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 journey, 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.
It didn’t take me long to reach it. The school is long and low, L-shaped with just a ground floor and first floor, hemmed in by other houses, almost all of stone. It’s a building of a certain importance compared to the other buildings, with plastered walls, built perhaps a century ago when the village had more people and there were more children. It looks as though it’s been parachuted here from who knows where.
I stopped at the main entrance door and looked up. The large first-floor windows were all open, but it was hard to tell whether there were classrooms inside.
Suddenly I saw a small dark shape darting across and realized that a child in a black smock had rushed past one of the windows.
I felt my breathing stop.
16
Last night there was another earthquake. Not just one tremor but several, one after the other in waves, each lasting ten seconds or so.
I had just fallen asleep, after having lain awake in the dark for a long time, my eyes closed, not thinking of anything. But sleep hadn’t come. At least it seemed like that, because we can never be sure what’s going on in our mind in those states before sleep, when we fall for a few moments into a kind of catalepsy and then immediately afterwards we’re once again completely present, back from someplace where we’d ended up, even if we hadn’t known where. Who knows whether there are explorers who push so deep into unknown territories that then, when they turn back, they no longer remember where they were?
A few seconds after I had finally gone to sleep — or at least that’s how it seemed, since time no longer exists when we’re like that, in that state — the bed began to shake beneath me. There was a disturbing light rumble, the kind of rumble where you can’t work out whether you’re really feeling it or whether it’s a sensation you have of the enormous crashing of rocks and earth going on at that same moment in the lithosphere.
I opened my eyes, if I didn’t already have them open. The tremors continued unremittingly, one after the other, in that enormous silence. No anxious shouts of people woken in their sleep, no lights suddenly coming on, no noise of feet, of people running out into the night, half naked, in dressing gowns, with blankets thrown across their shoulders. Just me, unseen, in an unlit room, staring into the darkness, in this deserted place, feeling the vibrations against my spine of the beast moving beneath the earth’s crust, with that slight sense of dizziness and nausea and loss of consciousness.
I turned and huddled on one side, since that way I seemed to feel the tremors less. I pulled the sheet up over my head. The tremors stopped for a while, for a few seconds, a few minutes, perhaps more, it’s hard to say, I had no notion of time. Then they started again. One of them was longer than the others: at one point I could hear the bed and the bedside cupboard creaking. It came from below, from the kitchen, a vibrating sound, louder and louder, perhaps the plates and the cups rattling against each other on the draining rack.
“It’s all coming down now!” I thought, huddling even more tightly on my side and covering my head instinctively with one arm.
I imagined the first rumblings of the house as it ruptured, its stone blocks with barely any mortar separating from each other and breaking apart, the roof tiles coming loose and falling, the first lengths of wooden beam coming down and hitting me on the head, smashing my ribs, the bones of my pelvis, my legs, my jaws, my teeth, breaking my skull with that poor brain matter inside still thinking and suffering in its desperate prison of broken bones and stones. I could barely breathe for the dust and with my lungs flattened beneath my broken ribcage. I was dying alone, in that sarcophagus of debris, far from everything, unseen, forgotten, unable to move beneath the weight of the collapsing house, who knows for how long, unbeknown to anyone in those faraway cities of the world illuminated in the night as far as the eye could see, breathing still with difficulty, with my brain half crushed, down there, who knows for how long, unable even to wet my lips in that terrible dehydration and thirst.
And yet, gradually, the tremors subsided. They stopped completely.
I waited a little longer, because sometimes it all seems to be over and then another more powerful, final one arrives. When I realized they really had finished, I turned on my back once more and tried to breathe more deeply, my eyes wide open in the dark.