Distant Light (12 page)

I stirred the rice with a spoon so that it didn’t stick to the saucepan before adding the water and the ingredients that I had bought.

The boy carried on watching me in silence, sitting on his step.

“Do you like eggs?” I asked.

“Yes, a lot!” he replied.

I broke four of them, two for me and two for him, on the edge of the saucepan where the butter was melting.

The boy got up. He took a freshly washed and ironed tablecloth and began setting the table, climbing onto the crate to take down some dishes and cutlery.

I switched off the rice and poured it steaming into the bowl. I grated some cheese over it and began stirring it with a spoon. It was still steaming as I served it on the plates. The boy looked on eagerly, making the gesture of licking his lips.

We began eating, first the rice, then the eggs. The boy cut them in half with his fork, to watch the yoke as it ran onto the plate. Afterwards, I pulled some oranges from the bag, as a surprise.

“I love oranges!” the boy exclaimed when he saw them.

I watched him as he peeled them with his little fingers and using his nails to help.

“What have you done to your hands?” I asked, since they looked as though they’d been damaged.

His little nails were chipped, his palms full of blisters and small cuts, his fingertips grazed.

“I’m doing some work,” he replied.

“What work?”

He dropped his head and smiled, at least that was how it seemed, or perhaps he was just biting his lips.

“I’m tidying up that little house in front …” he answered after a while.

There was a nice smell of oranges in the kitchen.

“I’m clearing out the rubble, the stones,” he continued. “I’m scrubbing down the floorboards …”

“Why are you doing it?” I asked, barely able to breathe.

He blushed a little and made no answer.

The panes of glass in the door were covered with a thick veil of water droplets.

Neither of us spoke.

“I’ll light the fire!” he suddenly exclaimed, jumping down from the chair.

I got up as well and began clearing the table. I folded the tablecloth and napkins and put them back into the drawer. I put the garbage into the plastic bag under the sink. I began to wash the few dishes, the two pans and the knives and forks.

Meanwhile the boy had cleared the ashes and dead embers from the back of the fireplace with a dustpan, taken some small bundles of twigs, arranged them in a pyramid and pushed some crumpled paper bags beneath them.

When I’d finished washing the dishes, I went over too. He was putting two larger logs on top of the pile.

Before lighting the paper with a match, he ran to get the two chairs that were still at the table, one by one, holding then up with the strength of his little arms. He put them in front of the fireplace.

He made me sit on one of them. Then he lit the fire.

The flames rose quickly from the crumpled paper bags to the first bundles of twigs which were already starting to crackle. Then still higher, until they lapped around the two logs full of loose filaments
and splinters, carrying with it a little smoke that disappeared up the chimney.

He too sat down, on the other chair.

“Let’s watch the fire!” he said.

We remained sitting by the fireplace for I don’t know how long, next to each other, because you can watch a fire for hours and hours and never get bored. It never stays still. The twigs crackle, snap, you see their little incandescent skeleton for an instant while the flames climb upward, begin to eat away at the inner parts of the larger pieces of wood, with that sound that resembles a sigh, constantly change color, turn blue, even green, merge into a larger knot with other little flames that rise here and there from the stack, starting from below, hissing, suddenly sending out clouds of sparks that hurtle far, as if from an explosion.

We drew back from time to time so that the sparks wouldn’t hit us in the face. The fire was now burning noisily. It had already enveloped the whole pile and seemed to want to demolish it. The flames leapt up into the chimney. Meanwhile, outside, up above, there was a lone smoking chimney pot, on the top of the empty ridge, in the middle of the woods.

We got up without saying a word each time a log dropped on its side and suffocated the flame, taking it with two fingers at the point where it hadn’t yet caught fire, or with the fire tongs, to rebuild the pile
and create gaps in which the fire could find oxygen and flare up again. Gradually we put on more logs as the first ones burned down and the flames needed new fuel. The boy in one way, I in another, because each person has a different way of conversing with fire. Then we went back to our seats and watched the blaze in silence.

There was a good warmth. The panes of glass dripped with condensation. I noticed beside me the boy’s head leaning slightly forward, his face lit up by the glow that came from the fireplace, his large eyes gazing intently into the flame.

We remained side by side for quite some time, not saying a word, while that little room grew warmer and warmer. Time passed. It began to get dark. I even seemed to doze off for a few moments, from time to time, in front of the fire which carried on burning new portions of the wood and of the world, over the large embers that pulsated in the half-light.

“Why are you fixing up that little house?” I remembered to ask him again, all of a sudden, stirring from a brief moment of drowsiness during which I could still see everything.

He remained silent, looking into the fire.

“That little house you are cleaning up, who is it for?” I asked again, with a shudder.

“For you,” he answered.

It’s really winter now. Everywhere is white with snow, as far as the eye can see. The mountains, the ridges, the footpaths, the bramble hedges, the ruins with collapsing slate roofs, the great immobile trees from which white powder falls when I pass beneath them walking in my rubber boots. The sky is also white. No more animal cries are heard, on the ground, in the air. Absolute silence.

This morning – I’m not sure why – I put snow chains on the car and drove to the village where that man lives with the animals, while the snow is still fresh, before it freezes and makes the wheels slide.

The snow swished and gave out that sound of soft catastrophe as the myriad structures of crystals, each different from the other, were annihilated and agglutinated under the press of the car tires.

I got as far as that village, advancing slowly, round the white curves, with windows down, in absolute silence, in the white world. The fresh snow that had not yet hardened chafed beneath the wheels. All I could see before me were expanses of white and it was barely possible to work out where the roads ended and the rest of the world began.

There was no one in that small open space by the church. All the
houses were closed up, just the odd chimney here and there that smoked.

I stopped the car. I reached that place on foot. But there was no one there. The mountain of manure was completely white. I walked down the short slope, wearing rubber boots, trying not to slip, and entered the cattle stall: it was empty. There were no animals, no computer screen on the bench, not even the bench was there. No goats, no dog, no billy goat. Nothing.

“He might have gone to spend the winter somewhere else,” I told myself. “He could have gone looking for other pastures. Or perhaps they’ve all climbed into one of those egg-shaped spaceships. They could be travelling who knows where …”

Even the little cemetery is white. I went down just now, walking slowly along the lane. You can only just see the light of the lamps filtering from under their caps of snow.

It stopped snowing for a short while, then started again. Now I’m sitting on the metal chair. I’m watching the little light on the other ridge. You can only just see that light too. It filters from a point of the wood that’s been wiped out, in the space crossed by a white vortex of snow.

“And then one day another little light will come on beside it …” I think, with surprise. “There will be two little lights instead of one. And I’ll watch them from here and I’ll say: ‘There, this terrible solitude is over. The penance is over!’ ”

This morning I found a dead moth between the mosquito net and the windowpane, where it had obviously become trapped without my noticing.

I’m not sure it was actually a moth, it looked like one of those little winged creatures that sometimes fly around the house, from who knows where, like the clothes moths that form invisibly in drawers, from those larvae deposited in wool that grow by incorporating its threads and then, at a certain point, emerge from obscurity and begin a new winged life. Small, invisible, troublesome animals that sometimes flap against your head in the dark, while you’re asleep, but which during their brief life undergo unimaginable metamorphoses.

In any event, it was one of those moths. But much, much bigger.

I opened the window, took it by one of its dead wings and went to throw it in the toilet. I flushed, but it didn’t go down. I waited for the cistern to fill up and flushed again. But it was obviously too light. It continued flying about in there, in the bottom of the toilet, in the whirl of water.

It went on like that all day. I went back every now and then to see if the moth was there still, if it had finally broken up. But it was still
there, floating on the water, extremely light but indestructible. Not a single fragment of its wings that looked so fragile had come apart. I urinated in the toilet, hitting it with the stream, from above. But it didn’t break up. I flushed again, the moth began whirling around once again at the bottom. As soon as the water stopped flushing down, the moth was still there, floating on the surface with its open, dead wings: indestructible, intact.

It’s still snowing outside. There’s an immense silence. Everything is white. You can hardly see the rest of the village and its ruins. The roads are closed, blotted out. It’s impossible to go outside because there’s no way of seeing where the paths end and the precipices begin. There’s also a heavy layer of snow weighing down on the roof of my little house, even its walls are almost hidden because the flakes arrive in flurries, brought by the wind, and stick to the stones, completely covering even the creepers, the dry shrubs and small trees that grow straight out of the walls, emerging from the gaps where they have taken root in the tiny seam of crumbling lime or even where there’s nothing. It’s hard to tell whether it’s the plant world that is working its way into the house or, on the contrary, whether it’s the house that is projecting itself outwards.

The ridge opposite is all white with snow too. I spent a long time looking, as soon as it was dark, to see if I could still spot the little light. But I couldn’t see anything, I can’t see anything, only the soft gleam
of the snow illuminated by the celestial vault that covers everything in the deepest darkness.

Before going to sleep, I went to look inside the toilet one last time. The moth was still there. I pulled the chain once more. It whirled around as the water went down. Then it reappeared, with its wings spread wide, immobilized at the point of maximum span.

I bent down, put my hand into toilet and pulled it out of the water. With the other hand I tore off a few pieces of toilet paper and wrapped them two or three times around the moth’s stiff little body so as to give it some weight.

I pulled the chain one last time.

Only then, wrapped in its shroud, was the moth finally swallowed up.

You can hear nothing. You can see nothing. The mountains, the sky, the woods, the precipices, the footpaths, the cobbled streets, the ruins and the few empty houses, the cable that crosses the village and still brings power to my house, who knows why, who knows where from, the balustrade, the metal chair with sunken legs in front of the steep white drop, the plant masses that emerge from the walls, all bent down under the weight of the snow … Plant forms also emerge from the walls of the other houses and ruins, actual trees and horizontal shrubs that sink their roots between the stones, sucking nutriment from their hard heart, while bushes grow out, dangling in the void, pushing their tissues and their fibers and their sap directly into space. There are ruins completely covered by them, you can’t tell if they are houses or slanting trees launching themselves into the void. The creepers have completely enveloped them beneath their blanket, from which small curved branches emerge that struggle to break out and free themselves from their terrible embrace.

When the winter ends, these old walls and these stones are covered with cruel new leaves and flowers. Clouds of newborn insects hum around them, come back to thrust themselves into their deep gashes,
they enter once again upside down into the wounds of the figs growing on the walls and twisting upward to reach the light, into the wounds of the wild apple and peach trees with their small riddled and tormented fruits. Then the fruits go dry, shrivel, fall, stay for a while attached to the ever-barer branches. The leaves fall too, cover the collapsing roofs, the roots press beneath the frozen slates to snatch a little sap from that mineral world suspended in space.

Plants go on dying and being reborn, dying again, everything inside the same circle of created pain. Their cells continue to struggle away desperately, continue silently reproducing and duplicating themselves, and they will carry on like this even when humans are no longer here, when they have disappeared from the face of this little planet lost in the galaxies, there will be just this whole torment of cells that struggle away and reproduce, for as long as some light still arrives from our little star. They will carry on relentlessly breaking and pulling apart the walls between whose stones their roots are clinging, the floors, the ceilings, they will burst out through the gaps in the broken windows, they will smash the few panes of glass still intact with their irresistible soft vegetal pressure, sending out ahead their tender waving pedicels into space in search of a place to land, they will smash and bring down roofs, they will overrun the paths, lanes, roads, emerging with their miniscule shoots looking up to space for the first time. They will split open the inner structure of matter they meet along their way, they
will find their way with their own atomic emptiness into its atomic emptiness, they will make the empty space whirl with those residues of electrically-charged particles that float in the void. They will demolish houses, roads, motorways far away from here, in some other part of the world, great deserted cities full of skyscrapers and towers, they will crash through window panes, garage doors, silently they will burst pipes, lift drain covers, with their vegetal torment and their soundless pressure, through car bodies, gas pumps, great glass shopping centers on the outskirts of cities. They will launch their vegetal pillars over skyscrapers, will rise over the roofs of skyscrapers with their furthest soft tentacles, will feel out new structures and new places to land in space. New reshaped cities, new visions of cities devoured by vegetation will reach the horizontal liquid masses of the seas, of the oceans, launching their tentacles ever further to reach the forests sleeping under their mute waters in deepest obscurity, to rouse them from their sleep and cover the world.