he drinks too much too often I’ll fetch him cider from the cellar, so many glasses he’ll go to sleep in the kitchen and I’ll put him to bed as soon as the cows are fed.