City by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online Page A

anymore.”
    â€œThat’s true. Let me see . . .”
    Gould handed her the list of questions. Shatzy glanced at it, then stopped at a question on the second page.
    â€œThis is a quick one. Read it . . .”
    â€œ31. Can the applicant briefly state the dream of her life?”
    â€œI can.”
    My dream is to make a Western. I began when I was six and I intend not to die before I finish it.
    â€œVoilà.”
    From the time she was six, Shatzy Shell had been working on a Western. It was the only thing she truly cared about, in life. She thought about it constantly. When good ideas came to her, she turned on her portable tape recorder and spoke them into it. She had recorded hundreds of tapes. She said it was a wonderful Western.

4
    They killed off Mami Jane in the January issue, in a story entitled “Killer Rails.” That’s the way things go.

5
    That business about the Western, among other things, was true. Shatzy had been working on it for years. In the beginning she had collected ideas, then she had started writing things down, filling notebooks. Now she used a tape recorder. Every so often she turned it on and spoke into it. She didn’t have a definite method, but she went on, without stopping. And the Western grew. It started with a cloud of sand at sunset.
    The usual cloud of sand at sunset, every evening wafted by the wind over the earth and into the sky, while Melissa Dolphin sweeps the road in front of her house; whipped by the river of circling air she sweeps, with unreasoning care, and futile. But carrying her sixty-three years calmly and gratefully. Twin sister of Julie Dolphin, who, swinging on the verandah, sheltered from the worst of the wind, watches her now: watching her, through the dust, she alone understands her.
    To the right, laid out along the main street, runs the town. To the left, nothing. There is no frontier beyond their fence, only a land that has been decreed useless, and has been abolished from thought. Rocks and nothing. When someone dies in these parts, people say: the Dolphin sisters saw him pass by. No house is farther out here than their house. Nor elsewhere, they say.
    So it is with astonishment that Melissa Dolphin raises her gaze to that nothingness and sees the figure of a man slowly approaching, blurry in the cloud of sand and sunset. Although she has occasionally seen something disappear in that direction—thornbushes, animals, an old man, useless glances—something
appear,
never. Someone.
    Julie, she says softly, and turns towards her sister.
    Julie Dolphin is standing, on the verandah, and in her right hand she’s holding a Winchester model 1873, octagonal barrel, .44-.40 caliber. She looks at the man—he walks slowly, with his hat lowered over his eyes, duster down to the ground, leading something, a horse, something, a horse and something, a bandanna protects his face from the dust. Julie Dolphin raises the rifle, slides the wooden butt against her right shoulder, bends her head to align eye, sight, man.
    Yes, Melissa, she says softly.
    She aims at the middle of his chest, and fires.
    The man stops.
    He looks up.
    He lowers the bandanna that hides his face.
    Julie Dolphin looks at him. She reloads. Then she bends her head to align eye, sight, man.
    She aims at his face, and fires.
    The echo of the shot is swallowed up in the dust. Julie Dolphin knocks the cartridge out of the bolt: Morgan red, .44-.40 caliber. She remains standing, watching.
    It takes the man a few minutes to get to Melissa Dolphin, motionless in the middle of the road. He takes off his hat.
    Closingtown?
    It depends, Melissa Dolphin answers.
    Shatzy Shell’s Western began exactly like that.

6
    â€œI’m going with you.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI want to see this damn school,” Shatzy said.
    So they went out, the two of them; there was a bus or you could walk. Let’s walk part of the way, then maybe take the bus. OK, but cover