He had been visiting border places for years, poor communities that he added to the census and remunerated with food. But for the first time, facing that little town sunken in the valley, Gismondi perceived an absolute stillness. He saw only a few houses. Three or four motionless figures, and a few dogs stretched out on the ground. He advanced under the noonday sun. He was carrying two big bags on his shoulders, and as the bags slid down, they dug into his arms and forced him to stop. A dog lifted its head to watch him, but didn’t get up from the ground. The buildings, a strange mix of mud, stone, and tin, were arranged in no particular order, leaving an empty street in the middle of the town. The place seemed uninhabited, but he could sense the townspeople behind the windows and doors. They didn’t move; they weren’t watching him; they were just there, and Gismondi saw, next to a door, a man sitting down; the back of a little boy leaning against a post; a dog’s tail poking out from the doorway of a house.
Dizzy from the heat, he dropped the bags and wiped the sweat from his forehead with one hand. He contemplated the buildings. There was no one to talk to, so he chose a house without a door and asked permission to enter before peering in. Inside, an old man was looking at the sky through a hole in the tin roof.
“Excuse me,” said Gismondi.
At the other end of the room, two women were facing each other at a table and, behind them, on an old cot, two children and a dog were dozing, their heads and limbs resting on one another.
“Excuse me . . .” he repeated.
The man didn’t move. When Gismondi got used to the darkness, he found that one of the women, the younger one, was looking at him.
“Hello there,” he said, recovering his spirits. “I work for the government and . . . Whom should I be talking to?” Gismondi leaned slightly forward.
The woman didn’t answer, and her expression was indifferent. Gismondi leaned against the empty doorframe, feeling dizzy.
“You must know someone . . . some kind of leader. Do you know whom I should talk to?”
“Talk?” said the woman in a dry, tired voice.
Gismondi didn’t answer; he was afraid of finding that she hadn’t uttered a word at all and that the noontime heat was affecting him. The woman seemed to lose interest, and she looked away from him.
Gismondi thought he could estimate the population and complete the record on his own, since no agent would ever bother to check the information in a place like this. But in any case, the car wouldn’t be back for him until the next day. He went over to the children, thinking he could at least make them talk. The dog, whose snout was resting on one boy’s leg, didn’t even move. Gismondi greeted them. Only one of the boys, slowly, looked him in the eyes and made a minimal gesture with his lips, almost a smile. His feet hung from the cot barefoot but clean, as if they had never touched the ground. Gismondi knelt down and brushed one of the feet with his hand. He didn’t know what led him to do this; maybe he just needed to know that the boy was capable of movement, that he was alive. The boy looked at him fearfully. Gismondi stood up. His eyes as he looked at the boy also held fear. But it wasn’t that face he was afraid of, or the silence, or the lethargy. Then he saw the dust, on the shelves and the empty countertops. He went over to the only container in sight, picked it up, and emptied its contents on the table. He stood there absorbed for some seconds. Then he traced a finger through the spilled powder without understanding what he was seeing. He went through the drawers and the shelves. Opened cans, boxes, bottles. There was nothing. Nothing to eat or to drink. No blankets, no tools, no clothes. Just some useless utensils. Vestiges of jars that had once held something. Without looking at the boys, as if he were talking only to himself, he asked them if they were hungry. No one answered.
“Thirsty?” A shiver made his voice tremble.
They listened to him, although they didn’t seem to understand. Gismondi left the room, returned to the street, ran to the bags, and carried them back. He stood in front of the boys, agitated. He emptied the goods onto the table. He picked up a bag at random, opened it with his teeth, and poured a handful of sugar into his palm. The boys watched as he knelt down beside them and offered them something from his hand. But neither of them seemed to understand. It was then that Gismondi felt a presence, and perceived, perhaps for the first time in the valley, the breeze of a movement. He stood up and looked to either side. A bit of sugar spilled to the ground. The younger woman was standing up now and watching him from the threshold. It wasn’t the same expression she’d had up to then—she wasn’t looking at a scene or the landscape, she was looking at him.
“What do you want?” she said.
It was, like all the others, a somnolent voice, but it was charged with an authority that surprised him. One of the boys had left the bed and was now looking at the hand overflowing with sugar. The woman looked at the packages spread out on the table and she turned toward him furiously. The dog stood up and restlessly circled the table. Men and women began to look in through the doors and windows, heads appearing behind heads, a growing crowd. Other dogs approached. Gismondi looked at the sugar in his hand. This time, finally, everyone focused their attention on him. He barely saw the boy, his little hand, the wet fingers caressing the sugar, the fascinated eyes, a certain movement of the lips that seemed to remember the sweet taste. When the boy brought his fingers to his mouth, everyone froze. Gismondi retracted his hand. He saw in those who were looking at him an expression that at first he couldn’t understand. Then he felt the sharp wound, deep in his stomach. He fell to his knees. He had let the sugar spill, and the memory of hunger spread over the valley with the rage of pestilence.
HEADS AGAINST CONCRETE