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 ofdomestic 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.
73
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 intoa 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’sbeen 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
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 ofdomestic 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.
73
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 intoa 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’sbeen 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
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