Distant Light

Distant Light Read Free Page B

Book: Distant Light Read Free
Author: Antonio Moresco
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the juices in which you were wallowing. Where do you live, where do you go to sleep? What happens, day and night, in your savage nests?”
    But they never answer.
    To toads, when I catch sight of one motionless, filthy, half-submerged beneath a veil of earth, with its fat body entirely covered withlarvae, in a spot where there must once have been a vegetable plot, since there are still tangles of growth that produce unrecognizable vegetables.
    “But what sort of life do you have?” I ask them. “Buried in the earth with your stores of fat larvae that you gorge down there in the dark. Your bodies like a soft leathery bag bursting at the seams, closed off by the earth and the darkness.”
    But they never answer.
    To aerial roots, which spread here and there and catch everything that comes in range, high up there, rotting leaves, pollen and spores that fly blindly in the air, perhaps even miniscule bodies of flying insects with many wings and antennae. They transform them into nutriment for a plant that sometimes isn’t there, doesn’t exist, still has yet to be invented.
    “Why are you born up there and not on the ground?” I ask, I shout, to make myself heard up there, in this silent green vastness that returns the echo of my voice. “Were you really born up there, right from the beginning, or did you too come from the earth like all the other roots and then, who knows why, began to move higher and higher, until you ended up there in space? Or did you come down from up there, from space, where perhaps there are miniscule roots that fall like an invisible rain from the sky, until one of them reaches the top of some plant and clings to it, and begins sapping everything up there within its range, before starting to descend gradually to the ground, and thento penetrate the earth, under the horizon line, in that sodden mass of a thousand other ferocious roots and miniscule animals with no eyes that devour everything, to then climb up again, little by little, upward, along the tormented trunks of trees, over their torn bark, higher and higher, as far as the sky?”
    But they never answer.
    The swallows, on the other hand, they do answer!
    Sometimes, when I see them darting past over the point where the lane narrows, where there are two stone troughs full of water, coming down from above, diving, frenzied, swooping low, close to the ground, at unimaginable speed, and then skimming over the troughs to snatch a little water in that brief instant in their beaks, all alone in that unearthly place, I wave my arms at them, yelling:
    “But you’re crazy!”
    “Yes, yes! We’re crazy!” those tiny animals reply, beside themselves, still flitting low over the lane and skimming the surface of the water, like darts, screeching.
    I start laughing with excitement, alone.
    “Isn’t there a psychiatrist for swallows?”
    “Yes, but he’s crazy too!”
    “So how are you going to get cured?”
    “Like this!” they answer, plunging their heads into the water and then soaring higher and higher, into the sky, fanning my temples and my eyes with their wings, their beaks.
    Then, when the sun goes down behind the ridge and it begins to grow dark, and all this plant world becomes invisible and black like a great nocturnal sponge, on the other side, there in the distance, every night, always at the same hour, that little light suddenly appears.

6
    Just now, while I was in bed, deep in my first sleep, I was woken by a tremor.
    It often happens, because this is an earthquake area. Sometimes I don’t even waken fully, but even in my sleep, or half asleep, I can still feel the vibrations that arrive here on the surface from the movement of underground faults that shake my bed, the walls of the house, the room, the few pieces of furniture inside it, the whole empty village where I live, but also the ground, the trees, the animals in their deep burrows, those night creatures that move about silently in search of their prey, and perhaps also

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