Death in Spring

I

I removed my clothes and dropped them at the foot of the hackberry tree, beside the madman’s rock. Before entering the river, I stopped to observe the color left behind by the sky. The sun-dappled light was different now that spring had arrived, reborn after living beneath the earth and within branches. I lowered myself gently into the water, hardly daring to breathe, always with the fear that, as I entered the water world, the air — finally rid of my nuisance — would begin to rage and be transformed into furious wind, like the winter wind that nearly carried away houses, trees, and people. I had sought the broadest part of the river, a place farthest from the village, a place where no one ever came. I didn’t want to be seen. With the mass of water descending from the mountains, snow and streams escaping the shadows through cleft rocks, the river flowed, confident of itself. All the waters joined together in the delirium of joining and flowed endlessly, land on both sides. As soon as I had passed the stables and the horse enclosure, I realized I was being followed by a bee, as well as by the stench of manure and the honey scent of blooming wisteria. The water was cold as I cut through it with my arms and kicked it with my feet; I stopped from time to time to drink some. The sun, filled with the desire to soar, was rising on the other side of Pedres Altes, streaking the white winter water. To trick the bee that was following me, I ducked under the water so it would lose me and not know what to do. I was familiar with the obstinate, seven-year-old bees that possessed a sense of understanding. The water was turbid, like a glass cloud that reminded me of the glass balls in the courtyards beneath the strong wisteria vines, the wisteria that over the years upwrenched houses.

The houses in the village were all rose-colored. We painted them every spring and maybe for that reason the light was different. It captured the pink from the houses, the same way it took on the color of leaves and sun by the river. Shut inside in winter, we made horsetail paintbrushes with handles of wood and wire, and when we had finished them, we stored them in the shed in the Plaça and waited for good weather. Then all of us, men and boys, would set out for the cave on Maraldina in search of the red powder we needed for pink paint. The mountain was covered with heather and crowned by the dead tree, and the wind whistled through the brush. We climbed down to the cave along a knotted rope that had been fastened to a stake. The man who led the way carried a lamp. We lowered ourselves into the damp, black well; it was streaked with veins that would glisten in the sun, then slowly extinguish as we moved deeper and darkness fell, swallowing everything. Through the well we entered the cave, which was like the mouth of the infirm: red and damp. We filled our sacks with powder, tied them tight, and the men who stayed above hoisted them up and stacked them, one on top of the other. When we returned to the village, we would mix the crimson powder with water to make the pink paint that winter would erase. In spring — the blossoming, blooming wisteria draping the houses, bees buzzing — we painted. And suddenly the light was different.

We would leave in the dead of night with the wind always blowing on Maraldina mountain. The ascent was difficult. We entered the cave through the well and left loaded with sacks, one after the other, like ants. From the slope coming down the mountain, we could see the horses grazing, but they were used only for food. We cooked the horseflesh over a log fire, especially at a funeral Festa. At the slaughterhouse, the blood man was in charge of the others, all of whom were too old to do anything but slaughter horses, and the way the old men killed the animals made the meat taste of nothing, nothing but wood. When we climbed Maraldina, the harrying wind would push us backwards, and when we descended with sacks on our shoulders, the wind pushed us upwards. Whether going up or coming down, the wind beat against us as if it were pressing its huge hands against our chests. The old men explained that the low wind on Maraldina blew through the brush when no one was on the mountain. It carried souls that wandered the mountain with the sole purpose of creating fierce winds whenever we went in search of powder, rendering our work more arduous. The wind was telling us that ours was a senseless job, something that was better left undone. Souls have no mouths, so they spoke to us through the voice of the wind.

We would leave our sacks in the middle of the Plaça, and soon thereafter begin mixing the powder with water and painting everything rose-colored. All of the houses were pink except one: the house that belonged to Senyor. He lived at the top of the small mountain that was cleaved by a cliff and overlooked the village, protecting and menacing. The cliff, topped by Senyor’s house, was covered with ivy that blazed in autumn and died soon after.

II

I craned my head out of the water. The light was stronger now, and I swam slowly, wanting to take my time before leaving the river. The water embraced me. It would have seized me if I had let it, and — pushed forward and sucked under — I would have ended up in the place where nothing is comprehended. Reeds grew in the river; the current bent them, and they let themselves be rocked by water that was carrying the force of sky, earth, and snow. I got out, the water dripping down my body, making my skin glisten. The bee that had followed me for a long time had finally lost track of me. I lay down on the grass, in the same spot where I had stood before, beside the madman’s rock. A dip in the ground, that had been formed by a man hitting his head, had been turned by the rain into a bath for a black-crested bird. The dark shadow from the forest in front of me quivered. We called this grass rosa de gos, dog rose. Spiders were spinning webs from leaf to leaf, and insects — tiny, dead, dried — were trapped in threads that turned grey on cloudy days. I pulled up a clump of grass. Its roots were white and specks of dirt hung from them. On the tip of a curly root dangled an almost perfectly round speck. I clasped the grass by the blades and made it dance about, from side to side, but the dirt clung to the grass. I placed it on my knee as if I were planting it. It was cool. After a while, when I picked it up from my knee, it was warm, and I shook it hard to watch the dirt fall. Then I planted it again. In front of me lay the forest, where the elderly went from time to time, and when they did, they locked us children inside wooden cupboards in the kitchen. We could only breathe through the stars on the cupboard walls, empty stars, like windows in the shape of a star. Once I asked a boy from the nearby house if he was sometimes locked inside the kitchen cupboard, and he said he was. I asked him if the door had two panels with an empty star on each side. He said, there’s an empty star, but it’s not large enough to allow much air in, and if the elders are long in returning, we start to feel ill, like we’re suffocating. He said he watched through the star as the elderly people set off, and after that he could see only walls and ashes. Everything conveyed a sense of loneliness and sadness. Even the walls grew sad and old when the elderly left them alone and all the children were locked in cupboards like animals. And what he told me about things was true: alone, they grew old quickly, but in the company of people they grew old more slowly and in a different way; instead of becoming ugly, they became pretty. The elders would return early in the morning, yelling and singing in the streets, and sleep on the floor. Often they would forget to unlock the cupboards and the children became ill, their backs aching even more than when their parents beat them in a fit of anger. The village was painted pink, yet people still grew anxious because of the horses, because of the prisoner, because of the weather, because of the wisteria, because of the bees, because of Senyor who lived alone in the house on the ivy-covered cliff that on late summer afternoons looked like a wave of blood. And because of the Caramens, the shadows that crept among the shrubs, always threatening to attack the village. When a horse was born, the village held a Festa, but they didn’t lock us in cupboards, nor did they lock us up during the Festa Major celebrations that began with the watchmen’s dance and continued with people getting ahead of themselves in the race. They used to say that the day a man got ahead of himself, from then on he would have it easy, or mostly. Before dinner — after the dance and the race — a man, alone and naked, would enter the river and swim under the village to the other side, to ensure that the water had not dislodged any rocks, that the village was not about to be washed away. Sometimes the man emerged with his face ravaged, sometimes ripped away.

The ivy that crept up the cliff to Senyor’s house died each year. The autumn wind stripped it naked, and all the courtyards were strewn with crimson leaves. This is the only thing Senyor gives us, they said, other than children when he was young. But not now. And they would laugh and look up at the windows. When all the ivy leaves had fallen, we boys collected them in our baskets and left them to dry; then we piled them up in the Plaça. When we burned them, we would look up because Senyor’s head would appear through the long, narrow, middle window, and we would stick out our tongues at him. He would remain motionless, as if made of stone, and when the blue smoke disappeared, he would close his window, and that was it until the following year.

Senyor’s eyrie was on the top of the mountain and the mountain was small. It looked like it had been split in two by an axe. No one ever went to the other side of the mountain. They built the village over the river, and when the snows melted, everyone was afraid the village would be washed away. That is why every year a man entered the water on the upper side and swam under the village and came out on the lower side. Sometimes dead. Sometimes without a face because it had been ripped away when the desperate water hurled him against the rocks that supported the village.

III

At night you could hear groans beneath the beds; the sounds were coming from the river, as if the earth were groaning, on the point of carrying everything away, as if everything would vanish with the water. But it didn’t. The village remained, and only the water slipped secretly away. It was calm when it first arrived, but then turned wild with foam because it had dwelt so long in the dark. As though it had been frightened by being locked up for so long. I would sleep, and before falling asleep, or when I slept without sleeping, I used to think about things. I remembered my mother, without wanting to remember: straight and thin, with a red streak in her eyes. She used to beat children and spoil wedding nights. She would stand outside the newlyweds’ window on their wedding night, howling like a dog until the sickly morning light finally silenced her. No one paid any attention to mother’s howls, because she explained that her mother’s mother had done the same, as did all the women on her side of the family. Like lightning, she would bolt out of the house as soon as the newlyweds closed themselves inside, and she would begin to yell and yell with her twisted mouth. When mother was dead and had been buried for some time, I–I alone — heard her crying out beneath my father’s window the first day he and my stepmother slept together. It lasted until the first taste of light appeared.

One of my stepmother’s arms was much shorter than the other. Before I fell asleep I would think about my stepmother’s little arm, and I thought about the empty star in the cupboard where they locked me when they went to dance and laugh at funerals. I thought about the crimson powder and the cloud of souls and the tiny, reddish-purple heather that bloomed in autumn all across Maraldina. I thought about the sacks that bumped against the walls as we climbed out of the cave. The old men from the village, from the slaughterhouse, would come to the house when father was working in the fields. They brought things with them, and my stepmother would say to me: go help your father. And I would go, but when I would turn back to look at the house, it seemed to me that all around it wisteria roots were forcing it upward. I would walk along, kicking the dust, stopping at times to throw a stone at a lizard to cut off its tail, and then I would watch the tail trying to live, alone and desperate, until it became unbearable.

When I got out of the water I was fascinated by the sulphur dust that came from the marriage of flowers. A patch of it floated in a corner of the water. The sun was so strong that it made the blue round it less blue. Some sleeping fog broke up above the dog rose. When I had finished planting the grass, I thought again about Senyor’s house. I could see the side of it, the side without windows. It was topped by a spire. I could see Senyor, in my thoughts, coughing and eating honey, waiting always for the river to carry away the village. The ivy, high on the rock, was green. From time to time two men with long canes would thrash the new sprouts that wanted to creep up the house. The shredded leaves would fall down the cliff, their tender blades and little hands uprooted, down, down to the roofs and courtyards. The ivy had to be cut back or it would devour the walls. Every time one of the men struck furiously with his cane, causing bits of leaves to fall, Senyor leaned out and looked down, his hands resting on the windowsill.

IV

I decided to stroll through the soft grass, up the incline; at the end of the slope the tree nursery appeared from behind some shrubs. The seedlings had tender trunks and no leaves; but after they were transplanted in the forest and grew tall, they would all carry death inside them. I walked among them, and they looked like objects you see only when you’re asleep. I stopped at the entrance to the forest, at the divide between sun and shadow. I had seen the cloud of butterflies earlier. The trees in the forest were very tall, full of leaves — five-point leaves — and, just as the blacksmith had often told me, a plaque and a ring were attached to the foot of each tree. There were thousands of butterflies, all white. They fluttered about anxiously; many of them looked like half-opened flowers, the white slightly streaked with green. The leaves stirred and a splash of sun jumped from one to another; in between you could see speckles of blue. The ground was carpeted with old, dry leaves, and a rotten odor rose from beneath them. I picked up a leaf that was only a web of veins, like the wood and beams of a house, with nothing binding them together. I lay down under a tree and watched the cloud of butterflies bubble among the leaves. I looked at them through the web of leaf veins until I was tired, and as soon as I let it fall, I heard footsteps.

I jumped up and hid behind a shrub. The steps came closer. The shrub had a yellow, half-unsheathed flower and five leaves that gave off a prismatic sheen. The bee was sheltering there, dusting off its legs. I was sure it was the bee that had crossed the river and followed me from the village.

The steps stopped. Everything was quiet. As I strained to listen, I thought I could hear someone breathing. I felt a weight in the middle of my chest from listening: the same uneasy feeling I had when they locked me in the cupboard for hours, and the village was deserted, and I would wait. That was how I felt now. Nothing had changed: the leaves were the same, and the trees and butterflies, and the sense that Time inside the shadow was dead. But everything had changed.

I heard the steps again, closer now, and saw a bright flash under the leaves. The man who was approaching carried an axe on his shoulder and a pitchfork in his hand. He was naked from the waist up, his forehead smashed. His face had been disfigured by the rushing river, and he was unable to shut his eyes because the skin on his forehead had healed poorly. His red, shrunken skin was pulled tight, always leaving a slit in his eyes. He had patches of black hair on his chest; his body was sunburned.

The bee seemed to be asleep, the flower too, until a gust of air arose and the flower swayed and the bee escaped from inside, grazing my cheek; and as soon as the flower was still again, the bee flew back in. The man left his axe and pitchfork at the foot of a tree, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked round as if he were lost. I was afraid he had seen me because his eyes stopped on the shrub. But he hadn’t. He began moving from one tree to another, reading the plaques that hung from the rings. He tripped on a root and almost fell. Then he went deeper into the forest. When he was out of sight, I breathed deeply; the anxiety in my chest had kept me from breathing all that while. Flocks of clouds passed slowly by; I wished I could control them, sending them where I wanted. A cluster of very small ones came to a halt directly above the forest and stayed there a long time, giving the impression they did not want to leave. When the cluster of little clouds started to move away, the man returned. With his axe he began making a cross on a tree trunk; he had marked it with a stone, top to bottom and side to side. He worked mechanically, and after a while he dropped to his knees and began to cry. I held my breath. Still crying, he stood up, spit in his hands, and rubbed them together. The bee buzzed in and out of the flower. As the axe cut the trunk, you could see the line begin to emerge. With the first axe strokes, the butterflies went wild. Two of them flew down to the grass and stuck on one of the man’s legs as he was cutting open the tree trunk. The bee was sucking the flower. The man rested and again spit in the palms of his hands. While he was rubbing his hands together, the axe under his arm, he looked up and seemed enthralled for a moment by the flutter of butterflies. He appeared more tired when he resumed work, as if each stroke of the axe bore all the weight of life.

Much later, the man began cutting the transverse line on the cross. One blow after another. The two butterflies caught on his leg were so close together, their wings folded up so tightly, that they looked like one butterfly. The man’s back shone with sweat, his ribs too; he was very thin. I wanted to go over to him, speak to him, wanted to tell him that the blacksmith sometimes talked to me — between hammer blows, near the forge and sparks — about the forest and the dead people inside the trees.

The blacksmith had a house at the entrance to the village, a house with two wisteria vines, one on each side of the huge door, winding upward, covering the roof in a tangled mass of branches. As the sparks flew from the forge, the blacksmith told me: you too have your tree, your ring, and your plaque. I did it when you were born. When someone is born, I make their ring and plaque right away. Don’t tell anyone I told you. All of us have our ring, our plaque, and our tree. And at the entrance to the forest stand the pitchfork and the axe.

V

I wanted to tell him that two butterflies were stuck to his leg, but I stood still behind the shrub, shut my eyes so I wouldn’t see, and tried not to think. I didn’t open my eyes for a while, not until I could no longer hear the axe striking. The man finished the transverse line of the cross and, using the pitchfork as a lever, he was prying the bark from the tree. It was difficult. When he had separated the bark, he grabbed one of the four ends with all his might and yanked it upward. He folded it back and nailed it to the tree with a large nail, using the back of the axe as a hammer. One after the other he nailed the ends — the four parts folded into the center — through the middle of the cross, then to the bark, the second nail above, the other two below. The trunk looked like a splayed horse. The tree was as wide and as tall as a man, and I noticed the seedcase inside. It looked slightly green in the green light of the forest, the same color as the tree trunks in the nursery. The man poked the seedcase with the pitchfork, first on one side, then the other, until it fell to the ground. Smoke rose from the gap left in the tree. The man put down the pitchfork, wiped the sweat from his neck, and rolled the seedcase to the foot of another tree. Some leaves were caught on it. He knelt down, head bowed, hands open on his knees, not moving. Then he sat on the ground and looked in the direction of the setting sun, at the butterflies.

Many of the leaves on the lower branches were partially eaten away, others merely pierced by little holes. The caterpillars never stopped chewing as they prepared to become butterflies. The man looked up with eyes he could not completely close. The air became wind. The man turned round, picked up the iron plaque, and looked at it as if he had never seen it before. He rubbed a finger over it, following the letters, one by one, until finally he stood up, seized the pitchfork and axe and headed toward the entrance to the forest, the axe on his shoulder flashing from time to time among the low-lying leaves. He came back empty-handed; and as if everything were going to recommence, the bee returned and entered the flower and the man approached his tree. He was weeping. He stepped backwards into the tree. The two butterflies had disentangled themselves from his leg when he rolled the seedcase and were now circling together above some blades of grass. They entered the tree with him, but flew out before the final entombment and landed briefly on a tree knot before moving to the soft, rubbery seedcase, where they stayed. I had turned my head, and when I looked back at the tree, I saw only the cross and the four nails on the ground. The bee was buzzing furiously before my eyes, like a pouch with yellow and black stripes. Tiny.

I stood up, rubbing my eyes from the sulphur-laced dust, and walked to the foot of the tree. Everything was still, more so than by the shrub. Everything was calm: the flutter of butterflies, the living and dying of caterpillars, the resin bubbling up and down and side to side on the cross as it healed the tree’s wound.

I was frightened. Frightened by the resin bubbling on its own, the ceiling of light hidden by leaves, and so many white wings flapping. I left, slowly at first, backing away, then I started to run, as if pursued by the man, the pitchfork, the axe. I stopped by the edge of the river and covered my ears with my open hands so I would not hear the quiet. I crossed the river again, swimming underwater because the bee was following me: I would have killed it if I could. I wanted it to be lost and alone in the dog roses where spiders lay in wait for it. On the other side of the river, I left behind the odor of caterpillar-gorged leaves and encountered the fragrance of wisteria and the stench of manure. Death in spring. I threw myself on the ground, on top of the pebbles, my heart drained of blood, my hands icy. I was fourteen years old, and the man who had entered the tree to die was my father.

VI

I passed by the stables and took the shortcut through the horse enclosure. Right away I heard the sound of hammering. In the last rays of sunlight, the village seemed to be wrapped in lilac-colored smoke. Bees were everywhere. I glanced at the slaughterhouse tower with its handless clock and the straggle of houses, some still standing, many leaning to the side from the weight of so much wisteria, so many jasmine vines. The sound of the river was louder once you left the village.

The blacksmith was short and wide with crooked legs. I had always liked going to see him: the hammer and anvil, sparks shooting from the forge, the iron screaming as if it were alive in the water. I had enjoyed these things since I was little, since the first day I had gone to see the blacksmith make rings, awls, plaques. The plaques for the villagers bore only their names. But a bee flying into a bird’s open beak was engraved above the names of the dead from Senyor’s household. They used to say Senyor was the last of his race. And then they would laugh.

At noon, especially in the summertime when it is hard to breathe and the shade is blue, the whole village echoed with the hammer striking the anvil. The blacksmith would say to me: You see? Medals with names on them. You see? Rings. Don’t tell anyone I told you. When you were born I made your ring and plaque right away, and we went with your father to nail it to your tree. He talked to me about the forest of the dead; he told me he never went there until he became a man.

As soon as he saw me at the entrance, he stopped hammering. He had tangled hair, thick eyebrows, and large hands with stubby fingers, his nails cut short. A drop of sweat trickled down his cheek. I walked over to him and explained what I had seen. He didn’t say a word. Instead, he plunged his head in the bucket used for cooling iron, put on some kind of shirt, and hurried out without buttoning it all the way up. I stood at the doorway, my teeth clattering. The blacksmith darted in and out of houses. A few frightened women called to their children. The blacksmith’s wife emerged and pushed me away before leaving with the other women. Soon, along the part of the street I could see, men were running as if they were being chased. An old man from the slaughterhouse, his arms dangling awkwardly, ashen like all the old men from the slaughterhouse, walked by me and asked what had happened; before I could answer, a man told him that everyone was heading to the Plaça. I kept staring at the wall on the other side of the street. It was made of large rocks all fitted together, with moss in the crevices. The wall was very old, its grey and yellow rocks timeworn; when the long-bladed grass growing on it became too thick, the blacksmith would climb on a box and pull it up. I saw a clumsy human figure etched on the wall that day. The legs, which appeared to be swimming, rested on a yellow rock and the stiff upper body on a thin grey strip of rock. The partially-erased arms were raised. It had no face. Shortly thereafter, as I searched for the face, I heard people approaching. A crowd of men passed by, led by the blacksmith. The old man from the slaughterhouse who asked what was happening walked beside him, talking constantly. Old men were followed by young men. One of them, a very tall, thin man, was calling out to see if the cement man — who wasn’t anywhere around — had been informed, offering to notify him and help with the mortar trough and trowel. They carried torches. The women passed me; the blacksmith’s wife with the purple mark on her cheek walked between two older women, giving the impression that she wasn’t looking. They marched right by me, in front of the wall. Pregnant women were last, behind everyone, their heads up, holding hands.

When they disappeared, I entered the nearest house. The door was open. Wisteria blossoms showered the courtyard; the bees no longer grumbled. I walked over to the star on the cupboard in the kitchen and glimpsed a pair of eyes observing me sadly, like an animal’s. I returned to the street. The village seemed dead, like Sunday afternoons when people set out to look at the prisoner. The only sound arose from the river. I headed for the path everyone had taken, the straight path, the path with the dandelions you blow apart with a puff, the path with lizards whose tails grow back. The path beyond the slope that was full of dust in summer and mud in winter. When I reached the Pont de Fusta, I stopped on the bridge to look at the water that was filled with a kind of sky that was not quite a night sky. I scrutinized it with such fascination that I didn’t realize the moon was shining until a cloud hid it.

Beyond the Pont de Fusta, the path descended. When I was little the path would pull me along as if I were suddenly empty. A cliff frightens you, stops you, but a slope is silent and sweeps you away. On a slope, man met shadow and they never parted. They established the village. The man, the shadow by his side, planted the first wisteria. But that’s not exactly how it was. A long time ago when the oldest of the old men in the village was young, he witnessed the birth of everything. The village was born from the earth’s terrible unrest. The mountain was cleaved and it collapsed into the river, scattering the water through the fields. But the river wanted to flow with all of its water gathered together and began burrowing beneath the crumpled mountain, emptying it little by little. The river never rested until all the water could flow happily together again, although at times it grew furious when it hit the rock ceiling. They say that one night, not at the bottom of the slope, but on the ground, on the rocks hurled from the cliff, the moon showed two shadows joined at the mouth. And it rained blood. That is how it all began.

A great storm arose. The thunder, lightning, and rain lasted all night.

VII

After I had left behind the Pont de Fusta and slope, I began to run. I stopped at the edge of the forest, out of breath. No sound issued from the forest, as if it had been swallowed up. I followed the line of trees until I arrived at the seedlings and entered the forest in the same place as before. Everyone was grouped round the tree, the cross bubbling, creating a border. The glowing torches turned the green of the low-hanging leaves a strange green. The butterflies must have been asleep because I could not see them in the high branches.

The blacksmith broke away from the crowd and approached the tree. My stepmother must have gone for the axe, because she handed it to him. His short arms were poised in the air, then he delivered the first blow to the vertical line marked by the cross. No one breathed. A woman, her arms extended, started to shriek like an animal and was led away to the river where she suddenly became quiet. A man stood beside me, on a spot where the torches shed only a faint light. I didn’t know him; I didn’t think I had ever seen him before. He turned his head toward me, and when he turned I could see his eyes, large and shiny. One of the torch bearers had moved, and I glimpsed the eyes of the man who was standing so close to me. The person who moved was at a distance, but the torch had cast the beam in the man’s eyes. The man cupped his hand in front of his lips, speaking to me out of the side of his mouth, so no one would hear — he told me that he enjoyed watching people die. When he wheeled round to see what was happening, I stepped back further into the shadow. As the blacksmith was preparing to swing the axe a second time, the old man who had walked beside him seized him by the arm, and he told the blacksmith that the tree should not be opened with an axe — it had already been breached — and the axe blows could kill whoever was inside, if he was still alive. Then the blacksmith sent for a large branch and, with some help, shoved it as best he could into the tree, through the middle of the cross. Carefully, through the hole made by the branch, he pulled, cut, and unsealed the tree. Four men grasped each end of the bark and yanked furiously. The blacksmith spun round, his face worn and pasty, and announced that the tree was resisting; it didn’t want the dead person that belonged to it removed. His mouth a square hole, his eyes glassy, my father appeared to be watching. The tips of his fingers were embedded in the sides of the trunk, and I am not sure if I saw it. his hair drawn upwards by the tree’s colorless blood. The branch that had been wedged inside the tree was pinning him backwards, piercing his stomach.

They started to shout. They shouted at my father who had little remaining breath and was clearly near his end. He was still alive, but only his own death kept him alive. They dragged him from the tree, laid him on the ground, and began beating him. The last blows made no sound. Don’t kill him, shouted the cement man. The mortar trough, filled with rose-colored cement, lay at his feet. Don’t kill him before he has been filled. They pried his mouth partially open, and the cement man began to fill it. First with watery cement so it would slide far down inside him, then with thick cement. When he was well cemented, they stood him up and put him back inside the tree. They replaced the cross and left to prepare the Festa.

I stayed on alone; the tree was barely visible without the torches. I went up to it and placed my ear against the bark. It seemed empty. I looked up because I wanted to see a little starlight. As I gazed upward, I could feel my link with life snapping. I felt detached from everything. I searched for my tree; night was a hand, wrenching me from my father’s tree, leading me to mine. I knelt down and crawled on my knees from one trunk to another, fingering the names of the living and the dead. I could smell the fretted leaves and trampled grass. When I lifted a plaque, the ring sometimes squealed, as if it were tearing something that was deeply hidden, something that thrust blades of grass and leaves on branches upward. A ray of moonlight helped me locate my tree; it was directly in front of my father’s. The plaque smelled of rust. I would end my days locked in that tree, my mouth full of cement that had been mixed with crimson powder, my entire soul within. Because, you see, the blacksmith used to say that with the last breath, without anyone realizing, your soul flees. And no one knows where it goes.

The village was deserted. Only the grieving sound of the hidden river reached me. From time to time a blossom fell from the cluster above, grazing my cheek. This was the hour that roots strained to upwrench houses. When a large crack appeared in a wall, it was filled with cement and the house became safe again. I followed all the villagers, as though I wasn’t following them. I could still hear the voice of the man in the forest. I entered many kitchens where eyes waited behind stars in cupboards, just as mine had waited for the elderly to come and free me. I opened the doors to all the cupboards, and the sleepy children staggered out. I made my way to the blacksmith’s house, where I struck the anvil two or three times with my open hand. I walked further inside. The blacksmith’s son was skeleton-thin, and they always kept him in bed. I went over to gaze at him and touched him, but he didn’t move. I continued on to my house and went upstairs; I could see the glow of the fires on the other side of the stables, on the Festa esplanade. All of a sudden I wanted to go and see them. No one was home, and as I was leaving I ran my hand along the windowsill. No flowerpot stood at the window; my stepmother always had a pot with a flower on the sill. Sometimes the flower was white, sometimes red. But there was no flowerpot that day. My stepmother wasn’t at home. She was sixteen years old.

The horses ate the juiciest grass, gorged on the sweetest alfalfa, chewed the flattest carob beans. Horseflesh, they told us, would replenish your blood. We ate it in a variety of ways: often raw (chopped up and mixed with herbs), roasted in drippings in winter, sometimes cooked over a log fire — always cooked over wood at funeral feasts. The fat was made into balls and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen or dining room. The balls of fat went well with the soap bubbles from the wash area where the water was playful; some hung from the courtyard arbors all spring, even part of summer. As though they were made of glass. The ones the children made almost always burst when shot from canes; no one could explain why some lasted a long time, others only a moment. If one ever turned into glass, we placed it carefully in the fork of the wisteria vines. At home, we had always had soap bubbles and balls of fat. Two or three times a week my stepmother would say to my father, go to the fields, I’m expecting some fat. And father would say, fine. I would also say, fine, very softly so they wouldn’t hear me because the two of them were walking together and I was farther off. Then my stepmother would put the flowerpot on the windowsill, and that night she had a ball of fat hanging from the ceiling.

My stepmother was so short she had to climb up on a wooden box to put the flowerpot on the windowsill. While she was waiting for them to bring her some fat, she would drag the bed to the middle of the room, where she usually slept, and crawl into it. An earth-colored blanket lay across the bed. If father and I were at home, she would sit in a chair, her legs folded beneath her, head resting against the back of the chair. She would often sit like that when father and I straightened up the kitchen. Sometimes while sitting in her chair she would take a cane and rock the balls of fat with little nudges. Father used to say she thought only about playing. Some days he would fill a basket with wisteria blossoms and tell her, play. She would say she was working because she was stringing wisteria flowers together with a needle and thread, threading all the flowers through the stems. They were necklaces. Some nights she didn’t want to go to sleep because she said she had slept all day, and on top of sleeping during the day, she couldn’t sleep all night too. I would sneak down and watch her. I discovered she didn’t want to go to bed because she wanted to eat the fat without anyone seeing her.

I slept upstairs. If I leaned out of the window, I had a glimpse of a speck of sky overhead. From my bed I could see the ivy wall on the cleft mountain. At times when I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I thought how I wanted to bring Senyor crashing down — especially in winter when it snowed — or help the roots upwrench houses, or walk the horses on Maraldina where no one had ever been. I would think about things like that with my eyes closed until I got sleepy. The last thing I would hear, while everyone rested with their eyes shut, was the river dislodging the rocks that supported the village.

I wanted to see the Festa, so I went. The villagers had gathered near the river, on the esplanade by the canes that whistled because it was windy. Tables and benches had been built from tree trunks. The horse hoof soup was already boiling in large cauldrons, and standing beside each pot was a woman who was removing scum with a ladle and throwing fat and lumps of cooked blood on the ground. For a funeral Festa, they killed horses and pregnant mares. First, they ate the soup, then the horse or mare, and then a morsel — but only a small piece because there wasn’t much to go round — of the little ones the mares were carrying inside them. They made a paste with the brains; it helped digestion. They peeled them, boiled them in a pot used only for brains, cleaned them, and then chopped them to bits.

With one spoonful of the paste, you had plenty. It was mixed with honey and went down like oil, passing through your innards, leaving you feeling fresh. More than one spoonful and you went mad. Just one spoonful, they would say. The paste provided them with the stamina needed to raise horses, cut alfalfa, and trudge all the way to the carob trees to look for beans. They used to say that those carob trees had witnessed the birth of the village, the two conjoined shadows, and the first horse’s leap as it neighed and emerged like a flame, all alone, from the middle of the river. They used to say that if those carob trees could talk.

I stood very still behind a clump of canes. They were still slitting open horses. They tied their legs and strung them up on a kind of clothesline; you could see the empty space inside them lighting up, glistening in the firelight. The blacksmith’s wife — short and ugly, with the purple mark on her cheek — was peeling brains with the two women who had accompanied her to the forest of the dead. Suddenly she jumped up, telling everyone to be quiet. She thought she heard the prisoner neighing.

VIII

In the firelight the men and the women all looked alike. In the daytime they appeared quite different: some were tall, some short, some thin, some fat; some had more hair than others, or a broader or longer nose, or different-colored eyes. But in the firelight they all looked alike. In the very middle of the day, when they were calm and occupied, the only ones who looked alike were fathers and sons. Some sons were identical to their fathers; some, however, did not resemble them at all. This almost drove the fathers mad, but little by little they grew accustomed to the idea. They said it all came from looking. Near the canes where I was hiding, a group of dirty, disheveled women were sitting on the ground away from the fire, their eyes blindfolded. They were the pregnant ones. They covered their eyes because if they gazed at other men, the children they were carrying would also take a peek and begin to resemble the men. They said a woman fell in love with every man she saw, and the longer she was pregnant, the faster she fell in love. So, what with women falling in love and children looking, what shouldn’t happen, happened.

They filled their plates with soup and sat down on the benches round the tables, like brothers and sisters, drinking the soup straight from their plates. The faceless men were seated at another table closer to the river; the men without noses, or their foreheads ripped away, or missing an ear, could sit at the table with everyone else and live like everybody. But the faceless men wished to be alone. They drank the soup with a funnel of sorts and chewed the meat with one hand grasping the hole in their mouths so the meat would not slip out. They were ashamed to live in the village and preferred to be alone. They lived together in an enclosure behind the stables and helped each other. Once a man had lost his face, he was always in the company of another faceless man. It was as though they had never had anything at all; being mutilated meant relinquishing whatever they possessed. They started work at night: they grazed horses, cleaned streets, chopped wood — all manner of jobs. When they were among themselves they talked about the water and the strange taste of the drink they were forced to swallow before swimming through the river. And the serpent, and the waterfall that sounded like it was hidden but was more formidable than Font de la Jonquilla, the buttercup fountain. They were always at peace, according to the elderly, because they had perceived truth up close. They were reborn, it seemed, after crossing the river; they were less driven and possessed greater clarity than before. But they died the same as others: one moment alive, then their mouths filled with cement, all the way down to their stomachs.

The canes whistled softly. When the villagers had eaten their fill, the shouts and cries of joy commenced. They called out to each other from table to table or ear to ear and laughed. The digestion-paste was passed round and all of them swallowed a spoonful. The blacksmith didn’t want any, so they grabbed hold of him and stretched him out on top of the table. Two women pulled at his feet, trying to make him fall off, onto the ground. One was my stepmother. The pregnant women stood up to dance. They danced alone, giving the impression that each was planted in the ground. And they sang to themselves as they danced. They lowered their heads to their chests, raised them up, threw them back, and spun round as if they would be spinning round like that all their lives, amidst shadows and flames, without a man, alone, bellies protruding in front of them, hair unkempt.

Until the canes began to sway in the wind, I had not realized they had been still for a while. The sky had blackened, leaving no trace of the moon. The first drops fell, fat and far apart. If it had not been for the shouts, I would have heard the rain falling on the river. They sprang to their feet and started to run, pursued by the rain. My stepmother ran too; she was the last one I saw in the firelight. The smell of extinguished fires pervaded everything. The water fell on the dead coals, drenched ashes, gnawed bones and grimy tools. A flash of lightning drew everything out of the shadow, and suddenly everything died. died. filled with cement, upright inside the tree. Father was dead. I felt I could not leave him there, that I should go back. I crossed the river again at the Pont de Fusta in the torrential rain. At the end of the slope, I took the path that led to the forest of the dead. As I approached the tree, the rain stopped, and I could hear it making its way to the other side of the forest. The cross on the tree was bubbling; the tree was digesting. I rubbed a finger over the resin and pictured the wall with the people passing by, heard the voice of the man with shiny eyes and the screams of the woman who had to be removed. and I had done nothing for my father. I gathered some resin and held it for a moment in my fingers. When it started to dry, I fashioned it into a ball and carried it for a long time in my pocket. My fingers were clasping the ball of resin the day the blacksmith told me things, and when I emerged from his house, I threw it away.

I left the forest by the seedlings and walked back toward the bridge, the Pont de Fusta, bordering the trees. A dead bee was trapped in a spider web suspended between two tall bushes. I broke the web and shoved it into the ground with the tip of my foot, bee and all.