We began eating, first the rice, then the eggs. The boy cut them in half with his fork, to watch the yoke as it ran onto the plate. Afterwards, I pulled some oranges from the bag, as a surprise.
“I love oranges!” the boy exclaimed when he saw them.
I watched him as he peeled them with his little fingers and using his nails to help.
“What have you done to your hands?” I asked, since they looked as though they’d been damaged.
His little nails were chipped, his palms full of blisters and small cuts, his fingertips grazed.
“I’m doing some work,” he replied.
“What work?”
He dropped his head and smiled, at least that was how it seemed, or perhaps he was just biting his lips.
“I’m tidying up that little house in front …” he answered after a while.
There was a nice smell of oranges in the kitchen.
“I’m clearing out the rubble, the stones,” he continued. “I’m scrubbing down the floorboards …”
“Why are you doing it?” I asked, barely able to breathe.
He blushed a little and made no answer.
The panes of glass in the door were covered with a thick veil of water droplets.
Neither of us spoke.
“I’ll light the fire!” he suddenly exclaimed, jumping down from the chair.
I got up as well and began clearing the table. I folded the tablecloth and napkins and put them back into the drawer. I put the garbage into the plastic bag under the sink. I began to wash the few dishes, the two pans and the knives and forks.
Meanwhile the boy had cleared the ashes and dead embers from the back of the fireplace with a dustpan, taken some small bundles of twigs, arranged them in a pyramid and pushed some crumpled paper bags beneath them.
When I’d finished washing the dishes, I went over too. He was putting two larger logs on top of the pile.
Before lighting the paper with a match, he ran to get the two chairs that were still at the table, one by one, holding then up with the strength of his little arms. He put them in front of the fireplace.
He made me sit on one of them. Then he lit the fire.
The flames rose quickly from the crumpled paper bags to the first bundles of twigs which were already starting to crackle. Then still higher, until they lapped around the two logs full of loose filaments and splinters, carrying with it a little smoke that disappeared up the chimney.
He too sat down, on the other chair.
“Let’s watch the fire!” he said.
We remained sitting by the fireplace for I don’t know how long, next to each other, because you can watch a fire for hours and hours and never get bored. It never stays still. The twigs crackle, snap, you see their little incandescent skeleton for an instant while the flames climb upward, begin to eat away at the inner parts of the larger pieces of wood, with that sound that resembles a sigh, constantly change color, turn blue, even green, merge into a larger knot with other little flames that rise here and there from the stack, starting from below, hissing, suddenly sending out clouds of sparks that hurtle far, as if from an explosion.
We drew back from time to time so that the sparks wouldn’t hit us in the face. The fire was now burning noisily. It had already enveloped the whole pile and seemed to want to demolish it. The flames leapt up into the chimney. Meanwhile, outside, up above, there was a lone smoking chimney pot, on the top of the empty ridge, in the middle of the woods.
We got up without saying a word each time a log dropped on its side and suffocated the flame, taking it with two fingers at the point where it hadn’t yet caught fire, or with the fire tongs, to rebuild the pile and create gaps in which the fire could find oxygen and flare up again. Gradually we put on more logs as the first ones burned down and the flames needed new fuel. The boy in one way, I in another, because each person has a different way of conversing with fire. Then we went back to our seats and watched the blaze in silence.
There was a good warmth. The panes of glass dripped with condensation. I noticed beside me the boy’s head leaning slightly forward, his face lit up by the glow that came from the fireplace, his large eyes gazing intently into the flame.
We remained side by side for quite some time, not saying a word, while that little room grew warmer and warmer. Time passed. It began to get dark. I even seemed to doze off for a few moments, from time to time, in front of the fire which carried on burning new portions of the wood and of the world, over the large embers that pulsated in the half-light.
“Why are you fixing up that little house?” I remembered to ask him again, all of a sudden, stirring from a brief moment of drowsiness during which I could still see everything.
He remained silent, looking into the fire.
“That little house you are cleaning up, who is it for?” I asked again, with a shudder.
“For you,” he answered.
27
It’s really winter now. Everywhere is white with snow, as far as the eye can see. The mountains, the ridges, the footpaths, the bramble hedges, the ruins with collapsing slate roofs, the great immobile trees from which white powder falls when I pass beneath them walking in my rubber boots. The sky is also white. No more animal cries are heard, on the ground, in the air. Absolute silence.
This morning — I’m not sure why — I put snow chains on the car and drove to the village where that man lives with the animals, while the snow is still fresh, before it freezes and makes the wheels slide.
The snow swished and gave out that sound of soft catastrophe as the myriad structures of crystals, each different from the other, were annihilated and agglutinated under the press of the car tires.
I got as far as that village, advancing slowly, round the white curves, with windows down, in absolute silence, in the white world. The fresh snow that had not yet hardened chafed beneath the wheels. All I could see before me were expanses of white and it was barely possible to work out where the roads ended and the rest of the world began.
There was no one in that small open space by the church. All the houses were closed up, just the odd chimney here and there that smoked.
I stopped the car. I reached that place on foot. But there was no one there. The mountain of manure was completely white. I walked down the short slope, wearing rubber boots, trying not to slip, and entered the cattle stalclass="underline" it was empty. There were no animals, no computer screen on the bench, not even the bench was there. No goats, no dog, no billy goat. Nothing.
“He might have gone to spend the winter somewhere else,” I told myself. “He could have gone looking for other pastures. Or perhaps they’ve all climbed into one of those egg-shaped spaceships. They could be travelling who knows where …”
Even the little cemetery is white. I went down just now, walking slowly along the lane. You can only just see the light of the lamps filtering from under their caps of snow.
It stopped snowing for a short while, then started again. Now I’m sitting on the metal chair. I’m watching the little light on the other ridge. You can only just see that light too. It filters from a point of the wood that’s been wiped out, in the space crossed by a white vortex of snow.
“And then one day another little light will come on beside it …” I think, with surprise. “There will be two little lights instead of one. And I’ll watch them from here and I’ll say: ‘There, this terrible solitude is over. The penance is over!’ ”
28
This morning I found a dead moth between the mosquito net and the windowpane, where it had obviously become trapped without my noticing.
I’m not sure it was actually a moth, it looked like one of those little winged creatures that sometimes fly around the house, from who knows where, like the clothes moths that form invisibly in drawers, from those larvae deposited in wool that grow by incorporating its threads and then, at a certain point, emerge from obscurity and begin a new winged life. Small, invisible, troublesome animals that sometimes flap against your head in the dark, while you’re asleep, but which during their brief life undergo unimaginable metamorphoses.