Read Online Out in the Open by Jesús Carrasco - Free Book Online

the plain beneath a moon that was not yet bright enough to light the ground they walked on. As the boy clung to the donkey’s halter, the animal’s swaying gait seemed to him like a litany as monotonous as the landscape they were crossing. Dark sky, dark horizon and dark, desolate fields. Guided by the old man and supported by the donkey, he abandoned himself to memories of the place he had come from. His village was perched above a river bed, where water had once flowed, but which was now just a long, broad indentation in the midst of an interminable plain. Most of the houses, many of them empty, were built around the church and the medieval palace. Beyond them, like a belt of asteroids, lay a scattering of crumbling walls, all that remained of the fields that had once fed the village. The streets were flanked by houses with whitewashed roughcast walls and gable roofs, with crudely made grilles at the windows and metal doors concealed behind curtains. The gates on yards were kept firmly shut to protect the wooden carts and threshing machines. There was a time when the plain had been an ocean of wheatfields and, on windy spring days, the ears of wheat rippled just like the surface of the sea. Fragrant green waves waiting for the summer sun. The same sun that now fermented the clay and ground it down into dust.
    He remembered the fringe of olive trees that extended along the north side of the river bed. The very olive grove in which he had taken refuge. An ancient, woody army tingeing the landscape with leathery browns. Often, each tree was supported by two or three gnarled trunks that reached up out of the earth like an old man’s arthritic fingers. It was rare to see an olive tree that really looked like a tree. Instead, there were endless knotty trunks full of deep cracks into which the rain had first penetrated, then frozen and split the wood open. A bunch of soldiers returned from the front. Wounded, but still marching. A march that had been going on for so long that no one could now testify as to their continued advance. They were not witnesses of the passage of time, but rather time owed its very nature to them.
    He mentally travelled along the railway line that traversed the village from east to west, following the axis of the old valley. It arrived raised up on embankments and sleepers and disappeared into the distance as if scissored out of the landscape. On one side was the village proper, with the church, the town hall, the barracks and the palace. On the other, a group of low houses built around an abandoned vinegar factory. The vaulted roofs on some of the warehouses had caved in and a pestilential smell percolated out from a rusty tank, little by little, day by day, like an unending curse. The time spent in the bone pit seemed positively pleasant in comparison with the invisible atmosphere generated by that place. Next to the factory, the single railway track branched off into three. Beside it stood the station building with its cantilevered roof and broken windows. In the centre was a platform like a large island lit by half a dozen rather feeble gas lamps and, next to this, a brick-built cattle-loading yard and two sheds with doors barred shut. Beyond that, above the last set of tracks, rose a faded-yellow grain silo crowned by a red sign bearing the word ‘ ELECTRA ’. A vast, imposing edifice that dwarfed everything else, and from whose roof one could see the mountains to the north marking the end of the plateau. A great hulk casting a dark, oppressive shadow.
    His family lived in one of the village’s few stone houses. It had been built by the railway company at one end of the station, just where the line was crossed by the road leading towards the fields to the south. Everyone called it the pointsman’s house. On summer evenings, the shadow cast by the silo completely covered the roof and part of the surrounding yard – an area of trampled earth that was home to a dozen or so