Читать книгу The Journey - Miguel Collazo - Страница 8

Next day, the men gave up. The whole business of looking for machines made no sense. Nobody knew what the machines did; nobody even knew what they were. Jalno was the only one, and now Beres and Bímer were saying they couldn’t expect him to help them anymore. So there was nothing left to do, the men said, and they took off in different directions. Borles straggled behind, and then went back to join the brothers. He liked the idea of the machines. If they’d let him, he’d keep clearing the sand and whatever else was there until he uncovered the machines.

Beres said okay, and looked at his brother.

Bímer nudged him with his elbow, sighed, and halfheartedly started digging.

It was tiresome working under that sun, then having to walk hours to hunt for water and food among the rocks and tangled vegetation out west of the flowers. They spent most of their time doing that, or arguing about the best way to clear the site. Every once in a while somebody would pass by and stand there watching them for hours, then move along. Or somebody would come and tell them how they should be doing it, giving instructions, until Beres threw rocks and drove him off.

One day Borles sat down on a rock and said he’d been tricked, that Jalno had tricked him. Without stopping to think Beres punched him in the face. Borles quickly went back to digging. After countless days of hard work they gave it up for good. There weren’t any machines. Yes, Borles said, they’d been tricked. Jalno had made all this stuff up just to play a joke on them. Beres punched him again; then he and Bímer set off for the valley, maybe because they’d grown very curious about how bad it could really be, maybe because they were sick of the desert, or maybe, as Borles thought, because they’d gone crazy.

It’s sun fever, Borles thought. But he wasn’t about to stay in the desert by himself, either. He’d gather his stuff and follow them; probably he meant to convince them, or maybe the poisonous proximity of the valley had convinced them all, or at any rate he’d convinced himself. Regardless, it wasn’t a good idea to stay behind in the desert. Plus, Beres and Bímer must know that in spite of all their disappointments, he still had the idea of the machines stuck in his head, nagging at him. Jalno had once told him about these things, had given him explanations he hadn’t entirely understood, maybe because Jalno hadn’t had a very clear notion of the machines himself.

To tell the truth, Jalno had never been nice to Borles. He used to call him the Etruscan Shrew, and Pigeon, and also Noahsark. Though Borles realized those were meaningless words, the contemptuous way Jalno said them irritated him. Besides, his name was Borles, not Noahsark or anything of the sort. Well, now there’d never be another Jalno. He’d fallen asleep and would never wake up again, and that was wonderful. Beres and Bímer weren’t bad people—especially not Bímer, because the other one was too quick with his fists, and one day he’d learn what Borles was like when he got really mad. Hopefully that would never happen and Beres would learn to control his fists.

And Borles, marching absentmindedly, had entered the valley and the forests. When he looked up and realized where he was, terror overwhelmed and paralyzed him.

It couldn’t be. You couldn’t enter the valley, and if you did.… Everything was different there, even time. Even he himself—wouldn’t he soon turn into something else? He remembered Jalno once telling him, “Noahsark, never go past the edge of the desert, because beyond it lies the valley, and no one has ever returned from there.”

On that occasion, Borles now remembered, he’d thought Jalno was just trying to scare him for some obscure reason. All of Jalno’s reasons were obscure. So what if nobody ever came back from the valley. What did that even mean, after all? Maybe they didn’t come back because they liked the valley, liked it so much they decided to stay there forever. That’s what Borles had thought at the time. But now Borles was looking around, his throat tight. Why had he followed Bímer and Beres? They didn’t seem to be around, and he was alone and scared. He saw the slippery mist oozing through the leaves at his feet, caught the scent of dead, fermented things, sensed the slow but relentless breakdown of the symbols, the movement of blindly yearning masses of heat, the whipping, flogging foliage, and the humidity. He hunched, expectant.

“Beres,” he dared call out. And the wind blew over his lips, and a little later he heard his voice, far away, bouncing off the black foliage.

He was certain he had heard not only the almost unrecognizable tone of his own echoed voice but a sound like footsteps on very soft sand, on sand mixed with mud. It might be Beres and Bímer, he thought. But there was also something else, a crunchy, absurd sound. From under a leafy branch Borles watched the patch of forest to his right. A few steps away water was flowing, a stream; one part of his mind was captivated by the mystery of running water.

“Noahsark, water flows in the valley.” That sound of water moving over stone and symbols, running off, sweeping everything away to the other side of the world.… “Pigeon, you even have to be careful of the water you drink, when you see it running. Do you know where that water goes? Shrew, Shrew, the opening to the abyss is on the other side of the world!”

The water in the stream, the abyss, and beyond that, Borles thought with horror, beyond that, something even worse: the sea!

No, Jalno hadn’t been trying to scare him; it was true. Wasn’t he seeing all these things for himself?

And Borles felt sorry for himself. Borles, poor Borles, in the valley the sky falls and tries to crush you, tries to merge with the sand and form a huge whirlwind to carry you off. How can you protect yourself? It was all so enormous, and he was so small, so tiny.

He started to turn back. One of his feet got trapped in roots, tripping him. His arms flailed behind him and hit the water, then his body slid smoothly, agonizingly, down the slippery mud of the riverbank. The water quickly embraced Borles, shook him, pounded him with pebbles and sand and reeds, entered his lungs until it seemed he’d never scream again. His hands desperately clutched something. It was an arm, but he wasn’t thinking about that: it was just something to grab onto so he could pull himself out of the water and the pain.

“You’re such an idiot!” Beres shouted as he pulled him out.

Borles saw Beres’s blurry face, a beautiful and distant thing. He loosened his grip, let go entirely.

Bímer slapped Borles’s cheeks, then, turning him over, pushed and pressed him on the back. Borles gasped and water gushed from mouth and nose.

That’s what he was supposed to do, Bímer thought with some surprise. Beres felt Borles’s skin and looked up at his brother. He remembered Jalno’s words: “Watch out for running water!” He stared at Borles’s body, but Borles seemed unscathed. He hadn’t been hurt, wasn’t bleeding or broken. He was clean besides. So the water hadn’t done any harm, just swept away the dirt.

Bímer seemed to guess what he was thinking. He said, “Jalno told us lots of things. Here we are, Beres, and nothing bad has happened, or will happen. Is there anything bad about the valley? Myself, I think it’s pretty nice.”

“Bímer, I almost think I like it, almost more than anywhere else.” He turned in circles, looking all around. He felt light, clean, washed by the caressing breeze from the forest. He then blew on Borles’s face and whispered into his ear. He had good news for him: didn’t he want to find machines? Well, there were machines here. Here, in the valley. A whole city, too—far off, the other side of those trees. Why hadn’t Jalno ever told them about this? He must have known. Not only that the valley wasn’t bad, but that there were men living in the valley. But Jalno had told them the valley was bad, that nobody lived there.…

Yes, Jalno made stuff up. Probably some of it was true, or he had some reason for tricking them, or maybe he didn’t even have a reason; nobody could say if it was right or wrong, nobody had ever understood Jalno and nobody could have understood him. And when you came to think of it, was he worth trying to understand?

“Let’s forget Jalno,” said Beres. Borles was happy to hear these things, though on the other hand he felt he couldn’t, felt afraid of denying Jalno. Couldn’t the valley suddenly turn into something bad, making Jalno totally right?

No, Borles told himself, it wasn’t good to turn his back on Jalno completely. About some things, sure. But others.… Nobody could make up all the things Jalno said. It was impossible; there had to be some truth in it. Bímer said they’d seen the city—at least, based on their father’s vague descriptions, something that looked like it.

“The people had skin like yours,” Beres said, looking at the water. “Like yours looks now, Borles.”

Borles sat thinking, Jalno’s city exists; so do the machines. And he decided he was right: he would not give up on Jalno completely. Nor believe all his stories, either.