Distant Light (3 page)

“But how does it manage to walk for so long on those shattered bones?” I asked. “How is it possible that no sound comes from its body racked by such tremendous pain?”

At certain moments I lost the sound of its steps behind me. “It can’t manage it!” I said to myself. “It must have stopped!” And yet, a few seconds later, passing round another bend, once again I could see its limping body, still there behind me, its eyes continuing to watch me silently in its great drooling head.

At a certain point, all of a sudden, I felt something pressing against my legs from behind. It was the head of the dog that had caught up with me on a downward slope and was nudging me with its wet nose.

I speeded up without giving the idea that I was doing so, so as not to trigger his suppressed anger, gradually tightening the muscles throughout my body and not just my legs, a short distance away from the mighty muscle fibers of that other body, its shoulders, its neck, its great legs that bound and held its shattered bones, preventing them from protruding.

At last I got back to the small village. I walked a little further along the deserted lane and could hear the relentless sound of its steps behind me and its claws as they struck the cobbles. When I stopped in front of my small house, as I opened the gate I could hear that the dog had also stopped. It sat down on the ground behind me, waiting to come in.

I took a few steps forward. The dog started walking silently behind me. I suddenly then moved back. We caught each other’s eyes as I reached the open gate and went in, closing it behind me.

The dog also moved back. It sat down again on the ground, on the other side of the gate. It watched me in silence, without a groan, silent, with the black marks of its eyes in its great muscular head full of bones and teeth.

“Now it’s going to stay there, holding me hostage!” I thought. “It won’t move until I open the gate and let it come in.”

And yet when night fell and I went out once again to walk in the dark, the dog had gone.

Sometimes I stop and I talk to animals, insects, trees, all the mighty vegetation that springs up everywhere as far as the skyline.

To wasps that drop angrily onto the gaping cracks in the figs rotting on the trees, thrusting their rostrate heads into the crevices full of putrefying seeds and juice. Going up close, perhaps too close, so that one day I was stung on the hand by a wasp. I felt its barbed sting penetrating the tender flesh between one finger and the next.

“But why are you always so angry” I ask. “Why do you drop headfirst into the pulp of unpicked fruit that’s rotting on the trees in this deserted unearthly place? So that sometimes, when I split one open to eat it, I find one of you inside, and you fly off in a rage, covered all over with dead liquids and the juices in which you were wallowing. Where do you live, where do you go to sleep? What happens, day and night, in your savage nests?”

But they never answer.

To toads, when I catch sight of one motionless, filthy, half-submerged beneath a veil of earth, with its fat body entirely covered with
larvae, in a spot where there must once have been a vegetable plot, since there are still tangles of growth that produce unrecognizable vegetables.

“But what sort of life do you have?” I ask them. “Buried in the earth with your stores of fat larvae that you gorge down there in the dark. Your bodies like a soft leathery bag bursting at the seams, closed off by the earth and the darkness.”

But they never answer.

To aerial roots, which spread here and there and catch everything that comes in range, high up there, rotting leaves, pollen and spores that fly blindly in the air, perhaps even miniscule bodies of flying insects with many wings and antennae. They transform them into nutriment for a plant that sometimes isn’t there, doesn’t exist, still has yet to be invented.

“Why are you born up there and not on the ground?” I ask, I shout, to make myself heard up there, in this silent green vastness that returns the echo of my voice. “Were you really born up there, right from the beginning, or did you too come from the earth like all the other roots and then, who knows why, began to move higher and higher, until you ended up there in space? Or did you come down from up there, from space, where perhaps there are miniscule roots that fall like an invisible rain from the sky, until one of them reaches the top of some plant and clings to it, and begins sapping everything up there within its range, before starting to descend gradually to the ground, and then
to penetrate the earth, under the horizon line, in that sodden mass of a thousand other ferocious roots and miniscule animals with no eyes that devour everything, to then climb up again, little by little, upward, along the tormented trunks of trees, over their torn bark, higher and higher, as far as the sky?”

But they never answer.

The swallows, on the other hand, they do answer!

Sometimes, when I see them darting past over the point where the lane narrows, where there are two stone troughs full of water, coming down from above, diving, frenzied, swooping low, close to the ground, at unimaginable speed, and then skimming over the troughs to snatch a little water in that brief instant in their beaks, all alone in that unearthly place, I wave my arms at them, yelling:

“But you’re crazy!”

“Yes, yes! We’re crazy!” those tiny animals reply, beside themselves, still flitting low over the lane and skimming the surface of the water, like darts, screeching.

I start laughing with excitement, alone.

“Isn’t there a psychiatrist for swallows?”

“Yes, but he’s crazy too!”

“So how are you going to get cured?”

“Like this!” they answer, plunging their heads into the water and then soaring higher and higher, into the sky, fanning my temples and my eyes with their wings, their beaks.

Then, when the sun goes down behind the ridge and it begins to grow dark, and all this plant world becomes invisible and black like a great nocturnal sponge, on the other side, there in the distance, every night, always at the same hour, that little light suddenly appears.

Just now, while I was in bed, deep in my first sleep, I was woken by a tremor.

It often happens, because this is an earthquake area. Sometimes I don’t even waken fully, but even in my sleep, or half asleep, I can still feel the vibrations that arrive here on the surface from the movement of underground faults that shake my bed, the walls of the house, the room, the few pieces of furniture inside it, the whole empty village where I live, but also the ground, the trees, the animals in their deep burrows, those night creatures that move about silently in search of their prey, and perhaps also those flying in the air searching the dark land with their round eyes for something alive, and perhaps from up there they feel even the air shaking.

Sometimes, when the tremors are stronger, I get out of bed, go out barefoot, and walk in the quaking village as far as an open space a short way from my house. I look around to see if the derelict houses are still standing or if they’ve collapsed. In the morning, when the light returns, I see broken tiles here and there, strewn across the stone streets, fallen from the collapsing roof of some ruin. I wander around my small house checking the walls to see if there are any cracks:
it seems impossible that nothing could have happened to its structure under the effect of so many tremors. I climb a ladder onto the roof, adjust the roof tiles that have been moved by the earthquake or by the scrabbling of all those birds and four-legged animals that find their way into the attic space at night, between my room and the roof, that I can hear walking around above my head when I’m half asleep or when I’m lying with my eyes wide open in the dark.

At other times I don’t get up at all, when I’m in my first sleep and can’t rouse myself. I hardly feel the succession of quakes, one after the other, the dizziness, the sense of nausea and slight loss of consciousness in my body as it continues lying there, half asleep and half awake, while everything vibrates around me, and deep down great dark masses and walls of earth and marble crash against each other.

Tonight I got up and checked the walls and around the doors to make sure no cracks had appeared. I also went down to look at the small vaulted cellar where I keep the wood. Then I came here, with a blanket over my shoulders because it’s cold at night even though it’s summer, to sit on this metal chair with thin legs that sink lower and lower into the ground, in front of the stone balustrade that looks out over the steep drop. Before leaving the house I took an old pair of binoculars I brought here with me but have never used, since there’s nothing to see, only this impenetrable expanse of green froth that covers the world as far as the eye can see.

I point them toward the little light. I rotate the rather worn knob to focus them, since the light seems to get wider and narrower as though I were looking at it through water. But I can’t see it clearly, perhaps because my eyelashes get in the way, perhaps because my eyes are still full of sleep and are covered with that liquid film that distorts shapes and blurs lights. It’s hard to tell what the light is, even harder than when looking at it with the naked eye. It’s hard to say whether it’s a light coming from a window or a low street lamp hanging from a wire. And yet it seems to get brighter, it seems to pulsate.

“What can that light be?” I ask myself once again. “Why does it sometimes look larger and brighter, and then straight after seem to grow smaller and smaller until it fades away? Could it be something else? Could it be some luminous phenomenon caused by magnetic activity of telluric origin?”

There’s not a sound, no cry from any nocturnal creature on the ground or in the air. They must all be motionless, who knows where, petrified, now that the earthquake has caused the earth and the sky to vibrate under their feet and wings.

“I must go there …” I tell myself again, still gazing at that little light with the blanket over my shoulders. “There has to be some road, some path, to get up there!”

This morning I took the car out of the stable. I drove down the long series of bends as far as the nearest inhabited village, where I go once a week to buy something to eat, along that winding and deserted lane from which the bones of uninhabited houses stick out here and there, with wooden shutters closed and broken, that suddenly narrow the roadway. Then, a little further on, the first signs of life, a dog curled up by a front door watching my car pass with one eye shut, an old man working in a vegetable garden, small flocks of sheep and goats, completely black, grazing on a steep sloping meadow, a horse and its young foal that stop grazing when they hear the car, raising their heads and swishing their tails.

I reached the village and parked the car. I went to the small shop that sells things to eat and drink, farm equipment, ironmongery, seeds, newspapers … Inside there’s a suffocating smell of cat because the old woman who looks after the shop collects stray cats. They sleep here and there, perched on sacks of seed and other goods, or walk about rubbing themselves against the legs of the infrequent customers.

Two men were in there looking at a shovel before buying it. Another younger fat man with a beard and long frizzy blond hair and a kind of
fluorescent jacket stood in one corner smiling, doing nothing, buying nothing. Perhaps he was the old woman’s half-witted son or grandson and was just passing the time.

While I was at the counter putting the things I’d bought into two plastic bags, I tried casually asking, in a loud voice so that the other customers could hear, whether there was by any chance anyone living up on that ridge where I could see the little light at night.

They became interested straight away. They asked me exactly where it was. I replied as best I could, since it couldn’t be seen from the village, so that I couldn’t go out of the shop and point to it. I tried to explain which gorge it was and what point of the ridge I was talking about.

“Is anyone going to live up there, in a place like that?” asked one of the two customers, shaking his head.

“Never heard of it! There’s just woods up there!” replied the other, returning to inspect the shovel which he held in the air like a lance.

“But what sort of light? What kind of light?” the first man asked again.

“Bah … I can’t work out whether it comes from the window of a house or from a streetlamp …”

“A streetlamp? There are no streetlamps up there. No one lives there.”

“So it must be something else,” I said just to end the conversation and finally get out of that place infected by the stink of cat.

I finished paying and made my way toward the door.

“Then it must be a UFO!” I heard someone say behind me.

I turned round.

It was the fat boy in the fluorescent jacket.

I looked at him. He was still there in the same corner, doing nothing, continuing to smile or laugh with his lips closed. His broad mouth was barely visible between his thick wild moustache and beard.

“What’s that? Are you joking?” I asked.

But he remained standing there, with his mouth stretched in that idiotic grin.

“No. Why?” he said eventually, still laughing.

I turned again toward the other customers.

“There’s someone who reckons UFOs have been seen around here,” explained one of the two. “There’s even an expert on such things, in a village near here. You can always go and talk to him. It won’t cost you anything to ask …”

He told me the name of the village and explained how to get there.

I left that hole, before the strong stench made me vomit. I loaded the bags into the car and drove off. Along the road I looked at the vegetal outlines of the mountain precipices, almost without seeing them, so blocked out they were against the daylight.

“I’ll go tomorrow!” I said to myself all at once.

I went. This morning I took the car out again and got to the village where the man with the shovel had directed me.

It’s not far from here, twenty minutes or so along narrow switchback roads, asphalted here and there and worn away with deep ruts. At various points the branches of trees and the limbs of long thorny brambles beat against the windows and the windshield. But then the lane widens and reaches a small village where a few people still live. Before entering a tiny square where there were a couple of cars and a truck loaded up with sacks of lime, a cement mixer and other equipment, parked in front of a small house at the top of a slope, in an area newly scythed, I saw an Arab woman with a veil over her head and face who was piling hay with a pitchfork.