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 otherswallows 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 …”
15
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
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 otherswallows 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 …”
15
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
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