Death in Spring

I

The birds always came from the direction of the cleft mountain. The ones in mourning were the first to arrive. They headed straight to the pasture where the horses grazed, cawing raucously and circling the sky all day long. On the following day they would approach the houses, raising an enormous din, soaring and diving as they hunted. The birds were black-plumed and black-billed; a white selvage circled their even blacker eyes. When they took flight, their tail and wing feathers would spread apart: you could almost count them. They would slowly take to the air, then suddenly begin making furious loops, their feet embedded in their bellies, out of sight, as if they had been misplaced. Straight away, they would begin building their nests in the forks of wisteria vines, where the entwined branches were most tangled. They made them with old grass they had scavenged from beneath tender grass, weaving the blades together with sedge that grew in the river. Once the nests were finished, they would return to the pasture and perch on the horses’ haunches, running their beaks slowly through the dense horsehair. The horses were fond of the mourners and would stand very still, hardly breathing. They would live together for two full weeks. If anyone tried to approach the horses, the mourners attacked them with their beaks, and the horses would lower their heads and stomp the ground with their right front hooves. When the two weeks had passed, the birds would return to find their nests full of bees that had grown fat on wisteria juice, bees they quickly downed before laying three eggs. They would sit on the eggs a few days; then the white birds would arrive. These small, mateless birds had red eyes and short, wide tail feathers. As the white birds swooped down, the mourners would scrutinize them, then attack them furiously just before they reached the nests. But the mourners would soon tire, and the white birds would manage to lodge themselves beneath the mourners’ feet and bellies and take over the nests, sitting on the eggs until the chicks hatched. Many were blood-spattered by the time they finished nesting on the eggs. If the white birds did not take possession of the nests quickly, the mourners would crush the eggs; and if the chicks had already hatched, the mourners would peck the little ones to death. The third of the mourners’ three eggs held a white bird. No one knew its origin.

When the mourners were ousted from their nests, they would drift aimlessly above the water, through the canes, until the fledglings could fly. Then they would return to the village and kill all the white birds. This would happen at night, and on that night we scarcely slept. When we got up the next morning, we collected the dead birds, nailed one to each door, and threw the rest into the river. The newly-hatched white chicks fled; no one ever heard them or saw them fly. It was as though they had been transformed into leaves, settling among the ivy. I found a white bird once and hid it in some shrubs. When I returned a few days later, it had become a swarm of maggots that stuck to your hand.

The mourners remained in the village until the end of summer, and when everything had turned blonde they would fly down the river toward the marshes. For a while some would wander back, roosting for four or five days on the slaughterhouse tower at Pedres Baixes, coming and going. When none was left, the elderly allowed us to take the nests apart. We examined how they were built and gathered the feathers that were caught in the nests.

My stepmother had a little box full of white feathers, another of black feathers. Sometimes, when we were tired of making soap bubbles in the courtyard, she would climb onto the table and take down the box of black feathers with the hand on her tiny arm. With the hand on her other arm — the one that was like most people’s — she would take out the feathers one by one, letting them drop from as high as she could. They were the mourners coming. I would collect them and pile them up on the table. Then she would take the other box and cry, here come the white birds, and the white feathers would flutter down, twisting round and round, a little slower than the black ones. The villagers used to say my stepmother was a bit retarded, but I didn’t think she was. We played with the feathers in the early autumn when no birds remained. In the courtyard beneath the bloom-less wisteria, a few odd flowers would still be blossoming, those that had not known how to bloom in time. Hidden among the leaves, they didn’t have much color. At times a weary wind would expose them for a moment, as if ashamed of displaying them.

II

My stepmother was shorter than me; she came to just above my shoulder. Her hair was straight and black, her eyes vaguely green. The corner of her eyes fanned out into thin lines, the same lines she had on both sides of her forehead and round her mouth. Like a little old woman. She fretted on the days she had to put the flowerpot at the window, in front of the curtain, and the lines would grow deeper, slightly dark.

I liked looking at her toenails while we sat on the step in front of the house: they were well placed on her toes and looked like glass. Sometimes they were sun-dappled with all the colors that arch in the sky from mountain to mountain after the rain. Her hair was mottled too, though more subdued, not as many colors. And her small teeth. She would settle in a corner on the days she was happy, from time to time laughing a howl-like laughter that gave a glimpse of the roof of her open mouth and her lizard-thin tongue. Little lizard arm, little lizard tongue. Her dresses fell straight from the shoulder, trailing the ground. In winter her feet and hands turned purple. She said they hurt. She was always cold. It took her a long time to reach the window and leave the flowerpot on the sill because she could hardly walk.

She had a sweet tooth: she would rub her hands with sweet-smelling herbs before cupping them to drink from the fountain. I tried it, but the water always tasted the same. I caught her one day eating a bee. When she realized I was watching, she spit it out, saying the bee had flown into her mouth. But I knew she ate bees. She would choose the ones that had drunk the most wisteria juice and keep them alive in her mouth for a moment, let them play a little before swallowing. One day when we were walking along the stone path, I cut off a lizard’s tail, and she threw a rock at me. The lizard was stunned. She picked it up and tried to reattach the tail. Then she stared at me and put it down without uttering a word, giving it a shove so it would scurry away while the tail finished dying.

Not much was known about her father. Her mother hanged herself. The old men at the slaughterhouse took her in, but when she had grown up a bit, she began following my father like a shadow. Father finally brought her home with him. She would fall asleep on top of the table, and father would pick her up in his arms and carry her to bed. Some nights I would reflect on things and sneak down to listen to them sleeping. I would steal down the stairs, keeping close to the wall because one of the steps creaked. Standing in front of their room, I would imagine she wasn’t sleeping with father. I would imagine she was sleeping alone, and I was afraid she was choking, choking on a bee inside her mouth, between her cheek and gum. Maybe it was flying round inside, waiting for her to fall asleep so it could escape to the courtyard with its last remaining breath. She was wild about horse fat. She would climb up on the table to take down the balls of fat she had been given. She would scoop the center out, little by little, and when father wanted to eat one, he almost always found it half-empty. If he scolded her, she went off to her corner and laughed that strange laugh of hers. But the two of them walked together and I stood apart.

She didn’t know how to swim. All the boys and girls in the village swam. But not her, because of her arm. She would sit on the riverbank and gaze at the water, sometimes plunging her feet in it, kicking and splashing water on her face and dress. When she was completely soaked, she would rub her face with both hands at the same time, then kick the water even more furiously. One day she wanted to go all the way into the water, near the canes, in the shallow water. The afternoon air was filled with color, and on the opposite bank everything had a slight tremor. Right away she wanted to go further into the river, but the water was already up to her waist. Then she slipped. I don’t know how she did it, with that tiny arm of hers, but she grabbed hold of my ankle. I lifted her up and her lips were pale. We climbed out of the river, water dripping from her dress, and she headed home. I stood and watched her until she was just a black speck in front of the houses.

I jumped back into the river. The water that enveloped my legs still seemed to hold her. We had been in this water together. Mourners were flying above the blue and purple river, beneath the branches, searching for mosquitoes and soft grass. Night arrived, and suddenly I scarcely knew my way back to the village: from Pedres Baixes to the slaughterhouse and from the slaughterhouse to the Pont de Fusta, where the river beneath the bridge transported stars and pieces of moon.

III

The white flower was the same as the red: the only difference was color. Five little leaves, five larger ones beneath, and a handful of yellow threads crowned by a little saucer sprouting from the heart of the flower. They bloomed year-round. When one withered, a new one immediately shot up inside the dead flower: death thrusting life upward, summer and winter, endlessly. The only flowers like that in the whole village were my stepmother’s. We didn’t know where she found them. The day she entered our house, she set the two flowerpots on the table. Father brought her bundle of clothes; the bundle and the two flowerpots were all she possessed.

The first night we were by ourselves, I sat on the floor by her door. Inside she was alone and I thought I could hear her sleeping. I imagined her covers had fallen off, like when my blanket would slide off the bed and I couldn’t be bothered to get up and put it back. While I was turning this over in my mind, I fell asleep. I woke up when I sensed I was being watched. Two eyes were bent over my face, two little rabbit eyes, small and round, like a shadow shining. When she realized I was watching her, she moved away, to her corner. The corner where she always retreated whenever father scolded her.

She would have stayed there if I hadn’t told her to sit at the table with me. She came and sat, and I told her that her hair was mussed and she laughed, and when she laughed she seemed so tiny. Then I combed her hair. I made four braids for her — two in front, two in back — like the four corners of the earth. I tied a rope round her waist and right away the dress was shorter and didn’t drag the floor so much. When she was all fixed up, we went out to the courtyard and collected wisteria blossoms to make necklaces. Then we lay flat on the ground to watch the roots emerging from the earth, lifting the house. We exposed the base of the largest root and the deeper into the ground it went, the whiter it was, as white as the worm clinging to it.

I would have spent the whole day with her, but in mid-morning she told me to leave, she had work to do, and while she was telling me this, she was unraveling her braids and shaking out her hair, which again fell down, past the rope I had tied round her waist. I left, and when I was some distance away, I turned round: the window was open and she had placed the pot with the white flower on the sill; she was watering it. The curtain fluttered in the wind. When I was little, mother would take the curtain down to wash it and I would secretly breathe in its musty odor. When it was washed, it smelled of soap.

That afternoon I discovered my father wasn’t my father. My fingers were firmly clasping the ball of resin in my pocket when the blacksmith told me he was my father; he said he would have to take care of me. He said all you had to do was look at my face, especially from the mouth up. He said he was my father, and that was why I always liked to keep him company, just like my mother, who couldn’t walk by without stopping to look at the sparks and listen to the iron screaming in the water. He showed me a corner of the forge, where pieces of old iron and rusty chains lay, and told me that was where they had made me. I looked at his crooked legs, and when he noticed, he told me I had a bit of everyone. Then he laughed, and his teeth were drenched in saliva.

When I was little, mother was like a bee, buzzing from one place to another, kitchen, pasture, river, her braid black as night and teeth the color of bitter almond. When she raised her arms to hang clothes in the bright sun, it was as if the morning light was rising. She spoiled wedding nights because all the women on her side of the family had done the same. Like shadows that possessed a voice. The voice from those shadows screamed and screamed through her mouth all night long beneath the newlyweds’ window. Then my mother grew ugly. Her eyes became sad; her braid lost its luster. And her cheeks. And her shapely arm. Her elbow no longer seemed pretty or made of honey.

IV

Font de la Jonquilla, the buttercup fountain, dried up that summer. The old men from the slaughterhouse talked about it in the Plaça; they said it had never happened before. The river ran only half as high as usual. Beyond the bend, past the tree cemetery, you could see the sandy bottom in places. The flowing water was earth-colored. Horses would go into the river, many of them rolling in it all day. People were afraid the village would sink. They said the drought was worse than the water from the melting snow coursing beneath the desperate village. Everything looked burnt: grass, ivy, wisteria. Courtyards were full of dead bees. Grey, white-bellied snakes from Pedres Baixes slithered into corners. They hid wherever they could, as a nursing mother realized one morning when she found one attached to each breast. They killed the snakes by beating them with canes and stones. The Muntanyes Morades were quite far away, yet seemed so near. They changed colors — grey in winter, blue in spring — so we never knew their real color. Maraldina was different; it was dark green all year, and when the heather bloomed it had a reddish-purple streak. The flatland from the river to Pedres Baixes was riven with cracks that slowly widened, forming a colorless, butterfly-like design. Night was suffocating: the hot shadow settled on your chest, giving the impression it wanted to crush you. I saw stars falling on the other side of Maraldina, beyond the forest of the dead.

One night, perhaps the brightest of all — sky taut, moon low — I heard the front door open. From the window I saw my stepmother strolling up the street. I went down and followed her from a distance. Doors were closed, windows open, the pebbles on the pavement beneath my feet hot. I felt someone staring at me from behind a window. It caused me more anguish than the anguish caused by the sleeping people. Not a single leaf stirred. When I had left the village behind, I found the earth warmer than the pavement. My stepmother had a strange gait. When I finally realized she was stepping from crack to crack, I became afraid she might get caught in one, like a fox in a snare. She stopped, and so did I. We seemed little because everything was very large and very dead. Legs helped draw us near other people; without legs everything would be isolated. I was thinking about legs because fear had settled there. My stepmother started walking again, heading for the Pont de Fusta. When she reached it, I sensed she had seen me, and I wanted to draw near. She was standing in the middle of the bridge. Just the thought that she was waiting for me set my hands sweating, and I rubbed them on my clothes. As I approached, I started thinking things I had thought before: people are closed in, but they open up when you approach them. Instinctively I opened my mouth wide and shut it slowly because an open mouth courts fear. I wasn’t sure what she wanted. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and leaned over to gaze at the water, not thinking, just listening. She leaned on the railing too, and we stood for a while watching the water flowing calmly. The stench of putrid fish rose from the parched river. The smell merged with a flash of lightning — a falling star — and her voice. She told me she had left the village because she preferred expansive heat to the narrow heat between walls, among houses. When she asked me whether I preferred day or night, my hands started to sweat again, and I rubbed my palms against the tree trunk that served as a railing; it was rough. I told her I didn’t know, but when I was little, even though I was afraid of night, I liked it more than daytime because you could see things too clearly in the light, and the utter hopeless ugliness of some things became too enormous. I told her then that I had left the house because I had seen her leave, had followed her, and a man had watched me from behind a window, frightening me. She told me that fear was nothing, and had I noticed there were two types of fear? One real, the other pretend. She had suffered real fear, the fear of hands, because hands can grab you. My fear of the man who had watched from the window was pretend, because from inside he couldn’t hurt me at all. She took a stone out of her pocket and threw it in the river. I asked her if she too had noticed the odor from the river, but she said she didn’t smell anything; one day we would go to the Pont del Pescador because the thing she most liked about the village was the bridges. I told her during fishing season the Pont del Pescador drank so much fish blood that just the thought of it caused me anguish, and my father had often taken me fishing with him on the days when others went to stare at the prisoner. I told her I found it all strange: the two rows of men, one at each railing on the bridge. When they caught a fish, they jerked the cane up in the air very fast, removed the fish from the hook, and flung it on the ground. Sometimes the fish would be stunned; sometimes it would leap up and fall back in the river. To keep it from flopping about, they would crush the head with their heels — if they could — slowly, so the blood would ooze out the gills without splattering them. When the fish was dead, my father would make me throw it back in the water. I would walk home again beside my father, my hands open, not knowing what to do with them because they were covered in scales. She said she had never understood why they fished, hour after hour, glued to the railing on the bridge, only to throw the fish back in the river when they were dead. As she was speaking, we started walking again, falling silent for a moment, till we reached the end of the bridge. Then we ran all the way down the path. When we got to the fork — one side leading to the forest of the dead, the other to Maraldina — she told me she wanted to climb the mountain. We’d go down into the cave. But first she wanted to visit the cemetery below the heather, where people without souls were buried: those who died alone or from some misfortune. I told her I didn’t want to go into the cave; I would walk with her only as far as the cemetery at the foot of Maraldina, no farther. She took my hand, and we climbed up to the first cluster of heather. She drew me along, so I would go with her. I pulled away, in an effort to stop; then she let go of my hand and started up without a word. I called to her, told her we hadn’t gone to the cemetery for people buried in the ground, and she turned round. She was still close by, and in the moonlight her face was white as a root. She said we’d go another day, she wanted to climb down the well because it was cool.

I began the ascent. The seemingly endless path snaked through the tall thicket. I spotted my stepmother’s shadow, half-hidden at times by the heather. She grabbed hold of twigs to keep from falling. She stopped for a moment, then abruptly vanished. I turned round to look at the view: below I could see the shimmering river that separated two strips of darkness. Looming above everything stood the slaughterhouse tower, the side with the clock sphere shining in the moonlight. You could see a brighter patch, the stables, and two or three windows lit up. Senyor’s house was silhouetted against the night. The wind whirled dust, and I was consumed by fear: fear of the village so quiet beneath me, its houses filled with sleepers. I spun round quickly, toward the mountain, and again caught a glimpse of my stepmother’s shadow in an opening in the path. I could tell she was looking at me, so I lay on the ground to be out of sight. Dust blew into my eyes and mouth. When I stood up, the heather was moaning. As I walked along I could feel the sleepers weighing things down, digging. Again, fear returned to my legs, the fear of night, the memory of revisiting my father’s tree. When this fear pierced me I always wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. Fear kept me scurrying between my father’s tree and the blacksmith’s house.

The wind was tiring. I glanced up the mountain and caught sight of my stepmother at the foot of the dead tree. When I drew near, I asked her what she was doing. Embracing the trunk, her cheek against it, she said she was thinking about things, things about my father and her, and the moon gazing down at us. She stretched out her hand and stroked my brow three times with her finger. I felt the urge to embrace the trunk, and when I finally did, my cheek against it too, I placed my arms and cheek higher than hers and we didn’t touch.

She let go and forced me to do the same. Again, she told me she wanted to climb inside the well, so we walked down the mountain a bit and stopped in front of the entrance. The access was steep, very steep, but some rocks served as steps. Had it been daytime, and if we held on to the rope, the descent would not have been difficult. A cool, damp air rose from the well. She made me go first, practically shoving me, and even though I stepped from rock to rock, my legs felt numb. Inside it grew darker and darker. When I reached the bottom I was stiff and felt like crying. I felt I would never again be able to leave the well; I would smother to death because the entrance would be closed off, or the rope would break. She descended slowly, blocking the little bit of sky I could see. She pushed me further inside, then clasped my hand again, telling me she had been afraid the first time, but she had killed the fear because it was bad for you. Her heart had almost run away. She made me sit down near her. I wanted to know where she was, and I stretched out my arm, groping for her left and right, but found nothing. Still sitting, I began edging backward until my shoulder hit the wall. I searched for my stepmother with my outstretched hand. Suddenly I let out a yell that echoed in my ears as if it had issued from someone else: she had dug her teeth into my hand. I shoved her away and with my other hand found a mound of dust. It was cool, and I sank my aching hand into it. I grew accustomed to the dark, even though I couldn’t see a thing, just a thread of dying light spilling down the shaft. Soon, not even that glimmer reached me: the moon must have shifted. The fear within me began to subside, replaced by a sense of peace as I sat, head against the wall, eyes shut. Then she began to speak. In a thin voice she told me that her father had died swimming under the village; no one ever saw him emerge. Every day, at the same hour her husband had died, her mother would go into the courtyard and stand there, head between her hands, rocking back and forth, back and forth. She told me that the day before the hanging, her mother had got a splinter in her foot and couldn’t remove it, so she had to hobble. She hanged herself during the night, with a rope tied in the fork of the wisteria vine. The first thing she saw the next morning when she went out to the courtyard was her mother’s dangling feet, but she wasn’t at all frightened. She didn’t know then what a hanged person was, or that the position her mother was in meant she was dead. Using her two fingers as pliers, she had removed the splinter from her mother’s foot. She told me she didn’t really know where her tomb stood, but she was sure it was where they bury the soulless dead, at the foot of Maraldina, with no marker. That was why, on her visits to Maraldina, she was always afraid she would step on her mother. She said if she hadn’t been hungry, she would have been fine the whole time she wandered through the village streets, even though she could hardly remember it. When the old men from the slaughterhouse took her in, they gave her a lot of blood to drink, and that was why she was so strong. One sunny, winter day she began to follow my father; his shadow, she said, was warm. She told me her feet were cold and asked if I wanted to warm them. I don’t know how she was sitting, but she put her feet in my lap and I took hold of them. They were freezing and, as I held them, I must have fallen asleep.

V

On the way back she told me she didn’t want to walk through the village. The faceless men would be sweeping the streets, drawing on the last bits of straggling darkness, and they frightened her. We headed toward Pedres Altes, through the fields of thirsting, fractured land. We sat down on top of the sundial. It was a round, flat stone the color of dry mud, black-flecked. The blacksmith told me the sundial used to stand in the middle of the Plaça; he had marked the hours and forged the pin in the center to signal them. A year later someone had stolen the pin, but no one cared; no one wanted time in their lives. From where we were sitting, we could see clumps of canes and a few birds flying low over the water. The sun came up, and we watched the sunrise, our eyes wide-open, though we wished they were closed. It was a globe of fire, splashes of flames everywhere, all of it ablaze. When we closed our eyes, a black spot quivered before us. We heard the hammer beginning to strike the anvil. She got up and stood right in the center of the stone, placing her feet firmly together to cover the hole where the iron pin had been. She said she would be Time. She stood very still, casting the edge of her shadow between two hours. Slowly, the shadow moved. Later, as the young men were leaving the village for the stables and the eldest for the slaughterhouse, her shadow rested on an hour before inching away. Once more it came to a halt between two hours. I asked her if she knew what time was, and she said, Time is me — and you. She made me stand beside her; I took her by the shoulders, and she took me by the waist. The sun dispatched a trail of misty haze over the slopes of Maraldina and Senyor’s mountain. And while we were Time, a strange force arose within me, as though my guts had been made of iron, as though my mother, behind the forge, had moulded me from iron as she merged with the blacksmith. At that moment I understood what it meant to experience the force of the boy leaving childhood behind. She looked at me. I took her hand and made her step down from the stone; then she dropped my hand. I headed to the stables, she to the village. I turned back to look at her; she had turned round too.

From out of nowhere four or five children appeared, naked, with skinny legs and fat bellies. They yelled, go with the ugly girl, go with the ugly girl, and jumped up and down like goats. The oldest one threw a rock at me, and the others followed suit. Then all at once five or six more appeared from behind some shrubs and started hounding me with rocks. I couldn’t respond to the aggression; there were too many of them. Besides, I was afraid that if I threw rocks at them, I would really hurt them. So I started running, and that excited them; they chased after me, their skinny bodies sunburned. I took the path to Maraldina, knowing that would tire them. They looked like little stumps, pursuing me, yelling, go with the ugly girl, the ugly girl. Without warning, a rock struck my upper arm and blood spurted out. Let’s kill him, kill him. They continued to run, but I had gained ground. Two were boys I had set free from kitchen cupboards. When I reached the cemetery of the uncemented dead, they froze. I watched them; even from a distance I could see the fear in their faces. They stopped throwing rocks and were silent for a moment. The oldest boy, head up, straight as a staff, flung his arm forward from time to time, his hand open, yelling, go with the dead, the dead, and they all shouted, the dead. As they strode away, they swung their heads round to shout, the dead.

We returned to the cave that night. We left the house together and slept there. We cleared a space in the dust, and in our crimson bed sweet sleep enveloped the delicate skin over our eyes. My arm hurt. The blood had formed a scab. With a trace of daylight from the shaft, we made two beds, like two cradles, one beside the other, so we could sleep holding hands. We formed a mountain of dust for a pretend table, and mounds of dust for pretend chairs, and little piles of dust for pretend pots and pans and little cups and round platters.

Every night we would go to the cave. As soon as we woke up, she would tell me what she had seen while she slept. One night a finger of hers turned into a caterpillar, and the tip gave birth to a red butterfly that died almost immediately. Another night she saw bees forming crowns above the horses’ heads, and the horses wore their crowns of bees. Then the bees crowned the old men’s heads, and when the men slaughtered the horses, horses and men were crowned by bees. On another night she saw a stack of horses’ eyes, and the mourners swooped down, snatched them in their beaks, and flew away, high into the sky. When they could fly no higher, they let the eyes fall into the river, and the water carried them away, flowing past the wash area where the women exclaimed, look at the spangles floating in the river. They said the prisoner had hurled them. Then she explained why some soap bubbles turned to glass: the ones that quivered and rose little by little burst, but those that shot straight up, did not.

Inside the well, we found another well. She discovered it. She said she could hear water beneath her and told me to listen. We held our breath. You could hear water flowing, just like I could hear the river from my bed. We stood up but heard nothing; we could only hear it if we were lying down. Stretched out on the ground, she began running her hand across the wall, very slowly. She located an opening in a corner, a long way from where we collected the red powder, and managed to squeeze through it. She crawled inside and returned much later, backing out of the hole. She said she had found a well with light and water flowing through it. The following day, I enlarged the hole with a shovel; every day, bit by bit, I widened it, until we could both go together to see the well and listen to the water.

We would throw red powder in our newly-discovered well and then go down to watch the river: we didn’t know where the water flowing deep inside the well came from or where it was going. We scrutinized the river, searching for a thread of rose-colored water. But the water from the second well dwelt in darkness, and the red powder we threw in it. who knows where it ended up? We threw almost all the powder into the water, all we had piled up when we had enlarged the opening, all that slowly fell from the cave walls from one year to the next, the powder used for painting the village.

We didn’t play in the afternoons. She stayed at home and placed the flowerpot on the windowsill. When the heat grew less poisonous, but still persisted, I took her to the forest of the dead. For a while we strolled from tree to tree, reading the names on the plaques. We found a low fence of thorny branches; the trees on the other side were very old, and on all the plaques, above the names, you could spot a bee flying into a bird’s open beak. We made piles of dry leaves, the ones the wind had left from the previous spring, naked, just veins and nerves.

VI

In the autumn we resumed sleeping in the house; I slept outside her door. If I had trouble falling asleep, from deep inside the cloud that always dwelt within me would loom the unease — of night, faded summer, fled mourners, bees that had transported so much honey. the season that had banished the lingering light and green grass.

One afternoon, returning from the stables with a group of boys, we heard screams. A man thrashing ivy with a cane had fallen, landing face-down in the center of a courtyard, his arm extended. His fall had shattered the ravel of twisted wisteria. They were shouting because he was already dead, and they were still shouting when Senyor arrived in a carriage that was drawn by two grey horses, a crimson-colored glass lamp affixed to each side. The stout, aged driver opened the door and helped Senyor out. I had never been that near him. His twisted legs made it difficult for him to walk. A birth defect: he had come out wrong. The midwife who birthed him had grabbed him by the feet, yanking him out, twisting them. They left him like that, his bones forever contorted.

Between them, two men picked up the crumpled man and placed him in the carriage. Everyone was grumbling because the dead man’s soul had already escaped. Senyor tried to calm them, told them not to worry, he wasn’t fully dead, his soul was still in his mouth. Senyor spoke slowly, in a soft voice, and while he was speaking he glanced about, never blinking. Some believed him because they wished to believe him; others didn’t. One said it would be better to tear down all the ivy, so they would never have to thrash ivy again. A few said if they pulled it all down, the village would be doomed because the ivy kept the summer cool. It swallowed the sun’s strongest rays, rays the naked rock could never absorb. Worse still, the rays would rebound onto the village, making it as hot as the blacksmith’s forge. Senyor kept telling them not to worry. He studied my face for a long time before climbing back into the carriage, where the dead man lay doubled up on the seat. The driver slammed the door with a dry bang, and the carriage pulled away. Bouncing over the round stones, it appeared to be on the verge of falling apart. The pregnant women had removed the bandages from their eyes, to look at Senyor when he descended from the carriage, and when their husbands realized this, they slapped them hard: first one cheek, then the other, one side, then the other. Slap after slap.

For a long time the village talked about the man who had fallen. He had plunged straight down, they said. The cane had slipped from his hand, tumbling down alone, slower than the man, until finally it lodged in the ivy. They talked until the first storm appeared. The horses neighed and tossed their heads, their eyes entranced, fixed, as if glued to a piece of wood. The river coursed by the village, laden with dead branches and leaves from Muntanyes Morades. My stepmother and I went to look at it. Powdery, star-shaped snow fell, and the water near the riverbanks froze. We tramped through snow that squeaked when it turned icy. We moulded mountains with the snow. One day we built a huge snow tree and bored holes in it; we looked at each other through the holes as though we were strangers, and then we laughed. The laugh rippled through the openings and crept into the spiral of our ears and continued for some time, before finally dying deep within our heads. During the snow season, we returned to the forest of the dead.

We came to a halt as soon as we entered: we had never seen it curded with snow. We had gone through the funeral entrance and stood there, holding hands, close to the axe and pitchfork. The trees were white, top to bottom. The trunks wore scabs of snow and ice that a dying ray of sunlight transformed into colors. From the highest branches hung glass twigs, glass stars and threads. The snow had turned to glass, glowing green and blue; a rose color filled our eyes until they almost died. We stayed until we sensed that we too were metamorphosing into trees. We could feel the frost-cold roots being born beneath our feet, growing, binding us to the ground. In the snow our feet were hard to lift; they felt lifeless. Before we crossed the bridge, we looked back, and all the forest was a forest of calm. From time to time snow tumbled from a branch, as though the branch had just taken a deep breath.

VII

Senyor’s grey, hoary house, blotched by damp, had two spans of snow on the roof. The snow fell thick and constant. At the approach of darkness, it was shoveled into piles in the middle of the streets. On windy nights shutters on the windows banged open and shut; the wind screeched and soughed, making everything seem alive. Perhaps that winter the river would carry away the village. but winter was ending and the river was now melted snow.

It was time to go in search of red powder. The wind on Maraldina was like no other. Unremitting, never sporadic, it was a weary wind, furious to be compelled to storm through the heather, endlessly. As we scaled the mountain, the wind would wrench shrubs out of the ground, tossing them in the air where they remained for a moment mottled against the light. The shouts commenced as soon as the first men descended into the cave. There was virtually no powder. One man exclaimed that it was pointless to shout, shouting made souls happy. The man beside him announced that the souls weren’t at fault, if such things as souls existed; what had happened was clear: because of the terrible summer heat, powder hadn’t fallen from the walls. The man who said it was pointless to shout told them to be quiet. They didn’t know what they were saying. The souls of all the unnamed dead were laughing because the villagers were shouting. He could hear them laughing.

The following day we returned to the cave with hoes and shovels to scrape the powder from the walls and ceiling. Breathing inside the cave was impossible. We emerged from its entrails red as rage. But the village had to be painted. Unpainted, from a distance it looked like a straggle of houses that were on the verge of collapsing — poor and begrimed, prisoners of the still dry wisteria. When I entered the dining room after the third visit to the cave, I found my stepmother sitting on top of the table, her head bent backward. Surrounded by paintbrushes, she was running a brush over her neck, slowly, as if she were painting a wall. As soon as she saw me, she stopped and said, now that it’s dark, let’s toss the brushes in the river. We wrapped them in a sack and set out to throw them away, hurling them as far as we could. We lingered, gazing at the black water, and had to hurry back because the faceless men that frightened her were beginning to emerge. The next day we searched for more brushes. They were stored in a shed in the Plaça. We didn’t rest until we had got rid of them all. On the last day, it was still early so we went and sat on the sundial; we could hear the wind howling from there. She said we weren’t hearing wind, but grieving souls.

When the wisteria first began to bloom, fresh grass sprouting, we returned to the forest by way of the river. To cross it, she clasped me by the waist, and I swam with her behind me, as though I were bearing a lily leaf. We were thirsty and swallowed mouthfuls of water, all the broad river wanted inside us. We left behind the dog roses and seedlings and sat beneath the blacksmith’s tree. All at once, I stood up and carved a cross on the trunk with my fingernail. We looked at each other and laughed. She picked up the plaque and held it in her hand for a long time, then spit on it to blacken it. I removed the ring and fastened it to another tree. She laughed and clenched her teeth, her tiny teeth, top against bottom. We stood up and began examining the trees; some were very old and the trunks were full of knots. We started to run. Racing through the forest like wafting leaves, we got separated. I called to her with a whistle I had invented, one she had learnt right away. One of my whistles enticed a shiny, black snake out from beneath a rock, and I picked up the rock where it had settled and threw it, killing the snake.

Everything pressed on toward summer, toward greenness locked deep in the forest. And we switched all the rings. Clusters of trees bore no rings at all; others had three or four. We scrambled over the thorny fence and studied the plaques with the bee and bird. Those were the oldest trees of all, their trunks all splintered. The tallest tree was full of dead branches, and when we removed the ring, moldy moss dust fell, revealing a long hole from which a bone protruded. I pulled on it and more bones tumbled out, and she scattered them. Every time we removed a ring from a tree within the fence, a hole would emerge and yellow bones would spill out. I widened the holes and started pulling out the skulls: they were the bones that couldn’t get out by themselves. We stacked them up, one on top of the other, and plugged the eye sockets with grass so they would not stare at us. The tiny bones from feet and hands were just right for playing. We would toss them in the air and catch them, and if one fell on the ground, the person who had let it drop lost. We had a hidden corner in the forest, imbued with the smell of moss, where we kept a stone that served as a pot, and we put lots of the small foot and hand bones in it. If we didn’t feel like playing, we would go to the stone and stir the bones, hold them up, then let them drop, just to hear the little noise they made when they landed.

One day I wanted to hack open a tree with an axe; she stared at me with big eyes, her hand in front of her mouth. My right palm stung, but she was watching me and I didn’t complain, hardly noticing the pain. The trunk was like rubber, and the dead person inside still had skin, grey as Senyor’s house, stuck to the bones. Four snakes were slithering between the ribs, just like the one that emerged when I whistled, only smaller.

As the weather turned warmer, butterflies were everywhere. Sometimes we would throw a bone at some leaves and the butterflies would take wing, scattering. We lay down on the ground to look at them, and I fell asleep until I sensed I was being watched. She was kneeling in front of me, the axe in her hand. Slowly she walked over to a tree, turning back from time to time to see if I was following. I followed, and she stopped in front of the tree and, handing me the axe, told me to open it. A ray of sunlight trickled down between the leaves onto her hair, charging it with colors. Little flecks of color glistened like water in the white of her eyes. Open it. She handed me the axe, but I didn’t take it. I looked only at her, and I could see her standing so close to me, yet only a short time before so far away: in the courtyard making soap bubbles, stringing together wisteria blossoms with a needle and thread, sitting on top of the table with a cane in her hand. standing in the middle of the window with the green curtain. Open. I didn’t utter a word, nor did I move. Abruptly, she dropped the axe and started spinning round me as if she were possessed, open, open, open. Again, she handed me the axe, but I didn’t take it. She marched off to play with the rings, and I stood before the tree, my eyes fixed on the axe lying on the ground.

I hadn’t budged. Barefoot and tiny, she returned, strolling through the trodden grass, down the narrow paths we had beaten during our frequent walks. She sauntered along, carrying a round bone in her hand, throwing it up, catching it. We played at being afraid. They’re coming, she would exclaim. And we ran back and forth, our hearts filled with fearful blood because we didn’t know who was coming, from what direction, if there were many of them, or if it was just the one conjured up by the fear our voices awakened in us. They’re coming, they’re coming. We hid behind tree trunks. We would stand very still for a moment, then suddenly thrust our heads out from the side of the tree, quickly hiding again, as if each of us represented ‘they’ for the other; we never knew who they were — they never arrived. When we emerged from behind the trunk and listened, there was nothing to be heard: only the breath of light and earth, and the air that dwelt on high.

Again, she picked up the axe and again handed it to me. She lifted it by the blade, offering me the handle. Open. She never took her eyes off mine, and I grasped the axe and began to unbar my father’s tree, top to bottom, side to side. It was soft. Trees that held the dead inside were like rubber, hard to breach. When I had opened the cross, she told me to pull, and, with her help, I pulled as hard as I could. Then it all spilled out. Bark and rotted flesh. And a watery mixture: black sweat from the body. At eye level stood the decomposing heart, partially attached to the chest by four veins and, above it, the mouth sealed with rose-colored cement; deep within lay a damp smudge of brighter pink cement. The flayed knees were bent, the bones twisted. Further up, the face — rotted fruit, forehead stripped clean — seemed to be laughing. But the eyes were missing, burnt by the sap. I ran away. I could tell she hadn’t moved. Then suddenly I heard her laugh. I swam across the river, never stopping until I reached the house. When I entered, I found her already sitting on top of the table, scooping out a ball of fat with her finger.

I dreamt my father’s breath was burning me.

VIII

A woman died in childbirth, and when they went to bury her, they discovered the forest had been ravaged. The weather that afternoon was troubled. The sky was sulphurous, not a leaf stirred. The unrest that had commenced at the cave returned. Between young and old. For some time the young from the wash district had been saying that people should be left to die their own death. The old men from the slaughterhouse argued that everything should continue as before. The middle-aged men were inclined to side with the elders, except for a few that no one heeded. One elderly man lamented the sad affair of mixing bones and stuffing grass in eye-wells, it should never have happened. The blacksmith wasn’t listening; he delivered the first axe blow to the tree they wished to open. The wedge slipped off the handle. He told them to stop quarreling and go look for a new, broader axe head, one that wasn’t rusty. An old man moved away, muttering, leave the bones alone, they can harm us. A young boy said, we should just live our lives, peacefully, us the living, and stop thinking about souls. Have you ever seen one? A woman covered her ears, her face white as snow. The man who had been sent to fetch the wedge returned, and the blacksmith slipped it onto the handle, pounding it with a stone until again he had a strong axe. They said order had to be reestablished in the forest before the village could be painted. For many days in a row they went to the forest, endeavoring to restore each ring to its tree, each skull to its own bones. The women sewed the crosses on with thick needles and horsetail hair, because the trees no longer produced the resin to seal them.

For days my stepmother and I didn’t speak to each other. If her eyes met mine, we quickly turned our heads, as if an invisible hand were pulling us by the hair, forcing us to turn. Day and night, I had visions of the tree: the hoary, green bark with white streaks. The malodor was everywhere, that smell coming from within, from the heart of the trunk, from flesh blended with live wood. I heard a voice telling me it should not have occurred. The ashen face of that woman, and my father’s empty eyes that saw how mine. Soon she came to the courtyard with the boxes of black and white feathers and asked me to play. She climbed onto the table and let the feathers flutter down; I caught them and placed them in heaps, each color in its own pile.

We began to amuse ourselves by hunting bees. And crushing them. She gathered honey and put it on the ground, just a drop. When the bees came to suck it, we would squash them. Sometimes, instead of squashing them, we would cover them with an upside-down glass, imprisoning them until they died. That first night, I could hear the bees, the ones that weren’t trapped in honey, buzzing and knocking into the tin walls. On windy days, we noticed that the bees collected a tiny piece of gravel with their legs and flew with the added weight, so the wind would find it more difficult to toss them about. When the wind stopped, they immediately released the gravel. We discovered this one day when a bee flew past my stepmother and dropped a little piece on her forehead. The older bees would fly to the fountain for the buttercup tear; many died on the return, strained by the weight. The younger bees would collect the infants with their snouts — they had deposited them on a leaf while they worked — and carry them away to sleep. The bees couldn’t comprehend what was happening; they would fly to the sundial and bury their dead all round it. They were so sad that year: instead of sucking wisteria, they headed to the fields and sucked bitter flowers. They couldn’t be bothered to fly into the folds of our clothes or the ravel of our hair.

The water from Font de la Jonquilla had to be filtered. In the fountain little worms curled and uncurled, rapidly. If they entered a person’s body, they burrowed through bones, veins, and skin in order to escape. As soon as they broke the surface, they died, because they could not live without water.

IX

When the work in the forest ended, it was time to paint the village. And there were no paintbrushes. My stepmother and I hid behind the blacksmith’s house; from there we could hear the shouts. Hurriedly they made new brushes, but not enough; they had to be shared, passed round from person to person. The village could not be painted quickly, nor all at once.

When the painting was completed, the thick-clustered wisteria had already finished blooming. The day of the Festa, everyone was uneasy: about the souls, the powder, the welter of disorder in the forest, the bees buzzing nervously through the fields (they must have told each other they were dying off).

The women had decorated the streets. From one house to the other, from one side of the street to the other, they had strung lines, adorning them with scraps of old, brightly-colored clothes. The blacksmith took the prisoner some honey, and when he returned he announced that soon the neighing would begin, the prisoner’s mouth was already horse-like. Mid-afternoon, the pregnant women began to dance in the center of the Plaça. From a courtyard, someone started hurling stones against the rock wall, trying to free the cane, wedged high in the ivy, that neither wind nor rain had been able to dislodge. You could see the cane and stones flying past. All of a sudden the cane quivered, then fell; for a moment it seemed that it would again be trapped, further down. But it wasn’t. The person who had freed the cane appeared in the Plaça and started breaking it into bits, handing them to whoever wanted a piece. He was young and tanned. The pregnant women stopped their dancing and approached the boy who was distributing the scraps; they removed their blindfolds, pretending to want a bit of cane, but they had eyes only for the young men round them. When the boy offered one of the women a piece of the cane, she grasped his hand before anyone realized and planted a kiss on his fingernail. The blacksmith standing beside me said the villagers would soon be busy killing desire. I did not know then what they did to kill desire, nor what it meant. The pregnant women began to dance again, but they could see nothing. Before they resumed dancing, their husbands had retied the bandages so tight that they pulled the skin on their foreheads.

My stepmother was sitting at the entrance to the house, a ball of fat in her lap. Everyone who passed by shouted things at her, but she kept eating, never glancing at them. But as soon as they had passed, she shook her finger at them. The pregnant women finished their dance, and all the men lined up to race. They ran with their eyes bulging, arms in front of them, chests forward. They gave the appearance of being disjointed. Their breath preceded them, and they followed it. Two very old men had already prepared the hollow tree trunk with the short sticks. All of the sticks had sharp pointed tips, except one, which ended in a fork. The man who drew the forked stick was forced to swim under the village. The faceless men, the noseless, the earless, all of them shut themselves in the stables so as not to dishearten the others. The one who drew the forked stick needed to be brave, brave as the sun. The hollow tree trunk with the sticks inside was painted pink, inside and out. It was repainted every year, just like the houses. The men and older boys had to run past the trunk and seize a stick. When a sharp stick was drawn, everyone was silent. When the forked stick was drawn, everyone burst out laughing and the children jumped up and down.

A boy who was not much older than me drew the stick. His face was like others’, but his nose was straighter, his cheeks more delicate. When he glimpsed the tip of the stick, he turned pale with the pallor of fear, and everyone knew — even before seeing it — that he had chosen the forked stick. Always, always, the one who drew the forked stick turned pale.

The blacksmith and a group of men accompanied the boy to the upper edge of the village, where the water from the river thrust itself downward, toward darkness. The boy stripped, and they gave him a drink; while he drank, his eyes wandered from one man to the other. He took too long to dive into the water, and the men had to throw him in, alone and naked. I had gone to watch, my stepmother beside me, and when the boy plunged into the water, she pulled a piece of string from her pocket and began swinging it. A man noticed us, and he struck me on the chest with his fist, knocking me to the ground. All of the men raced to the lower edge of the village to watch for the boy. In the Plaça, three women were pounding and mixing together wisteria blossoms and bees in a wooden mortar: this was the ointment to dress the boy’s wounds, re-sheathing the skin over his blood. Senyor observed it all from his towering window. He was waiting for the boy to emerge and announce that the village would soon be swept away by the river. He could see when a man entered the water and when he emerged. If the man was unconscious when he reappeared, the villagers would fish him out and carry him to the riverbank. As soon as the man had left the water, Senyor would close his window.

My chest hurt, and I headed for home. My stepmother followed me. We sat on the step in front of the house. I looked at her and she laughed, and all the while the water beneath the village was thrashing the boy against the rocks, mutilating him.

X

When they pulled the boy from the river, he was dead; they returned him to the river. Those who died in the water were returned to the water. The river carried them away and nothing was ever known of them again. But at night, at the spot where the bodies were thrown into the water, a shadow could be seen. Not every night. Not today or tomorrow, but on certain nights a shadow trembled. They said the shadow of the dead returned to the place where the man was born. They said that to die was to merge with the shadow. That summer, the shadow of the boy was clearly distinguishable. It was unmistakably him because he had been separated from one of his arms, and the shadow had but one arm. Struggling against the current, the shadow — which was only will, not body or voice — attempted to slip beneath the village. And as the shadow struggled, the prisoner neighed.

Only one prisoner remained in the village. Long ago, there had been another, and he had lived, they said, twice as long as most people did. The prisoners were thieves: the village only punished thieves, and they punished them by taking away their humanity. The blacksmith built the prisoner’s cage. He made it small, just large enough for a person to sit in, but not lie down. The first prisoner had had a wooden cage; everyone recalled how he passed the time biting his nails until blood spurted from them. Then he would begin to sob. The wooden cage rotted before the prisoner had ceased to be a person, and they were forced to build a new one. The iron one, they said, would last a lifetime. In winter, the villagers placed logs around the cage, so the prisoner would not be cold. Everyone loved the prisoner. They took him food and water every day. He was kept below the wash area, and when the women gathered there, the mad ones would call out, neigh, neigh for us. Sometimes, when the prisoner was alone, he would attempt to neigh, but instead of a neigh, a kind of yowl would emerge, a strange voice. On Sundays, many villagers went with their children to see the prisoner. They would toss him morsels of meat, close to the bars, and he had to catch the scraps with his mouth. If he couldn’t catch them, he had to pick them up from the ground with his teeth, like a horse eating grass. When no more meat could fit inside him, he would close his mouth and eyes, shutting the villagers out, and on the following day he would be punished. If it was summer the blacksmith would smear honey on him, and soon the prisoner became a fury of bees. Before honey could be smeared over his body, he would be seated in a bucket, his ankles and wrists tied with heavy rope to the bars of the cage.

The prisoner was so thin you could count his ribs, and his eyes had red streaks like my mother’s. No one knew what he had stolen, but they all agreed that he had stolen. If it was winter, instead of smearing him with honey, they would force him to drink unfiltered water from Font de la Jonquilla. Worms would emerge through his skin, and as soon as they did, they died, because they could not live without water. The prisoner was wasted after that, drained of strength. He would recover very slowly and open his eyes, without looking. I saw him once, hands and ankles tied, his head leaning motionless against his shoulder, a swollen vein in his neck.

That summer as the shadow struggled, the prisoner neighed and the horses responded. The following day, the whole village gathered to watch the blacksmith remove the cage. They lifted it in the air and abandoned it on Senyor’s mountain. When the prisoner realized he was no longer surrounded by iron bars, he began to neigh with all his remaining force, spreading his arms and legs wide. He remained in that position, as if still tied. He is no longer a person, the blacksmith announced. The skin on his wrists and ankles had lighter-colored stripes, as if the sun had been unable to penetrate the rope that sometimes bound him. Two men stood him on his feet, and when they let go of him, he fell to the ground, again spreading his arms and legs. The blacksmith turned to face the group and announced once more that the prisoner was no longer human, but he would live longer than they would.

XI

Another summer ended. It was as though all the dead autumns were the same, with their relentless insistence on returning. Autumn was here again. Nailed to the rock wall, from the ground to the top of the cliff, autumn was a surge of fiery leaves that would be snatched away when the sulphur-bearing wind returned, grown old and icy. Leaves fell on the village streets and on the river that carried them away. Swirling in whirlpools, they drifted to the clock tower, as far as Pedres Altes. They tumbled down, still bearing the scent of their former, tender-green selves. The sickly stems that had held the leaves all summer were now devoid of water, and they thudded to the ground as well. The leaves were blown down and swept away. We waited for the last to drop so we could rake them into piles and set fire to them. The fire made them scream. They screamed in a low voice, whistled even lower, and rose in columns of blue smoke. The smell of burnt leaves pervaded houses and air. The air was filled with the cessation of being. If the leaves burned too slowly, we poked the pile with a cane, lifting one side so the flame could leap upward. Little by little, spring died in autumn, on the round stones in the Plaça. Soon the first, small rain would extinguish the last warmth and unpaint the houses. Everything pink faded, vanishing in black trickles. The village was a different village with no leaves and no color. A village of weary, decaying houses, clustered together above the water, embedded in Senyor’s mountain.

One night when the horses were standing asleep in their enclosure and the village was dead, my stepmother and I went out. We strolled past the horse fence, my stepmother’s dress down to her feet, her hair to her waist, her forehead capturing the nocturnal dew. She told me she had seen the blacksmith’s son sitting in front of his house, mere bones clothed in skin, his face all eyes. We held hands as we walked; then all at once we laughed because we had turned to gaze at the shadows stuck to our heels. We jumped backwards, treading on them. We turned to face the shadows and they stuck to the tips of our toes, and we trod on them. Suddenly my shadow was longer than hers, then hers longer than mine. I caught an unfamiliar scent. I couldn’t say of what herb or what flower hidden within the earth, something that — before going to sleep — was preparing the scent it would offer at the conclusion of cold. We climbed up onto the fence and sat on the rail. She told me she knew many things: far away the river was flowing; the dead were asleep; trees that held a dead person likewise died a bit; cement inside a dead person took a long time to dry. She said we knew many things about the light, about everything that transpires as it goes round, returning to us — neither too fast nor too slowly, like our shadows cast on the sundial hours. The same, always the same, no beginning, no ending, never tiring. You and I grow tired. She stretched out her arm, searched for my face in the dark, and stroked my brow three times with her finger. She climbed down from the fence, wanted to play, to make ourselves into a ball. We sat on the ground, our knees against our chests, arms clasping knees. We played for a while, leaning first to one side, then the other. Let’s stretch out, she said, and roll far away. The trampled grass allowed itself to be trampled as it played with us. And the horses slept.

When we tired, we got to our feet. She turned and met me, and we stood facing each other. Her eyes shone, and within the dark gleam cast by the ever-higher moon, I seemed to glimpse the swaying leaf of a cane, a tiny one. Without a word, we began to run, as if we were flying; we stopped when we reached the center of the bridge, our hearts pounding.

The smell of the water rose from the river below, as though the water itself lived in the air, coursing through its channels. The scent of moist flower, earth, and root reached us. The water that flowed in smelled the same as the water that flowed out. The same, always the same. We looked, straining to glimpse what could not be glimpsed. Behind us, the moon pinned our shadows to the ground, slowly casting them onto the river; it partially erased them, and joined them at the mouth. When the moon died, it carried away the shadows, still joined at the mouth, as if it had dragged them away by their feet.

We had a little girl, just like my wife. And my wife always said: she’s just like me.