Out in the Open by Jesús Carrasco Read Free Book Online Page A

firmly, and only then did he remove the rope hobble tethering the donkey’s two front legs.
    The dog was scampering about, herding the goats up so close to the donkey’s hind legs that the donkey occasionally tried to kick them out of the way. The old man surveyed the campsite and counted the goats, pointing to each of them in turn. He then put on his hat and held out one hand to the boy.
    â€˜The blanket.’
    The boy sprang to his feet, picked up the blanket and gave it to him. The old man took it and used it to cover the contents of the panniers. He then whistled to the dog and, as on the first occasion they had met, the dog raced over to the stray goats and herded them together, barking and snapping. The boy wondered if his own day would also be a repetition of the previous one: an early breakfast followed by a long walk in the blazing sun. The old man grabbed the halter and tugged at it twice. The donkey set off after him, panniers swaying, and the rest of his retinue followed behind. The boy stayed where he was, watching the flock pass slowly by, with its usual cacophony of bleating and clanking of bells seemingly tuned to every possible register. The old man and the donkey were at the front, the dog chasing madly after them, and last of all came the goats, leaving behind a slipstream of dung like the tail of a comet. When they had gone about twenty yards, the old man stopped and turned round:
    â€˜Come on, I can’t wait for you all day.’

4
    THEY WALKED FOR a couple of hours over unploughed fields, with the boy keeping close to the donkey, as the old man had told him to. They paused in one field where there were still the remains of the last harvest. The goats immediately scattered and, heads down, began nibbling the stubble. The boy, who had covered his head with his shirt, observed the scene from the shade afforded him by the donkey. The old man remained standing, surveying the vast space surrounding them. Shading his eyes with his hand, he paused for a moment, gazing towards the south. Then he took his tobacco pouch out of his bag and rolled himself a cigarette. When he had finished, he gazed up at the clear sky and scanned it from side to side. He took off his hat to cool his head, whistled to the dog, and off they went.
    They crossed the stony ground at such a slow pace that they didn’t even kick up any dust. The landscape they passed through, full of abandoned arable fields and threshing floors, spoke to them of desolation. As did the flattened furrows covered in a crust of baked earth so hard that it only gave beneath the hooves of the heavily laden donkey. Fields as corrugated as washboards and sown with waxy, sharp-edged flints thrown up by the threshers. There came a point when the sun was so high that the donkey was no longer protecting the boy with its shade, and he kept trying to arrange his shirt so that it covered both head and shoulders. He occasionally glanced at the old man, trying to communicate his distress, but the old man, impervious to the heat, continued on in the same direction, as if they were strolling along the shore of a mountain lake. Once, the boy hung back to rearrange his turban. The dog stayed by him, wagging its tail and running around him as if his master’s companion were a new toy. In order to adjust the shirt to his head, the boy flailed around with his arms, snorting angrily, as if this would somehow help to make the shirt bigger or oblige the old man to find a shady beech wood in the middle of nowhere. At best, all he managed was to get the goatherd to stop, not in order to wait for him, but to pretend to be pouring water out of an empty flask. Seeing the man ahead of him raising the mug to his lips, the boy stopped fiddling with his shirt-cum-turban and hurried on in order to reach the old man before all the water was gone. When he got there, with his shirt draped haphazardly over his head, the old man was already putting the cork back in the