“What now?” Daniel asked.
“Now you have to learn to ride them.”
Natan spat on the ground. “Shit,” he said.
Old Pancia laughed and started towards the house. “See you tomorrow at dawn.”
IT WAS IMMEDIATELY CLEAR to everyone that the horses would take the two brothers to different places. It’s pointless to keep telling ourselves that we are all equal, we all make use of the world in our own way — to get, despite ourselves, to wherever we are meant to be. Some of us use a knife to kill, others to peel an apple. The same knife, but it makes the world different for each one of us.
The villagers soon became accustomed to seeing that figure on horseback wandering on the hill with the sun behind him, and it wasn’t long before Natan told his brother that he wanted to go west, beyond the hill, and visit the city. They had heard a lot about the city, even though no one really seemed to know much about it.
“Are you coming, too?” Natan asked his brother.
“No,” Daniel said.
They were both sitting on their horses, leaning on their long necks, looking down at the valley. Natan nodded and said nothing.
One morning, Daniel went to a nearby farm: there were two horses there that needed shoeing, and old Pancia had asked him to go. During the months he had spent with old Pancia, Daniel had learnt everything there was to know about horses. Natan, on the other hand, had been content just to learn what he needed.
Although he’d finished taming his bay, Daniel had continued going to old Pancia’s. He would give him a hand and pick up some money, which he’d either save or spend on a couple of drinks down at the village inn. He and his brother had stopped stealing drinks from the cellar of the old woman at the end of the road. That was something they missed from time to time, but that’s how it was. In the same way, they sometimes missed racing their carts downhill.
When Daniel got to the farm, he saw three men in the stable, standing round a thin, hollow-looking mare, talking. The mare was a fine, tall, solid chestnut, but it was as if some mad sculptor had gone over her from head to foot, chiselling away until there was not much left.
“Hello,” Daniel said.
One of the men turned and screwed up his eyes to get a better look at the figure standing against the light. His face was creased and weathered by the sun and his legs bent outwards by overwork, like two bows.
“Hello,” the man with the bow legs said.
The other two men looked at Daniel in silence. They were chewing straws.
“I’ve come to shoe the horses,” Daniel said.
One of the two men who were chewing straws gave a half-laugh. He, too, had a weathered face and bow legs.
“Old Pancia must be slipping,” the man who had not laughed said.
“That isn’t a job for boys,” the first man said, standing in front of Daniel.
“If I can’t manage, you can complain to old Pancia and he’ll come and do it for free.”
One of the two men leaning against the stable wall took the straw from his mouth and pushed back his straw hat to get a better look at this boy who talked like a man.
“Come on, then,” the first man said with a shrug and started to walk out.
“What’s the matter with that mare?” Daniel asked, without moving.
The man who was on his way out stopped and turned to the animal. “She’s sick,” he said. “She’s dying.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Daniel asked.
“She’s old. She’s stopped eating and drinking. Must be cancer.”
“Can I?” Daniel asked, indicating the mare with his chin.
The man shrugged again and gestured to him to go ahead. Daniel approached the mare and one of the other two men moved away from the stable wall with a smug look on his face, still chewing his straw.
Daniel entered the stable and started to move his hands over the mare’s back, legs and stomach. As he went round the front of her to get to the other side, he gave her a couple of slaps on the neck and pulled her upper lip to see her teeth, then moved a hand over her muzzle as if stroking her and walked to the other side.
“She’s a fine animal,” he said from behind the mare.
The man who had let him go into the stable looked at that heap of bones with the swollen belly and let out a laugh.
“She’s old and sick,” the first man said, the one who had been about to go with Daniel to shoe the horses. “She’s no use to anyone any more.”
Daniel came out from behind the animal and, trailing a hand over her back, walked out of the stable. “What are you planning to do with her?” he asked.
“What can we do? We’re taking her to the abattoir,” the man at the door said.
Daniel turned back to the mare and moved his hand over her again, this time on her hind quarters. “I’ll buy her from you,” he said after a couple of seconds.
The two men leaning on the fence laughed loudly this time.
The man at the door also burst out laughing. “And how much would you give me?”
“Whatever the abattoir gives you. How much do you think the abattoir will give you?”
The man said a high figure.
Daniel looked him in the eyes for a moment and gave a little laugh. “You’ll be lucky to get half that for this bag of bones. You’ll be lucky if the abattoir doesn’t laugh in your face.”
The three men had stopped laughing now. The man at the door, though, was still smiling. “What figure did you have in mind?” he asked, slightly twisting his head round.
“Half that, less something for saving you the trouble of taking her to the abattoir. I’ll take her with me today after I’ve finished shoeing the horses.”
The man stopped smiling and thought it over for a few seconds, without taking his eyes off Daniel. “Half exactly, trouble or no trouble.”
Daniel turned for a moment to take a last glance at the mare and looked at the man in the doorway again. “It’s a deal,” he said, and walked up to the man with his hand out.
The man took his hand and shook it. “Deal,” he said.
It was the first deal Daniel had done in his life and, as he followed the man out of the stable to go and shoe the other horses, he felt an electric shock down his back and a sensation as if a length of silk were unwinding round his shoulders.
Daniel followed the man who had sold him the mare into a large open space, where three horses were tied to big iron rings in the wall. Daniel walked round to the other side of his bay and started taking tools out of the big bags slung over the horse’s back. He placed the tools on the ground, tied a large piece of dark, heavy leather round his waist, picked up the tools again and approached the horses.
“Do you want me to hold the nose clippers for you?” the man asked.
Daniel stopped and turned. “The what?”
“The nose clippers. To keep the horse still.”
“Oh, no thanks, there’s no need.”
The man looked a little puzzled. Daniel had heard that some people, when shoeing horses, used a kind of tongs that squeezed the horse’s nose so that the pain made it keep still.
He had talked about it once to old Pancia.
“Rubbish,” the old man had replied.
“Isn’t it true?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“So why’s it rubbish?”
“Because you don’t need it.”
Daniel had said nothing and continued his work.
“Did anyone ever cut your nails?” old Pancia had asked after a while.
Daniel had thought about it. “Of course,” he had said.
“And did they use clippers to squeeze your nose and keep you still?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I’d like to see how you’d react if, when they cut your nails, they beat your hands with a hammer and filed them with a wooden file. Maybe they’d need nose clippers to keep you still, too.”