by Ivan Repila
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because I want you to understand that I am not afraid of dying, I don’t base my life on the knowledge that one day it will all end. There are times when life presents circumstances where the only recourse is a radical move, an extraordinary sacrifice, and I can accept that. What I couldn’t bear, though, would be to see you grow up in a wasteland, like this well; a place to die with no peace, all because of the apathy of civilization. A cemetery in which to wither, like a flower that won’t ever help the land to grow. It is the thought of you dying that makes the world so small.’
59
SMALL HAS NAMED himself Inventor and he organizes cultural activities for his brother, although really he does it because he cannot stop imagining.
He has perfected what he has called ‘osteo-vegetable music’, which is what comes from hitting certain bones with dry roots. He rehearses on his own body, above all with his knees, hips, torso and collarbone. But what he’d really love would be to somehow rotate his head and arms and rock out on his spine. His extreme boniness makes him look like a misshapen neighbourhood made up entirely of street corners, and this affords him an inordinate range of obscure, high-pitched sounds which come together as a tune when he strums his tendons and thumps his stomach and chest. The result is a series of concerts with a hard, repetitive bass line, but which boast brief flashes of harmony so that, skeletal origins aside, one can appreciate a certain musicality. Apart from the symphonies, Small takes particular pleasure from his elaborate overtures, where with great ceremony he takes up position—to play himself—and explains the contents of the works with such unfeigned titles as ‘Kneecap and Ribs Song’, ‘Hungry Fingers’ and ‘At Night a Cranium’.
He also organizes outings to The Well Space, home to various temporary art exhibitions. He dedicates a lot of time to finger-painting on the walls: generally abstract pieces embellished with stones, roots and rotten leaves. Unfortunately he can only draw one or two works in the space available to him, and in order to make room for new installations he is obliged, much to his sadness, to delete the old ones. Had it been possible to preserve every one of them and arrange them chronologically, an astute observer would have picked up on his painstaking narration of life inside the well, a kind of pagan Stations of the Cross. Wolves Smelling Men, The Arrival of the Sea, First Worm, or The Bird of Virtuous Death were acclaimed works and only just missed forming part of The Well Space’s permanent collection.
Energy levels permitting, his creativity extends to another kind of pursuit, one that requires greater exertions: gestural theatre, folk dances, human sculptures and contortionism, activities that Big also takes part in on occasion. But the privation of recent times has reduced the number of festivals, much treasured when they do go ahead.
At the end of the day’s line-up, Big spends a few minutes applauding, whistling and hear-hearing like a doting public. Afterwards, if he finds Small in good spirits, he calls for an encore and bows in reverence until he gets one, at which point they fall about laughing at the unintended variations on the show, always unrepeatable.
A few hours later, famished and exhausted, they can hardly remember what they have done, seen or heard.
61
‘WHO ARE YOU?’ asks Small.
‘You know who I am,’ answers Small.
‘How did you get here?’
‘The same way as you. Falling into the well.’
‘Where have you been these past weeks? I haven’t seen you before.’
‘I kept quiet.’
‘And now you want to talk?’
‘Let’s.’
Big is snoring like a wild boar.
‘Am I going to die?’ asks Small.
‘Yes. One day. Does that worry you?’ answers Small.
‘Sometimes. When I’ve got things to say it scares me to think I don’t have time to say them. My brother thinks I hallucinate, but he’s wrong. It’s sort of an emergency.’
‘You’re not special in that regard.’
‘Yes I am. I think things the others don’t think. I see things the others don’t see, or if they see them they can’t interpret them correctly.’
‘You speak as if you know the truth.’
‘No. I speak as if I were tired of being wrong.’
‘And you’re not wrong anymore?’
‘No. It’s everything else that’s wrong. This well, the walls, the forest, the mountains. I’ve been confused for a long time, but I’m OK now.’
‘You don’t look OK.’
‘I’m going to die. I’ve never been better.’
‘Will we get out of the well one day?’ asks Small.
‘You, yes. In twenty-eight days,’ answers Small.
‘And my brother?’
‘The young boy sleeping over there will never get out. His bones will turn to dust here in this hole. Someone must die in order for you to live; you must know that by now.’
‘I don’t want him to die. He’s being strong for me.’
‘Many will be strong for you. You will show your gratitude when the time comes. To your brother, too.’
‘I don’t know how I ever could… I’ve got nothing to give them. There is a hole where other things should be.’
‘You can’t fight that. Nobody will be able to fill that hole, that hunger you feel every day. You can’t sate yourself.’
‘It’s like a prison sentence.’
‘I suppose it is. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. I had options, but I chose this path.’
‘And what do you think you will find at the end?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Maybe a punishment, or a reward. Maybe there’ll be pain, nothing but pain, a searing white pain that will leave me blind. I don’t care. Life is wonderful, but living is unbearable. I’d like to pare down existence. To pronounce over a century one long, inimitable word, and for that word to be my true testament.’
‘A testament for whom?’
‘For whoever understands it.’
‘Do you think I will be remembered?’ asks Small.
‘Perhaps by your contemporaries, by your generation,’ answers Small.
‘That’s not enough. I don’t know if I belong to any generation: none of my loved ones are my age. I will be remembered by all, until not one man remains on the earth.’
‘And why should you be remembered?’
‘For what I know. For what I am going to do. For surviving the well. For my visions. Because my words are new. Because I am big.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re Small.’
‘That is only a name.’
67
SMALL HUMS SOFTLY to himself like a ventriloquist’s dummy, while Big urinates blood and thinks that his time is up. A red puddle splashes the earth before being soaked up into it. Big sees it as his body’s final warning. Perhaps he’s pushed it too far. Or perhaps his kidneys were always going to pack up today, at this very moment, even if he had been living at home and eating normally. He covers the blood with brown earth and smiles.
‘Today,’ he says, ‘I feel wonderful.’
The absent look on his brother’s face makes him question whether Small, like him, is haemorrhaging blood and not saying so. Looking at his paper-thin body it seems impossible that it would survive blood loss. Then again, over these weeks he has shown that his desire to stay alive is great enough to survive even the gravest illnesses. That small, gaunt thing has battled against hunger, thirst, fevers, the cold and heat, and although his mind has begun to desert him, his spirit stands firm.
He envies Small’s indolence and self-absorption, and all the shades of grey that his world seems to contain.
‘Want to play?’
Small perks up all of a sudden.
‘Yes. What shall we play?’
‘A guessing game.’
‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with en.’
Small pulls an intrigued face and strokes a non-existent beard, s
quinting his eyes. He knows his brother, and, given that there aren’t too many options within their line of vision from the bottom of the well, he knows which word he is thinking of. But he enjoys playing, and the best thing about the game is the game itself.
‘Necessity!’
‘No.’
Words beginning with en pile up in his head, all of them a product of his captive condition. He decides to stretch the rope a little more, to test his brother’s resistance.
‘Necrosis!’
‘No.’
‘Niche!’
‘No!’
He loosens the knot a fraction: his brother is clearly losing the will to go on.
‘Nothing!’
‘No.’
‘It’s really difficult. Give me a clue.’
‘OK… You can see it, but you can’t touch it.’
Now is the moment of joy. He can’t put it off any longer.
‘Nightfall!’
‘Yes! Well done!’ bursts out Big with an enormous smile.
‘Again!’
‘Something beginning with… ar.’
Small admires the simplicity of his brother. It must be easy to make decisions in a world with such radical contrasts, where everything is black and white. It must be easy to do the right thing.
‘Rage!’
‘No.’
Interred in a well, his brother sees roots. He cannot see anything else because he looks in the way that dogs look. It is that basic, that beautiful. A piece of meat and a few pats of his back would suffice to make him feel loved. Roots. For Small, there are entities more certain than those things he can touch.
‘Reality!’
‘No!’
Human Remains. Rations of insects. Red-Raw knees. Rebellions. Ravings. Routines. Rituals. Rot. The game could be a lot more fun if only his brother understood. He throws him a bone out of the goodness of his heart.
‘Rocks!’
‘Warmer!’
‘Am I close?’
‘Very. Go on!’
Nor does he want his brother to think him an idiot.
‘Roots!’
‘You got it!’
‘Cool!’ Small hoots exaggeratedly. ‘Now it’s my turn.’
‘OK, but none of those abstract words. Only things that can be seen.’
‘Agreed.’
‘I spy…’ begins Small.
‘I spy,’ says Big.
‘I spy with my little eye… Something beginning with… bee. With bee! With bee!’ Small shrieks, looking down at the russet-coloured earth.
71
‘LOCK UP ANY MAN in a cage,’ says Small.
Give him a blanket, a feather pillow, a mirror and a photograph of the ones he loves. Find a way to feed him and then forget about him for a number of years. Under these conditions, in the majority of cases the end result will be a shell of a man, reduced to guilt, bent to the shape of a cage.
In exceptional cases, he goes on saying, the chosen subject will die, consumed by the slow wasting of his essential organs, or he will go insane watching his own reflection in the mirror. Or he will die of a terminal illness, which in any case he was fated to suffer.
On the other hand, for those subjects predisposed to rebel, those who can’t ignore the call of their inquisitive spirit, prolonged captivity is impossible: lock up a rebel in a cage for a few years and he will either escape, commit a meticulously planned suicide making use of the objects he has at his disposal, or die carving up his own body into pieces small enough to pass through the bars. The real problem, though, is the way these dissenters—fertile by nature—breed and spread in our human conscience: when one dies, two occupy his place.
Given the above, imagine cages hanging from the ceilings of every café, bookshop, church, hospital, and, above all, every school, and imagine that at least one of those cages is inhabited by a subversive—a non-conforming, rebelling subject. Imagine the speeches of these twisted, concave bodies, incited by the crowds who surround their altar with their guilty consciences; what perverse, lucid public acts will they come out with during their reign. Imagine what will become of the inmate from a hospital, beautiful and sustained like a blue machine that pumps out memory, bearing witness to disease and corpses. Imagine the 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 of domestic 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
WHEN 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 into a 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’s been 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.’
&nbs
p; ‘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 sketch of a prehistoric child. He lifts him up and rocks him to the rhythm of a drifting boat. An ancient voice carries across a hundred generations and shakes them:
‘Sleep, my child, sleep. They say that life is good. They speak—let them speak!—, they know not what they say. Sleep, my child, sleep. Your day will come and you shall have the longest, sweetest rest. Sleep, my child, sleep. The gentle night is coming—for me, and then for you,’ Big sings, without thinking, without knowing what he says.
79
IN A FIT OF HYSTERIA Small scoops up several fistfuls of earth and eats them. Minute stones grind against his back teeth and the grit scratches the enamel, twisting his attempt at a smile into a grimace. It only takes a few seconds before he is bent double, vomiting a dark paste of soil and bile, but the smile still hangs from his face. He looks like he has risen from the dead.
‘Beeerrrrggggg, beeerrrrrggggg,’ he says.
Big doesn’t know if it was an attack of hunger or an attempted suicide. Seeing how he smiles it seems more likely the upshot of a terminal mental breakdown. He knocks him cold when he goes to scoop up more earth and carry on eating.
