Antonio Moresco - Distant Light

It is night now. Several days have gone by since I went there. I look at that little light, knowing now where it comes from, sitting behind this low stone balustrade, while the clear moonless sky is filled with stars, and not very far away can be heard the cries of night animals and birds of prey and the occasional grunts of wild boar moving about in the thick undergrowth.

“And perhaps,” I marvel, “perhaps that boy can also see the light from my house up there, at night, on the other side of the gorge, in the middle of all this darkness as far as the eye can see, of all the darkness of the world, in the same way that I can see his. I forgot to ask him if he can see it …”

This morning I wanted to go back to see the Albanian who is interested in alien presences, to tell him I’d discovered where that light comes from, that extraterrestrials had nothing to do with it. Not least because I had to go down to fill up with gas in a village not far from his, where there’s a gas pump in front of a yard, and an old man who spends all his time tormenting his few black teeth with a small wooden ice cream spoon. If he sees someone stop at the pump, he leaves the vineyard where he’s been working and comes and serves you.

I told him everything as soon as he’d stopped making those guttural sounds and sudden abrupt grunts on seeing me scrambling down the small slope full of manure and fetid puddles.

“You see?” I said. “It’s got nothing to do with extraterrestrials, aliens, movements in hyperspace, time warps … It’s a child, simply a child …”

He looked at me puzzled, and yet, due to the particular shape of his mouth, he seemed to be smiling.

“Ah … a child … You say it’s a child?”

“Yes, sure, it’s a child!”

Two or three times he shook his head, from which his two large ears stuck out, and his crown of straight greasy hair that hung down like spaghetti.

“A child living alone, in the woods … And you don’t think it’s strange? It seems normal to you?”

“Yes … or rather no. It surprised me as well.”

“What sort of child?” he asked, shaking his head again, with that fixed smile. “Is he really from this world?”

“But I saw him! He’s a little boy, I promise you!”

“You see, aliens aren’t like what they show you in the movies! They can also take on a completely human appearance. Indistinguishable from the others. Who knows how many are already here, among us!”

I looked at him. He was smiling at me, though I don’t know whether he was smiling or not. The goat bells could be heard close by. The dog was jumping up and barking.

Even though it’s late, I’m still sitting here, looking at that little light that flickers on the other ridge. The night is cloudless, stars loom in every part of this immense hollow space that dwarfs me. I’ve zipped up my sweatshirt and put the hood up over my head as it’s beginning to get cold at night, in this place surrounded on all sides by trees and vegetation. Even my legs are rather numb, since I’ve been sitting here a long time looking at that little light, while that child will be asleep in his little stone house in the middle of the woods, alone.

I get up from the metal chair and stretch my legs. It’s late but I’m not tired.

I go out of the gate and automatically close it behind me, even though there’s no one here and I could leave it open. I walk toward the small cemetery below, with all those reddish lamps that flicker in the night. Through the village I carry on walking down the lane. All that can be heard are my footsteps under this immense dark and forgotten space full of avalanches of stars. On certain nights, when the season is right — which is now — there are hundreds, thousands of fireflies along the side of the road. They swarm about the thick dark foliage, with their myriad of tiny lights that flash on and off intermittently. It’s like walking in an enchanted land. I’m careful not to tread on those that cross the dark path, flying close to the ground, and make sure my legs and arms don’t hit those that float before me as if to show me the way. Sometimes I take one of them in the palm of my hand and look at its poor little body transfigured by that light that filters out from its soft parts, through its tiny viscera.

“Ah … you’re still here! You’re here still!” I try telling them, among all that dark swarming with lights. “So you haven’t been wiped out by the hail storm! Where were you hiding while those hailstones were raining down from the sky and smashing everything? They stop at nothing, not even at the most beautiful scented flowers! Where do you hide in the daytime, when no one can see you? You too will have small holes, small underground burrows, somewhere to hide when it’s light, when the sky fills up with hail! But how do you manage to light up like that? What’s inside your poor little insect bodies? What power do you have to light up and transfigure yourselves like this, to produce such a light that can even be seen far away, and flash on and off constantly, for hours and hours? I know, it’s a mating signal. But why have only you, of all insects, invented such a signal? How have you done it? Where has that tiny, desperate invention come from, that little light. And why, if you then disappear straight after, wiped out, not to be seen again for the rest of the year, if you live just a few weeks, come out from who knows where and thousands of you begin flying around pulsating in the darkness of this night that surrounds us? Why? Why have you invented this inconceivable thing? Why do you attract each other like this, in the darkness, in the few moments when you’re in this world you cannot see? To carry on reproducing? But why? So that other beings like you can carry on reproducing and flying about for a few weeks, for a few moments, in this enormous darkness that surrounds us?”

But they don’t know. And if they do, they don’t answer.

It’s raining again, pouring. There’s no chance of going out. I take the opportunity to do some laundry that was piled up in the basket, even though it can’t be dried outside. I’ll hang it on the drying rack here inside the house.

I go and split some wood in the cellar. I light a fire in the hearth. When it’s going well, I move the laundry and put it in front of it, so that it will dry more quickly. Not too close, away from those clouds of sparks that fly out from the logs as they turn to ashes.

Sitting on a chair with sawn-down legs, I watch the fire as it coils around the logs, its color continually changing. It whistles for a while and then suddenly explodes into a thousand great sparks, flaring up to lick the pinnacle of wood shards and bark. From outside, anybody who happened to be watching would see smoke rising from the chimney, the only one among the chimneys still there on the roofs of these empty and derelict houses.

I cook some pasta, drain it and eat it, sitting at the end of the small empty table, looking out the open glazed door, watching the rain that keeps falling heavily on the grass in front.

Some time has passed. I’ve washed the dishes, taken a cloth and cleaned the top of the cooker which was all marked, defrosted the fridge, chipping off the sheets of ice with a scraper, mopped up the pool of water that had formed in front of it and put the food back in, used some bleach to remove some patches of mold that had formed over the walls, then went and threw the garbage in a hole.

A short while ago, as I was doing these things, I heard a sudden clatter coming from the road. I ran outside to look, since no one ever passes here.

I stopped in front of the door.

A group of horsemen, all wrapped in transparent plastic capes to protect them from the rain, were going along the lane mounted on their tall horses.