I took a few steps forward. The dog started walking silently behind me. I suddenly then moved back. We caught each other’s eyes as I reached the open gate and went in, closing it behind me.
The dog also moved back. It sat down again on the ground, on the other side of the gate. It watched me in silence, without a groan, silent, with the black marks of its eyes in its great muscular head full of bones and teeth.
“Now it’s going to stay there, holding me hostage!” I thought. “It won’t move until I open the gate and let it come in.”
And yet when night fell and I went out once again to walk in the dark, the dog had gone.
5
Sometimes I stop and I talk to animals, insects, trees, all the mighty vegetation that springs up everywhere as far as the skyline.
To wasps that drop angrily onto the gaping cracks in the figs rotting on the trees, thrusting their rostrate heads into the crevices full of putrefying seeds and juice. Going up close, perhaps too close, so that one day I was stung on the hand by a wasp. I felt its barbed sting penetrating the tender flesh between one finger and the next.
“But why are you always so angry” I ask. “Why do you drop headfirst into the pulp of unpicked fruit that’s rotting on the trees in this deserted unearthly place? So that sometimes, when I split one open to eat it, I find one of you inside, and you fly off in a rage, covered all over with dead liquids and the juices in which you were wallowing. Where do you live, where do you go to sleep? What happens, day and night, in your savage nests?”
But they never answer.
To toads, when I catch sight of one motionless, filthy, half-submerged beneath a veil of earth, with its fat body entirely covered with larvae, in a spot where there must once have been a vegetable plot, since there are still tangles of growth that produce unrecognizable vegetables.
“But what sort of life do you have?” I ask them. “Buried in the earth with your stores of fat larvae that you gorge down there in the dark. Your bodies like a soft leathery bag bursting at the seams, closed off by the earth and the darkness.”
But they never answer.
To aerial roots, which spread here and there and catch everything that comes in range, high up there, rotting leaves, pollen and spores that fly blindly in the air, perhaps even miniscule bodies of flying insects with many wings and antennae. They transform them into nutriment for a plant that sometimes isn’t there, doesn’t exist, still has yet to be invented.
“Why are you born up there and not on the ground?” I ask, I shout, to make myself heard up there, in this silent green vastness that returns the echo of my voice. “Were you really born up there, right from the beginning, or did you too come from the earth like all the other roots and then, who knows why, began to move higher and higher, until you ended up there in space? Or did you come down from up there, from space, where perhaps there are miniscule roots that fall like an invisible rain from the sky, until one of them reaches the top of some plant and clings to it, and begins sapping everything up there within its range, before starting to descend gradually to the ground, and then to penetrate the earth, under the horizon line, in that sodden mass of a thousand other ferocious roots and miniscule animals with no eyes that devour everything, to then climb up again, little by little, upward, along the tormented trunks of trees, over their torn bark, higher and higher, as far as the sky?”
But they never answer.
The swallows, on the other hand, they do answer!
Sometimes, when I see them darting past over the point where the lane narrows, where there are two stone troughs full of water, coming down from above, diving, frenzied, swooping low, close to the ground, at unimaginable speed, and then skimming over the troughs to snatch a little water in that brief instant in their beaks, all alone in that unearthly place, I wave my arms at them, yelling:
“But you’re crazy!”
“Yes, yes! We’re crazy!” those tiny animals reply, beside themselves, still flitting low over the lane and skimming the surface of the water, like darts, screeching.
I start laughing with excitement, alone.
“Isn’t there a psychiatrist for swallows?”
“Yes, but he’s crazy too!”
“So how are you going to get cured?”
“Like this!” they answer, plunging their heads into the water and then soaring higher and higher, into the sky, fanning my temples and my eyes with their wings, their beaks.
Then, when the sun goes down behind the ridge and it begins to grow dark, and all this plant world becomes invisible and black like a great nocturnal sponge, on the other side, there in the distance, every night, always at the same hour, that little light suddenly appears.
6
Just now, while I was in bed, deep in my first sleep, I was woken by a tremor.
It often happens, because this is an earthquake area. Sometimes I don’t even waken fully, but even in my sleep, or half asleep, I can still feel the vibrations that arrive here on the surface from the movement of underground faults that shake my bed, the walls of the house, the room, the few pieces of furniture inside it, the whole empty village where I live, but also the ground, the trees, the animals in their deep burrows, those night creatures that move about silently in search of their prey, and perhaps also those flying in the air searching the dark land with their round eyes for something alive, and perhaps from up there they feel even the air shaking.
Sometimes, when the tremors are stronger, I get out of bed, go out barefoot, and walk in the quaking village as far as an open space a short way from my house. I look around to see if the derelict houses are still standing or if they’ve collapsed. In the morning, when the light returns, I see broken tiles here and there, strewn across the stone streets, fallen from the collapsing roof of some ruin. I wander around my small house checking the walls to see if there are any cracks: it seems impossible that nothing could have happened to its structure under the effect of so many tremors. I climb a ladder onto the roof, adjust the roof tiles that have been moved by the earthquake or by the scrabbling of all those birds and four-legged animals that find their way into the attic space at night, between my room and the roof, that I can hear walking around above my head when I’m half asleep or when I’m lying with my eyes wide open in the dark.
At other times I don’t get up at all, when I’m in my first sleep and can’t rouse myself. I hardly feel the succession of quakes, one after the other, the dizziness, the sense of nausea and slight loss of consciousness in my body as it continues lying there, half asleep and half awake, while everything vibrates around me, and deep down great dark masses and walls of earth and marble crash against each other.
Tonight I got up and checked the walls and around the doors to make sure no cracks had appeared. I also went down to look at the small vaulted cellar where I keep the wood. Then I came here, with a blanket over my shoulders because it’s cold at night even though it’s summer, to sit on this metal chair with thin legs that sink lower and lower into the ground, in front of the stone balustrade that looks out over the steep drop. Before leaving the house I took an old pair of binoculars I brought here with me but have never used, since there’s nothing to see, only this impenetrable expanse of green froth that covers the world as far as the eye can see.
I point them toward the little light. I rotate the rather worn knob to focus them, since the light seems to get wider and narrower as though I were looking at it through water. But I can’t see it clearly, perhaps because my eyelashes get in the way, perhaps because my eyes are still full of sleep and are covered with that liquid film that distorts shapes and blurs lights. It’s hard to tell what the light is, even harder than when looking at it with the naked eye. It’s hard to say whether it’s a light coming from a window or a low street lamp hanging from a wire. And yet it seems to get brighter, it seems to pulsate.