Antonio Moresco - Distant Light

The child had begun sharpening his pencil, carefully studying the slit along the blade where the powdered graphite came out so as to stop just a moment before the point broke.

“Can I come in? I tried asking.

“Sorry,” he answered with his little voice, “but I’ve got my homework to do now.”

And so, every two or three days, when I go there, I sit on the small broken bench by the door so as not to remain standing up all the time, while the boy works away at his chores, washing his clothes, or the dishes or the floor, pushing a rag back and forth on the end of a worn-down brush.

“So you go to school then …” I say, to start a conversation.

“Yes, sure!” he replies, continuing to scrub the kitchen floor with the rag.

“But what school do you go to? Because sometimes I come in the morning and you’re here.”

“To night school.”

“There’s a night school around here?”

“Yes, down in the village.”

“And you go the whole way on foot, by yourself, in the woods?”

“Of course!”

“Do you want me to take you?”

“No thank you, I’m used to it.”

I say nothing. I watch him, leaning forward from the bench so that I can look inside the kitchen, while the little boy carries on pushing his improvised scrubbing brush, his face red with exertion, stopping every now and then to answer my questions.

“And the light?” I ask again, after a while. “When do you switch the light on? Why do I always see it switched on at the same time, from my house?”

“I switch it on as soon as I get back from night school.”

I fall silent again. Even from where I am, I can hear the noise of his little breath under the effort.

“And what do you do about the animals,” it occurs to me to ask, after a while. “You’re in the middle of the woods … How do you keep the animals away?”

He stops for a moment or two, and comes up to the door to answer.

“I bang some lids!” he tells me, looking at me with his round eyes. “I take two lids from the cooking pans and bang them loud to frighten them and keep them away!”

I smile.

“I do that as well, sometimes …” I reply. “At night, when I hear them making noises too close to the house …”

I go silent again. I can hear the child has stopped washing the kitchen floor, has gone to rinse the cloth in the stone sink and has propped the worn-down brush nearby.

“Do you want me to help you do your homework?” I ask, when I see he has pulled his exercise books out of his schoolbag and has gone to sit at the table.

“No, thanks, I have to do it myself.”

He says nothing else for a while. I sit there in silence so as not to disturb him. From where I am, I can see him with his little shaved head bent over his exercise book, concentrating, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth. The only sound, anywhere, is the buzzing of insects thrusting head first into the fragrant rot of the blossom.

“How strange … how strange …” it occurs to me. “Those schoolbags you hold with a handle aren’t used any more, I reckon … Children these days go to school with shoulder bags, like backpacks …”

I get back to the car to go home and, when I’m already out of the wood and have turned onto the asphalt road and am driving down to the bottom of the gorge, where it’s not so steep and there are several mown fields, I see men in overalls who over the last few days have been burning the straw with flame throwers. They walk along the remaining strips, brandishing long tubes from which blue flames hiss out. An acrid smoke rises from the heaps already turned to ash.

I can’t be sure, but I seem to detect something odd about the behavior of the swallows. They still carry on darting through the sky as before, while I’m sitting there on the metal chair, in the last light of the day. And they still swoop down, madly following insects, flying almost into my face with their beaks open and shrieking and then soaring up to certain areas high up where there are many other swallows flying around in such a frenzy that it’s hard to see how they can pass so close to each without ever colliding. But at the same time I seem to notice something different in their behavior, even though they carry on as always with their crazy life and keep it well hidden. As if they were here and at the same time they were here no longer. Something imperceptibly different in their way of filling the sky with their shrieking and swooping, as though they also had something else to do, something else to say.

“What are you up to?” I shouted out a short while ago.

“Can’t you see? We’re flying!” they replied.

“Yes, yes, I can see that!” I shouted again. “But you’re doing something else! You’re flying like I’ve never seen you flying before …”

“We always fly like you’ve never seen us fly before!”

I watched them for a while longer, watching in silence, hardly breathing. The whole sky was streaked by those mad darts which yet don’t fly like darts but swerve, thrust, suddenly go in the opposite direction, shrieking.

“What medical terms would they use to describe your hyperkinetic nature, your mental state: motor neurosis, hysteria, schizophrenia …?” I shouted out again at one of them that had come down lower than the others.

“In the meantime take this!” it replied.

A moment later I was hit on the forehead by a splatter from the tiny pulsating orifice between the feathers of that mad little body in flight.

The sky grew steadily darker. Then, suddenly, from the opposite side of the gorge, along the line of the other ridge, that little light came on in the dark.

“There! He’s back from school …” I say. “He’s just got home, he’s gone straight to switch the light on, after walking through the woods in the dark, all alone …”

I wasn’t wrong. Something enormous is happening in the sky, in those tiny brains of just a few grams that cross the space like darts, in all that teeming of wings that ruffle the atmosphere.

The swallows are preparing to migrate.

They appear as though life is carrying on as normal. They fly around madly, as usual, shrieking away. They streak across the sky with their beaks open, shoveling insects. They appear as always from their thousand invisible nests, up in the air, in rusty leaking gutters, in the holes between the stones and the collapsing roofs of this village over which they have taken possession, away from the world. Adult swallows, and others only just born and learning to take their first short mad flights, swoop down as usual and skim across the water in the troughs, almost smashing themselves against its stone edges. And yet, and yet … there’s a new frenzy, a new agitation, a greater disturbance in their behavior. They gather at points far up in the sky, shrieking even louder. Who knows what they are saying? Who knows what’s going on among those clouds of tiny bodies in flight? What’s sparked it all off? How do they first start gathering high up there, in the first flocks that circle in ever greater numbers over these deserted ruins soon to be abandoned, perhaps without any of them even knowing it? More and more of them swoop madly down over the troughs, as though they were building up reserves of water for the great long journey who knows where, emerging like darts from the low archway and from the curve in the road and diving down to skim the water with their open beaks, shrieking, splashing the smooth surface with the tips of their frantic wings. Who knows if they know where they’re going? Whether at least one of them knows and is able to tell the others, or whether they decide on the route once they’re on their way, in those first immense circles full of myriads of tiny brains of a few grams that cross the sky in every part of the world, so dense that it is hard to understand how all those wings in there can move?