It was very early in the morning and
Martin was alone. Still in bed, hands under his head, he felt inevitably awake.
“Thoughts roam around unsuspected places when sleep flyes away” he murmured
when he realized he was missing the bells. The bells of the alarm clock, the
bells in the school, the bells of the church, all those damned bells he had hated
through his whole life, resounded now in his mind like echoes of joyful. That
was an unexpected feeling since he certainly went into retirement as a prisoner
reaches his release. Fed up of schedules, timetables, bosses, at last, fed up
of people in general and particularly one by one, retirement appeared to his mind
as a new brilliant world full of vague
promises of liberty, revived passions, and tranquility of the soul. But that morning
had broken odd and his living apart paradise seemed, under the first pale sun
lights, a huge amount of empty time. There
was a worm growing inside Martin. There was a worm scratching deep, in the soft
thing. “Enough!” he exclaimed, “enough!”
The man jumped out of the bed, dressed up
and made some tea, like a captain commanding his soldiers, with discipline and martial
accuracy. Then, being the universe controlled again, took a book and started to
read by the bedroom window. Morning seemed perfectly calm and quiet except for
the birds singing outside, in the garden, mainly in the great old elm, which
Martin’s great grandfather had planted according to the family record. That old
tree had had a life longer than all of them. On the one hand, that great tree,
on the other hand, those little lives, with their little business, insignificant
troubles, pusillanimous joeys and sadness, little deaths and births. All of them are the same as those birds which stirred
up the leaves. “A huge amount of useless efforts” thought the worm. And Martin:
“enough, enough!”
He closed his eyes and, suddenly, there
was such a deep silence that Martin was affected. He looked again through the
window and discovered a boy under the tree. He surprised he didn’t noticed him
before, since the vision was totally out of the context. The boy was there,
deeply concentrated, reading a book, as it was his habitual place of reading, a
corner of his own garden. After a while looking at the boy but still not very
sure about the reality of his vision, Martin decided to creep downstairs and,
carefully, he opened the glass door onto de garden. He paced to the tree. “It
seems a good book, doesn’t it?” For the first time, the boy looked away from
the pages and, smiling in a shy but charming way, said: “It is the book of my
life”.
Astonish, Martin looked at the boy for a
long time while the boy got back to his book. He didn’t understand anything.
Martin thought (or was the worm?) that that boy could be himself, or his
father, or his grandfather many years before. “So, this is thing, the old wheel
of eternal return start a new, the long series of little lives under the tree
never end” And he thought (or the worm) that all the business under the tree
are nothing but a huge amount of empty time. “ENOUGH!” shouted Martin. And the
boy, suddenly, disappeared.
