The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse (7 page)

O
VER THE FINAL
five days the routines of the well changed. Big exercised more vigorously than ever, always giving his muscles the necessary rest time for him to fulfil his objective. The food was divided in three and distributed in the following way: half of everything they collected was for the survival kitty which they stored in a makeshift bundle made out of a strip of shirt tied up in tight knots; of the other half, two parts went to Big and the rest was for Small.

Big also helped his brother to recover a certain degree of mental stability. He spent hour upon hour working on memory and coordination; he gave him advice on how to walk further while exerting less energy; he reminded him what he could and couldn’t eat and at what times; he told him how to build a den out of branches, and the most suitable places to rest. Above all, he stressed which direction he must take to get home, even though, without the exact coordinates of the well, he himself couldn’t be quite sure. He did, at least, have a rough idea of the location of the forest that surrounded them, and he judged that this information would be enough.

Enlivened by the turn of events, Small, for his part, showed a great ability to resist the bouts of delirium that he’d suffered over the previous days. He rigorously memorized every one of his brother’s instructions, asking questions whenever he had doubts, or drawing maps in the earth with dry roots. It’s true that at night he fell into confused trances that threw him off balance and made him forget who or where he was, but for the best part of the day he remained in his right mind.

They eat in silence a little after sunrise. Big does his warm-up exercises and asks his brother to stretch out his muscles, a request that his brother fulfils without a word, despite his feeble physical state. When they are done, they sit around the survival pack.

‘It’s time,’ says Big. ‘You’re leaving.’

‘Yes.’

‘You remember everything I’ve told you, right?’

‘Everything.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Nervous. I’m not sure I can do it without you.’

‘Sure you can. You’re strong like me, or stronger.’

Small’s face breaks into a shy smile that does little to hide his immense sadness.

‘How do you feel?’ he asks.

‘Really good. I’m happy you can get out of this hole.’

‘I’m happy to get out, too. But I’m not happy to leave you here.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll be fine. In a couple of days you’ll come back to find me and we’ll go back home together.’

‘You promise?’

‘Of course I do! Do you promise?’

‘What would I do without you?’ replies Small, who chokes back a few tears and hugs his brother.

‘It’s all right now, it’s all right now. Let’s talk seriously.’

They go over the moves they are going to perform in detail. Big tells his brother the position he must put his body in for the first few seconds, how he has to change his stance after that, and the way to fall so as not to hurt himself. Small jokes about the idea of falling when the ground is, ironically, above him, and this relieves the tension as the moment approaches. The explanations go on. By mid-morning everything has been said, and the sun blesses them with just the right degrees of heat and light. There is nothing left but to do it.

Big is overwhelmed. He knows he will only get one chance and that on that chance both their lives depend. An ice-cold scorpion scuttles up his back. If he fails, if he messes up any of the moves he has so meticulously rehearsed, his brother will die. All these days and weeks making himself
strong while his brother has wasted away like a corpse, to the point of weighing so little that a breath of wind could lift him. The methodical repetition of positions and turns, the will to resist… all of it is justified in this one, unrepeatable moment of affirmation and daring.

He can sense the state in which his body will be left after so much strain. It forewarns of his ruin. The strength he is about to use will wrench his bones from their cartilage, break them into pieces, rip apart his muscles like strings from a rope and burst his veins, producing livid, violet haemorrhages under his skin. After the coming effort he will be left twisted like an old doll, and will undoubtedly be unable to move. He is going to burst inside. And he’ll be alone. Under these conditions, to survive one day would be a miracle. If his predictions are right and his brother manages to escape from the forest, and if he finds the path to the house and honours his pledge by coming back finally to find him, several days will have passed. At best, his life will no longer depend on him. For the first time.

‘Up you get,’ he says.

‘Already?’

‘Yes. We can’t delay it any longer.’

‘OK. Shall we say goodbye?’

The brothers come together in a long, unrestrained embrace. Big ties the little bindle to a belt loop on Small’s
trousers. Afterwards, he scrapes around in a corner and pulls out Mother’s old bag of food, which his brother looks at with a sidelong glance, recalling a forgotten nightmare. He tosses it out of the well, and as it hits the ground, cloying fumes of putrid cheese splutter through the seams and it spits out black breadcrumbs and thin, wrinkled figs, decomposed like them.

‘Give me your hands,’ he says.

Small gives them to him, and as he does he remembers the first day they spent in the well. He goes back to that time, but they are no longer the same; the well is no longer the same. Not even the distance separating them from the world is the same. They take their positions: Big spreading his legs to steady himself when the speed picks up, Small with one knee on the ground so that he isn’t dragged along, both of them gripping with such force that their knuckles blanch. And without another thought they start to spin. Big pulls his brother upwards so the rotation is clean and goes on spinning, and Small is raised a hand from the ground and he spins, another hand and he spins, until with the next spin he’s virtually horizontal, with his eyes closed and his clenched teeth making dents in his gums; and still they spin, faster and faster, with each spin mapping a bigger circumference, and when it seems like they are at the point of falling, exhausted and breathless from so much spinning, Small slips down to
the ground, but doesn’t touch it, then soars back up at an angle, and they repeat this twice more, and in the final ascent Big shouts Now and lets go, and with his eyes still closed Small breaks free and he takes off from the earth towards the sun like a comet of bones, and he extends his weightless body, made from a stalk or an arrow, and casts a fine shadow over his brother’s face as he flies above the roots into the daylight, and he tumbles several more times before settling like a leaf on the smooth grass that grows just beyond the well.

Laid out on top of it, Small beams. With his hands he caresses the daisy petals, the small stones, the blanket that covers the earth. Everything has changed. The light is different. The smells are different. What a smell, the forest. Thirstily he breathes in the distant perfume of fruit and almonds. He turns his body to rub it against the new colours, to breathe as if for the first time. It feels like he has been born. He cries.

Afterwards he drags himself towards the mouth of the well—mainly because he doesn’t want to break the spell that he is caught up in, and secondly to avoid stumbling and being pitched back in again. He pokes his head over and sees his brother sitting in a strange pose with his arms bent backwards and his legs spread out as if they belonged to another body.

‘We did it!’ Small cries, delightedly.

‘Ha ha! I knew it! We’re the greatest! Have you hurt yourself?’

‘A bit. But I’m fine. Are you OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

They look at each other for a few seconds not knowing what else to say. It feels strange to be so far apart, even if in reality the distance separating them is just a few metres. It’s Small who speaks first:

‘I think I have to go.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll come back for you.’

‘Yes. But before that you must keep your promise,’ says Big.

‘I know.’

‘I hope you can.’

‘I’ve thought about it a lot. I won’t be afraid.’

Small gets to his feet and collects Mother’s bag, which landed a few metres from the well. Then he goes back to the edge to look at his brother for the last time.

‘Kill her for what she did to us,’ Big says.

And also:

‘Remember that she threw us in here. You don’t love her anymore.’

With those words still sounding through the forest, on the mountains and along every path, Small departs. And huddled in a corner of the well, alone now, Big surrenders himself to a torture that will go on for hours and days, and he utters one last message, which nobody hears, in that capricious language of tears and laughter:

‘Amam cor…’

S
MALL ARRIVES DRENCHED
in the orange light of the afternoon. He lets the things he brought with him drop to the ground: a rucksack, two ropes, a small stick, several stakes and a hunting knife. It wasn’t hard to find the way back: an invisible cord pulled him from his navel.

Seeing it now, with new eyes, it is a beautiful place to die.

He remains painfully thin. His eyes are still sunken deep in their sockets, as if they were tired of looking. His cheekbones could cut right through the flesh that covers them. He has, however, recovered the olive colour in his face and managed to separate the animal from the man.

He walks slowly towards the well, giving each step its due importance, gauging the distance that separates him from the mouth and which grows shorter with each new step. He stops two metres from the well. He still can’t see. Nor does he say anything. Another step. The bottom of the well glistens in the corner of his eye.

The next step is the last. With his hands holding on to the edge, he leans over.

The previous days were very strange for him. Not because of the trouble he had finding the way home, or the nights he spent out in the open, imagining himself lost. Not because he went back to eating ripe fruit, but because he bore his brother’s absence like a necessary void. He felt as if a shark had ripped his body at the waist, and as he walked along like that—so incomplete, his organs hanging out for all to see, powerless to hide the emptiness and with no way of preserving his dignity—he felt ashamed.

The previous days were very strange for him, with that shame seeping out of every pore on his skin, leaving him slippery for any human contact. Along the dirt paths, in the copper mines, in factories destroyed by desperation, in the cities left to ruin, people made way for him. None of them could stand the glare of his eyes since in them it was still possible to see the well. And yet the people assumed his shame—the obscenity of so many years spent in a daze—and in silence they began to escort him—an unassailable throng, a mob of men and women emerging from their cages.

The previous days were very strange for him, visiting Mother, who seemed to have expected the parting and neither screamed nor put up resistance. He didn’t want to know her reasons for doing what she did, but seeing her happy and without remorse was enough for him to understand that there were stories he didn’t know. He
suffocated her with the old food bag she had left them with in the well—that bait that never broke their spirit—so that she understood, before she went, that they didn’t touch a morsel of that false charity, that they overcame every urge, that they did not surrender.

The previous days were very strange for him; the family home surrounded by an expectant crowd, and him, inside, alone, avoiding their gaze. And ultimately leaving, because that place could no longer be his and because he knew that his spirit was no longer close to what it had been before.

‘I’m back,’ he says.

He unravels the ropes and secures the ends to the stakes nailed into the ground. He takes the opposite end of one of them and ties it around his body, winding three circles around his waist and two more around his groin. An endless human tide observes the ceremony in complete silence, spilling out from the edges of the forest. He tosses the other end of the second rope into the well. Afterwards, he sits down on the edge. And while the night closes its gates above him, announcing the end of an era of darkness, blooming like a cluster of promises in his chest which, despite his death, will keep on growing, he wonders if he should cut the ropes and let himself fall, or if it would be better, after all, to retrieve the rotting corpse of his brother and hold him
up as a symbol of insurrection, and for his anniversary to light the darkness with a tremor of footsteps and noise, and for us to wake up tomorrow from this grim dream with the courage of a rising sea, tearing down the walls that silenced us, regaining our ground, having our say.

This book, like the last one, is the product of much effort and affection. Given that I don’t know if I will ever have this opportunity again, I would like to thank all the people who, in one way or another, accompanied me in the process.

To my parents, Rafael and Nieves, for teaching me both to keep my feet on the ground and to lift myself up several hand spans above it; to my sister Adriana for her unstinting faith in me; to the old friends who followed the writing from close by or afar and who helped me: Izas, Jaime, Adriana, Pere, Ángela, Santi, Jesús, Galder, Igor, Ada, Ángel, Pablo and the Parretis Rafa and Mario; to Pedro de Hipérbole, my first passionate reader; to those who spread the word; to the Cantabrian and Mediterranean family.

I owe a special mention to the people of Libros del Silencio, above all my editor, Gonzalo, who believed in me, understood how to guide me, and allowed me to live out a dream. And not forgetting Irene (retrospectively), Marc and Pablo, who worked so hard over many weeks and treated me with respect and friendship. What immense talent you have, all of you.

Thank you to Koldo Asua for lighting the way.

And my thanks to Ana Cristina, for countless reasons: from Quinta da Regaleira to today, now, as someone is reading this page.