One afternoon when we’d gone for a swim, I found the weather strange at our small cove without knowing how it was different from any other day. I sat down on the rocks and I watched Marie walk along the shoreline. The sea, spread under a veiled white sky, was uniformly gray. The water lapped gently on the shore, murky, slightly troubled, of a lead or lava-rock gray, like an artificial lake around a nuclear power plant. We entered this viscous sea, our bodies hardly cooled by its warm and oily water, swimming cautiously since Marie had spotted some jellyfish, she swam in front of me, tracing a path through the water to help me avoid them, all while turning around, rapt, to point them out (the more we were in danger, the more she shook her finger in frenzied excitement). We’d got out of the water, and we lay drying on the rocks, gazing at the gray sea lapping before us in this apocalyptic lighting. The humidity was high, the air stifling, insects buzzed nervously and stuck to our skin. There are days like this, at the end of summer, when the stagnant heat hangs heavy from sunrise to sunset, weighing down your body and numbing your mind, and finally I realized that my strange feeling at the cove was due to a total absence of blue in the surroundings. It seemed as though, with the help of some sort of computer image editor capable of removing one color at a time, all the blue had been entirely extracted from the setting without affecting the rest of the chromatic scale. All the blue had disappeared, the usual blue of this cove, the radiant blue, the striking blue of the sky and the sea, the Mediterranean’s endemic blue had vanished into thin air. All was haze from the heat and wooly white light. The air was still, windless, not even a slight breeze stirring the rushes in the cove — as though the wind was gathering its strength for the coming storm.
That night, Marie flew into my room at around four in the morning, she swung the door open and darted in, she was barefoot and in a T-shirt, confused, troubled, she came all the way over to my bed and told me that there was smoke in the garden, that the fire was at the gates of the property. I slipped on a pair of pants and followed her out onto the terrace, we wandered in search in the night through clouds of dust. Terrible gusts of wind, which had already knocked over the metal garden chairs, raged up the driveway intermittently. The deckchairs were battered by the wind, their canvas backs turned in and out alternately, whipped by each gust. I ran around the house in search of the fire, but I didn’t see anything, the night was black and windy, impenetrable, the trees sunk into the shadows, shaking together in a wild sway of branches, a whirl of leaves. Smoke now entered the terrace, still light and semitransparent, a few wind-borne plumes, curling slowly in the air. I turned off all the propane tanks in the garden and helped Marie to unravel the hose, to extend it and stretch it over the terrace and all the way up to the windows to protect the house. Marie ran back and forth on the terrace closing the shutters of the first-floor windows. She picked up the hose and went around the house, spraying each side in the night, lingering longer at the wooden shutters to soak them thoroughly, abruptly tugging the hose if she felt any resistance or if it formed kinks on the ground. The spray arched up to the second floor, and the house glistened under the shower. Water streamed down the sides of the house, and the weathered wood of the wet shutters shone in the night.
We didn’t know where the fire was, whether it was approaching or moving away from the property. We knew nothing, the fire was still abstract, distant and invisible, provoking even more terror in us for this very reason, filled as we were with an unimaginable and indescribable fear, when, all of a sudden, at the boom of an explosion in the distance, the fire appeared on the crest of the hill, rising in a sort of gasp, an unleashing of long-gathered energy, and it was then, immediately, that I saw not the few flames I’d imagined issuing from a bush in the garden but a veritable wall of fire on the hilltop in the distance, thriving and dynamic, jagged, blazing in the night in a rage of flames, red, yellow, orange, and copper, hissing and crackling, from which giant billows of black smoke rose to the sky. Although a good three hundred yards separated us from the blaze, we felt its heat at once, we felt its brightness, its power, its smell, its roar, and its speed, flames had already begun to race down the hill and spread toward us, popping and hissing in their pursuit. Marie and I, abandoning the hose without delay, leaving it there on the ground, partially rolled, still busy spraying the terrace, ran off toward the old truck parked in the driveway, Marie wearing only a T-shirt and her old flip-flops, which she’d managed to slip on without stopping, but which held her back more than they helped her to run I had only cotton pants on and a pair of old loafers. Marie jumped in at the wheel and we sped out through clouds of dust. The headlights shone on the road’s spectral surface, white and chalky, while wild shrubs swayed and shook on the roadside as we sped into the night.
Having reached a small white bridge, Marie slammed on the brakes, came to a full stop, looked behind her to reverse, then resolutely took the unpaved road that lead to the equestrian club. We’d hardly driven thirty feet over the bumpy undergrowth than we were stopped by a thick curtain of smoke blocking the road, but Marie didn’t slow down, she continued to speed forward, penetrating the curtain of smoke, at first white, light and volatile, then increasingly dark, an opaque mass of smoke, dense, stifling, whose odor filled the truck. Through the beam of our headlights we saw nothing but smoke and the yellow truck of a forest ranger parked on the other side of the road. Marie had stopped answering my questions, she drove with both hands gripping the wheel, continuing on for a few dozen feet until it became utterly impossible, at which point she stopped, opened the door, and fled through the smoke on foot, I tried to stop her, trailing behind her, she charged down the road determinedly, almost at a run through the dense smoke. Presently there was no horizon, no vegetation, the road had disappeared, we were completely enveloped in smoke. Marie reached the equestrian club, and, fearful, I called out for her, I asked her to come back, but she didn’t respond, she continued to charge forward, stooped and determined, her shirt lifted to cover her face, exposing her naked body, as she had nothing underneath. Many of the club cottages were on fire, a shed was in flames. Screams could be heard here and there, there was great confusion around the stables, locked, inaccessible, where the silhouettes of animals stamped and leaped, whinnying raucously in desperation, almost human in their intonation, and yet inhumanly violent. We proceeded through the smoke and we saw Peppino only a couple feet from a stable in flames, a handkerchief over his mouth, striving to free a bucking horse still tethered inside its stable. When the stable roof began to collapse, with a progressive dissolution of boards and sheet metal, Peppino jumped inside the stable, vanishing momentarily into the dense black smoke only to reemerge with the horse, man and horse surging out into the night in a ring of fire, as if ablaze, a halo of flames and incandescent sparks emanating from their dazed bodies. The horse was severely burned, its skin scorched and its muscles bared, a black syrupy liquid oozing from its sides. Peppino ran alongside the horse trying to calm it and take it to shelter behind the fire trucks. Eight other horses had been tied there to a tanker, bound together by the same rope, attached to each other as though in solidarity, a giant shifting mass pulling in every direction, jostling and turning every which way amid swinging tails and tossing manes, a compact conglomeration of agitated and panicked bodies, the sheen of their coats reflecting the fire, the whole beastly mob shaken incessantly by a nervous wave of agitation. They stuck to one another, twisting, drawing back, storming forward and pulling so hard on the rope that they’d knock the tanker off balance, its wheels lifting momentarily in the dust. Residual pockets of fire continued to burn all around in the paddock of the equestrian club, cottages were in flames, barns, stables, the ground itself, the grass ablaze here and there, and Marie suddenly took off toward Peppino. She zigzagged through a grassy area, where plumes of violet smoke hung suspended in the night’s trembling air. Marie made a beeline for Peppino, charging through the spreading fire, lifting high her flip-flops, picking up her pace, running, dancing in place as her feet burned, and Peppino pushed her back angrily when he saw her, furious and beside himself, chasing her away, and Marie turned back around, no longer aware of where she was going, lost, still running, turning in circles, the soles of her feet scorched. A fireman saw her and ran toward her, grabbed her and brought her back to me, leading her under his protective wing, while she laid her head gently on his shoulder.