Free Distant Light by Antonio Moresco

said, eventually, in a whisper.
    I felt a slight shudder, in that large empty room, in front of the boy who watched me in silence, looking up at me with his round swollen eyes.
    “There, now you’ve seen everything!” he said quietly, before turning round and starting toward the staircase.
    I followed him. We reached the top, he in front and me behind. He went down slowly, his small legs climbing down the steep steps, at a slight angle, supporting himself with his hand against the wall.
    Once we were back in the kitchen, the boy pulled his exercise books from his schoolbag without saying a word, opened them on the table and sat down before them.
    I didn’t know what to do, whether to stay or whether this was a sign that I ought to go.
    I watched him as he opened his exercise book, his head bent, his eyes still rather red and swollen, running the palm of his little hand over it several times from the bottom upward.
    “You’re always alone!” I couldn’t stop myself exclaiming.
    “I’m used to it,” he replied without lifting his head.
    He began to sharpen a pencil, more and more slowly, biting his lips as he was doing so.
    “Yesterday they put me behind the blackboard!” he suddenly exclaimed, uncontrollably.
    I was standing rigid.
    “So that’s why it took him so long to come downstairs when I arrived!” I thought. “He was crying, ashamed, up there in the big room, alone …”
    I sank down onto the other chair, close by.
    “And why did they put you behind the blackboard?”
    He remained silent for a while. He was trembling.
    “I never understand anything! I never learn anything!” he exclaimed again, and I could see he was clenching his teeth and biting his lips so as not to cry in front of me. “I can never do the homework!”
    “So let me help you!”
    He shook his head two or three times without looking at me.
    “No, it’s no use! The teacher knows if you haven’t done it yourself!”
    I was watching him, watching him as he gritted his teeth in despair.
    There was a long silence.
    “They told me in the village that there’s only the day school …” I stammered, all at once, in a low voice.
    The little boy looked up at me.
    “That’s for the other children …” he answered, looking at me, fixing me with his round, wide eyes.
    “The other children? What children?”
    He hesitated for a moment before answering.
    “The ones still alive.”

18
    There’s a bird somewhere down below, in the woods in front of my house, that sounds like a door creaking.
    At first, I couldn’t work out what it was, where that strange noise was coming from, like an old door that creaks slowly, very slowly, on its rusty hinges when you open it, but with each creak quite separate from the others, except that it came from the woods, where there are no hinges, no doors.
    Then, I don’t know how, I realized it was the sound of an animal, of a bird.
    I hear it every now and then. I heard it a short while ago, and then I asked, speaking out in the middle of all this silence:
    “And you, what kind of bird are you?”
    It made no reply, but I imagined instead that it did reply:
    “I’m the creaky door bird.”
    “But why don’t I ever see you? I search among the foliage when I hear your sound, but I don’t see you …”
    “Isn’t it just the same with creaky doors? You turn round and look and no one’s ever there.”
    “But someone will have made them creak, even if they’ve then quickly hidden themselves so they can’t be seen!”
    “Sometimes there’s no one, it’s just the wind.”
    “So you’re the wind then?”
    “No, I’m the door that’s made to creak by the wind.”
    “So why do I sometimes hear you even when there’s no wind?”
    “I’m the bird that also makes the wind creak.”
    The swallows have left. Their shrieks are no longer to be heard in the sky after the sun has gone behind the ridge, in the very last moments of light, when they used to launch themselves for the last time