Laid out on top of it, Small beams. With his hands he caresses the daisy petals, the small stones, the blanket that covers the earth. Everything has changed. The light is different. The smells are different. What a smell, the forest. Thirstily he breathes in the distant perfume of fruit and almonds. He turns his body to rub it against the new colours, to breathe as if for the first time. It feels like he has been born. He cries.
Afterwards he drags himself towards the mouth of the well — mainly because he doesn’t want to break the spell that he is caught up in, and secondly to avoid stumbling and being pitched back in again. He pokes his head over and sees his brother sitting in a strange pose with his arms bent backwards and his legs spread out as if they belonged to another body.
‘We did it!’ Small cries, delightedly.
‘Ha ha! I knew it! We’re the greatest! Have you hurt yourself?’
‘A bit. But I’m fine. Are you OK?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
They look at each other for a few seconds not knowing what else to say. It feels strange to be so far apart, even if in reality the distance separating them is just a few metres. It’s Small who speaks first:
‘I think I have to go.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll come back for you.’
‘Yes. But before that you must keep your promise,’ says Big.
‘I know.’
‘I hope you can.’
‘I’ve thought about it a lot. I won’t be afraid.’
Small gets to his feet and collects Mother’s bag, which landed a few metres from the well. Then he goes back to the edge to look at his brother for the last time.
‘Kill her for what she did to us,’ Big says.
And also:
‘Remember that she threw us in here. You don’t love her anymore.’
*
With those words still sounding through the forest, on the mountains and along every path, Small departs. And huddled in a corner of the well, alone now, Big surrenders himself to a torture that will go on for hours and days, and he utters one last message, which nobody hears, in that capricious language of tears and laughter:
‘Amam cor…’
97
SMALL ARRIVES DRENCHED in the orange light of the afternoon. He lets the things he brought with him drop to the ground: a rucksack, two ropes, a small stick, several stakes and a hunting knife. It wasn’t hard to find the way back: an invisible cord pulled him from his navel.
Seeing it now, with new eyes, it is a beautiful place to die.
He remains painfully thin. His eyes are still sunken deep in their sockets, as if they were tired of looking. His cheekbones could cut right through the flesh that covers them. He has, however, recovered the olive colour in his face and managed to separate the animal from the man.
He walks slowly towards the well, giving each step its due importance, gauging the distance that separates him from the mouth and which grows shorter with each new step. He stops two metres from the well. He still can’t see. Nor does he say anything. Another step. The bottom of the well glistens in the corner of his eye.
The next step is the last. With his hands holding on to the edge, he leans over.
*
The previous days were very strange for him. Not because of the trouble he had finding the way home, or the nights he spent out in the open, imagining himself lost. Not because he went back to eating ripe fruit, but because he bore his brother’s absence like a necessary void. He felt as if a shark had ripped his body at the waist, and as he walked along like that — so incomplete, his organs hanging out for all to see, powerless to hide the emptiness and with no way of preserving his dignity — he felt ashamed.
The previous days were very strange for him, with that shame seeping out of every pore on his skin, leaving him slippery for any human contact. Along the dirt paths, in the copper mines, in factories destroyed by desperation, in the cities left to ruin, people made way for him. None of them could stand the glare of his eyes since in them it was still possible to see the well. And yet the people assumed his shame — the obscenity of so many years spent in a daze — and in silence they began to escort him — an unassailable throng, a mob of men and women emerging from their cages.
The previous days were very strange for him, visiting Mother, who seemed to have expected the parting and neither screamed nor put up resistance. He didn’t want to know her reasons for doing what she did, but seeing her happy and without remorse was enough for him to understand that there were stories he didn’t know. He suffocated her with the old food bag she had left them with in the well — that bait that never broke their spirit — so that she understood, before she went, that they didn’t touch a morsel of that false charity, that they overcame every urge, that they did not surrender.
The previous days were very strange for him; the family home surrounded by an expectant crowd, and him, inside, alone, avoiding their gaze. And ultimately leaving, because that place could no longer be his and because he knew that his spirit was no longer close to what it had been before.
‘I’m back,’ he says.
He unravels the ropes and secures the ends to the stakes nailed into the ground. He takes the opposite end of one of them and ties it around his body, winding three circles around his waist and two more around his groin. An endless human tide observes the ceremony in complete silence, spilling out from the edges of the forest. He tosses the other end of the second rope into the well. Afterwards, he sits down on the edge. And while the night closes its gates above him, announcing the end of an era of darkness, blooming like a cluster of promises in his chest which, despite his death, will keep on growing, he wonders if he should cut the ropes and let himself fall, or if it would be better, after all, to retrieve the rotting corpse of his brother and hold him up as a symbol of insurrection, and for his anniversary to light the darkness with a tremor of footsteps and noise, and for us to wake up tomorrow from this grim dream with the courage of a rising sea, tearing down the walls that silenced us, regaining our ground, having our say.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book, like the last one, is the product of much effort and affection. Given that I don’t know if I will ever have this opportunity again, I would like to thank all the people who, in one way or another, accompanied me in the process.
To my parents, Rafael and Nieves, for teaching me both to keep my feet on the ground and to lift myself up several hand spans above it; to my sister Adriana for her unstinting faith in me; to the old friends who followed the writing from close by or afar and who helped me: Izas, Jaime, Adriana, Pere, Ángela, Santi, Jesús, Galder, Igor, Ada, Ángel, Pablo and the Parretis Rafa and Mario; to Pedro de Hipérbole, my first passionate reader; to those who spread the word; to the Cantabrian and Mediterranean family.