Distant Light (4 page)

I had seen other people in still-inhabited villages lower down. Women and men who had come from distant parts of the world to these empty villages and hamlets where houses and ruins cost little.

I got out of the car and looked around. There were two old women sitting on a wooden bench, their faces parched by the sun and full of wrinkles, their heads shaved, who stood staring at me.

I went up to them and said I was looking for a man who was interested in alien presences.

At first they didn’t understand. I had to repeat myself two or three times, using my hands and arms to help me.

One of the two was constantly shaking her head as though she had Parkinson’s.

“You know … extraterrestrials, beings from other worlds, lights in the sky …” I insisted.

At last they understood. They pointed out where I could find him, talking both together and interrupting each other in their harsh, shrill dialect.

I set off in search of the place. I had to go out of the village and drive up a switchback. Every so often, flattened on the asphalt, were the outlines of squashed frogs or snakes, since vehicles could still pass and there was another last hamlet higher up. You could see the odd cow or goat grazing on the strips of land between the tight curves.

I arrived at some open ground, excavated a few meters below the level of the road, where a man in large gumboots was shoveling a mound of manure.

“No, that can’t be him!” I thought to myself.

The man looked up when he saw me. He stood there with his shovel in the air, still full of manure that he was piling into a wheelbarrow after having dug it from the mound.

I tried to explain who I was looking for. But he couldn’t hear me. I shouted louder, since we were a certain distance apart.

The man dropped the manure into the wheelbarrow and stuck the shovel into its open face where he’d been working. The remainder of the mound lay overgrown with grass and taller vegetation.

With an abrupt wave, he gestured me to come closer.

I began to climb down toward the terrace. A dog suddenly appeared from somewhere, ran toward me and started jumping at my legs, as if to prevent me from going further. Meanwhile the man, still standing by the manure heap, repeated his abrupt wave.

I carried on down, with the dog attached to one of my legs. When I reached the bottom, the man took a stick from the ground and beat the dog two or three times so that it let go immediately.

There was a great stench of manure and piss, and a swarm of flies that you had to keep away by waving both hands.

I looked at the man, who was standing quite still in front of me. He was also looking at me. He was wearing trousers caked with manure and a filthy t-shirt torn at the chest. He was younger than he had seemed from a distance, completely bald but with a crown of long blondish hair that went down to his shoulders, protruding ears, pointed chin, his mouth slightly open with its corners turned upward.

I tried to say something: why I was there, whether he was the person who was interested in alien presences. I also mentioned the little light.

The man carried on looking at me without replying, he didn’t even seem able to reply. Except that, from time to time, he gave a husky or sudden shrill sound that didn’t even seem human, while the dog continued watching us from a distance, turning its head first to look at me and then its master.

“What am I doing here?” I began thinking. “He can’t even speak!”

All of a sudden the man signaled for me to follow him, and set off toward the entrance to a stone and timber building that must have been a cattle stall.

I followed, walking across ground covered with rotting manure, still swatting flies with my hand, and kept my eyes on his skinny back. He waddled in baggy trousers tied around the waist with string, stiff as armor, and from his bald head hung long straight greasy hair.

We entered the cattle stall. Three or four cows turned their great heads in unison toward us. They studied us for a while before turning back to carry on chewing.

The man stopped at a bench cluttered with frayed ropes and buckets. He lifted a thick dirty torn blanket that covered something. A second later, to my enormous surprise, I saw a computer monitor in front of me. One of those LCD ones, ultra thin.

The man looked for the keyboard which had ended up beneath the tangle of ropes. He sat on a small one-legged milking stool and switched on the computer.

I watched him, hardly breathing, standing behind him, behind his young bald egg-shaped head that shook a little because his manure-covered hands had already begun tapping at the keyboard.

“Where do you say you see it, that little light?” he suddenly asked, without turning, still tapping away.

I was astonished, for this man until just a moment before had made only grunts, had seemed unable to speak, and yet now, in front of his computer, he was talking easily, though with a strange accent that wasn’t from these parts, like that of someone who’d come from Albania, from the Balkans.

“There are some,” I thought, bewildered, “who also come here from Slav countries, from Romania, from the Ukraine, or from Macedonia, from Montenegro, from Albania, to these abandoned areas where they work as shepherds or tend cattle. Sometimes they set fire to woodland to extend their grazing land, and then they’re chased away and take their flocks somewhere else in the area …”

The man now turned toward me. He had opened an image full of small luminous dots that pulsated on the dark screen. He was pointing to it with his hand.

“It’s a map of all the sightings in this area,” he told me in his suddenly fluent tongue, with that strange accent of his. “I keep it updated. I’ve monitored the whole territory. There are continual sightings here, alien presences …”

“Well … I don’t know …” I tried to tell him. “It’s not certain it’s that … All I’m saying is there’s a little light that comes on in a place where there shouldn’t be anyone …”

The man looked at me, his head turned, still sitting on his stool, his eyes light in color, almost white, and the corners of his mouth still turned upward in a fixed, immovable smile.

“What’s it like, this light?” he asked.

“It’s difficult to say … It’s not exactly a light, it’s just a glimmer … But sometimes it seems to shine more brightly in the dark, to get bigger, to expand. Or perhaps it’s just an optical effect, just something that happens on the retina of the eye when you carry on looking at it in the pitch darkness at night …”

He showed me the map of the area with the luminous dots of sightings, and asked me to indicate exactly where I saw the little light.

I had some difficulty finding the spot. But then, with the help of the names of certain mountains and villages, and following the lines of some of the higher ridges above the small gorge, I succeeded.

He began talking again as he continued typing on the keyboard and making rapid movements of the mouse over that bench covered with clutter of every kind, in order to insert a new luminous dot in the grid at the exact point I had indicated.

“There you are, it’s here!” he said at last with a sigh that resembled joy, putting his dirty finger on that dark area of the screen where there was now a luminous dot.

He turned and looked at me with excitement.

“There’s never been any contact there!” he said “It’s the first time it’s happened!”

“I can’t be sure that’s what it is …” I tried to tell him again.

But he wasn’t interested, and continued on his own way.

“All the other luminous dots are sightings, sometimes repeated … contacts. This area is much visited by extraterrestrials. There are no military bases, no transmitters here. They come down here because there are uninhabited areas, they’ve nothing to worry about, they’re not going to be hunted out by magnetometers, cameras, radar, gravimeters, lasers, parabolic microphones, spectrum analyzers … When there’s a new sighting people come straight to me. Farmers, hunters, shepherds, people cutting wood in front of their houses at night, old women who live alone, standing all the time at their balcony railings or windows, even when it’s dark, they watch everything, they see everything. These are my lookouts, scattered over the whole area. Me as well, here, when I’m out at night herding the animals back to the stall …”

He was interrupted by the cow closest to us swishing its tail against the computer, trying to fend off horseflies. The man struck the tail with his hand to move it away, so it wouldn’t damage the screen.

“Come with me!” he said suddenly. He got off the stool, covered the screen with the old blanket and left the stall. He put two fingers
in his mouth and whistled. The dog ran up, its tongue hanging out. It jumped on its hind legs, leaping up from the ground, barking.

“Come! Come!” continued the man, or boy – difficult to say how old he was.

He climbed up a slope. His feet waggled in his large gumboots.

I began to follow him while the dog rushed ahead, as far as a herd of goats grazing a short distance away.

The man kept talking, or rather shouting, since in his agitation he had started once again to make those incomprehensible noises that didn’t seem human.

We arrived in the middle of the herd. The dog had begun racing around the edge, barking loudly and jumping up at one of the goats, nipping its leg, so that the herd would close up. You could hear their bells ringing out as they moved here and there to escape the joyous fury of the dog.

There was also one male goat with long curved horns, alone, on its hind legs, nibbling at the bottom leaves of a tree.

The man stopped.

“They’ve seen too!” he suddenly said, in a language once again comprehensible, human.

“Seen what?” I asked.

“Them.”

“Who?”

“The extraterrestrials! The aliens!”

I looked at him. He also looked at me, with his light gray, almost white eyes and his mouth with its turned-up corners.

“I’ve seen them too!” He added.

I looked at him, saying nothing, in the midst of the barking and noise of goat bells, while the billy goat carried on nibbling leaves, with its front legs leaning on the trunk of the tree.

“Them too …” he repeated pointing to the goats, and seemed unable to speak from excitement.

“Them what?” I asked again, as I didn’t understand what he was trying to say.

He swallowed two or three times, then relaxed.

“One night …” he continued, his voice suddenly fluent, “as I was coming down a path with the goats, taking them back to the stall, I saw a light I’d never seen before, coming up from a ravine. ‘What could it be?’ I wondered, because we’re on a fault line here and sometimes there are geoluminescencent phenomena caused by energy emitted by the earth’s surface. The goats started running down to the ravine, drawn by that light in the darkness. When I arrived and looked out over the edge of the precipice, I saw beneath me a dazzling globe of light. I shut my eyes, worried it was going to blind me. It was enormous. It was suspended just above the ground like a vast egg of light with no shell. I covered my eyes with my hand, but I could see all the same. It seemed as though that blinding light was continually relighting itself even though it was already alight, as though something was
opening up inside all that light, from which another light was coming out. The goats were running faster and faster down the slope, toward that door of light which had opened up inside the light. They rushed in, one after the other. Even the dog that was following them went in, even the billy goat. You couldn’t hear the sound of their bells any more. I started running after the herd, to try to get them back. But when I got closer, the door of light suddenly closed. The egg rose up into the air, with all that light that was too bright to look at. Then it disappeared, not gradually but all of a sudden, as though it was sucked into something else you couldn’t see, which was there but you couldn’t see it.”

“What could have happened? Where could it have gone?” I tried to ask, since the man had stopped speaking and was looking at me, waiting for me to say something.

“Well … who knows … a movement in hyperspace, a wormhole, teleporting …”

I looked at him amazed, looked at that young bald man who spoke with a thick foreign accent, who one moment had been uttering grunts yet a moment later, when he started talking about alien presences, began expressing himself fluently, as though he were two completely different people.

“What do I do now?” he continued. “I felt desperate as I went back to the stall, with no herd, no billy goat, no dog … The following night I returned … The egg of light was no longer there, but my herd and my dog were there waiting for me. The dog barked with joy when it
saw me arrive. The herd rushed up to me with their bells ringing away. Everyone knows, they’re stupid beasts, goats. If they’re stupid, then they’re beasts …”

Meanwhile he pointed to the herd, which continued running zigzag here and there under the assaults of the dog that wanted to show its master, perhaps also me, how clever it was, while the billy goat, unconcerned, a little way off, carried on nibbling, still on its hind legs and stretching its body and neck to reach the higher leaves.

“What’d happened? Why did they return them to me?” the man was asking. “Where had they taken them? Are they still the same goats?”

We looked at each other in silence. The billy goat suddenly stopped grazing, returned onto its four legs and began running along the path, taking incredibly high, nimble leaps on its cloven hooves, raising its back and arching its body, and it didn’t seem possible that such a large animal could move so lightly.

As I left, the man hailed me from a distance with his usual grunts.

“There’s nothing! There’s nothing!” I told myself as I drove down those narrow deserted curves that slowly took me back to where I live. “There’s just this desperate teeming, from every part, of life and death through time, through space, this desperate daydreaming …”

Now I’m here. It’s pitch black. It’s late at night. I’m gazing at that little light.

“I’m going to go!” I suddenly tell myself. “I’m going to see what’s there!”