“What can that light be?” I ask myself once again. “Why does it sometimes look larger and brighter, and then straight after seem to grow smaller and smaller until it fades away? Could it be something else? Could it be some luminous phenomenon caused by magnetic activity of telluric origin?”
There’s not a sound, no cry from any nocturnal creature on the ground or in the air. They must all be motionless, who knows where, petrified, now that the earthquake has caused the earth and the sky to vibrate under their feet and wings.
“I must go there …” I tell myself again, still gazing at that little light with the blanket over my shoulders. “There has to be some road, some path, to get up there!”
7
This morning I took the car out of the stable. I drove down the long series of bends as far as the nearest inhabited village, where I go once a week to buy something to eat, along that winding and deserted lane from which the bones of uninhabited houses stick out here and there, with wooden shutters closed and broken, that suddenly narrow the roadway. Then, a little further on, the first signs of life, a dog curled up by a front door watching my car pass with one eye shut, an old man working in a vegetable garden, small flocks of sheep and goats, completely black, grazing on a steep sloping meadow, a horse and its young foal that stop grazing when they hear the car, raising their heads and swishing their tails.
I reached the village and parked the car. I went to the small shop that sells things to eat and drink, farm equipment, ironmongery, seeds, newspapers … Inside there’s a suffocating smell of cat because the old woman who looks after the shop collects stray cats. They sleep here and there, perched on sacks of seed and other goods, or walk about rubbing themselves against the legs of the infrequent customers.
Two men were in there looking at a shovel before buying it. Another younger fat man with a beard and long frizzy blond hair and a kind of fluorescent jacket stood in one corner smiling, doing nothing, buying nothing. Perhaps he was the old woman’s half-witted son or grandson and was just passing the time.
While I was at the counter putting the things I’d bought into two plastic bags, I tried casually asking, in a loud voice so that the other customers could hear, whether there was by any chance anyone living up on that ridge where I could see the little light at night.
They became interested straight away. They asked me exactly where it was. I replied as best I could, since it couldn’t be seen from the village, so that I couldn’t go out of the shop and point to it. I tried to explain which gorge it was and what point of the ridge I was talking about.
“Is anyone going to live up there, in a place like that?” asked one of the two customers, shaking his head.
“Never heard of it! There’s just woods up there!” replied the other, returning to inspect the shovel which he held in the air like a lance.
“But what sort of light? What kind of light?” the first man asked again.
“Bah … I can’t work out whether it comes from the window of a house or from a streetlamp …”
“A streetlamp? There are no streetlamps up there. No one lives there.”
“So it must be something else,” I said just to end the conversation and finally get out of that place infected by the stink of cat.
I finished paying and made my way toward the door.
“Then it must be a UFO!” I heard someone say behind me.
I turned round.
It was the fat boy in the fluorescent jacket.
I looked at him. He was still there in the same corner, doing nothing, continuing to smile or laugh with his lips closed. His broad mouth was barely visible between his thick wild moustache and beard.
“What’s that? Are you joking?” I asked.
But he remained standing there, with his mouth stretched in that idiotic grin.
“No. Why?” he said eventually, still laughing.
I turned again toward the other customers.
“There’s someone who reckons UFOs have been seen around here,” explained one of the two. “There’s even an expert on such things, in a village near here. You can always go and talk to him. It won’t cost you anything to ask …”
He told me the name of the village and explained how to get there.
I left that hole, before the strong stench made me vomit. I loaded the bags into the car and drove off. Along the road I looked at the vegetal outlines of the mountain precipices, almost without seeing them, so blocked out they were against the daylight.
“I’ll go tomorrow!” I said to myself all at once.
8
I went. This morning I took the car out again and got to the village where the man with the shovel had directed me.
It’s not far from here, twenty minutes or so along narrow switchback roads, asphalted here and there and worn away with deep ruts. At various points the branches of trees and the limbs of long thorny brambles beat against the windows and the windshield. But then the lane widens and reaches a small village where a few people still live. Before entering a tiny square where there were a couple of cars and a truck loaded up with sacks of lime, a cement mixer and other equipment, parked in front of a small house at the top of a slope, in an area newly scythed, I saw an Arab woman with a veil over her head and face who was piling hay with a pitchfork.
I had seen other people in still-inhabited villages lower down. Women and men who had come from distant parts of the world to these empty villages and hamlets where houses and ruins cost little.
I got out of the car and looked around. There were two old women sitting on a wooden bench, their faces parched by the sun and full of wrinkles, their heads shaved, who stood staring at me.
I went up to them and said I was looking for a man who was interested in alien presences.
At first they didn’t understand. I had to repeat myself two or three times, using my hands and arms to help me.
One of the two was constantly shaking her head as though she had Parkinson’s.
“You know … extraterrestrials, beings from other worlds, lights in the sky …” I insisted.
At last they understood. They pointed out where I could find him, talking both together and interrupting each other in their harsh, shrill dialect.
I set off in search of the place. I had to go out of the village and drive up a switchback. Every so often, flattened on the asphalt, were the outlines of squashed frogs or snakes, since vehicles could still pass and there was another last hamlet higher up. You could see the odd cow or goat grazing on the strips of land between the tight curves.
I arrived at some open ground, excavated a few meters below the level of the road, where a man in large gumboots was shoveling a mound of manure.
“No, that can’t be him!” I thought to myself.
The man looked up when he saw me. He stood there with his shovel in the air, still full of manure that he was piling into a wheelbarrow after having dug it from the mound.
I tried to explain who I was looking for. But he couldn’t hear me. I shouted louder, since we were a certain distance apart.
The man dropped the manure into the wheelbarrow and stuck the shovel into its open face where he’d been working. The remainder of the mound lay overgrown with grass and taller vegetation.