That noisy team of bear
tamers had finally gone, after the bears, neglected by their drunken owners,
had pulled the only keeper the town cemetery had ever had to pieces. He was the
only living man left out, because all the towns folk, frightened by the eerie,
unprecedented color of the sunset, as if they had changed their human brains
for an ostrich mind, had decided to stay indoors. The keeper couldn’t see very
well – people even said his sight had been absorbed, in so many years of honest
service, by the bizarre luster of the tomb marble – so that he could barely
move; but it seemed he had still loved life on the earth, which he saw
increasingly blurred, because, a few seconds before he was caught in the bears’
avalanche, he had cried out:
“Oh, Lord, a great
hunger is coming my way!”
So the dead were left
without protection, and after the keeper was buried two other disasters
followed: most of the wealthier tombs were stripped of their marble (which was
used to erect barricades on the walls facing the direction the end of the world
was expected to come from, on the names, numbers and old tear-inspiring poems
were erased, so the marble could be used later as brand new), and the wheat
silos caught fire. The rich got out of their houses at the same time they got
out their minds, and walked around and around the staggering fires, until the
smell of well-done toast turned, painfully persevering, into a smell to ashes.
Our giant daily and nightly bread became flying, hot ash, and one would have
thought the ghost of mandatory humbleness was hovering over the grim roofs of
the town.
“It’s clear there is a
curse on this town,” the priest stated.
But this was much the way it had always been: when we didn’t have a town we had the curse of the town, and the other way round. By curse, most people meant not only the curse of God pronounced somewhere at the beginning of time – and which, esoterically speaking, had done nothing else but preserve the divine hierarchy – but a curse embodied in man, in an ill-omen animal, or in a witch that even hell spits out. An inquisitorial investigation was conducted into the dreams of the town’s inhabitants to find out as much as possible if any of them had tried to time travel, to escape his own body, to resurrect dead men, to fly to the moon, to do foolish things against nature etc. Long services held by the three religions, as well as the private exorcising incantations of conjurors, astrologers, card gamblers etc, somehow chased out the sadness of the bread ashes; they were paralleled by a magician who came in from far away. It is impossible to calculate from how far, because the sadness that had nestled in the souls of the people was so deep that everybody could only feel very far away from everybody else: which is terribly abandoned, terribly lonely.
