With his head back, his neck twisted and half his face lying in the dirt, at last Small coughs. A long, muddy piece of phlegm is projected from his throat right up to his lips, and he coughs again. Big stops the screaming, the hitting and the blowing and he watches him, motionless, holding his breath.
‘Can you hear me?’
There’s no answer. And yet Small’s chest is moving. A warm breath pushes open his mouth to the day. His fingers clench and unclench with the frailty of a premature child.
‘Can you hear me?’
Small coughs again. And before he loses consciousness, as if remembering an ancient grammar, he whispers:
‘Forty-three. Forty-one. Seventy-one. Twenty-three. Thirteen. Twenty-nine. Eleven. Eighty-three. Two. Sixty-seven.’
Sitting up, his back against the wall, drinking water. Small spends the afternoon like this, with his torso and legs still covered in earth. Next to him, his brother looks at him with resignation. Neither of them has said another word to the other, until now.
‘What have you done?’ asks Big.
‘Made a hole.’
‘I understand that. What I’m asking is why.’
‘Because I can’t go on in the well. I’m going mad.’
‘And you think a hole can help you get out?’
‘If I can’t get out from up there, I’ll get out from below. Even if I have to cross the world like a worm,’ says Small defiantly.
Hearing this, Big accepts that the time has come. He can’t put it off any longer.
‘Get ready. In six days I’m going to get you out of here,’ he says, lying down to sleep.
89
OVER THE FINAL five days the routines of the well changed. Big exercised more vigorously than ever, always giving his muscles the necessary rest time for him to fulfil his objective. The food was divided in three and distributed in the following way: half of everything they collected was for the survival kitty which they stored in a makeshift bundle made out of a strip of shirt tied up in tight knots; of the other half, two parts went to Big and the rest was for Small.
Big also helped his brother to recover a certain degree of mental stability. He spent hour upon hour working on memory and coordination; he gave him advice on how to walk further while exerting less energy; he reminded him what he could and couldn’t eat and at what times; he told him how to build a den out of branches, and the most suitable places to rest. Above all, he stressed which direction he must take to get home, even though, without the exact coordinates of the well, he himself couldn’t be quite sure. He did, at least, have a rough idea of the location of the forest that surrounded them, and he judged that this information would be enough.
Enlivened by the turn of events, Small, for his part, showed a great ability to resist the bouts of delirium that he’d suffered over the previous days. He rigorously memorized every one of his brother’s instructions, asking questions whenever he had doubts, or drawing maps in the earth with dry roots. It’s true that at night he fell into confused trances that threw him off balance and made him forget who or where he was, but for the best part of the day he remained in his right mind.
They eat in silence a little after sunrise. Big does his warm-up exercises and asks his brother to stretch out his muscles, a request that his brother fulfils without a word, despite his feeble physical state. When they are done, they sit around the survival pack.
‘It’s time,’ says Big. ‘You’re leaving.’
‘Yes.’
‘You remember everything I’ve told you, right?’
‘Everything.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Nervous. I’m not sure I can do it without you.’
‘Sure you can. You’re strong like me, or stronger.’
Small’s face breaks into a shy smile that does little to hide his immense sadness.
‘How do you feel?’ he asks.
‘Really good. I’m happy you can get out of this hole.’
‘I’m happy to get out, too. But I’m not happy to leave you here.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll be fine. In a couple of days you’ll come back to find me and we’ll go back home together.’
‘You promise?’
‘Of course I do! Do you promise?’
‘What would I do without you?’ replies Small, who chokes back a few tears and hugs his brother.
‘It’s all right now, it’s all right now. Let’s talk seriously.’
They go over the moves they are going to perform in detail. Big tells his brother the position he must put his body in for the first few seconds, how he has to change his stance after that, and the way to fall so as not to hurt himself. Small jokes about the idea of falling when the ground is, ironically, above him, and this relieves the tension as the moment approaches. The explanations go on. By mid-morning everything has been said, and the sun blesses them with just the right degrees of heat and light. There is nothing left but to do it.
Big is overwhelmed. He knows he will only get one chance and that on that chance both their lives depend. An ice-cold scorpion scuttles up his back. If he fails, if he messes up any of the moves he has so meticulously rehearsed, his brother will die. All these days and weeks making himself strong while his brother has wasted away like a corpse, to the point of weighing so little that a breath of wind could lift him. The methodical repetition of positions and turns, the will to resist… all of it is justified in this one, unrepeatable moment of affirmation and daring.
He can sense the state in which his body will be left after so much strain. It forewarns of his ruin. The strength he is about to use will wrench his bones from their cartilage, break them into pieces, rip apart his muscles like strings from a rope and burst his veins, producing livid, violet haemorrhages under his skin. After the coming effort he will be left twisted like an old doll, and will undoubtedly be unable to move. He is going to burst inside. And he’ll be alone. Under these conditions, to survive one day would be a miracle. If his predictions are right and his brother manages to escape from the forest, and if he finds the path to the house and honours his pledge by coming back finally to find him, several days will have passed. At best, his life will no longer depend on him. For the first time.
‘Up you get,’ he says.
‘Already?’
‘Yes. We can’t delay it any longer.’
‘OK. Shall we say goodbye?’
The brothers come together in a long, unrestrained embrace. Big ties the little bindle to a belt loop on Small’s trousers. Afterwards, he scrapes around in a corner and pulls out Mother’s old bag of food, which his brother looks at with a sidelong glance, recalling a forgotten nightmare. He tosses it out of the well, and as it hits the ground, cloying fumes of putrid cheese splutter through the seams and it spits out black breadcrumbs and thin, wrinkled figs, decomposed like them.
‘Give me your hands,’ he says.
Small gives them to him, and as he does he remembers the first day they spent in the well. He goes back to that time, but they are no longer the same; the well is no longer the same. Not even the distance separating them from the world is the same. They take their positions: Big spreading his legs to steady himself when the speed picks up, Small with one knee on the ground so that he isn’t dragged along, both of them gripping with such force that their knuckles blanch. And without another thought they start to spin. Big pulls his brother upwards so the rotation is clean and goes on spinning, and Small is raised a hand from the ground and he spins, another hand and he spins, until with the next spin he’s virtually horizontal, with his eyes closed and his clenched teeth making dents in his gums; and still they spin, faster and faster, with each spin mapping a bigger circumference, and when it seems like they are at the point of falling, exhausted and breathless from so much spinning, Small slips down to the ground, but doesn’t touch it, then soars back up at an angle, and they repeat this twice more, and in the final ascent Big shouts Now and lets go, and with his eyes still closed Small breaks free and he takes off from the earth towards the sun like a comet of bones, and he extends his weightless body, made from a stalk or an arrow, and casts a fine shadow over his brother’s face as he flies above the roots into the daylight, and he tumbles several more times before settling like a leaf on the smooth grass that grows just beyond the well.