The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

This chapter does not want to be only a tragedy, and it would be a lie to tell it as if it were one from beginning to end, because there were years — not months, whole years — in which the little one and his mother were, within the narrow and dangerous limits of the world they'd been given, genuinely happy.

The happiness of a donkey without full consciousness and a hybrid conscious of more than he should be does not resemble the happiness two-legged beings tell each other about in their stories. There were no words of affection, because his mother had no words to give. There were no promises whispered in the ear, none of the thousand small ceremonies with which conscious creatures usually decorate love to make it easier to recognize. There was, instead, other things. There was a wet nose gently pushing him against a warm flank when the cold pressed too hard. There was a whole body that placed itself, unasked, between him and any unknown sound coming from the darkness of the forest. There were his mother's ears, always alert, always turning toward wherever he was, as if the rest of the world could wait but he never could.

And there was, on his side, something that also had no exact words but that felt, in the chest, exactly like love should feel: the habit of curling up against her every night not because he was cold — often he wasn't — but because the warmth of her body was the one constant proof, repeated every night without fail, that he still had someone. The habit of watching over her while she slept, knowing she could never thank him for it in words, and doing it anyway, because being thanked in words had never been the point.

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They played, in their own way. She ran in wide circles through the forest clearings, and he — clumsy, disproportionate, his legs never quite agreeing among themselves about which animal they were trying to be — ran after her, falling more than running, and his mother, instead of leaving him behind, slowed just enough that the distance between them never grew too large. He learned to read, in the way she turned her head back to check he was still there, something he could only call worry, though he'd never had anyone to teach him that word.

They ate together whatever the forest gave them — sweet grass on the slopes where the sun lingered longer, roots his mother knew how to dig up with a skill he never quite matched, fruit fallen from trees neither of them could name — and in those quiet meals, with full stomachs and no predator near, the little one felt something that only much later, as an adult, he would have the vocabulary to call peace.

It was on one of those quiet afternoons, the sun going down slowly over a valley neither of them knew had a name in any human tongue, that the little one understood, without anyone needing to explain it to him, a simple truth he would carry with him the rest of his life: it didn't matter what the rest of the world thought of them. It didn't matter that the herds had rejected them, that the stone towns in the distance looked at them, when they looked at all, as something between curiosity and threat. He had a mother. She had a son. That, in a world that owed them nothing, was enough.

He did not yet know how much it would cost him to learn that "enough" and "safe" had never been the same word.