It will take me three days to clear these places, another three or four to cross the low mountains and be further out at the rim of the wilderness. We had lived in this place for eleven years, healing the gashes and fractures of our past, using the sun and dust to staunch the jagged memories. This peninsula of abandonment had given much, and a part of me ached to plan a return, even though I know it will never be possible.
The heat of the day has become saturated with weight, the brightness sullen and pregnant with change. Clouds have thickened and coagulated with inner darkness; water is being born, heavy and unstable.
This is the breath of the sickly wind called Burascio by the natives of the land; a wind which sucked rather than blew, its hot, inverted breath giving movement but not relief. It toys with expectation by animating suffocation, tantalising the arid earth with its scent of rain, whilst beneath the reservoirs, caves and cisterns strained their emptiness towards its skies.
This was the reason we had lived here. Este said the isolation was part of the treatment, but the mending and evolution of the body and spirit could only take place above a honeycomb of hollows. The skies and the sea would be heard in those places. Their vastness and motions would be echoed down beneath the taut earth, swilling and booming the darkness into quiet against their unseen mineral walls. She spoke of their unity of voice, from the humblest well to the vastest cathedral cave, how they are like pipes of different sizes in a mighty organ. An organ constructed to shudder in fugues and fanfares of listening, not playing; where a cacophony of silence was only counterpoised by insistent drips of water.
She knew it was their action that influenced the minute physical and the immense mental and spiritual spaces inside human beings. I think of this as I walk across the lid of their meaning, of her unfolding these wonders to my baffled ears. I think of her voice, very close, very clear, and I stare in shock at the truth of holding her bones and flesh in my sweating hand.
During the night, lightning can be seen far out at sea. Above the horizon, soundless dendrites of storm flicker, marbling the curve of the earth on their way towards here and the waiting dawn. I take shelter in a dug-out shepherds’ cave at the edge of one of the poorest villages. The terraced fields here are worn down, losing their boundaries in limping disrepair, survival and oblivion quarrelling among the falling stones and parched plants. In this domain of lizards, flies and cacti, the human signatures were being erased.
My shelter feels like it has not been used for years, the stitched-together sacking that made its rudimentary door falling apart in my hand as I try to unhook it. This crouching space had been scratched out from the soft yellow stone, just big enough for a small man or boy and a few goats. There are still remnants of occupation: a low bed or table blocking the far end; a few tools bearing the labour scars of generations; a car wheel, its tyre worn smooth; dry, sand-encrusted empty bottles and a few exhausted shotgun cartridges. Hanging on a nail is a fragment of rusted armour, an articulated breastplate of diminutive size. Whether this is a genuine artefact dug up from some unknown battle, or part of a carnival costume from one of the gaudy pageants that once marked the saint’s passage through the year, it is impossible to say. The hot land and the salt wind have etched and cooked it into another time, a time that never stained memory, because it was too ancient to have yet been conceived.
The cave’s bare interior seemed at once empty and brimming with occupation. I curl into the sanctity of this most human shelf, and taste the joy of its simplicity with the edge of my sudden tiredness.
The thunder enters my sleep. It slides between the laminations of dreams with the grace of a panther, its first sound being no more than a whisper or a vibration. Each mile it runs it gains volume and power, each mile it flies it trains my unconscious to not respond, each growing resonance being only fractionally louder than the last. The hours are eaten in its stealthy approach, my nightmares absorbing the shocks until it is directly overhead and its massive percussion shakes the ground with light; a huge whiteness, battering the pale morning with a fury that refuses all kinship.
The village is awake and active, people darting from one house to another as the sky opens and torrents of rain fall to meet the rising earth’s unbridled appetite. Within minutes, the fields have drunk deep and are forming lakes. The streets and tracks of the village are alive with rivulets and yellow tributaries of fast water. The villagers fall upon these eddies with a great frenzy of action. Rolled-up sacks and hessian are used to divert the flood into wells and gulleys which lead to other cisterns. Logs and stones, even items of clothing, are improvised to divert this precious storm. The feuds and squabbles that fossilised the village are forgotten, water and its capture going beyond blood and its boundaries. The rain is constant and spiteful, the villagers are determined and drenched with mud. People slither and run, shout instructions to the very young, scream for more sacks, laugh and fall with the very old, who curse. Those who are normally locked away join the rush, limping and screaming with exhilaration and confusion. The entire village turns into mud beings, a chaotic, purposeful mania rattling under the rains. Some animals watch from their stables and doorways, surprised and indignant at so much energy, water and noise.
I can not stay outside of this circus vortex, so I carefully stash the bow and other goods high in the cave, away from the flood and beasts, and run to work alongside a toothless elder who is trying to build a dam of rocks and rags.
His efforts are useless against the power of the flow. His slowness gives a pathetic humour to the event, and his wall tumbles away every few minutes while he methodically continues to pile, seemingly unaware of the gleeful water and his mechanical futility. Together, we manage to turn the stream, sending it into the corner of the courtyard. It pours into the mouth of an open well, and falls into its resounding depth with echoing splashes. As I watch our minor triumph, in a flash it occurs to me that I have no memory of Este bleeding, no picture of the blood leaving her body, just a vague blur of its presence drying everywhere in the room. Have these sounds caught a reflection, cupped the act in a palm of memory?
The old man tugs at my sleeve and clears my vision. He has started work on another stream and needs my help. We continue directing the water for two hours, soaked to the bone but satisfied. The storm passes, the rain stops and the steaming earth has begun to dry. Birds noisily make use of the orange puddles before they return to dust. A saturated heat begins to rise, forcing all labour to cease.
The family of the old man insist I join them in their dripping home. Our celebratory feast is simple but powerfuclass="underline" we drink a coarse red wine made from the family’s parched, hard grapes and eat a dish of fat rice and dark meat cooked in pomegranate juice, punctuated by delicious bread with black onions baked into its crust. There is much merriment and we share that language of need and alcohol, where the native and the foreign are overrun by excitement, and delicacies of grammar are jolted loose by emotion.