Distant Light

by Antonio Moresco

  Copyright © 2013 Antonio Moresco

  Copyright © English translation 2016 Richard Dixon

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Originally published as La Lucina by Arnoldo Mondadory Editore S.p.A, 2013.

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.​archi​pelagobooks.​org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moresco, Antonio, 1947- | Dixon, Richard.

  Distant light / Antonio Moresco; translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon.

  Lucina. English

  First Archipelago books edition. | Brooklyn, NY :

  Archipelago Books, 2016.

  LCCN 2015035962 | ISBN 9780914671428 (pbk.)

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-914671-43-5

  LCC PQ4873.O6676 L8313 2016 | DDC 853/.914–dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.​loc.​gov/​20150​35962

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.​pengui​nrandomhouse.​com

  Archipelago Books gratefully acknowledges the generous support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  1

  I have come here to disappear, in this desolate and abandoned village where I’m the sole inhabitant.

  The sun has just gone down behind the ridge. The light is fading. At this moment I’m sitting a few yards from my small house, before a steep wooded drop. I’m watching the world about to be engulfed by the darkness. My body is perfectly still, on a metal chair whose legs are sinking lower and lower into the ground, yet every so often I catch my breath, as though I’m on a swing with ropes fixed to a point infinitely far away in the universe.

  The sky is crossed by the last swallows that fly here and there like arrows. They swoop past my head, plunging headfirst into massive spheres of insects suspended between sky and earth. I feel the gust of their wings on my temples. Before me I see distinctly the black body of a larger and fleshier insect as it disappears into the mouth of a swallow that was chasing it with beak wide open, screeching. Such is the silence that I can even hear the clang of its body in continued suffering being crunched and dismembered inside the body of the other animal as it swoops up rapturous into the sky.

  I remain for some time sitting here. The light fades little by little, this whole plant world grows darker and darker before my eyes. The cries of night animals start to rise up from every corner, invisible in the black foliage.

  No sign of human life.

  Only that, as the darkness grows even thicker and the first stars come out, on the other side of this steep narrow gorge, on a flatter part of the facing ridge, hollowed into the woodland like a saddle, each night, every night, always at the same hour, a little light suddenly appears.

  2

  “What light could that be? Who’s switching it on?” I wonder as I walk along the cobbled streets of this small village where no one is left. “A light filtering from some isolated cottage in the woods? The light of some remaining streetlamp in another village abandoned like this one, but obviously still connected to the power supply, switched on automatically, always at the same time?”

  All that can be heard is the sound of my footsteps echoing in the streets. I glimpse a flight of uneven stone steps, the broken door of a stable, ruined slate roofs collapsed and overgrown with creepers, from which emerge the tops of fig or bay trees growing among the rubble, two stone troughs full of water, street doors of bright peeling paint.

  “Where am I?” I ask myself. “What am I seeing? Does this unearthly place I see before me really exist? Even if no one apart from me, in the whole universe, knows it exists or knows that at this moment there’s a man entirely alone who is moving about among these derelict stones over which the vegetal torment of the creepers never stops for a single moment, night or day.”

  I turn into a lane that leads down to a small cemetery. When the moon is out you can clearly see in its spectral light, as though it were day, the edge of the road invaded by vegetation, the crags from which you can hear the sound of rushing water cutting its bed through the resounding ravines of the rain-sodden mountains and, in the gorges, the great outlines of trees that stand out against the sky. Only at night, in the moonlight, can you really understand what the trees are, these columns of wood and froth that stretch out toward the empty space of the sky.

  If there’s no moon, you have to grope your way in the dark, under the disquieting celestial vault riddled with a myriad of uninhabited stars and traces of light.

  One night, walking down this same lane, just after a bend where the darkness is even denser, I heard a faint noise among the foliage. I turned to look. There were two badgers, staring at me, the white rings around their eyes almost like reflectors in the dark. I stopped in amazement. One of the two badgers hurried across the lane, completing a movement it had probably already begun before seeing me appear. The other stayed still and kept staring at me, terrified by this human presence on its territory.

  I too stayed still, to give it time to cross and to reach the first badger already on the other side. But it didn’t move. It kept staring at me with its large white-ringed eyes, still at the side of the road, exposed, so terrified that it couldn’t even hide in the foliage.

  “Come on!” I encouraged it quietly. “Cross the road! There’s someone waiting for you on the other side. I’ll stay here, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.”

  But the badger didn’t move. I stayed looking at those two white circles in the dark. Then I took a few steps back to widen the distance between us and to reassure it. But it seemed stuck there. I moved back even more. It wasn’t enough. I went back round the bend so it couldn’t see me any longer and might decide to cross. I leaned round every so often to look, to see whether it had finally made up its mind. But those large white rings were still there and, in the middle of the rings, two gleaming eyes staring toward me, feeling my presence in the dark.

  That night I’d had to return to the village so that the badger, hearing the sound of my feet moving further and further away, might decide at last to join the other badger waiting hidden in the bushes.

  Tonight all is black, there is no moon. I walk down this lane as far as the last bend after which, all of a sudden, little lamps can be seen glowing in the cemetery. I carry on down, looking from a distance at this small galaxy of lights in the darkness. I reach a locked gate. I gaze in at the small lamps in front of the tombs, their color an indefinable shade of orange and red, flickering intensely in the darkness of this moonless night. “These little lamps
must also be switched on automatically …” I tell myself. “But why is there a cemetery so close to this deserted village? Who is buried here, in the earth and in those vaults? Where do they come from? Men, women, even children it seems, judging from those mounds of earth that are shorter than the others and the small photographs barely illuminated by those little lamps …”

  I return to my house, along the black lane, beneath that chaos of stars. Beside the stone troughs I see the dark stubby outline of a toad that has perhaps come out from an old iron grill under which I hear the gurgle of water, and it clambers away on hearing my footsteps.

  I go into the house, closing the gate, even though there’s no one about. I drink two glassfuls of water in the kitchen. I climb the short flight of wooden stairs. I enter my bedroom, undress, put on my pajamas. I get into the small bed that creaks a little when I stretch out. My ears buzz in the total absence of sound. I stay like this for some time, with my eyes wide open in the dark. I’m not sure for how long. Perhaps I’m already half asleep when I seem to hear creaking from below: small sharp noises, perhaps the wood of the furniture and the drawers that contract and expand in the darkness.

  I get up, climb down the small steps, wander about downstairs, switch on the light to check that everything’s in order and that no one’s come in, even though I know there’s nobody here. I also go and check the toilet. I pull the chain since there’s a small drip caused by the valve that doesn’t close properly, which in the silence and darkness of the night seems louder.

  I return to bed. I’m about to go back to sleep. But there are other tiny noises, this time from above, from the space between the ceiling and the roof. Animals, even quite large ones, manage to get in through the roof tiles or by the chimney: not just birds but also four-legged creatures which then wander around up there in the dark, over my head.

  I switch on the light and get out of bed again. I take the torch, prop the ladder against the wall and climb up. I open the hatch, coughing from the dust that comes down. I look from below into that dark space full of still objects, planks, sheets of polythene under a dusting of plaster, looking almost like stone.

  I shine the torch here and there but can see nothing. No eyes fixing me in the dark.

  I return to bed and switch off the light on the nightstand. But I get up again straight away: I’m not sure whether I’ve closed the wooden shutter at the window. I take a few barefoot steps across the floorboards. I look out for a moment over the black tree-covered mountains and take one last look at that little light shining on the other side of the gorge, in the darkness.

  “What can that light be?” I ask myself again.

  I shut the window and go back to bed. After a while I fall asleep.

  3

  My day starts early.

  I wash, dress. I go and open the windows. I gaze out for a while at this whole plant world, as motionless as an apparition. The little light is no longer there. Just these mountains covered with woods as far as the eye can see. They drop down steeply, scoured by gullies and crevices that are barely visible behind the thick veil of foliage, like a primeval landscape shaped by thumb strokes. All that can be distinguished, looking carefully in that direction, is a tiny speck, lighter in color, barely visible through the trees.

  “Could it be a small house?” I wonder. “But who would live up there, in the middle of the woods?”

  I have something to eat. I wash my dirty linen in a plastic bowl in the shallow stone sink. I hang it outside on a line stretched between two stripped poles I’d found lying by a path when I arrived here. I wash the dishes once a day, in the evening, in this stone house, surrounded by absolute silence.

  In front, lower down, on the wood-clad precipice, there’s a chestnut tree that’s half alive and half dead. The top of it soars up naked and white over the green of the trees, petrified, while the rest of it is a vigorous mass of foliage. There are many others like it, mostly chestnuts I think. Some are almost entirely dead, and they stand out in the woodland with their spectral appearance. Yet, from various points of these fossil trunks, in season, sprout two or three branches laden to breaking with chestnuts.

  Sometimes I stop in front of one of these trees and look at it.

  “But how do you live like that?” I ask it. “For humans it’s not possible: either they’re alive or they’re dead. Or so it seems at least …”

  It gives no answer.

  I stroke its smooth stripped, petrified surface. Then that living part, covered with leaves. I imagine the river of sap that runs turbulent beneath the bark, skirting the dead part and then flowing into the new branch that reaches up toward the sky, invented by its very own pressure.

  And in various steep points where the earth has slipped, there are roots of living trees growing over strata of naked rock or completely out of the ground, hanging in the void. Great trees squashed against the base of a boulder that run level along the ground and then turn their crowns upward. Small trunks that have grown one beside the other and have then been swallowed up by another. Trunks that rise like snakes up larger trees and coil into their branches. And nearby, trees dying, suffocated by suckers or by a cloud of ivy and other creepers that climb skyward to entangle them in their lethal embrace. Mosses and lichens swathe slanting columns of wood, great protruding rocks with their shrouds of velvet and glass. Other strands of vegetation like dry lianas that hang down from the tangle of top branches in the trees. Or they rise up from below, who knows, for it’s hard to say where they start, whether from the ground or from the tops of the trees, or perhaps from neither, since there’s not only the top and the bottom. Perhaps they start in the middle, in the air, and then sprout forth as tiny plant structures seeking life and seeking death. And then there’s all this savage undergrowth and these thousands and thousands of plant forms that grasp and fight each other, thousands and thousands of rootlets and thousands of other forms urged on by their chemical turgidity, still formless, which then erupt like armies from the ground with their naked bodies still devoid of bark, devise their first mechanisms for respiration and metabolism with the air and start to climb upward in a furious and mute tangle of forms born from seeds carried by the wind or by other missiles that proliferate in the rotting stomach of the world and begin their struggle to move upward, toward the light.

  “Why is there all this evil undergrowth,” I wonder, “that tries to engulf and smother and suffocate the larger trees? Why all this wretched and desperate cruelty that disfigures everything? Why all this teeming of bodies striving to sap other bodies, sucking them with their thousands and thousands of rampaging roots and their tiny, wild suckers, to siphon off their chemical power, to create new plant forces capable of annihilating everything, of massacring everything. Where can I go where I won’t have to see any more of this slaughter, this blind and relentless torsion they call life?

  4

  I had an encounter today.

  In the early afternoon, after eating, I took my stick and went out. I walked through the alleyways and up the steps and under the low bare arches of this deserted village. Here and there, along the side of the lane, are stones jutting out that were once used as steps for climbing up to the small vegetable plots above, planks impregnated with lime and half broken, abandoned flower pots, invaded by relentless lichwort or other plants and other forms carried by the wind. In one spot, over a low wall where there must once have been a vine, the large indefinable leaves of vegetables gone wild spread along the ground and then spill over with tendrils searching for anchorage. Nearby there’s an old metal bathtub filled with soil that must once have been used as a flowerbed and is now full of nettles and skeins of suffocated plants.

  I turned onto a winding path that skirts the gorge, rutted in the middle by small furrows hollowed out by the water that runs down from the mountain. Beside it are hedges coiled with brambles on which fractious wasps settle while small yellow butterflies flit clumsily in the sky. Here and there barbed wire can be seen buried in the ground, t
rampled by wild boar in their roaming through the woods, put up who knows how long ago, when the village was still inhabited. But there’s a spot where the space opens out, a small clearing beside the path, reached by stepping over a section of broken down wire fence. From there you can see how far the mountain vegetation and woods extend, where there’s no sign of human life as far as the eye can see. Except for the other side, exactly the other side, of the gorge, the spot where when it grows dark I see that little light come on.

  I’ve looked long at it. I’ve observed that small lighter-colored speck, perhaps the corner of a stone house hidden on all sides by trees.

  “Who knows if someone lives there?” I wondered again, resuming my walk along the path.

  But there’s no sign of any road there. Who knows, perhaps there’s a path through the thick woods that you can’t see from here. It’s always possible. From this side of the gorge it’s hard to see, but perhaps there’s someone living there, who can say … One day, for example, I decided to go to a small village I’d never been to before, around twenty kilometers from here. Only one person lives there, a retired soldier, or so they told me in a village further down where I go from time to time to buy something to eat, driving down in a car that I keep in an abandoned stable at the edge of the village.

  I got there, arriving at a small open space below a derelict chapel, driving slowly because what was left of the road was uneven and worn away by rain and snow. I stopped, looked around, with the engine still running. A moment later a pack of angry dogs appeared from somewhere in the village, barking furiously, launching themselves against the car. Up on their hind legs, they beat furiously against the doors. I could hear the thudding noise of their claws against the bodywork and the windows, I saw their disfigured heads all around, barking madly, their fangs covered with drool and their tongues. It was impossible to open the door with that pack of dogs besieging it and that furious mass of muscle pressing in from every side. I couldn’t get out. I put the car in gear and started moving slowly forward, making my way through all those frantic dogs that continued to jump up, even onto the hood with their noses against the windshield, even onto the roof, as though one of them was trying to attack me from above, at the risk of ending up beneath my wheels as I edged forward slowly among that mass of gnashing heads and claws. Meanwhile the only inhabitant of that abandoned and derelict village was perhaps somewhere I couldn’t see, behind an archway or at a window, watching his ferocious hounds attacking and chasing off this other man who had ventured onto his territory.