Distant Light

I have come here to disappear, in this desolate and abandoned village where I’m the sole inhabitant.

The sun has just gone down behind the ridge. The light is fading. At this moment I’m sitting a few yards from my small house, before a steep wooded drop. I’m watching the world about to be engulfed by the darkness. My body is perfectly still, on a metal chair whose legs are sinking lower and lower into the ground, yet every so often I catch my breath, as though I’m on a swing with ropes fixed to a point infinitely far away in the universe.

The sky is crossed by the last swallows that fly here and there like arrows. They swoop past my head, plunging headfirst into massive spheres of insects suspended between sky and earth. I feel the gust of their wings on my temples. Before me I see distinctly the black body of a larger and fleshier insect as it disappears into the mouth of a swallow that was chasing it with beak wide open, screeching. Such is the silence that I can even hear the clang of its body in continued suffering being crunched and dismembered inside the body of the other animal as it swoops up rapturous into the sky.

I remain for some time sitting here. The light fades little by little, this whole plant world grows darker and darker before my eyes. The cries of night animals start to rise up from every corner, invisible in the black foliage.

No sign of human life.

Only that, as the darkness grows even thicker and the first stars come out, on the other side of this steep narrow gorge, on a flatter part of the facing ridge, hollowed into the woodland like a saddle, each night, every night, always at the same hour, a little light suddenly appears.

“What light could that be? Who’s switching it on?” I wonder as I walk along the cobbled streets of this small village where no one is left. “A light filtering from some isolated cottage in the woods? The light of some remaining streetlamp in another village abandoned like this one, but obviously still connected to the power supply, switched on automatically, always at the same time?”

All that can be heard is the sound of my footsteps echoing in the streets. I glimpse a flight of uneven stone steps, the broken door of a stable, ruined slate roofs collapsed and overgrown with creepers, from which emerge the tops of fig or bay trees growing among the rubble, two stone troughs full of water, street doors of bright peeling paint.

“Where am I?” I ask myself. “What am I seeing? Does this unearthly place I see before me really exist? Even if no one apart from me, in the whole universe, knows it exists or knows that at this moment there’s a man entirely alone who is moving about among these derelict stones over which the vegetal torment of the creepers never stops for a single moment, night or day.”

I turn into a lane that leads down to a small cemetery. When the
moon is out you can clearly see in its spectral light, as though it were day, the edge of the road invaded by vegetation, the crags from which you can hear the sound of rushing water cutting its bed through the resounding ravines of the rain-sodden mountains and, in the gorges, the great outlines of trees that stand out against the sky. Only at night, in the moonlight, can you really understand what the trees are, these columns of wood and froth that stretch out toward the empty space of the sky.

If there’s no moon, you have to grope your way in the dark, under the disquieting celestial vault riddled with a myriad of uninhabited stars and traces of light.

One night, walking down this same lane, just after a bend where the darkness is even denser, I heard a faint noise among the foliage. I turned to look. There were two badgers, staring at me, the white rings around their eyes almost like reflectors in the dark. I stopped in amazement. One of the two badgers hurried across the lane, completing a movement it had probably already begun before seeing me appear. The other stayed still and kept staring at me, terrified by this human presence on its territory.

I too stayed still, to give it time to cross and to reach the first badger already on the other side. But it didn’t move. It kept staring at me with its large white-ringed eyes, still at the side of the road, exposed, so terrified that it couldn’t even hide in the foliage.

“Come on!” I encouraged it quietly. “Cross the road! There’s someone waiting for you on the other side. I’ll stay here, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.”

But the badger didn’t move. I stayed looking at those two white circles in the dark. Then I took a few steps back to widen the distance between us and to reassure it. But it seemed stuck there. I moved back even more. It wasn’t enough. I went back round the bend so it couldn’t see me any longer and might decide to cross. I leaned round every so often to look, to see whether it had finally made up its mind. But those large white rings were still there and, in the middle of the rings, two gleaming eyes staring toward me, feeling my presence in the dark.

That night I’d had to return to the village so that the badger, hearing the sound of my feet moving further and further away, might decide at last to join the other badger waiting hidden in the bushes.

Tonight all is black, there is no moon. I walk down this lane as far as the last bend after which, all of a sudden, little lamps can be seen glowing in the cemetery. I carry on down, looking from a distance at this small galaxy of lights in the darkness. I reach a locked gate. I gaze in at the small lamps in front of the tombs, their color an indefinable shade of orange and red, flickering intensely in the darkness of this moonless night. “These little lamps must also be switched on automatically …” I tell myself. “But why is there a cemetery so close to this deserted village? Who is buried here, in the earth and in those vaults?
Where do they come from? Men, women, even children it seems, judging from those mounds of earth that are shorter than the others and the small photographs barely illuminated by those little lamps …”

I return to my house, along the black lane, beneath that chaos of stars. Beside the stone troughs I see the dark stubby outline of a toad that has perhaps come out from an old iron grill under which I hear the gurgle of water, and it clambers away on hearing my footsteps.

I go into the house, closing the gate, even though there’s no one about. I drink two glassfuls of water in the kitchen. I climb the short flight of wooden stairs. I enter my bedroom, undress, put on my pajamas. I get into the small bed that creaks a little when I stretch out. My ears buzz in the total absence of sound. I stay like this for some time, with my eyes wide open in the dark. I’m not sure for how long. Perhaps I’m already half asleep when I seem to hear creaking from below: small sharp noises, perhaps the wood of the furniture and the drawers that contract and expand in the darkness.

I get up, climb down the small steps, wander about downstairs, switch on the light to check that everything’s in order and that no one’s come in, even though I know there’s nobody here. I also go and check the toilet. I pull the chain since there’s a small drip caused by the valve that doesn’t close properly, which in the silence and darkness of the night seems louder.

I return to bed. I’m about to go back to sleep. But there are other tiny noises, this time from above, from the space between the
ceiling and the roof. Animals, even quite large ones, manage to get in through the roof tiles or by the chimney: not just birds but also four-legged creatures which then wander around up there in the dark, over my head.

I switch on the light and get out of bed again. I take the torch, prop the ladder against the wall and climb up. I open the hatch, coughing from the dust that comes down. I look from below into that dark space full of still objects, planks, sheets of polythene under a dusting of plaster, looking almost like stone.