TheInkWell Fiction Challenge | Faces, Dreams

One night when I was six years old, I accompanied my sister on an evening walk through village. In my memory - it is possible that reality was different - there was no one on the streets except for us. We walked on the sidewalks and sometimes in the middle of the street, on the asphalt that still gave off the heat of the afternoon sun; we didn't run into anyone and no cars passed. From somewhere far away, three or four streets ahead, on the left or on the right, came a joyful song that said: "Walking up and down, down and up..."

My sister was sixteen. Now I wonder what she was looking for or expecting from that walk that seemed to go nowhere, just a walk along empty streets, peeking into the houses of our neighbours that looked like shipwrecks in which the occupants were still moving, unaware that they had long since succumbed under the clear waters.

The village was a final destination, on a detour from the main road, not a place of transit, no one passed through there by chance or to go somewhere else. Why were we in the street, wandering around like lost tourists? I don't know; I don't know now. At the time I must have known. It was my sister who had decided to go out and take me with her; it was she who was looking, waiting or perhaps wanting to forget something; I was just accompanying her; I was adjusting my steps to hers, much longer - she was a tall girl - and she wasn't questioning me about anything, but she was absorbing a special form of the night; the quiet, solitary night, in which the faces of the people around us, in their houses, seemed to inhabit a parallel, distant, illuminated and silent world.

More than fifty years after that, in my dreams, while waiting in a hospital for an operation that I may not get out of, I have found again that same night. My village is only the route I took with my sister, the special air of that night and those streets; the aura, like a distillate, a concentration, similar to that of a perfume that preserves the vegetable essence - flowers, leaves, roots - that is at its origin; because the landscape of the village in these dreams does not resemble the real village.

In my dreams, it is always night and there is silence, and through the windows I see the motionless faces of women, men and children illuminated by the flickering light of black and white televisions. The houses are bigger than the ones I knew as a child. In that timeless world of dreams there are no streets but narrow, winding roads amidst immense trees unknown to me; trees like those that might be found in a rain forest, but not in the semi-arid savannah where the village is located. Despite the differences, I recognize my birthplace. There I am at home. Where I will return when everything is over.