Gazing up at the motionless fronds of the palm tree silhouetted against the blue sky, he wondered about his father’s need to hoard water. Perhaps he was storing it up in order to sell it at a premium when the pump did finally run dry. Perhaps he wanted to protect his family in case there was another drought and he became the last man to leave the village. He had inscribed his domination of his wife on the inside of the wooden barrel, like an open wound to which slimy bits of algae attached themselves. A hidden mark or a secret code. A gash that was like a dagger held to his mother’s throat.
Even though he had walked all night, the boy knew that he mustn’t fall asleep. The sun would set eventually, but as it progressed, the shade would shift too, leaving him exposed. He lay down on the easternmost side of the shade, thinking that he would change position as the shadow passed over him. He raised his head and looked around so as to calculate where he would end his reptilian advance. Then he lay down again and allowed himself to be lulled by the rattle of the dry palm leaves rustling up above.
He fell asleep.
When he woke, he had been lying in the sun for nearly two hours. His skin, from his chin to his scalp, felt strangely taut. Every hair follicle quivered with microscopic anguish, which, multiplied a hundredfold, provoked in him a feeling of stiff bewilderment. His brain burned and buzzed with a kind of cobalt-blue electricity and his head felt as if it were about to explode. He crawled on all fours into the shade and flopped down, sending up a miniature cloud of dust.
In his delirium, a rubbery web of curves is swaying and hovering above an oily surface. There is no horizon to speak of, but somewhere a source of reddish light is slowly disappearing. Darkness is winning the battle. All shades and nuances are disappearing, every cerebral cell is gradually closing down, until one convolution of his brain stirs back into life, creating an embryonic state of alert. His will, like Laocoön struggling against the serpents, is battling to forge a path into his consciousness through the damp penumbra of his brain. He or someone living inside him has sat down on the sella turcica of his skull and taken control of his body. He activates the organs and opens taps so that the blood can once more flow through the channels that had fallen in upon themselves during that sudden temporary void. The boy sitting in the seat orders him to open his eyes, but he can’t because his eyelids won’t lift. A strange, minuscule wave passes over his forehead like a sheet of sticky sandpaper abrading his tender skin. Again he tries to open his eyes, but without success. His eyelids weigh as heavy as curtains made of embossed leather. Infernal screams push the walls of his brain inwards. He feels a pounding in his translucent temples and his eyes bob about in their sockets like ice cubes in a glass. The person sitting inside his brain is searching for alternatives. He travels through his hollow body as far as his fingertips. He sends a strong electrical charge through them, even kicks them, but there’s not a flicker of movement. The warm sheet of sandpaper passes over his face and crawls over his teeth and gums. He is clearly trapped inside his head, and his only option now is to wait for death. He hears the tinkle of bells apparently immersed in grease. Anxious, clumsy footsteps approach. Someone has found his body and will perhaps bury it. However horrible his agony, at least the dogs won’t eat him. Death begins with a grubby gnawing at the fingers. They either bite them off or chew them in situ, before moving on to the palms of the hands. The tips of tongues clean out the gaps between the thick tendons of the thumb. The crunching of the radius sounds like the gentle crackle of a bony firework display. The shattered bones hang from the dangling sinews of the muscles. There is no pain at any point; it is all simply a matter of waiting, either angrily or patiently, for the teeth to reach the centres of power. Whether death comes from an infectious bite or a torn ventricle is of no importance. All that matters is his inability to raise his body and, with his only half-eaten hands, stop that orgy of dogs and microbes. Something shakes his face. A hand perhaps. Then a blow. The child inside the child trembles, holding onto his seat. In the midst of this internal earthquake, he unwittingly activates some hidden mechanism and manages to prise the other child’s eyes open. The face of the goatherd, only inches from his, interposes itself like a lunar eclipse between him and the sun.
‘Wake up, boy, wake up!’
The dog was licking one of the boy’s hands as abrasively as it had previously been moistening his face and gums. The old man’s sour breath burned the boy’s newly opened eyes. He stammered out some incoherent comment as his gaze fixed on the goatherd’s forehead, or more precisely on a pimple placed like a boundary post between his eyebrows. The man’s face was dripping with sweat, and some drops slid down his nose, running over his skin like someone else’s tears. He went to fetch something from one of the panniers on the donkey, then returned to where the boy was lying and knelt down beside him with a tin in his hand. He didn’t need to open the boy’s mouth because the sun had left the skin so tight that his mouth was like a buttonhole cut out of stiff leather. As tight as the skin of a suckling pig fresh from the oven. The goatherd took the precaution of administering the water by placing the edge of the mug on one corner of the boy’s mouth, but the dog, circling inquisitively, distracted him for a moment and caused him inadvertently to tilt the tin so that the water poured straight down the child’s throat. The boy choked and sat bolt upright like a crazed Lazarus. His absent gaze was still lost somewhere in his nightmare and, for a moment, he seemed barely human. The goatherd removed the tin and stood to one side as if fearing an imminent explosion. The glow of the sunset was slowly transforming reality, edging everything in red. The boy shattered the air with the cry of someone returning back down the tunnel that connects life and death. The old man heard that cry and, fortunately, was the only one to hear that broken voice crying in the wilderness.
In between giving the boy sips of water, with night fast closing in on them, the old man briefly reconnoitred the area round about and soon returned with a bunch of herbs and an abandoned honeycomb. He made a fire among the rocks, poured some oil into a blackened frying pan and quickly fried some plantain and calendula leaves. The strange odours from the leaves mingled with the medley of other aromas emanating from the animals and from that dark, drought-stricken plain. Hints of liquorice, oregano and cistus. Dried earth. Memories of the captive fig tree. Excrement and urine from the goats, sour cheese and the damp, warm stink of a fresh lump of dung deposited by the donkey a few feet away. The old man crumbled pieces of wax from the honeycomb into the hot mixture of fried leaves and, when he had mixed it all together, he spread the concoction onto strips of dirty rag. Lying next to the palm tree, the boy, partly out of weakness and partly out of necessity, uncomplainingly allowed the old man to wrap his head in these rags.