We went to live in a villa surrounded by greenery, two floors of rooms that led to a glass-roofed mansard and a large crystal dormer window. We were rich, I believe, because it was a beautiful place, I was happy and I was a child. ‘Used to’ is the verb form I feel closest to, along with the past tense, because everything that used to be is a thousand years away from this future and is without boundaries, like a vague blessing lost too soon and too painfully
The mansard was for me, for my sister Alina and for Catrina, who represented I’m not sure exactly what in our lives. Maybe she was a governess, maybe an aunt. To be perfectly truthful I don’t remember, because I wasn’t yet six years old. I didn’t know how to read or write.
One night the glass of the roof caught fire because there was a violent collision, and that strange little machine with the retractable metal toes fell through it. I still ask myself why they were retractable. A serious design mistake, which in the end would be paid for dearly.
The last time I saw my childhood mummy and daddy were there, watching wordlessly as I took flight. My sister had already gone, and Catrina was weeping.
I jumped into the flying machine and went up, up and away, in my pyjamas and slippers. Those little machines – obviously we all knew it, even if we’d never paid too much attention to what would happen at the moment – would arrive with the war to try to carry as many people as possible to safety. Now here they were, and in a split second it was clear that there weren’t enough for everybody. Parents can’t escape while abandoning their children to the approaching fire – though later on I learned that there was many who’d done precisely that – and I remember at the back of my mother’s iris her fear of the lonely flight waiting for me. But I didn’t understand as I went up, up and away with cold heels into the dark sky.
When I felt ice-cold I came down a bit towards the ground, but a boy who was on foot jumped out from behind a tree-trunk and tried to knock me off and steal the machine from me. No, I didn’t want that. I was attached to the wheel and to my mother’s eyes: I would never get out.
I pushed the boy so hard that he lost his balance and I flew upwards again without a pause. Never again would I get so close to the ground that I could be captured.
I flew without asking myself any questions. And what could a child of five say to himself in the face of total destruction?
I kept on going the way you do when you have to, at whatever age and however mature and knowledgeable you may be, when survival is at stake. I never thought about my sister or Catrina, except briefly when I saw machines on the ground with their drivers lying next to them. Child that I was, the idea that they might me dead never entered my head – or maybe that was merely thanks to our common human need to keep our fear under control. Most of them were dead, while others were dying almost soundlessly. I was nearly frozen and my pyjamas were soaking wet when at last I saw the city in the distance. Not mine, which was already lost, but another seaside town, which at that moment seemed unfamiliar, but which I might have been to before, who knows how many times. There were tall buildings in flame. I reached the seashore, still flying as high as I could, and went a few meters further to be over the water, where I couldn’t be unseated.
I watched the buildings burn from there. They’d told me to look for a building with a bright signal, but I couldn’t find the signal. I was only five years old, after all. And then, there were no lights in front of me, except for the conflagration. I was too frightened to look behind me because the sea at night is too black for a child who is escaping all by himself.
I looked down and saw mountains of corpses heaped up on the beach: people who had tried to escape and hadn’t made it. This time I understood right away that they were dead, because there was enough light cast by the world in flames, and I’d grown up a lot in the few hours that had passed.
There were machines everywhere, most of them broken. I had to get some more if I wanted to travel to discover if anyone had survived.
I went down and took two machines. I had to find a container to hold some more. And I had to find something warm to put on, because the long night was still ahead of me and I was cold. I went down to steal clothes from the dead, choosing children about my size. I was careful that no one was alive, because I was terrified of the living.
I went far away, going down only to get new machines that were working. I never spoke and couldn’t hear any human voices, and this attitude has remained with me ever since. I don’t like conversation and I don’t look for it, because Alex, who more or less is me, but not quite, for the rest of his life has been flying in a little machine without even being able to think about his mum and his dad. I stole food from the shops. At first only chocolate, but then I started looking for bread and sliced meat and when they became inedible I began looking for tins. Tuna and breadsticks made up my diet. And chocolate eggs with surprises inside. They reminded me of the small thrills of my prior life, when it was lovely to hope to find the missing piece for my little collection of pirate snails. I couldn’t allow myself to remember clearly, because of Alina and my mother’s eyes. But I couldn’t forget, for the self-same reason.
There were a few people alive, but after the boy on the first night I was too frightened not to hide, not to escape. My equilibrium as a child survivor rested on my hope to make it on my own and I didn’t look for allies. Funny, because my kindergarten teacher used to say I was too dependent on the other children, that I didn’t know how to be alone. But did the world have to end to teach me something I’d have learned anyway in good time as I grew up?
I flew with my little childish ideas in my head, and my childhood at an end. I slept in trees or else crouched down inside the machines, far away from everything and especially from the dead, who gave off a bad smell.
I arrived in another city, reduced to a heap of ruins. It was the eleventh since I’d set out, but I couldn’t be sure I’d counted exactly. While I was flying away, I saw the signal. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen one but this time I was tired and felt the temptation to give in and go in search of another person. My mother always said I should trust people, and she’d often scolded me because I always wanted to be in control. She said you shouldn’t be so suspicious at five years old. But suppose there was someone like the boy I’d met on the first night, the one who’d tried to knock me down to the ground?
I looked at the signal and then at the sea. I picked up a good supply of food, hitched on four spare machines and went towards the dark. I thought I had crossed the ocean, but it was actually only a fairly small stretch of the sea. Two oceans, for a small child. More than two oceans for me still, even if I’m old now. After all, I was a terrified little boy – though not so little any more – and I saw the ground.
A city burnt down, like the others. On the coast, like the city I’d come from. There weren’t any bodies on the roads and already this was positive. There weren’t any little machines and I couldn’t go on any longer. So when I saw the signal I decided to listen to my mother and I headed towards a sort of dismantled gym. There were people inside. They all ran out, weeping. I was the first child they’d seen since the world had come to an end.
The first who was still alive. The survivors I met that day raised me, educated me and even loved me. With time, they had children of their own, but for them I remained a sort of gift from heaven. Everyone was told about what I’d done, how I’d managed to stay alive. My twenty parents said my life was a miracle. I didn’t speak at all for several years, then I became a father of the country. Everyone wanted me to, and in the end it was what I wanted as well. I am the President of the new world, a living legend and also a great sage. But I’m still Alex and sometimes I’m still five years old. I’ve helped to refound the human race but I never wanted children of my own. I didn’t want to risk the possibility that one day I’d have to put a child of five on a flying machine and make him wander about among the ruins of the Earth in his slippers.
I’ve tried time and again to discover the reason for what happened and finally I came to suspect that, from one consumption to the next, in the end there was nothing left.
I travelled through good and evil, both as abstract concepts and as wounds, overcome by the immensity of the molecules of water that suffocate the ocean and give it weight, and I’ve never understood the reason for anything. Some people are denied all certainties, that’s all there is to say. And in the end that’s why they’re considered to be wise.
I am terrified by the idea of a precarious flight over the sea and of the impossibility of landing on the beach. I’m still flying in the little machine that took me away from mummy and I’m still frightened to come down.
I feel a cold emptiness.
trans. by Brenda Porster