3
THE BOY SPENT the rest of the morning in the sparse shade of a withered almond tree, a solitary example that had sprung up on an old boundary line between two now abandoned ploughed fields. From there, he had a panoramic view of the surrounding area and, should the search party come in sight, he could easily hide, or even escape, by crawling along that boundary. A few yards from where he was sitting, the path that had led him to that place continued downhill in a northerly direction. During the time he’d been sitting there, he’d travelled that path over and over with his eyes. To the right, an abandoned olive grove. Beyond that, a descending curve that skirted a small hill topped by a palm tree and, a little further off, what seemed to be a fig tree. And beyond that, the road appeared and disappeared among the waves of landscape until it vanished completely behind the last hill a couple of miles to the north.
He thought back to his meeting with the goatherd: the dog sniffing his hand and the man sitting smoking, bent-backed, his blanket over his legs. At midday, a drop of sweat trickled down his forehead and onto his trousers, where it dried instantly. He took off his shirt, laid it out before him and emptied onto it the contents of his canvas bag. He separated his belongings from the provisions given to him by the old man: three strips of dried goat’s meat as taut as a barber’s razor strop, a bit of cheese rind to gnaw on, a piece of bread and an empty tin. ‘It will come in useful,’ the man had said in the morning, throwing it at his feet.
‘It will come in useful,’ the boy repeated to himself as he sat there in the light shade. Why didn’t he just give him some water? Were the springs so plentiful in the area that he assumed even a child like him would find them? Or was it an invitation to come back? Would he drink milk in it the next time they saw each other?
Thirst.
When the sun was at its highest point, he put everything back in the bag, pulled on his shirt and set off along the path. He walked as far as the bend and, before it continued downhill, he left the rutted track and climbed the hill to the palm tree. Its trunk was full of holes and up above hung a great dewlap of dead branches. The shade from the tree cast a dark stain on the earth, with the trunk at its centre. He put down his knapsack and cleared the leaves and stones from a patch of ground. Just as he had earlier, he took off his shirt and placed it like a tablecloth on the cleared area. Taking the food from his bag, he arranged it on the cloth and sat down to eat. He gnawed at the cheese rind, trying to drive from his mind the thought that he had no water. The greasy, rancid cheese formed a film on the roof of his mouth and would not let him rest because only water could wash away the sour taste it left behind. Still vainly rubbing at it with the tip of his tongue, he stood up. He inspected the ruins of an old adobe house so eroded by sun and wind that a low rectangle of mud bricks was all that remained of its walls. He could still make out the plan of the house which, like most houses in the province, had only one room, and this made him think of his own house on the outskirts of the village.
Now, alone beneath the sun, he contemplated the four-cornered crater formed by those low, blunt perimeter walls, barely a foot or so high. He climbed onto one of the walls and looked about him for anything that might betray the presence of his pursuers or indeed anyone else. The land, shimmering in the heat haze, undulated innocently away in all directions.
He looked, too, for some sign of a well. He imagined that whoever had built the house must have done so near a spring or some underground stream. Without realising it, and keeping his eyes fixed on the ground, he gradually widened the radius of his explorations as far as the fig tree he had first noticed when he was sitting under the almond tree. He was surprised that it still had green leaves at that time of the year and did not smell of parched grass. Entranced by the sweet scent of the absent figs, a small, unconscious part of him allowed itself to be lulled into summoning up a pleasant memory. A summer afternoon perhaps, when he played beneath the fig tree at the railway station, at some still unsullied moment in his life. Hidden among the tender branches and the ripe figs. Drunk on the cavernous, labyrinthine abundance of the fruit’s warm flesh. The changing colours as the figs ripened, their thin skin like a delicate frontier or a feeble façade created by the midsummer heat and intended to last only until touched.
He paused briefly beneath the perfumed shade and continued his search. Behind the fig tree he found the skeleton of a metal tower lying on the ground. Squares of rusted iron riveted together, at one end of which he could make out the rings that must once have supported the wooden arms. He thought it must be some kind of wind pump. He gave the structure a gentle kick, and the whole thing collapsed. At first, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t noticed these remains from his viewing point beneath the almond tree, but seeing this heap of rust and iron smeltings from close to, what really surprised him was that anyone would have built such a small tower. Had it been a few feet taller, it might have caught some of the higher winds, which would have turned its arms faster and thus worked better for the farmer and his family. They might not then have had to leave, and that small heap of crumbling adobe would still be a home. He wondered how they hadn’t realised something so obvious, and his first thought was that the farmer had perhaps run out of metal. Why then did he not use wood? How could anyone so unimaginative settle in a place like that? To judge by the state of the structure, his solution to the problem had arrived many years too late, and besides, who would have consulted a mere boy about how high to build a wind pump?
The feeling of his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth brought him back to reality. He had come there in search of water. Near where the wind pump should have stood, he found the remains of a dead fig tree growing up between the bars of an iron grating. Given the abundance of tangled branches, growing thick and fat through the interstices of the grating and merging seamlessly with each other as if they were made of jelly, he deduced that there had once been plenty of water beneath its roots. He inspected every inch of this strange beast — half-tree, half-grating — until he found an as yet uncolonised gap in the rusty metal. He tried to look through the gap, but could see nothing, although he did feel a cool, damp breeze blowing up from the darkness below. Perhaps, despite everything, he was in luck. Had the goatherd intended to guide him to that spot when he gave him the tin?
He picked up a small pebble and dropped it in. The stone did not take long to reach the bottom, but for the boy, hoping to hear the sound of clear, fresh water, the time it took stretched out long after the stone had reached its destination. He dropped in another pebble and waited, with all his five senses alert. From the bottom there came only a dull thud. Not the plop or splash one would expect from a well full of water. There was no sound either of stone hitting stone, and the boy decided that the bottom of the hole must be covered in the sticky mud left behind by some retreating subterranean stream.
Feeling flushed and agitated, he returned to the palm tree. His shirt was no longer in the shade. The cheese rind lay sweating on the cloth, leaving a large grease stain on it shaped like a coral reef. The tin was scalding hot and only the strips of meat seemed to have survived being left out in the sun. He stuffed the food back in his bag, put on his shirt and prepared to rest in the sparse shade and wait for the noonday heat to abate.
The hours passed slowly, but despite his hunger, he didn’t touch the food, because he knew that eating would only make him thirstier. Again and again, the image of the water butt they had at home came into his mind. They used it to collect rainwater from the roof on the days when there was any rain. Even though it often didn’t rain for months, the barrel was always full. His mother would go to the pump in the square carrying a three-gallon pitcher so that the water level in the butt never went below a mark cut into the inside of the barrel. This was an order issued by his father. She would go to the village square and walk along the line of pitchers left by the other women, all waiting their turn. When she reached the end of the line, she would set down her pitcher and return to the house to get on with her work. Every now and then, she would go back to where she had left the pitcher and move it closer to the pump as the pitchers ahead of hers were filled and taken away. And although almost all the pitchers had sprung from the hands of the same potter, everyone knew who each pitcher belonged to. The women who passed each other in the narrow streets would exchange murmured comments about how the line of pitchers was doing or whether the flow of water from the pump had improved. In summer, the flow — feeble at the best of times — would become a pathetic, infuriating trickle. And yet his mother still went to the pump every time the water in the butt sank lower than it should. He still remembered the afternoon when his father had burst into the room where they were sitting, grabbed his wife by the elbow and dragged her outside. He had stood her in front of the water butt, shaking her, before taking out his knife. His mother had opened her mouth, then buried her face in the folds of her black headscarf. With the point of his knife, his father had made a deep incision in the inside wall of the butt, then stormed off. Left alone, his mother had then slumped against the body of the barrel and slid to the ground. A little sawdust had remained floating on the surface of the black water.