In the darkness, he cupped his face in his hands. A small, warm place in which to hide away. A tiny room in which he would be spared the sight of that eternal, futile plain stretching away beneath him. In this seclusion, he found one dirty hand and one hand wrapped in a dusty napkin, the bundle concealing his torn and throbbing thumb. No, even there he could find no rest.
‘Get up, boy.’
The goatherd’s quavering voice and his bony hand on his shoulder. The boy sprang to his feet and, without even looking at the goatherd, he flung his arms about his frail body. He pressed his face into the old man’s rags so as to become one with him, to enter the tranquil room his own hands had denied him. It was the first time he had been so close to someone without trying to fight him off. The first time he had been skin to skin with someone and allowed all the humours and substances of his being to flow forth from his pores. The goatherd welcomed him without a word, as if he were welcoming a pilgrim or an exile. The boy embraced him so tightly that the goatherd cried out: ‘Mind my ribs,’ and immediately the knot dissolved and they separated. There was no embarrassment, just the discreet distance required by the laws of that land and that time. The seed, however, had been sown.
They boiled some water, and once the goatherd and the goats had drunk it, the old man and the boy ate the cripple’s sausages right down to the strings and drank the cripple’s wine, the old man taking long swallows and the boy trying unsuccessfully to conceal his grimaces. He drank because the goatherd drank and because he felt that, after his strange journey, he was a different person: the boy who had risked his life to bring water back for a few goats and who had deliberately aimed a stone at a cripple’s head. Then, when they had eaten and drunk their fill, the boy told the goatherd all about his adventure. The goatherd said:
‘We have to find that man before the crows peck him to death.’
The boy felt all the old tension in his muscles descend on him from above, and his jaw tightened. He turned to the old man, unable to understand what he had just heard, but the goatherd did not return his look. The boy knew that what he had done was not good, but rather than being told to set off to help the man who had wanted to kill him, he had expected a pat on the back or a firm handshake, as a sign of approval or respect. The goatherd might not have been prepared to greet him like a hero or recognise the sacrifice he had made, but he should certainly not oblige him to put his head back in the lion’s mouth. He studied the goatherd’s hands, remembered his swollen eyelids and the triangular marks left on his back by the riding whip. The old man was clearly not going to be the one to hand him the key to the world of adults, that world in which brutality was meted out for reasons of greed or lust. He himself had been guilty of meting out violence, exactly as he had seen those around him do, and now he was demanding his share of impunity. The elements had pushed him far beyond what he knew and didn’t know about life. It had taken him to the very edge of death and there, in the midst of that camp of horrors, he had raised his sword rather than proffered his neck. He felt he had drunk of the blood that transforms boys into warriors and men into invulnerable beings. The old man should, he thought, have marched him through the victory arch, crowned with laurels by a slave.
‘That crippled bastard chained me up and then ran off to tell the bailiff.’
‘He, too, is a child of God.’
‘That “child of God” wants us dead.’
They woke before dawn and set off along the towpath. The old man riding the donkey, his head drooping, and the boy leading the way, with a stick in one hand and the halter in the other. Since the dog was no longer with them, the boy was the one who had to keep the goats moving whenever they stopped to graze.
While they walked, the boy kept thinking about the cripple. The image of that pile of flesh and bones he had left lying in the dust returned to him over and over. Would he still be there? Would he have been able to right himself and set his wheels on the road? As he recalled, the plank had very wide axles, which was good when it came to surviving potholes, but a problem should he fall over. The boy didn’t know what he would feel when he saw him. The last time they had met, they were still compadres. Then came his captivity, the theft of the donkey, the cripple’s flight, the stone aimed at the cripple’s head, the kicks he had dealt him before abandoning him to his fate, and since then there had been no chance to explain or clarify anything.
As it grew light, they were able to make out the mountains in the distance. The plain was like a sea that ended abruptly at the foot of those northern slopes, but, at that moment, they were merely a watery illusion. A boundary, a goal, a reminder that a place might exist where one could breathe more easily. Those misty mountains held a magnetic attraction for him. He imagined himself reaching the end of the plain and entering those foothills. The goatherd, the goats and the donkey were with him. Together they entered via a fold in the hills and ascended to a high plateau, walking along a path that wound through unfamiliar trees. The path was raised up above wooded slopes and followed the comings and goings of shady gullies. Every now and then, they would stop to rest and he would amuse himself by making little boats from the bark fallen from tall pine trees. Higher up, in the meadows, they would find lodging in a stone shelter with a heather roof. In his dream, the herd of goats had grown in size and was scattered over the length and breadth of a green and fragrant plateau. Towards the north, the mountains grew steadily higher. They rose above the woods and scrub like stone nipples. Higher still were the white peaks, where the eternal snows filled crevices that appeared to have been gouged out by some giant. To the south, a dramatic overhang provided a balcony from which they could survey the plain. The same plain that they were now crossing, their eyes bruised by the pitiless hammer of the sun’s rays. In the evenings, after they had milked the goats and the old man was settled comfortably on his blanket, they would sit on the overhang and contemplate the plain, which would seem to them a vague and distant place. From the vantage point of their abundance, they would summon the angels and archangels to carry to their village the rain that would restore fertility to the wheatfields. The men and their families would return and move back into their old houses, and the silo would once again be full. They would all be awash with money, the bailiff would receive his taxes, and no one would ever again recall the boy who disappeared.