I have two horses, two young foals, the one a nick bigger than the other. Their names, Savopopo and Savokampi. I keep them in the loft. In front, giving on to the street, the high veranda runs down the loft’s west wall. Up the inner staircase in the back of the building I surreptitiously climb. There they are on the veranda, unaware of my presence. They stand whispering, on their toes, the young one with the dark curls and the slightly bigger one with stiff white lips, both totally dedicated to the effort of lifting the peg from the gate closing the veranda off from the outside stairs, intent upon climbing down and absconding. Ah, and they are blood-young. Until they see me and become frightened and covered with shame. Why do they want to run away then, I ask myself. They serenade me in the way I taught them until I can no longer rein in my sorrow and am obliged to turn my sobbing face to the wall so as not to inconvenience them. A man doesn’t cry in front of his horses. Then it is time to sleep and I prepare a couch of litter in the warmest corner of the loft. We lie down, Savokampi by Savopopo, and I pressed tight against them, above us the cool hushing of leaves, thousands upon thousands of cards shutter-flickering punching data. Savokampi’s dark eyelashes, I notice, are wet with tears.
In the late night I’m sitting in the old professor’s house, telling him the tale of my two horses. The room glimmers. The professor has a grey visage. I wrap up my story in words and try to present it in patterns which he may comprehend. Actually I display everything but when I deviate from the truth the grey face becomes quite hidebound and then he wags an admonishing finger to correct the lessons. I always have to report to him, starting from the beginning afresh. Among my words the leaves rustle. When I relate how they sang for me my heart is deeply moved and weeping I have to turn to the blindness of the room’s wall.
All of that is so deep in the past. You did want to hear the telling. The whole night through I sat at the table by the window with the night-writing under my fingers. I can see far across this town where we decided to while away the darker hours. It is only a traveller’s halt in the desert — perhaps their only income is from the pilgrims interrupting their journey here for the night. On either side of the speedway, quiet now, are three or four rows of hotels; and further still more, up the hillsides. All the windows are dull gleaming squares. There is the same light, barely sombred by the passage of night, in all the many windows, but I can scarcely believe that slumbering or cold people may in fact be stretched out behind the walls and the panes. Wind is moving through the leaves. The entire town is a paradise of mulberry trees so that the wind at least may have a hollow for its foot, and the only sound discernible is the on-going soft rooting of all the many lungs. The night isn’t all black for the remaining stains of snow (the stripped beards) in the gutters and along the rooftops’ slopes throw back the starlight. It is as if, somewhere not far off, there should be bubbling water, perhaps underground. The earth is full of wind.
Now it’s lighter and we climb up the slight incline of the street to go breakfast on the patio of one of the big hotels. Your hand clings to mine. Your stride is youthful and vigorous. You’ve slept well, your eyes are clear, and with every step the long black hair (reminding me so much of a horse’s mane) lashes your shoulder. You insist. You want me to relate the story of the horses. Agreed, agreed — but later.
On the stoop some of the other guests are already at table. It is early yet. The square frames even now still show the fine yellow light of muffled electricity. We walk down the length of the stoop. In the corner is a Spanish couple — the hidalgo with the grey suit and the cigar and the crossed ankles. Wait for me here then. Let me first go and rinse my fingers because the night was long and my hands are unkempt and oily from all the writing, and the leaves shrill so, exactly like pens proceeding over paper in a scraping way. You order our breakfast meanwhile. I shall take a cappuccino with the croissants. Better to have attempted all things and found them empty than to have tried nothing and leave your life a blank. Did you know that the crescent-shaped early bread originated in Vienna where it is called a Kipfel in memory of the Turks who besieged that city? Soon it will be broad daylight.
I am in the tiled bathroom and I lift the hands to my face. The hands smelling vaguely of horse. Water is lapping in the wash-basin. All of this already so long ago. So many years since I’ve seen you last, since I finally lost you. Whom shall I ever tell my story to? I look in the mirror and am frightened. The long grey hair there, and the terrible thick white face, the blubbery blancmange of the dewlap and the mouth buried in folds, the rough pores of the hide. An ancient dismantling. From face to face. It awaits me.
The Shoes
Late that afternoon we went swimming for the last time in the sea at the bottom of the garden, the slanting rays. Shadows had started fumbling over the land and the sea was perceptibly growing more winy and deeper. The earth is its own impediment to light. In this very blue glow we plashed about until my wife’s hair was lank and sluggish like a shoe to the sloe-eyed face, and then we ran back up the garden in our pale bodies. Behind us the sea was churning the gravel, and quickly afterwards darkness.
It was the next day that we departed for our destination: the North. (“The Devil hath established his cities in the North” — St Augustine.) Father, Mother, my wife and I, our dead uncle Don Espejuelo and the warder. We were to drive to the city from where we could take the aeroplane — and onward in two legs, first to a halfway point and then beyond to the true North. Complicated! Cutting up the journey and using two tickets each somehow worked out cheaper. Away from the sea we thus sped, the road winding through the dry hills with the sparse scrub, and in the back of the car our dead uncle Don Espejuelo was coughing dust and shaking his head at the senselessness.
We found the city quite deserted and dark. Even the air terminal was enfolded in darkness as if by heavy drapery and we came upon no other prospective passengers there. Here we were to wait for a while before we picked up our tickets and all the necessary paraphernalia and papers with which to proceed past the customs barrier to the airstrip somewhere outside the limits of the agglomeration. That, I was convinced, would present major problems: the man of customs in his white shorts would leaf through our passports and then poke his head through the rolled-down window to scan the interior of the car and he might just ask a question of our dead uncle Don Espejuelo sitting there as big as life in his dust coat and his dark glasses and surely Don Espejuelo would open his mouth to utter his favourite silly argument — “He is two. Always he is together like wheat transformed. And what is it holds him together? Why, the sandwich spread of the soul to get her. Don’t open him up. One-sliced he’ll become crumbly and dead: just bread. . ” — whereupon the perplexed official (not programmed for this type of irregularity) may sharpen his glance and our uncle would vomit his cackling cough and his coat will probably even come awry or flap open to show that underneath it harbours merely dust and then we should be in trouble because it is surely illegal to be gallivanting along the State’s roads with a defunct member on the back seat, even though in presence of a warder. . “And anyway,” Don Espejuelo would compound the official’s ire with a bare-toothed grin, “it is anyway to pass from the hardly known to the hardly unknown.” Full of disjointed and inappropriate clichés he is, Don Espejuelo. “Point less, hah!”