The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse (6 page)

S
MALL HUMS SOFTLY
to himself like a ventriloquist’s dummy, while Big urinates blood and thinks that his time is up. A red puddle splashes the earth before being soaked up into it. Big sees it as his body’s final warning. Perhaps he’s pushed it too far. Or perhaps his kidneys were always going to pack up today, at this very moment, even if he had been living at home and eating normally. He covers the blood with brown earth and smiles.

‘Today,’ he says, ‘I feel wonderful.’

The absent look on his brother’s face makes him question whether Small, like him, is haemorrhaging blood and not saying so. Looking at his paper-thin body it seems impossible that it would survive blood loss. Then again, over these weeks he has shown that his desire to stay alive is great enough to survive even the gravest illnesses. That small, gaunt thing has battled against hunger, thirst, fevers, the cold and heat, and although his mind has begun to desert him, his spirit stands firm.

He envies Small’s indolence and self-absorption, and all the shades of grey that his world seems to contain.

‘Want to play?’

Small perks up all of a sudden.

‘Yes. What shall we play?’

‘A guessing game.’

‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with en.’

Small pulls an intrigued face and strokes a non-existent beard, squinting his eyes. He knows his brother, and, given that there aren’t too many options within their line of vision from the bottom of the well, he knows which word he is thinking of. But he enjoys playing, and the best thing about the game is the game itself.

‘Necessity!’

‘No.’

Words beginning with en pile up in his head, all of them a product of his captive condition. He decides to stretch the rope a little more, to test his brother’s resistance.

‘Necrosis!’

‘No.’

‘Niche!’

‘No!’

He loosens the knot a fraction: his brother is clearly losing the will to go on.

‘Nothing!’

‘No.’

‘It’s really difficult. Give me a clue.’

‘OK… You can see it, but you can’t touch it.’

Now is the moment of joy. He can’t put it off any longer.

‘Nightfall!’

‘Yes! Well done!’ bursts out Big with an enormous smile.

‘Again!’

‘Something beginning with… ar.’

Small admires the simplicity of his brother. It must be easy to make decisions in a world with such radical contrasts, where everything is black and white. It must be easy to do the right thing.

‘Rage!’

‘No.’

Interred in a well, his brother sees roots. He cannot see anything else because he looks in the way that dogs look. It is that basic, that beautiful. A piece of meat and a few pats of his back would suffice to make him feel loved. Roots. For Small, there are entities more certain than those things he can touch.

‘Reality!’

‘No!’

Human Remains. Rations of insects. Red-Raw knees. Rebellions. Ravings. Routines. Rituals. Rot. The game could be a lot more fun if only his brother understood. He throws him a bone out of the goodness of his heart.

‘Rocks!’

‘Warmer!’

‘Am I close?’

‘Very. Go on!’

Nor does he want his brother to think him an idiot.

‘Roots!’

‘You got it!’

‘Cool!’ Small hoots exaggeratedly. ‘Now it’s my turn.’

‘OK, but none of those abstract words. Only things that can be seen.’

‘Agreed.’

‘I spy…’ begins Small.

‘I spy,’ says Big.

‘I spy with my little eye… Something beginning with… bee. With bee! With bee!’ Small shrieks, looking down at the russet-coloured earth.

‘
L
OCK UP ANY MAN
in a cage,’ says Small.

Give him a blanket, a feather pillow, a mirror and a photograph of the ones he loves. Find a way to feed him and then forget about him for a number of years. Under these conditions, in the majority of cases the end result will be a shell of a man, reduced to guilt, bent to the shape of a cage.

In exceptional cases, he goes on saying, the chosen subject will die, consumed by the slow wasting of his essential organs, or he will go insane watching his own reflection in the mirror. Or he will die of a terminal illness, which in any case he was fated to suffer.

On the other hand, for those subjects predisposed to rebel, those who can’t ignore the call of their inquisitive spirit, prolonged captivity is impossible: lock up a rebel in a cage for a few years and he will either escape, commit a meticulously planned suicide making use of the objects he has at his disposal, or die carving up his own body into pieces small enough to pass through the bars. The real problem, though, is the way these dissenters—fertile
by nature—breed and spread in our human conscience: when one dies, two occupy his place.

Given the above, imagine cages hanging from the ceilings of every café, bookshop, church, hospital, and, above all, every school, and imagine that at least one of those cages is inhabited by a subversive—a non-conforming, rebelling subject. Imagine the speeches of these twisted, concave bodies, incited by the crowds who surround their altar with their guilty consciences; what perverse, lucid public acts will they come out with during their reign. Imagine what will become of the inmate from a hospital, beautiful and sustained like a blue machine that pumps out memory, bearing witness to disease and corpses. Imagine the prisoner from a church, near blind, forced into a plaintive silence of prayer and worship. Imagine a wise man like a picked flower, drooping in the perfect position of the captive, taking off every winter with the first gust of wind that comes from the west!

Imagine…

Imagine I can forge the key to the cells. That we wait years, many years, and that afterwards, when the world is fully inured to hiding men behind the bars of a cage, when tradition and indifference require that all the lost souls, the coerced, the imprisoned become the product of a storage warehouse social system, a generation of
domestic animals, a race made up of furniture and ancient mummies, and then, only then, we set them free.

And let them be like fire, the unconquerable summer of all winters.

The world would be ours, he ended, brother.

W
HEN HE WAKES UP
he thinks about how giving oneself up to hallucinations is not the same as when hallucinations prevail over sanity and finally break the soul. There’s a difference in attitude.

‘I have to get out of here,’ says Small.

‘You will. Very soon.’

‘You don’t understand. I have to get out of here now. I’m not well. I’m losing my mind.’

Small can pinpoint his real sickness. He knows that his organs have stopped fighting against starvation and the elements, that they will hold out no more than a few days, but his head will never recover. It hurts as if a bubble of gas were expanding in the centre of his brain, making the lobes press against his skull and hammering red-hot needles into his memories, into his ability to add and subtract, into the abyss out of which his words arise. If he could, he would cut up his bones into little splinters and let the brain matter slide out through his ears, letting him breathe.

The pain is so severe that Small curls himself up into
a ball in a corner of the well, massaging his temples with his fingers. He babbles like a newborn baby.

Big watches him nervously and tries to calm him down by rubbing his back.

‘Hold on.’

A few hours later the situation has worsened. Small’s jaw goes into spasm, he dribbles and he can no longer string full sentences together.

‘Shiver… mind going…’

He doesn’t want to eat, because he’s not hungry. It’s something else. Deep cracks open up in his thoughts and he can feel how the walls that contain them are beginning to collapse. He feels his reason plunging into a hole; waste collects at the smoking base and noxious fumes rise up and lacerate the chimney of his sanity. He is saying goodbye to reality. It is defeating him.

‘I must hurry…’

Big can do no more than comfort him and trust that the exhaustion will overcome him and force him to rest. He is still not ready to take him out of the well. He needs a few more days; less than a week, maybe. He will only get one chance and he can’t risk the effort of these last two months and a half, even if his brother is losing weight quicker than he can bear. It’s torture to see him this way—destroyed, in the last agonies, like a city that’s
been flattened by a meteor—and he feels more shame still for feeling so strong in himself, for surviving with such dignity. But he can’t pity him, not now. Not if he wants to keep his promise.

A fine rain numbs the night. Big places maggots in Small’s mouth and pushes them right to the back of his throat to force him to swallow them. The boy takes them without fuss.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ he says.

‘Don’t thank me. Eat.’

‘I’m somewhere far away…’

‘I know. But I can still see you.’

‘No… You can’t.’

‘I’m seeing you right now. I’m talking to you.’

‘You aren’t talking to me. I’m an echo.’

‘Sleep, please. Don’t talk anymore,’ says Big with a quake in his vocal cords, despite himself.

‘It’s been weeks since it was me talking.’

To the nocturnal eyes of his brother, it looks like Small is wrapped in a black shroud, the scribbled sketch of a prehistoric child. He lifts him up and rocks him to the rhythm of a drifting boat. An ancient voice carries across a hundred generations and shakes them:

‘
Sleep, my child, sleep. They say that life is good. They speak—let them speak!—, they know not what they say. Sleep, my child,
sleep
. Your day will come and you shall have the longest, sweetest rest. Sleep, my child, sleep. The gentle night is coming—for me, and then for you,
’ Big sings, without thinking, without knowing what he says.

I
N A FIT OF HYSTERIA
Small scoops up several fistfuls of earth and eats them. Minute stones grind against his back teeth and the grit scratches the enamel, twisting his attempt at a smile into a grimace. It only takes a few seconds before he is bent double, vomiting a dark paste of soil and bile, but the smile still hangs from his face. He looks like he has risen from the dead.

‘Beeerrrrggggg, beeerrrrrggggg,’ he says.

Big doesn’t know if it was an attack of hunger or an attempted suicide. Seeing how he smiles it seems more likely the upshot of a terminal mental breakdown. He knocks him cold when he goes to scoop up more earth and carry on eating.

Even unconscious he holds on to the crazed smile.

In the hours that follow, Small stirs a few times; momentary spasms of lucidness that alternate with heartrending cries, whimpers and incoherent monologues. He doesn’t have a temperature; it’s more like he has knocked his head and the impact has jogged his brain out of place, flipping it
over. He spits continuously. His eyelids open and close like the wings of a fly, beating large pieces of coppery rheum that fall off then stick to his cheeks. An invisible leprosy is consuming him.

‘Water,’ he asks.

Big gives him a drink.

‘I’m cold.’

Big lies down beside him and holds him with all of his body.

‘I’m hot.’

Big undoes his brother’s shirt, mops his collar and the nape of his neck with cool water, and then flaps his own to create a current.

‘I’m dirty.’

Big takes down his brother’s trousers, wipes his buttocks with damp earth and dresses him again.

‘I’m scared.’

Big lifts him up in his arms, the way a groom carries his new wife, and rocks him. He weighs so little he could hold him in one hand.

‘Kill me.’

I
T IS A COOL DAWN
. An invitation to go on sleeping, to sink back into the warm earth and let the forest’s hum slowly stir the senses. The sun just about warms his toes, his ankles, his legs. It strokes his skin and makes his hair stand on end, but doesn’t burn him. Flocks of birds chatter in the trees before flying off. Big is awake, but his eyes are still shut. He wants to draw out the bliss of his slumber, to let himself be towed by the undercurrent all the way to the shore. He knows that all pleasure will disappear when he opens his eyes to the sky and the walls of the well cover him with their heavy shadow.

His mind made up, he concentrates all his strength in one eye, then, at last, opens it, and the morning enters in like a spray of light, blinding him for a few seconds, drawing back the curtains in one stroke. The world spins.

Around him the bed of earth is all stirred up. He is still not completely awake. He yawns. He rubs his eyes to level his horizon. He yawns again. Something seems different. He blinks. He looks. Something is different.

Small is not there.

It feels like a lightning bolt is moving through him from his genitals all the way up to his heart, electrifying his organs, coursing through his cells. Small is not there. Adrenaline bursts into thousands of bubbles that dampen his stupor as if with a shower of metal, and leave him like a cat caught in acid rain. Small is not there. He turns his head this way and that in such a hurry that he looks without seeing and his brain can’t retain the visual details of his surroundings. It’s not possible, he thinks.

He breathes in. He looks again, this time taking his time. There are no footprints on the walls. There are no hand or tread marks. If his brother has escaped from the well, he will have had to do it by flying. He looks again. The soil on the ground has been turned over. He stops. There is a mound over in the corner, like a camel’s hump. He hasn’t seen it before. He moves closer. The bulge is a mountain formed out of layers of fresh soil. Behind it, a half-closed hole. Or half open.

In the time it takes for him to swoop down on the hole and start to haul up layers of soil, he has understood that his brother has spent the night digging a tunnel underneath the well. He screams as his arms sink and rise up again and his skin shreds, leaving his hands like red-hot trowels.
And he goes on screaming as his nails break off, flipping like snapped animal traps into the air, and the last speck of earth is shifted. He is still screaming when from a metre away he spots the submerged body, its head buried in the depths of a ridiculous vertical passageway. He goes on screaming as he drags the rag doll that only yesterday was his brother and is now a piece of mud-battered flesh, and he screams as he pulls him out of his lair. And when at last he sets him down and washes him, slapping water on him as if he were a dirty shoe, he is still screaming.

Big removes the hard pustules from his eyes, his ears and his mouth. Resting his ear against Small’s chest, he listens for a heartbeat, but hears nothing. He’s not sure if he is dead or alive. He puts his mouth against Small’s mouth and blows, and then he presses into his ribs with his hands, and then blows again. He doesn’t even know what he is doing, but his movements are driven by instinct and he goes along with it, repeating them as many times as necessary. Nothing happens, there are no changes. His brother doesn’t move. The blowing turns into a reverberating cry that travels across their mouths and the compressions turn into violent, unbridled thumps, like blows from a mallet coming down on a casket of bones. He takes him by the shoulders and shakes him against the ground, and he can’t stop because his hands are locked into fists and they will not open.

With his head back, his neck twisted and half his face lying in the dirt, at last Small coughs. A long, muddy piece of phlegm is projected from his throat right up to his lips, and he coughs again. Big stops the screaming, the hitting and the blowing and he watches him, motionless, holding his breath.

‘Can you hear me?’

There’s no answer. And yet Small’s chest is moving. A warm breath pushes open his mouth to the day. His fingers clench and unclench with the frailty of a premature child.

‘Can you hear me?’

Small coughs again. And before he loses consciousness, as if remembering an ancient grammar, he whispers:

‘Forty-three. Forty-one. Seventy-one. Twenty-three. Thirteen. Twenty-nine. Eleven. Eighty-three. Two. Sixty-seven.’

Sitting up, his back against the wall, drinking water. Small spends the afternoon like this, with his torso and legs still covered in earth. Next to him, his brother looks at him with resignation. Neither of them has said another word to the other, until now.

‘What have you done?’ asks Big.

‘Made a hole.’

‘I understand that. What I’m asking is why.’

‘Because I can’t go on in the well. I’m going mad.’

‘And you think a hole can help you get out?’

‘If I can’t get out from up there, I’ll get out from below. Even if I have to cross the world like a worm,’ says Small defiantly.

Hearing this, Big accepts that the time has come. He can’t put it off any longer.

‘Get ready. In six days I’m going to get you out of here,’ he says, lying down to sleep.