The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse (3 page)

D
URING THE FIRST HOURS
of rain they drank non-stop. They played, squelching from one side of the well to the other, and hugged. They drank themselves full and rolled about laughing, the laugh that exists on the border between elation and desperation.

Afterwards, they sat out the downpour with their backs against the walls, cornered, enduring the curtain of rain with stoicism. Little rivulets of insects and soil and leaves formed at the edge of the hole and crashed down in vertical torrents on top of them. The black sky reflected in the deep pools at their feet, choked with clouds that expanded and contracted like the lungs of an ocean. They drank for drinking’s sake, anticipating another drought, and stuck their heads in holes in the ground and lapped away at the springs formed by trickles of water.

It stopped raining two days after the storm reached them. By then, the well had turned into a bog and its walls had warped. Their legs sunk into the wet, fudgy ground, their
clothes began to rot after the prolonged exposure to the damp, and the mud seeped into their testicles and limbs. Big had not been able to do his exercises, and Small, who imagined the well like a limp, sagging coffin, stopped collecting food. They didn’t celebrate the clear sky or the heat of the sun because their numb muscles were still trembling, and because the rain shower had demanded a gruelling feat of resistance: no sinking, no drowning, no sleeping. The lack of food had begun to take its toll on their shrunken stomachs, in particular that of Small, who slipped into a feverish stupor.

As the sun starts to dry the earth and evaporate the water from the saturated soil, and the well floor firms up again, Big notices that his brother is suffering from some form of pulmonary condition. He coughs up green mucus, thick like jam, and his forehead is on fire. Big dedicates himself to the task of feeding him regularly, giving him cool water every hour, keeping his clothes dry and moving him away from the last puddles. Totally devoted to the care of his brother, he neglects both to feed himself and do his exercises. Small’s fever, however, does not abate.

To see him like this, emaciated and ashen, with the ribs of a starved greyhound, his fingers blue and forehead blazing, sick from the cold and from the phlegm, fills Big with an
aching sadness. Small is a cut of barely breathing meat, settled in fitful sleep from which, every now and again, he wakes up in paroxysms of rage or of weeping and shouts garbled phrases. Big feeds him with perseverance and revulsion, but he feels a new affection when he lays him out in the sun and watches him stretch his limbs.

‘You can’t leave. You made a promise.’

At night, Big covers him with two layers of clothes to protect him from the frost. He curls up naked beside his small body and tries to warm it a little. He rubs him, kisses him, and holds him until he falls asleep.

‘Maybe I do love you,’ he says.

S
MALL GOES ON DYING
for days, and his brother goes on keeping him alive. As if they were playing.

Big feeds him the plumpest insects, the spongiest worms and the sweetest roots. He filters water through his shirt so that whatever he drinks is pure, crystal clear. He uses the coolest water from the morning to mop his brow, and the lukewarm water from the afternoon to wash his feet and hands and hair. When Small’s breathing returns to normal and his fever abates, Big goes back to his physical exercises. Push-ups, sit-ups, squats. His head becomes drenched with sweat, and during these hours he stops thinking about his brother’s illness; he escapes the well, charges across fields and dells and goes back. He ensures that justice is done. More than the hunger and the sun, it is the loneliness that ages him. It transforms his adolescent face into one belonging to a deeply wounded man—a man just back from a civil war or prison, his figure bent by the burden of so much toil and privation, and his big hands marked with new lines, calluses that he couldn’t erase even if he wanted to. He talks to his brother like never before:

‘When we go home we’ll eat meat.’

He cooks him some dishes that they’ve tried once or twice, and others that he doesn’t know, but can imagine. Cream of sun-blushed poppies with a few wild nuts and diced banana. Rice pudding with pink cinnamon, the rind of a lemon, a dusting of cacao and the syrup of a custard apple. Roast sea lion with strawberries and cassava in the juice of a ripe orange and coconut milk. He explains in detail how to peel potatoes, the best way to cut onions so that they soften in oil without burning, how long it takes to brown the best cut of chicken or beef. Once or twice, Small wakes up and says something in an apparent flash of lucidity. The odd word, stray sentences.

‘Laurel…’

And so Big devises lessons in botany and agriculture, comparing methods, recalling smells and shapes and tastes. When he doesn’t know them, he invents the secret reasons behind the order of things: he improvises entire cities where the natives speak other tongues; he travels beyond the cliff’s edge and encounters indescribable wonders. He talks to him about the twin moons of the North and the wandering trees of the South. He tells him about the starry doves that live in the deep lakes, of houses with eyes where windows should be, and which weep tears of wine when their owners leave. He tells him about how when his grandparents were children they endured great floods
which forced them to move the entire town a few kilometres down the road; about the cemetery of giants that covers an entire continent; and about the part of the sky that you can touch because it buckled under its own weight at the other end of the earth. He constructs geographies, ways of life, and labyrinthine, fanciful maths. He invents multicoloured cereal, women with crystals for nails, and fabled miracles: clay that protects you from bad fortune; magical creatures that live in the walls and grant a thousand wishes to whoever finds them; rivers that part if you ask permission. When he senses that he’s become a bore and has exhausted his imagination, he tells him true stories.

‘Sometimes I think we aren’t really brothers.’

‘It was me who killed our dog. With a stone.’

‘I’ll die in here.’

At night they sleep very close to one another. The moon is nearly full and its white light forms a gaseous orb over the edges of the wood, the tree canopies and the paths. The fever starts to leave Small’s body, and with it his cough and the shivers and phlegm. For the first time since the storm passed they surrender to exhaustion and rest, truly rest, without interruption. They sleep so deeply that they don’t hear the footsteps moving towards the mouth of the well, or notice the figure that appears and watches them, or see it disappear to return to where it came from in total silence.

T
HE TWINKLE
has returned to Small’s eyes, and with it the strength to collect food, but he has been left with the wastes of the fever still inside him. He does everything indifferently, as if he no longer cared to eat, or speak or breathe. His voice has changed, too: it has become darker and deeper.

‘Where are we?’

He looks with the eyes of an adult who has eaten a child and infected him with a hundred centuries of madness. From closer up you can see that his shining eyes bear the weight of a wall, a wall containing a spiral of berserk ideas that have ladder hands and a forest head. With those eyes he scans the enormous body of his brother, sensitive to small changes.

‘Drink more water. You must be dehydrated,’ says Big.

‘The real water is outside. This water is a lie.’

Big has resumed his full regime of exercises. He has spent over two weeks repeating them and this, along with his limited diet, has caused his muscles to develop strangely; they are misshapen, somewhere between those of
a half-starved man and a mastiff. He is aware of the strain he is putting his body under, and that if he had to run, his heart would barely hold out for two kilometres before collapsing. His training is reproducing an incredibly short muscular memory, a kind of corporal amnesia that stretches the limits between survival and progress.

‘I’m tired of the well. I’m leaving,’ says Small.

‘OK.’

‘You don’t think I can?’

‘No. I don’t think you can.’

‘In that case, I’ll leave you here to rot,’ says Small, and his brother looks at him and doesn’t recognize him.

Hours go by and neither says a word: Big, dumbfounded by the newfound independence of his brother’s tongue; Small, consumed by his own musings and becoming ever more miserable.

‘You’ve hardly eaten today,’ says Big. ‘If you don’t eat, you’ll die.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You should eat even if you aren’t hungry.’

‘I’ll eat when I’m hungry. I’ll drink when I’m thirsty. I’ll shit when I feel like shitting. Like dogs do.’

‘We aren’t dogs.’

‘In here we are. Worse than dogs.’

The last of the sun’s strokes sweeps away from the well, taking all life’s colour with it and bringing the monotony of their cohabitation into relief. Like when, in the middle of a dream, it is all revealed to be make-believe and waking up is a kind of cruel joke.

‘Your head’s still not right after the fever. Have something to eat and go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll feel better,’ says Big, lying down.

Small doesn’t move.

‘I think I’ve got rabies,’ he says.

‘No. You don’t have rabies yet.’

Small looks at him lovelessly, and asks:

‘Then what is this anger I can feel inside?’

‘You’re becoming a man,’ says Big.

‘
T
ODAY, I’M GOING
to teach you how to kill.’

For people like you and me, the first thing is anger. With no anger we will never find the necessary courage to take a life. There are other people who observe different impulses, who have grown up around unimaginable violence and look at you from inside caverns that you cannot even imagine. For those people, living is the well. You can’t kill them, and if you confront them, they’ll finish you off. You and me aren’t like that. We require anger. A restless anger that won’t let you stop, which bubbles under the skin, making your muscles shake; an anger that is black on your insides, but on the outside starts to turn you red, until you look like a burn victim who can’t find his place in the world. You must charge yourself up with reasons to hate, despise whatever you see around you and, what’s more, convince yourself that this anger is necessary. When you’re full, don’t hold it inside: release it, let it out into the world, shake it from your fingers, shout, run, burn the branches of trees, dig holes until your nails bleed, punch doors and walls and any other thing made by the hands of men. And before you
collapse, exhausted, stop. Take a breath. Say nothing. For a few seconds, hold on to that last drop of anger in you; let it glisten at the corner of your mouth like a kiss about to fall. Exhale, feel your ribs rise and fall. Regain calm. Look at the destruction, your raw knuckles, the holes you’ve torn open with them. Feel the silence; how all matter, in its shock, has ceased to move; how the things around you no longer make a sound, the wood doesn’t creak, the wind doesn’t blow. It’s the same silence that will one day occupy earth, when men decide to end it all and we witness the end of time. And it’s the silence that you’ll live with, too, every waking hour, while inside the anger transforms into its exact opposite.

Calm. This is the second thing. You must spend three days—not a day more or less—guarding the secret beginning to reveal itself inside of you. You must move like a bird, not touching the ground, and speak in a quiet voice so as not to disturb a single blade of grass. Try not to have any contact with anyone and go to bed early. And at all times—don’t forget—remember that scarlet drop that you held back, think about it taking on the most horrifying forms in your body, until it becomes plumper and larger. Talk to it as if it were your disease, insult it, imagine the worst cruelties you could inflict, and subject it to your heart’s desires so that it bleeds like a wound and oozes giant monsters. Live as if its presence weighed down on your back, be incapable of loving or admiring beauty. Note how loyalty squirms about
in your stomach and how an enormous void contaminates everything you touch. Finally, on the third night of this unbearable calm, when you take yourself off to sleep, take a deep breath, feel that breath move around your rotten insides, and let the calm engulf you. Let your disease lace you with poison like a spider’s legs. Let the drop spread through your veins, showering you with razor-sharp stones. Let it cut you to the marrow with one foul slash. And then, sleep. And then, dream.

The last thing is will. The morning of the crime you won’t be able to eat for the terrible dreams that will have plagued you. You’ll do everything under the spell of a dazzlingly brutal violence, but a bubble of uncertainty will rove in circles around you, as if you were afraid to drink water for fear of breaking the glass. Don’t worry. Take each step as it comes, feel your feet open up dark trenches along the bends of your soul, advance as if the earth turned and looked you directly in the eyes. And when at last, starved and terrified, you face your enemy, honour your resolve with the killing. Be quick, ferocious. Don’t cause pain other than with your look. Give them a just, worthy death.

Killing, the act of killing, the force of your hands around the neck or the exact place where the knife sinks in, this can’t be taught because it’s already understood. Blades, firearms, sticks or stones, it’s all the same. But remember that as men we must be there, watching as the light in
their eyes goes out, living the crime at close range. We kill in seconds because we don’t know any other way to kill. We’re direct, impatient. Don’t hesitate: it’s your soul that will decide the precise movement, and once the deed is done you will be as great as all the great men who inhabited the earth before you.

These are the things you must know.

Small, who during the first few lines of the monologue didn’t move, has set about sketching each of the concepts, drawing up symbols on the walls and the well floor which only he can make sense of, using his fingers and elbows like palette knives to translate these new teachings. He howls with wild abandon, testing out new sections of his brain with each revision of those terrible maps. The architecture of an unknown pleasure makes him drunk to the point of retching; it transports him to an archipelago of poisonous islands that roar like sea monsters. Shaken by earthquakes, he scans his wicked city again and again, memorizing it like a creed to which you give yourself with total devotion. He amends any miscalculations with the correct formulae and pales, horrified, before the flames spreading like wildfire through his childhood. Big observes him, satisfied.

At dusk the breeze and the water start to slowly smooth away the tracks that Small has worked so hard to put
down. Like a sleepwalker, tired but with the conviction of someone who remembers everything, he decides that for the rest of his life he will carry writing paper and pencils, ink, quills, old books; tools that will allow him to attest for all time the miracles of his enlightenment. To translate the unpronounceable.