Distant Light (9 page)

Then, all of a sudden, a slight sound of footsteps could be heard coming from very far away.

A few moments later, several children started coming out of the door, one after the other, in silence, with their black smocks and their schoolbags.

My legs were trembling slightly, I watched them, hardly breathing, hidden round the corner in the dark, as they came out of the doorway and walked down the few steps that brought them level with the street. I tried to make out the shaved head of the boy in the midst of the others.

A few more came out. I thought that was all, but another two emerged.

Then no more.

“He’s not there!” I thought, at last.

And yet, when it seemed as though there was no one else, he too appeared.

The door closed immediately behind him, without a sound.

Each of the children went off in their own direction, none of them exchanging a word, or any gesture of goodbye.

I was about to come out from the corner where I’d been hiding, to go up to the boy, to take his schoolbag and take him back to his little house far away in the middle of the woods. But then I stopped myself, since he’d already said no to me when I’d offered before.

“What world is this?” I wondered as I watched the children walking alone in the dark, with their little bare legs sticking out below their smocks, and their schoolbags. “Where, while everyone’s asleep, there are dead children who come out of night classes in silence, alone, and no one knows about it, and no one sees them. They find no one standing there at the door, they don’t even look up in the dark because they
know there’s no one waiting for them. They go off alone, who knows where … That boy will now cross the deserted village, will take the lane up as far as the beginning of the ridge, then the other narrower path overgrown with vegetation and brambles which climbs through the woods, deep in the night, in the darkness, alone, and will reach his little house, and switch on that little light … How sad it is for dead children like that when they leave dark schools, at night, alone! But then … isn’t it just as sad for those alive?”

It’s getting colder. I begin to feel the air much more, against my face. Even the light is colder – clearer and colder. Something’s also happening to the animals, big and small, on the ground and in the air. I notice it when I’m sitting looking out above this steep drop in the evening or at night, or when I’m walking along the paths in the woods. I seem to be hearing different sounds, a sort of bustle, among the leaves of the trees overhead that are beginning to lose their greenness and dry up, behind the bramble bushes from which come the patter of paws or little padded feet that run away at the sound of my footsteps, but at the last moment, as though they were busy with other tasks, so absorbed in their thoughts that they’re only aware of my presence when it’s almost too late. And slow, eerie, grunts from points very close.

I still go every two or three days to visit the boy. I stop the car in the usual place, by the broken tree trunks. I go into his house without saying a word. Sometimes I take a few things I’ve bought, in a plastic bag that he then uses for the garbage. He hasn’t said no.

“Do you want to stop and eat with me?” he asked unexpectedly this morning when I arrived.

I’d gone there rather earlier than usual because I couldn’t manage to do anything else, I couldn’t manage to be anywhere else.

This time it was me who hesitated. I was about to say no, but then I saw the boy smiling at me for the first time.

I could see that small broken tooth between his lips that were always slightly open – perhaps he didn’t breathe so well through his nose due to his adenoids.

“How did you break that tooth?” I happened to ask, just like that, though it had nothing to do with anything.

“In a fight!” he replied, raising his little head in a gesture of pride.

I stood there, rigid, without responding.

I didn’t know what to say. I kept silent. The boy also looked at me in silence, with his round, serious, anxious eyes.

“Who’s cooking?” I then asked, with a smile, to break the long silence.

“Me! Me!” exclaimed the boy, running toward the cooker and the sink.

He began pulling the vegetables out of the bag that I’d brought, washed them under the tap, standing on the upturned crate, and immediately began slicing them, rapidly, holding them firmly with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife.

I sat on the chair, facing him, not saying a word. I watched his little hands in amazement and his little nails that moved back at lightning speed as the knife advanced, cutting more and more pieces of
vegetable. And then as he filled the pot beneath the tap, holding it with more and more difficulty as it gradually filled with water and its weight grew, standing on the upturned crate to reach the level of the sink, and then as he put the pasta in as soon as the water had started to boil, quite a long time later, because water up here takes longer to boil.

“What’s your name?” I blurted out.

All at once he became serious.

“I don’t know,” he answered, shaking his little head.

“What do you mean?”

He turned and looked at me, helpless.

“I can’t seem to remember.”

“But you must have a name!”

“I don’t know.”

But I realized he was still thinking, that he had something else to add.”

After a while, he turned and looked at me again.

“My schoolmates call me Putty” he suddenly said.

“Why?”

He shook his head again.

“I don’t know.”

Then, for a while, I just watched him as he was preparing the food in front of the sink and at the cooker, standing on the crate, with his back to me.

I got up, since it was almost ready and it was time to set the table.

“The tablecloth is there!” he said, pointing to one of the drawers. “I’ve only just washed and ironed it.”

“Really? You iron as well?”

“Of course!”

“What with?”

“I found an old iron here.”

I took the tablecloth from the drawer, all neatly folded and ironed. I opened it, spread it over the table and put two napkins in front of the two places. I took dishes, cutlery, and glasses, reaching over the boy’s head to get to the plate rack while he was dressing the salad in a plastic bowl.

“Try the pasta as well, to see if it’s done!” he said, as he bit a strand of spaghetti that he’d pulled from the pot with a fork.

I took some too, and chewed it.

“Yes, it’s done!” I said.

He switched off the gas, lifted up the full pot, with difficulty, holding the handle with both hands above his head. He turned toward the sink where the colander was ready.

I went up to him. I took the colander, lifted it up, turned the steaming mass of spaghetti into it, holding the pot as well, and then dropped the spaghetti into another bowl that was already there on the cooker.

The boy then took a large piece of butter that he’d cut with a fork from a block he’d taken out of the fridge. He began grating cheese over it with a small narrow grater, the kind normally used for nutmeg.

I stirred the pasta, to melt the butter and the cheese, and placed the bowl in the middle of the table.

We sat down. We began serving ourselves with a large fork with long wide prongs that the boy had pulled from the cutlery drawer.

He finished putting the pasta into his dish, I into mine. There was still a little left in the bowl.

“Take it!” he said. “It’s too much for me. I’m only small.”

We began rolling the spaghetti with our forks.

Neither of us spoke. All that could be heard, in the silence, was the light sound of chewing. I was just aware of the boy’s head, eating intently. He seemed pleased, I thought.

“It’s good!” I said eventually.

He lowered his head a little and blushed.

From time to time you could hear the sound of water as we filled our glasses from a bottle that the boy had filled from the tap and had placed in the middle of the table before we’d sat down.

We stayed like this for a while, with the empty dishes in front of us. Then the boy took them to the sink. We put some salad onto our plates and began to eat it.

I watched the boy as he chewed the salad and used his fingers every now and then to wipe away the tiny streaks of oil that were escaping from his lips. He also looked at me every now and then without lifting his head.

You could hear the sound of the old refrigerator, the kind that still
had a handle, which went off every now and then, and then came back on again without warning, vibrating a bit, as though with a small shiver.

“How did you die?” I asked him, in a low voice, a whisper.

The boy lowered his head and let out a sigh.

“I killed myself,” he replied, also in a low voice, a whisper.

“Why” I tried asking him.

“They hurt me,” was all he said, frowning, without raising his head.

I remained completely silent, rigid, for a moment.

“Yes, I know, this is a terrible world to live in …” I heard myself saying.

The night is black. The sky is still full of black clouds. There’s no sign of the stars, no sign of the sky, as I go down that small twisting road that passes the cemetery. There aren’t even any fireflies, their brief season has ended. You can just about see the enormous black outlines of the trees silhouetted against the clouds. There’s no sound of night animals, of those small birds of prey that lie hidden among the undergrowth and let out, who knows why, that cry of theirs when they hear the noise of my footsteps in the dark. On one side, just beyond a small metal barrier that they’ve put up, who knows when, there’s a steep drop over which power cables pass, taking electricity to the villages below, looping down between one pylon and the next, over a narrow strip of cleared woodland.

I walk and walk so as to feel this movement of bones and muscles that continues onward in the dark. And nerves and tendons and connective tissues and vertebrae. And the brain matter that sends the signals that trigger this movement which seems involuntary to me, as though it were happening somewhere else. As though it were going forward by itself, without needing to receive any impulses, while the brain is elsewhere, inaccessible, alone, infinitely distant, and limits itself to registering other impulses that have occurred who knows why, who knows when, on a separate track of memory, already long past or not yet activated.

I turn another curve and emerge from an area of denser woodland. I suddenly see before me that small colony of lamps that flicker in the night.

I move still closer. I arrive at the gate, closed with a simple piece of twisted wire that can easily be undone. I stop in front of it. I gaze for a while at the lamps on the vaults and at the small space in the middle with those mounds of earth that have no grave stones and no names.

I undo the wire fastening and go inside the small cemetery. I take a few steps between those mounds of earth circled by lamps.

“Could that child, could he too, be buried here?” I wonder all of a sudden, startled. “Could all those buried here be suicides?”

A little sunshine has appeared. If I look out from the window of the room where I sleep, I can see the chestnut wood below is losing its leaves, that pale petrified point that soars up, high above the branches still alive, over the mantle of leaves that are gradually curling up. That tip is now rushing ahead, and the rest of the tree following it. It’s the same in other parts of the wood, where in early spring those pale limbs stripped of their bark were all the more prominent while all around, on other branches, tender green leaves were starting to bud. Along the sides of various footpaths there are whole trunks or enormous bases of trunks felled and cut, with roots severed and turned to marble, looking like blocks of stone.

There is something, at one point along the path that you can see from here, which glints unbearably when the sunlight catches it at a certain angle, so strong that it hurts your eyes to look at. I know what it is. It’s the metal base of a bed fixed to the remains of a fencepost with two rudimentary hinges and used as an entrance gate in a place where there must once have been a vegetable plot. Its steel frame has obviously not yet been attacked by rust. At a certain time of the day, at
a certain angle of the sun, it sends out piercing rays of light, so strong that you have to look away.

“Who knows who once slept on it?” I find myself thinking. “When this village was still inhabited, when that bedspring still lay suspended on a metal or wooden frame and supported a mattress that got more and more matted, whose wool was perhaps taken out and carded from time to time, or perhaps not, perhaps the wool carder didn’t come up to villages like this, perhaps there weren’t enough people to justify the journey, with that machine full of nails that turned in opposite directions and tore apart the matted wool … Someone who slept alone each night on the mattress as it grew harder and harder, during the cold winter months, in the upper floor of one these houses that have now become ruins overgrown with vegetation where the bats come to hibernate, hanging from the beams, where the hay was once kept and the animals lived on the floor below, in the cattle stall, with those three broken stone steps up which the cows clambered, sliding on their hooves, spurred on by the yells of someone behind who was beating their rumps with his hand and pushing them hard to get them in. Houses with no heating because the fireplace was on the floor below, the fire had gone out, there were just a few cold black embers in it by then. Or some old woman left on her own. Or, before that, a younger couple. And the man would lie on the woman, on that same bedspring, entering her half asleep and numb with cold, not even washed because
the water would freeze at night, with a woolen shawl over her nightdress pulled up to her hips, he with his work sweater riddled with holes that he wore even at night, ever faster inside the body of the woman who carried on sleeping, her breath now and then growing heavier, more rasping, perhaps because of the man’s weight on her body or perhaps because she was snoring, and then the spring would creak a little more loudly, and at the end, both of them with the blankets pulled up to their heads so as to stay warm. And like that each night, every night, while something grew in the darkness inside the belly of that woman half asleep and numb with cold, on these bedsprings that are now used here and there as gates for abandoned vegetable plots, some desperate little being with its tiny tail made its way up her vaginal canal to be the first to break the membrane of one of the eggs that teemed blindly inside the blind matter of her flesh, to give life to new bodies and to new little tailed beings and to new eggs in the midst of all that vegetal desperation and that coldness. Why? For what reason? Like those shoots that are everywhere and climb up the sides of trees almost suffocating them, always higher, higher, their leaves arriving almost at the top of the tree around which they have grown until they have imprisoned it. The same thing that also happens for the beings of our own species. All these lives that become entrapped with each other, this continual creation of colonies to occupy more and more portions of territory and to take it from others. Why? Why? To perpetuate our own DNA? But if then, after only four or five
generations, a blink in time, nothing of our chromosomal inheritance and our original DNA is left in new beings that have come to life, after four or five generations they will perpetuate nothing of their DNA in the new beings they have brought to life! I don’t know about the trees, the brambles, the cruel lichwort that invades everything and always looks exactly the same, identical leaves, the same stems with their strange reddish color that snap immediately as soon as you pull them up, while meantime the remainder of the plant carries on sprouting relentlessly, producing always the same columns of wood that rise up toward the light. Whereas individuals of our own species all look different from each other, or are different in appearance only, or we imagine them to be like that when in fact we are looking at them through the distorting diaphragm of the atmosphere, behind the dense black veil rippled by the wind, and from the contours of their faces we seek to interpret what is happening in the dark funnel of their lives, like when we see that sudden splash of sea spume that rises up close to the shore from the waves of the black sea, of night …”