Out in the Open (4 page)

Now, alone beneath the sun, he contemplated the four-cornered crater formed by those low, blunt perimeter walls, barely a foot or so high. He climbed onto one of the walls and looked about him for anything that might betray the presence of his pursuers or indeed anyone else. The land, shimmering in the heat haze, undulated innocently away in all directions.

He looked, too, for some sign of a well. He imagined that whoever had built the house must have done so near a spring or some underground stream. Without realising it, and keeping his eyes fixed on the ground, he gradually widened the radius of his explorations as far as the fig tree he had first noticed when he was sitting under the almond tree. He was surprised that it still had green leaves at that time of the year and did not smell of parched grass. Entranced by the sweet scent of the absent figs, a small, unconscious part of him allowed itself to be lulled into summoning up a pleasant memory. A summer afternoon perhaps, when he played beneath the fig tree at the railway station, at some still unsullied moment in his life. Hidden among the tender branches and the ripe figs. Drunk on the cavernous, labyrinthine abundance of the fruit's warm flesh. The changing colours as the figs ripened, their thin skin like a delicate frontier or a feeble façade created by the midsummer heat and intended to last only until touched.

He paused briefly beneath the perfumed shade and continued his search. Behind the fig tree he found the skeleton of a metal tower lying on the ground. Squares of rusted iron riveted together, at one end of which he could make out the rings that must once have supported the wooden arms. He thought it must be some kind of wind pump. He gave the structure a gentle kick, and the whole thing collapsed. At first, he couldn't understand why he hadn't noticed these remains from his viewing point beneath the almond tree, but seeing this heap of rust and iron smeltings from close to, what really surprised him was that anyone would have built such a small tower. Had it been a few feet taller, it might have caught some of the higher winds, which would have turned its arms faster and thus worked better for the farmer and his family. They might not then have had to leave, and that small heap of crumbling adobe would still be a home. He wondered how they hadn't realised something so obvious, and his first thought was that the farmer had perhaps run out of metal. Why then did he not use wood? How could anyone so unimaginative settle in a place like that? To judge by the state of the structure, his solution to the problem had arrived many years too late, and besides, who would have consulted a mere boy about how high to build a wind pump?

The feeling of his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth brought him back to reality. He had come there in search of water. Near where the wind pump should have stood, he found the remains of a dead fig tree growing up between the bars of an iron grating. Given the abundance of tangled branches, growing thick and fat through the interstices of the grating and merging seamlessly with each other as if they were made of jelly, he deduced that there had once been plenty of water beneath its roots. He inspected every inch of this strange beast – half-tree, half-grating – until he found an as yet uncolonised gap in the rusty metal. He tried to look through the gap, but could see nothing, although he did feel a cool, damp breeze blowing up from the darkness below. Perhaps, despite everything, he was in luck. Had the goatherd intended to guide him to that spot when he gave him the tin?

He picked up a small pebble and dropped it in. The stone did not take long to reach the bottom, but for the boy, hoping to hear the sound of clear, fresh water, the time it took stretched out long after the stone had reached its destination. He dropped in another pebble and waited, with all his five senses alert. From the bottom there came only a dull thud. Not the plop or splash one would expect from a well full of water. There was no sound either of stone hitting stone, and the boy decided that the bottom of the hole must be covered in the sticky mud left behind by some retreating subterranean stream.

Feeling flushed and agitated, he returned to the palm tree. His shirt was no longer in the shade. The cheese rind lay sweating on the cloth, leaving a large grease stain on it shaped like a coral reef. The tin was scalding hot and only the strips of meat seemed to have survived being left out in the sun. He stuffed the food back in his bag, put on his shirt and prepared to rest in the sparse shade and wait for the noonday heat to abate.

The hours passed slowly, but despite his hunger, he didn't touch the food, because he knew that eating would only make him thirstier. Again and again, the image of the water butt they had at home came into his mind. They used it to collect rainwater from the roof on the days when there was any rain. Even though it often didn't rain for months, the barrel was always full. His mother would go to the pump in the square carrying a three-gallon pitcher so that the water level in the butt never went below a mark cut into the inside of the barrel. This was an order issued by his father. She would go to the village square and walk along the line of pitchers left by the other women, all waiting their turn. When she reached the end of the line, she would set down her pitcher and return to the house to get on with her work. Every now and then, she would go back to where she had left the pitcher and move it closer to the pump as the pitchers ahead of hers were filled and taken away. And although almost all the pitchers had sprung from the hands of the same potter, everyone knew who each pitcher belonged to. The women who passed each other in the narrow streets would exchange murmured comments about how the line of pitchers was doing or whether the flow of water from the pump had improved. In summer, the flow – feeble at the best of times – would become a pathetic, infuriating trickle. And yet his mother still went to the pump every time the water in the butt sank lower than it should. He still remembered the afternoon when his father had burst into the room where they were sitting, grabbed his wife by the elbow and dragged her outside. He had stood her in front of the water butt, shaking her, before taking out his knife. His mother had opened her mouth, then buried her face in the folds of her black headscarf. With the point of his knife, his father had made a deep incision in the inside wall of the butt, then stormed off. Left alone, his mother had then slumped against the body of the barrel and slid to the ground. A little sawdust had remained floating on the surface of the black water.

Gazing up at the motionless fronds of the palm tree silhouetted against the blue sky, he wondered about his father's need to hoard water. Perhaps he was storing it up in order to sell it at a premium when the pump did finally run dry. Perhaps he wanted to protect his family in case there was another drought and he became the last man to leave the village. He had inscribed his domination of his wife on the inside of the wooden barrel, like an open wound to which slimy bits of algae attached themselves. A hidden mark or a secret code. A gash that was like a dagger held to his mother's throat.

Even though he had walked all night, the boy knew that he mustn't fall asleep. The sun would set eventually, but as it progressed, the shade would shift too, leaving him exposed. He lay down on the easternmost side of the shade, thinking that he would change position as the shadow passed over him. He raised his head and looked around so as to calculate where he would end his reptilian advance. Then he lay down again and allowed himself to be lulled by the rattle of the dry palm leaves rustling up above.

He fell asleep.

When he woke, he had been lying in the sun for nearly two hours. His skin, from his chin to his scalp, felt strangely taut. Every hair follicle quivered with microscopic anguish, which, multiplied a hundredfold, provoked in him a feeling of stiff bewilderment. His brain burned and buzzed with a kind of cobalt-blue electricity and his head felt as if it were about to explode. He crawled on all fours into the shade and flopped down, sending up a miniature cloud of dust.

In his delirium, a rubbery web of curves is swaying and hovering above an oily surface. There is no horizon to speak of, but somewhere a source of reddish light is slowly disappearing. Darkness is winning the battle. All shades and nuances are disappearing, every cerebral cell is gradually closing down, until one convolution of his brain stirs back into life, creating an embryonic state of alert. His will, like Laocoön struggling against the serpents, is battling to forge a path into his consciousness through the damp penumbra of his brain. He or someone living inside him has sat down on the sella turcica of his skull and taken control of his body. He activates the organs and opens taps so that the blood can once more flow through the channels that had fallen in upon themselves during that sudden temporary void. The boy sitting in the seat orders him to open his eyes, but he can't because his eyelids won't lift. A strange, minuscule wave passes over his forehead like a sheet of sticky sandpaper abrading his tender skin. Again he tries to open his eyes, but without success. His eyelids weigh as heavy as curtains made of embossed leather. Infernal screams push the walls of his brain inwards. He feels a pounding in his translucent temples and his eyes bob about in their sockets like ice cubes in a glass. The person sitting inside his brain is searching for alternatives. He travels through his hollow body as far as his fingertips. He sends a strong electrical charge through them, even kicks them, but there's not a flicker of movement. The warm sheet of sandpaper passes over his face and crawls over his teeth and gums. He is clearly trapped inside his head, and his only option now is to wait for death. He hears the tinkle of bells apparently immersed in grease. Anxious, clumsy footsteps approach. Someone has found his body and will perhaps bury it. However horrible his agony, at least the dogs won't eat him. Death begins with a grubby gnawing at the fingers. They either bite them off or chew them in situ, before moving on to the palms of the hands. The tips of tongues clean out the gaps between the thick tendons of the thumb. The crunching of the radius sounds like the gentle crackle of a bony firework display. The shattered bones hang from the dangling sinews of the muscles. There is no pain at any point; it is all simply a matter of waiting, either angrily or patiently, for the teeth to reach the centres of power. Whether death comes from an infectious bite or a torn ventricle is of no importance. All that matters is his inability to raise his body and, with his only half-eaten hands, stop that orgy of dogs and microbes. Something shakes his face. A hand perhaps. Then a blow. The child inside the child trembles, holding onto his seat. In the midst of this internal earthquake, he unwittingly activates some hidden mechanism and manages to prise the other child's eyes open. The face of the goatherd, only inches from his, interposes itself like a lunar eclipse between him and the sun.

‘Wake up, boy, wake up!'

The dog was licking one of the boy's hands as abrasively as it had previously been moistening his face and gums. The old man's sour breath burned the boy's newly opened eyes. He stammered out some incoherent comment as his gaze fixed on the goatherd's forehead, or more precisely on a pimple placed like a boundary post between his eyebrows. The man's face was dripping with sweat, and some drops slid down his nose, running over his skin like someone else's tears. He went to fetch something from one of the panniers on the donkey, then returned to where the boy was lying and knelt down beside him with a tin in his hand. He didn't need to open the boy's mouth because the sun had left the skin so tight that his mouth was like a buttonhole cut out of stiff leather. As tight as the skin of a suckling pig fresh from the oven. The goatherd took the precaution of administering the water by placing the edge of the mug on one corner of the boy's mouth, but the dog, circling inquisitively, distracted him for a moment and caused him inadvertently to tilt the tin so that the water poured straight down the child's throat. The boy choked and sat bolt upright like a crazed Lazarus. His absent gaze was still lost somewhere in his nightmare and, for a moment, he seemed barely human. The goatherd removed the tin and stood to one side as if fearing an imminent explosion. The glow of the sunset was slowly transforming reality, edging everything in red. The boy shattered the air with the cry of someone returning back down the tunnel that connects life and death. The old man heard that cry and, fortunately, was the only one to hear that broken voice crying in the wilderness.

In between giving the boy sips of water, with night fast closing in on them, the old man briefly reconnoitred the area round about and soon returned with a bunch of herbs and an abandoned honeycomb. He made a fire among the rocks, poured some oil into a blackened frying pan and quickly fried some plantain and calendula leaves. The strange odours from the leaves mingled with the medley of other aromas emanating from the animals and from that dark, drought-stricken plain. Hints of liquorice, oregano and cistus. Dried earth. Memories of the captive fig tree. Excrement and urine from the goats, sour cheese and the damp, warm stink of a fresh lump of dung deposited by the donkey a few feet away. The old man crumbled pieces of wax from the honeycomb into the hot mixture of fried leaves and, when he had mixed it all together, he spread the concoction onto strips of dirty rag. Lying next to the palm tree, the boy, partly out of weakness and partly out of necessity, uncomplainingly allowed the old man to wrap his head in these rags.

When the old man had finished, he arranged his blanket on the ground a few feet from where the boy was sitting and indicated that he should lie down on it. The boy got up and swayed slowly over to the blanket, like a reed with a very plump thrush perched on top. The man had provided him with the packsaddle as a pillow. The boy carefully laid his head down and made himself as comfortable as he could on the threadbare woollen blanket. From there, he perused the Milky Way from end to end as he listened to the old man coming and going and to the goats moving about nearby. That brilliant, peaceful band of stars. He identified the constellations he knew and, once again, followed the edge of the Plough that pointed to the North Star. He wondered if he would continue to walk in that direction when he recovered. He felt the stiff poultices cooling on his face, a mask in which the old man had left openings only for eyes and mouth. The damp, waxy cloth had not yet permeated through to his skin, which still felt horribly tight. He thought about what had happened, about this initial misfortune, which, right at the very outset, had left him lying prostrate on a blanket belonging to an old goatherd.