The house in the sky

It all started with my husband one day climbing the mountain behind our town, carrying planks, a bag of nails, a saw, and a hammer. My younger son ran towards him in excitement, but my husband must have scolded him pretty harshly, because a second later he was crying next to me. But I knew my husband well, so I decided to give him space. He was a good man, perhaps not very good at explaining himself, but that could barely be seen as a flaw.

A few hours passed and there was no sign of him coming back. I started getting worried and asked my elder son to go after him. He did, but when he returned I noticed that he hesitated. Instead of coming to me, he stayed alone in the garden with our dog. Not playing or anything, he just sat on the floor. When I called, he finally came to me. He seemed nervous.

“I don’t think he’s coming back today, ma,” he said when I asked where his father was.

“What do you mean?”, I asked.

“I saw him on the mountain. He was building a shed—or I guess it was a little house—on a cliff next to the summit. When I asked him what he was doing, he just mumbled some words.”

“What? And did you try to talk to him again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

My son didn’t answer. I could tell that he was edgy about something.

“C’mon! Tell me. What happened?” I insisted.

“He entered and stayed inside the little house, ma. He didn’t say anything else.”

“So, did you knock on the door?”

Once again he remained quiet. He looked down, at his feet, as though he wanted to avoid my eyes.

“So? Did you knock on the door?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because there was no door.”

“What?”

“He built the house around him, ma. There’s no door to get in or out.”

Now it was my turn to be in silence as I listened to my son. My expression must have been pretty distressed, because it made him come forward and hug me.

“I heard him crying there, ma. I felt so sad that I ran back here. Now I feel like I want to cry too. I’m sorry, ma.”

“It’s ok, son. It’s ok. He must be tired or something. I’ll go there and talk to him.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to go there today. It’s going to get dark soon. And I think it’s going to rain too.”

My son had a good point. It would soon be dark, and going up the mountain at night was an idea that everyone in town would consider imprudent, because of wolves and other dangers. But the thought of my husband alone, locked up in a makeshift house by the edge of an abyss, shaken by blasts of wind and rain, made me shiver.

I couldn’t find enough peace in me that night. I stayed up ruminating about what could have possibly happened to lead my husband to that fate. I retraced our lives in the last months, in a desperate attempt to find any hint that could explain what was happening. Then I looked into the past years, the years before we moved into that house, before we had our children. Then I moved even further back, to the time before we were married, and the times before we hadn’t even met. But there was nothing. My husband was good to me and he was always there when I needed him. He was definitely an introspective man, but he was definitely not one for doing things unexpectedly.

While wandering about the house, lost in these thoughts, I walked past my elder son’s bedroom and, through the half-open door, I could see him awake in the dark. He looked at me for a long time without saying a word. I entered his bedroom and I guess we both wanted to say something, but when we realized there was nothing to be said, we just held each other.

At sunrise, I took my younger son to stay with our neighbour and set out with my elder son. After about one hour trekking in the woods and climbing the mountain, I saw the little house standing on a very narrow area. It wasn’t exactly a cliff, as my son had mentioned, it was more like a peak, maybe the fourth or fifth highest point on that mountain. There was no doubt, however, that my husband had purposely chosen the narrowest peak on the mountain to build that house.

The house itself looked indeed quite small, too small perhaps even for a shed. I reckoned it had about two meters in length and one and a half meters in width. It looked as though my husband wanted to be as far away from the earth as possible—and touch as little of it as possible. From where I stood, dozens of meters below, the house appeared to have been painted to fit the astonishing scenery that surrounded it. The mountain filled the background with its mighty summit, while trees populated the foreground. My husband had chosen a great place to build it. There were deer footprints all around, and eagles flew in the distance. Hardly any people visited that pristine area.

I tried to get to the house, but the way my husband had built it made it impossible. The base of the house was longer and wider than the terrain on which it had been built, so there was no way to climb around it. It looked as though you put a matchbox on top of a standing bottle. There wasn’t enough area for the house, regardless of how small it was.

There was also no way to climb into the house because, as my son had already explained, there were no openings in the floor or walls large enough for a person to get in. There were, in fact, two holes in the floor, which my husband kept closed by leaving a rock or some other object covering them. The first was large enough to allow a small bucket to pass through. I later found that he used this hole to collect water from a brook that passed some ten meters below the house. As for the second, well, it had a far less noble utility. My husband used it for his natural needs.

I went as close to the house as I could and called my husband. He didn’t answer. I called him once again and all I could hear was the sound of my son stepping on the rocks by the brook. I called a third time and it was all the same. I asked my son to come up and call him too. He did, but with no effect.

Frustrated by the peculiarity of the situation, I asked him to at least give me the satisfaction of showing that he was alive. By then I truly didn’t expect him to comply but, to my surprise, he did. I saw him remove the rock that he had placed on the hole he used as a toilet. I couldn’t distinguish his figure through the darkness of the hole, but it was ok, because I knew he was watching me. That was all I needed at that moment. I had already realized, after all those years with my husband, that expecting an explanation from him when he didn’t feel like explaining things was a dead-end road. But now that he had opened that hole to me, I suddenly had a say in the situation.

“Are you really not going to tell me what you’re doing?” I asked. “You know you can tell me. My God, people just don’t go and build a house around themselves with no door, in the middle of nowhere. That’s not normal. Please, tell me what happened. I’m your wife, and you must tell me what happened.”

I kept looking at him, or at least I wanted to believe that he was there, on the other side, also looking at me. I really thought he would say something, he owed that to me. I was, after all, his wife, and I had been with him for almost twenty years.

But once again he remained quiet. I stood in silence with my son beside me, apprehensive, waiting for a word from his father. Then I realized the absurdity of the situation. There we were, my son and I, looking through a shithole, literally, waiting for an answer from an entity who didn’t seem interested in us at all. And, to make matters worse, my husband slowly moved the rock once again to cover the hole. I guess he hesitated, but he hid himself again, regardless of what I thought or said.

Angry, frustrated, and—why not say—heartbroken, I took my son’s hand and left.

“Fine,” I said, “if that’s how he wants, we can live without him.”

I was so angry when I left that I even considered the possibility of never returning to that place again. I would wait for him to give up and then we would talk. My elder son didn’t ask me anything, which was odd. But my mind was so ridden with strange feelings that I thought it would be better that way. I guess he understood the situation better than I did. I mean, as if there was any way of understanding it. My younger son, however, proved much harder to deal with. The first thing he did when I went to pick him up was to ask about his father. I told him that his father was camping on the mountain, and that he would be there for some days. His childish and innocent reaction was to excitedly ask me if he could go too, which brought me to tears.

For all my hate, and despite the promise I had made to myself, I climbed the mountain again the very next day. I went alone. I reckoned that if it were only the two of us, we could have a candid conversation. But once again my husband didn’t answer. I brought him some foods that he liked, in hope of luring him out, but he didn’t seem to care. I wondered if he had food with him, but I guess he had found a way of using the same hole he used for water to catch fish from the stream below.

I walked around the house to try to find any evidence that he was actually eating. I found tiny fish bones scattered around the area. That discovery, oddly, made me sad. Part of me wanted my husband to be hungry, so that he could depend on me to bring him food. But even that was taken from me. He had water, food, and a small roof over his head. I guess that was all he needed.

However, while looking around, I did find something unexpected. The house had a window. It was small and hard to see when closed, but quite easy to spot when open. It faced the valley, so I could only picture my husband sitting alone inside that little house all day, watching the trees, the prairies and the rivers below. That should be quite a view from his vantage point.

“I can see the window open, dear. Come on, talk to me,” I said.

But, as expected, my husband didn’t answer. I insisted and I called him a second time. After the third, he closed the window. I could hear noises coming from the house, sounds of things being moved, and then silence. I reckoned my husband was moving stuff so that he could lie down and wait until I left.

“Listen, it’s pretty clear you don’t want to talk to me,” I said. “It’s ok. I’ll keep coming here until the day you feel like talking, ok? That’s all you need to know. That it’s ok. I mean, it’s ok, even if it doesn’t look ok. Alright?”

I waited for an answer for a while. Not that I expected one, but because my mind, as anyone’s mind, was naturally built to allow a moment of pause after making a question. But when I considered the absurdity of the situation, I shrugged. I looked around, saw the fishbones and the water running down the stream below.

“I can see that you’ve been eating. That’s good. But I’ll leave food here, if you ever want to get out of there and eat.”

On the way back home, I met two of my husband’s friends. People in town were already aware of the occurrence, apparently. They wanted to be kind to me. They asked me if what they had heard was true, even though I knew they knew it was true. I hesitated to tell them, so I made up another version of the story, telling them it was just people overreacting. I told them that my husband had only built an atypical fishing cabin, and that he was enjoying it. They didn’t seem very convinced, but agreed with me nevertheless. They asked me where he had built it and I gave them the wrong location, I don’t know why. I guess I just wanted the whole thing to be untrue, to rid me of that embarrassment. But I also felt sorry for my husband, when his friends eventually found his house. It was becoming clear to me that he wanted to be left alone, and for a moment I wished that every person in the world would disappear, just to leave my husband alone in his self-reliant existence. I knew how bizarre the whole thing looked from the outside, but ultimately my husband hadn’t harmed anyone, not even me or my children, those directly affected by his actions.

Regardless of how I felt, the whole town started talking about it. Some came to my house and tried to console me, as though I was already mourning my husband. At first I tried to be nice, but eventually I politely started asking to be left alone with my children. Still, they kept coming. I would find refuge by crying in the bathroom while the visitors ate my food and drank my wine. I really missed my husband, and at those times I desperately wanted to be with him in that little house, shrinking and crumbling in the absence of light and space. The nights were terrible. My bed felt empty without my husband there, like a vast wasteland with no purpose in this world, except to remind us that some places on Earth are not allowed to bear life.

When the weekend came, I took my sons to camp near my husband’s little house. They liked the idea. We had picnics there and slept in tents facing the house. My younger son and I would often approach the house and talk to my husband. He didn’t answer, but we didn’t mind. At this point, it was enough to know that he could listen. I had already accepted his silence. My elder son, however, never said anything. I don’t know whether because he was angry or afraid of his father. I encouraged him to talk, but he simply didn’t want, so I let him be. We had a good time setting camp there, and life almost felt normal. It was comforting to be away from all the prying people in town.

We started doing that every weekend, to the point where we endured the week, suffered the staring eyes and the comments in public just to enjoy that redemption at the end of the week. We liked to be left alone on that mountain, with the ever present silhouette of the little house watching over us. The house was always so quiet that at times I wondered whether my husband was alive in there. But then, a simple walk around it would reveal the fresh droppings and fishbones. One night I woke to drink water from the brook and I saw a fishing line reaching the water. I smiled and wanted to say something to my husband, but held my impulse. Instead I took the time to appreciate what I saw.

One Sunday, when we arrived, we found a few people already camped next to the house. I didn’t like that, but there was nothing I could do. In the afternoon, more people came and they disrupted the tranquility of the area. My sons and I could no longer find peace to play around the house and have picnics on the grass. We then headed back to town and vowed to return the next weekend, hoping to find the place peaceful and deserted again. However, to our surprise, there were even more people camped there the following Saturday. They climbed the rocks that led to the little house and took pictures of it. They used the zoom in their cameras to try to peek inside, and then they uploaded the videos on the internet, which caused even more people to visit that area.

One day I saw some children throwing rocks at the house and to my surprise none of the adults nearby tried to stop them. I rushed and yelled at them, which caused them to run away. A few minutes later, however, they were back with their parents. They seemed angry and told me I had no right to yell at their children. We started a heated argument that scaled up quickly, but which ended rather abruptly when they realized that I was the wife of the man locked in the tiny house. That thing made me feel humiliated. I didn’t want anyone there to know that, but fortunately that revelation stopped the children from throwing rocks or going too close to the house.

The next day I went to the police and asked them to stop people from going near where my husband lived.

“Sorry, we can’t do that,” the chief of police said. “That’s a public area. People can come and go as they please.”

“But can’t you at least create a protective perimeter around it?” I insisted.

“No, we can’t. Like I said, that’s a public area. Also, if anything, your husband is the one breaking the law. He has no permit to build a shed there.”

“So you mean you can go there and bring his house down, if you want?”

“If that order comes, we will do it, obviously. Do you want that to happen?”

I couldn’t answer. To be honest, I didn’t know if I wanted that to happen. I mean, it would end the whole thing, but what would be of my husband? The way he seemed committed to living in that little house made me question whether he would be willing to continue living outside at all.

Terrified by that possibility, I went to talk to the mayor. He used to be very close to my husband, until one day they had a fight about a matter so stupid that I can’t even remember. I explained him the situation. I told him that my husband seemed to be fully adapted to the life he had chosen, and that he seemed committed to spending a long time like that. The mayor said that he had been planning to visit my husband and that he completely understood my situation. He promised me that he would make sure no one would be allowed near my husband’s house. I thanked him with tears in my eyes.

“I understand that some people just want to be left alone in this world,” he said.

“I guess I also understand that now,” I said.

“Why do we have to keep believing that those who seek seclusion must always be persuaded back into society? I mean, isn’t solitude the gift of those who overcome loneliness?”

“Do you think he wanted to be away from me? Or his family?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe he was just looking for a way to see the world without him, or any other person, at the center.”

“What hurts me the most is how everything was so abrupt, so unannounced.”

“He told me one day that he’d do that,” the mayor unconcernedly said as he looked out the window.

“What?” I asked in disbelief. “So you knew about it? Did he tell you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he didn’t say that he’d one day build a house around himself on the mountain and stay there for the rest of his life. He didn’t say with those words. It’s just that, one day, before we had our argument, we went fishing and on the way we found this abandoned fishing cabin in the woods. I joked that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to abandon everything and live there, fishing all day while staying away from the world. We both laughed, but then he said that that cabin wouldn’t be enough. That it wasn’t far enough.”

“So he did tell you about that. In a way.”

“I guess he did. But I think it was just a thought he had back then. Whatever compelled him to abandon everything and move to that mountain now, that’s hard to comprehend. It’s beyond us. We only have conjectures. I believe not even your husband fully understands what he’s doing.”

“And I guess no one will ever understand it. He won’t talk.”

“I admire your husband. I truly do. It takes guts to do what he’s doing. I trust there are plenty of people calling him a fool right now, a lunatic, but I’m sure none of them has ever seen the world from his stand. Perhaps that’s why your husband won’t talk. After everything he’s seen, he could be anything from utterly disenchanted with humankind to extraordinarily marveled by the world. Either extreme is enough to make a man seclude himself and live a life without words.”

I went home feeling both relieved and sad. My husband seemed to be doing something remarkable, yet nobody actually knew what it was. But the growing certainty that the road he was taking had no way back frightened me. Somehow I knew that, but my hope pertinaciously fought that assertion.

When I returned to the mountain, I found the area empty and peaceful. I told my husband about the conversation I had had with his old friend. I told him everything we discussed, and when I said that the mayor had promised to keep people away from there, my husband opened the window, as though he wanted to say ‘thanks’.

That was all the communication we had. Whenever I said something my husband didn’t like, he would close the window. If he liked it, he would open it. If the window happened to be already open when I said something he liked, he would open it even further. But if I said something he didn’t like when the window was already closed, his deafening silence was the only answer I would get.

And that went on for fourteen years. Fourteen years of me going up that mountain at least once a week. Fourteen years talking to wooden walls, because by that point I could no longer differentiate my husband from the house he had built. They were one, built one inside the other. They built themselves on top of that precarious peak, and it was impossible to know who was sheltering whom in that symbiotic existence. The wood was already crumbling, broken in some parts, but it still stood defiant against the atemporal blasts of wind and the occasional rains that insidiously weakened its fibres.

My children eventually moved to places far from our town, and they rarely came to see their father. When they did, they came as though they were coerced. Though they never told me, I could sense a mix of shame and anger on their visits. And when they had their children, they never brought them to see their grandfather. But I understood their position, so I tried not to oppose them. What I was still far from understanding was my husband’s motivesm. All I had were hypotheses that changed from time to time.

One morning, after a storm that wrecked the town, I rushed up the mountain to see how my husband had coped with it. I found the wooden walls still standing, but part of the roof was gone. That sight broke my heart. It felt like watching my husband being maimed. I then sat on the grass and started crying.

“Enough, that’s enough!” I shouted. “Enough! Please, enough. I can’t take this anymore.”

As usual, no response came from my husband. Or so I thought because, when I finally stopped sobbing, I could distinctly hear my husband crying in the house, too.

“Please, my husband, this is it! It’s over!” I shouted. “If you had something to prove, it must’ve been proven by now. Just leave this shed now and come live with me again. You are as old as me, so let’s at least find peace in living the remaining of our days together.”

I then noticed that he had stopped crying, which made me happy for a moment. But since no other sound or movement came from the shed, I continued.

“Ok, my love, if you’re never coming out, then let me at least stay there with you. That’s all I ask. I just want your companionship on the last part of our journey.”

That’s when, after so many years, I finally heard my husband’s voice again. I couldn’t understand what he said though, because his voice came out very hoarse. But knowing that he was trying to talk again was more than enough. I climbed the rocks that led to the house as he began breaking the walls. I was in ecstasy.

However, when I came close enough, I saw his hands and I petrified. They were strangely bony and wrinkled, also pale and horribly deformed. The fingernails were long and yellow, distorted like a horn. They looked more like claws than hands. And as I watched they move up and down, breaking the wooden walls, my husband continued uttering guttural sounds that made me even more scared.

Then I saw a glimpse of my husband’s face. I saw it through the broken wall and I panicked. I saw it for no more than half a second, but it was enough. His hair and beard were long and white, as expected, but they also had large patches of skin showing. He was balding, but more than that, it looked as though he had some disgusting disease that made him lose hair in some parts, while other parts were still densely hairy. Perhaps that was a consequence of his poor nutrition during all those years. His eyes were amber-yellow, and they leaked some sort of viscous liquid that covered his cheeks and formed a white crust when dry. He probably had some sort of eye disease that had gone untreated for too long. And on top of all that, his face was disturbingly skinny, almost disfigured, and as pale as a ghost.

I ran. I ran out of fear, I ran out of disgust. That beast could never be my husband, I kept telling myself. My husband was a sweet and handsome man, not a creature covered in diseases and with terrifying claws. I ran until my lungs could no longer take it. I leaned on a tree and I cried again. I cried like I had never cried before. I cried for the disturbing state of my creature-husband more than I had cried on the day I realized he had no desire to leave the house he had built on the mountain. And now that he was free in the open, I wanted him to go back, to be encaged in that shed again. I didn’t want that beast in my life. I wanted him dead, voiceless, absent in the world, but omnipresent in my heart, as I had grown accustomed to.

I tried to continue my way, but I was too weak to run again. After taking a few steps, I fainted. I woke hours later and I felt disoriented. Afraid that my husband would come after me, I rushed home. Once there, I locked myself in my bedroom, frightened by the possibility of him coming in the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I spent the night looking at the doorknob and feeling jumpy every time I heard a creak or muffled sound inside the house.

When the morning came, I started feeling somewhat foolish for my panic attack. I went to the mayor and explained what had happened. He agreed to go up the mountain with me in the afternoon with new planks and tools in order to fix the house and somehow help my husband. When we arrived, we found one side of the house partially destroyed and my husband missing. We looked around and found no indication of his presence. We started debating whether we should split and search for him, but I was adamantly against that idea. I was still afraid.

Then the mayor pointed to the sky.

“I think we found him,” he said.

I looked up and didn’t understand at first, but when he said, “vultures,” everything made sense.

There were five or six vultures flying in circles not far from where we stood. We walked some ten more minutes up the mountain and found my husband’s body lying on a field of flowering bushes and tall grass. We didn’t say anything, but it was clear that we were both relieved for finding him dead. I didn’t cry and the mayor said no special words about my husband. We took the planks we had brought to fix the house and used them instead to build a rudimentary coffin.

We then went on to bury my husband next to his broken house. His body already smelled of rotting matter, so I covered my nose. I also covered his face because I simply couldn’t look at it. The beautiful man who was once my husband was gone in that creature. All that was left was what the house had done to him.