Alessandro Baricco - Without Blood

And they went away.

Tito saw a drawn curtain on the other side of the room. He released the safety of his pistol and advanced. He parted the curtain. Behind it was a small room. Everything was in disarray.

Chairs overturned, trunks, tools, and some baskets of half-rotted fruit. There was a strong smell of food gone bad. And of dampness. On the floor the dust was strange: it looked as if someone had dragged his feet through it. Or something else.

He heard El Gurre on the other side of the house beating the walls with his machine gun, looking for hidden doors. Salinas must have still been there, holding on to the table, shaking. Tito moved one of the fruit baskets. He made out on the floor the line of a trapdoor. He hit the floor hard with one boot, to hear what noise it made. He moved two more baskets. It was a small trapdoor, carefully cut out. Tito looked up. Through a small window he saw the darkness outside. He hadn’t even realized that it was night. He thought it was time to go, get away from there. Then he knelt on the floor, and lifted the trapdoor. There was a girl inside, curled up on her side, her hands hidden between her thighs, her head bent forward slightly, toward her knees. Her eyes were open.

Tito pointed his gun at her.

“Salinas!” he shouted.

The child turned her head and looked at him. She had dark eyes, oddly shaped. She looked at him without expression. Her lips were half closed and she was breathing calmly. She was an animal in its den. Tito felt returning to him a sensation he had felt a thousand times, finding that exact position, between the warmth of sheets or under the afternoon sun of childhood. Knees folded, hands between the legs, feet balanced. Head bent forward slightly, closing the circle. How lovely it was, he thought. The child’s skin was white, and the outline of her lips perfect. Her legs stuck out from under a short red skirt, as if in a drawing. It was all so orderly. It was all so complete.

Exact.

The girl turned her head back, to its former position. She bent it forward slightly, closing the circle. Tito realized that no one had answered, beyond the curtain. Time had surely passed, and yet no one had answered. He could hear El Gurre banging with his gun against the walls of the house. A muted meticulous sound. Outside it was dark. He lowered the trapdoor. Slowly.

He remained there, on his knees, to see if through the cracks in the floor he could see the child. He would have liked to think.

But he couldn’t. Every so often he was too tired to think. He got up. He put the baskets back. He felt his heart banging against his temples.

They went out into the night like drunks. El Gurre supported Salinas, pushing him forward. Tito walked behind them.

Somewhere, the old Mercedes was waiting for them. They went a dozen yards or so, without exchanging a word. Then Salinas said something to El Gurre and El Gurre went back, toward the farmhouse. He didn’t seem very certain, but he went back.

Salinas leaned on Tito and told him to keep walking. They skirted the woodpile and left the road to take a path that led through the fields. There was a deep silence, and for that reason Tito was unable to say the sentence that he had in mind and had decided to say: There is still a child in there. He was tired, and there was too much silence. Salinas stopped. He was shaking and it was an enormous effort to walk. Tito said something softly, then he turned and looked back. He saw El Gurre running toward them. Behind him he saw the farmhouse rip the darkness, ablaze with the fire that was devouring it. The flames shot up and a cloud of black smoke rose slowly in the night. Tito moved away from Salinas and stood petrified, watching. El Gurre joined them and without stopping said Let’s go, kid. But Tito didn’t move.

“What the hell did you do?” he said.

El Gurre was trying to drag Salinas away. He said again that they had to go. Then Tito grabbed him by the neck and began to shout in his face WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?

“Calm down, kid,” said El Gurre.

But Tito wouldn’t stop, he began shouting louder and louder, WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?, shaking El Gurre like a puppet, WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?, until Salinas, too, began shouting, STOP IT, KID, they were like three madmen, abandoned on a dark stage: CUT IT OUT!

The stage of a theater in ruins.

Finally they dragged Tito away by force. The glare of the fire lighted up the night. They crossed a field and went down to the road, following the stream bed. When they came in sight of the old Mercedes, El Gurre put a hand on Tito’s shoulder and said to him softly that he had done a fine job, and that it was all over now. But Tito wouldn’t stop repeating the words over and over.

He didn’t shout. He spoke softly, in a child’s voice. What the hell have we done. What the hell have we done. What the hell have we done.

The old farmhouse of Mato Rujo stood blankly in the countryside, carved in red flame against the dark night. The only stain in the empty outline of the plain.

Three days later a man arrived, on horseback, at the farmhouse of Mato Rujo. He was filthy, dressed in rags. The horse was an old nag, skin and bones. It had something in its eyes, a yellow liquid that dripped down its muzzle, and the flies buzzed around it.

The man saw the walls of the farmhouse standing blackened and useless, coals in the middle of an enormous quenched brazier. They were like the last remaining teeth in the mouth of an old man. The fire had also consumed a large oak that for years had shaded the house. Like a black claw, it stank of calamity.

The man stayed in the saddle. He made a slow half-circle around the farm. He went to the well and without getting off the horse unhooked the bucket and let it fall. He heard the slap of metal on water. He looked over at the farmhouse. He saw that sitting on the ground, leaning against what remained of a wall, there was a child. She was staring at him, two motionless eyes shining in a smoke-grimed face. She was wearing a short red skirt. She had scratches all over. Or wounds.

The man pulled up the bucket from the well. The water was blackish. He stirred it with a tin dipper, but the blackness remained. He refilled the dipper, brought it to his lips, and took a long drink. He looked again into the water in the bucket. He spit into it. Then he set everything on the edge of the well and pressed his heels into the belly of the horse.

He went over to the child. She raised her head to look at him.

She seemed to have nothing to say. The man studied her for a while. Eyes, lips, hair. Then he held out a hand. She stood, grabbed the man’s hand, and lifted herself up to the saddle, behind him. The old nag adjusted its hooves to the new weight. It tossed its head, twice. The man made a strange noise, and the horse calmed down.

As they rode away from the farmhouse, at a slow trot, under a fierce sun, the girl let her head fall forward and, with her forehead against the man’s sweaty back, slept.

The signal changed to green and the woman crossed the street. She looked down as she walked, because it had just stopped raining and in the hollows of the asphalt there were puddles that reminded one of the sudden rain of early spring. She had an elegant gait, confined by the tight black skirt. She saw the puddles and avoided them.

When she reached the opposite sidewalk she stopped.

People passed by, crowding the late afternoon with their steps toward home, or freedom. The woman liked to feel the city trickling around her, so she stood for a while, in the middle of the sidewalk, inexplicable, like a woman who had been left there, abruptly, by her lover.