by Ivan Repila
‘When we go home we’ll eat meat.’
He cooks him some dishes that they’ve tried once or twice, and others that he doesn’t know, but can imagine. Cream of sun-blushed poppies with a few wild nuts and diced banana. Rice pudding with pink cinnamon, the rind of a lemon, a dusting of cacao and the syrup of a custard apple. Roast sea lion with strawberries and cassava in the juice of a ripe orange and coconut milk. He explains in detail how to peel potatoes, the best way to cut onions so that they soften in oil without burning, how long it takes to brown the best cut of chicken or beef. Once or twice, Small wakes up and says something in an apparent flash of lucidity. The odd word, stray sentences.
‘Laurel…’
And so Big devises lessons in botany and agriculture, comparing methods, recalling smells and shapes and tastes. When he doesn’t know them, he invents the secret reasons behind the order of things: he improvises entire cities where the natives speak other tongues; he travels beyond the cliff’s edge and encounters indescribable wonders. He talks to him about the twin moons of the North and the wandering trees of the South. He tells him about the starry doves that live in the deep lakes, of houses with eyes where windows should be, and which weep tears of wine when their owners leave. He tells him about how when his grandparents were children they endured great floods which forced them to move the entire town a few kilometres down the road; about the cemetery of giants that covers an entire continent; and about the part of the sky that you can touch because it buckled under its own weight at the other end of the earth. He constructs geographies, ways of life, and labyrinthine, fanciful maths. He invents multicoloured cereal, women with crystals for nails, and fabled miracles: clay that protects you from bad fortune; magical creatures that live in the walls and grant a thousand wishes to whoever finds them; rivers that part if you ask permission. When he senses that he’s become a bore and has exhausted his imagination, he tells him true stories.
‘Sometimes I think we aren’t really brothers.’
‘It was me who killed our dog. With a stone.’
‘I’ll die in here.’
At night they sleep very close to one another. The moon is nearly full and its white light forms a gaseous orb over the edges of the wood, the tree canopies and the paths. The fever starts to leave Small’s body, and with it his cough and the shivers and phlegm. For the first time since the storm passed they surrender to exhaustion and rest, truly rest, without interruption. They sleep so deeply that they don’t hear the footsteps moving towards the mouth of the well, or notice the figure that appears and watches them, or see it disappear to return to where it came from in total silence.
19
THE TWINKLE has returned to Small’s eyes, and with it the strength to collect food, but he has been left with the wastes of the fever still inside him. He does everything indifferently, as if he no longer cared to eat, or speak or breathe. His voice has changed, too: it has become darker and deeper.
‘Where are we?’
He looks with the eyes of an adult who has eaten a child and infected him with a hundred centuries of madness. From closer up you can see that his shining eyes bear the weight of a wall, a wall containing a spiral of berserk ideas that have ladder hands and a forest head. With those eyes he scans the enormous body of his brother, sensitive to small changes.
‘Drink more water. You must be dehydrated,’ says Big.
‘The real water is outside. This water is a lie.’
Big has resumed his full regime of exercises. He has spent over two weeks repeating them and this, along with his limited diet, has caused his muscles to develop strangely; they are misshapen, somewhere between those of a half-starved man and a mastiff. He is aware of the strain he is putting his body under, and that if he had to run, his heart would barely hold out for two kilometres before collapsing. His training is reproducing an incredibly short muscular memory, a kind of corporal amnesia that stretches the limits between survival and progress.
‘I’m tired of the well. I’m leaving,’ says Small.
‘OK.’
‘You don’t think I can?’
‘No. I don’t think you can.’
‘In that case, I’ll leave you here to rot,’ says Small, and his brother looks at him and doesn’t recognize him.
Hours go by and neither says a word: Big, dumbfounded by the newfound independence of his brother’s tongue; Small, consumed by his own musings and becoming ever more miserable.
‘You’ve hardly eaten today,’ says Big. ‘If you don’t eat, you’ll die.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You should eat even if you aren’t hungry.’
‘I’ll eat when I’m hungry. I’ll drink when I’m thirsty. I’ll shit when I feel like shitting. Like dogs do.’
‘We aren’t dogs.’
‘In here we are. Worse than dogs.’
*
The last of the sun’s strokes sweeps away from the well, taking all life’s colour with it and bringing the monotony of their cohabitation into relief. Like when, in the middle of a dream, it is all revealed to be make-believe and waking up is a kind of cruel joke.
‘Your head’s still not right after the fever. Have something to eat and go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll feel better,’ says Big, lying down.
Small doesn’t move.
‘I think I’ve got rabies,’ he says.
‘No. You don’t have rabies yet.’
Small looks at him lovelessly, and asks:
‘Then what is this anger I can feel inside?’
‘You’re becoming a man,’ says Big.
23
‘TODAY, I’M GOING to teach you how to kill.’
For people like you and me, the first thing is anger. With no anger we will never find the necessary courage to take a life. There are other people who observe different impulses, who have grown up around unimaginable violence and look at you from inside caverns that you cannot even imagine. For those people, living is the well. You can’t kill them, and if you confront them, they’ll finish you off. You and me aren’t like that. We require anger. A restless anger that won’t let you stop, which bubbles under the skin, making your muscles shake; an anger that is black on your insides, but on the outside starts to turn you red, until you look like a burn victim who can’t find his place in the world. You must charge yourself up with reasons to hate, despise whatever you see around you and, what’s more, convince yourself that this anger is necessary. When you’re full, don’t hold it inside: release it, let it out into the world, shake it from your fingers, shout, run, burn the branches of trees, dig holes until your nails bleed, punch doors and walls and any other thing made by the hands of men. And before you collapse, exhausted, stop. Take a breath. Say nothing. For a few seconds, hold on to that last drop of anger in you; let it glisten at the corner of your mouth like a kiss about to fall. Exhale, feel your ribs rise and fall. Regain calm. Look at the destruction, your raw knuckles, the holes you’ve torn open with them. Feel the silence; how all matter, in its shock, has ceased to move; how the things around you no longer make a sound, the wood doesn’t creak, the wind doesn’t blow. It’s the same silence that will one day occupy earth, when men decide to end it all and we witness the end of time. And it’s the silence that you’ll live with, too, every waking hour, while inside the anger transforms into its exact opposite.
Calm. This is the second thing. You must spend three days—not a day more or less—guarding the secret beginning to reveal itself inside of you. You must move like a bird, not touching the ground, and speak in a quiet voice so as not to disturb a single blade of grass. Try not to have any contact with anyone and go to bed early. And at all times—don’t forget—remember that scarlet drop that you held back, think about it taking on the most horrifying forms in your body, until it becomes plumper and larger. Talk to it as if it were your disease, insult it, imagine the worst cruelties you could inflict, and subject it to your heart’s desires so that it bleeds like a wound and oozes giant mo
nsters. Live as if its presence weighed down on your back, be incapable of loving or admiring beauty. Note how loyalty squirms about in your stomach and how an enormous void contaminates everything you touch. Finally, on the third night of this unbearable calm, when you take yourself off to sleep, take a deep breath, feel that breath move around your rotten insides, and let the calm engulf you. Let your disease lace you with poison like a spider’s legs. Let the drop spread through your veins, showering you with razor-sharp stones. Let it cut you to the marrow with one foul slash. And then, sleep. And then, dream.
The last thing is will. The morning of the crime you won’t be able to eat for the terrible dreams that will have plagued you. You’ll do everything under the spell of a dazzlingly brutal violence, but a bubble of uncertainty will rove in circles around you, as if you were afraid to drink water for fear of breaking the glass. Don’t worry. Take each step as it comes, feel your feet open up dark trenches along the bends of your soul, advance as if the earth turned and looked you directly in the eyes. And when at last, starved and terrified, you face your enemy, honour your resolve with the killing. Be quick, ferocious. Don’t cause pain other than with your look. Give them a just, worthy death.
Killing, the act of killing, the force of your hands around the neck or the exact place where the knife sinks in, this can’t be taught because it’s already understood. Blades, firearms, sticks or stones, it’s all the same. But remember that as men we must be there, watching as the light in their eyes goes out, living the crime at close range. We kill in seconds because we don’t know any other way to kill. We’re direct, impatient. Don’t hesitate: it’s your soul that will decide the precise movement, and once the deed is done you will be as great as all the great men who inhabited the earth before you.
These are the things you must know.
Small, who during the first few lines of the monologue didn’t move, has set about sketching each of the concepts, drawing up symbols on the walls and the well floor which only he can make sense of, using his fingers and elbows like palette knives to translate these new teachings. He howls with wild abandon, testing out new sections of his brain with each revision of those terrible maps. The architecture of an unknown pleasure makes him drunk to the point of retching; it transports him to an archipelago of poisonous islands that roar like sea monsters. Shaken by earthquakes, he scans his wicked city again and again, memorizing it like a creed to which you give yourself with total devotion. He amends any miscalculations with the correct formulae and pales, horrified, before the flames spreading like wildfire through his childhood. Big observes him, satisfied.
At dusk the breeze and the water start to slowly smooth away the tracks that Small has worked so hard to put down. Like a sleepwalker, tired but with the conviction of someone who remembers everything, he decides that for the rest of his life he will carry writing paper and pencils, ink, quills, old books; tools that will allow him to attest for all time the miracles of his enlightenment. To translate the unpronounceable.
29
IMPRISONED NOW for an entire lunar cycle, hunger and desperation have broken both communication and their sanity. Big gets on with his exercise plan. Meanwhile, Small has descended the last steps of madness into a cellar devastated by hallucinations. He hums to himself repeatedly: popular songs whose lyrics he twists, making them obscene. He gives absurd speeches, which his brother has stopped listening to, whether out of boredom or a feeling of wretchedness.
‘I think no one hears our cries because they mistake us for animals. You and I haven’t noticed till now, but for days we have been talking like pigs. Tomorrow we’ll shout in Latin. So they understand us.’
On other occasions he remains in silence for hours until an idea or rational thought snaps him out of it and compels him to shout out odd words, barely human sounds, nonsense poems.
‘Today might be the eve of my self.’
Skeletal, unmoving and shamefully underfed, he cannot collect food like before, and now his brother undertakes this role, with the determination of a father. A sensation of bestiality governs them. The hunger in Small’s stomach is so intense it rumbles like thunder and Big plugs his ears with two lumps of clay, modelled from earth and damp weeds, so as not to hear him. He only removes the earplugs for a couple of hours a day in the hope of hearing any noise in the forest that might signal help. But every night, driven half mad by the scandal going on in his brother’s intestines, he puts them back, visibly saddened. He knows that with the earplugs in not only does he smother Small’s voices, but also that crusted layer of guilt that he carries, and which eats away at him.
Small asks unnecessary questions:
‘Why are we here?’
‘Is this the real world?’
‘Are we really children?’
Big never answers.
31
‘YOU SHOULD KNOW, brother, that I am the boy who stole Attila’s horse to make shoes out of his hooves, and in that way ensure that wherever I set foot the grass would no longer grow. The vilest of men fear me, as they fear the scourge of the gods, because I dried out their land and their seed in my vast wanderings across the world.’
‘Did you do it alone?’
‘With the Huns.’
‘Who are the Huns?’
‘Attila’s soldiers. When he died many of them tore pieces of flesh from themselves. I’m also missing pieces of flesh, only you can’t see because they’re missing from the inside.’
Big sighs and puts his earplugs back in. His brother has fallen into one of his trances, more frequent of late, in which he doesn’t seem to know who he is or where he has come from. The night before he spoke for a long time about human nature, explaining that men were marine beings before becoming land animals; he argued that for this reason it is important to look at the sea, because in doing so mankind can return to the origin of its species.
Later he took it upon himself to describe in the finest detail how certain feelings appear as he sees them in his mind. He arrived at some unbelievable conclusions, such as: the structure of hate is pyramidal and rotatory; or that boredom has a viscous inconsistency. Last thing before going to sleep he announced that every number could correspond to a word, and that one day he would be capable of expressing himself only through numbers. Those hellish monologues were unbearable for Big, since they confirmed the enormous, likely irreparable damage caused to his little brother by the fevers and deprivation.
‘At first my feet hurt. I had to scoop out the insides of the hooves with a spoon and later stick them together with strips of black hide so that when I walked my feet could bend. They smelled like the shell of a dragon’s egg, or like the skull of an idol. And they hurt my feet a lot, so much so that my heels bled and the nails came away from my toes. But when I got used to it I began to walk all over wearing the hooves, and I crossed entire lands that later turned to deserts. People ran away from me and I was happy. When I covered the same ground twice it went black. I walked for years all over the world, and you could see the footsteps of my pilgrimage from the sky like a dreadful wound that wouldn’t heal.
‘Then I wanted to find out what might happen if, instead of walking in my shoes over paths and forests, I walked over people. I chose a camp where everyone was sleeping and I jumped from body to body in a game of bouncy hopscotch. At first nothing happened, but later they began to wake up, screaming and vomiting, their skin shrivelling up like grapes which left yellow stains on the floor. Their bodies turned brown and red. It looked like a poor man’s rainbow: lustreless, born out of a candle and a puddle of urine. I felt important, like a painter. I noticed that the adults dried out quicker than the children, and that the children didn’t weep when they saw death approaching, but received it peacefully, understanding it. I continued along my way, crushing towns and races, and I know that an entire language fell out of use because I jumped excitedly—excited enough to nearly cause myself an injury—on the last man who spoke it.
‘When I grew old, a few years a
go, I took off my shoes for the first time since I was a boy, and I saw that my feet were still small. They were clean, unmarked; they even smelled good. I placed the shoes in a golden box, which I placed in a silver box, which I placed in a bronze box, and I buried them in a well in the forest that is half a day’s distance from my old house, and in there I left two of my children so that nobody could ever take them away.’
37
SOME NIGHTS Big finds he cannot sleep, whether for the nightmares tangled up with painful memories, or because of his quiet dreads, fuelled by the forest’s sounds and the thick air of the darkness. Having now spent over five weeks in the well, insomnia is just another routine in the small and ridiculous perimeter of his life. It’s natural, he thinks, for men to lose the ability to sleep when their world is becoming choked up. That’s why revolutions by injured peoples take place at night, like plagues.
In restless moments like these, he lies on his back and counts the stars. Alert to any little sign of flight or breath or moan, he has no other means to bring on sleep. Nor does he want to disturb his brother’s rest; fragile, like the skeleton of a butterfly.
And so it is that in the distance, with ears so wide they could hold an ocean, he hears branches bending, then the sound of fumbled walking through the forest shrubs and potholes, followed by a few hovering steps on tiptoe which, on arriving at the mouth of the well, stop and turn—first one then the other, agile and devious like fox feet—edging towards a lookout onto a cage of children.