Antonio Moresco - Distant Light

Today I surprised the boy while he was praying.

I arrived there in the afternoon. I stopped the car in the usual place, climbed over the fallen tree trunks and walked round the blank wall of the little house, as far as the open door.

I looked in. But there was no one.

“Are you there?” I called quietly, in that great silence.

No reply.

So I went in. I took a few steps into the kitchen. I went to look round the corner where the fireplace is.

No one.

I sat on a chair, sat there waiting, just in case the boy had gone out to do his business in the woods and would then return.

But he didn’t come back.

There was absolute silence.

I sat there for a while. I got up to leave. But before going out of the door, it occurred to me to go and have a look upstairs.

I began to climb the wooden staircase, going up very quietly, cautiously, trying not to make a noise, I don’t know why.

When I got to the top and turned the corner and looked into the big room above, I immediately saw the boy.

He was kneeling down, on the bare floorboards, by his little iron bed, with his hands together.

I froze.

The boy was so absorbed that he still hadn’t realized I was there.

“What are you doing?” I asked, quietly.

Only then did he notice me.

He looked up quickly, gazed at me in surprise, with his round eyes.

“I’m praying,” he replied.

“Who are you praying to?”

“Nobody.”

“So why are you praying?”

“This is what they’ve taught me.”

A little later, when we were both back in the kitchen and the boy had put his exercise books onto the table to do his homework and had opened them flat, rubbing his hand up and down the spine and pressing hard, and I was sitting nearby, about to leave, it suddenly occurred to me to ask him:

“But what do they teach you at school? What subjects do you study?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I see?” I asked, stretching my hand a little toward the exercise book.

He let me take it. I turned the pages. They were full of words written large and drawings with colored pencils. At the bottom were crosses and low marks written down in red by the teacher. Very low marks: three, four, one, even a zero.

“I’ve lots of them!” he said.

He got up from the chair, and ran to get some more exercise books from the dresser.

He brought them to me. I began leafing through them, starting from those at the bottom of the pile.

I opened the first. I could hardly believe it: the curves of each letter had been formed on badly-drawn rows of little sticks, not even upright, splattered all over the place with enormous blotches of ink.

“But do they still teach you to write your letters on sticks?” I said amazed.

“Not anymore!” he replied. “That’s an old exercise book.”

I looked at him. He looked at me too, in that absolute silence, in that house in the middle of the woods. I suddenly noticed that his chin was quivering, as though he was about to cry, and his large round eyes were filled with a veil of tears.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him, closing the book.

“I’m no good at school!” he said, lowering his eyes. “I can’t learn anything! The teacher’s always giving me bad marks! The others make fun of me!”

“Maybe you can’t see very well!” I tried saying to cheer him up. “Maybe you can’t see the blackboard very well. It happens sometimes …”

He shook his head, trying not to cry in front of me.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I can’t see the blackboard, I can’t see anything!”

“Do you want me to go and see the teacher?” I asked.

He looked at me again wide-eyed.

“Oh no, no!” he replied in terror.

I remained there a little longer, while the boy did his homework. I heard him sighing every now and then in that deep silence. He was writing, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth and with his face almost touching the book.

When I left the house and reached the car, parked in the woods on the other side of those large fallen trees, a moment before I got inside I saw the driver’s door had been dented.

I was shocked.

“What could have happened?” I thought in amazement, opening the door and closing it again to see whether it still worked.

The window was intact but the lower part of the door was dented and pushed in, as though something enormous had crashed heavily against it.

“What could have happened?” I thought, confused. “There’s no one here, in this deserted place. It must have been an animal, but a large animal, a wild boar … It must have struck it as it ran down the slope from the woods, it must have seen the car at the last moment, or perhaps it didn’t see it at all. It must have been unable to swerve away, it must have crashed against it as it thrust forward with its muscular shoulders, covered with bristles, its great head and snout with those tusks sticking out, before managing to change direction, grunting in great pain in the thick darkness of the wood …”

Last night, standing stock still behind the corner of that group of houses in the deserted and sleeping village, in that stretch of road barely lit by the streetlamp that rasps as it sways with each gust of wind, I waited for the main door in the dark frontage to open, and for the dead children to come out one by one from the school.

“It ought to be open by now!” I thought, since time was passing but the door hadn’t opened.

Just the light rasp of that street lamp in the silence of the village deep in sleep.

“Sometimes it happens …” I told myself, “when children haven’t behaved themselves, and the teacher makes them stay for another ten minutes, even though the time for the end of the lesson has passed, even though the children are impatient to leave their desks and rush out …”

Finally the door opened. The children left, with their black smocks, their schoolbags.

They walked off in silence, without saying goodbye, each going his own way.

When they had all left, I came out from behind the corner, almost running to get to the door before it closed again.

I crossed the small street diagonally.

The entrance was still open, but it seemed as though the double doors were already moving.

In the darkness, you couldn’t see who was closing them.

I almost ran up the few steps and went inside, my heart racing, into the darkness.

You couldn’t see anything, there was just that faint light that seeped in from the streetlamp outside, whose weak beam reached just as far as the hall inside, revealing the outline of an old teacher’s desk opposite the entrance, with flights of steps on either side and a metal railing.

“I’m closing. What do you want?” I heard a voice saying, in the darkness, in a quiet, kindly manner.

I turned round. In the half-light I glimpsed the outline of a short, stocky man wearing a work coat.

“It must be the janitor …” I thought.

“What do you want?” the voice asked me again, though amiably.

“I’d like to talk to the teacher,” I said, approaching him in the darkness.

“Which teacher?”

“Why do you ask? How many are there?”

“There are two: one for the morning and one for the night school.”

“The one for the night school.”

“He’s already gone.”

“But I was there outside! No one else left, apart from the children!”

“The teachers leave from the door at the back.”

I moved further forward toward the janitor. Now that my eyes were growing a little more accustomed to the dark, I could make out his head: it was large, bald, cheerful, an old rustic face.