Distant Light (7 page)

I smile.

“I do that as well, sometimes …” I reply. “At night, when I hear them making noises too close to the house …”

I go silent again. I can hear the child has stopped washing the kitchen floor, has gone to rinse the cloth in the stone sink and has propped the worn-down brush nearby.

“Do you want me to help you do your homework?” I ask, when I see he has pulled his exercise books out of his schoolbag and has gone to sit at the table.

“No, thanks, I have to do it myself.”

He says nothing else for a while. I sit there in silence so as not to disturb him. From where I am, I can see him with his little shaved head bent over his exercise book, concentrating, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth. The only sound, anywhere, is the buzzing of insects thrusting head first into the fragrant rot of the blossom.

“How strange … how strange …” it occurs to me. “Those schoolbags you hold with a handle aren’t used any more, I reckon … Children these days go to school with shoulder bags, like backpacks …”

I get back to the car to go home and, when I’m already out of the wood and have turned onto the asphalt road and am driving down to the bottom of the gorge, where it’s not so steep and there are several mown fields, I see men in overalls who over the last few days have been burning the straw with flame throwers. They walk along the remaining strips, brandishing long tubes from which blue flames hiss out. An acrid smoke rises from the heaps already turned to ash.

I can’t be sure, but I seem to detect something odd about the behavior of the swallows. They still carry on darting through the sky as before, while I’m sitting there on the metal chair, in the last light of the day. And they still swoop down, madly following insects, flying almost into my face with their beaks open and shrieking and then soaring up to certain areas high up where there are many other
swallows flying around in such a frenzy that it’s hard to see how they can pass so close to each without ever colliding. But at the same time I seem to notice something different in their behavior, even though they carry on as always with their crazy life and keep it well hidden. As if they were here and at the same time they were here no longer. Something imperceptibly different in their way of filling the sky with their shrieking and swooping, as though they also had something else to do, something else to say.

“What are you up to?” I shouted out a short while ago.

“Can’t you see? We’re flying!” they replied.

“Yes, yes, I can see that!” I shouted again. “But you’re doing something else! You’re flying like I’ve never seen you flying before …”

“We always fly like you’ve never seen us fly before!”

I watched them for a while longer, watching in silence, hardly breathing. The whole sky was streaked by those mad darts which yet don’t fly like darts but swerve, thrust, suddenly go in the opposite direction, shrieking.

“What medical terms would they use to describe your hyperkinetic nature, your mental state: motor neurosis, hysteria, schizophrenia …?” I shouted out again at one of them that had come down lower than the others.

“In the meantime take this!” it replied.

A moment later I was hit on the forehead by a splatter from the tiny pulsating orifice between the feathers of that mad little body in flight.

The sky grew steadily darker. Then, suddenly, from the opposite side of the gorge, along the line of the other ridge, that little light came on in the dark.

“There! He’s back from school …” I say. “He’s just got home, he’s gone straight to switch the light on, after walking through the woods in the dark, all alone …”

I wasn’t wrong. Something enormous is happening in the sky, in those tiny brains of just a few grams that cross the space like darts, in all that teeming of wings that ruffle the atmosphere.

The swallows are preparing to migrate.

They appear as though life is carrying on as normal. They fly around madly, as usual, shrieking away. They streak across the sky with their beaks open, shoveling insects. They appear as always from their thousand invisible nests, up in the air, in rusty leaking gutters, in the holes between the stones and the collapsing roofs of this village over which they have taken possession, away from the world. Adult swallows, and others only just born and learning to take their first short mad flights, swoop down as usual and skim across the water in the troughs, almost smashing themselves against its stone edges. And yet, and yet … there’s a new frenzy, a new agitation, a greater disturbance in their behavior. They gather at points far up in the sky, shrieking even louder. Who knows what they are saying? Who knows what’s going on among those clouds of tiny bodies in flight? What’s sparked it all off? How do they first start gathering high up there, in the first flocks that circle in ever greater numbers over these deserted ruins
soon to be abandoned, perhaps without any of them even knowing it? More and more of them swoop madly down over the troughs, as though they were building up reserves of water for the great long journey who knows where, emerging like darts from the low archway and from the curve in the road and diving down to skim the water with their open beaks, shrieking, splashing the smooth surface with the tips of their frantic wings. Who knows if they know where they’re going? Whether at least one of them knows and is able to tell the others, or whether they decide on the route once they’re on their way, in those first immense circles full of myriads of tiny brains of a few grams that cross the sky in every part of the world, so dense that it is hard to understand how all those wings in there can move?

They perch in greater numbers on the edges of old derelict houses, on the roofs and the few remaining old wires. Then they rise up again in flight. It seems they’re going back to daily life, it seems as though nothing has changed, that there’s no plan to leave, that it’s been delayed for who knows what reason, for some imperceptible change of temperature and air composition that they alone have fast detected, living so high up in the sky. It seems still early to go. It’s still summer. And yet, the day after, all this incredible restlessness resumes. New and even larger flocks gather, once again they start flying raggedly here and there to attract other swallows that are still alone. But they break up again immediately
after, and in a few seconds each goes off in a different direction. But higher up, still higher up, other flocks are reforming. And then more still. Until suddenly the first great boundless teeming clouds of screeching swallows head off on that mad journey, not even knowing where they’re going.

Up there they knew it before anyone else, that something on the land has changed, that something enormous is going on, that summer is coming to an end, that the sky and the land will soon no longer be the same, that fall, winter will begin.

This morning, when I went to take the car from the stable, I saw a layer of swallows blackening everything, on the few wires and on the roofs, on the tops of the dry canes still sticking in the ground where vegetable plots had once been, as though they were all there to say goodbye to me before they flew off.

I drove down slowly so that I could take another look at them. I reached the village, then took a walk along its narrow streets, not thinking of anything. I arrived at the shop. This time there was no one there. Just the old woman who was shifting some sacks of seed. I took some pasta, some potatoes, a few tins, choosing those with tops that were less rusty. Every now and then I held my hand over my nose for the stench. A pair of fat cats, overfed by the old woman, came out from who knows where on hearing the sound of my feet in the empty shop. They started rubbing against my legs, their stomachs swollen like balloons. When it came to paying and putting what I had bought
into a plastic bag I’d brought with me, I tried asking the old woman whether there was a school in the village.

“Oh yes,” she replied in dialect, “there’s a school alright.”

“A night school …” I added after a while, as I was putting away the change.

She looked surprised.

“What’s a night school?” She asked.

“You know … where the kids go in the evening rather than in the day!”

“Never heard of it!” she replied. “I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never heard of it! I’ve always seen the children leaving in the day.”

She must have had a very itchy scalp, as she began scratching herself with the point of a knitting needle.

“Could you tell me where this school is?” I added.

She walked out of the shop in her slippers and showed me the way to get there.

It didn’t take me long to reach it. The school is long and low, L-shaped with just a ground floor and first floor, hemmed in by other houses, almost all of stone. It’s a building of a certain importance compared to the other buildings, with plastered walls, built perhaps a century ago when the village had more people and there were more children. It looks as though it’s been parachuted here from who knows where.

I stopped at the main entrance door and looked up. The large first-floor windows were all open, but it was hard to tell whether there were classrooms inside.

Suddenly I saw a small dark shape darting across and realized that a child in a black smock had rushed past one of the windows.

I felt my breathing stop.

Last night there was another earthquake. Not just one tremor but several, one after the other in waves, each lasting ten seconds or so.

I had just fallen asleep, after having lain awake in the dark for a long time, my eyes closed, not thinking of anything. But sleep hadn’t come. At least it seemed like that, because we can never be sure what’s going on in our mind in those states before sleep, when we fall for a few moments into a kind of catalepsy and then immediately afterwards we’re once again completely present, back from someplace where we’d ended up, even if we hadn’t known where. Who knows whether there are explorers who push so deep into unknown territories that then, when they turn back, they no longer remember where they were?

A few seconds after I had finally gone to sleep – or at least that’s how it seemed, since time no longer exists when we’re like that, in that state – the bed began to shake beneath me. There was a disturbing light rumble, the kind of rumble where you can’t work out whether you’re really feeling it or whether it’s a sensation you have of the enormous crashing of rocks and earth going on at that same moment in the lithosphere.

I opened my eyes, if I didn’t already have them open. The tremors continued unremittingly, one after the other, in that enormous silence. No anxious shouts of people woken in their sleep, no lights suddenly coming on, no noise of feet, of people running out into the night, half naked, in dressing gowns, with blankets thrown across their shoulders. Just me, unseen, in an unlit room, staring into the darkness, in this deserted place, feeling the vibrations against my spine of the beast moving beneath the earth’s crust, with that slight sense of dizziness and nausea and loss of consciousness.

I turned and huddled on one side, since that way I seemed to feel the tremors less. I pulled the sheet up over my head. The tremors stopped for a while, for a few seconds, a few minutes, perhaps more, it’s hard to say, I had no notion of time. Then they started again. One of them was longer than the others: at one point I could hear the bed and the bedside cupboard creaking. It came from below, from the kitchen, a vibrating sound, louder and louder, perhaps the plates and the cups rattling against each other on the draining rack.

“It’s all coming down now!” I thought, huddling even more tightly on my side and covering my head instinctively with one arm.

I imagined the first rumblings of the house as it ruptured, its stone blocks with barely any mortar separating from each other and breaking apart, the roof tiles coming loose and falling, the first lengths of wooden beam coming down and hitting me on the head, smashing my ribs, the bones of my pelvis, my legs, my jaws, my teeth, breaking my
skull with that poor brain matter inside still thinking and suffering in its desperate prison of broken bones and stones. I could barely breathe for the dust and with my lungs flattened beneath my broken ribcage. I was dying alone, in that sarcophagus of debris, far from everything, unseen, forgotten, unable to move beneath the weight of the collapsing house, who knows for how long, unbeknown to anyone in those faraway cities of the world illuminated in the night as far as the eye could see, breathing still with difficulty, with my brain half crushed, down there, who knows for how long, unable even to wet my lips in that terrible dehydration and thirst.

And yet, gradually, the tremors subsided. They stopped completely.

I waited a little longer, because sometimes it all seems to be over and then another more powerful, final one arrives. When I realized they really had finished, I turned on my back once more and tried to breathe more deeply, my eyes wide open in the dark.

I got up. I walked barefoot toward the window and in the darkness heard the sounds of my small bones that clicked as they touched the floorboards. I opened the window and also the small wooden shutter on the outside. I looked for a while at the peaks of the mountains and the black woods all around. Even the sky was black. Not a sound of night animals. Total silence. The whole world dazed after the violent tremors that even the animals felt, there amid the black foliage, hiding in their nests, even those miniscule, blind creatures and even the trees, even the roots that are the first to bear that terrible subterranean
upheaval, their terminal filaments reaching far down, smaller and smaller, with those invisible inverted cerebral sensors that feel before anything else the whole world turning upside down.

I looked toward the other ridge.

The little light was still there, as though nothing had happened. It was filtering through the woods, in the night, in the darkness.

“I wonder if he felt the earthquake too!” I thought.

Today, the boy let me in for the first time.

I arrived there in the early afternoon. I wound up the windows before getting out of the car – I had left them open last time, and when I’d come back to drive off I’d seen a fairly large animal, probably a fox, on its hind legs, stretching up with its pointed nose level with the window and looking inside.