Distant Light (2 page)

I shine the torch here and there but can see nothing. No eyes fixing me in the dark.

I return to bed and switch off the light on the nightstand. But I get up again straight away: I’m not sure whether I’ve closed the wooden shutter at the window. I take a few barefoot steps across the floorboards. I look out for a moment over the black tree-covered mountains and take one last look at that little light shining on the other side of the gorge, in the darkness.

“What can that light be?” I ask myself again.

I shut the window and go back to bed. After a while I fall asleep.

My day starts early.

I wash, dress. I go and open the windows. I gaze out for a while at this whole plant world, as motionless as an apparition. The little light is no longer there. Just these mountains covered with woods as far as the eye can see. They drop down steeply, scoured by gullies and crevices that are barely visible behind the thick veil of foliage, like a primeval landscape shaped by thumb strokes. All that can be distinguished, looking carefully in that direction, is a tiny speck, lighter in color, barely visible through the trees.

“Could it be a small house?” I wonder. “But who would live up there, in the middle of the woods?”

I have something to eat. I wash my dirty linen in a plastic bowl in the shallow stone sink. I hang it outside on a line stretched between two stripped poles I’d found lying by a path when I arrived here. I wash the dishes once a day, in the evening, in this stone house, surrounded by absolute silence.

In front, lower down, on the wood-clad precipice, there’s a chestnut tree that’s half alive and half dead. The top of it soars up naked and white over the green of the trees, petrified, while the rest of it is a
vigorous mass of foliage. There are many others like it, mostly chestnuts I think. Some are almost entirely dead, and they stand out in the woodland with their spectral appearance. Yet, from various points of these fossil trunks, in season, sprout two or three branches laden to breaking with chestnuts.

Sometimes I stop in front of one of these trees and look at it.

“But how do you live like that?” I ask it. “For humans it’s not possible: either they’re alive or they’re dead. Or so it seems at least …”

It gives no answer.

I stroke its smooth stripped, petrified surface. Then that living part, covered with leaves. I imagine the river of sap that runs turbulent beneath the bark, skirting the dead part and then flowing into the new branch that reaches up toward the sky, invented by its very own pressure.

And in various steep points where the earth has slipped, there are roots of living trees growing over strata of naked rock or completely out of the ground, hanging in the void. Great trees squashed against the base of a boulder that run level along the ground and then turn their crowns upward. Small trunks that have grown one beside the other and have then been swallowed up by another. Trunks that rise like snakes up larger trees and coil into their branches. And nearby, trees dying, suffocated by suckers or by a cloud of ivy and other creepers that climb skyward to entangle them in their lethal embrace. Mosses and lichens swathe slanting columns of
wood, great protruding rocks with their shrouds of velvet and glass. Other strands of vegetation like dry lianas that hang down from the tangle of top branches in the trees. Or they rise up from below, who knows, for it’s hard to say where they start, whether from the ground or from the tops of the trees, or perhaps from neither, since there’s not only the top and the bottom. Perhaps they start in the middle, in the air, and then sprout forth as tiny plant structures seeking life and seeking death. And then there’s all this savage undergrowth and these thousands and thousands of plant forms that grasp and fight each other, thousands and thousands of rootlets and thousands of other forms urged on by their chemical turgidity, still formless, which then erupt like armies from the ground with their naked bodies still devoid of bark, devise their first mechanisms for respiration and metabolism with the air and start to climb upward in a furious and mute tangle of forms born from seeds carried by the wind or by other missiles that proliferate in the rotting stomach of the world and begin their struggle to move upward, toward the light.

“Why is there all this evil undergrowth,” I wonder, “that tries to engulf and smother and suffocate the larger trees? Why all this wretched and desperate cruelty that disfigures everything? Why all this teeming of bodies striving to sap other bodies, sucking them with their thousands and thousands of rampaging roots and their tiny, wild suckers, to siphon off their chemical power,
to create new plant forces capable of annihilating everything, of massacring everything. Where can I go where I won’t have to see any more of this slaughter, this blind and relentless torsion they call life?

I had an encounter today.

In the early afternoon, after eating, I took my stick and went out. I walked through the alleyways and up the steps and under the low bare arches of this deserted village. Here and there, along the side of the lane, are stones jutting out that were once used as steps for climbing up to the small vegetable plots above, planks impregnated with lime and half broken, abandoned flower pots, invaded by relentless lichwort or other plants and other forms carried by the wind. In one spot, over a low wall where there must once have been a vine, the large indefinable leaves of vegetables gone wild spread along the ground and then spill over with tendrils searching for anchorage. Nearby there’s an old metal bathtub filled with soil that must once have been used as a flowerbed and is now full of nettles and skeins of suffocated plants.

I turned onto a winding path that skirts the gorge, rutted in the middle by small furrows hollowed out by the water that runs down from the mountain. Beside it are hedges coiled with brambles on which fractious wasps settle while small yellow butterflies flit clumsily in the sky. Here and there barbed wire can be seen buried in the
ground, trampled by wild boar in their roaming through the woods, put up who knows how long ago, when the village was still inhabited. But there’s a spot where the space opens out, a small clearing beside the path, reached by stepping over a section of broken down wire fence. From there you can see how far the mountain vegetation and woods extend, where there’s no sign of human life as far as the eye can see. Except for the other side, exactly the other side, of the gorge, the spot where when it grows dark I see that little light come on.

I’ve looked long at it. I’ve observed that small lighter-colored speck, perhaps the corner of a stone house hidden on all sides by trees.

“Who knows if someone lives there?” I wondered again, resuming my walk along the path.

But there’s no sign of any road there. Who knows, perhaps there’s a path through the thick woods that you can’t see from here. It’s always possible. From this side of the gorge it’s hard to see, but perhaps there’s someone living there, who can say … One day, for example, I decided to go to a small village I’d never been to before, around twenty kilometers from here. Only one person lives there, a retired soldier, or so they told me in a village further down where I go from time to time to buy something to eat, driving down in a car that I keep in an abandoned stable at the edge of the village.

I got there, arriving at a small open space below a derelict chapel, driving slowly because what was left of the road was uneven and worn away by rain and snow. I stopped, looked around, with the engine still
running. A moment later a pack of angry dogs appeared from somewhere in the village, barking furiously, launching themselves against the car. Up on their hind legs, they beat furiously against the doors. I could hear the thudding noise of their claws against the bodywork and the windows, I saw their disfigured heads all around, barking madly, their fangs covered with drool and their tongues. It was impossible to open the door with that pack of dogs besieging it and that furious mass of muscle pressing in from every side. I couldn’t get out. I put the car in gear and started moving slowly forward, making my way through all those frantic dogs that continued to jump up, even onto the hood with their noses against the windshield, even onto the roof, as though one of them was trying to attack me from above, at the risk of ending up beneath my wheels as I edged forward slowly among that mass of gnashing heads and claws. Meanwhile the only inhabitant of that abandoned and derelict village was perhaps somewhere I couldn’t see, behind an archway or at a window, watching his ferocious hounds attacking and chasing off this other man who had ventured onto his territory.

The path dropped down a little. I continued on, whirling my walking stick every so often over my head and shoulders to fend off horseflies and other insects that came to buzz around the only living person wandering through their world. The stick is slightly crooked, made of cherry wood I think: I found it one day propped against a tree.
Someone must have worked it, who knows when, stripping all its bark with a knife, except for a section at the top, at the handle.

Without warning, after a shady bend in the path where there were several puddles that hadn’t completely dried up, I saw a large dark dog in front of me, sitting in the middle of the path, still, motionless, waiting for me.

I stopped at once.

The dog gazed at me in silence, still blocking the way. It must have heard my footsteps a long way off and stayed there like that, waiting for me.

I too gazed at it in silence, without moving, without breathing, all the more so because I realized this great beast was one of those breeds of dog they train for fighting, a Rottweiler.

I couldn’t continue on as the dog was blocking my path, still watching me in silence. I couldn’t chase it away with my stick as I didn’t know how it might react to such a violent gesture.

So I turned round and began to go back the way I’d come. Without speeding up too much, so as not to give the idea I was running away and thus arousing its fury. But without moving too slowly either, since I was far from home, alone, at the mercy of that dog.

I took the first few steps without turning round. I couldn’t hear anything behind me. Perhaps the dog had stayed there, motionless, sitting in the middle of the path where it had blocked my way, and
was watching me as I walked off, with its black eyes in the middle of its great fierce head.

But after a while, as I was turning a bend thinking I had left it behind, I began to hear a light regular sound behind me.

I turned my head slightly.

The dog was following.

It was walking slowly, in perfect silence. I heard its heavy breathing behind me.

I carried on walking, increasing my pace but without seeming to do so. The dog was still behind me, I could hear it from its breathing, I could see it when I turned my head. My house was at least half an hour away, and I continued walking with that large fighting dog following me in silence, in that enormous green solitude that stretched as far as the eye could see.

“Who knows why it was there in the middle of the path, waiting for me?” I asked myself. “Who knows why it’s now following me? Who knows why it doesn’t make some small sound, why it doesn’t bark, and just follows me in perfect silence with that heavy relentless step? What can be going on in that great, fierce, inscrutable head?”

All the more since I knew how these dogs behaved. I had read about them in the past, in newspapers, in reports about attacks on men, women and children who had been killed or disfigured by their bites. They don’t bark, they give no sign of agitation, it’s impossible to know what they’re thinking. Then, with no warning, they jump at
you and sink their teeth into your hands, arms, throat, face, they chew your flesh, your bones. They don’t stop until they’ve torn you to pieces, or somebody else comes along to beat them off, shooting them in the head.

But here there was nobody.

I walked on in silence, with that great fierce dog behind me. I turned round slightly every so often. The dog was always there, at the same distance. It continued to follow me with its relentless step, swaying slightly.

At one point, on a tight bend, turning back rather longer, I could get a better look. Not just its enormous silent head but also its massive muscular body, its whole figure, from the side.

Its legs were crooked, very crooked. Something more than crooked, I thought …

I caught my breath.

“It’s had all four legs smashed!” I suddenly realized. “Perhaps it has come from one of the inhabited villages lower down, from someone who keeps their dogs wild so that nobody dares approach their house. Someone must have smashed its legs with a shovel, perhaps after it had attacked a man, a woman, a child. It must have dragged itself up here where there’s nobody, on its broken legs, so that it couldn’t be found.”

Now that I had turned my head a little longer, I thought that I could actually see, on one of its hind legs, a jagged bone protruding a little
from the skin when it bent its leg to take a step. Nothing jutted from the other three, though, as if the bones had now healed enough to somehow support it.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to carry on or to stop and stroke the great head of that injured animal. But its absolute silence frightened me. No complaint, no whimper, not the slightest sound came from the body of that tortured animal. Only that deep, rasping breath as it continued to follow me on its shattered bones. I had no idea what would happen if I held my hand out toward its head, toward its drooling mouth and teeth. What it was thinking. Perhaps, in its mute anger, its hatred, it might have thought I wanted to approach it to hurt it, and it might have sunk its teeth into me out of despair, out of distress.

And so I carried on walking for more than half an hour with that large maimed dog behind me, in that immense vegetal solitude. When I came across some sudden upward slopes or, immediately after, some steep descent, I thought the dog wouldn’t be able to follow me, that its body would be too heavy for its legs to cope with such gradients. But it didn’t give up, it was always there, without complaint, without a sound, always at the same distance, relentless as a machine.