That first blast of putrefaction soon dissipated. Before him lay a kind of tub overflowing with iridescent blues and creamy whites, with globular shapes that twisted and turned in every possible direction. The old man was expecting him to gut the goat, then cut it up just as he himself had done with the rabbit and the rat. So overwhelmed was the boy by the complexity of the goat’s entrails that he didn’t know what to do. Sleeves rolled up, knife in one hand, he looked at the goatherd and shrugged.
‘Stick your hand underneath its guts, feel for the point where they begin and make a cut right there.’
An hour later, the guts were lying next to the pile of corpses like some goatishly ironic joke or a Dantesque vision of the future or a warning from a hit man. On the way, he had to stop several times to pick up bits of intestine that slipped from his embrace.
During the hours that followed, the old man continued issuing orders to the boy, who silently carried them out like a tool being wielded by the mind of another.
He began carving up the goat, dislocating its legs and then crudely deboning them. He cut as many slices as he could from the resulting lump of meat, placed them on a stone and salted them liberally. At one point, he made the mistake of wiping the sweat from his brow. The salt penetrated the wounds on his sweat-moist cheeks. The pain was such that he clenched his eyes tight shut and felt a kind of hollow forming inside him. He didn’t cry out. He merely gazed up at the sky and wept like a St Sebastian full of arrows, his hands burning and his skin cauterised by the salt. He spun round and round, holding his hands out, palms facing him, as if shading the glowing lamp of his face. Had there been a swamp nearby, he would gladly have hurled himself into it. The old man watched this agonising dance and even tried to get up, not that he could have done much to help. The boy knelt down and fell back on the ground, still keeping his hands away from his face. The old man reached out one arm to him and held it there for as long as he could. Then he slowly let it fall and closed his eyes.
In the silky light of the half-moon, the boy unwound the string from the handle of the knife, his eyes still red and his face still stinging. Having hunted around for a couple of sticks and stuck each in a hole in the wall, he then strung a piece of string between the two sticks and on it hung the strips of meat. The result drew a grotesque smile on the bluish stones, a smile that soon attracted the flies. Then he picked up his tools and arranged them around the old man, as if he were a sailor shipwrecked on a beach. Again following the goatherd’s instructions, he rounded up the three surviving goats and tied them together using the collars from the bells of those who had been killed. Then he tethered one end to a nearby rock so that they were all within reach of the goatherd’s crook. He put the saddle pad and the blanket on the donkey, tied the two empty flasks together and slung them over the donkey’s back like a pair of boots.
By dawn, they had finished their preparations for the journey. There was scarcely any breeze, and the stones of the castle wall were quietly doing penance for the heat they had absorbed during the day. The old man and the boy ate what little remained to them: a few crumbs of bread, a handful of raisins salvaged from the ground and some wine. When they had finished, the old man asked the boy to sit down next to him.
‘I’m going to teach you how to milk a goat properly.’
The boy looked at the goatherd in surprise. At any other moment, those words would have filled him with pride. However, it seemed strange to him that, in their current situation, the goatherd should want to waste precious time on such a thing.
‘It’s getting late. If I don’t leave soon, it will be daylight.’
‘I know it’s late.’
‘You can teach me when I get back.’
Several black birds flew past, heading for the well. Their wings creaked as they flew across the dark sky. The donkey, head down, was moving forlornly about in front of them. The boy’s eyes filled with tears, but he didn’t cry or even sniffle. He simply stayed where he was next to the bent old man, feeling the sky brushing the earth and aware of an ancient murmur emanating from the rocks. He imagined a watermill in a beech wood and horizons like the jagged blade of a saw. The sky penetrating and piercing the earth, and the mountains rising up to meet it. The home of the gods. The paradise the priest had so often spoken of. A green carpet on which the trees rested nonchalantly, unaware of their own lush foliage. Maples, fir trees, cedars, oaks, pines, ferns. Water springing eternally up between the rocks. Cool moss covering everything. Pools where transparency was the norm and whose stony beds glinted in the sun. Rushing streams temporarily tamed and on which the light traced rainbow spirals.
The boy hastily swallowed his tears and got up. Without even bothering to untie it from the others, he led one of the goats over to the old man. Then he sat down next to him and waited while the old man placed the tin in its proper place. When he had done this, he asked the boy to take hold of the teats. The boy formed his hands into loose fists, put them around the teats and squeezed. Then the goatherd positioned the boy’s thumbs so that the nails pressed the teats against his other fingers. He put his hands over the boy’s hands and, without a word, manipulated the teats, making the milk flow freely. And in doing so, the old man passed on to the boy the rudiments of his trade, handing him the key to a knowledge that was at once vital and eternal. The key to extracting milk from animals or making a whole wheatfield grow from an ear of wheat. They had soon filled the tin and the empty oil bottle, leaving the goats completely dry. They kept the bottle for the old man’s breakfast the next day and shared the milk in the tin between them.
Later, once he was mounted on the donkey, he took one last look at the goatherd, who was lying down now, his beard sticky with rivulets of dried milk. He appeared to be asleep or unconscious. A fine breeze touched the boy’s cheek, reminding him that, only a while before, his face had been like a fiery planet.
‘Be very wary of the people in the village.’
The old man’s voice emerged from some indefinable place, from somewhere beyond exhaustion.
The boy turned his gaze north, towards his uncertain fate. Then he slung his knapsack on the packsaddle and dug his heels into the donkey’s sides, to which the donkey responded by emitting a series of sour belches and breaking into a trot that carried them away from the castle.
8
THE WAXING CRESCENT moon hung in a clear night sky. Thousands and millions of stars, many of them already dead, winked down at him from above. He had to head north along the towpath until he reached a lock. From there, he was to follow a gentle downhill path for about two hours until he came to a small oak wood, from where he would be able to see the village. The well was in the village. Assuming he didn’t get lost, he should, according to the old man, be within sight of the houses by dawn.
Boy and donkey travelled beside the dried-up aqueduct, from which side channels occasionally branched off, only to vanish into the barren fields. Empty, bluish fields. From time to time, the boy nodded off and almost lost his balance. Then he would briefly become more alert and beat the donkey with his stick, and while this succeeded in eliciting protests from the poor, startled creature, it failed to make it trot any faster. The boy was aware that they were only moving at a walking pace, but he still preferred to ride rather than walk, so as to preserve the little strength he had for when they reached the well.
‘Be very wary of the people in the village.’ Each time the donkey stumbled, the boy would wake, pondering the old man’s words with a mixture of disquiet and satisfaction. He didn’t know if the goatherd had said this because his own life depended on him returning with the water or simply out of a desire to protect him. Then his neck would droop and his head would once again fall onto his chest and he would again become lost in the magma of his thoughts and memories. The hole he had dug, the palm tree, the poultice, the arrow slit, the goatherd’s penis, the bailiff’s cigarette ends.
The boy spotted the sluice during one of his brief waking moments and, after that, he did not f
all asleep again. To urge the donkey on, he dug his heels into the donkey’s sides and squeezed its flanks with his thighs, but received no response. When they arrived, he dismounted and, for the last few yards, led the donkey by its halter, before releasing it to nose around for dry stalks to graze on. The boy scrambled up the bank to the tank into which the water from the aqueduct had once flowed. The aqueduct formed a T-junction here. Two iron sluices operated by winding gear controlled the flow of water. From his vantage point, he looked southwards down the gap-toothed channel until it became lost in the darkness. The bottom of the aqueduct was nothing but dry mud. He turned then and looked north, where the path curved down towards the plain. No oak woods and no villages, only bare, eroded slopes ribbed with stones.
Just as the old man had predicted, the boy reached the wood shortly before sunrise. He tethered the donkey to the low branch of an oak tree and walked over the bed of serrated leaves and empty acorn cups as far as the northernmost edge of the wood. From that dark fringe of trees, he had a clear view of the village, which consisted of perhaps twenty houses, a single street and a church situated midway between the wood and the village. A few yards from the church was a cemetery, and above the cemetery wall he could see the swaying tops of three cypresses like upended paintbrushes. The same slight breeze stirred the branches above his head. The occasional empty acorn fell onto the soft ground that crunched underfoot, and he was reminded of his own empty belly. The village showed no signs of life. He could make out a few enclosures that might be corrals, but there were no sounds of any farm animals. Maybe it was deserted, he thought, or maybe it was simply too early for people to be up and about. He decided it would be best to make his first foray without the donkey. Then, if the conditions were right, he would return for the donkey, load it up with water and lead it back to the castle.
He emerged from the wood at the first light of day, taking care not to stumble. His boots still afforded his feet some protection from the ground, but the front part of one of the soles had come loose, allowing the boot to fill up with grit. When he crouched down to empty it out, he noticed that the backs of his hands were still smeared with soot and blood. He touched his cheekbones and felt the scabs that were beginning to form. He still stank to high heaven. The breeze veered slightly, and he could feel the cool dawn air through the tears in his trouser legs. If there were any dogs in the village, they would soon begin to bark.
The thought of dogs made his stomach contract, because the bailiff used to keep a black one as a guard dog. A Dobermann he called it. Pointed ears on a head that seemed carved out of stone, and a tar-black snout that would nose around among his clothes and make him tremble. The bailiff had often deliberately submitted him to the dog’s presence whenever he resisted his desires. That thought was like a cold chisel cutting into his tender fontanelle or a sharp instrument gouging into his elbows in search of white bone. He hunched down until he was hugging his knees and, for the second time in a week, he peed his pants. The light was growing brighter around him, picking out new shapes in the landscape.
He covered the distance separating him from the cemetery on all fours. Sand clung to his damp crotch. When he reached the nearest wall, he stood up and circled round until he reached the westernmost corner. From there he could see some of the houses, but not the well, because the church was in the way. Head down, he crossed the area separating cemetery and church and got as far as the portico. As in his own village church, the pillars supporting the roof were connected by a continuous row of stone benches, interrupted at one point to provide access to the church. The area was carpeted with the leaves the wind had blown in from a nearby acacia tree and deposited in untidy piles around the benches. The door, hanging by one hinge, seemed about ready to fall off. He followed the filthy, crumbling wall round to the apse. Broken tiles and bits of plaster littered the ground, and it was clear that the church was no longer in use. This was a discovery that both reassured and worried him in equal measure, because if no one was taking care of the church, that was because no one attended it any more, and he would probably not have to hide from anyone. On the other hand, the lack of inhabitants could also mean a lack of water. He positioned himself by the apse wall and from there, at last, had a panoramic view of the village. He saw sunken roofs and a few gaping windows, as well as a large wood-and-metal harvester like a Trojan horse devoured by scrub.
He entered the village by the same path that had led him into the oak wood, although, for the last stretch, he had chosen to go across the fields instead. On either side of the dirt road, he found either locked and barred houses or broken-down doors through which the same scene could be seen over and over: fallen beams that opened up great holes in the roof and shed light onto the piles of rubble beneath. Ceramic tiles with grubby, faded designs. The occasional photo of the king and queen or out-of-date calendars bearing advertisements for nitrates. Lumps of ceiling plaster mixed with wattle, and struts wound about with twine. From some façades drainpipes hung, their fixings having come loose from the walls, leaving indentations like bullet holes. Cavities left by crumbling plaster laid bare the skeletons of the houses, their thick wooden beams. He had a look at one such house. It smelled of darkness and rotten olives. Somewhere up in the roof he heard the fluttering of pigeons and their monotonous cooing.
Towards the far end of the village, the street opened out to form an irregular square, like the stopping-place for a caravan of pioneers. On one side was the well, from whose wrought-iron arch hung a pulley bereft of rope and bucket. He leaned over the granite rim, expecting the worst, but could make out nothing until his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness below. Only then could he see the brick wall and, about fifteen feet down, a kind of brick buttress that traversed the well from side to side. Below that, nothing. He dropped in a stone that bounced off the arch before continuing its descent. Immediately afterwards, he heard the dull splash of the stone hitting water. He threw in a few more stones to make sure. With his hands resting on the rim, he gave a sigh of relief, although he was all too familiar with abandoned wells and their bad water.
He visited various ruined houses, unwinding twine from the beams. Some was simply wound around, while some had been nailed to the wood with tin tacks. To remove the tacks he used one leaf from an old laminated spring he found lying around, until, finally, he had enough twine for his purposes. In the pantry, he found several suspiciously swollen cans. He placed one on the floor and, holding it with one hand, struck the lid with the sharp corner of a tile. Brown liquid spurted forth. The smell was so overpowering that he had to run out into the street to catch his breath. While he waited, he improvised a bucket by tying a twine handle to an earthenware pitcher. Then, using the same metal leaf, he opened the can fully, emptied out the contents and went back to the well.
The water he brought up was full of small white worms that moved by expanding and contracting like tiny springs. He poured a little water into the can to rinse it out, and when it was more or less clean, took off his shirt and placed it over the top of the can to act as a kind of filter. The worms writhed and leapt about on the cloth like tuna fish in a net. The first sip he took tasted slimy, but he was so thirsty that he threw caution to the wind and drank until he could drink no more.
He washed his smoke-stiffened face and, even though several hours had passed since the fire in the tower, the water still dripped black into the dust. He hauled up another pitcher of water and took off his trousers. While the water didn’t wash away all the grime, it did refresh him and, for the first time since he had run away, he felt something akin to the comfort he had known at home with his family. The mixture of soot, dust, blood and urine ran in grubby streams down his legs. He emptied several pitchers of water over his head and, before going back to fetch the donkey, sat down on the rim of the well to rest.
He felt the first pangs when he was halfway between the village and the wood. The cramps in his stomach forced him to squat down on the path. He clutched his belly as he was gripped b
y continuous waves of contractions, a feeling like being kicked repeatedly in the gut. He lowered his trousers and defecated right there and then. He felt a momentary relief, and his stomach seemed briefly to return to normal. He wiped his bottom on a stone, but, as he was about to pull up his trousers, his legs gave way beneath him as a new wave of cramps took hold. He only just had time to pull down his trousers again before another stream of excrement covered the bottoms of his trousers and his heels. He felt an endless need to open his bowels as if inside his body, a tap had been turned on that he could not turn off.
He found the donkey grazing placidly, seemingly as happy to nibble on last spring’s aborted oak leaves as it was to munch on tiny, crunchy wild asparagus shoots. The boy untethered it, climbed onto its back and headed off towards the path. They proceeded at the gentle pace dictated by the old donkey, whose swaying gait again sent tremors through the boy’s stomach. Fortunately, he had nothing more inside him. After days spent out in the open, a whole night spent perched on the sill of an arrow slit, followed by another sleepless night on the trail of that half-putrid water, and now, having found the well and having been spared any dealings with the villagers, he felt so relaxed that, by the time they entered the village, he was asleep with his arms around the donkey’s neck and with the hard frame of the saddle pad sticking into his stomach. As if endowed with the skills of a water diviner, the donkey headed straight along the street to the square, where the fallen pitcher had left a pool of water. When they arrived, the donkey stopped and reached down to lick the damp mud, almost propelling the boy forward over its head. However, the boy woke just in time to regain his balance. He then sat very erect on the donkey’s back and stretched his arms up to the sky, fists clenched, then he unclenched them and felt something click in his solar plexus. He dismounted, and the first thing he did was to lower the pitcher down the well and give the donkey some water to drink. As soon as he placed the pitcher on the ground, the donkey thrust its muzzle into the pitcher’s round mouth and lapped up all the water its tongue could reach. While the donkey was drinking, the boy considered removing the flasks, filling them up and then putting them back. He had seen similar wicker-covered flasks at home, usually filled with wine, and he reckoned they must hold at least five gallons of water each. In the end, though, he rejected this option as impracticable and decided instead to fill the flasks gradually, without taking them off the donkey’s back. He accordingly spent the next hour drawing up water from the well and pouring a little into each of the flasks in turn, so that the load wouldn’t become unbalanced. When he thought the flasks were half full, he decided to sit down and rest. He walked round the well, in search of shade, but the sun was so high there was scarcely any shade to be had. He could have gone into one of the houses, but, given the precarious state of most of the roofs, he dismissed this idea too. Instead, as he had on the long walk to the reed bed, he decided to use the donkey to protect him from the sun. He sat down, leaning his back against the stone wall of the well, holding the halter so that the donkey would not move away, and then promptly fell asleep.
Out in the Open Page 9