Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco (translated by Ann Goldstein).
Title: Without Blood.
Author: Horacio Castellanos Moya (translated by Lee Klein).
Genre: Literature, fiction, crime.
Country: Italy.
Language: Italian.
Publication Date: 2002.
Summary: When-in an unnamed place and time-Manuel Roca's enemies hunt him down to kill him, they fail to discover Nina, his youngest child, hidden in a hole beneath his farmhouse floor. After this carnage, Tito, one of the murderers, discovers Nina's trapdoor. Enthralled by the sight of Nina's perfect innocence, he keeps quiet. By the time she has grown up, Nina's innocence will have bloomed into something else altogether, and one by one the wartime hunters will become the peacetime hunted. But not until a striking old woman calls upon a familiar old man selling newspapers in town decades later can the reader know what Nina will ultimately make of her brutal legacy.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ He returned to the table and placed a hand on his daughter's head. Get up, he told her. He took a key from his pocket, put it on the table, and nodded at his son. Yes, the son said. They were children, just two children.
♥ It would have been better to go straight there, said one of the two sitting in back. Now he'll have time to run, he said. He had a gun in his hand. He was only a boy. They called him Tito.
He won't run, said the well-dressed man. He's had it with running. Let's go.
♥ He remained standing there, as if there were still something he had to say, or do.
"This isn't what I intended," he said. "Remember, always, that this is not what I intended."
The child searched instinctively in her father's eyes or something that might help her understand. She saw nothing.
&hearts Gunfire fanned the house, back and forth like a pendulum, as if it would never end, back and forth like the beam of a lighthouse over a coal-black sea, patiently.
Nina closed her eyes. She flattened herself against the blanket and curled up even tighter, pulling her knees to her chest. She liked being in that position. She felt the earth, cool, under her side, protecting her-it would not betray her. And she felt her own curled-up body, folded around itself like a shell-she liked this-she was shell and animal, her own shelter, she was everything, she was everything for herself, nothing could hurt her as long as she remained in this position. She reopened her eyes, and thought, Don't move, you're happy.
♥ Let's go, Salinas said. They went around the stack of wood and headed straight for the farmhouse. Salinas walked slightly bent, as he had seen it done in films. He was ridiculous like all men who fight: without realizing it.
♥ "Now listen to me, Doctor. Do you know how many times I fired a shot in four years of war? Twice. I don't like to shoot, I don't like weapons, I've never wanted to carry one, I don't enjoy killing, I fought my war sitting at a desk, Salinas the Rat, you remember? That's what your friends called me, I screwed them one by one, I deciphered their coded messages and put my spies on them, they despised me and I screwed them, it went like that for four years, but the truth is that I fired only twice. Once was at night, I shot into the darkness at no one, the other was the last day of the war, I shot my brother
listen carefully, we went into that hospital before the army arrived, we wanted to go in and kill all of you, but we didn't find you, you had fled, right? You saw which way the wind was blowing, so you took off your jailers' shirts and ran, leaving everything behind, just as it was, beds all over the place, sick people everywhere, even in the corridors, but what I remember most was that you couldn't hear a complain, not a sound, nothing. I will never forget it, there was an absolute silence. Every night of my life I will hear it, an absolute silence, those were our friends in the beds, and we were going to free them, we were saving them, but when we arrived they welcomed us in silence, because they didn't even have the strength to cry, and, to tell the truth, they no longer had the desire to live. They didn't want to be saved, this is the truth, you had reduced them to a state where they wanted only to die, as soon as possible, they didn't want to be saved, they wanted to be killed
I found my brother in a bed among the others, down in the chapel, he looked at me as if I were a distant mirage. I tried to speak to him but he didn't a answer, I couldn't tell if he recognized me, I bent over him, I begged him to answer me, I asked him to say something. His eyes were wide open, his breath was very slow, it was like a long death agony, I was leaning over him when I heard his voice say Please, very slowly, with a superhuman effort, a voice that seemed to come from Hell, it had nothing to do with his voice, my brother had a ringing voice, when he spoke it was like laughter, but this was something entirely different, he said slowly Please and then after a while he said Kill me, his eyes had no expression, none, they were like the eyes of someone else, his body was motionless, there was only that very slow breath going up and down
I said that I would take him away from there, that it was all over and I would take care of everything, but he seemed to have sunk back into his inferno, returning to where he'd come from, he had said what he wanted to say and then had gone back to his nightmare, what could I do? I tried to think how I could take him away, I looked around for help, I wanted to take him away from there, I was sure of it, and yet I couldn't move, I couldn't manage to move, I don't know how much time passed, what I remember is that at some point I turned and a few feet away I saw El Blanco, he was standing beside a bed, with the machine gun on his shoulder, and what he was doing was crushing a pillow over the face of a boy, the one lying on the bed
El Blanco was crying and crushing the pillow, in the silence of the chapel only his sobs could be heard, the boy wasn't moving, he didn't make a sound, he was going silently, but El Blanco was sobbing, like a child, then he took away the pillow and with his fingers closed the boy's eyes, and then he looked at me, I was looking at him and he looked at me, I wanted to say What are you doing?, but nothing came out of me, and at that moment someone appeared and said that the army was coming, that we had to get out of there. I felt lost, I didn't want to be found there, I heard the others running along the corridors. I took the pillow from under my brother's head, gently, I looked for a while at those frightened eyes, I placed the pillow on his face, and I began to press it, bending over my brother, I pressed my hands down on the pillow, and I felt the bones of my brother's face, there under my hands. One cannot ask a man to do such a thing, they couldn't ask it of me, I tried to resist but at a certain point I stopped, I pulled the pillow away, my brother was still breathing, but it was like something digging up air from the depths of hell, it was terrible, the eyes unmoving, and that rattle. He looked at me and I realized that I was screaming, I heard my voice screaming, but as if from a distance, like a dim and fading lament, I couldn't help it, I was still screaming when I noticed El Blanco, he was beside me, he didn't say anything but he was offering me a gun, while I was crying, and they were all fleeing, we two were inside, he offered me the gun, I took it, and placed the barrel against my brother's forehead and, still screaming, I fired.
Look at me, Roca. I said look at me. In the whole war I fired twice, the first time it was night, and at no one, the second time at close range, and it was my brother.
♥ Then Salinas stopped shouting. His voice came out calm and fierce. He said to the boy that now he knew what sort of a man his father was, now he knew that he was an assassin, that he had murdered dozens of people, sometimes he poisoned them little by little, with his medicine, but others he killed by cutting open their chests and then leaving them to die. He said to the child that with his own eyes he had seen boys come from that hospital with their brains blown out. They could hardly walk, they couldn't speak-they were like idiots. He said that his father was called the Hyena, and that it was his friends who called him the Hyena, and they laughed when they said it. Roca was gasping on the floor. He began to murmur quietly, "Help," as if from far away-help, help, help-a litany. He felt death approaching. Salinas didn't even look at him. He went on talking to the child. The child was listening, not moving. At the end Salinas said to him that things were like that, and that it was too late to do anything, even with a gun in your hand. He looked him in the eyes, with an infinite weariness, and asked if he understood who that man was, if he truly understood. With one hand he indicated Roca. He wanted to know if the boy understood who he was.
The boy put together everything he knew, and what he understood of life. He answered:
"He's my father."
Then he fired. A single shot. Into emptiness.
El Gurre responded instinctively. The machine-gun burst lifted the child up off the floor and hurled him at the wall, in a mess of lead, bone, and blood. Like a bird shot in mid-flight, Tito thought.
♥ El Gurre fired. A short burst. Dry. The last of his war.
♥ Nina heard a silence that frightened her. Then she joined her hands and stuck them between her legs. She curled up even tighter, bringing her knees toward her head. She thought that now it would all be over. Her father would come to get her and they would go and have supper. She thought that they would not speak again of that night, and that soon they would forget about it: she thought this because she was a child and couldn't know.
♥ When Tito passed the boy on the floor he bent down for an instant and closed his eyes. Not like a father. Like someone who turns off the light as he is leaving a room.
Tito thought of his own father's eyes. One day some men had knocked on the door of his house. Tito had never seen them before. But they said they had a message for him. Then they handed him a canvas sack. He opened it and inside were the eyes of his father. Take care which side you stand on, kid, they said. And they went away.
♥ The child turned her head and looked at him. She had dark eyes, oddly shaped. She looked at him without expression. Her lips were half closed and she was breathing calmly. She was an animal in its den. Tito felt returning to him a sensation he had felt a thousand times, finding that exact position, between the warmth of sheets or under the afternoon sun of childhood. Knees folded, hands between the legs, feet balanced. Head bent forward slightly, closing the circle. How lovely it was, he thought. The child's skin was white, and the outline of her lips perfect. Her legs stuck out from under a short red skirt, as if in a drawing. It was all so orderly. It was all so complete.
Exact.
♥ The man saw the walls of the farmhouse standing blackened and useless, coals in the middle of an enormous quenched brazier. They were like the last remaining teeth in the mouth of an old man. The fire had also consumed a large oak that for years had shaded the house. Like a black claw, it stank of calamity.
♥ The woman waited, standing calmly, as if it had nothing to do with her. Every so often someone passed by and turned to look at her. Because she seemed to be alone, and was beautiful. Because she was not young, and seemed alone.
♥ The savagery of children, he was thinking.
We have turned over the earth so violently that we have reawakened the savagery of children.
♥ Then the woman asked if he remembered.
The man stared at her. And only in that instant, finally, did he see again, in her face, the face of that child, lying there, impeccable and right, perfect. He saw those eyes in these, and that extraordinary strength in the calm of this tired beauty. The child: she had turned and looked at him. The child: now she was there. How dizzying time can be. Where am I? the man wondered. Here or there? Have I ever been in a moment that was not this one?
The man said that he remembered. That he had done nothing else, for years, but remember everything.
♥ "Before leaving Belsito that day, as I was walking down the long hallway, with all those closed doors, I thought that somewhere, in the house, you were there. I would have liked to see you. I would have had nothing to say to you, but I would have liked to see your face again, after so many years, and for the last time. I was thinking of that as I was walking down the hallway. And an odd thing happened. At some point one of those doors opened. For a second I was absolutely certain that you would come out of there, and would pass by me, without saying a word."
The man shook his head slightly.
"But nothing happened, because life is never complete-there is always a piece missing."
The woman, with the spoon in her hand, was staring at the dessert sitting on the plate, as if she were trying to see how to unlock it.
♥ The woman raised her eyes from the plate.
"Do you have children?" she asked.
"No."
"Why?"
The man answered that one had to have faith in the world to have children.
♥ "From that day I began to expect you."
The woman had raised her head and was staring at him.
"I knew nothing could stop you, and that one day you would come to me as well. I never thought that you would shoot me in the back or send someone to kill me who didn't even know me. I knew that you would come, and would look me in the face, and first you would talk to me. Because I was the one who had opened the trapdoor, that night, and then closed it. And you would not forget it."
The man hesitated a moment more, then said the only thing he still wanted to say.
"I have carried this secret inside me for my whole life, like a disease. I deserved to be sitting here, with you."
Then the man was silent. He felt his heart beating rapidly, in his fingertips and in his temples. He thought how he was sitting in a café across from an old woman who was mad and who, from one moment to the next, might get up and kill him. He knew that he would do nothing to stop her.
The war is over, he thought.
♥ "No matter how you try to live one single life, others will see inside it a thousand more, and this is the reason that you cannot avoid getting hurt."
♥ "He was abnormal. You were all animals. You men always are, in war. How will God forgive you?"
"Stop it."
"Look at yourself, you seem to be a normal man, you have your worn overcoat, and when you take off your glasses you put them carefully in their gray case. The windows of your kiosk are clean, when you cross the street you look carefully to the right and the left, you are a normal man. And yet you saw my brother die for no reason, only a child with a gun in his hand, a burst of gunfire and he was gone, and you were there, and you did nothing. You were twenty, holy God, you weren't a ruined old man, you were a boy of twenty and yet you did nothing. Please, explain how it is possible, do you have some way of explaining to me that something like that can happen, it's not the nightmare of a man with a fever, it's something that happened, can you tell me how it's possible?"
"We were soldiers."
"What do you mean?"
"We were fighting a war."
"What war? The war was over."
"Not for us."
"Not for you?"
"You don't know anything."
"Then tell me what I don't know."
"We believed in a better world."
"What do you mean?"
"..."
"What do you mean?"
"You can't turn back, when people begin to murder each other you can't go back. We didn't want to get to that point, others started it, but then there was nothing else to do."
"What do you mean, a better world?"
"A just world, where the weak don't have to suffer for the evil of the others, where everyone has a right to happiness."
"And you believed that?"
"Of course I believed it, we all believed it, it could be done and we knew how."
"You knew?"
"Does that seem so strange to you?"
"Yes."
"And yet we knew. And we fought for that, to be able to do what was right."
"Killing children?"
"Yes, if it was necessary."
"But what are you saying?"
"You can't understand."
"I can understand, you explain and I'll understand."
"..."
"..."
"You can't sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth."
"..."
"First there has to be a time of suffering, do you understand?"
"No."
"There were a lot of things that we had to destroy in order to build what we wanted, there was no other way, we had to be able to suffer and to inflict suffering, whoever could endure more pain would win, you can't dream of a better world and think that it will be delivered just because you ask for it. The other would never have give in, we had to fight, and once you understood that it no longer made any difference if they were old people or children, your friends or your enemies, you were breaking up the earth-then there was nothing but to do it, and there was no way to do it that didn't hurt. And when everything seemed too horrific, we had our dream that protected us, we knew that however great the price the reward would be immense, because we were both fighting for money, or a field to work, or a flag. We were doing it for a better world, do you understand what that means?, we were restoring to millions of men a decent life, and the possibility of happiness, of living and dying with dignity, without being trampled or scorned, we were nothing, they were everything, millions of men, we were there for them. What's a boy who dies against a wall, or ten boys, or a hundred, we had to break up the earth and we did, millions of other children were waiting for us to do it, and we did, maybe you should..."
"Do you really believe that?"
"Of course I believe it."
"After all these years you still believe it?"
"Why shouldn't I?"
"You won the war. Does this seem to you a better world?"
"I have never asked myself."
"It's not true. You have asked yourself a thousand times, but you're afraid to answer. Just as you have asked yourself a thousand times what you were doing that night at Mato Rujo, fighting when the war was over, killing a man in cold blood whom you had never even seen before, without giving him the right to a trial, simply killing him, for the sole reason that by now you had begun to murder and were no longer capable of stopping. And in all these years you have asked yourself a thousand times why you got involved in the war, and the whole time your better world is spinning around in your head, so that you will not have to think of the day when they brought you the eyes of your father, or see again all the other murdered men who then, as now, filled your mind, an intolerable memory. That is the only, the true reason you fought, because this was what you had in mind, to be revenged. And now you should be able to utter the word 'revenge.' You killed for revenge, you all killed for revenge, it's nothing to be ashamed of, it's the only drug for pain there is, the only way not to go mad, the drug that enables us to fight. But it didn't free you, it burned your entire life, it filled you with ghosts. In order to survive four years of war you burned your entire life, and you no longer even know-"
"It's not true."
"You no longer even remember what life is."
♥ Then she said something else. It was that evening, at Mato Rujo. She said that when she had seen the trapdoor raised she had not been afraid. She had turned to look at the boy's face, and everything had seemed to her very natural, even obvious. She said that in some way she had liked what was happening. Then he had lowered the door, and then, yes, she had been afraid, with the worst fear of her life. The darkness that returned, the sound of the baskets dragged over her head again, the boy's footsteps growing distant. She had felt lost. And that terror had never left her. She was silent for a moment and then she added that the mind of a child is strange. I think that at that moment, she said, I wished for only one thing: that that boy would take me away with him.
She went on talking, about children and about fear, but the man didn't hear her because he was trying to put together the words to say one thing that he would have liked to let the woman know. He would have liked to tell her that while he was looking at her, that night, curled up in the hole, so orderly and clean-clean-he had felt a kind of peace that he had never found again, or at least hardly ever, and then it was looking at a landscape, or staring into the eyes of an animal. He would have liked to explain to her exactly that sensation, but he knew that the word "peace" was not enough to describe what he had felt, and yet nothing else occurred to him, except perhaps the idea that it had been like seeing something tat was infinitely complete. Just as many other times, in the past, he had felt how difficult it was to give a name to what had happened to him in the war, as if there were a spell under which those who had lived couldn't tell the story, and those who knew how to tell the story had not been fated to live. He looked at the woman and saw her speak, but he didn't hear her because his thoughts again carried him away and he was too tired to resist. So he remained there, leaning back in the chair, and did nothing, until he began to weep. He wasn't ashamed, he didn't hide his face behind his hands, he didn't even try to control his face, contorted in sadness, while the tears descended to his collar, sliding down his neck, which was white and badly shaved, like the neck of every old man in the world.
♥ The man had stopped crying a little before. He had pulled out of his pocket a big handkerchief and had dried the tears. He had said:
"I'm sorry."
Then they had said nothing else.
It seemed, indeed, that they no longer had anything to understand, together.
♥ They took a room that looked onto the street, on the third floor. The desk clerk apologized that there was no elevator and offered to carry up the suitcases.
"No suitcases. We lost them," said the woman.
The clerk smiled. He was a good man. He watched them disappear up the stairs and didn't think badly of them.
♥ They held each other by the hand. The man would have liked to hear her speak again, but he knew there was nothing more to say, and that any words would be ridiculous at that moment. So he was silent, letting sleep confuse his ideas, and bring back to him the dim memory of what had happened that evening. The night outside was illegible, and the time in which it was vanishing was without measure. He thought that he should be grateful to the woman, because she had led him there by the hand, step by step, like a mother with a child. She had done it wisely, and without haste. Now what remained to be done would not be difficult.
He held her hand, in his, and she returned his clasp. He would have liked to turn and look at her but when what he did was let go of her hand and roll onto his side, giving her his back. It seemed to him that it was was she was expecting from him. Something like a gesture that left her free to think, and in a certain way gave her some solitude in which to decide the final move. He felt that sleep was about to carry him off. It occurred him that he didn't like being naked because they would find him like that and everyone would look at him. But he didn't dare tell the woman.
♥ Then she thought that however incomprehensible life is, probably we move through it with the single desire to return to the hell that created us, to live beside whoever, once, saved us from the inferno. She tried to ask herself where that absurd faithfulness to horror came from but found that she had no answers. She understood only that nothing is stronger than the instinct to return, to where they broke us, and to replicate that moment forever. Only thinking that the one who saved us once can do it forever. In a long hell identical to the one from which we came. But suddenly merciful. And without blood.