Distant Light (6 page)

I get up from the metal chair and stretch my legs. It’s late but I’m not tired.

I go out of the gate and automatically close it behind me, even though there’s no one here and I could leave it open. I walk toward the small cemetery below, with all those reddish lamps that flicker in the night. Through the village I carry on walking down the lane. All that can be heard are my footsteps under this immense dark and forgotten space full of avalanches of stars. On certain nights, when the season is right – which is now – there are hundreds, thousands of fireflies along the side of the road. They swarm about the thick dark foliage, with their myriad of tiny lights that flash on and off intermittently. It’s like walking in an enchanted land. I’m careful not to tread on those that cross the dark path, flying close to the ground, and make sure my legs and arms don’t hit those that float before me as if to show me the way.
Sometimes I take one of them in the palm of my hand and look at its poor little body transfigured by that light that filters out from its soft parts, through its tiny viscera.

“Ah … you’re still here! You’re here still!” I try telling them, among all that dark swarming with lights. “So you haven’t been wiped out by the hail storm! Where were you hiding while those hailstones were raining down from the sky and smashing everything? They stop at nothing, not even at the most beautiful scented flowers! Where do you hide in the daytime, when no one can see you? You too will have small holes, small underground burrows, somewhere to hide when it’s light, when the sky fills up with hail! But how do you manage to light up like that? What’s inside your poor little insect bodies? What power do you have to light up and transfigure yourselves like this, to produce such a light that can even be seen far away, and flash on and off constantly, for hours and hours? I know, it’s a mating signal. But why have only you, of all insects, invented such a signal? How have you done it? Where has that tiny, desperate invention come from, that little light. And why, if you then disappear straight after, wiped out, not to be seen again for the rest of the year, if you live just a few weeks, come out from who knows where and thousands of you begin flying around pulsating in the darkness of this night that surrounds us? Why? Why have you invented this inconceivable thing? Why do you attract each other like this, in the darkness, in the few moments when you’re in this world you cannot see? To carry on reproducing? But why? So
that other beings like you can carry on reproducing and flying about for a few weeks, for a few moments, in this enormous darkness that surrounds us?”

But they don’t know. And if they do, they don’t answer.

It’s raining again, pouring. There’s no chance of going out. I take the opportunity to do some laundry that was piled up in the basket, even though it can’t be dried outside. I’ll hang it on the drying rack here inside the house.

I go and split some wood in the cellar. I light a fire in the hearth. When it’s going well, I move the laundry and put it in front of it, so that it will dry more quickly. Not too close, away from those clouds of sparks that fly out from the logs as they turn to ashes.

Sitting on a chair with sawn-down legs, I watch the fire as it coils around the logs, its color continually changing. It whistles for a while and then suddenly explodes into a thousand great sparks, flaring up to lick the pinnacle of wood shards and bark. From outside, anybody who happened to be watching would see smoke rising from the chimney, the only one among the chimneys still there on the roofs of these empty and derelict houses.

I cook some pasta, drain it and eat it, sitting at the end of the small empty table, looking out the open glazed door, watching the rain that keeps falling heavily on the grass in front.

Some time has passed. I’ve washed the dishes, taken a cloth and cleaned the top of the cooker which was all marked, defrosted the fridge, chipping off the sheets of ice with a scraper, mopped up the pool of water that had formed in front of it and put the food back in, used some bleach to remove some patches of mold that had formed over the walls, then went and threw the garbage in a hole.

A short while ago, as I was doing these things, I heard a sudden clatter coming from the road. I ran outside to look, since no one ever passes here.

I stopped in front of the door.

A group of horsemen, all wrapped in transparent plastic capes to protect them from the rain, were going along the lane mounted on their tall horses.

I waved to greet them since they were the first people I’d seen here from when I first arrived. They responded in silence, from high up, with a nod of their heads under the hoods of their capes dripping with rain, while their horses cantered on, their hooves clattering on the stones in the lane. Under the transparent cover of their capes you could clearly see their clothes. Among them was also a woman, a girl it seemed, wearing jeans and boots.

Once they had gone I looked out from the gate. They had stopped at the two stone troughs. The horses had their heads in the water and were drinking. They seemed enormous in the small narrow space of the lane.

Then they moved on. They went under the arch, and then you could hear the clatter of the hooves even louder as they passed through the village and finally disappeared.

“There’s a horse fair!” I said to myself. “In one of the villages lower down. Every year, I think … They’ll be going there on their mounts. They must have wanted to take the longer route, through the woods and deserted villages, along paths they didn’t know …”

My heart was racing. I had to get some fresh air. I walked for some time, striding out, even though it was raining heavily, sheltering as best I could under an old umbrella that had spokes sticking out of it. I turned onto the path where the horsemen had come from. There were deep hoof prints in the muddy ground, already full of water. There were also puddles and trickles of water newly formed by the heavy rain running down from the mountains. Small streams, in fact, that flowed along the middle of the path forming a transparent veil of ripples in freshly made furrows or in others that seemed to be tire marks from a motocross bike, made by who knows who, who knows when, since I’ve never heard the sounds of motors, not even in the distance.

“That’s how streams, torrents, rivers are formed …” I said with excitement. “Masses of water that gradually grow and gather force, attracting and absorbing other smaller masses of water that flow down the steep mountain, while others are lost here and there without the strength to turn themselves into streams, into torrents, into rivers. Rivulets apparently all the same, formed like this, in some unknown
place, in the middle of nowhere where no one sees them, which then come out in the open when they are already large, rushing, and scour their beds in the mountain gorges, in the valleys, and then in the great plains, and no one can stop them any longer …”

I went again to the boy. When I arrived, after I’d driven slowly, at walking pace, along that narrow path submerged in vegetation, and crossed the small timber bridge that juddered under the weight of the car, and clambered over the broken trunks, and after I’d walked around the blank wall of the small stone house – little more than a ruin that had perhaps once been an animal stall with a hay loft above it like almost all the houses in these parts – the boy was washing the dishes, standing on an upturned crate to reach the tap.

When he heard my footsteps in front of the door, he turned his little shaved head toward me, looked at me with his round eyes, his mouth open with his broken tooth sticking out. Then he turned back and carried on washing the dishes.

“You want me to help you?” I asked, to break the ice.

“No, thanks, I’m used to doing it myself,” he replied politely.

I was standing at the door since I didn’t know whether I could go in. I watched the child’s little hands washing the plates and cutlery in the stone sink, carefully cleaning between each of the soapy tines of the forks, rinsing the plates until he felt they were perfectly polished and
made that squeaky sound under his fingers, his head bent forward, ignoring my presence.

I looked around. There was a sheet hung out to dry, on a cord stretched between two forked sticks, along with several smaller items: tee shirts, underpants, socks. A little further away there was another small house that I hadn’t noticed the first time, lower, half derelict, almost hidden in the trees.

“Does anyone live there?” I tried asking the child, pointing to the other house.

“No,” he answered.

He had finally finished rinsing the dishes and was drying them one by one with a cloth before lining them up on the plate rack, rising on the tips of his toes to reach it with his little hands.

“Isn’t there anyone who helps you?” I asked him, still standing at the door.

“No,” he replied.

“And you cook for yourself as well?”

“Yes, of course!”

“What do you cook?”

“Oh … I cook pasta, I cut up vegetables, grate cheese …”

I was watching him, watching him as he continued putting the plates away, trying one by one to find the groove in which to place them, stretching as far as he could with his little body, standing
on the crate, his shaved head straining as high as possible so as to see.

“But you’re always alone!” I couldn’t help saying.

He didn’t answer. There were many plates, suggesting that he hadn’t washed them for some while. He continued putting them away, concentrating, absorbed. He put the cutlery into their container, separating spoons, forks, knives.

“But does he really belong to this world?” I wondered.

He had finished putting the plates away. He got down from the crate and carefully dried his hands, rubbing the cloth well between each of his fingers.

“And your hair?” it occurred to me to ask. “Who cuts your hair?”

“I cut my hair myself!” he replied.

“Really? And how?”

“With the electric trimmer!”

“Ha! I don’t believe it!”

He became excited. I saw him turn and run toward the wooden stairs that went up to the first floor, with their steep rungs that he had difficulty climbing with his short legs.

The sound of his footsteps could be heard running over the floor boards above.

He climbed back down holding something black and came almost to the doorway to show me.

I bent over to look at it, without crossing the threshold, since he hadn’t invited me in.

In his open hand, the boy was showing me a long electric trimmer with a single head.

“This kind of razor hasn’t been in use for a long time! How did you get it?”

“I found it here,” he answered.

I looked at it closely, from a meter away or not much more, since he’d come right to the door and I too had moved forward a little to take a proper look at it.

“And how do you manage to use it? I asked.

“Like this!” he replied, beginning to move the trimmer, still switched off, over his small head, making the noise of the motor with his mouth.

Then he stopped and suddenly took a step back. I don’t know why, but I took a step back as well.

I stayed there for a while, saying nothing, while the child ran back upstairs to return the trimmer.

I looked around, waiting for him to return. There was a small colored ball under the broken bench by the door.

“He plays games then!” I thought. “Now and then, alone …”

The little boy returned but he didn’t come back to the door. He began rummaging with both hands inside a schoolbag. He pulled out two exercise books, two pens, a pencil, a pencil-sharpener and two
erasers. He put them all on the table and sat down in front of them.

He opened an exercise book.

“What are you doing?” I asked, from the other side of the door.

“I’m doing my homework!” he answered.

I looked at him in great astonishment.

“Why? You go to school?”

“Sure!” he replied, opening another exercise book.

He began moving his pencil the exercise book, taking no more notice of me.

I didn’t know what to say or do.

The child had begun sharpening his pencil, carefully studying the slit along the blade where the powdered graphite came out so as to stop just a moment before the point broke.

“Can I come in? I tried asking.

“Sorry,” he answered with his little voice, “but I’ve got my homework to do now.”

And so, every two or three days, when I go there, I sit on the small broken bench by the door so as not to remain standing up all the time, while the boy works away at his chores, washing his clothes, or the dishes or the floor, pushing a rag back and forth on the end of a worn-down brush.

“So you go to school then …” I say, to start a conversation.

“Yes, sure!” he replies, continuing to scrub the kitchen floor with the rag.

“But what school do you go to? Because sometimes I come in the morning and you’re here.”

“To night school.”

“There’s a night school around here?”

“Yes, down in the village.”

“And you go the whole way on foot, by yourself, in the woods?”

“Of course!”

“Do you want me to take you?”

“No thank you, I’m used to it.”

I say nothing. I watch him, leaning forward from the bench so that I can look inside the kitchen, while the little boy carries on pushing
his improvised scrubbing brush, his face red with exertion, stopping every now and then to answer my questions.

“And the light?” I ask again, after a while. “When do you switch the light on? Why do I always see it switched on at the same time, from my house?”

“I switch it on as soon as I get back from night school.”

I fall silent again. Even from where I am, I can hear the noise of his little breath under the effort.

“And what do you do about the animals,” it occurs to me to ask, after a while. “You’re in the middle of the woods … How do you keep the animals away?”

He stops for a moment or two, and comes up to the door to answer.

“I bang some lids!” he tells me, looking at me with his round eyes. “I take two lids from the cooking pans and bang them loud to frighten them and keep them away!”