The Crossing: Book 2 of The Border Trilogy by McCarthy Cormac

Author:McCarthy, Cormac [McCarthy, Cormac]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307762467
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

He told the time of day by turning his face to the sightless sun like a worshipper. By the sounds of the countryside. The coolness of the night, the damp. By the calls of birds and by the first warmth of the rumored light upon his skin. People brought him water and food from the houses he passed and provisioned him for the road ahead. Dogs that came bristling into the road to challenge him slank away again. He was surprised at the authority which his blindness conferred upon him. He seemed to want for nothing.

There had been rain in the country and wildflowers bloomed by the roadside. He made his way slowly, tracking the ruts with his greenwood stick. He’d no boots for they’d long been stolen and those first days he walked barefoot and his heart was filled with despair. More than filled. Despair was in him like a lodger. Like a parasite that had turned out his very being from its abode and taken up the shape of that space within him where it once had been. He could feel it lodged against his throat. He could not eat. He sipped water from a cup proffered anonymously out of the world’s dark and handed the cup away into that dark again. His liberation from the cárcel meant little to him and there were days his freedom seemed to him no more than just some further curse and in this condition he tapped his way slowly north along the road to Parral.

In the cool dark of his first night alone in the country it had rained and he stopped and listened and he could hear the rain coming across the desert. Borne on the wind the smell of wet creosote bush. He lifted his face and stood by the roadside and his thoughts were that other than wind and rain nothing would ever come again to touch him out of that estrangement that was the world. Not in love, not in enmity. The bonds that fixed him in the world had become rigid. Where he moved the world moved also and he could never approach it and he could never escape it. He sat in the roadside weeds in the rain and wept.

On the morning of his third day abroad he entered the town of Juan Ceballos and there he stood in the road with his cane aloft and turned, listening, squinting his terrible squint. But the dogs had already crept away and a woman spoke to him at his right side and asked that she might take his hand and he gave it.

Y adónde va? she said.

He said he did not know. He said that he was going where the road went. The wind. The will of God.

La voluntad de Dios, she said. As if choosing.

She took him to her house. He sat at a rough board table and she gave him a pozole with fruit to eat but he could not eat it for all that she urged him.

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