Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

So, as the caravan journeyed down through the fields of France, the frantic loving continued and for both of them the old country faded and was put away like the things of childhood. They did not speak to each other of the past. Cait was a capable woman with a lively manner, and she bore no sentimental attachments. She sat on the timber seatboard and sometimes held the reins and clucked forward the horse while Finbar sought for sleep in the back. She learned the spices of the gypsies and soon cooked braised suckling pig and other assorted meats in such a savoury manner that the smoke itself was sustaining. Her only weakness was an occasional longing for fish. When it arose she could not abide meat of any kind and demanded that Finbar find her a river. He would set off then on the small grey horse that was theirs and be gone until the evening or the following day, when he would return with a bucket of live trout. The excitement would be immediately visible on Cait’s face and she would reach in and take some of the fish in her bare arms and hold them slithering against her bosom. Although he knew what to do, she would still command Finbar to fill their zinc bathtub, and he would do so, and later her cries would be heard like seagulls about the camp. For some nights after, the caravan would groan and rock all the more and the gypsies at the fires would seem to see it as a ship sailing away across a dark sea.

As ever, the gypsies had no destination or fixed itinerary. They wandered down through Normandy and found themselves crossing the Maine and into Anjou and then farther south still into the country called Limousin. They travelled down the map of France like ink dribbling down a page. Had they considered it, had they seen a map, they might have chosen a more southeasterly route, but they had not, and the leader now among them was too young and raw in the manner of command to show his inexperience and ask for opinion. His name was Masso. While the roads were easy and the weather clement, he waved them daily forward. He did not show his own fright or uncertainty, or the reality that he had no idea where he was leading them. There were green fields. There were animals they stole and killed and others they hunted. There were tranquil farmhouses where the gypsies could barter tin spoons and ladles and other assorted oddments of their own manufacture. There were broad valleys where in the summertime they came to a somnolent stop and where in the buzzing of bees and flies they told stories and drank sweet wine. Sometimes armies passed them on the road. Men in blue and scarlet and black boots to the knee marched past heading off to some field of blood, doomed figures already called by Death. They looked at the gypsies with leering expressions, then looked at their women with a kind of hopeless lust, passing on all the time. Thirty, forty cannon rattled past and cavalrymen too with bridles of supple and polished leather and spurs that jangled in the afterdust. So the world passed by those gypsies, and it was as if they were living in a parallel domain or had escaped into an undiscovered dimension where none saw or cared for them and where the history of the world was not known.

Then, at the end of summer, when lassitude had almost overcome them all and their faces were dark with sun, Masso announced that they must leave the soft valleys and go east once more. He made the announcement with no fixed idea of the geography of that country but was secretly thinking that his position as their leader would be made secure if he brought them into Bohemia. So, they had set out just as the mistral was blowing. Under their breaths many of the gypsies cursed. Their eyelids were heavy and their eyes narrow and small. They had grown soft in the summer and now the journey into winter made each of them age rapidly. Within two weeks they were in the mountains and the wind blew knives past their ears. Then there fell upon them the infamous snow that was widespread throughout Europe that year. It fell in those mountains in large, thick flakes. Each was like a piece of paper, torn fragments of some broken treaty between heaven and earth. It fell from the sky so quickly that the caravans had to stop in the narrow passes. The drop to the valley below vanished, the peaks above likewise, and the gypsies were held there with frozen faces, amazed. They looked to Masso for enlightenment and were told to go back and sit in their caravans. The following day the snow was rising above the wheel axles. Men dug as the snow drifted upon them and made of their shoulders white epaulets or poor wings. Food was thinned. Battered buckets of snow were melted and the water added to thimble measures of soup stock. As the hunger became first a sound and then a loud noise like a beast among them, Cait opened the barrel of salted fish that she had stored and Finbar carried some along the stalled line of the caravans. Still the snow fell. The mountains that they did not know were the Alps mocked them with their white peaks. In his caravan Masso stared at the canvas wall and slowly rocked. It came so that he could not bear to look outside, and instead in the unearthly silence of that place he listened to the soft pounding and slide of the snow as it began to bury his caravan. Then, when Finbar came with others of the gypsies to ask him how they were not to starve, Masso stopped his rocking and looked them straight in the face.

“You must eat me,” he said, and stabbed a thin iron spike clean through his heart.

They did not eat him but took all of his clothes, his blankets and scarves. Under Finbar’s direction they distributed these to the very young and old gypsies until they were like deeply padded polar creatures and not even their faces could be seen. The starving horses they released and watched as they made slow, terrified progress away down the road. Then they pushed Masso’s caravan over the edge of the road and it crashed and splintered and echoed as the only sound of man in those mountains.

They endured another seven days and nights. Finbar Foley became their leader without election or discussion. He told them to gather six in a caravan and embrace each other’s bodies as if in the strongest grip of passion. He told them to lock their lips and breathe into each other and seal there the energy of life in one long and continuous circuitry of warm air.

The caravans lay in the snowy pass, and within each of them the gypsies embraced. Young and old clung to each other and worked an elaborate puzzle of connection so that no part of man or woman was left untouched. Giggles, groans, moans, and other sounds travelled the length of the caravans and into the white air like the ghosts of pleasure. And then there was silence.

Years later, when the grandchildren of those gypsies told it, the snow would fall faster and faster. Each flake would become larger, they would spread their arms to show, and the snowflakes would transform until they were wide as sheets unpacked and tossed from some chest in the heavens. The gypsies would hear them fall upon them. In the darkness of their caravans they would sense the weight of whiteness thump as though it were landing on their spirits. Then by the magic of such memories, and the inheritance of the inexplicable that was theirs, the gypsy grandchildren would tell how the snow sheets defied science and were not cold but warm. The heat inside the hoops of canvas grew. Those who had prepared themselves for death and were starved and frozen into stilled pose as in some collapsed mosaic of byzantine intricacy now moved their limbs. They stretched as the blood warmed and ran into their toes. Their faces felt the breath of those next to them. Their eyes dribbled a rheumy warm fluid and then their noses, too. Sweat flowed off them and the heat was such that in their delirium or fever they rose and threw off the layers of clothes they were wearing and fell to the most passionate and sexual loving that surpassed even their own dreams. The caravans steamed. The young writhed upon each other. The leathery skin of those gypsies old and long travelled softened like apples in October and filled the air with the fruitful scent of remembered Indian summer. Whether the gypsies were dead or dying, they could not be sure. Whether this was the hereafter or they were being granted a final night of loving on the farthermost edge of life seemed equally likely, and they did not question it.