Just the day before the big cold, the grandchildren had finished building the foundations of the new nests, to propitiate the return of the swallows the following spring. We all wanted to have many, for the house to be blessed. Under the supervision of Mitja, a neighbor with golden hands who gladly welcomed them into his charming workshop, the little ones had cut and planed wooden planks to assemble them in a triangle and fix them to the ceiling of the shed, where the swallows had always returned. At least for 170 yearswhen the house was built and the shed was still a stable.
This spring they had returned in greater numbers than usual. Considering their average life span, they were at least the fortieth generation who always returned to the same place with astonishing topographical precision, after a flight of at least two thousand kilometers from North Africa. They had invaded every space useful for nesting and during the day they had populated the web of light wires that overlooked the center of the town. Each morning they greeted the beginning of the day with trill concerts.
One neighbor’s barn was full of them. At least fifteen families, fifteen nests with a mat of black-and-white excrement at its base and a frantic coming and going through the single window. They kept them willingly, because they brought good luck, they blessed the house. The whole village had welcomed them, almost with relief. A year earlier, apocalyptic fires had wiped out nearby forests, but they had proved stronger than the climatic disaster. Their return represented the continuity of life.
From March to September, my garage door had to be left open for them. On the door I had fixed a bilingual sign with the inscription “Attention swallows! Forbidden to close!”. They woke me up early with heavy chatter in front of the window. While the June borns were off at flight school, the second broods huddled in the nest in the shed. They resisted everything, even the traffic of workers who were replacing the boiler and consolidating the ceiling. Drills, hammer blows: nothing got them out. Mili’s favorite game, the cat, was trying to catch them on the fly on the threshold as they went out or back to feed the little ones, but hers didn’t get caught and, on the contrary, teased her with threatening glides just out of reach of her claws .
The next morning November came, three months early. He rained violently for forty hours, in a pounding succession of lightning. An electromagnetic storm. The great cistern filled to the brim and its perimeter crowded with crazed frogs. Then half of Slovenia was devastated, rivers of water invaded nearby villages. From 30 degrees, the temperature dropped to 10, and remained so for an afternoon, a night and another day. The insects stopped flying, stealing food from the swallows. It was a horrendous, interminable night. Adults could not fly. The last born starved and went into hypothermia. A twenty-gram creature goes out in minutes.
Already after a few hours we found one of the five puppies dead on the concrete. The next morning, three more sticky balls. After a few hours, the adults also disappeared. Bad luck! After 170 years, the garage remained empty, it lost its usual tenants. In many other houses the nests were deserted. More newborns lay on the ground. The great escape had started, and the law of survival required abandoning the weakest. Her black and white friends had left, more than a month early, and even the toughest peasants in town were sad. Men accustomed to the proximity of bears, lynxes and wild boars. Men for whom rain is a blessing. Something had broken in the sky.
It happened a few hours ago, but I still used the remote past. It is best suited to represent something definitive. Those empty strings of light, that silence in the stables and on the cornices confront us all with something epochal. Today it’s still raining. Under the eaves of the house, two remaining adult swallows wait for it to stop. A few others, shivering, try to fly again. In the city no one would notice, the pain of animals does not emerge. In small towns it is another matter. Swallows are part of a community and today the inhabitants look up at the sky. The hope of a return burns in them. But hardly anything moves in the village. Silence, emptiness.