good as blinded, gripping onto the table, clearing my throat till I saw stars, but, oddly, I wasn’t sick. The surge of acid had subsided; just a warning. But it left such a horrible sensation that, in order to get rid of it, I had the ridiculous idea of throwing myself body and soul into writing down memories, and these soon turned into an endless stream, a great succession of French words as soft as my mother’s breath. I didn’t dare stop, even to smoke, for fear of being assailed by the mysterious acid reflux again, or having to face reality. Acting on this impulse, I made sure not to miss a single detail and looked up from my writing only to sharpen my pencils, worn down at impressive speed as the pages went by.
For two weeks the terrifying symptom didn’t re-offend. I carried on writing, interrupting my work only to eat a mouthful or sleep for a while, so that I could stay in Tumchooq’s world, maintain contact with him—he’s been gone three weeks, that’s twenty-one days with no news—and keep him company day and night, wherever he may be.
On the 28th of last month, the day before Chinese New Year (which Tumchooq celebrated with his father, who, since Mao’s death, has been promoted to the rank of pig-keeper and finally freed from working in the depths of the gem mines), for reasons I don’t understand, I declined invitations to parties organised by my university and the French embassy, and spent the New Year alone in the company of my private diary, locked in my room out of mute solidarity with this “devoted son.” Bent over my paper, writing about him, his father and his prison colony, I felt I was with them in that part of China banned to foreigners.
Pig-keeper! How ironic for the eminent Western scholar, who should have had a chair at the College de France or been elected to the Académie frangaçise long ago. I think Paul d’Ampère would have preferred to be appointed a shepherd (after all, we call the evening star the “shepherd’s star” in French, but, as far as I know, no pig-keeper’s star shines in the firmament). There’s none of that nobility of pastoral care, sovereignty or leading the flock about the term “pig-keeper;” instead it conjures an image of a poor, skinny little child darting between hunks of wobbling flesh as his pigs sprawl in the mud with their small, mistrustful eyes. That same child hoping to steal a share of the dirty, fetid food they bury their muddied snouts in, grunting; he swallows it straight down, only too happy to find anything to cheat the appalling hunger that grips his innards.
In comparison with a prisoner digging in the mines, though, pig-keeper is the most sought-after position after working in the canteen, given its food-related benefits. Should we read into this the effects of his faith in Buddhism, which respects all creatures, or his joy at leaving his previous team, synonymous as they were with the Underworld if not with death itself? But, according to Tumchooq, even the most jealous of his new fellow prisoners acknowledge that Paul d’Ampère is the best pig-keeper the River Lu camp has ever had.
At break of day he stands dreamily chopping grass with a knife, setting a regular, unchanging rhythm like a monk beating a stone instrument. Then he lights a wood fire and boils up the chopped grass with bran in a huge cast-iron pot. Meanwhile he cleans the floor of the pigsty, centimetre by centimetre, using water drawn from the River Lu; then he calls one of the pigs by the Tumchooq name he has given it, and the animal grunts and nudges through its companions, making its way towards the gate like an obedient soldier coming to his commander. Paul d’Ampère cleans the animal so competently he might have been doing it all his life. He pours water on its skin and brushes it until it gleams like black silk. He gives them all the same treatment, and last of all comes the queen, a solid, no-nonsense, magnificently fat sow with dark silk patches on her back and lighter ones on her belly, and teats that fill out when she has piglets—which the directors hand out to the warders’ families. Waddling, reluctant, she has the privilege of a bath in the River Lu, and she buries her short legs in the mud and flicks her snout to splash herself with water