The boys open their mouths as if to shout, but don’t.
The first of the wolves drops its head and eyeballs them, baring the roof of its mouth. It knows its prey is weak, that it’s ailing and has no means of escape. There is constant movement at its sides. The pack circles the hole in a hunger dance. One of them extends its paws, threatening to pounce. It’s not the only one. They seem to be considering ways of reaching their feed and retreating back into the forest. Another one prepares to launch itself into the well, the very idea of which leaves a long thread of drool dangling from its muzzle. But before it bends its legs a rock splits its head open and the dance breaks up.
‘Get out of our house.’
The sound of bone cracking is followed by an authentic yelp, genuine pain. The animals protest and pace around, but the rocks keep hitting them all the same. They retreat.
‘You got him!’ says Small.
Over the next minutes a few of the wolves return to the hole, but without conviction. Most of them back off, regrouping several metres away where the rocks don’t reach. Eventually, they leave.
‘Can you hear them?’
‘No. They’ve gone.’
‘You frightened them.’
‘Yeah. I frightened the wolves. With rocks!’
Small lets out an astonished laugh, still gripped with fear.
‘Let’s sleep for a while. They won’t come back. There are still a few hours till the sun comes up, and we have to preserve our energy. You go first. I’ll stay awake a bit longer, just in case any of the bastards show their faces here again.’
Small thinks, he said ‘bastards’. His brother has beaten the wolves. Tonight he’ll sleep like few nights before, and it will be the last night, too, that he rests peacefully.
Big settles down in the middle of the well, rocks in either hand, and he doesn’t take his eyes off the hole. Tonight he’ll ask himself how he would fend off the wolves if they got out of the well, and the thought won’t let him sleep. In his head terrible images will take shape of his brother’s skin separated from the bone, of his own, ripped apart in a bloody ritual, his mind still alert to the sound of the beasts as they chew.
11
FOR FOUR DAYS the sun scorches the fields, dries the well, and marks the trees with great strokes of copper. The water that filtered through the earth turns first to sludge, then to clods of black sand. When there is nothing left to drink, the two brothers break their daily routine to suck on the roots that poke out from the walls until their mouths taste of coal.
‘I’m not well,’ Small says.
‘It will rain.’
They know this land well, the motions of the sky under which they’ve grown up, the cloud cycles. They know that a ferocious sun this month heralds an imminent downpour. It will rain because it always rains when their skin starts to peel, and because the land seems to be governed by a mechanism of suffering that works against every one of nature’s decrees. As such, the people here are tough in skin and character, and they meet the exigencies of the land with unbending patience, without demands or complaint. This, however, presupposes a rupture in their emotional communication, in their shows of affection and in the human contract of cohabitation. The brothers are living proof of it. They no longer look one another in the eyes or search for themselves in the other as they did in the early days. Displays of affection aren’t called for in a world dictated by the need to survive. Love is like a vow of silence, where cruelties befitting a reptile, a prehistoric crocodile, are meted out freely.
‘Do you love me?’ Small asks.
‘It will rain.’
By the time the sun sets on the fourth day of drought they have gone hours without drinking a single drop of water, and Big is showing signs of dehydration. Even his urine has dried up. A silent rage throbs in his temples and for a moment he wants more than anything in the world to strangle his brother, to put his hands around his neck so that his eyes pop out of their sockets and he can bite into them and suck out the white jelly, as if they were salt-water sweeties.
‘Don’t ask me any questions.’
‘I haven’t said anything to you.’
‘Don’t talk to me either.’
Small closes his eyes and thinks about rivers, lakes, puddles of rainwater that he could splash and dance and jump about in. He imagines torrential floods in all flavours: lemon clouds that release their juice over the meadows and marinate the livestock; deluges of sweet orange to swim and dive in with his mouth open, never drowning; hailstorms of purple grapes; supernatural ice melts; underwater meadows. He digs a hole in the darkest part of the shade and puts his head in up to his ears, in a place where the soil retains a cool cover of blackness and silence. And in this ostrich-like pose his mind elevates beyond the well and his thirst disappears, his brother disappears, the prolonged pain in his stomach disappears, and his breathing slows to the exact stillness of invisible things.
He burrows down deeper still.
His teeth are covered with earth as he opens his mouth to breathe in the thick air. Deeper. The oxygen barely reaches his lungs, and in this state of near breathlessness he is struck by a flash of lucidity, a grey thought sparks white, and sets off a chain of impossible links. Each of his doubts corresponds to a certainty, like a tide of small fires that course into a river of molten lava. He is no longer himself. Now it is not him suffering this slow death in the well. Now no longer a thirst to quench. Now no. At the heart of his discovery is a murderous act of selfishness, new levels of indolence. He lets himself be carried by the nothing, by the emptiness…
‘Get out of there, you idiot!’
Big grabs his legs and heaves the weightless body of his brother who hasn’t moved a muscle in minutes and is practically unconscious. He seems to be immersed in a hallucinatory dream and Big slaps him on the face to snap him out of it. Small comes around and opens his mouth like a fish out of water. His neck is encrusted with sticky sweat and he coughs up grainy clumps of earth, with his tongue covered in a carpet of yellow moss and stone shavings.
‘You nearly suffocated! Have you lost your mind?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well.’
‘I’ve told you, it will rain. It always rains. You have to hold on.’
A couple of hours later, Small realizes that the well is not a well, but a mortar, and his brother is nothing but a fruit stuffed with bones that he must pestle in order to extract its oil, like they do with olives. At first he uses rocks to bash him, but the process is slow and onerous. So he builds a blood mill operated by oxen that drag a shaft, which in turn rotates an enormous stone, and grinds the flesh and bone and entrails until they become a wet paste. He then collects it all in his brother’s skull and invokes the rain, which appears in the form of a gushing tap; and from a mixture of the water and the paste he distils a dark liquid, so thick he can neither chew it nor drink it, but which nonetheless sates his thirst, his hunger, everything. And when it is all gone, he positions himself underneath the huge stone and spurs the oxen.
By nightfall their bodies have collapsed and they lie unconscious, covered by a blanket of earth. A tremor courses through Small’s fingers. Something in his mind has broken beyond repair from the thirst and hunger. His pupils spin like blind carousels. They see a lawless palace celebrating the eve of his madness. Big is suffocating. His parched skin sticks to his flesh and his muscles shine out like a moon, swollen from the strain of their daily overexertion. He gargles in his dreams and nibbles the cracked flesh of his lips so that a trickle of blood leaks down into his throat, filling him up until he feels sick.