Niente was a simple man. He lived alone in the middle of a place that had no name and which you would not be able to find on a map. For Niente, the question as to where he was was as irrelevant as to that which might have asked as to who he was. Questions like this, or of any other kind, never crossed his mind.
He lived in a small, single floored, wooden house. He slept on a mattress on the floor, in a corner that was directly opposite the bare window from which the sun came each day. Outside and adjacent to the house was a garden in which he grew various fruits and vegetables. It never rained in this place, but Niente was able to tend to his garden by drawing water from a well on the opposite side of the house.
In and around this place there was not any other person, or thing. The landscape was an abject bleakness in all directions. The sky was a cloudless, pure, and relentless blue by day and by night there existed only a dead black, with neither moon nor stars, that enveloped all of the vast emptiness that could be seen by day into one whole, still, blind union by night.
He took all of the things that he had for granted and never thought to ask himself how it was they were there, or how he had come to be using them. They were there and he used them in order to survive. That these things could one day disappear never entered his mind. Notions of any kind of lack were as alien to those of any sense of abundance. He was there as were his things, and this was how it would always be. Niente's world was fixed and in it there existed no possibilities of change, or surprises of any kind.
Niente moved only between the house, the garden and the well. He never once thought to try and stretch the boundaries of his world and walk beyond the nothingness that surrounded him. He was, without any actual formal appreciation of the feeling, content with what he had.
Whilst it was true that he never asked for or questioned anything, he was on occasions aware of a previous life that he had led before getting to this place.
From time to time, vague images and recollections of somewhere and some things, which were different to this place, would come to him as he carried out his daily tasks, haunting him like unobtrusive ghosts floating without direction through his windless sky.
Once as he was leaving his house, the light from the sun - reflected off the glass window - conjured up a dizzying vividness for him that was alien to the stoic life he lived on his small desolated spot of land. The outlines of new shapes formed, and bewitched him momentarily in a rainbow of colours that he sensed he knew, but whose names he had learned to forget.
On another occasion he slipped and fell to the floor, while walking to his well, and became lost as he saw - in his wake - the dusty sand of the earth dance majestically from the floor, towards the empty sky, then fall back softly to the ground from which it came. This simple movement had pushed him back to a time where he had not been alone, and of another person who was not the one he knew himself to be.
These reveries, or sporadic flights from reality, came and went without any regular frequency and possessed all of the significance that Niente attached to them, which was none. They were there whenever he wanted to notice them and would be lost, as quickly as they had come, as he looked around and was reminded of what he was supposed to be doing at the time.
One day, while retrieving water from the well, he was distracted by one of these recollections of another history and walked absent-mindedly, in the opposite direction of the house and out into the vast expanse of the flat, arid land around it. A stray drop of water fell from his pail, onto the bare skin of his foot, and awoke him from his day-dream. He looked around into the emptiness that surrounded him. Quickly realising his innocent mistake, he turned without a second thought towards the house and to his daily tasks.
The next day, Niente awoke, lit up mechanically, as the sun's incessant rays rained down upon his face, bringing with them the first manifestation of life. He left the house to collect the water from the well, as he always did at this time, only to see that there was a man crouched beside the well. The stranger was replacing the earth over a point in the ground where it appeared he had just planted or buried something. Niente felt neither curiosity nor fear upon finding another man in what had always been, until this moment, this most solitary of places. He made his way towards the man only in order to carry out the task that he always did at this time. That the man was next to the well, and the well was the place from which he drew water, was the sole reason for Niente's movement towards him.
Without any form of greeting or communication between the two, Niente proceeded to fill his pail. While doing so he noticed that this man's appearance was similar to the physical idea that he had of himself. However, as with the flashbacks of the forgotten past, this idea was soon displaced as he retrieved the now full pail from down the well. With his task complete, Niente turned his back to the stranger and walked to the garden in order to cultivate the crops. Later when he turned away from the sun, and as he knelt to take a tomato from the vine, he saw that the man was walking away, out into the barren desert. Upon returning to the well for more water, Niente failed to notice that the man had gone completely.
The day continued as all of the others before it had done and with the swift disappearance of the sun, and the black enshrouding of the night, Niente slept. In his sleep he dreamt, if at all, of nothing more than the place in which he lived and the ascetic life he lived there. In his dreams he would see his hands pulling vegetables from the ground, or hear only the sound a rush of water would make as it fell from the pail onto the incredibly fecund earth of his garden. However, on the night that followed the day where the stranger had appeared, Niente was taken away by a dream that was not of the simple life that he lived alone on his empty plot of earth.
He saw a new world grow up from the spot where he had seen the stranger covering the earth. A vast new world opened up to him, within his sleep, of vibrant colours, and it was filled with a cacophony of noise, and overwrought with the intoxicating smells of a pure nature. His stagnant land of sand and emptiness transformed before his eyes into a living place with fields full of the thickest deep green grass, which were surrounded by mountains and hills whose peaks and brows he felt compelled to climb and conquer, sure in the promise that on the other side he would find more of this new wonder. From above and behind came the onrushing of a roaring thunder, and under a thin veil of rain, he watched ferocious waves, from a great blue sea, crashing violently in white blasts of salty cloud onto the sandy shore. Wild animals ran freely through the forests and fields, and the laughter of little children could be heard as they played hide and seek behind the protection of the trees.
Niente was lost in the feast of this new kingdom. Gasping for air, he awoke quickly before the morning light had the chance to come and force him to wake. He leapt from his bed into the void of darkness and ran to the door in furious anticipation of his dream having become a reality. Outside it would all be true, the stranger had sowed the seed, and the world he had dreamt would blossom into the most beautiful flower before his wild, ravenous eyes. He pulled open the door and tore towards the well and the spot where the stranger had been the day before.
He had run for only a few metres when he stopped dead, under the blinding light of the instantly risen sun, in the realisation that all was the same and nothing was any different than it had ever been before. The only change being in himself and that his teary eyes were now unable to focus clearly upon the well and the spot where the stranger had stood, and nothing had grown.
Niente fell to his knees and cupped his face in the hands he had only moments ago held outstretched to a future that he had already lost. The coarse sand offered little cushion to his knees and was now nothing more than ugly, yellow dust devoid forever more of any hidden significance or meaning. Now, he noticed for the first time that the hands that touched his face were wrinkled and old, and that the skin they touched was of the same weathered leathery texture.
He stayed locked like this, frozen on his knees, and began to sob.
Simon Friel is a Mancunian, living and working in El Raval, Barcelona.