E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
Joncour Human Nature
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-427-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-427-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Serge Joncour is a novelist and screenwriter. He was born in Paris in 1961 and studied philosophy at university before deciding to become a writer. He wrote the screenplay for Sarah's Key starring Kristin Scott Thomas, released in 2011. Wild Dog, winner of the Prix Landerneau des Lecteurs in France, is the first of his novels to be published in English.
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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...
