Hunting Party Read online

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

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  Copyright 2012 © Editions de l’Olivier

  Translation Copyright 2018 © Christiana Hills

  Foreword Copyright 2018 © Jessie Chaffee

  ISBN: 978-1944700-5-91

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931446

  Originally published in the French as Une partie de chasse by Editions de l’Olivier.

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Designed & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

  This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Translator’s Note

  Biographies

  Introduction

  The Beautiful Brutality of Existence

  “A black tunnel opens up before his eyes. He doesn’t know how deep it is, he can’t see the bottom.”

  In one of the key moments in Hunting Party, the protagonist, Tristan, finds himself burrowing into the earth, into a void of his own making, while a storm rages around him. This scene, terrifying and euphoric, is not unlike the experience of reading Agnès Desarthe, who immerses us in the simultaneous beauty and violence of nature, language, and love. Part philosophical meditation and part thrilling adventure, this novel—her fifth to be published in English translation—reads like a myth, and Desarthe operates on that expansive scale. With inventiveness and daring, she produces talking animals, biblical floods, the end of the world, while also delving in to examine the smallest exchanges of intimacy between people and within oneself. Throughout she brings the reader to the same point of reckoning as she does her protagonist—suspended over the abyss, trying to decipher precisely what is gazing back at us.

  Tristan has joined the local hunting party of three men at the urging of his wife, Emma, in an effort to better “fit into” the small French village where the couple has settled. We quickly learn that at stake is not only the couple’s assimilation but also the survival of their marriage. More prone to reflection than violence, Tristan has seemingly little in common with his peers, who relish the thrill of ending life. But moments into the hunt, it is Tristan who takes the first shot, injuring a small rabbit to whom he becomes inextricably bound. When one of the hunters is swallowed up by a literal void—a hole in the ground—Tristan follows him, dying rabbit in tow, and as the afternoon devolves into chaos both natural and man-made, the rabbit engages him in a spirited dialogue about free will, mortality, and desire.

  Desarthe challenges the confines of genre with the same deftness that she dissolves the boundaries between the interior worlds of her characters and their exterior landscapes, until they become one and the same. Descending into the earth, Tristan feels that “inside him, like outside, a storm is brewing,” and “the more his hands feel the earth, the more they’re learning about the nature of what’s going to sweep over them.” The theme of interior and exterior states repeats as Tristan confronts the ghosts of his past, the fragility of this present, and the “persistent pain of exile” that he feels, a pain that poses a question pertinent to all the book’s characters, not to mention its readers: Can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever know ourselves? And, as Tristan wonders, “where can this missing link be found—inside or outside of himself?”

  Knowing and being known are, in part, an issue of translation. Tristan reflects on his time as a student in England, where he struggled to decode an unfamiliar culture and to comprehend a new language, an experience that made him feel as much of an outsider as he does on the ill-fated hunt. But though Desarthe questions the limitations of language, she also conveys its limitless joys as Tristan begins to master English: “His voice changes, the muscles in his cheeks and lips reorganize themselves around this new nucleus … He’s being reborn.” One of the pleasures of reading Hunting Party is Desarthe’s own use of language, beautifully translated by Christiana Hills. When Tristan recounts his final days with his ill mother, he describes the way her massless body allowed light to filter through, like “a strainer, a wire fence, a cheesecloth.” Desarthe’s prose, in Hills’s translation, has a similar translucent quality. The story is dense with meaning, but the language is airy, allowing the ideas to filter through, just as the light does in the warren in which Tristan finds himself, the sun “leaping to and fro … as precise as a lacemaker’s needle.”

  Though Hunting Party feels in many ways outside of time, the questions it poses about masculinity, violence, and the relationship between them are extremely timely. The narrative is permeated with overt and underlying violence, Chekhov’s gun looming large as both metaphor and reality. Tristan wonders at the story’s beginning “how an argument ends when you have a loaded gun in your hands.” Emma is an aspiring author, and her books are filled with bodies that have been brutalized and burned, because, she explains to her husband, violence in ever-increasing amounts is the only way to keep people’s attention in a culture that has grown inured to it. In Desarthe’s world, one of the things gazing back from the abyss is this endless propensity for violence. “The last refuge of creativity lies in destruction,” Emma says. “Art has to plant a bomb.”

  In such a context, what happens to a gentle, deeply feeling man who is “at home in solitude,” who “dreads the fight. The loaded guns. The restless bullets”? Where does he fit? The answer—and the problem—of course, is that he doesn’t fit, because there isn’t room in narrow definitions of masculinity for a man like Tristan. As his mother asks him in childhood, “Do boys like you even exist?” Not nearly enough of them. And as Tristan clumsily mimics the gait and callousness of his companions, one of the central threats is that he may be found out for precisely what he is not.

  The philosophical rabbit is likewise an outsider in his species. In the book’s opening, he wishes for a longer life than the one nature dictates for him. What he desires is not only the pleasures that such an extended existence would bring, but also the pains that inevitably accompany them: the “magnificent, speechless sorrow” of moving from childhood into adulthood; the wisdom of old age and its weariness; and, above all, love, along with “the infinite luxury of losing it.” V
iolence may dominate the narrative, but it is love that comes into sharp focus as a force that brings with it the same ecstasy and destruction as the storm that sweeps through the valley, a force that creates the void but also serves as its antidote. And if, as Tristan’s mother teaches him, violence is “written in our DNA,” so too, Desarthe seems to suggest, is our capacity for love.

  Hunting Party is about nothing less than the search for meaning—in the world, within oneself, and, most vitally, in relation to others. In disappearing into the abyss of his past and his present, Tristan contends with the vulnerability of love, the inevitability of loss, and the beauty to be found in both. “What is this solemn thing that hurts, that takes the heart like a bear claw and crushes it?” he wonders as he is falling in love with Emma. “His jaw tightened against a sob born from his gratitude, from his fear of losing her,” for “the finiteness of others. That’s where love is born.” It is in this vulnerability that Desarthe offers a new kind of hero, in a moment when it is sorely needed. Emma sends her husband out with a gun to prove that he is a man, but in Desarthe’s story, the hero doesn’t wield a gun. Rather the hero is the person most willing to be vulnerable, the person most willing to burrow into the possibility of loss. The hero is a lover.

  —Jessie Chaffee, author of Florence in Ecstasy

  1

  I’d love to die of natural causes. I’d like to grow old. None of my kind grows old. We depart in the prime of our lives.

  I’d love to have time to leave childhood, to know the poignant nostalgia that grips teenagers’ hearts. Something in them mourns the child they no longer are, and it’s a magnificent, speechless sorrow.

  I’d like to get bored, to know disgust. Then, to enjoy the relief that comes with maturity.

  I’d like to have the time to know love and the infinite luxury of losing it.

  “I don’t love you anymore, it’s over; we’ve been seeing each other for too long, I don’t feel anything for you now.”

  Often, in order to hurt myself, to fully feel the cruelty of my fate, I play out this impossible scene in my head, I repeat to myself this line that I will never say out loud.

  I have a big imagination. They say it’s rare in our family line. My mother told me so. She thought I was smarter than the others. She used to say she didn’t entirely understand me. She would tilt her head while uttering these words, and the sun, held captive for a moment in her iris, would pierce my retina.

  She died, of course. Very quickly. She hardly said much to me. None of us has time for anything, those who are left. But she told me this anyway, that I have a big imagination, and probably a larger brain than my brothers, my cousins, my ancestors, so I use it. I pretend to be old.

  “Old,” “aged,” “elderly”—these words make me tremble with pain and joy. They’re the loveliest, sweetest, and most dreadful words of our language. I dare to utter them. I know the risk I take. My heart could give way from an excess of delight. But I bet on the excellence of my heart, I don’t have a choice. I bet on the caliber of each one of my organs and muscles. I am made to last, to endure, to survive. I’m going to make it. I might be the only one, but who knows? Once I’m seasoned and worn out, when my teeth are missing and my blood flows less swiftly through my veins, I’ll be able to teach others, take a few young ones under my wing and tell them my secrets, my tricks, explain to them that it’s possible. “Look at me! See my ears, weary and drooping, my lazy eyelid that half covers my right eye. The hump on my back. My tired whiskers.”

  I will be their prophet; I will find a territory; I will organize the resistance. Too long have we suffered, too long have we given in to our fate.

  We don’t have memories. We don’t have time to build up remembrances, experiences. With each birth, the entire species starts all over again, and we run, we jump, panicked, in zigzags. No sooner have we felt the sun on our brows, the warmth of a mother’s milk in our throats, than we must leave home, set off, catch up with the lateness that’s been written in our genetic code since the beginning of time. Late, late, we’re always too late. The threat is inscribed in each one of us. The threat is our destiny.

  For the moment, I am alone. I’ve found a place. I’m holding on. I must somehow manage to think, to wait, to get myself organized. It’s unnatural. My tendons are itching to go. My instinct dictates flight, but I’ve seen too many who, in fleeing, were caught, killed in motion.

  I attempt stillness; I attempt calm. But my whole body yearns to escape, to slip away. I must control it, impose a law on it that I’ll make up as I go along. I must be my own tyrant.

  In order to give myself courage, I repeat my motto, “To die of natural causes, to die of old age.” Ah! To be worthy of one’s own demise, to ultimately wish for it, to experience weariness.

  Soon, I will have to go out, find something to eat.

  Soon, I will have to find myself a companion.

  I’ll know how to screw her like I’m supposed to. No need to think about it. It’s inscribed in us. But that’s the trap: doing what you know how to do. That’s what we die from, from our bodies’ tyranny and our lack of foresight.

  I’ll be abstinent. As soon as the desire arises, I’ll repress it. Dying of hunger, is that a natural death? Dying of loneliness, of grief?

  No.

  There must be another way. I’m having a hard time concentrating, because of hunger, because of urgency, because of my petrified limbs begging for action, for speed. It’s like an impulse within me, a force that disregards my being, despises my willpower. The same force that transforms a stem into a trunk, that makes thunder strike, waves crash and break, volcanoes erupt, planets follow their orbits in the heavens. My body is too small for it; I feel torn apart. This force will rip me open if I try to subdue it. I’m still holding on, but this tingling under my skin tells me I’m not going to last much longer. I’m going to give in, like elastic, a catapult, a bow, and burst out like a cannonball, a lead bullet.

  The bullet shoots from the rifle the instant I shoot out of my hole. What a beautiful encounter. An encounter in time, in the synchronic perfection of chance. The hunter didn’t do it deliberately. He couldn’t have known that my paws would propel me out of the earth at that very second. He didn’t see me. He didn’t aim, but I’m lying here stunned, awestruck, admiring the beauty of the unexpected, admiring the inevitable. I’m so young and I’m going to die. It’s impossible. I had such a big, bright future in store. I couldn’t have inherited this awareness for nothing. Someone, somewhere, must have had an idea in the back of their mind. Or maybe not.

  I’m so small; I’m so sweet. What a shame. The man who picks me up looks like me. We stare at each other. His thumb is on my heart, which is still beating. He’s crying. He tries to hide. He doesn’t want anyone to see him. He’s probably not alone. I hear a voice a little farther away. A man’s voice.

  2

  “What the fuck are you doing? You didn’t shoot yourself in the foot, did you?”

  Bursts of raucous laughter.

  A young man, with shaky knees, holds a cottontail rabbit in his right hand. Dawn is breaking. A pearly vapor is foaming up at the top of the meadow. With a thumb on the animal’s heart, the man feels the rapid heartbeats, which excite his own cardiac rhythm. He is crying. He has never killed anything or anyone. But the rabbit isn’t dead. If the heart is beating, it means he’s alive. Don’t show him to the others. Keep him. Look after him. Care for him.

  Here come the dogs.

  He doesn’t like dogs. He’s always been afraid of them. They’re going to smell the rabbit. They’re trained for it. They’re going to betray him, and then Dumestre’s big hands, crack, a quarter turn will suffice. The head will hang down, as though it’s lost interest in the body, in a blasé pose that makes death appear like a welcome nap, a dreamless, pleasureless sleep.

  The young man opens his gamebag, a lovely name, a practical object, simple, which keeps its promises—it was Dumestre who let him borrow it—and slips the trembli
ng rabbit under the dish towel he took when he left the house. He does that. All the time. A sort of compulsive habit. Leaving with a dish towel. At restaurants, he sometimes takes the cloth napkin with him. The dish towel smells like oranges; it came from the fruit bowl. Maybe the dogs will be put off by the scent.

  He can still hear the shot’s echo in the air, as though the atmosphere refused to accept the intrusion. No wind in the trees to dissolve it; no breeze in the grass to carry it away. Something has been paralyzed, petrified.

  “Aren’t you going to say something? You hurt or what? You’re not dead, are you?”

  Raucous bursts of laughter once more. Closer. And wham! A big slap on the back nearly knocks him over. The young man smiles.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “It’s okay, you didn’t wake anybody up. We’re not sleeping!” The laughter continues.

  Three men surround him. Dumestre: a barrel mounted on two stiff legs, neck of a bull, large, flat head, crimson face from which his eyes emerge, slightly bulging, like two snails. Farnèse: stealthy, pale blue eyes matching his gray complexion, a spectacular thinness, an alcoholic thinness. Peretti: broad hips, hollow chest, bowed legs, weak jawline that merges with his throat, eyes both intelligent and fearful, mouth of a guilty little boy.

  Three men. He is the fourth. It’s a hunting party. Joking, beer, warm blood, the scent of dogs, leather, steel, wood.

  Tristan brings his hand up to his face, breathes in. The orange fragrance from the dish towel is trapped in his palm. It calms his racing heart.

  “Would ya look at that, the dogs are making a fuss over you. Incredible! A success like that with the mutts. You’re the animals’ friend, am I right?”

  Yes, thinks Tristan, who feels the rabbit’s heart beating too slowly, too dully against his hipbone.

  Live, he silently orders the rabbit. If you live, then everything is possible. What went wrong will be made right.