Chapter 1.

Frail morning sunlight streaked through the auditorium’s ajar windows. The professor’s distant voice, reflected in a creaky echo by the old wooden benches, the tiled floor and the empty walls, became an indistinct hum, lulling the drowsy students to sleep. I had stopped listening for ages, and only snatches of sentences buzzed into my head like annoying flies. I watched the sun dust swirl lazily here and there around the hall, disturbed by a scholar suddenly awakening from the ubiquitous slumber.

This dust, I thought, had been here since the beginning of Earth. It had been there before the wall was built, possibly mixed with the cement that set the bricks, only to fall again, washed away by erosion, to the other side of the wall. I suddenly hated this dust, this insidious mass of tiny particles that penetrated our lungs, irritated our nostrils, infiltrated our clothes without our noticing. Only the combination of light and shadow from a certain angle revealed the existence of this dust, reminding us of our finitude in relation to death, to time, to the universe, which spare none of our organic debris.

My ear picked up some of the professor’s fly-like words, a string of names of politicians often mentioned in relation to the wall. Self-proclaimed leaders regularly appeared in our city, sometimes surrounded by gullible followers who then formed parties whose program was exclusively focused on the wall.

The wall had always been there. No one knew when, why or by whom the wall had been erected. It towered over the village with its imposing mass, rising skyward and blending into the horizon on either side. It was so present that it had become absent. The villagers had grown accustomed to it over so many generations that the question of the existence of a world behind the wall made no more sense than a query about extraterrestrial life.

But sometimes, in the midst of some social tension, a demagogue would rise up and toy with the villagers’ superstition, blaming the wall for all the village’s misfortunes, starting with inflation and ending with the flu epidemic. The wall hid the truth from us, and the late afternoon sun, and emanated coldness and occultism unworthy of a modern, progressive town. The crowd would get riled up, wave flags and headgear, while the histrion would tear out his vocal cords, preferably at the foot of the complicit wall whose echo multiplied his decibels. But as the villagers gasped for air, the wall would penetrate them in the form of dust, leaving its mark on their mucous membranes, and they couldn’t understand why, in the evening, their imagined triumph was marred by a wet cough.

The bell rang and, without mixing with the mass of students slowly recovering from their stupor, in a few light steps I reached the exit and took a breath of summer air. Over the rooftops rose the wall. As I looked at it, I whispered, “Now it’s just the two of us.”

What should the narrator do? Leave the village: go to Chapter 2. Stay in the village: go to Chapter 13.