He tried to recall some other memory, some other image or sound that might give him an idea of where he was. He turned his head towards the window. A pale blue and yellow light was starting to be visible beyond the hills, which stood out against the sky like a piece of cardboard. It looked like being a nice sunny day and he felt like laughing, but if he as much as smiled it was like a red-hot dagger turning in his flesh.
He pulled himself up into a sitting position and sat there for a couple of minutes with his elbows on his knees. All he wanted was for his heart to leave his face alone and go back to his chest. He got to his feet, picked up his trousers from a chair in the corner of the room, put them on, pulled on his boots, tried to crack his spine, and went and opened the door.
He saw a dark, bare corridor with a couple of prints on the wall. On the left of the corridor, a series of doors, closed except for one, through which he glimpsed the arm of an armchair. On the right, the corridor led to what looked like a kitchen and on the other side of the kitchen what looked like a door leading outside.
Daniel touched the gauze lightly with his fingertips, waited a few seconds, and finally headed for the kitchen. His legs felt heavy, as if two ten-kilo sacks were tied to them, and apart from the pain his face now felt unpleasantly itchy. If he closed his eyes, those damn slivers of colour floated in front of him again.
Slowly, he managed to get through the kitchen and reach the door. He liked this kitchen, he thought, it had a homely feel.
“You should rest,” a voice said behind him.
The pharmacist was standing in the door from the corridor, still as a statue, his hands in his pockets, staring at him without expression.
It took Daniel a few seconds to put everything together, and he never took his eyes off the man’s. “I can’t,” he said at last. “But thanks all the same.”
Then he turned and opened the door to go out.
“We need to talk,” the pharmacist said.
Daniel turned back to look at him. “I know,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
The pharmacist nodded, and after a couple of seconds Daniel managed to get through the door and close it behind him.
Fortunately, his bay was there, outside the house. He gathered what strength he seemed to have left, put the saddle on the horse, tightened the girth as much as he could, and got on.
He let the horse take him to old Pancia’s house. He could not keep his left eye open, and if it had not been for those damn slivers of colour he would have kept the other one closed, too. As the bay carried him calmly towards old Pancia’s, the morning light was starting to illumine and cool the countryside. Daniel remembered his brother’s cigarettes: now would have been the perfect moment to smoke one, he thought. It was as if something was missing from the dawn and the steam from the bay’s nostrils and the bandage on his face and the eye that didn’t want to stay open, and a cigarette would certainly have completed the picture. Life was always like that, Daniel thought: something was always missing, whereas the nice thing about stories was that everything that should be there was there.
When Daniel reached old Pancia’s, the house was still shrouded in silence. The only sound was the song of two hoopoes somewhere nearby. It was day now, and after the dawn frost the air had already started to warm up. No sooner had the bay’s hooves started to beat on the gravel leading to the house than old Pancia came out through the door with a steaming cup in his hand and his shirt hanging down over his belly as usual like a skirt.
“You’re early this morning,” old Pancia said, taking a sip from the steaming cup. Then he saw Daniel’s gauze and the closed eye and the purplish-blue tinge that coloured half his face.
“Good heavens, son, what have you done?”
Old Pancia walked forwards quickly, took hold of the bay’s bridle and watched as Daniel dismounted with difficulty.
“Never mind,” Daniel said.
The boy left the bay where he was, in the open space in front of the house, and walked towards the stables. “Didn’t you hear anything last night?” he asked old Pancia.
“No. What happened?”
“Never mind.”
Daniel reached the stable and opened the little gate. In the second box, First Deal was lying on the straw in a pool of blood, her neck slashed. She didn’t look like herself any more, she was like some grotesque life-size rag doll. And that big cut on her neck, at least two hands long, looked as if it had been sliced in rubber. Only the blood gave the impression that everything was real.
“Shit,” Daniel said. He tilted his head to one side and held it with one hand, lightly squeezing his closed eyelids.
He stood like that, without moving, as if something had become jammed.
“What are you going to do?” old Pancia asked.
“I don’t know,” Daniel replied, without moving or opening his eyes.
After a few more minutes, old Pancia had the impression that Daniel had nodded. Then he lifted his head, walked out of the stable, told the old man that he would be back later, got calmly back on his horse and rode off.
DANIEL RODE ALL THE WAY HOME, went in, took a rifle from the rack, found two cartridges in the drawer of the cabinet and loaded them in the gun. When his father saw him, he asked him what he was planning to do. Daniel turned and looked at him with his one good eye.
“Don’t worry, Dad.”
His father had often thought that something like this would happen one day. He had felt it since the day his wife had died and he had felt alone and had seen the two boys going off alone through the countryside. He had never thought, though, that it would happen to Daniel. He would have expected to see Natan come back one day dying or covered in blood, with the police after him. But he would never have thought that it would happen to this other son who had bought a horse with his own money and who got up every day at dawn to work. He wondered if he ought to do something, or stop Daniel from doing something, but he had a kind of feeling that his son had understood what he was thinking. Then it struck him that it had been a while now since, without saying anything, each of them had chosen to live his own life, and that it was pointless to do anything.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, letting him pass.
“Don’t worry,” Daniel replied, dragging himself outside. He was hungry, but he would eat later, he thought.
When Daniel got to the farm where he had bought First Deal, there didn’t seem to be anyone around, and the sun was high in the sky by that time, which made things more difficult.
Daniel settled down with his bay, right in the middle of the open space in front of the big reddish house, with his rifle resting across the animal’s neck.
After a few minutes, the man who had sold him First Deal emerged. He also had a rifle in his hand, and was followed by three other men with bowed legs and weathered skin. Two of them were the men who had been present almost two years earlier when the mare was sold.
They all stood there motionless for a couple of minutes, not sure how to act.
“What are we going to do?” Daniel said, without moving.
The man who had sold him First Deal waited a few seconds and tried to swallow. He didn’t like this situation at all.
Another man came out through the front door. He was wearing a white shirt and a nice greenish jacket. His grey hair was combed back as if it was sculpted, and a small beard outlined his jaw as precisely as a ruler. “Tonino,” he said.
The man who had sold First Deal to Daniel turned abruptly. He looked worried.
“What’s going on?” the man in the shirt and jacket asked.
The man called Tonino turned back and looked fixedly at Daniel. “This kid stole a horse from us, sir.”