Out in the Open (14 page)

The cripple must be a very greedy man, the boy thought, to undertake a journey like that just for a reward, and this again made him wonder what price the bailiff had put on his head.

With only a few yards left before he caught up with them, the boy took even more care not to be seen. When he felt sure he could not possibly miss, he bent down, picked up a sharp stone about the size of a large potato and aimed it at the cripple's head. However, the stone whizzed past its intended target and struck the donkey squarely on the rump, causing the donkey, entirely out of character, to buck and bray furiously. It reached round to lick its wounded haunch and kicked wildly in all directions, one of those kicks striking the cripple on the forehead, rendering him unconscious. The donkey then began to trot aimlessly down the road, as if its load were as light as a feather, dragging the cripple's inert body, still strapped to the plank, from one side of the road to the other. The man's head bounced limply over the stones. Then the donkey calmed down slightly, turned and galloped back towards the boy, slowing its pace as it got nearer and stopping just short of the boy's feet. Stunned by the violence of what he'd just seen, the boy stared at the donkey as if he had tamed a fierce bull through the sheer power of thought. He held out his hand and the donkey approached meekly and sniffed his fingers. The edges of the plank had made ruts in the surface of the dirt road, marks blurred by the cripple's slewing body. The boy slid his hand under the donkey's jaw and stroked the loose skin. The donkey kept snorting like an angry child until it had fully recovered from the pain inflicted by that stone.

For a while, as night closed in on him, the boy stayed where he was, his arms around the donkey's head. He was resting, enjoying a silence broken only by the sound of the donkey's tail flicking away the horseflies, and letting time pass until he could summon up the courage to find out if the man was alive or dead. The donkey shook its head, and the coarse tuft of hair between its ears grazed the boy's face. Then the boy stepped away from the donkey and, as if it were something he had done time and again, walked determinedly round to the rear of the donkey to inspect the apparently lifeless body of his betrayer. He pressed one ear to the man's mouth and established that he was, in fact, still breathing. He felt the man's jacket and, in the inside pocket, found a tobacco pouch, a lighter and a folded piece of paper. He opened this out and held it up to the fading light. He couldn't make out the smaller lettering, but could read the large letters announcing his disappearance. A reward of twenty-five
monedas
was offered to anyone providing reliable information as to his whereabouts. He folded up the piece of paper again and put it back where he had found it.

He cut the ropes binding plank to donkey and gave the donkey a slap on the rump, thus permanently sundering that unlikely centaur. The donkey moved slightly to one side, leaving the man lying on the ground, the plank still strapped to his thighs, its greasy and now motionless ball bearings gazing up at the sky. The mark left by the donkey's hoof was imprinted on the man's forehead like a red letter U, and a jagged line of blood leaked from the wound made by one of the nails in the shoe. The boy was shaken both by the violence of the scene and by the recurring thought that this man had been intending to hand him over to his executioner. He gave the cripple a kick in the ribs that provoked a somnolent moan and sent the man rolling over the stones, his half-open mouth pressed into the dirt, on which a red spot of blood appeared.

The boy looked around him, recognised a few landmarks and reckoned that they must already be quite close to the sluice and the aqueduct. In his pursuit of the cripple, his one intention had been to stop him in his tracks, then abandon him on the road and continue on alone with the donkey and the water to find the goatherd. Now, with that large body lying at his feet, he had to reconsider his options. He knew that leaving him there meant condemning him to die within a matter of days beneath the hammering sun. Taking him with them would only slow them down and, even if the man were to forswear any further attempts at betrayal, he would clearly be a source of problems when they met up with the goatherd again. He considered dragging him back to the village and leaving him there safe among his provisions, but if he did that, he would definitely arrive too late to save the goatherd.

With his thumb throbbing under the napkin and his feet rubbed raw, the boy tried to put these various options into some hierarchy of importance so as to reach the right and fair decision, one that would save one man and condemn another to certain death. His heart was with the goatherd, but it was the body of the cripple that lay bleeding at his feet and whose twisted image he would carry with him for the rest of his days. He knew that whatever he decided to do, he would be committing a mortal sin and this reminded him of the village priest in the pulpit: his yellowing chasuble, his admonishing finger, the curve of his belly, and his spit raining down on his parishioners. The publican and the pharisee, the wise man and the fool, the meek and the proud, the whore and the mother. The categories which, it seemed, defined God's purposes or their opposites. These sermons had never brought him any enlightenment. The hell awaiting him at the end of his days would not, he thought, be so very different from the suffering he had known while alive. The flaming pit, full of black souls, could as easily be the plain with its pack of villains.

The cripple lying at his feet appeared to be regaining consciousness, writhing formlessly about on his wooden mount and moaning glutinous words that failed to cohere into any known meaning, doubtless the dialect of the hellhound that would greet him at the gates of Hades. He imagined the cripple's amputated legs lying among the bushes. He thought of the goatherd, of his father and, lastly, of the bailiff, and that final image fixed itself on his eyelids like the flash of an explosion. The man gave another groan, and the boy, hardening his heart, kicked him in the mouth, opening up another gap among his already rotten teeth and returning him to his previous position on the road. The boy felt the blood flowing through his veins, felt it burning him inside. His scalp was pricking and his boots were full of grit. He looked about him, perhaps in search of witnesses or help, but found nothing and no one. Only the remains of an abandoned water tank a few yards from the road. For a second, he considered dragging the cripple over there and throwing him in so that no one would find him or so that he would bake to death the following day. He could drag his naked body over the rocks, tie his hands to the metal tubes that emerged out of the ground near the tank, harness him to the donkey and tear him limb from limb. Or he could take him with them, heal his wounds and ask his forgiveness. Then the man gave another distant groan, and the boy looked down at him. He took two steps back and dealt him another kick in the face, this time breaking his nose. Such was his torment and anguish.

HE URGED ON
the donkey, even though he knew this would have no effect. He wanted to get away as fast as possible from the place where he had left the cripple. He struggled fruitlessly to justify what he had done. Something about just men and sinners or about a needle, a camel and the kingdom of God. He couldn't be sure whether he had condemned the man to certain death or not. Before leaving him, he had emptied out the contents of his knapsack next to the body. On the other hand, he had then made off with the donkey laden with the two bottles of water and the food that the cripple had provided for his journey in search of the bailiff. Perhaps the road was better used than he imagined, and the following morning, the man would be safely stowed on some merchant's wagon, among sacks of dried chestnuts and apricots.

It was still dark when he spotted the ragged silhouette of the castle. The half-moon bathed the ruins in a watery blue wash. As he approached, he could make out the pile of bodies on one side and hear the clink of a bell from some goat already awake. The sound cheered him because, ever since he had left the castle the night before, there had been a kind of knot in the pit of his stomach: the idea that, when he returned, the goatherd would not be there. The tinkling bell did not, of course, come from the goatherd, but at least it was better than absolute silence. He dug his heels into the donkey and encouraged it to make haste by jiggling back and forth in the saddle. When they got closer to the dead goats, he heard the monotonous buzz of thousands of flies which he could not see, but which he imagined like a great black cloud hanging over that mound of death. Even though the wind wasn't blowing in his direction, he still had to cover his mouth against the pestilential smell so as not to vomit. A few yards from the wall, he jumped down from the donkey and hurried to the place where he had left the goatherd, but more urgent than checking on him was finding the saucepan and putting some water on to boil. The goatherd's possessions were there, but his ‘bed' was empty. The boy squatted down next to the blanket and ran his hand over it just to confirm what his eyes were seeing. All his tension evaporated and he felt it rise up to join the warm, ascending current of air given off by the wall. He sat down beside the blanket and, resting his elbows on his knees, covered his face with his hands and wept. His childish flight, the searing sun, the bleak, indifferent plain. He sensed the immutability of his surroundings, the same inertness in everything he could touch or see and, for the first time since he had run away, he felt afraid of dying. The idea of carrying on alone terrified him, and the image flashed into his mind of his house beside the railway track and the silo. He could decide to go back. He could abandon his desperate struggle against nature and against men and return home. Well, if not home exactly, at least to some kind of shelter. He would return in a far worse state than when he left. He wasn't the prodigal son. He had rejected his family and would have to accept whatever verdict they passed on him. He was thinking these thoughts because the plain had worn him down in a way he could never have imagined while living safe beneath a roof. He found this state of utter helplessness exhausting and, at such moments, would gladly have exchanged even the most precious part of his being to enjoy a little peace or simply to be able to satisfy his most basic needs quietly and naturally. These other things: protecting himself from the sun, wringing from the earth every last drop of water, inflicting pain on himself, liberating himself from slavery, deciding on other people's lives, none of these things were appropriate to his still-expanding brain, his still-growing bones, his supple limbs, his physical frame on the verge of becoming something larger and more angular. He imagined the goatherd's lifeless body being dragged along behind the bailiff's motorbike and the bailiff's deputies on horseback, laughing.

In the darkness, he cupped his face in his hands. A small, warm place in which to hide away. A tiny room in which he would be spared the sight of that eternal, futile plain stretching away beneath him. In this seclusion, he found one dirty hand and one hand wrapped in a dusty napkin, the bundle concealing his torn and throbbing thumb. No, even there he could find no rest.

‘Get up, boy.'

The goatherd's quavering voice and his bony hand on his shoulder. The boy sprang to his feet and, without even looking at the goatherd, he flung his arms about his frail body. He pressed his face into the old man's rags so as to become one with him, to enter the tranquil room his own hands had denied him. It was the first time he had been so close to someone without trying to fight him off. The first time he had been skin to skin with someone and allowed all the humours and substances of his being to flow forth from his pores. The goatherd welcomed him without a word, as if he were welcoming a pilgrim or an exile. The boy embraced him so tightly that the goatherd cried out: ‘Mind my ribs,' and immediately the knot dissolved and they separated. There was no embarrassment, just the discreet distance required by the laws of that land and that time. The seed, however, had been sown.

They boiled some water, and once the goatherd and the goats had drunk it, the old man and the boy ate the cripple's sausages right down to the strings and drank the cripple's wine, the old man taking long swallows and the boy trying unsuccessfully to conceal his grimaces. He drank because the goatherd drank and because he felt that, after his strange journey, he was a different person: the boy who had risked his life to bring water back for a few goats and who had deliberately aimed a stone at a cripple's head. Then, when they had eaten and drunk their fill, the boy told the goatherd all about his adventure. The goatherd said:

‘We have to find that man before the crows peck him to death.'

The boy felt all the old tension in his muscles descend on him from above, and his jaw tightened. He turned to the old man, unable to understand what he had just heard, but the goatherd did not return his look. The boy knew that what he had done was not good, but rather than being told to set off to help the man who had wanted to kill him, he had expected a pat on the back or a firm handshake, as a sign of approval or respect. The goatherd might not have been prepared to greet him like a hero or recognise the sacrifice he had made, but he should certainly not oblige him to put his head back in the lion's mouth. He studied the goatherd's hands, remembered his swollen eyelids and the triangular marks left on his back by the riding whip. The old man was clearly not going to be the one to hand him the key to the world of adults, that world in which brutality was meted out for reasons of greed or lust. He himself had been guilty of meting out violence, exactly as he had seen those around him do, and now he was demanding his share of impunity. The elements had pushed him far beyond what he knew and didn't know about life. It had taken him to the very edge of death and there, in the midst of that camp of horrors, he had raised his sword rather than proffered his neck. He felt he had drunk of the blood that transforms boys into warriors and men into invulnerable beings. The old man should, he thought, have marched him through the victory arch, crowned with laurels by a slave.