CHAPTER XXXVI: THE STORY TELLER

  Frozen stiff and semiconscious, but with a small skylight of clarity to see what still was happening around me, I heard the sound of feet approaching, with that usual timing of firm treads and true course, without ostentation, so I knew it was Luke and he looked for me urgently. In the end he found me where he expected, in the middle of the alder grove. He had begun his quest in the east end, where the Kilmourne twists near the landfill and fails to go south to find the curve of St. Alban, under Meander Bridge and, not finding me there, he was walking around the alders in the direction of the river, along the dirty sidewalk, at that hour rather than black impenetrable, which wove between them. The dark night, surely a new moon, made eyes useless, and Luke rested securely in the senses of touch and smell, the only walking sticks which could help to hit the blackness and separate the shadows.

  He walked without getting lost, being led by the vivid smell of wood and by the soft sensation of his feet, poorly shod, on the leaf litter, and a special in-the-dark skill that we have all in well known places. Finally he arrived at that place where if you outstretch your arms, you can touch the alders with both hands, there where trees hug and you get out of that tunnel along a small crack between the branches, to the clearing where he found me. The evening and the night of that Friday were intensely cold, the coldest in that icy October, and the glacial feeling increased due to the strong winds blowing from the northeast, less appalling, however, than the pain that had decided to make my heart the unsafe doorway where to sit to spend every night; and which came from the tops of Crownridge, so close and then not even intuited, but like my solitude accurate, so invisible and endless. He found me sitting on a hard stone, slippery still from the last rains, frozen and white as a tombstone. He started when he observed the rigidity of my shoulders and realized that my soul, in an extreme tension, participated of the same dread of the river, which at that time raged tormented by the gale. On the verge of freezing, I was aware of my precarious situation and my inadequate clothes. If only there had been some dry leaves to light a bonfire! If only some warm hands on my shoulders sheltered me from the wind, only the wind! However, fortunately, that night there was no fog.

   Once I had said goodbye to John and the evil jaws of darkness, hungry for meat to swallow, surrounded me, I walked away looking for the warm company of the grove in the south, where many times I had been lost and so many times I had found myself; and with the poor guide of my perplexities, I must have got lost through the dusky tree silhouettes and perhaps I was deceived by the warm lure of the lights of the roundabout. But I have forgotten how or when I got to that treeless place in the skull of the alder grove.  I do not know, in addition, how long I was there later: I could swear that at least it was one hour, but it could have been an hour and a half, two hours, one week, one generation...


 

-In later years, Protch - I said-, I could have told you the elapsed interval, looking at the stars. As you know that they move; and it would have sufficed with retaining the constellation that was setting on the west, if the lighting of Rivers' Meet would have allowed it, when I got to that clearing among the alders; and what constellation was setting when Luke found me. I cannot be sure, but I think I glimpsed the great square of Pegasus, in the southeast, when I turned my head to look at it, for what I now think that it was about nine o'clock.

-Nike - he interrupted-, surely my words will be a bit childish for you, because it is obvious that you had much more terrible thoughts; but if I imagine myself in your place, and on a night like that, dark and cold, in the middle of the forest and with my loneliness by all company... I think that I would be unable to avoid, in addition, the fear of possible dangerous animals or other more sinister figures. Did nothing like this happen to you? Did you not feel terror of the very shadows surrounding you?

-See, Protch, that in the approach to the question you have actually found the answer. You see, I have the theory that human beings can’t be threatened at the same time by a physical fear and a spiritual fear, or rather, I have the security that a kind of fear kills the other fear. For example, if in a night of prowling ghosts a man flees frightened by what he believes sepulchral voices, he won't have fear of hitting his knees in an incidental clash against trees. In the same way, one that is suddenly invaded by strange fevers or suffering from certain ailments shall not fear the presence of creatures of terror, whether seductive or evil, or as it is often the case, the two things at the same time. I believe it is a sort of balance, one of the unknown laws of survival. 

-I see that once again I have to assent. Please, continue.


 

  So both my reason and my feet had been wandering from dismay to serenity, from the violent shores of the river to the peaceful nudity among the trees; and when Luke found me, I was not at all aware that my thoughts had moved away from erratic babbling and were already following a certain line, and that I had been able, in the end, to make a decision, and choose one of the four realities that were offered to me; or only three, if I kept the promise that John had helped me to make just a couple of hours earlier, although despair is a master in hiding that we can be the owners of our weaknesses and it wasn't easy to discard the subtle idea of death and oblivion. But on the edge of that fateful election there was a crossroads where started three roads with new possibilities; and at the time that I weighed with disdain the option of returning to the wilderness of wealth, I considered two ways of staying on the street. Thus, I had ahead, once again, four trails, four decisions. Dear Mistress Oakes, always accurate! And blessed be the flash which then brought to my memory her sardonic smile, which helped me to adapt to darkness the eyes of discernment, not to lose the last light on that blind night!

   When I saw that Luke appeared suddenly in the shadows, I had the impression that it was one of the trees that had felt like walking, the surrounding moisture dripping between the branches, dirty boots as mud at the roots, the same dress of wood. In his arms he carried the old corduroy beige jacket that once had protected me; and in his glance a hidden, petrified, restrained grin... which did not transmit me tranquility. I looked at him with an empty soul, wondering whether he had come to me to warm me or curse me.

-"Yes -Luke began in an enigmatic manner-, you are frozen, my beggar: now the time has come that you were afraid of and the greater darkness surrounds you. That’s why you doubt whether I have come to bring you the peace or the sword and think that maybe it doesn't matter too much because you no longer have anything to lose; and however, you are still thinking to get rid of what little you have, if cold does not take it before. But if you allowed hot blood to run from your paralyzed heart to your eyes and looked twice, you would see that the only thing that I bring you is this damaged jacket which has already covered you, as sometimes the heat of my poor words... I don't know how long I have been looking for you, My Mate, but when I had lost hope, in the end I've found you. Nike – he pronounced as a lament, as he helped me put on the jacket, and my eyes, who took his earlier words by prophecy, shed tears of blood. Oh, that damn hour of waste in which I found myself walking through the ruins of my time in life and had to add to my losses that of the smile and the serenity of my mate!-, there are solitudes in the life of a man that should not be broken because they are sacred. But maybe, if you allow me to sit beside you and accompany you, if that is your wish, with silence, my silent presence would not bother you and it is even possible that it comforts you. How many times it has been you who, sitting next to me without speaking, have let me feel you close – he ended while scrutinizing uselessly for a seat, he found a thick trunk which could be good to sit and stood, uncomfortable, on my right-, and if words are not necessary, we will not say anything."

-"Luke –I started to say. But it was difficult for me to continue, startled by the aftertaste of bitterness that came out with his name. Did I believe that he had really come to comfort me? Perhaps I would have had an answer if I had been able to immerse myself into the abyss of his eyes, which never lied; but in that light, we were hardly able to see each other. I had to make an effort to overcome and say something that completed the sentence I had started so that my feelings towards him were hidden in the useless words, because at that time I learned that his silent presence would be a shade that would upset me and sometimes one has delusions in which you can suffer pain of shade -please, stay beside me and talk to me about anything. Your words could help me stop thinking."

-"Words... If you really need them then, I could tell you those that John must be saying to our fellow mates, worried by your absence, to reassure them and reaffirm his faith in you; I could tell you that I've been to his tent and we've talked about many things, in a necessary and naked conversation in which I have been assured that you would be ok, for you had promised. Words, for example, like those that Lucy sends you: Remember, Nike, that in the end the Earth knows the men who know its children and it will not open any abyss beneath your feet; or her words to me to encourage me to find you... and put all my heart and my manhood towards my mate and his dignity; or I could tell you that the king that you love so much is sleeping peacefully in her grandmother's arms, oblivious to the tumult of the world... But all these words, which want to be calm, would open again all your wounds... and there is no balm in this darkness to cure them and perhaps it would be wisdom to talk about different things. Or shut up and devote ourselves to breathe the beauty of the alders, and if we cannot see them, feel in the smell of moisture of the wood the cold which is burning their skin and is wounding their flesh; or in the rustling of leaves their terrified swinging in this inclement time in which they risk their life."

   Words... It was still Luke, the same every day Luke, but his words had a pungent odor. Or would it not be me who was no longer able to distinguish? Under the golden sheath that covered them (and it was always the same things: the wood and leaves; the alders, light and beauty), he seemed to speak of me with a clear message whose aim escaped me, because he was showing me a melting pot where the matter of his usual serene expression melted in a solution of hard images. Now I know that what Luke smelt of then was fear, he was more afraid than I was; but that night my only certainty was that the words he said were not empty words, but a cautious dive at the well of my fears, groping walls moss, looking for the bottom. And I was in that fatalistic attitude where each new pain, rather than hurt, it pleased. So I was not surprised when I looked at myself and I saw myself willing to open my heart and face the consequences, because it was not the first time that I was ready to accept whatever reached me from him. My solitude was a deadly cold where love was the wind, and my lucidity was freezing. I had to jump into the fire and burn, if only so I could know whether affection or contempt awaited me: anything but silence. The time had come and I opened my lips with determination. But it was he who spoke:

-"You are trembling, my beggar. And if my poor jacket is no good, I'll have to surround you with my arms - and it was said and done, Protch-. And we will be no luckier if we returned to the camp in search of a fire. It has not stopped raining in the last days and there will be no firewood available either there or in this exile. At times like these, My Mate, one has to find a way to survive the night ice, and the words and the stories are the last flames. I don't know if your heart may have now other emergency or your reason wants to get lost in the calm of your loneliness to find whatever you are looking for. But I am a beggar and it hurts me to see that my mate is freezing. Nike - I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew that he had stopped to look for mine. The passion he had just put on the syllable of my name startled me-... I'd like to tell you a story... to take away your cold. You are still trembling and perhaps I have in my hands a little bit of the heat you need... will you not let me shelter you?"

-"I am so cold, Luke, that I will not say no before I listen to you. Is it a story that I have never heard?" -I was surprised, but how welcome this truce of his words. 

-"I do not know if you have ever noticed, My Mate, there are times when I am absent-minded, and I must confess a weakness that you probably don't know: sometimes, when I am alone, I let my mind wandering and let it graze wherever it wants to graze and then I try to create. But I realize that the materials are always the same. It is, Nike, a story I have just invented; a story, it could not be otherwise, of beggars. And I don't think I am mistaken if I say that a story of beggars is what, at the moment, you would prefer to hear."

-"I will always prefer them to all others, Luke."

-"It's such a long tale that I still haven’t finished it; because it was ready for some time later, but my heart is telling me that I should not wait to tell you. For this reason in many parts I will improvise and you will have to help me. I don't know if it has any value, Nike, but I wanted to invent a story to tell my mate in an hour of cold; it is a tale that has been thought for you, that no one else has heard."

   He paused a second and a distant light that lit up the skies for a few moments, a comet that so betrayed the absent moon which would have wanted to impose a night of blindness, let me the fleeting impression of Luke’s eyes looking at me. I don't know if I read tenderness in them; but urgency, that strange entity that they had sometimes spoken to me about, was present in his way of weighing up how he should continue: 

 -"I was thinking, My Mate, that I not only wish you to hear it, but also that you collaborate with me. But I have to tell you that being a story of beggars its characters will remind you, inevitably, the people you love and, more than once, also yourself, because you have long been one of us; and that it could, from time to time, startle you. But you have nothing to fear from those who only are beings of my imagination, do you understand? Fictional characters who would only have a soul if you got to love them as I love them. Nothing I can tell has ever happened or will ever happen but the street is their home as much as it is your house and mine and no one can convince us that we may not have found them in any alley or that we might not have lived some of their episodes or surprises. But we have nothing in common with them, if the teeth of hunger or the daggers of cold are not enough so that in the end we are all the same beggar and we are always telling the same story. I would like to know, My Mate, if you have understood me and I would like to hear that you want to help me."

   The wind of those moments was attacking me with something more than daggers and teeth, and I was getting frozen and terrified. I had the intuition that the beggars in his tale I could know them better than just having found them in a corner. I started to sweat in the fridge of that night of winter that had arrived in mid-October. I could not forget that John and Luke had just been talking and I was wondering what things they might have talked about. At that moment, when I thought that the Earth sank at last beneath my feet, I remembered the words that Lucy had entrusted to Luke to bring me and my mind flew towards her, reminding me how often her voice had appeased me, a source springing up from the deep Earth, from her black eyes of universe. I evoked her again on that night of images and saw her as usual lucid and joyful, opening the windows that had brought me the remote air of a new clarity and a new pain. How to avoid, if she had come into my heart and was there with me, that Luke could see it. But to remember her at that hour soothed me and I let her, from the distance, help me hear again the call of the Earth. The words that she had brought me were becoming liquid, a river of healing on whose shores I believed with her that no chasm would open under my feet. They repeated again: Nike, don't be afraid of your heart, and I looked again at her partner, the man who lived with her and so often had bathed in the same river; and I began to do him finally some justice. I began to appreciate the effort with which he looked up words to take cold away and I decided to follow him where he would like to lead me, since I had learned with him the degrees of the hand and the roads, and now I just had to trust that on the last road I would not find a stranger, but the man who had always been my mate, and sit with him to keep assimilating Luke, the story teller.

   I sighed while he, who had not wanted to interrupt my delirium, was waiting.

-"I have understood, My Mate – I said-, and it is true that I want to get to know them. But I do not know where you need my help."

-"It's a long story and you are dying of cold. Under these conditions, the heat that I want to give you only may come in short waves, slowly, and perhaps sometime I can bring some fire for you; but so that I can get it, I need a promise from you: I want you to promise that you will not interrupt me; that you will not speak until I address you and claim your help. I will often stop the story so you can tell me if I have correctly interpreted a situation, if I'm reading a character well or I have lost his soul and you know where it is or how it is; so that I can find out whether you are seeing them as I've seen them. And they will never receive any contempt or will be judged without first allow you to be the voice of their defense. Then I will guide my protagonists… or you, if you want to please me. Your participation is so necessary that I may start a tale and your word may lead them towards another tale: I want you to enter the tale, and if you're able to see with me their dignity and their unworthiness, if you understand, just as me, that beauty comes from both, you will see that you love them because you respect them, and respect is often the death of fear. It is only a story, my beggar, with which I will only try to tear away your cold, because I have no right to guide you towards any decision; and my characters just want to be lights, necessary in any way, because everything can always be seen otherwise. Do you want to help me, Nike? Do I have your promise?"

-"I do not know what is to come – I said restless-, but I'm sure that if you have put your respect in them, they will also have mine: you have my promise, My Mate!" –he was next to me and I could perceive his body temperature. And even if I could not see him, I was almost capable of touching the blood flowing upstream, downstream; the dirt that he never hid to me; the whips of the wind on his skin which failed to stifle his breathing or his heartbeat. It was possible that, in the same way, he perceived mine and my heart betrayed me; but this beggar was freezing next to me and I had to react and respond to his efforts. And thus came the second promise in just a few hours, in the evening of the 19th to the 20th of October which was to transform my life.

-"I think that still you do not know, My Mate, the strength that you are able to get out of your dignity. Thank you for your promise. I want to ask you something more: I want you to hear what I'm telling, to give value or take it to my words, the rhythm and the colors; because I would finally like to hear your critical voice, with the same right with which I have had the audacity to tell you."

-"I do not find myself capable of making a literary review, Luke, if that is what you mean."

 -"Make an effort."

-"Okay! I'll try; because whenever you've asked me, I have ended up learning and being thankful. I will follow you once again. Start then whenever you want. The time is cold and it seems that the soul wants calm and look for the warmth that may come from a tale."

-"I will begin at once, Nike, but not here - I said-: in two or three hours the wind could destroy us. It is fortunate that you've stopped so close to the cave of the beggar. Some heat we shall find in that belly. - But, noticing my strangeness, he asked-: is it possible that nobody has spoken to you of this cave or you have not discovered it yet on your walks? And, however, it is not too hidden: you can find it behind that semicircle of old alders that you have on your left. It is not wide but it will allow us to take refuge from the hurricane and sit without being too stiff. And perhaps the hoarse voice of the river buries a little the wind roars; since if we pierced the south wall, you would see that the ground of the bottom stands like a balcony over the Kilmourne."

-"Why do they call it the cave of the beggar, Luke?"

-"The beggar Sally died there. But that's a story that nobody knows: it happened more than one century ago. One thing that seems certain is that someone found her bones months after she died alone and abandoned. Her image still haunts my nights, Nike: they say she died of hunger..."

   A tomb. In which we were going to enter alive so as not to die before dawn. And if we pierced the south wall, we would enjoy a box seat hanging over the river near the crosses and niches of St. Alban. But it was that hour in which you enter without fear in the dark or in death, if they give heat. And we were beggars; strangers with no guarantee to continue to breathe in the afternoon the air of the morning. We had survived the last hours and we had to fight for the following.

-"Follow me, Nike - said Luke. And I saw that he had been reading me-: keep your strength, beggar. And I don't have to tell you about courage, because you have it."

   Seven alders guarded the cave as the half-moon of a cromlech. The eldest was a bent old man who moved ahead three fingers of one large callused hand, it is not known if in a pleading gesture- "thirty degrees", I thought-, or as a gesture of warning. But when my skin touched its trunk the voice of the wood vibrated, whose irritated strings told a tale of mutilated branches and torn leaves, while the forgiven arms imprisoned, recognized and touched me until finally they set me free to go in demand for help, distinguished as an ally against the common enemy wind. I apologized to my new friend the old alder, as a sign of impotence; I stopped a second to look at it, respectfully, as a silent prayer to the tree-gods and came back with my mate.

   The cave was behind a strip of muddy earth between the trees and the river, embedded in a bare wall that was suddenly cut to the east, where a ledge, slippery and dangerous, ran along the edge of a steep cliff. The door offered an opening wide enough to be accessible by a man easily, and there could enter hand in hand two beggars like Luke and me, whom deprivation had been stealing surface.

-"Let me inspect it first, Nike - said Luke-. I want to make sure there are no hidden animals. If only we would have a little more moonlight..."-he complained.

 -"Take my lighter" – I offered him.

-"Light! -he exclaimed. And suddenly he began to laugh-: and it has been there all the time."

   Once he saw that everything was in order, he offered me to choose if I would rather place myself in the mouth of the cave or in the dome of the other end. With the dim light of the lighter I examined what little there was to see: it was a sack of dark stone, with cracked but solid walls and a floor covered by a thin layer of dust almost buried by the dead leaves that the north wind had torn from the alders in the last days, surely warm in gentler days. There was room for two people seated who could not, however, extend their feet. But it touched me its cozy burrow look, as a millennial uterus, and there came to me a hasty desire to inhabit it, to lie; that intimate greed... to close your eyes and relax. Finally, I preferred to stay in the dome of the end to enjoy better the protection of those sheets of rock; I sat without anger drawing back my feet, my hands on my knees, tasting that placid feeling of being an underground animal. Luke sat confidently next to the door, with the gesture of one who is accustomed to penetrate in this beloved cavern. We had sat looking west, towards Rivers' Meet. For a few minutes I kept holding the lighter in my hand, which had very little gas, because I did not resign to the darkness that soon we had to submit and I wished to continue swallowing the last sips of light with greed. But when Luke started his tale, he did it in the dark.


 

-So finally... it was Luke your story teller. 

-When did you guess it, Protch?

-It was not too difficult: your words, rather than cover, have been curtains where his name has always been transparent. And he seemed the most likely in addition.

-I think that I'm telling you a story that you already know. But that I rejoice, because I so wanted it to be.

-If I repeat only your expressions, I can say that "You have been giving me the keys" and I could even predict much of what happened next. But I will not say what I foresee, and if it is what I think, I will still be moved... But I would rather your voice move me again.

-What time is it, Protch?

-Half past nine.

-I don't know how many hours it will take me to tell only his tale. And the night was to be even longer. I'd like to recite it fast. I don't want to rest even to eat.

-Maybe I will help you if I make the same promise you made to Luke: I am not going to interrupt you.   

-Thank you, my friend. But, not only because I don’t have enough time, but because so I would like to do it anyway, even I will hide myself. I'll let loose the flow of his words and I will strip his tale of comments and my own thoughts. Because it is Luke’s tale and I want you to hear only his sound; and my voice, just in the background, answering him when he asked me, will help you to deduce what I thought or what I was feeling. And you will know by our broken dialogue whether gradually calm reached me or I lost everything or won everything, in that gloomy cave where we would spend all night. 


 

   The Cave of Beggar Sally. A bat cave guarded by sacred trees, a blind viewpoint over the river with a wall on the cliff. Luke and Nike entered that sarcophagus of stone to know of metamorphosis and delirium; and when the first rays diluted the purple of dawn, two very different beggars were to come out transformed; altering, and it is very possible that originating, the fate of several souls. In subsequent years, those who knew them used to lay them naive ambushes to attract them to our mood so that they told us again the same Gospel. It was very easy with Nike, if the time was indicated and the trickster was a person he loved. Luke was refrained sometimes by the blush of someone who knows that in creation he has stripped. But both, in the end, compromised. And even if I have remembered it many times, they are words that over the years I'm still chewing as yeast, praying them as psalms. In the dark almost complete, only interrupted from time to time by the sparks of Nike’s lighter when they remembered that that night they had tobacco, the tale was born phosphorescent, just the light of a firefly; and Luke begins incoherent, without introducing all the characters, as a neophyte in literature that has so many things to say that he stumbles; but his first words are still kept in the attic of my affections. Then... If the light without heat of the dim halo of a candle grew subtle and overflowed the arms of the candelabra, setting fire to the wood of courage, friendship and beauty, it is because neither of them feared to become a yellow fountain, litter ready for the fire. If from tense limbs, exacerbated in their first dialogues, would come the splendor of the bonfire and the infinity heat of calm, it is because Luke was seeing in Nike’s responses that no beautiful words should be hidden, if one owns them or is able to find them, when the one who touches your heart longs for them; and a narrator is not ashamed that the love he gives or the dignity towards which it aims intend to pick up the glow of the core of stars. 

  I leave my place to the narrator and I withdraw. I'll be back when from Luke’s throat has come out his last burst of words, leaving only the voice of the tender storyteller and the broken reply of his listener. So many times, in those evenings in which untimely melancholy makes me gestures of approaching with the shadow of the lights that died, only the memory of those I love defends me of its sharp appendages. And it is then when I imagine them there, small and half-buried... and the photography show them always alone, dirty, dying of cold, embraced so they give some warmth to each other and darkness falls off, the head of the listener reclined on a heart that smelled of earth. Because they loved each other so much.


 

-October evenings still bring me the memory of Luke prancing with the words, the flavor of his repeated sentences, the rhythm and the ellipsis... I never understood of such things, Protch, but it is true that they are in the soul of everything that is said, by woman or man, in each parley.

-Is it impossible to speak without using them?

-It is impossible to speak about beauty or love without literature.

-Bring me his word then...

-For me the Word... which now I will pour to you as I remember it; for if nothing I forgot, and I never studied it, it is because each syllable was like hot steel which engraved your skin with lines of fire; and now I just have to read my tattoos.

   Night, suddenly attentive, lied down to hear. The outside wind roared but it had changed direction. The east was now blowing and this prevented it from entering and desecrating our cathedral, but its oblique blow quaked and froze. Surrounded by its icy breath and disturbing shadows, when we just sat down, I heard the voice of my mate who asked me to hold his hand and leave the light for an emergency; and once everything was a black hole, in that vibration with which silence breathes, recognition became a flash in my reason, when suddenly with the vehement intonation of one who is going to recite a story, Luke began: Once upon a time there was a beggar who was born in a golden cradle...