The Book of Color by Julia Blackburn

Author:Julia Blackburn [Blackburn, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82924-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

When the boy woke, the room that he was in seemed familiar to him even though he knew he had never seen it before. The pattern of each day was familiar as well, even though he had no idea when that pattern had first been established.

He got up as soon as it was light, dressed himself, took some food that had been left out for him and went into the garden. He followed a path that led away from the house and there, deep among the trees and noisy with the cascading of the waterfall, he came to the wooden pen and the hut in which the pig lived. The pig belonged to him now. He never paused to wonder who had decided to give it to him, he only knew that it was his and, in some way that he did not need to understand, it protected him from harm.

He came with a basket filled with food: a bunch of the sweet bananas that grew in such profusion close to the stream, scraps from the kitchen, handfuls of green leaves that looked as though they must be good to eat and anything else he could find. He would stop to fill an enamel jug with fresh clear water and then he would clamber over the wooden fence that enclosed the pig’s territory and knock politely on the door of the shed in which it slept at night. The pig always answered his greeting with a startled but welcoming grunt and with that signal he walked in, leaving the door wide open so that the mottled sunlight could cover the walls and the floor. He sat on an upturned bucket and presented his offerings to the pig, one by one until they were all gone. Then he filled the trough with water and waited patiently for the hours to begin to pass.

The pig got on with the business of being alive and the boy was content to watch it. Sometimes it would peer at him with a casual curiosity from behind the blinkering of its big pink ears. Sometimes it would come and stand close to him, leaning its heavy body against the side of his knee, and then if he scratched the warm skin where the front legs joined with the chest, it would enter a sort of trance, the tail limp with pleasure, the body swaying as if blown by a wind, the mouth slightly open, the eyes flickering through the orange lashes.

Birds flew across the sky or settled in the trees overhead. There was often the noise of monkeys but they never emerged from the safety of the undergrowth. A few chickens had the habit of entering the pen around midday and they would scratch and search for food before moving on. In the distance the boy might hear people talking, laughing, shouting, singing, but no one came close. As he sat there day after day, he felt he knew exactly what it must be like to

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