Antonio Moresco: Distant Light

There was also one male goat with long curved horns, alone, on its hind legs, nibbling at the bottom leaves of a tree.

The man stopped.

“They’ve seen too!” he suddenly said, in a language once again comprehensible, human.

“Seen what?” I asked.

“Them.”

“Who?”

“The extraterrestrials! The aliens!”

I looked at him. He also looked at me, with his light gray, almost white eyes and his mouth with its turned-up corners.

“I’ve seen them too!” He added.

I looked at him, saying nothing, in the midst of the barking and noise of goat bells, while the billy goat carried on nibbling leaves, with its front legs leaning on the trunk of the tree.

“Them too …” he repeated pointing to the goats, and seemed unable to speak from excitement.

“Them what?” I asked again, as I didn’t understand what he was trying to say.

He swallowed two or three times, then relaxed.

“One night …” he continued, his voice suddenly fluent, “as I was coming down a path with the goats, taking them back to the stall, I saw a light I’d never seen before, coming up from a ravine. ‘What could it be?’ I wondered, because we’re on a fault line here and sometimes there are geoluminescencent phenomena caused by energy emitted by the earth’s surface. The goats started running down to the ravine, drawn by that light in the darkness. When I arrived and looked out over the edge of the precipice, I saw beneath me a dazzling globe of light. I shut my eyes, worried it was going to blind me. It was enormous. It was suspended just above the ground like a vast egg of light with no shell. I covered my eyes with my hand, but I could see all the same. It seemed as though that blinding light was continually relighting itself even though it was already alight, as though something was opening up inside all that light, from which another light was coming out. The goats were running faster and faster down the slope, toward that door of light which had opened up inside the light. They rushed in, one after the other. Even the dog that was following them went in, even the billy goat. You couldn’t hear the sound of their bells any more. I started running after the herd, to try to get them back. But when I got closer, the door of light suddenly closed. The egg rose up into the air, with all that light that was too bright to look at. Then it disappeared, not gradually but all of a sudden, as though it was sucked into something else you couldn’t see, which was there but you couldn’t see it.”

“What could have happened? Where could it have gone?” I tried to ask, since the man had stopped speaking and was looking at me, waiting for me to say something.

“Well … who knows … a movement in hyperspace, a wormhole, teleporting …”

I looked at him amazed, looked at that young bald man who spoke with a thick foreign accent, who one moment had been uttering grunts yet a moment later, when he started talking about alien presences, began expressing himself fluently, as though he were two completely different people.

“What do I do now?” he continued. “I felt desperate as I went back to the stall, with no herd, no billy goat, no dog … The following night I returned … The egg of light was no longer there, but my herd and my dog were there waiting for me. The dog barked with joy when it saw me arrive. The herd rushed up to me with their bells ringing away. Everyone knows, they’re stupid beasts, goats. If they’re stupid, then they’re beasts …”

Meanwhile he pointed to the herd, which continued running zigzag here and there under the assaults of the dog that wanted to show its master, perhaps also me, how clever it was, while the billy goat, unconcerned, a little way off, carried on nibbling, still on its hind legs and stretching its body and neck to reach the higher leaves.

“What’d happened? Why did they return them to me?” the man was asking. “Where had they taken them? Are they still the same goats?”

We looked at each other in silence. The billy goat suddenly stopped grazing, returned onto its four legs and began running along the path, taking incredibly high, nimble leaps on its cloven hooves, raising its back and arching its body, and it didn’t seem possible that such a large animal could move so lightly.

As I left, the man hailed me from a distance with his usual grunts.

“There’s nothing! There’s nothing!” I told myself as I drove down those narrow deserted curves that slowly took me back to where I live. “There’s just this desperate teeming, from every part, of life and death through time, through space, this desperate daydreaming …”

Now I’m here. It’s pitch black. It’s late at night. I’m gazing at that little light.

“I’m going to go!” I suddenly tell myself. “I’m going to see what’s there!”

I get up from the metal chair, go and close the shutters, hear them creak on their hinges, in this deserted place where there’s not a living soul. I undress, stretch out on the bed that squeaks a little each time I move. I lie there with my eyes wide open in the dark, waiting for sleep.

This morning, rain, hail, wind. It’s impossible to get there. I looked out the window for a long time at that tumult of water and ice falling violently from the sky. The wind raged, roof tiles flew, large jagged hailstones struck the windows almost smashing them. I had to close the shutters, leaning out while those hard cold missiles lashed and cut at my hands, my arms, my head.

When I was able to get out, everywhere was covered with pieces of ice. I took the ladder and climbed onto the roof to put the tiles back in place. I walked a little in the village, stopped to look at the flowers growing here and there, now all beaten down and ruined. Including three white lilies that were flowering in an old cooking pot full of earth, next to some stone steps, that I’d been carefully watching, stopping each day to examine and sniff their open calyxes. The lilies here flower late, not in May but in June, even late June. For several days their long stems swayed under the weight of their large white petals, their stamens laden with yellow pollen. All around was a sweet perfume, from the moment when the first closed buds had begun to turn white and open.

And now they are there, crushed, their petals ruined, their stems broken, the yellow powder of the pollen spilt over what is left of the torn white corollas.

“What disaster! What horror!” I say, moving away so as not to look. “To be in a hailstorm at the exact moment of flowering! After all that vast strange chemical activity in the bulbs underground, through winter, spring, and then that sudden and almost miraculous soaring of long shoots, straight as swords, and then those swellings that begin to appear here and there and which makes them bend under their new weight, and then their lightning-quick opening in just a few hours. By the evening they have closed again, and reopen the following morning, spreading their fragrance … The mechanical process of blooming can no longer be slowed down, can no longer be stopped, and then, all of a sudden, the lash of cold freezing rain, all those pieces of ice that suddenly beat down from the sky against those white calyxes that had only just been invented …”

A day has passed. During the night the wind blew away the black clouds that hung everywhere and the sky cleared.

I went to get the car. I drove it out of the narrow stable whose walls and beams are still impregnated with the smell of animals that used to live here.

“How am I going to find that place?” I wondered as I drove down the asphalt road to the bottom of the gorge and then climbed up the other side for some distance, looking for a small road or at least a path that might take me as close as possible to the point on the ridge where I see that little light glimmering at night.