by Ivan Repila
Even unconscious he holds on to the crazed smile.
In the hours that follow, Small stirs a few times; momentary spasms of lucidness that alternate with heartrending cries, whimpers and incoherent monologues. He doesn’t have a temperature; it’s more like he has knocked his head and the impact has jogged his brain out of place, flipping it over. He spits continuously. His eyelids open and close like the wings of a fly, beating large pieces of coppery rheum that fall off then stick to his cheeks. An invisible leprosy is consuming him.
‘Water,’ he asks.
Big gives him a drink.
‘I’m cold.’
Big lies down beside him and holds him with all of his body.
‘I’m hot.’
Big undoes his brother’s shirt, mops his collar and the nape of his neck with cool water, and then flaps his own to create a current.
‘I’m dirty.’
Big takes down his brother’s trousers, wipes his buttocks with damp earth and dresses him again.
‘I’m scared.’
Big lifts him up in his arms, the way a groom carries his new wife, and rocks him. He weighs so little he could hold him in one hand.
‘Kill me.’
83
IT IS A COOL DAWN. An invitation to go on sleeping, to sink back into the warm earth and let the forest’s hum slowly stir the senses. The sun just about warms his toes, his ankles, his legs. It strokes his skin and makes his hair stand on end, but doesn’t burn him. Flocks of birds chatter in the trees before flying off. Big is awake, but his eyes are still shut. He wants to draw out the bliss of his slumber, to let himself be towed by the undercurrent all the way to the shore. He knows that all pleasure will disappear when he opens his eyes to the sky and the walls of the well cover him with their heavy shadow.
His mind made up, he concentrates all his strength in one eye, then, at last, opens it, and the morning enters in like a spray of light, blinding him for a few seconds, drawing back the curtains in one stroke. The world spins.
Around him the bed of earth is all stirred up. He is still not completely awake. He yawns. He rubs his eyes to level his horizon. He yawns again. Something seems different. He blinks. He looks. Something is different.
Small is not there.
It feels like a lightning bolt is moving through him from his genitals all the way up to his heart, electrifying his organs, coursing through his cells. Small is not there. Adrenaline bursts into thousands of bubbles that dampen his stupor as if with a shower of metal, and leave him like a cat caught in acid rain. Small is not there. He turns his head this way and that in such a hurry that he looks without seeing and his brain can’t retain the visual details of his surroundings. It’s not possible, he thinks.
He breathes in. He looks again, this time taking his time. There are no footprints on the walls. There are no hand or tread marks. If his brother has escaped from the well, he will have had to do it by flying. He looks again. The soil on the ground has been turned over. He stops. There is a mound over in the corner, like a camel’s hump. He hasn’t seen it before. He moves closer. The bulge is a mountain formed out of layers of fresh soil. Behind it, a half-closed hole. Or half open.
In the time it takes for him to swoop down on the hole and start to haul up layers of soil, he has understood that his brother has spent the night digging a tunnel underneath the well. He screams as his arms sink and rise up again and his skin shreds, leaving his hands like red-hot trowels. And he goes on screaming as his nails break off, flipping like snapped animal traps into the air, and the last speck of earth is shifted. He is still screaming when from a metre away he spots the submerged body, its head buried in the depths of a ridiculous vertical passageway. He goes on screaming as he drags the rag doll that only yesterday was his brother and is now a piece of mud-battered flesh, and he screams as he pulls him out of his lair. And when at last he sets him down and washes him, slapping water on him as if he were a dirty shoe, he is still screaming.
Big removes the hard pustules from his eyes, his ears and his mouth. Resting his ear against Small’s chest, he listens for a heartbeat, but hears nothing. He’s not sure if he is dead or alive. He puts his mouth against Small’s mouth and blows, and then he presses into his ribs with his hands, and then blows again. He doesn’t even know what he is doing, but his movements are driven by instinct and he goes along with it, repeating them as many times as necessary. Nothing happens, there are no changes. His brother doesn’t move. The blowing turns into a reverberating cry that travels across their mouths and the compressions turn into violent, unbridled thumps, like blows from a mallet coming down on a casket of bones. He takes him by the shoulders and shakes him against the ground, and he can’t stop because his hands are locked into fists and they will not open.
With his head back, his neck twisted and half his face lying in the dirt, at last Small coughs. A long, muddy piece of phlegm is projected from his throat right up to his lips, and he coughs again. Big stops the screaming, the hitting and the blowing and he watches him, motionless, holding his breath.
‘Can you hear me?’
There’s no answer. And yet Small’s chest is moving. A warm breath pushes open his mouth to the day. His fingers clench and unclench with the frailty of a premature child.
‘Can you hear me?’
Small coughs again. And before he loses consciousness, as if remembering an ancient grammar, he whispers:
‘Forty-three. Forty-one. Seventy-one. Twenty-three. Thirteen. Twenty-nine. Eleven. Eighty-three. Two. Sixty-seven.’
Sitting up, his back against the wall, drinking water. Small spends the afternoon like this, with his torso and legs still covered in earth. Next to him, his brother looks at him with resignation. Neither of them has said another word to the other, until now.
‘What have you done?’ asks Big.
‘Made a hole.’
‘I understand that. What I’m asking is why.’
‘Because I can’t go on in the well. I’m going mad.’
‘And you think a hole can help you get out?’
‘If I can’t get out from up there, I’ll get out from below. Even if I have to cross the world like a worm,’ says Small defiantly.
Hearing this, Big accepts that the time has come. He can’t put it off any longer.
‘Get ready. In six days I’m going to get you out of here,’ he says, lying down to sleep.
89
OVER 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 exercise
s 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…’
97
SMALL 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 th
at 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.
