All the hair on his back was raised, as the feline escaped to the kitchen where he fully expected to beg for more accessible consolations. He got his name from these repeated scoldings: Hérode. More than anyone or anything, he’d run into the cruel paradox that underpinned the administration of his masters: being surrounded by infinite space all round, but settling for cultivating a siege mentality in the dark, like a precious endive. Despite the traumatizing aspects of the experience, Hérode forged himself a vigorous attitude and never completely succumbed to the culture of living inside a shell, prime examples of which were to be found in the Outfitters’ general store: narrow-mindedness set up as a fortress; continence sublimated by a snarl at the whole world. Hérode was young and vigilant; he rapidly crossed, if not the entrance door, then the boundary between innocent games and real life, where wounds bleed, and suffering reigns. Endowed with a sandfly’s ferocity, but incomparably better equipped, he knew how to dig into your back with one paw. He got into the habit of lurking under a shelf, near the counter, nestled defiantly between large bags of dog food. When a customer moved along the rows of canned food, Hérode would pounce on his legs with a tiny cry of enthusiastic resolve. He’d bite away, making no distinction between hairy pillars and varicosed columns. More than one tall character would fall flat, forehead against the ground, and more than one mushy skinned creature nearly fainted while our friend sharpened his claws on calves marbled like blue cheese. If a customer made the mistake of sticking a blind forearm into the shadows beneath the lower shelf, resolved to grab a bag of dog food, he’d immediately pull it out covered with a strange fur implant. He’d created a kind of de facto blockade around the central supply source for the village dogs.
The Old Man was beginning to worry. He clearly distinguished between protecting the Outfitters’ assets and indiscriminately taking it out on all customers. But he also had to repress a smile when the people of Grande-Ourse started jigging in front of us, inspired by our cat’s ground-level attacks. Moreover, how could you not get intense delight when the tiny cat diligently lacerated the crooked legs of the Muppet who was gradually anaesthetized by visits to the cold room and who chatted as though he didn’t notice?
Admiral Nelson became the kitten’s friend and official protector. When the Old Man chased the kitten, Nelson intervened and pleaded his cause. But the Old Man was unyielding on that point. He stretched out his arms like twisted branches, trying to grasp the immense reality of the outside world, offering himself as an example to mankind: youth and freedom were two calamities he’d been able to dispose of long ago.
“Poor Ti-Kid! A tiny cat! I don’t give him an hour to live if he sets foot outside!”
One day, when Hérode had just taken an offensive position, rolled up in a ball amid cans of Dr. Ballard’s, as I was daydreaming with book in hand, the door swung open violently and wind swept through it. The movement of air, combined with the surprise effect, nearly threw me off my stool. I put the book face-down on the counter to mark the page. A trembling mountain moved before me in all directions at once, swallowing space like a malignant growth. I had a vision of a goddess with a thousand purple nipples, able to crush your skull like that of a newborn, a twisted image of maternity, filled to the breaking point with its own matter. Rolls of fat rippled across her flesh like waves over the water while she spread over the surrounding floor with the same humid generosity as the ocean. I immediately understood with whom I was dealing, and felt like praying.
Instinctively, I turned to the back of the store, but no living creature dared betray itself. The aisle seemed longer than ever.
Lili looked at me with the eyes of a grouper about to gobble a piece of anything. After sizing me up, sorting me irrevocably among the nonentities, she quietly passed by, breathing heavily. Hérode made a slight hesitant jump, tried to look like a man-eater, then froze on the spot. He sifted through the limited web of his recollection, searching for something related to that humongous flesh heap. Lili swung her foot, ready to crush him, and he barely managed to dodge her, gaining considerable speed in his retreat.
“A cat?” grumbled Lili. “Must be vermin in the building.... Doesn’t surprise me....”
She scoured the store, incessantly griping, sniffing the dust and pondering comments likely to be rather negative. She seemed quite determined to make me work for her money. Goods piled onto the counter at a distressing rate. Whenever I feigned to head towards the cash register, just to start reducing the heap quietly, she’d dryly tell me to stop.
“Not so fast, young fella! I’m not done.... You’ll get confused if other customers come in....”
It was more than a word of advice. Clenching my teeth, I smiled at her.
I got the jitters as I was about to convert all this into numbers. Lili was staring at me. The least carelessness could be fatal. I immediately started blundering, getting hopelessly confused. She quickly lined up her purchases for the sole pleasure of seeing me get flustered. I mumbled confused apologies while she stood quietly and coughed, gloating in her victory. Only the euphoric jiggling of her flesh testified to the operation’s complete success. She even added to the insult by pressing her glasses against the labels, giving me the prices in a loud and slow voice, filled with crushing superiority, as though she were dealing with a three year old. I had no doubt that following this demonstration she’d make it her duty to show everyone proof of my incompetence, as recorded in minute detail on the ribbon she angrily tore away as I cringed. Lili needed a scapegoat in life, and she thought I fit the bill. I felt this woman would get no rest from having reduced me to the level of an embryo only worthy of being expelled from this place with blows from a stick.
Grande-Ourse struggled at the extremity of its road like a fish at the end of a line. The world sometimes let the line out, enticing with meagre prospects, and unfulfilled promises; the village would then go off in all directions, roughshod and half-cocked. The world gave it some line as though to help it drown.
Beyond a stretch of prowling dust strewn with sparse and shivering weeds, among the scattered houses that seemed to have been tossed there like dice on a green carpet, the Outfitters’ warehouse raised its sheet-metal undulations, while the morning sun covered its sides with pools of light. The warehouse had served as a garage for the heavy machinery used back in the days of prosperity. Salvaged by the new owners, it now contained only a few dozen metal barrels filled with helicopter fuel. Hardly any of the air craft were now seen in the region, but people subconsciously watched for them; they were the roaring oracles of a recovery. Everyone knew that the Company’s measurers were in the habit of cleaving through the air in one of those machines to cast their sharp glances at lines of future logs. Frees had started to regenerate north of Grande-Ourse and, in some places, you could see the kind of nearly mature plantings that make the calculators of surveyors quiver. As soon as a section of forest was thirty-or-so-feet high, regardless of trunk size, greed would kindle behind the expanding pupil of a planner holed up in his faraway lair. The most optimistic of the village’s unrelenting dreamers discussed the possibility of attracting a sawmill, the last hope for this hamlet of seventy-five souls. Company measurers had in fact been seen flying over the surrounding area. People who mentioned the mill always did so with a respectful shudder. And sceptics, among whom the Old Man always held centre stage, would reply that people who only argued from morning till very late at night couldn’t work towards a common goal.
Though many residents harboured a certain animosity towards the Outfitters, I learned that Lilis dissatisfaction had a specific origin. A former cashier at the general store, as spiteful as she was irritable, she’d been ousted from her livelihood as part of the rejuvenation program, from which my being hired sprang, having bumped into a pocket of