“The council should find it any day now!” Benito said.
Two months had gone by since that conversation and the equestrian statue of Trajan had still not turned up. But by then — and this is what lay behind the wink — Julián had discovered the identity of Benito’s informant.
“It seems an angel told him about the statue. What do you think of that?”
“I think he’s very lucky,” I said, looking across at Benito’s radiant face lit up by a beatific smile.
6. Houses that have never been lived in, or, for example, holiday homes that have been built to be lived in only at certain times of the year do not tend to have ghosts. Although empty, they don’t seem it, and any murmurings you hear coming from them are never overly querulous. Such houses know deep down that their solitude will not last forever. Sooner or later someone will come. The doors will open, the lights will go on, and they’ll begin to live again.
On the other hand, houses that were lived in once but have since been abandoned seem even emptier than they really are and they begin to talk the moment they’re left alone. It’s said that the life they gave shelter to in days gone by never quite disappears and that they display odd bits of evidence to the passerby, as if displaying old wounds. Thus a curious passerby might find a kitchen utensil abandoned on the ground, the small mirror the house’s former owner used when shaving, or a metal rod that was once part of a baby’s cradle. And having listened to that revelation, the passerby comes to realize that all abandoned houses are literally crying out for someone to walk through the front door and make themselves at home.
There were some three hundred houses in Vilamediana and almost all had been abandoned fifteen or twenty years before I arrived. Beyond the church, for example, there was an area that seemed more like a cemetery for dead houses than part of the village. You would look in vain for signs of life in its deserted streets and squares. Nothing stirred, no light was lit. There were only shadows, ghosts, silence, and, in the midst of that silence, the dull clamor of the abandoned houses calling: Come in, come in, or whispering: Over here, over here.
People in the village disliked any mention of the place and did their best to forget its existence; they were even ashamed of the dilapidated state of its half-ruined walls and roofs. The few times they spoke of it, they did so with repugnance. There’s nothing but rats and snakes there now, they’d say, it’s a danger to the health of the whole village. It’s no use to anyone. It ought to be pulled down.
That very general way of talking, however, concealed an inaccuracy, or at least so it seemed to me one Sunday afternoon when, after climbing up to the bell tower of the church, I was sitting there reading. For I had the distinct impression that somewhere there was a little boy walking around. Something, some noise probably, made me raise my eyes from my book and look down below me. And there I saw a small figure apparently strolling along a winding road, appearing and disappearing from view as he followed the path traced by the curves. He was walking along, his hands behind his back, with the serenity of one of those wealthy emigrants who returned from South America at the turn of the century. From time to time, he’d sit down on a stone bench and — like me — settle down to read.
Those last two details — especially the habit of walking with his hands behind his back — didn’t particularly strike me and I gave no importance to what I’d seen. I did reflect on the behavior of children, on the taste they often have for solitude, and on how, as in that instance, they’re not in the least bothered by having to walk through a place full of rats and snakes in order to be alone. I felt sure though that he must be a foreign child, for no village child would have dared to come there.
It didn’t take me long to discover my mistake. My supposition was proved wrong when I was witness, again and again, to the same scene I saw that Sunday. On almost every afternoon that I went up to the church to read I’d see the boy strolling through the empty streets. I wondered if he didn’t perhaps live there, if there wasn’t a family still living in the area. I even thought they might be gypsies.
There was only one way to clarify the matter and that was to walk those same streets at night. Just as, when I first arrived in the village, I had gone out in search of the bright lights of the shepherds’ house, so now I would seek out the lights of that family who seemed to have remained there in isolation. One window would tell me if that part of the village was truly dead or not. That same week, one night when I was on my way to the hunters’ bar, I set off instead to find that window.
And there was life there; the quarter wasn’t completely empty. But it wasn’t the kind of life I expected to find. I’d imagined a kitchen, the clatter of plates at supper time, a snatch of conversation. Instead I found only a silent, solitary light in the low window of one of the big houses.
I approached, trying to avoid trampling the nettles that grew around about. I didn’t want the people in the house, when they got up the next day, to realize that someone had been spying on them. But at the time what troubled me most, even more than the rats and the snakes, was the possibility of dogs. What would I do if two or three dogs suddenly appeared? “Steal something as I fled,” I thought in answer to my own question. That at least would lend the episode coherence.
Luckily, nothing broke the silence and I gazed in through the window undisturbed. There was the little figure, bent over a table, intently studying a book by the light of a reading lamp. From the table the eyes of a cat glinted.
“There’s a little boy I’d like to find out more about,” I remarked to Daniel. That was on a Sunday too, and we were out for a walk in the woods, he in the line of duty and I just to take a little exercise. I told him what I’d seen from the church and the explanation I’d come up with, though without mentioning my night visit. He burst out laughing.
“Yes, he certainly is an unusual little boy,” he said. I wanted to know what he found so funny. “Once we’ve checked the woodlands, we’ll go to his house. He does tend to hang around there, along with the rats and the snakes. But I didn’t know he slept there too. I’ll introduce you. Then you’ll see just how unusual he is.” Again he burst out laughing.
As usual we had lunch in the woods and then headed off down toward the village. It was six o’clock in the evening by the time we reached the empty quarter. By day the house seemed smaller to me. It had been a beautiful house once with its portico and wide balcony, rather like the palaces that often end up being made into town halls; and although the upper floor was in ruins, it was the best preserved house in the whole neighborhood. Tied to the grille covering the window I’d found lit on that other night was a bunch of thistles.
When we knocked, we heard the sound of something inside dropping to the floor, then a muffled cry. Finally, when it seemed to us that the silence had gone on much too long, we heard footsteps approaching, and Daniel elbowed me in the ribs to prepare me.
At last, the door was flung open, as if the person opening it were in a rage. I think I must have turned white at that moment, for before me stood a dwarf. From between his legs a Persian cat looked up at us, surprised, as if demanding to know our reason for coming there.
“Yes?” said the little man.
He didn’t even reach my chest but he was no ordinary dwarf. Although small, he was well proportioned, straight-legged, and had no hump. Unlike other dwarfs I’d seen before, he had a small head, small and pretty like a doll’s.