Distant Light (11 page)

We had now reached the end of this last stretch of corridor. We turned back.

“He wasn’t very good at school. He used to get bad marks. Sometimes the teacher would throw exercise books at him, would put him behind the blackboard …”

“Yes, it’s true! He put him behind the blackboard!”

“I used to see him as I went along the corridor, passing the open doors …” continued the janitor, who was so absorbed in his story that he didn’t seem to have heard me, “because the blackboards were put at an angle at the far end of the classrooms. When I passed, he used to lift his head which he kept bowed, we’d catch each other’s eye, he’d look at me with those eyes of his, so large, and all full of tears …”

“Yes, yes …” I murmured.

“But there was one thing that no one could beat him at … During playtime, every now and then, they played a game. Though, in a way, I don’t know whether it was a game. Anyway, when the bell rang they all ran to that point there, look, where the corridor widens slightly by the toilets. At that time there was a large carpenter’s bench, the kind that has a wooden vise. I don’t know who’d put it there, what it was doing there … The children ran there to eat the sandwiches they’d brought from home or the focaccia they’d bought before they arrived from the baker’s that used to be just by the school, which they’d take out of its greasy wrapping. Others would eat some fruit, or nothing at all, because they were getting ready for the fight …”

We’d stopped moving, I think, and I was staring at the large bald head of the janitor, in the darkness.

“The game was like this: one boy jumped onto the shoulders of another stronger boy who gripped his legs with his arms, and the one on top fought against another who was also riding on his mount. The two horses ran into each other and collided. Each of the riders tried to grab the other rider with his hands and unsaddle him, knock him to the ground, either just him or with the horse as well. The whole trick was not to get caught, but to be the first to grab the other rider by the arms or the head and send him flying to the ground, ideally backwards, when there was a good coordination between the rider and the horse and the horse was giving support from below while his rider was fighting. That boy was transformed when he climbed on the shoulders of another boy who was the horse and the fighting began, he became unbeatable. Once he knocked another rider to the ground with such force, grabbed him so firmly by the ear that he pulled a piece off and they had to stitch it back on. Another time, the only time I ever saw him fall, he finished upside down against the vise on the carpenter’s bench and broke a tooth …”

“Yes, yes, it’s true, he’s got a broken tooth!”

“But he didn’t touch the ground, he remained hanging upside down from his horse, who kept a firm grip on his feet with his arms. Then he pulled himself up, got back into his saddle and launched himself furiously at the other rider, knocking him to the ground.”

I think that by now we had started walking again, because I could no longer see that large head and that broad, kindly face in front of me. He was still holding me, his hand pressing my arm firmly every so often and then relaxing, then pressing harder with emotion at certain points of the story.

“Why did they call him Putty?” I tried asking him.

The janitor smiled in the dark, or so it seemed.

“Because he used to eat the putty!” he replied. “At that time, the panes of glass in the windows were fixed into the frame with putty. When a broken pane had to be changed, or when it rattled a bit because the putty had gone dry and was falling out, the glazier came and fixed it. He pulled out a ball of putty from his leather bag, broke it into smaller pieces and spread it carefully along the frame with a spatula so that the glass was firm. But the putty soon disappeared. The glazier was continually being called out to put in new putty, otherwise the glass would rattle and there was always the risk of it breaking when the windows were being opened and closed. It never had time to dry. When it was still fresh, you could always see little fingerprints on the surface that had been smoothed out by the knife, because the children enjoyed taking out pieces to make little balls or other things. But he, no, he used to take it and eat it. That’s why they called him Putty!”

He laughed a little. In the darkness I could just about see the upper plate of his dentures hanging slightly loose from his gums.

“Did anyone come to meet him, when he left?” I suddenly asked.

He paused for a moment, thinking.

“Sometimes an animal used to come to meet him.”

“An animal? What animal?”

“It looked like a dog, but I don’t know whether it was a dog … It sat there in front of the entrance, on the other side of the road, waiting for him. I used to see it when I opened the door, there, perfectly still, with its ears sticking up, watching closely. When they began coming out, its head would move back and forth all the time so as to spot him among the other children. They went off together, him and that kind of dog, walking side by side, in silence.

“But no one else ever came to meet him? Only an animal?” I asked again, too loudly perhaps.

He remained silent for a few moments.

“Sometimes there was also a person who came to meet him …”

“Oh yes? A person? And who was that?”

I wasn’t sure whether he replied, I couldn’t hear. He seemed to turn toward me and to gaze at me with wide-open eyes, lifting both of his hands to his head, in the dark.

We were probably walking down the stairs because, every now and then, there was no ground beneath my feet, between one step and another.

We eventually arrived at the small door at the rear. The janitor opened it. I could hear him saying goodbye, with his kindly voice, in
the thickest darkness. Before leaving, I had the feeling that he stroked me on the back of my neck, from behind, high up, with his large hand, in the dark.

As I was returning home in the car, deep in the night, on one curve a large insect was squashed against the windshield. I saw it thrown from its meandering course, blinded by the headlights, a moment before it collided against the wall of the car racing through the dark. Then the trail of its innards that oozed yellow over the glass.

“Who knows if the sky has another sky above it?” I ask myself as I sit looking out from the precipice. “The sky that I can see from here at least, from this gorge, above this group of houses and abandoned ruins. Who knows if the light itself isn’t inside another light? And what kind of light is it, if it’s a light you can’t see? Even if you can’t see the light, what else can you see? Who knows if the matter the universe is made of, at least the little we’re able to perceive in the sea of dark matter and energy, isn’t inside another infinitely larger matter, and the dark matter and energy aren’t also inside an infinitely larger darkness? Who knows if the curvature of space and time, if there is a curvature, if there is space, if there is time, aren’t also themselves inside a larger curvature, a larger space, a larger time, that comes first, that hasn’t yet come? Who knows why things have ended up like this, in this world? Could it be like this everywhere, if there is an everywhere, in this maelstrom of little lights that pierce the darkness in this cold night and in the deepest obscurity? Could there be someone watching us, from one of those planets that orbit round those masses of blazing gas that appear to us from
far away like white stars, as that man thinks, the one I went to see in the cattle stall, surrounded by those animals that had been spirited away into hyperspace? What could life be like for them? Why would they have gone travelling off into the universe in that egg of light without a shell? Can their life be as unhappy as ours? And do pain and evil also bring some distraction for them, at least for a few moments, from unhappiness? Do they too have that short, cruel dream that has been called love? Could that also be inside something that exists somewhere else? Does someone else exist in the middle of all these spheres of gas that burn in the deepest obscurity and these conglomerations that cool and calcify, with their mineral surfaces full of wounds and gashes, in the middle of all these dead experimental masses crammed into this vertigo that we have called space? Alpha Centauri, the star closest to our sun, is four light years away. The Large Magellanic Cloud, the galaxy closest to our galaxy, is a hundred and sixty-five thousand light years away from our solar system. And I am here, sitting on this metal chair that sinks lower and lower into the ground, in this place far away from the world, about the same distance from everything and from space and from time and from my life and from my death …”

Sometimes I think there are no more living people in the rest of the world. But there are. Because today, while there was still some daylight, suddenly looking up, I saw that the clear blueness was crossed
from side to side by a perfectly straight white streak that stretched out in the sky, traced by an airplane so far away that you couldn’t even hear its roar in the vastness of space.

The world is changing in front of my eyes. The ground gets ever colder. The leaves are curling up, falling. A few of them remain dangling here and there from the stump of a branch. The trees are barer and barer. There’s no longer any distinction between the living and the dead.

I walk on a carpet of charred leaves that crackle under my feet. They completely cover the paths, I feel the cracking of their veins and of their lifeless tissues disintegrating under the weight of my vertical body as it presses on the ground. There are almost no more sounds in the wood. The animals have left or are preparing to hibernate. They dig their little holes in the cold ground which begins to freeze at night and is already being covered by the first light flurries of snow which leaves its white veil, dissolving in the first sun of the day. They dig headfirst with their claws, their teeth, to get deeper down into the ground, where there is still some warmth.

This morning, in a ruined house, I surprised a group of bats in hibernation. I was walking along the empty streets, among these walls covered with creepers and this dry vegetation and these trees that have grown between the stones, among small flights of loose steps that go up to the doors of derelict houses. I passed in front of a ruin I’d never
been into before. It’s strange how this place is so small and yet I still don’t know it all. With my foot I pushed the door with its now broken hinges. It opened. I went in. It was completely dark inside, since there wasn’t even a window. Just stone walls and a wooden ceiling high up. All of a sudden I saw a great number of bats in front of me, hanging upside down, staring at me with their bulging eyes. There must have been some light then – at least the light coming from the door I’d just opened, even though it seemed dark in there, unless it was coming directly from the circles of their terror-stricken eyes, woken from their hibernation. It was an instant. The casings of their whole bodies which until a moment before were upside down, wrapped in the membranes of their black wings of skin, hooked with their claws onto the old beams and wall ledges, had suddenly launched into flight, terrified, searching for a way out. I flung myself against a wall. Their frantic black bodies were crashing against the walls and the ceiling. Then they found the gap in the doorway from which I’d come and, hurling themselves against me from every direction, they flew out in a whirl of naked wings and eyes.

Before going to sleep I peered for a long time at that little light. It has been shining much more brightly for some time, it seems, because the air is colder, the sky is clearer.

I changed the bed sheets and the pillowcase. I put on the heavier blanket. Over it I carefully folded back the upper sheet. I also turned down the corner of the blanket and sheet on one side, before getting
undressed and putting on my heavier pajamas that I had pulled out of the wooden chest of drawers which creaks slightly from the change of temperature. In this way I would find everything ready for me when I undressed for bed and climbed in, as though that act had not been done by me, as though someone else who doesn’t exist had done it for me as a secret act of kindness.

Now it is night. I’m lying here staring, it seems, into the dark. I can’t say whether I’m awake or asleep. Just now there were some earth tremors. But faint. Slight vibrations that rose up from the deep. But so slight, so slight that I can’t say whether they have woken me up or sent me to sleep.

I think I even smiled a little, recognizing their sweet voice in the dark.

The boy invited me to eat with him again today.

I left early, but got there late as it had started snowing and the road up to the ridge was covered with a white shroud and I had to go slowly, carefully, so that the wheels didn’t slide on the downward slopes and in the ruts, and even more so on the path that went through the woods and over the narrow timber bridge made slippery with the thin coating of snow.

When I arrived, the boy was at the door, looking out, as though waiting for me.

I pulled down the hood of my parka before going in, and brushed the snow off my shoulders with my hand to avoid taking it into the house.

He ran inside, happy, or at least he seemed to be.

He went to the plate rack, climbed on the crate and pulled down a saucepan.

“Do you want to stay to eat?” he asked, once I was inside, and I took off my coat and shook it a little, by the door.

“Yes, but I’ll do the cooking this time!”

He didn’t object.

“Alright!” he said calmly.

He let me take over at the cooker and went to sit on the bottom step of the wooden staircase.

I looked at him.

“Your knees are red. Are you sure you’re not cold in those short trousers?”

“No, no,” he replied. “I’m used to it.”

I put my bag of shopping down by the sink.

The boy, still sitting on the staircase, watched me silently with his round eyes as I pulled from the bag the things I had bought in the village.

I too looked at him every now and then, turning my head, as I stood at the cooker.