MargenThey hired me to draw the map of a village that no longer exists. Not an old village: one that disappeared last Tuesday, with its streets, its fountain and its seventy-one inhabitants, without a single person in the district remembering it the next day.
The commission came from an unnamed office in the capital. They handed me a file of old aerial photographs, an envelope of money and one single instruction: «Draw it well. It's the only way for it to be somewhere again».
I drove up to the valley. Where the file marked the village, the satnav insisted there was nothing: a pine wood, a stream, the green nothing of the mountain. But I have spent my whole life mapping, and I can read ground the way other people read a face. There, under the new grass, you could make out the outline of a square. Over there, the rectangular shadow of what had been a church. The pines grew in lines too straight to be a forest: they were streets waiting for someone to name them again.
I worked nine days. I measured, I calculated, I drew. And something happened that I can't explain without sounding mad: as the ink filled the paper, the village came back. First the smell of bread from a bakery I couldn't see. Then the echo of a bell in a belfry that wasn't there. On the seventh day, a boy brought me water from a fountain that the morning before had been nothing but pine trees.
"Are you the one who's drawing us?" he asked.
I nodded, my hand shaking above the paper.
"Tell the ones in the capital to make it last this time," he said. "The last time they erased us, it took them fifty years to remember to send somebody."
I finished the map on the ninth day and delivered it to the unnamed office. The official unfolded it, looked at it for a long while and smiled with a sadness that didn't match his suit.
"Perfect," he said. "Every line in its place. Now it exists again."
He put the map away in a metal drawer, locked it and held out his hand.
"And if one day you lose this map?" I asked.
"Then we'll send another cartographer, half a century from now, to draw it all over again." He looked at me with something close to pity. "The way we did with you."
I didn't understand what he meant until I stepped out into the street and looked for my car where I'd left it. It wasn't there. Neither was the street. Nor the city. Only a pine wood of lines too straight, and very far away, the tiny light of an office, keeping in a drawer the only place where I still exist.