Three Horses

by Erri De Luca

  And Laila says that I’m the first to break free on his own and she is happy not to have this hold over me. “Songs are what loosen and release you from my sound. Now you know.” And she says that this, too, is a sign of her stopping.

  “You don’t have this hold over me,” I say. “You have something more. You took a bite. With you I’m bitten like a piece between two jaws, you have a hold on me, I let myself be held because you want me and I can’t find anyone in the world who knows how to want a person, how to spend all this desire.”

  “I want you,” she says, “and it’s up to you to open your arms and hold me. I love you out of love and out of disgust with men. I love you because you’re whole even if you are left over from another life. I love you because the piece that remains is worth the whole and I love you by exclusion of the other lost pieces.”

  We stay still, drink her picnic wine. I cut hard cheese, sprinkle some sage and a sliver of oil.

  She eats with strong jaw movements, chewing a lot, swallowing slowly, sniffing the smell of the room.

  I already have basil in different pots, making this a field of smells.

  She takes a walnut, places it on my palm. I put it on the table and open it with a little smack against my forehead, a game that amuses the children in the courtyard when I do it at the window.

  Laila laughs. “The Americas,” she says, “made you loco.”

  Turning serious, she asks if a person could plan an assault with no escape route, whether he had to be off his rocker or just determined to let himself be killed while killing.

  “It’s America of the South, Laila, days without a day after. Not many people are left. You barrel around like a soul unhinged. You face down blows without bending, since it’s not up to you whether you live. You stick it out. We’re fish on the surface of the water.”

  Don’t ask me, Laila, I think. I’m not that man anymore, no one can stay that way for long. That’s why wars end and a later generation catches its breath looking forward and erasing what’s behind. Escape route, you say. I remember the escape but not the route. I’m lost and I run to the bottom of Argentina, I don’t stop anymore.

  I run over the scorched plains of the South where you can be seen for miles. No one would go hunting there.

  I’m seeking the bottom, the void.

  I feel hidden by the wind that squeezes your eyes shut and puts your ears to sleep.

  At night I walk along the side of the road. If a light appears on the horizon’s funnel, I lay on my back behind a bush.

  At dawn I leave the road and stretch out to sleep, far away.

  One day a goat wakes me, it wants to be milked. I empty it, drink the best milk of my life.

  I spend a few days with the goat, step-by-step, eye-to-eye.

  I forget. I look at it and forget.

  It sleeps next to me, at dawn it licks my nose.

  I give it a little of my salt ration. We drink at a lost underground river. We climb back up.

  From the distance I see a fence. The goat goes toward it. I turn around and return.

  I spend a day picking off fleas in the bend of a river. I search my clothes for lice like towns on a map. I wash, smack, dry.

  I learn not to fear snakes, wise creatures that lick the air.

  In two days I find the road again. I go back to walking south at night.

  I trust the darkness, bare my pupils, align my thoughts.

  One night in the distance I notice a campfire on the road. I take a downwind approach, to avoid giving a scent to any dog possibly nearby. I listen to voices, two Italian mountain climbers with a broken car.

  I wait for the dawn, show myself, introduce myself as an Argentinian wanderer. They explain the problem, I understand and fix it. I get a ride and a soup. It’s been more than a month since I’ve eaten anything hot. My stomach rumbles a nursery rhyme like the foliage of a tree when the nests reawaken.

  They ask me nothing. I listen to their intricate projects, a new scaling line up a granite pillar behind the last ridge of walls in the world. They talk to each other seriously and intently, about this and this alone. They have just enough money. They’ve been traveling for a week, following a map, looking straight ahead.

  I can’t remember ever having been like them. I listen to them like a stranger. They’re men with only one side, facing forward without casting a single look back. They’re men who don’t turn around.

  Stretched out on their rope coils, I feel the nerve bundles in my back that make me move, turn around, go forward at the sound of footsteps.

  I travel with men who don’t watch their backs. All their risks are ahead of them. I listen to them and rest. The road down is now a question of wheels, maps, not soil and stars.

  I look at the route on the map. For the first time I know where I am and the distance contained in my escape.

  With an engine below, the place in the South I’m headed for is within a day’s reach.

  I fall asleep behind the best strangers, dangerous only to themselves. They have a straight line to follow. They tread an outline. I take advantage of their trail. For the first time I go in a straight line, but my escape is sketchy, like the folds in the wings of a bat.

  It’s evening when I suddenly ask to get out and say good-bye.

  It’s the road of a seaside town, I go to the port and brush a mooring cable with the back of my hand. I smell my childhood on the Mediterranean and try to look like a sailor when I shove a tavern door.

  The room is smoky, the wind that sneaks in with me shakes it like a rag. A lamp throws light in the face of anyone who enters. “What are you looking for, mister?” asks a voice from behind a counter while I try to understand whether the place convinces me.

  I lower my eyes and go calmly toward the voice, even if its welcome is a slap on my nerves.

  I sit down, and tell him that I’m looking for a place to sleep and a passage.

  “To travel or to work?”

  Now that I’m not under the light anymore I can see the tavern-keeper, a hairless bear. I set my hands on the counter and get the urge to tell it like it is: that I’m not a sailor, but I can do any type of work to pay for the trip.

  “Kid’s stuff, you’re too old to be a ship boy.”

  Now I look at him. I see eyes purple with exploded veins. He’s at least sixty with hair as white as ice.

  “A man’s life lasts as long as three horses’. You have already buried the first.”

  “I’ve got a little money and I can wait,” I say.

  “I don’t think so. You’re in a rush. You came to the counter too slowly.”

  “Can you help me?” I say. I don’t know what’s gotten into me to speak this way rather than walk out of there quickly with my gun at the ready to dissuade anyone from coming after me.

  “Let me have a look at your hands,” he says.

  I open them up in front of him. They’re dirty, steady. But he immediately turns them over, uncovers my wrists.

  “There’s still good stuff in you. I’ll put you on a ship and you’ll go away from here. You’ll be safe. It’ll cost you your children: you won’t have any. Guys like you are left without any.”

  I’m about to spit in his face when I feel a cramp deep in my intestines and throw a hand on the countertop to grip something.

  And he tells me in another low, low voice, that there’s a bunkroom upstairs and a free bed. To stay there and not go out. For meals he would come to call me. I don’t know why, but I do as he says. And I climb up to a big room and wash myself before tasting a bed for the first time since I fled. I keep my gun cocked, because if he gives me up to the police I want to be ready. On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out.

  The tavern-keeper wakes me to eat his fish stew, at the counter. I pick at it with my hands, down to the last bones, then I gulp down the broth from the bowl.

  I chew badly. My f
ace is like pressed cardboard. It doesn’t melt for food or even for a smile.

  On the opposite wall is a map of the world. It’s upside down, with Antarctica on top. He notices me staring at it.

  “You’re from the North,” he says, “Northerners act so dumb when they see their nice planet upside down. For us instead that’s the way the world is, with the South on top.”

  I sit there with my eyes lost on the map.

  “Irish sailors come to fill their bladders with beer and they stare and move their heads like dogs when they sense something strange. You and your northern heads are blind. You only understand the earth when you turn it around the other way. Look at the continents: they all push toward the North and end up in that hemisphere. Because they broke away from Antarctica and are traveling toward the lower part of the planet, down where they plunge. They leave the oceans behind them. Even the sea currents start here in the South, because this is the beginning, the high point of the earth. And Antarctica is land, with mountains and volcanoes, not frozen water like your icicles. The North draws up false maps with its nice pole on the top. Truth is the North is at the bottom of the bag. Then all you care about is East and West, while for us they’re just choppy water, westward and eastward oceans. We’re at the pointed horn of the world, huddled close to the ground so that we won’t be torn away by the wind.”

  I listen to him and believe everything he’s saying, even the promise of a passage. An Irish fishing ship is supposed to arrive. He’ll put me on it.

  Host of the upside down, what a man. He sizes up a fellow with his eyes and turns maps around. I force myself to smile at him, but I don’t know how to move my face anymore. My hands are greasy, I pass the back of my hand over my mouth to clean it but especially to rub it, to push it into a grin. I force my mouth to harden into the most stilted of smiles.

  Then he pours me half a glass of cloudy bitter water. “My treat,” he says, and I accept and feel it plunge into my chest like a knife and I paper my eyes to keep from spurting tears. It’s liquid fire for a man who hasn’t touched any degree of alcohol for years.

  A stirring of cordiality, a being at peace before another man runs through my body. I deliver myself to this hairless bear who with the same hand could send me out to sea or break my spine. Who knows what it is about me that makes him decide one of the two.

  The upside-down map looks right to me now. It teaches me how to stand on the antipode. The escape I thought was toward the bottom is turned upward. I’m at the peak of a cliff waiting to dive.

  At night on a cot in the bunkroom I hear the bitter breath of marooned sailors looking for a berth, travelers waiting for a lucky voyage. We are men inside a hold that doesn’t take to sea. No one speaks to the other. During the day they stand with their heads bent down, like sunflowers at night.

  When the ship arrives he tells me, “Climb aboard when it’s dark. Don’t bring any weight, just your clothes. Throw the rest away, you won’t need it anymore, ever again.”

  I do what he says.

  Laila hugs me, pours wine, brings it to my lips. I keep my hands closed to hear the sounds of the neighboring families sitting down to supper.

  She says she doesn’t know anyone who talks about the past using the present tense.

  “What am I supposed to do with verbal gymnastics? I’m not the master of time. I’m its beast of burden.”

  “It was alright for writers of the past and their once-upon-a-time.”

  “And the future tense helps fortune-tellers who grow rich on predictions. I know the lives that last a day. Making it to the night is already to die old. The future doesn’t need verbs, it needs nouns. Mine is the word ‘rain-pipe’ that in an unknown well collects rainwater on a parched island.”

  “My future,” she says, “is a dirty, practical little verb.”

  “To kill?” I ask. She puts her head down and takes her arms off my shoulders.

  I say nothing.

  Once that verb is used it stays in your body, forever.

  A dewy freshness enters in. Voices from televisions seek to blare affection, the houses run under an electric regimen.

  I close the windows, keep the lights off.

  “I have no more power over you. Now you know how song is released from my voice. All it takes is a stanza to rouse you.”

  I couldn’t break away even if I sang until morning like a blind finch. I go toward her, take her in my arms, circle the room, stop at the window and sing to her, “E tu gondola, bella mia gondola, sulle mie braccia dondola do,” and she swings inside the hammock of my arms.

  “If you’re the sea, then hold me.”

  I lay her out on the sheets.

  We undress and hold each other naked without kisses.

  This night is a shelter to cherish in the mind, not a wedding boat.

  To stay with our heads leaning against each other, say the right words to plant affection and make sure it lasts.

  She looks at me from atop an elbow propped on a pillow and places a finger over the scar left by the bullet that raced ahead of me. She says she’d like to find that bullet and wrap it around her finger like a wedding ring.

  “I can’t imagine living without you, gardener, even if I wring my imagination out. I can think coolheadedly about ambushes, about moving quickly so I get there before him. I can plan the details of the escape. But what I can’t do is see beyond you.”

  “Laila, for you I am a steam-powered love, the force that moved the first trains, the first ships without sails.”

  “Steam-powered love is good for one era.”

  “You go through many and now you’re in the early nineteen-hundreds. You have to wage your war and if you come back alive, then will come the electric loves, turbo-powered. You can’t see them from here.”

  “The love I bring you is the kind that burns slowly, like a good wood-or coal-burning furnace. It’s good for departures.”

  “Your thirty years have been still for a while.”

  “I believe your story, that you are risking defeat. And I believe your news, that you are somehow drawn to me. But I’m staying, you’re going away, and my wish to you is that you come out on the other side of life, even if it is on the other side of the world.”

  “My steam-powered love, we’ll look at unclouded days and, if I manage to live, I’ll look for your rain-pipe island.”

  The day doesn’t come; the night withdraws.

  I know the exact point when. Everything is still a black pavement, then a paper rustles on the street, less than a single beat of a fan. Next to his wife, a man’s hand soundlessly slips on a shoe in the dark. An old woman’s head slumps while reading a novel, waiting for sleep to return. Suddenly the night draws together at one spot through a secret movement and the darkness is not a gas but an oil slithering off to the west.

  I know the point in the night when it breaks away from the earth and slides away on top of it. However much a laborer who’s been on his feet for some time already might wish it were day, there’s still a part of him that wouldn’t mind chasing after the night, to travel westward inside its darkness.

  That’s the spot where I break away from the sleep of Laila, who’s ended up on my arm.

  First she grabs my pillow as a trade-off, then she wakes. “It’s my time,” I say, “you can sleep.” But she wants to leave the house with me, so she asks if we can clink coffee together.

  In the half-spent kitchen lit by the corridor, we warm ourselves with a cup.

  She rubs her nose and her slumber against my freshly shaven face. She exhales and swallows and ruffles her hair. Our good-bye feels like gunshots.

  “Don’t think of that now, I can hardly stand up.” You’re half-asleep but you still hear my buzzing.

  “Go ahead and sing, that way I don’t hear anything.”

  I start to hum the gondola nursery rhyme and she punches me in the chest with a clumsy fist. “Not that one again or I’ll faint,” and she releases a yawn as long as the howling of a wolf. />
  She leans against me, we go out, the outside air is brisk. She grumbles, “What the hell kind of life do people lead who leave the house at this hour?”

  “Laila, this is what the laborers of the world do. They get up before it’s light, come home after it’s light. They move from darkness to darkness.”

  Laila takes a deep breath, I don’t know if she’s exhaling or yawning.

  Near us someone else is on his way, a guy I know. I offer him a ride in Laila’s car. She throws herself in the back seat and huddles to catch up on her sleep.

  The man says nothing, he’s shy. He’s going to a construction site, a corked bottle and faint smell of pasta coming out of his shoulder bag. His wife gets up before him to cook it and put it in his lunch-box. He works with iron, laying down the grid for pillars. He keeps his hands folded in his lap: two orange peels lined with broken capillaries.

  I leave him at a bus stop.

  Laila moves to the front, she’s awake.

  “I don’t know when I’m going to do it, but it’ll be soon. After that we’ll manage to find each other somehow.”

  To hide my thoughts I start humming an old Christmas song of the zampognari. Laila laughs, then she immediately stops.

  A car with a man inside is parked in front of the garden where I work. I don’t need to ask if it’s him. We’re at a corner where we can see him without being seen.

  In a hoarse voice I ask Laila brusquely to give me his address. I feel another twist on my nerves, up an octave. My feet are hot and my face is cold.

  “Don’t mess things up,” she says.

  I insist, bluntly.

  She says a street, a number, I don’t need to write it. I get out without touching her. I hear her shifting into reverse. I go back up the road. Before entering the garden I pass slowly next to the stopped car on the driver’s side. We stare at each other and I feel salt in my mouth. One of us is already dead and now I don’t care who.

  I cross the street and go into the garden.