The Horse of Turin
I am a horse. Each morning, I step into the waking streets of Turin, and the sound of my hooves on the cobblestones mingles with the groan of the cart behind me. The city rarely lifts its veil of winter fog; stone walls stay damp, and the air hangs heavy with the smoke of coal fires and the faint, comforting scent of fresh bread.
I’ve lived this life for seven years. Once, I was young and full of strength, my coat smooth, my body firm. Now my ribs show, and my coat has dulled, but my legs still carry me. They still know what to do.
It was during the autumn of 1887 that I first noticed him. He always appeared along the same stretch of road, walking slowly, never rushing like the others. He wore thick spectacles, and while the rest of Turin hurried past, he took his time, his gaze lingering on buildings, on clouds, and eventually, on me.
At first, I thought he might have business with my master, or perhaps with the cart I pulled. But he never spoke. He only stood and watched me work, day after day.
I remember one afternoon in particular. The cart was loaded with stone, and the road sloped steeply upward. My breath came hard, chest straining, legs aching as I pushed forward through sheer force of habit. When I stopped briefly to catch my breath, I saw him standing at the side of the road, his eyes fixed on me. There was something in his expression I had never seen in a human being before, something like reverence, maybe even longing.
He whispered something then, though I barely caught it: “Such pure force.”
I didn’t know what the words meant, but I felt the weight behind them.
After that, I saw him more often. He came regularly now, always silent, always observing. He never pointed, never mocked my pace like others sometimes did. He simply watched, as though he was waiting to discover something not in me, but through me.
One grey day, rain came down steadily as I stood in the square. My master had disappeared into the tavern, and the cold water soaked through my mane and dripped from my muzzle. The man stood across the way, under a narrow overhang, shielded from the worst of the rain, though he barely seemed to notice it.
“You endure it all,” he said suddenly, his voice loud enough to reach me through the noise of the rain. “The cold, the wet, the weight, and you don’t resist. You just continue. If tomorrow brings the same, and the day after that too, I imagine you’d accept it without question.”
I flicked my tail at the flies and let his words settle. He wasn’t wrong. I had never imagined anything different. This was my life.
He walked over, slowly, and raised a trembling hand to touch my muzzle. His fingers were icy, but careful. “Do you know what nobility is?” he asked quietly, his voice strained but sincere. “It’s remaining true to your nature, even when everything around you is harsh and unforgiving. You pull your weight, you take the blows, and you never ask for more than what is needed. You don’t lie. You don’t pretend. You simply are.”
Only then did I begin to understand why he kept coming back. In me, he saw something he couldn’t find in the human world. I lived without deception. I didn’t question my place or search for meaning beyond what was already there.
As the months passed, he changed. His visits grew more intense, and his gaze more desperate. He began to speak more openly, even to me, as though I were capable of answering him.
“They all wear masks,” he cried once, almost angrily. “Every single one of them plays a part, pious, moral, respectable, but it’s all performance. And you… you never pretend. When you’re hungry, you seek food. When you’re tired, you rest. When you hurt, it shows. You are the only honest creature I’ve met.”
I could feel something unravelling inside him. He was a man torn open by the knowledge that he could see the truth of things, but not live within it. He envied me not because I was wise, but because I didn’t need to be. I simply was, while he was forever becoming.
He began talking about things I could not grasp, about the death of God, about the need to create new values, about a kind of humanity that didn’t yet exist. But whenever he looked at me, I saw that those ideas, so grand and important in his mind, seemed to falter.
“We must become creators of meaning,” he told me once, his voice full of passion. “We must overcome everything we've inherited. We must stand beyond good and evil.” And then, after a pause, he added, more softly, “But you… you are already there. Nothing binds you, and you need to invent nothing. Your being is already complete.”
And perhaps that was the source of his grief. Everything he had worked toward, every theory, every idea, was a path meant to lead to what I had from the beginning. It was this terrible irony he could not bear.
In the last months of 1888, his mind began to fray. His words came in fragments, his presence became erratic. Sometimes he would rush toward me and bury his face in my neck, his shoulders shaking with sobs he could no longer control.
He was at war with himself. One part of him longed to be like me: to live without the burden of thought, to return to something more instinctual, more whole. But the other part, the thinking part, the human part, would not let go. Once self-awareness takes hold, there is no way back.
I remember him pacing before me, muttering under his breath: “Become beast, or become god? Which is the escape?” I could offer no comfort. I only watched as he drifted further from whatever peace he had once known.
Then came that bitter morning in January of 1889. Snow had fallen lightly overnight, covering the streets in a thin white sheet. My master was in a foul temper. Perhaps he had lost money, or slept poorly. Whatever the reason, he began beating me more cruelly than usual. The whip lashed across my back and flanks again and again, until the skin broke and warm blood began to drip down my legs.
I didn’t fight. I never have. This, too, was part of my life. And then I saw him. He had appeared at the end of the street, and as he saw what was happening, something in him broke completely.
He cried out, in a sound so raw it seemed to come from the deepest part of his being. He rushed forward, shoved my master aside, and threw his arms around my neck. He held me tightly, sobbing without restraint, his voice cracking with grief.
“Forgive me,” he whispered again and again. “Forgive me, my brother.”
In that moment, I understood. All his theories, about strength, about rising above morality, about becoming more than human, meant nothing when faced with one creature's pain. He had tried to understand suffering with his mind. But in that moment, he felt it in his body. And it broke him.
He had spoken of nature’s purity, but could not accept its cruelty. He had praised the will to power, but recoiled at the use of force. He had imagined a world beyond good and evil, but was crushed by a simple act of violence.
And most of all, he saw that no matter how far reason stretches, it will never explain why a being suffers, nor can it undo that suffering.
When they came to take him away, his eyes were vacant, and his words were senseless. But just before they pulled him from my side, he looked at me one last time. In that gaze, I saw something I hadn’t seen before, not madness, not grief, but a quiet kind of peace. He had stopped trying to solve the world. He had finally surrendered to it.
I still walk these streets. The snow melted. My wounds healed, though the scars remain.
They say he went mad, but that is only the name people give to the moment a man no longer fits the world he once believed in.
I remember the way he looked at me, the way he spoke, as if I were the last creature on earth he could trust. In those quiet memories, I understand now: he had glimpsed a truth he could not bear. That a beast without question may live closer to peace than the man who spends his life writing a thousand answers.
He wanted to rise above life, to master it, to transcend it. But life, raw, ordinary, unrelenting, refused to release him.
And so he wept, and finally went mad, from the unbearable burden of seeing clearly, and knowing there was no escape. He went mad for me, for himself, and for the impossible task of thinking one’s way free from the very condition of being.