Distant Light

by Antonio Moresco

  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 …”

  13

  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.”

  14

  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, t
o 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!”

  I smile.

  “I do that as well, sometimes …” I reply. “At night, when I hear them making noises too close to the house …”

  I go silent again. I can hear the child has stopped washing the kitchen floor, has gone to rinse the cloth in the stone sink and has propped the worn-down brush nearby.

  “Do you want me to help you do your homework?” I ask, when I see he has pulled his exercise books out of his schoolbag and has gone to sit at the table.

  “No, thanks, I have to do it myself.”

  He says nothing else for a while. I sit there in silence so as not to disturb him. From where I am, I can see him with his little shaved head bent over his exercise book, concentrating, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth. The only sound, anywhere, is the buzzing of insects thrusting head first into the fragrant rot of the blossom.

  “How strange … how strange …” it occurs to me. “Those schoolbags you hold with a handle aren’t used any more, I reckon … Children these days go to school with shoulder bags, like backpacks …”

  I get back to the car to go home and, when I’m already out of the wood and have turned onto the asphalt road and am driving down to the bottom of the gorge, where it’s not so steep and there are several mown fields, I see men in overalls who over the last few days have been burning the straw with flame throwers. They walk along the remaining strips, brandishing long tubes from which blue flames hiss out. An acrid smoke rises from the heaps already turned to ash.

  I can’t be sure, but I seem to detect something odd about the behavior of the swallows. They still carry on darting through the sky as before, while I’m sitting there on the metal chair, in the last light of the day. And they still swoop down, madly following insects, flying almost into my face with their beaks open and shrieking and then soaring up to certain areas high up where there are many other swallows flying around in such a frenzy that it’s hard to see how they can pass so close to each without ever colliding. But at the same time I seem to notice something different in their behavior, even though they carry on as always with their crazy life and keep it well hidden. As if they were here and at the same time they were here no longer. Something imperceptibly different in their way of filling the sky with their shrieking and swooping, as though they also had something else to do, something else to say.

  “What are you up to?” I shouted out a short while ago.

  “Can’t you see? We’re flying!” they replied.

  “Yes, yes, I can see that!” I shouted again. “But you’re doing something else! You’re flying like I’ve never seen you flying before …”

  “We always fly like you’ve never seen us fly before!”

  I watched them for a while longer, watching in silence, hardly breathing. The whole sky was streaked by those mad darts which yet don’t fly like darts but swerve, thrust, suddenly go in the opposite direction, shrieking.

  “What medical terms would they use to describe your hyperkinetic nature, your mental state: motor neurosis, hysteria, schizophrenia …?” I shouted out again at one of them that had come down lower than the others.

  “In the meantime take this!” it replied.

  A moment later I was hit on the forehead by a splatter from the tiny pulsating orifice between the feathers of that mad little body in flight.

  The sky grew steadily darker. Then, suddenly, from the opposite side of the gorge, along the line of the other ridge, that little light came on in the dark.

  “There! He’s back from school …” I say. “He’s just got home, he’s gone straight to switch the light on, after walking through the woods in the dark, all alone …”

  15

  I wasn’t wrong. Something enormous is happening in the sky, in those tiny brains of just a few grams that cross the space like darts, in all that teeming of wings that ruffle the atmosphere.

  The swallows are preparing to migrate.

  They appear as though life is carrying on as normal. They fly around madly, as usual, shrieking away. They streak across the sky with their beaks open, shoveling insects. They appear as always from their thousand invisible nests, up in the air, in rusty leaking gutters, in the holes between the stones and the collapsing roofs of this village over which they have taken possession, away from the world. Adult swallows, and others only just born and learning to take their first short mad flights, swoop down as usual and skim across the water in the troughs, almost smashing themselves against its stone edges. And yet, and yet … there’s a new frenzy, a new agitation, a greater disturbance in their behavior. They gather at points far up in the sky, shrieking even louder. Who knows what they are saying? Who knows what’s going on among those clouds of tiny bodies in flight? What’s sparked it all off? How do they first start gathering high up there, in the first flocks that circle in ever greater numbers over these deserted ruins soon to be abandoned, perhaps without any of them even knowing it? More and more of them swoop madly down over the troughs, as though they were building up reserves of water for the great long journey who knows where, emerging like darts from the low archway and from the curve in the road and diving down to skim the water with their open beaks, shrieking, splashing the smooth surface with the tips of their frantic wings. Who knows if they know where they’re going? Whether at least one of them knows and is able to tell the others, or whether they decide on the route once they’re on their way, in those first immense circles full of myriads of tiny brains of a few grams that cross the sky in every part of the world, so dense that it is hard to understand how all those wings in there can move?

  They perch in greater numbers on the edges of old derelict houses, on the roofs and the few remaining old wires. Then they rise up again in flight. It seems they’re going back to daily life, it seems as though nothing has changed, that there’s no plan to leave, that it’s been delayed for who knows what reason, for some imperceptible change of temperature and air composition that they alone have fast detected, living so high up in the sky. It seems still early to go. It’s still summer. And yet, the day after, all this incredible restlessness resumes. New and even larger flocks gather, once again they start flying raggedly here and there to attract other swallows that are still alone. But they break up again immediately after, and in a few seconds each goes off in a different direction. But higher up, still higher up, other flocks are reforming. And then more still. Until suddenly the first great boundless teeming clouds of screeching swallows head off on that mad jo
urney, not even knowing where they’re going.

  Up there they knew it before anyone else, that something on the land has changed, that something enormous is going on, that summer is coming to an end, that the sky and the land will soon no longer be the same, that fall, winter will begin.

  This morning, when I went to take the car from the stable, I saw a layer of swallows blackening everything, on the few wires and on the roofs, on the tops of the dry canes still sticking in the ground where vegetable plots had once been, as though they were all there to say goodbye to me before they flew off.

  I drove down slowly so that I could take another look at them. I reached the village, then took a walk along its narrow streets, not thinking of anything. I arrived at the shop. This time there was no one there. Just the old woman who was shifting some sacks of seed. I took some pasta, some potatoes, a few tins, choosing those with tops that were less rusty. Every now and then I held my hand over my nose for the stench. A pair of fat cats, overfed by the old woman, came out from who knows where on hearing the sound of my feet in the empty shop. They started rubbing against my legs, their stomachs swollen like balloons. When it came to paying and putting what I had bought into a plastic bag I’d brought with me, I tried asking the old woman whether there was a school in the village.

  “Oh yes,” she replied in dialect, “there’s a school alright.”

  “A night school …” I added after a while, as I was putting away the change.

  She looked surprised.

  “What’s a night school?” She asked.

  “You know … where the kids go in the evening rather than in the day!”

  “Never heard of it!” she replied. “I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never heard of it! I’ve always seen the children leaving in the day.”

  She must have had a very itchy scalp, as she began scratching herself with the point of a knitting needle.

  “Could you tell me where this school is?” I added.

  She walked out of the shop in her slippers and showed me the way to get there.