To the Spring, by Night
Page 17
The school was built, and the teacher began his third year, the first for me, in the new school, on a property just outside the village, to the west.
We had begun the year in surroundings that had no furnishings. The exteriors were barely finished, the interiors barely dry, heavy and humid in a way our houses never were. But the schoolmaster, while waiting for his materials, kept us inside only to take attendance. We then went out under a shady tree to continue the school day. Up until mid-November rain showers were rare, the good weather, although in gradual decline, held fast, and we were able without any problem to have our classes outside. There, in the shade, the new pupils were taken in hand by the older ones, who helped them work on the assigned exercises.
During the first days two students assisted me in my apprenticeship: a cousin on my mother’s side, and a brother of the smuggler who had tried to escape from his shadow. A brother who, himself, was taken for a simpleton, and who to our great delight, without breaking stride, shouted at his father, “I’m not crazy and I don’t want to look after the goats,” all the time racing between houses while his father, stick in hand, chased after him to punish him for his recalcitrance. In time, my two instructors proved to have little aptitude for studying, and left school without a certificate, never having advanced beyond the alphabet. Much later, when I reminded them that it was with their help that I had first begun to learn my letters, they refused to believe it and accused me of mocking them now that I knew how to read and write, claiming they could never have taught me anything, given that they had learned nothing themselves. But they had learned the alphabet, and had shown me the letters.
And, in the shadow of one of these trees, I began, guided by my two angelic tutors, to fill in with little pebbles the first letters the schoolmaster had drawn in the dirt. Letters which, as they were traced, created a bond between myself and the earth, the tree, the tree’s shade, the machines and their growling, and all that had come before.
Letters I have gone back to ever since, from the shade of those trees to the currents that run through my life today, mouth full of pebbles, fingers mingling with the dust. Tracings I fill up with letters in the company of the wolf, the moon, the goat, under shifting skies, passing from one language to another, one alphabet to another, as one might change mounts along the road, riding through the night, to the spring.