David Malouf's An Imaginary Life

.

WHEN I FIRST saw the child I cannot say. I see myself – I might be three or four years old – playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance. The goatherd is dozing against an olive bole, his head rolled back to show the dark line of his jaw and the sinews of his scraggy neck, the black mouth gaping. Bees shift amongst the herbs. The air glitters. It must be late summer. There are windblown poppies in the grass. A black he-goat is up on his hind legs reaching for vineshoots.
The child is there. I am three or four years old. It is late summer. It is spring. I am six. I am eight. The child is always the same age. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us.
He is a wild boy.
I have heard the goatherds speak of a wild boy, whether this one or another I do not know; and of course I do not admit to them, or to anyone that I know him. The wild boy they speak of lives among wolves, in the ravines to the east, beyond the cultivated farms and villas of our well-watered valley.
There really are wolves out there. I have heard stories of how they raid the outlying pastures, and once I think I heard one howling in the snow. Unless it was the child. And I have seen a wolf’s head that one of the hunters brought back to hang up as a warning in his fold. It was gray, and not very fierce looking, despite the curling back of the flesh over its fanged jaw. I thought of the child, and how wolves must have something in their nature which is kindly, and which connects with our kind, or how else could the child live amongst them? What was frightening was the way the head had been hacked off, with ropes of dark blood hanging from it and the fur at its throat matted with blood. Later I heard, again from the goatherds perhaps, that there is indeed some part of our nature that we share with wolves, and something of their nature that is in us, since there are men, at certain phases of the moon, who can transform themselves into wolves. They close their human mind like a fist and when they open it again it is a wolf’s paw. The skull bulges, the jaw pushes out to become a snout. Hair prickles down their spine, grows rough on their belly. The body slouches and is on all fours. The voice thickens. It is the moon draws them on. I believed such things in those days, and wondered. Was the child a wolf boy? Were those wolf men who lived secretly among us, changing themselves painfully at the moon’s bidding, children who had been captured from the wilds and brought in among us, to be adapted to the ways of men?
Sometime when my own body began to change and I discovered the first signs of manhood upon me, the child left and did not reappear, though I dreamt of it often enough in those early years, and have done so since. I have forgotten the language we used, and if he were to reappear, perhaps we could no longer communicate. Did he have some message for me then? If so, he failed to deliver it. Or did so and it has slipped my mind. Or the language he used on whatever occasion it was had already passed my understanding and could not be translated into daily speech. I believe (I think I have always believed) that he will come again. But in what guise? As a child still? As a man of my own age? As a wolf? Or has he the power to adopt other forms as well? Has he already returned to me, perhaps, in a form so humble, so ordinary, that I failed to perceive his presence?
I tell no one of this, as all those years ago I was careful to admit to no one that he was there – not even my brother who was the same age and would have understood. Under all my skepticism this grain of belief.