Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain

Behind him came the drummer with his drum of saltcured rawhide stretched upon a frame of ash and this he beat with a sort of flail made of a hardwood ball tethered to a stick. The drum gave off a low note of great resonance and he struck it with an upward swing of the flail and at each beat he bent his head to listen as perhaps a man might who were tuning a drum.

There followed a man bearing a sheathed sword upon a leather cushion and after him the bearers of torches and then the litter and the men who carried it. The traveler could not tell if the person they carried were alive or if this were not perhaps some sort of funeral procession passing through the mountains in the rain and the night. At the rear of the enfilade came the hornsman bearing an instrument made of cane bound with wrappings of copper wire and hung with tassels. He played it by blowing through a length of tubing and it played three notes which hovered in the shrouded night air above them like a ponderable body itself.

How many of these people were there?

I believe eight.

Go ahead.

They advanced upon the road and the traveler sat up and swung his legs over the side of his altarstone and pulled the blanket about his shoulders and waited. They came on until they were opposite to the place where he sat and here they stopped and here they stood. The traveler watched them. If he was curious he was also afraid.

What about you?

I was only curious.

How did you know he was afraid?

The man studied the empty roadway beneath them. After a while he said: This man was not me. If he may have been some part of me that I do not recognize then so may you. I fall back upon my argument of common histories.

Where were you all this time?

Asleep in my bed.

You were not in the dream.

No.

Billy leaned and spat. Well, he said, I'm seventyeight years old and in that time I've had a lot of dreams. And as near as I can recollect I was in ever one of em. I dont recall a time that I ever dreamt about other people but what I wasnt around somewheres. My notion is that you pretty much dream about yourself. I even dreamt one time that I was dead. But I was standin there looking at the corpse.

I see, the man said.

What do you see?

I see you've thought a bit about dreams.

I aint thought about em at all. I've just had em.

Can we come back to this question?

You can do whatever you want.

Thank you.

You sure you aint makin all this up.

The man smiled. He looked out across the roadway and the fields and shook his head but he didnt answer.

Or did you want to come back to that?

The problem is that your question is the very question upon which the story hangs.

A tractortrailer passed overhead and the swallows nesting in the concrete coves flew forth and circled and returned.

Bear with me, the man said. This story like all stories has its beginnings in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.

Every story is not about some question.

Yes it is. Where all is known no narrative is possible.

Billy leaned and spat again. kndale, he said.

He was curious and afraid this traveler and he called out to the processional some greeting which echoed among the rocks. He asked them where they were bound but never did they answer back. They stood in the old road through the pass huddled together, these mute and midnight folk with their torches and their instruments and their captive, and they waited. As if he were a mystery to them. Or as if he were expected to say some particular thing which he had yet to say.

He was really asleep.

That is my view.

And if he had of woke?

Then what he saw he would no longer see. Nor I.

Why couldnt you just say it would of vanished or disappeared?

Which?

Which what?

Desaparecer o desvanecerse.

Hay una diferencia?

S'. Lo que se desvanece es simplemente fuera de la vista. Pero desaparecido? He shrugged. Where do things go? In a case such as that of the traveler and his adventureswhere one is on uncertain ground to even say from whence they came at allthere seems little to be said as to where they might be when gone. In such a case one can come upon no footing where even to begin.

Can I say somethin?

Of course.

I think you got a habit of makin things a bit more complicated than what they need to be. Why not just tell the story?

Good advice. Let's see what can be done.

Andale pues.

Although I should point out to you that you are the one with the questions.

No you shouldnt.

Yes. Of course.

Just get on with it.

Yes.

Mum's the word here.

C-mo?

Nothin. I'll shut up askin questions, that's all.

They were good questions.

You aint goin to tell the story, are you?

So perhaps he struggled to wake. For all that the night was cold and his bed hard stone he could not. In the meantime all was silence. The rain had ceased. The wind. The processioners consulted among themselves and then the bearers came forward and set the litter on the rocky ground. Upon the litter lay a young girl with eyes closed and hands crossed upon her breast as if in death. The dreamer looked at her and he looked at the troupe standing about her. Cold as the night was and colder as it must have been in the windswept reaches from which they had descended they yet were thinly clothed and even the capes and blankets that they wore over their shoulders were of loosely woven stuff. In the light of their torches their faces and their torsos shone with sweat. And strange as was their appearance and the mission they seemed bent upon yet they were also oddly familiar. As if he'd seen all this somewhere before.

Like in a dream.

If you wish.

It aint up to me.

You think you know how this dream ends. I got a notion or two.

We'll see. Carry on. With the troupe was a sort of chemist who carried in a belt at his waist the nostrums of his trade and he and the leader of the group conferred. The leader thumbed back the turtleshell to the top of his head like a welder tipping back his mask but the dreamer could not see his face. The outcome of their conferencing was that three of the halfnaked men from the company detached themselves and approached the altarstone. They carried a flask and a cup and they set the cup upon the stone and poured it full and offered it to the dreamer.

He better think twice.

Too late. He took it in both hands with the same gravity with which it had been offered and raised it to his lips and drank.

What was in it?

I dont know.

What kind of cup?

A cup of horn heated in a fire and shaped so it would stand. What did it do to him? It caused him to forget. What did he forget? Everthing?

He forgot the pain of his life. Nor did he understand the penalty for doing so.

Go ahead.

He drank it down and handed back the cup and almost at once all was taken from him so that he was like a child again and a great peace settled upon him and his fears abated to the point that he would become accomplice in a blood ceremony that was then and is now an affront to God.

Was that the penalty?

No. There was a greater cost even than that.

What was it?

That this too would be forgot.

Would that be such a bad idea?

Wait and see.

Go on.

He drank the cup and gave himself up to the dark mercies of these ancient serranos. And they in turn led him from the stone out into the road and they walked up and back with him. They seemed to be urging him to contemplate his surroundings, the rocks and the mountains, the stars which were belied above them against the eternal blackness of the world's nativity.