excerpt
He opened the cottage door and stepped out into glaring sunlight. The sun told him it was early afternoon. He must have slept for several hours though he could not remember sleeping. He was confused and disoriented. He looked up at the sky; its blue lacquer was so pale as to be almost white. He glanced out to sea; its blue was deeper but it sparkled as if shot with silver threads. The day dazzled like a vision of heaven. At any other time Michael would have thrilled to the joy of being alive; today he felt as if he would be better dead.
His eyes ranged the hillsides below him and the land’s ragged edge. Nothing moved; neither man nor dog, neither sheep nor bird. Even the sea seemed frozen, save where the glitter of sun on the far water danced with incongruous gaiety. Could she be down there somewhere, safe in a friendly house?
Michael could not keep his eyes away from the church, arrogant on its grassy ridge. It appeared almost white in the sun, gleaming like a freshly painted cottage. And small. In one hand he could have lifted it, raised it above his head and smashed it to pieces on the black rocks of the Drumard coast. Would that the church had never been built, he thought. Would that Padraig had never come back.
Michael felt sick with fear.
He walked to the side of the cottage and looked up at the mountains. Clouds feathered the sky above them. A wind ruffled the heather. A sheep or two nibbled the grass between the untidy boulders. The hills beckoned Michael sympathetically. Their solitude offered greater solace on this fateful day. If the police came to arrest him for Padraig’s murder he would hide in the hills and live like a wolf.
Michael began to climb, and with each long stride his heart grew lighter. Gradually he shed the weight of his fears, dropping them one by one like cast-off clothes. At last he stood unburdened and breathless in an exaltation of mountains. Valleys covered with heather, strewn with boulders, coursed by streams, cupped dark pools in their craggy hands. Mists began to infiltrate the valleys, to hover in the shadows like ghosts. Above them hove the mountains, a tight herd corralled in a pound between the sea and the rolling country inland. Michael loved the mountains. He loved their silence and their solitude. He admired their strength and self-sufficiency. Mountains meditated, Caitlin once said. They saw all but said nothing. They transcended the petty concerns of life. They attracted men seeking to share their aspirations, men like Michael, who could not express their feelings in words but who found them unspoken in the mountains.
Libros Libertad 