A short while ago, as I was doing these things, I heard a sudden clatter coming from the road. I ran outside to look, since no one ever passes here.
I stopped in front of the door.
A group of horsemen, all wrapped in transparent plastic capes to protect them from the rain, were going along the lane mounted on their tall horses.
I waved to greet them since they were the first people I’d seen here from when I first arrived. They responded in silence, from high up, with a nod of their heads under the hoods of their capes dripping with rain, while their horses cantered on, their hooves clattering on the stones in the lane. Under the transparent cover of their capes you could clearly see their clothes. Among them was also a woman, a girl it seemed, wearing jeans and boots.
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.