Three Horses

by Erri De Luca

  Holy man of Africa, I think, you come to impart your wisdom to a European savage who follows the moon on the calendar and the clouds on the radio bulletin and can’t read a word without an alphabet.

  “Is life so in tune, so musically scored as to notify through signs, counterpoints? Better to know nothing ahead of time. Because it takes your kind of patience to bear the knowledge. It takes your wide nose, your teeth shining through to smile, your forehead furrowed with sweat. It takes your calloused gray and not my eggshell color.”

  Selim finishes his cup and mumbles his syllables of benediction.

  “You’re familiar with ashes and the sky, you know so many things, Selim.”

  “I only breathe out a few thank yous to the heavens,” he says. “I make my breath rise. It mixes with the clouds and becomes rain. A man prays and in this way builds his substance in the sky. The clouds are filled with the breath of prayers.”

  I look above, the clouds are arriving from the sea. I say, “Man how they pray in Sardinia!”

  And he laughs with me and says that it’s good to laugh and that faith comes after laughter rather than after tears.

  Then he stands up. In the depths of my empty intestines, agitated by the coffee, I feel a growling of tenderness for Laila, who has landed on my fifty years like a stone on a nest.

  I haven’t been home for a day, I think, while cleaning the coffeepot.

  Skip a turn and you never return. In Argentina I miss an appointment and I’m safe. I arrive just as they’re taking away the family from the last hiding place. I stay in the bus, which is blocked by soldiers, while my last friends disappear into a truck.

  The ashes can’t teach me anything, Selim. I am the ashes.

  Selim makes a bouquet of rosemary branches and thyme. He wants to try selling them to restaurants. Now that they’re in bloom they can be set on tables instead of vases.

  He thinks that good business requires items that no one has asked for yet. The demand has to be invented. This way he feels like he’s offering a novelty.

  “How does the idea come to you?” I ask.

  “I look at gardens. There are many new items in gardens. But there are not many gardeners,” and he makes a smile that uncovers his teeth.

  And I think that the most important thing at his and my age is maintaining your smile.

  I strew the ashes over the loose soil surrounding the oak that I’ve planted. I can’t help but say a couple of words. I pat the still delicate trunk. There’s already a robin on one of its branches. Selim’s voice saying good-bye from the gate arrives from behind, together with the sun that is already warming my back. I unbutton the collar of my red flannel shirt and pull up the sleeves. I’ve been wearing it for two days. It’s filled with my smell like the book I keep in the pocket of my overalls.

  At the tavern I sit at my usual place, which has a good view of the front door.

  For the first time I find myself looking up each time someone comes in. Selim’s news, the warning of the ashes, has given half a twist to my nerves. The first sign is my vigilance. I don’t like it and I have to be careful to keep my body from trembling.

  A narrowing of the eyelids reminds me of a lesson learned from Argentina, from quick glances, a heavy jacket and hot breath running through my nose. And my hand starts to make a lost gesture and I realize that it’s resting on the spot left empty by the weapon of my years in the South. Before regaining control of my nerves, I sense this groping in search of a lost object.

  And it’s a long time before I can take a deep breath, unwinding.

  The tavern-keeper comes up and sits down. He’s got his walnut liquer and pours me a glass.

  “What are you thinking about, my friend? A woman?”

  “No,” I say, and feel my narrowed eyelids relax and a hint of a smile slowly arise. “I’m thinking of a town in the South, of many years down there.”

  “You still haven’t realized that you’re back, have you.”

  “Here I do. At your place it’s like being in an old-fashioned house, open to everyone. Is there something to celebrate?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says, “a birthday of sorts. On this day many years ago I got out of prison.”

  He touches his glass against mine. “Welcome out,” I say and he says, “Welcome home.”

  I toss the walnut liquer down my throat and start on the road uphill to the garden. I set my heel more forcefully into my step and Argentina abandons my thoughts.

  As work ends it’s still light out. Laila is waiting for me at the gate. She doesn’t want to talk indoors. We go down to the sea.

  The wisteria is beginning to bloom on the path to the beach from where we leave the car. I take my shoes off. I walk more in touch with the ground than with Laila’s first words. We sit on stones. The light arrives at an acute angle that narrows and beckons far from the struggling words.

  I listen to her and think of the ruckus of soldiers fumbling through the rocks in search of me. I know I’ll have to come out into the open.

  Laila speaks of a man to kill or be killed.

  Her job is to make men talk. She’s had enough. “The last trip took a lot out of me. It took me a long time to finish, I couldn’t. I had the imprint of your hands on me, all over me. It took me days, nausea, nostalgia, and now I know it’s over. I can’t take anymore. He’s onto me, is watching me, is already setting up another date and I’m trying to find time I don’t have. This is not the kind of job you’re allowed to quit. When you can’t do it anymore, you either run away or die.”

  I barely listen, thinking of Dvora, the Buenos Aires girl who I followed down there, of our good years, the Sundays when I wake her by slipping a drop of jasmine under her nose to see her smile in her sleep. And meanwhile the crowds pass through the streets with banners and from our balcony it looks like bunches of grapes, the fruit is their heads, and at the beginning we never think that the crowd belongs to us, singing the serenade of its reasons to us onlookers.

  The crowd parades below and we stay on our balconies, in a kind of accompaniment. And some people from below wave for us to come down and I want to wave to everybody to come up, to reciprocate, and meanwhile I greet them with my eyes and don’t realize that Dvora has gone down to the street. She waves to me and shows me the way and then so do I. It only lasts one year and the bad times come in one day, when they throw her into a car and pull me away by force and there I am doubled over from the sobs in the street like a crooked nail. I’m safe, discarded by death because of the green Italian passport in my pocket. “Where have I brought you, novio? Here they’ll kill us all.”

  And her eyes cloud up and I rub my finger over her eyelids and tell her, “Hey, why the teardrops?” And these are the last words and the last caress at the gate, before being separated by death.

  I leave our family home. I enter the vagabond war where every shelter is an artificial home. From our wedding house I take away only one thing of Dvora’s, her sneakers, still tied tight because she takes them off by pulling on the heel. It’s my job to untie the knots and keep them ready for her. I carry them away, out of my mind with pain, to remind me of a debt of neglected care, in the hope of seeing them on her feet again.

  Then I forget them and a year later I have to empty out one of my underground shelters and I find them again under a purse in the back of a closet. I have nothing of Dvora’s because without her I am grasping onto nothingness. Her shoes are there with the laces tied tight. I kneel down and loosen the knots, the eyelets. Then I leave them there.

  I know that she’s at the bottom of the sea with her hands tied. I can only untie her shoelaces. I bid farewell on my knees before an empty closet.

  I think of this beneath Laila’s words and once more nothing of me is left.

  In the suburb to the south of the Palermo quarter in Buenos Aires I run into the last survivors of the first Italians who arrived. I work in a shoe factory, learn about leather and enjoy the love of Sundays on Dvora’s arm with the promise of gro
wing old and foolish together.

  I don’t have a death-rattle of regret for the shootings, the little war, the portion of revenge taken without paying. Because I’m unharmed: I don’t know how to say it, don’t know how to curse it.

  I’m barely listening, Laila, a short return by way of cruel Argentina. It’s better not to be in a room right now, better to see an arm of the Mediterranean than the immense mouth of the Rio de la Plata.

  Laila isn’t asking for help, she’s speaking out of loyalty, like the first time. She wants to shrug off her problems. I believe her.

  I join my empty palms. I think: Now you, too, with the killing?

  My hands stay closed as do my words. I say nothing. Instead Laila says, “Me, too, with the killing.”

  She hears my inner rumblings. I don’t react, don’t have a single sentence I can keep secret from her. It must be really uncomfortable to listen to thoughts, fill yourself with other people’s chaos even when they’re silent. It’s tough to know that, while you’re speaking to a guy, he is thinking of something else.

  The sea is purple, like the rosemary flower. The wind of the last rays of sun blows Laila’s hair over my forehead.

  “So that’s how you snatch my thoughts, with your hair?”

  “No,” she says. It’s an animal ability, a remnant of the brain of a snake, a fish, a swallow, or at least that’s what she imagines her gift to be. But she can only hear thoughts that are close by.

  Doesn’t this scare me? Nothing scares me about this love.

  She hugs my arm and says, “You make me forget who I am.”

  “No, I help you to know better. You are the woman I am in love with. For me no reason could be better.”

  “You caress every bone in my body, place your lips on my marrow, set my body at peace,” she says.

  Her hair whips my face, wants to place itself downwind. No, I hold it, I don’t want her hair to blow aimlessly.

  We are quiet for a while, tasting the salt on the dying wind.

  “It’s disgusting to kill, Laila. You never get rid of death’s grease. It doesn’t wash away. You’re young, so you think that it will pass and through a fit of willpower for a while you do forget it. And then one day when you’re at peace with the world and are looking at it and feel the air teasing your breath and are maybe thinking of the tiny bit of oxygen and the huge amount of nitrogen, the furthest point from that bloodshed, it comes back because you, yes you, are breathing, living, you’re one of the damned living.

  “And you recite the most urgent reasons for the bloodshed and you repeat that, at night you sleep and every sleep contains absolution, and no matter, the murdered one is still there, attached to you.

  “And remorse doesn’t count and you don’t have to get insomnia, but there you are surrounded by empty seats, a woman changes sidewalks when she runs into you, bread crumbles in your hands, faces that resemble, annoyance at hearing footsteps at your back and, at the first stroke of luck, the thought that you, too, might end up mowed down by bullets and have no right to dodge them.

  “And when you admit this, you actually feel relief.

  “So many murderers let themselves be killed.”

  And I continue, I continue reading to Laila an awkward lover’s plea.

  “Otherwise he’ll kill me. Because I don’t want to continue anymore and as a free woman he thinks I’m a danger. And he knows about you and this is making things risky for you.”

  “I don’t know how to shield you from evil. It’s the second time I’ve failed, but the first I went about it numbly and reacted late and for revenge. Now that I’ve wasted half a lifetime running away, I still cannot save anyone.”

  “You can’t pull me out of the water dry. I’ll serve him as long as I can and not even that is sure to satisfy him. One day he’ll decide that someone knows too much and, pity because she was good, but it’s better to get rid of the problem.

  “I used to think I could stick it out, now it’s impossible to stick it out and leave it at that. And I’m ending up straight in the mouth of one of the quick fixes. You rattled me just in time, through a couple of wrinkles on the neck, a way of crumbling sage and scenting your fingers, the quiet silence that sits in your thoughts. Now I have to save myself. To kill and escape and this way have a few days’ advantage over people who know about me while I know nothing about them.”

  Who are they? I try to imagine without asking.

  “They’re people quick to do harm. You already know some of them.”

  “You need help, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “No, and the less you know the better.”

  “They might come looking for me.”

  “I don’t know, it’s not for sure. They work by sector, maybe he’s still the only one that knows about you. Whatever the case you won’t be able to say anything. I’m not telling you how to get in touch with me.”

  “It ends here, Laila.” While I’m saying this my eyes go dry. I touch the book in my pocket for support, feel a wind from other waves on my brow. It’s the Atlantic from the South, flight and fury inside my body to avoid getting caught by the Argentinians who come ashore to occupy Soledad Island.

  It’s April, autumn. I run away from Maria without saying a thing. She’s one of them and once again I’m in the land of hunt and capture.

  I hide by a coastal inlet on a tip of the island called “Eagle’s Pass,” the southernmost tip, tempests and marine birds and winds that ruin your ears.

  I fish, drink rainwater, steal eggs from nests, make peat fires at night and feel the trap snapping at me from every side. I resist, just enough to live. I discover the carcass of a sailboat, salvage wood from it for my hiding place in the grotto.

  I spend days in hiding, looking out at the sea.

  I feel my life hardening to absorb the blow and accept it.

  There’s no escape at land’s end, no other South where I can descend, no ship’s hold where I can rock in a sleep of salvation.

  I see the sea scratching the cliffs and the white of the waves’ nails and the line that separates it from the land.

  I see the thin red line of sunset that separates day from night, I think that the world is made by the king of the verb “divide,” and I wait for the line that comes to detach me from the days.

  And life is a long-spun line and death is going back to the start, bodiless. I see the thrashing of wings inside the hollow of waves and not even a fish with the whole ocean to hide in is safe.

  The birds fly above: each is alone and unallied. Their family is the air, not the wings of others, and each egg laid is solitude. And in the darkness of embers I make an omelet of solitude and kill my hunger.

  And when the feeling grabs me that my time is near, I think of what is streaming through most of the world and passing alongside mine: trees ruffling pollen, women waiting for water to break, a boy studying a verse of Dante, a thousand recess bells ringing in every school on earth, wine fermenting in casks. Everything is happening together with me so time joins with these forces to become something more.

  Thoughts of a life gone by, Laila, I know you are listening to them.

  It lasts several weeks. They find me by combing the area and I escape over the cliffs, they fire against the wind and a lead pebble goes through my lungs and I think I can see it coming out the front and escaping even further ahead, with me running behind it until my breath stops. Finally my ears are becalmed and I hear them kicking like they were at a gate. One guy wants to do me in right there and then and the others say sending me to the mainland will make a better impression. They put me in the back of a truck like an animal after the hunt and circle the city shooting in the air saying that they’ve captured a terrorist and they call me the aparecido and throw me in prison. An English doctor sews up the exit and entry points and tells me good luck and to hang in there, his guys are on their way.

  I don’t know who his guys are, but after a few nights I hear cannons at sea.

  And I’m on the cot i
n my cell and no more guards are around and from other cells they’re screaming with hunger, no food for days. Then they come to open the cells and everyone is crazy with joy and I can’t breathe, but I know that death is spitting in my face once again.

  All these stories are just an inch away from Laila’s head. Once again there’s no time and we have to arrange another night for leaving each other. We break away from the dark sea. I slip on my shoes and slip one arm under hers.

  “Until the last of us remains, I will stay,” I tell Laila.

  “Let’s go to a room,” she says, “get right into making love. I don’t want to waste that lucky bullet that exited without killing.”

  We go to my little neighborhood, on the outskirts of the sea. At the windows the eternal laundry drips and from the balconies the short-sleeved arms of women shake.

  The kitchen air is withering. I open the windows. In comes the strangled shout of a courtyard game of soccer. Laila looks out, then she opens drawers, finds the corkscrew and from her handbag comes a bottle. While I’m putting the glasses on the table, the buzzing of her voice begins. I recognize it, try to stop it with my hand, she holds it in the air and again I hear my words taking leave of me.

  I see them even as I say them.

  “There’s a house on an avenue hedged in bougainville. Inside is a man wearing a uniform and on the street another waiting to shoot. There’s a minimal escort, a driver. When he comes out I emerge from the hedges with the advantage of being fast, alone. In my mouth I clench the reins of my nerve ends. And a radio starts up with a song. The moment is filled with musical notes, I stress them all, the seconds jump like tarantella steps and I see the side of a uniform and a hand that searches for a weapon too late and the driver tries something then dashes for cover. I jump into his car and take off and hear a few shots go off, but mainly I hear the song on the car radio that’s still on.”

  How can I be spitting out another cursed hour? You see, I’ve stopped talking and started to sing that song on the radio. While I’m singing, the buzzing sound from Laila’s close-lipped voice comes to a stop. I sing and the story stops, I sing and there’s nothing to obey and once again I’m inside my own voice.