...of peasants and jockeys

…I pushed away the mirror, my or rather that ghastly face swaying spinning as though sucked up by the shadowy brown depths of the barn vanishing with that lightning-like rapidity which the slightest change of angle imposes on reflected images and in its place I saw them at the other end of the stable, palavering or rather saying nothing I mean exchanging silences the way other people exchange words I mean a certain kind of silence which they alone understood and which was undoubtedly more eloquent to them than any speech, surrounding the horse lying on its side: three men with peasant faces: three of those taciturn suspicious close-mouthed types which made up the larger share of the regiment’s fighting force with that painful expression in their precociously wrinkled faces stamped with that nostalgia for their fields their solitude their animals for the black and greedy earth, and I said What is it what’s happening? but they didn’t even answer, undoubtedly thinking that it was no use or that maybe we didn’t speak the same language then I went over and looked for myself for a moment the horse breathing hard, Iglésia was there too but he didn’t seem to have heard me any more than the others although between us I thought I hoped that there could at least be a possibility of contact, but probably being a jockey is also a little like being a peasant despite the appearances that would lead you to believe that he, in other words since he had lived in cities or at least in contact with cities it was understandable to suppose he was after all a little different from a peasant, I mean betting gambling and even somewhat enlightened the way jockeys often are, and having spent his childhood not tending geese or leading the cows to the watering trough but probably playing in the gutter and in the city’s streets, but most likely it’s not so much the country as the animals the company the contact of animals, for he was almost as close-mouthed as taciturn as uncommunicative as any of them and like them always occupied absorbed (as if he were incapable of remaining idle) in one of those intricate and slow tasks they have a secret of creating for themselves…

[The Flanders Road, Simon, C.]