Death in Spring

I

The day my child turned four, I took her to Font de la Jonquilla. She didn’t want to go. I went with my father to the fountain when I was my daughter’s height, and I had never been back. I remembered it as a dark hollow in the shade. I knew that once you passed the slaughterhouse the path followed the river, and you could see the wash area and the prisoner’s cage on the opposite bank. Midway, the sound of the falls reached you. If you looked back after walking a while, Senyor’s mountain began to turn sideways. When you got to the Pont de Pedra, the ivy-shrouded cleft came into sight; opposite it, a slope with trees at the bottom and grassland at the top. Three paths led from the Pont de Pedra. One of them winded up the mountain. The wasteland round the bridge welcomed only stinging nettles and weeds, weeds that — if you boiled and swallowed the liquid — would bring up everything inside you. My child stopped near the bridge to gaze at the river. When we left the village the sun was asleep behind Pedres Altes, but now it had risen and was sweeping through the bend in the river, splashing the green leaves, turning them yellow. The trees bordering the river beyond the Pont de Pedra had changed a great deal: when I was little I could touch the lower leaves — I liked touching them because their underbelly was white — but now I could hardly reach them. Soon after crossing the bridge you could hear the waterfall. The path dipped, then gradually turned away from the river till it finally ended in front of a cluster of thick-trunked trees that surrounded a circle of rocks. The spring stood in the center; it was not dark, dappled sun danced on the ground, and the mountain loomed in the distance. When I was little I had been frightened by the worm-filled spring that always spewed water; it was something alive that I couldn’t understand. The rocks where the water gushed were covered by a dense climber with white-flecked blossoms; the water that collected at the fountain trickled off, down a canal adorned with blue buttercups. Taking hold of my child’s hand, I remembered myself at her age, my fear, my father, the first day my wife showed me the child and told me to look at her, saying she’s just like me (the midwife who birthed her wanted to show her to me, but I didn’t want to look because of all that had happened). The child stood still, her hand in mine, gazing at the buttercups. Bees were drinking, buzzing round the rocks and canal. I picked a buttercup and offered it to my daughter, but she didn’t want it and knocked it out of my hand; when I stooped to pick it up, she said she wanted black night. Two women carrying buckets joined us in the dark shadow of the trees; they glanced at me and began to laugh. One was young and tall with protruding eyes, like all the old women in the village. The other was short, her braided hair falling across her breast, all the way down to her waist. They approached the fountain, the protruding eyes staring straight at me, laughing all the while. The whole village had done the same, ever since the child was born. When the woman laughed, I sensed she was thinking the same thing the children did when they caught sight of me with the child and cried deformed, deformed with their hands cupped in front of their mouths, just as they had shouted, go with the ugly girl, the ugly girl. Now the children had grown up, and the youngest had learnt spiteful things from their elders. The braid was filtering the water when, all at once, she threw a handful on my child. She started to scream: a tiny, spark-size worm was curling and uncurling on her hand. The woman said my daughter was a child with corrupted blood. And a crybaby. They began talking to each other, but before they began to speak, I asked them how they would like to find a worm on their skin; they paid no mind. They talked as if they were on their own, but everything they said was for my benefit. They said both my wife and daughter bore withered arms. I had had the prettiest mother in the village, jealous of newlyweds, a woman who died, consumed by some kind of inexplicable rage. The braid stared at me with black eyes. She looked at me as though I were a tree or grass. She said I should be ashamed, should have been thrashed from time to time after my father had died, instead of disgracing myself by climbing into bed with my stepmother. The protruding eyes said my dead father had wanted an indecent death. They had killed his desire because they realized right away what he was doing. he was obstinate. And they couldn’t finish killing him because his soul had enveloped him with such a dense mantle. The braid spoke up, so he went to bed with his stepmother who has a flowerpot with one bloom. The protruding, stark-white eyes doubled forward with laughter, and the braided one doubled backwards, laughing even harder, like two mad women. At that moment the ivy on the fountain shook. It was the blacksmith’s son. The braid stopped laughing and shouted, you think we don’t hear you, you think we don’t see you, you think we don’t know you spy on everyone. I’ll tell your mother to strap you to the bed again. My child began to shout, come out, come out. As soon as the blacksmith’s son jumped from the rock, he grabbed the braid’s arm and stuck his face right up against hers and told her to leave me alone and hurry back to the village, the wisteria roots were upwrenching her house: two Caramens had come in the night to water them with the grass juice that makes them grow uncontrollably. The protruding eyes told him to stop plying them with stories and go back to the bed where he’d spent his whole life, where he should end it, and if his father was the leader of a group of people with stones for brains, her husband was a watchman, so the two men were about the same, maybe the watchman was a little better, he didn’t pester anyone. The braid jerked her hand away from the boy, said he was always looking for excuses to touch her, told him to watch out because, scrawny as he was, one slap from her and he’d be knocked to the ground, and she’d make him fall with such fury that his flimsy, marrowless legs would break into three pieces: two to plug his eyes and the third to stuff his mouth. They picked up their buckets and strode off together, but they turned round after a moment, and the braid stuck out her tongue at us, crying, so you think you’re as good as Senyor? Ha! My child was hugging the blacksmith’s son’s legs, telling him she wanted black night.

II

The blacksmith’s son was five years younger than me. He had been frail since birth; the blacksmith’s wife, she of the purple cheek, said it was better that way. He had lived all his life shut away, lying in bed. Only in the last year had he been allowed to go wherever he wished. It wasn’t clear if he had lived in bed because he was ill or because his bones were soft. He would speak in a low, hoarse voice — like the prisoner’s — that rose from deep inside him. Sometimes he would stop talking when he tired and breathe deeply, a sort of music emerging from inside him. He had coarse, blonde hair, a bit darker at the back of his head. When he talked for a long time, the first two fingers on one hand would spread apart the fingers on the other, as if he wanted to tear loose the skin where the fingers joined. He always said he had learnt many things from lying in bed so much. So much time to think. The day I first took my child to the forest of the dead, he jumped out in front of me without my hearing him; he had never spoken to me before. He told me he had been following me for days because I had entered his house one night when all the village had gone to a funeral; ever since then my hand seemed to accompany him. He told me I had touched him. He said before I left I leaned over to look at him, but he didn’t know how to speak then; his tongue wasn’t strong enough to form words because he had been forced to grow without food, so that he would always be ill and not have to swim under the village, not when he was young or old. He wanted me to touch his arm, said it was like a corpse even though blood flowed through it, like a dead person’s arm because all the flesh had fled, everything that helped him to move it had vanished. Ever since the night he spoke to my child about souls — less than a year before — my child had loved him more than me. From the time she had the use of reason, she only wanted to be mine. The day he appeared before me in the forest, by surprise, without my hearing him, he told me he knew more things than I did because I had always been able to eat according to my appetite. He said he knew who turned the forest of the dead upside down, who played with the bones, and he never told anyone, but he asked me if one day I would open up a tree — he would help me — because he wanted to examine some leg bones, learn how knees bent in order to walk. My child was looking at a butterfly that had just been born; when the blacksmith’s son realized, he caught it and put it in my girl’s hand. She laughed and looked at him for a long time with quiet eyes. When we separated, she wanted to go with him instead of coming home with me. One night he explained to her all about souls, described what they did. After that they were inseparable. I heard him telling her. One evening when we had gone to see the prisoner, my child wandered off without our realizing; a while later the blacksmith’s son got up to look for her, saying he would bring her back. They had been gone for a long time, so I went in search of them and found them at Pedres Altes. He was stretched out on top of the sundial, my child sitting on his chest, her feet on his neck, sometimes putting her foot in his mouth to make him be quiet. I listened from behind a large rock as the blacksmith’s son explained to her that all souls went to the moon. Souls went to the moon. I watched them. My child’s mouth was agape, and the blacksmith’s son placed a finger inside her mouth and told her again that all souls went to the moon. All the ones that emerged from an uncemented mouth, because the ones that had lived inside people whose mouths were cemented couldn’t escape. He said it wasn’t exactly that souls could fly, but if they took a big leap, they were able to soar upward. He said they departed one at a time, sometimes joining up with others, like soap bubbles often do if you blow them one after the other. Occasionally, he said, they would catch the cloud cart pulled by the oldest souls, just like horses. They would go up and down, faster than mourners, and no one knows this — just like no one knows when the white birds fly away — but when they can no longer see the earth, it means they’re approaching the moon. My child asked him what souls were like, and he told her there was no real way of knowing, and she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, he would tell only her — if it was even possible to explain. They were like a breath, a luminous breath in dark night. They fly up, he told her, and when they get close to the moon they go half mad with joy, like the birds when they fly down from the mountain, but just the opposite, because souls fly up. And they are so happy they don’t know what they are doing, and they jump into the moon, and those that haven’t got up enough speed — because they’re tired, the voyage lasts a thousand years — fall back to earth. Some have time to grab onto an edge of the moon, and if they are strong enough, they remain there, and if not, they tumble down, and it’s as if they had never even started their ascent. The ones that fly round and round on Maraldina are the ones that are waiting, or the ones that have fallen. He told her that on the moon there were patches of white grass, the most tender of all grasses — more tender than anything that could possibly be tender — because it was always half-grown. The best souls — that’s when my child told him to be quiet — the best souls reach the center of the moon, not the edges, and they bore through it as if it were made of fog, and the souls that are waiting for them see them bounding up from the earth like a new sprout. Then he told her, yes he did, he told her that the oldest souls could eat the grass; they ate it through a horn in the middle of what had been their forehead. all of them aslant, eating grass. all of them, he told her, all of them aslant, eating grass in the pastures until they come to the river that goes round and round, no beginning, no ending, the river’s mouth biting its tail. The ones that want to drink water drink water, and as soon as they’ve drunk they don’t remember a thing. Not about you, not about me. Not about anything. The little they have inside them dies. If they suffered hunger, they don’t remember what it means to be hungry; if they slept very little, they don’t remember what it means to sleep. At first they’re calm when they don’t remember a thing, but soon they begin to feel uneasy; they don’t know what it is, and no one explains to them why they feel like that. my child put her feet in his mouth and fell backwards, and he leaned up a bit and laughed as he took hold of her, telling her he wasn’t finished. He told her that in the colored arc that forms in the sky after the rain, souls were lining up, waiting to take the cart. I can see them heading to the moon. The part where the colors spread and blend together, that part’s full of souls. My child stuck a blade of grass in his mouth and said, eat — she had picked the blade near the prisoner’s cage. And he ate it, confessing that after so many years without food, the more he ate the thinner he got. He continued talking — night was well under way and he spoke very slowly, as if he had to think before releasing any words. He explained to her that while soap bubbles were forming inside canes, they were being filled with souls; when one burst, it was because the soul had blown on it, and it escaped all sad-like. Sad. The bubbles that turned to glass held a soul inside: the bubble was the cage, you blow on it and it doesn’t break. My child was laughing and putting blades of grass in his mouth, and he was chewing them, swallowing them down, pretending it was really hard to do so.

I emerged from my hiding place, and they glanced at me. He kept on explaining to her as if I wasn’t there, all souls are good, evil things are done with hands and eyes, they don’t have any of that, only one thing, they are souls and they can create wind. They blow, creating the wind, and the wind rushes through the heather and pushes men down the mountain, then up, because the souls that are waiting and the ones that have fallen to earth are sad, they want no part of anything, never again any part of this world. So they blow.

III

On our way to visit the prisoner, he told me that if we got in the habit of seeing each other, we’d learn a lot, he liked learning. The prisoner wouldn’t tell him much because he knew he was the blacksmith’s son, but if the two of us visited him together, he’d reveal a lot of things. My wife didn’t want to come. She’d come a couple of times, but she soon grew tired of visiting him, because the prisoner frightened her; she said she dreamt about him at night and she had trouble getting up the following day. But she didn’t want to come because she didn’t like the blacksmith’s son; he felt it, and, just to upset her, he’d call her deformed. As we were walking toward the wash area, the blacksmith’s son told me it wasn’t true that the worms from the fountain bored through skin; years ago someone had duped the village and everyone had believed it. If worms emerged from the prisoner’s skin after he’d drunk water, it was because he really believed it was true. All the things you truly believe occur. You’ll see, he said. I was weary of the blacksmith’s son, but I liked the tract of land after the wash area, where the ground slopes down, narrows, then comes to a halt in a sharp point between the cleft mountain and the river. From there you could see Pedres Altes and Maraldina, and on the other side of the river closer to us, the trees lining the path that led to Font de la Jonquilla, ivy leaves above our heads, a trace of wind making them sing from top to bottom.

As soon as the prisoner saw us, he spread his arms and legs, tilting his head as if he were dead. The blacksmith’s son poked his ribs, told him he had to be punished, told him his father had ordered it because he hadn’t neighed in several days and the whole village really enjoyed his neighs. He made him drink water from a jar he’d brought from home; he’d filled it with water from the river once we’d passed the wash area. The prisoner swallowed it, and when he opened his mouth as if he were going to neigh, the blacksmith’s son threw more water down his throat, as though his mouth were a bucket. The prisoner choked and coughed, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, the veins on his neck all swollen. To stop the choking the blacksmith’s son had him drink more water; then he finished the little that was left. We sat down on the ground, but I had to jump up to seize my child; she was trying to thrust her head between the bars of the abandoned cage that was a little ways off: she had it halfway in and couldn’t get it out. The prisoner sat very still, hardly breathing. After a while he began to groan, and the blacksmith’s son said, you see? Look at me, I drank the same water and nothing’s happened to me. His mouth smelled of slime. I could still catch the stench of slime when the prisoner threw himself on the ground. My child nudged one of his feet, and the blacksmith’s son told her not to touch the prisoner because he was rabid. In the darkness the prisoner appeared to have two little specks on his arm surrounded by a bit of juice, like blood mixed with water. The blacksmith’s son looked at me and kept saying, I don’t have a thing. It only happens to him because he believes in it; the worms go down you and die, they don’t hurt you, I drink water from Font de la Jonquilla all the time, as much as I want. He stood up, took the prisoner’s head with both his hands, and told him the water he’d drunk didn’t have worms, he shouldn’t believe the stories. In exchange for what he was revealing, he should tell us what they do to kill desire; he’d asked many people, many times, and no one wanted to tell him. The prisoner looked down at his arm and shook his head; the blacksmith’s son took hold of his head, pulled his hair, and we left.

Alone and bored while my child and the blacksmith’s son roamed through the fields of black night or the forest or Pedres Altes, I would visit the prisoner. I’d sit by his side, and when I was tired of being there, I’d leave. One day, without my asking him anything, he spoke. He told me you had to live pretending to believe everything. Pretending to believe everything and doing everything others wanted; he’d been imprisoned when he was young because he knew the truth and spoke it. Not the truth of the faceless men. The real thing. The only person I felt close to was the prisoner. With my wife it was always the same — she couldn’t abide me — and the child was crazy, infatuated with the blacksmith’s son. I would wait until the wash women had left, and then I’d sit close to the prisoner. His fingers and toes were very long, his bones covered with dark skin, shriveled from being exposed so much to the sun, cold, and wind. Sometimes I’d find him half asleep, weary from neighing and listening to the women screaming at him, ordering him to neigh. His voice was different when he talked to me. It became human. He told me the burden of life came from the fact that we sprang partly from earth, partly from air. He was silent a moment, then told me not to keep company with the blacksmith’s son because his mother was a beast. Then he repeated: part air, not like fish that are only from water. Or like birds that are from the air. One married to water, the other married to air. Man is made of water, lives with earth and air. He lives imprisoned. All men. He explained that when the villagers came to gaze at him, exhibiting him to their children, they all said he’s a prisoner, but he wasn’t a prisoner, he said, he lived differently from others, only that. He’d grown accustomed to living that way, and when they removed the cage because they thought he was no longer a person, it was all the same to him. So he stayed. Nothing mattered to him, living behind bars or with no bars. He was his own prison. Everyone bears their own prison, nothing changes, only habits, from listening so long to the coursing river, he said, and from seeing so much water drift past. What drifted past was him. I flow past, he said, everything else remains. Man lives between earth and air, is made of water, and lives imprisoned like the river that has earth beneath it and air above. The river is like a man. Always along the same appointed path, and if at times the river overflows, like a man’s heart when he can no longer bear it, a law returns it to its course. He spoke without looking at me. He could only look in front of him — with red-ringed eyes consumed by fire — as if he couldn’t turn his head, as if what bound head to shoulder had grown rigid. To look at me — the few times he did so — he would turn his whole body, groaning as if his bones caused him pain. When things were calm and he felt part of the flowing river of life — like a wave of wind in the ivy leaves — he would raise a hand and listen with his eyes shut. When he spoke again, his words seemed to flow above the water, cleaved, partially destroyed. He felt them fleeing and said, everything I say, everything I say, everything I have said is carried away by the water, abandoned. Neither men nor women can feel what I’m describing. He said it was all a lie. Before, they didn’t want to hear what he said, and now he doesn’t want to speak. Everything they say is a lie: those that say that a serpent changed into water. they want to believe, need to believe, that if a mouth is cemented, the person’s soul remains in the body. They need to believe that the pregnant women won’t fall in love with other men, and their children will look like their fathers, if their eyes are bandaged. They don’t know that if they bind their eyes it’s because the child is already ill before being born. They don’t see this, but what I speak is true. They believe they must swim under the village and must die in doing so. The village can only be settled above the river, instead of at Pedres Altes or by the forest; the cemetery only placed at the edge of Maraldina. And the shadows of the Caramens that no one has ever seen: no one has ever seen a shadow, no one knows if the Caramens’ village is a village or a cloud. The watchmen are on guard, but what they guard against is nowhere to be seen. They continue to mutilate men because they say two shadows once joined together. It’s fear. They want to be afraid. They want to believe, and they want to suffer, suffer, only suffer, and they choke the dying to make them suffer even more, so they’ll suffer till their last breath, so that no good moment can ever exist. If the rocks and water rip away your face, it’s for the sake of everyone. If you live with the belief that the river will carry away the village, you won’t think about anything else. Let suffering be removed, but not desire, because desire keeps you alive. That’s why they’re afraid. They are consumed by the fear of desire. They want to suffer so they won’t think about desire. You’re maimed when you’re little, and fear is hammered into the back of your head. Because desire keeps you alive, they kill it off while you’re growing up, the desire for all things, in that way when you’re grown.

While he was speaking, night fell, and I returned home, taking my time as I walked along the streets, everything asleep. I thought about the blacksmith’s son. One day he told me he could feel when desire wafted through the village. Desire weighed on his chest, the same heaviness and troubled spirit in his blood as when a storm was brewing. I stopped in front of doors, and in the darkness I could make out the large black smudges left by so many hanging birds. One night, as I lay in bed listening to the flow of the river, I felt it was true; I was like a river with the earth below and air above. The true river had stopped, and I was the one who flowed farther and farther away, all alone in the center, trees on both sides. Then the prisoner spoke to me of desire.

Not the desire of children, who want everything, he said. All the women in the village have long hair. Here he stopped that first day. He stopped at the beginning. When he’d finished explaining, I couldn’t see his face, only the shadow of his head, like the night above the cemetery of the uncemented dead, when I could see only the shadow of my stepmother’s hair. All of them have long hair until. and when they desire a man, if her husband realizes it, if he realizes, he said, then he begins to stroke his wife. He does everything she wishes. Everything. And while he’s doing everything she wishes, one day he takes her, sits her on his lap, and places his lips against her neck. But first he takes her hair and gently moves it away from her neck, brushing her hair aside; some strands slip away, fall, and he picks them up again until no hair remains on her neck. Then he places his lips on her neck and tells his wife to say the name. The name. He asks and asks. The wife won’t tell, doesn’t tell him. No. Some of them almost die. Finally, some wives, drowsy from the gentle kisses and the soothing feeling on their hairless skin, tell their husbands. The prisoner spoke softly, so softly I had to move closer in order to hear, and I realized I was doing the same thing as the blacksmith’s son: with the first two fingers on one hand I was spreading the fingers on the other, almost tearing the skin at the joints. He told me they’d killed my father’s desire after my mother turned ugly, when she screamed the loudest at the newlyweds, before he brought my stepmother home. He said they’d killed my father’s desire, and that of many in the village. The village was full of them, and when they’ve killed your desire, they look at you tenderly, all happy, as if you were a child. A man and a woman, he said, walk past each other on the street and look at each other. It’s the birth of desire. When desire is killed in old men they seem more dead than others. When the husband has forced out the name, he makes his wife lie on the bed and has the other man brought to him, makes him lie next to his wife, and stands at the foot of the bed watching. If the wife has given the other man’s name, he can’t refuse to obey the woman’s husband. They can look at each other but they can’t speak. It depends on the kind of woman: some won’t look, others won’t stop looking, and, as time elapses, her husband at the foot of the bed becomes more and more of a man. And the two who are lying down become less and less man and woman with each passing moment, till finally the day arrives when the woman covers her face with her hands and screams. This is how they kill desire, bit by bit, if need be. The longest phase lasts an afternoon. If the woman doesn’t scream, there’s another afternoon. Sometimes this lasts for months, if the husband encounters strong desire. When the woman screams, desire flees from the hearts of the man and woman. I had it. It was born, I don’t know how. I did everything I could so they wouldn’t notice. I didn’t look. But they discover it in your eyes. Don’t look. They guessed it in the woman, and I knew she wouldn’t be able to bear it and would reveal my name right away. I could feel it stretched out in bed, ill all over. I don’t know how, but I could feel the weight of her hair as it slipped between her husband’s fingers, again and again. It was worse than listening to the river flow, day and night, worse than neighing. Worse than everything. It was as if every strand of hair that his hand brushed away was strangling me, each hair one day of my life, a fleeting day, while I lay still and salt water streamed from my body, out of my pores. Look at all the men in the village whose desire has been killed; they have eyes like horses that don’t know when they’re living and when they’re slaughtered. They are the ones who stand in front of the others when they come to gaze at me. They’re like me.

IV

For some time I couldn’t rid myself of the blacksmith’s son, so I began doing everything I could to avoid encountering him. I left the house when I knew he was coming. I stopped going to the places I used to frequent. I would pretend to go down one path, then cut off to another. He appeared everywhere, as if I had told him where I was going before even I had decided. My child would wander aimlessly if she wasn’t with him; and if she spent a whole day without seeing him, she would throw herself on me, scratch me, crying that she wanted him, wanted black night. When we slept, she would sneak out, and I would have to search the village streets to find her. I finally had to let it be, and when I allowed them to do whatever they wanted, then the blacksmith’s son spoke of the green window. I could tell he was happy to talk about it because he sensed I was weary of him, and while he talked he stared at me with a leaden look, pretending he was sorry to tell me these things, but happy inside that he could. I began to know him. He carried about him all the rancor of having suffered the life he had been forced to live. Without my wishing it, he knew how to draw me to his side. For some time he told me that I was a hand to him, repeating it so often that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It entered my blood. When he sensed I was snared, he breathed deeply, and I shriveled up. I would take hold of my daughter and ask her whose child she was, and when my child said she was his, she looked at me for a long, long time without blinking, her eyes like still water. He asked me if I had ever looked behind the green window. I have, he said. I had never wished to grab him and kill him as much as that day. Often I had had to restrain my desire to kill him, push him off the Pont de Fusta into the river, strike him with an axe as if he were a tree of the dead. He told me in the red-powder cave, where for a long time he had wanted to go, but not alone. He told me, sitting on the ground, my child on his lap, breathing in the crimson powder — a lot had recently fallen from the ceiling, and a mound of it lay near the opening my stepmother and I had made to gain entrance to the second well. Everything smelled of powder and heather-earth. My child had fallen asleep, and he was stroking her hair, gently, almost without touching her. I told him another well existed, where you could hear the river flowing, but the water from that river had no outlet. If it had, the water would have been red when it surfaced the day we threw so much powder in it. He said the mud-flower pond lay beyond the tree cemetery, hidden in the growth at the end of the marsh, and the water in the pond was always half-red. The flowers bore the color of the water, as if in order to grow they had drunk from it. The pond was bloody from the red powder and the horses and old men from the slaughterhouse. He said he’d looked carefully at my house. As soon as he was able to leave his bed, he said, I started looking at things slowly because my eyes couldn’t hold so many new things at the same time. I wanted to see things; I knew nothing. Not about grasses or other people’s faces. You can’t imagine what it is to never see another person other than your parents, then to see a face and glimpse it in the open air, by yourself. When I was little, people would come to stare at me, but then they stopped coming, and the only thing I saw was the wall of ivy, a swarm of those creatures that make honey, my father’s crooked legs, my mother’s purple cheek. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t hungry, nor will I ever be again, but my eyes’ hunger will always exist. those twigs the day we lay on the ground, the ones we saw in front of the fog, we saw only the twigs, as if everything were dead. He had said, look at them, they’re swimming in the air in front of the fog, but there is no air, and if you stare at them long enough you can’t tell what they are, just thin streaks on fleeing water that’s turned into fog. The wish to see comes from not knowing anything. I could only remember you. And you, you’re a hand. The first night I was able to stand and walk a bit — because they fed me — I went in search of your house, the hottest night of all, a snake hidden in the courtyard under a sack. They said the wisteria was tilting the houses, and I grew uneasy, afraid your house would collapse. No birds were strung on the doors; I’d imagined all the doors with birds hanging by their feet. The leaves were yellow, the wall just beginning to turn red. This was the only thing I knew about plants: some leaves turned yellow, others red. Later, I lifted the curtain. I could see nothing. Later still, I learnt that your house had a worn step, the one in the middle. The transparent leaves on both the white and red flowers had thick veins. I know, he said — I can still hear him — when they opened up your father’s tree, his fingertips were red, his hair standing straight up. I know the wisteria trunk bears three incisions that your mother carved with a knife. I know what my father said when your father died. One word from a mouth is enough for me to guess everything. They say the prisoner tells lies. Do you believe it? And that my father is right. Do you believe it? I’ve learnt a lot, yet I can tell you I know nothing, only this: what happens is what counts. I felt he was uttering many of the things I thought, almost as if he were me. Maybe he had become me, from so many years of thinking about me as he lay in bed, lived in bed. He said, they all come, all of them. Everyone knows, you too. Your door is an open door. They go in and out. I tell you everyone knows. You’ve always known, from the time your father was still living. No one would want them because they stink of blood. Everyone keeps quiet about it because it suits them. You’re afraid to look. You were afraid to look, and you know nothing. You don’t know what she does: she fastens a rope round their necks. Playing. She’s always liked to play. They become little again when they’re with her. She ties a rope round their necks, he said, and she lies on the bed and makes them go round and round, one side to the other; the faster they run, the happier she is, but she doesn’t laugh — I’ve never seen her laugh — until finally the old men tire. The one I saw was tall and fat, with a sunken chest and soft hands. He was like a horse. Have you noticed that the men in the village look like horses? I realized as soon as I saw a group of them together. and she’d pull on the rope or loosen it, sometimes moving her lips, never allowing a word to escape, but you could see she was saying, gitty.

We left the well. Outside, a gust of wind filled our eyes with earth, and we started walking, the wind bending us. When we reached the bottom, he said, you knew. Then we headed to Pedres Altes and sat on the sundial, contemplating the night. The following day he taught me how to make fire with two dry branches.

V

In a cave behind Pedres Altes lived the man with the cudgel. His palms were scarlet from swinging his cudgel on so many nights. The cudgel was his defense; he earned his living from it. He was old and no longer agreed to daily fights with boys from the village. The townspeople sent him boys one by one, and he received them, cudgel in hand. He was a tall man, taller than all of them. His hair was thinning, part-white, part-yellow. His toenails were like horse hooves: long and hard. Black. Because he walked through the manure pit near his cave to breathe in the stench, drawing strength from it. He had been trained in this manner since he was a child. To live patiently. A boy from the village awoke feeling brave one morning, wanting to devour sky and river, and asked to be allowed to fight the man with the cudgel. With his long, razor-sharp cane, the boy went in search of the old man, calling him out of his cave, challenging him, jumping and running about. The man emerged slowly, asked the lad what he wanted, knowing full well he wanted to battle; when the boy declared that he had come for combat, to defeat him, the man picked up the cudgel with both hands, lowered his head, and announced that they could begin. He opened his legs wide, planting himself firmly on both feet, and began to dodge the cane. Sometimes the cane grazed his skin, but he felt nothing. The combat continued until the boy fell to the ground, out of breath, half-dead, at which point, without even a glance at the lad, the man entered the cave to wait for night, when he would practice with his cudgel on the spot where the boy had fallen. The boy returned to the village a different person. If his blood had boiled before, now it had grown calm. He lived life better now than he had before. They said the man in the cave turned weak men strong. When he fought, he made a sort of shrill sound with his tongue, and his lips grew soft. When he came out at night to swing his cudgel in the air, he clamored for the poisonous river serpent to rise up, the mountains to flatten, man to die before birth. He would swing his cudgel from left to right, right to left, upward, then down, his body hardly moving. He controlled everything with his arms, they said, and with a look that rose from deep inside. He had lived in the cave for more than fifty years. Almost all the men in the village had endured the trial of the cudgel. They took him food and manure — silently, so as not to wake him if he were asleep.

The blacksmith’s son said he wanted to visit the man with the cudgel. We left the child asleep on top of the stone clock and circled Pedres Altes. At the entrance to the cave stood a clearing surrounded by high grass and shrubs. We caught sight of him right away, straight as a tree, swinging the cudgel above his head. He was uttering things we couldn’t understand because he spoke in a low voice, but we caught the word round and the word wind. They said patience had made him strong, the patience to live a life swinging his shiny cudgel — shiny from being held so often — and defeating the village boys. While we watched him, he swung the cudgel from side to side at shoulder level; then slowly he stooped to knee level. If any legs had been within reach, he would have smashed them. We saw him stop and enter the cave, by this time his body bent from weariness, as if putting aside the cudgel had made him instantly grow old, his backbone soft. Not many boys from the village wanted to fight him. The elderly said that all the good things were fast vanishing.

I found myself alone. The blacksmith’s son had disappeared; I didn’t hear him leave. The night had been clear, but clouds began to form, and a diaphanous fog rose above the river and remained there. While I was gazing at it, suddenly — without my realizing it — the blacksmith’s son appeared at my side again, telling me we had to hurry. I’ve taken the old man’s cudgel and hidden it in the shrubs; let’s leave before he notices. I think it was that very morning that I went down to the river to look for cane. The blacksmith’s son had collected my daughter and taken her home. The fog didn’t dare thicken; its drowsiness put the water to sleep. I headed to the Festa esplanade. It wasn’t yet dawn, but a brighter ribbon of light gleamed from the sun side, and I was thinking about the man with the cudgel and how it had turned his palms scarlet, as if they were covered in blood.

VI

By the esplanade the river vaulted underground, creating a wave; but the water by the canes was calm. I sat down on a bench, my arms on the table, my head on my arms. I shut my eyes as if I were dead. I was dead. I would have stayed there all my life, until the wind scattered my dust. I could envisage my body, no longer flesh, turning first into sulphur dust that caught on the underside of bees, then into earth, and finally breathing new life into flowers. Once my existence unraveled, it became death and flew about; from spring to spring only winter’s death would live. All of me was weighted down. As I was feeling the weight, I heard a splash and raised my head. Rings had formed in the water, giving birth to other rings, as if someone had hurled a flat rock. The rings kept spreading until they reached the point where they died. The days-old water was green on the opposite bank, where I had watched the Festa years before. When all the rings stopped, I glimpsed a hand by the canes. A hand above the water, as if supported from below, tiny and white and flat like a fearless spider. The hand rose, then fell furiously, striking the water. I approached the canes and hid. I caught sight of a girl who climbed out of the water and got dressed; she reappeared from behind the canes, tucking her bodice into her skirt, her back to me, the hem of her skirt almost grazing my knee. Her feet were pale. And the lower part of her legs. Her heels were rose-colored, like the pink houses in spring. When the bodice was tucked in, she took a few steps, stopped, looked at the sky, then dashed back to the water she had just abandoned and began waving her hand from one side to the other as she blew away the illusion of fog that wasn’t really there. Just a bit of smoke. She returned to where she had been standing, but faced me this time and, raising her arms, she grasped her hair with both hands, pulled it up and tied it. As she lifted her arms, her bodice again escaped her skirt, and again she tucked it in. At that moment, without giving it a thought, without wanting to, I got to my feet. We looked at each other. She stood in front of me, her hands still raised, I in front of her. Both of us standing. Eye to eye, mouth to mouth, our hearts troubled. Not wanting to, not thinking, I stretched out my open hand, wishing to touch her because she was alive, yet wondering if she was real. As if I had passed on to her the wish to do what I had done, she extended her arm toward me, her hand open. That was enough. The two of us standing, our fingertips on the verge of touching, barely separated by what might have been the thickness of a leaf. We remained like that as the morning mist grew thinner, as if the water in the middle of the river had swallowed it, instead of spitting it out. And she departed. I stood there with my hand outstretched. I jumped with a start when her hair abruptly came loose and fell like sudden night down her back. You, you are a hand, the blacksmith’s son had told me. I stepped forward, placing my feet on the water spots she had left on the ground and pressed the soles of my feet as hard as I could against the earth, my body weightless. Her short, wet hair, was swept up, away from her neck. This is what I most remembered about her, before her hair fell loose. All the women in the village have long, fine hair. Her husband takes hold of her hair, a strand of which dangles free. I felt the birth of desire as I had never felt it, desire alone, violent and solitary as a rock. Look at them, their eyes like horses’, never knowing when they live, when they die.

I gathered some canes and was heading back when I encountered a group of men leaving the village. I didn’t look at them. As I was approaching the first street, I had a glimpse of the blacksmith’s son running toward me. His father wanted to see me right away. I handed him the canes, told him to take them home, and hurried to the blacksmith’s.

VII

The blacksmith needed me to deliver a message: he was unable to visit Senyor. He explained how to make the journey up to Senyor’s house: after the bridge, the middle path. Three paths converged just beyond the bridge. One followed a difficult stretch through rock and water, ending in the village opposite some courtyards and rock. Another led to the flatlands. The path in the middle gave the appearance of being level but soon began to climb. I set out alone. My child was no doubt at Pedres Altes with the blacksmith’s son. Dusk was falling. As I made my way up the mountain, it quickly grew dark below, but the higher land was still enveloped in light. The wind swirled whirlpools of dust. The village fields and stables lay to my right, Senyor’s land — flat and endless — to my left. I told the blacksmith that Senyor might not believe his lie — that he couldn’t scale the mountain because he’d fallen in the courtyard — but the blacksmith replied that Senyor believed everything. The prisoner had told me that all the women in the village had long, fine hair, all of them. Soon the stables and esplanade were hidden and only the river was visible, still calm without the fury of melting snow. A pregnant woman was bounding down the path. She was almost beside me before I noticed her. The sound of her footsteps lasted a while, then faded. When I could no longer hear them, I turned back to look at her, but she was merely an earth-colored shadow blending into the earth. I realized then that her eyes weren’t bandaged, and I stopped to think about it. Higher up the air carried different, fresh smells. Two round rocks were planted in the ground on each side of the entrance. One was poorly set and leaned to the side. Above the door hung the stone coat of arms: at the top two birds faced each other; the rest was a bed of wisteria. I entered the patio. Several torches were blazing at eye level; a mourner was perched beneath each, half the number as on the coat of arms. I felt as if I had seen it all before. As I pondered the fact that I had witnessed this somewhere, I realized the impression sprang from the torches: the same torch flames that had made the low-hanging leaves glow that night in the tree cemetery. The sky was like that night, only now the butterflies had not yet been born. From the patio I glanced up. I could see a sliver of a moon; it was the same color as the sharp edge of the axe, and both ends curled toward the center. A man approached and asked what I wanted. I spoke to him of the blacksmith, and he immediately called to a woman who emerged from a little door and disappeared through the large one. She was gone a long time; when she returned she said Senyor was waiting for me. The woman led me down a wide corridor, through a very large room and another corridor, until we finally arrived at a long, narrow room that smelled of smoke from the extinguished fire. At the far end, in a black armchair, sat Senyor. As soon as he saw me he squinted to bring me into focus, said he knew me, had known my mother, I was beginning to look like her. He burst into a coughing fit and the glass in the window shook. When he stopped coughing, his chest rising and falling heavily, he asked about the blacksmith, and I explained about the fall. He had tears in his eyes from coughing and wiped them with a finger, shaking them away from the armchair. His upper lip curled a moment; then with both hands — which immediately turned whiter with the effort — he took hold of the arms of the chair to lift himself. When he was halfway up he sat back down, saying he couldn’t remember why he wanted to get up. His upper lip rose after every word and trembled slightly round the corners of his mouth. He said perhaps he could tell me what he needed to tell the blacksmith, since the blacksmith had sent me instead. He had known my mother. His remarks were all jumbled. He told me he had been forced to live like that, had been given that kind of life, but when he was little they didn’t prick his ear because his mother said he had enough with his twisted feet. He said maybe it would have been better if they’d left him completely empty. When he was little he always looked at people’s feet, didn’t know which feet were the proper ones, until little by little, thinking about it as he grew up, he came to realize that everyone had feet the way they should. Everyone except him. Then he was quiet for a long time, touching his knees. The moon — the skeleton of the moon — settled in front of the window; and finally Senyor said, when you’ve had to live, he said, when you’ve had to live with your lower body deformed, a man could at least choose his own way of dying. The prisoner — he called him the man in the cage — the man in the cage knew me, he was the bravest, forever looking straight in front of him, he’d always say: since you can’t choose the way you live, you should at least be able to choose the way you die, and you should finish. But I can’t finish anything; there are things you can’t do unless someone helps you, and these things include dying the way you wish, when you wish. Death is always ugly, those worms that have hatched within you, waiting for you, the worms of patience that do their work fast — when they can — and do it well. The man in the cage had to endure hours and hours of torment, of having his desire killed off. One day they told me he’d wanted to end his life, he wanted to end his life, he lived without living, always thinking about himself and about the village, as if the village was him and he the village. As soon as they locked him up, I think he began to live because he could no longer wish for anything, everything came from others rather than from himself. like what they did with your father. I didn’t find out for a long time. On this side of the mountain things are always chipped and dented when they reach us because of a sort of rupture built up over the years, but even so, news of everything reaches us in the end. Some people want to change things, maybe they’re right, it’s all the same to me. Now that I’m old, I only wish for one thing, to die with an empty mouth. I don’t want to die like your father, because what they did to him. I don’t want to die the way they force you to die. The closer I get, the less I want it and the more I think about it. He made me describe my father’s last death. From time to time, he placed a hand before his mouth, and his fearful eyes peered at me above the hand. I explained how they had pulled him from the tree, black night filled with shouts, everyone carrying a torch, a drop of saliva running with delight from the corner of an old man’s lip, how they had finished him off. He told me I was young; when he was young the villagers never glimpsed his eyes because he so rarely went down the mountain. Then he said: that’s what kept me alive, never stopping, never stopping, one woman after another, always preferring the other one. I didn’t know then what was inside a man, and when I discovered, I wanted to die. With unfocused eyes he said: accompanied by the wish to live, you have the wish to die; it’ll be like that till the end. Spring is sad, in spring all the world is ill, plants and flowers are earth’s plague, rotten. The earth would be calmer if it were green-less, without this fury, this blind will that consumes everything but craves more, the affliction of the green, so much greenness and poisonous color. When the wind drives everything from one end of the world to the other, seeds and particles and everything it covets, then men become tormented. Birds contribute to this, so do bees — they carry so much sulphur dust, caught on their backs, their legs, nothing carries as much sulphur dust as bees. The man in the cage used to say, kill the wisteria, he said it often, I know they spread honey on him, he’d often say that, he was truly a man, now they say he’s thin as a cane, his brain twisted round. One morning you’ll get up thinking that the things you carry within you have died, but it won’t be true; when you think this has happened it’ll really be you who has died a bit. Things don’t die. They continue. They pass from one to another, always in this fashion, from one to another. He waved his open hand from right to left, a worn hand, covered with blemishes, fingers stiff at the joints, the hands of a very old man. Always from one to the other, like water from the sky that falls to earth, like fog that rises from the water, like seeds and particles. The mourners come, then the white birds arrive and end up hanging from doors. The mourners leave, and the horses call out to them. I have come only to leave, for that reason alone. But I came without being able to walk like others, punished perhaps by those who first began to kill the horses, but I don’t want cement. I’m descended from the man who established the village. Give me your hand. His hand was hot and dry. He broke out in a coughing fit that was worse than the first. As soon as he could speak, he pointed to a jar on a little table, saying he wanted some honey. Dog roses were painted all across the white jar, and the handle of a spoon, in the form of a serpent’s tail, protruded from it. He took a spoonful of honey, ate it little by little, said the honey was bitter. Who knows what diseased flowers the bees have sucked? Like women. The river said it had been a serpent — as he spoke he plunged the spoon into the honey — the serpent. He broke off to run his tongue over his lips, removing the honey stuck to them. The first man who settled the village killed the serpent at the top of the mountain, and flung it, flung it against the mountain, and the mountain split. He was already dead. All of him was dead, blood still flowing through him, but with the pallor of death on his emaciated face, thin lips, and miraculously straight back. Men who are eager to kill are men who are already dead. Men who do things are men who are already dead. He was a man who was already dead, could do only remarkable things, he and his horse were one and the same because he’d passed on to his horse all of his death, never realizing they were both dead from the first day they began pursuing the serpent. The moment the serpent died, it changed into water and coursed beneath the rocks that had come hurling down. The man who had been dead inside, since the day he first began to pursue the serpent, died on the outside, trampled by his horse a few years later, down the mountain, at the bend in the river, near the tree cemetery. He clutched my hand. When the moon is round, you’ll see the serpent scales above the water. In the village you can still hear the neighing of the horse that went mad — a man had passed his own death on to the horse by forcing him to pursue the serpent time and time again. He squeezed my hand, tighter and tighter. As his hot, mottled hand clasped mine, I caught the scent of water and canes, the air barely clipped by a hand approaching me. He said, with my hand in his, he could feel the weight of death, everything coming to an end. He held youth in his hand but couldn’t retain it. Everything is ending: the light, my existence that still binds me to the earth, as the earth binds and envelops roots. He said things formed piles within him. The years too. Things become superimposed and each thing wants to be the first on your mind. Things pile up, the years too. The years are jumbled in our thoughts. At the moment of thinking, instead of thinking about the last years — the youngest — or thinking about the first ones — the oldest — he thought about the middle years, and within the middle years he jumped from one idea to another without restraint. Sometimes everything got jumbled, and he had to shut his eyes, one hand on each side of his forehead, his head was splitting open. Everything was choking him, sinking deep inside him, like the river engulfing the dead. But sometimes at night the water draws things upstream — sad, broken things, sadder than the white bird that appeared like a sigh, escaping out of the serpent’s mouth at the moment of its death. A man never thinks what he’d like to think. Tell him that, you hear me? And he squeezed my hand. Tell him to come and help me, convince them, because I think like him. We’re alike. Tell him to let me die, don’t let me be killed. Tell him without telling him I told you. I’ve suffered enough. I couldn’t walk like others, and one day I wanted to cut off my feet. But my heart stopped. The heart’s like that. Moving his shirt aside, he had me place my hand on his chest. It never stops, always working. It’s what keeps us alive. Sometimes it’s tired and moves slowly, like a person; sometimes it stops with a furious tremor, sometimes it melts. My heart stopped when blood streamed across my feet. Then it began to gallop like a horse gone mad, leaving the impression that my heart had slipped deeper inside me, so as to beat more strongly later on. You tell him this and tell him not to fall again. Some falls are bad. One day you’ll realize the heart must live alone; everything that envelops it is worthless. Mine has lived. If only you knew how it has lived from spring to blazing leaves and from blazing leaves to spring. He released my hand, having passed on to me his burning heat. Honey burns, he said, nothing burns as much as honey, even if it’s made from diseased flowers. Tell him I’ll see that he’s notified, now leave. When you’re a man, you’ll choke like me and you’ll remember my hand that was beginning to die, was thin, was no longer a hand.

But he had to die like everyone else. They made him die in the center of the Plaça. They wanted to watch him. When Senyor’s eyes began to protrude, an old man from the slaughterhouse said: he wanted to see the village carried away by the river, and the village sees him carried away by death. And I didn’t know where that girl was.

VIII

Everything was solitary and quiet as I walked back down the path. Groups of men were strolling through the streets. I could not rid myself of the fever that had passed to my hand, nor free my eyes of the image of Senyor’s vacant eyes peering at me above his mottled hand as I described my father’s last death. All of this merged with the images of the man who enjoyed watching people die and the woman shouting as she was led away. I approached one of the groups, where a man was explaining that early that morning — when the sun was scaling the stone arch, heading for the bend in the river — he had ventured close to the old man’s cave and found the man with the cudgel standing in the center of the clearing, hands in the air, crying out to the stones and to all that could hear him — everywhere his voice could reach — that he was a dead man. I left the group and drew near another, where a man said that someone had stolen the cudgel from the old man of the cave. The man announced that if he discovered who had committed the deed, he’d drag his face through the dust, slash open his back with the old man’s cudgel, and sow the ground with his blood. Another man said in a troubled voice that when he was young he’d fought against the patient old man, and after the contest the way he perceived life had changed. In front of the blacksmith’s house, a large number of men were discussing whether it was a good thing to have troubled the old man, who’d had a difficult life. To steal his cudgel was to steal his hands. One mentioned that he could remember how the old man had won the cave when he was young by fighting against two cudgel-swinging men. He’d defeated the two of them without moving, stopping the blows of one and the other as they swung and tried to outwit him. Finally he’d delivered the death blow to both, and took possession of the cave, leaving the men at his feet, slain by killings as clean as handfuls of water. As the man uttered these last words beneath the heavy wisteria-laden night, I saw the hand without ever seeing it. The blacksmith’s voice could be heard above the others’, telling them there was no need to be so anxious: his son had just reported that the old man had recovered his cudgel. Go home to your houses, don’t think of this any more. A youngish man, with black eyes and sunken cheeks, approached the blacksmith, placing his hand on the smithy’s shoulder. The blacksmith turned his head, glancing at the hand on his shoulder, and looked into the man’s eyes. If anyone torments the old man of the cave, announced the young man, they’ll have to reckon with me. The day we battled, I sliced open the man of the cave’s chest, and with blood gushing out of him, the only thing the old man did was stop my blows. When I fell to the ground, as everyone did — the man of the black eyes exclaimed — instead of wounding me, he left me with light, and patience pervaded all my being. He removed his hand from the blacksmith’s shoulder and continued speaking: if anything bad should happen to the old man of the cave, I give my word that I’ll kill the prisoner. He began to shout: that bag of bones and rancor, evil soul, worse than any of us. Another man, similar to him — black eyes and flattened hair — approached him, shaking his head from side to side, as if his words were directed at everyone, and he announced that he’d talked to the prisoner once about the man of the cave. The prisoner said if the men who ventured out to fight were unmanly after their mothers had mangled their ears, they were even less so after combat. It’s hard to believe, the prisoner had told him, that no one recognizes the man of the cave’s pride. He leaves the combatants half-dead and returns to his cave to laugh. The blacksmith told him to be quiet; he wanted to know if the prisoner had said this while he was still locked in the cage or when he’d ceased to be a person. The man couldn’t respond because the man with the sunken cheeks struck him on the face with his fist, knocking him flat on the street. People cried out for the prisoner to be put back into the cage. The blacksmith raised his hand to calm the crowd, again telling everyone to go home. In the end nothing bad had occurred, the old man again had his cudgel, according to what his son had told him, and while everyone was worrying about the old man, he was sleeping like a rock. At that very moment a barely audible neighing sprang from the prisoner, and from out of the darkness a desperate neighing issued from one of the village streets. No one knew who had neighed.

When everyone had left, the blacksmith had me enter his house and by the forge asked me what Senyor had said. When I told him, he replied that he had imagined as much. While I was explaining everything Senyor had told me, he slowly ran a finger through the ashes, forming a furrow. Without cement! Don’t they understand, like your father, that it’s for their own good? To have a calm life beyond life, they must be complete, as they were before. Can’t they see that? He moved away from the forge and picked up an iron bar that I would never have been able to lift, and, full of rage, began striking the anvil madly, shouting louder and louder: don’t they understand? Don’t they understand?

IX

A sense of unease swept through the village. I could feel it. The unease the blacksmith’s son felt when too much desire troubled the inhabitants, weighing on his chest like a storm brewing behind the mountains. At night, the prisoner would tell me his life was drawing to an end; it was almost over. He had had his fill. The water, the ivy, the wash women who think of one thing only, laughing at me because they believe that I too think only about this thing. All the women waiting for night to fall, and this thing far away, carried off not by water but by my blood that has changed and changed, growing old and thick. He asked me if the blacksmith’s son had hidden the old man’s cudgel. I told him that when the cudgel was hidden, groups of men had gathered in the village to talk about it. The prisoner said they only wanted to wag their tongues. Years ago the villagers should have mistreated the man with the cudgel; he was useless. The only thing he did was shatter young people’s strength and eagerness; the youth should thank him for wearing them out.

Two or three weeks after my visit to Senyor, a man came down the mountain and told the blacksmith to go up right away because Senyor wanted him close by, to help him die as he wished. The blacksmith made the climb with four or five other men, plus two very robust ones who carried a stretcher. I didn’t realize until later, but I think it was at that point that evil was set loose and began to ravage the village. No one was able to stop its course. As the blacksmith moved through the village, he wore the same face as the day I told him my father had entered the tree and had most likely stopped breathing. He had seemed possessed as he rushed out to gather people. They strapped Senyor to the stretcher by his feet and wrists. It seems an argument developed on the mountain — some men didn’t want Senyor to be brought down to the village. They said he should die in his own house. But the blacksmith and the men with him convinced them, with words or with blows. As the stretcher reached one end of the Plaça, the cement man arrived from the other side. Senyor looked at them all with yellow, dull eyes, as if the film covering them had been ripped away. Everyone was in the Plaça, the village crones in a corner by the shed where the paintbrushes were stored. The prisoner and horses began to neigh; no one had ever heard such a chorus of neighing, all at the same time, that lasted so long. The blacksmith gave the word for the cement man to commence; they forced open Senyor’s mouth and began to fill it. Senyor’s eyes were bulging; his chest rose twice as he retched. The man next to me described how they had gone up the mountain to fetch him. As soon as Senyor realized what they wanted, he jumped from his deathbed with frightening youthful force and tried to escape, but the blacksmith gave him a hard blow with his fist on the back of his neck and he lost consciousness. He came to his senses as they were carrying him down the mountain; they say he began to whimper, as if instead of mother and father he had had only a mother, for he whimpered more than any woman. Several young men approached the stretcher and attempted to untie Senyor; one of them grasped the cement man by the neck and would have strangled him if another man had not quickly knocked him to the ground, kicking him in the stomach. The villagers grabbed hold of the men who wanted to untie Senyor and placed them under guard near the old women. Senyor began to cough furiously, bringing up cement; a drop of blood fell on the ground, he had dug his fingernails into his palms. His body retched again; when it calmed he was dead. The pregnant women began to scream because several pregnant women from the mountain, whose eyes were unbound, wanted to remove their bandages. Throughout it all, the old women standing near the men who wanted to untie Senyor had spat and insulted Senyor as he lay dying. All except one, who went over to him, knelt down, removed the cement from round his mouth, and closed his now undiscerning eyes with her palms, so people would not see them. So people would not see the suffering eyes, the old woman had knelt in front of him and with her rough palms had pressed his eyes half closed, while there was still time she said. Everyone prepared to go to the forest. The men had already lifted the stretcher, their arms extended, the veins in the bend of their elbows taut.

The blacksmith announced that they would cage the prisoner when they returned from the burial.

X

The villagers left the Plaça: the men with the stretcher in front, the blacksmith leading everyone. They carried torches, but the last dregs of light could still be glimpsed behind Maraldina and the Muntanyes Morades. As soon as they had quit the village, the sound of galloping horses reached them from the right-hand side of Pedres Baixes. Everything came to a standstill, even before the blacksmith raised his hand, signaling them to stop. When the horses had almost reached the slaughterhouse, the blacksmith turned and exclaimed: the watchmen! Three men galloped up; their horses came to a halt before the stretcher and reared. Without dismounting, the middle watchman said this time it was certain. They had seen the Caramens at dawn, up close — impossible to be any closer — hiding in the shrubs, crouching and creeping from one shrub to another. You could hardly hear them, as if they didn’t have legs. A loud rumble of voices rose at the back of the group because they hadn’t heard a word. The man who had spoken pointed to the watchman on his right, saying, he saw them. The blacksmith asked if there were many of them; the middle watchman said it was hard to know but he thought so. The blacksmith turned and faced the villagers, telling them to go to their houses and look for arms with which to defend themselves. He sent the watchmen back and chose some men to follow them, to gather wood and build large bonfires between Pedres Baixes and Pedres Altes. Once night had fallen, if they received word that the shadows were approaching, they were to light the fires to frighten them away. He gave them some iron awls, longer than the ones they used to torment children’s desire. The watchman who had seen the shadows said the horses were tired; they’d die if they had to make the return trip so fast. The blacksmith ordered them to be given fresh horses, and while everyone was returning to the village, he took me and a few others, saying the first thing we had to do was cage the prisoner. The blacksmith’s wife and a few other women came with us, and when we approached the wash area, they began to laugh and poke each other with their elbows for no reason at all. The blacksmith gave his wife an angry slap across her purple mark and told her it wasn’t the time to laugh, that would come later. He told her to go and rest, because the real party would begin when the Caramens attacked the village. The women were still, but didn’t leave. The blacksmith talked to the prisoner, I can’t remember what he said, something about not behaving as he should, all the village wanted to see him caged, and if after he was caged he spoke to the village boys of things he shouldn’t, he’d find a way to punish his deceitful tongue. While the men looked from the prisoner to the blacksmith, I was watching the village and suddenly noticed smoke rising. At first, I didn’t think anything about it; I looked at the smoke curling as it climbed and tried to imagine the men who had glimpsed the shadows in the shrubs. The smoke was like a black tree trunk rising in the air. I was surprised when I heard my voice saying that a house in the village was on fire, only I didn’t say a house, I said the village, because it seemed to me that the whole village was burning; the shadows had set fire to the village while people was preparing to defend it. Everyone turned to look at the smoke, and the blacksmith’s wife and the other women became agitated. It’s hard for me to know, hard to think, hard to remember, hard to know in what order things happened, but in the end it all goes round, when I’ve forgotten it all, forgotten about me and everything else, and the fire returns. The blacksmith’s house was on fire, and it was as if fire and wind inhabited it, and wind and fire poured out of the windows, at times in steady streams, other times in broken spells. A furious tongue of fire rose, then suddenly broke into deliquescent red and blue tongues, sometimes clear fire, sometimes crowned by smoke searching for its way through the air, not knowing which direction to take, until finally the wind carried it off. The fire cried out with a desperate voice, like a voice laughing at everything, crimson with madness. And the prisoner. no, it was then that they beat me, not one man alone, more than one, because it was my fault that the prisoner had killed himself. Some days later the blacksmith’s son told me who had started the fire. The pain I felt when they were beating me merged with the smoke that was drawing flames with it as it fled; it all blended into the murmur of the water coursing beneath the village and the hands beating me. As we watched the smoke, the prisoner had let himself slip into the water; he went under and the river swept him away, at the spot where people went to gaze at the rocks. The blacksmith’s son wasn’t with us. He hadn’t come to cage the prisoner. Nor was he in the Plaça while they were cementing Senyor. I woke up — or was regaining consciousness after the beating — and saw more houses burning. The fire leapt higher and higher, turning the sky scarlet, like tinted fog. My back ached, especially my right shoulder. I wiped my mouth and discovered clotted blood on one side. The taste in my mouth was one I’d never experienced before: dust and ashes and filthy water. I stood up and found myself alone. By the light of the fire, I could make out the place where the prisoner had let himself slide into the water when I shouted that the houses were on fire. I was just beyond the wash area, on my way back into the village, when I came across a frightened woman who, as she passed me, said they were killing her husband and she couldn’t bear it any longer. Men were fighting in front of the blacksmith’s house; my wife was seated in a corner, terrified, her hands covering her face. I walked toward them, and just as I reached the group, someone grabbed me by the neck, a man I didn’t know. He told me some boys from the village had killed the man of the cave and I was part of it, because my wife had borne the news. He shook her by the shoulders. She said it was true, she’d heard shouts and had stopped, heard how the boys killed him, the old man groaning, the boys laughing. They killed him with his own cudgel. She ran to the village to give the news and discovered the burning houses. When the man asked her what she was doing near the cave, she said she’d gone to Maraldina to visit the cemetery where her mother was buried. She went there often, and when she came back she always took the long route, to see if she could get a glimpse of the man from the cave. She was also looking for her daughter whom she hadn’t seen all day. The boys who killed the old man entered the village before her; when she reached it they were explaining how they’d slain the old man, displaying the cudgel, which was still wet with blood, beating their chests with delight. Everything began with the fire; people were terrified about the shadows the watchmen had seen. A group of men had cornered the man from up the mountain — the one who had tried to strangle the cement man — and he’d bolted into a house, propped the door shut, and was running along the roof, to see if he could jump from one to another and escape, but they followed him. He told them it wasn’t his fault, he’d been blind with rage. The ones on the street called to him to come down, we won’t hurt you, come down. The man kept shouting that he wasn’t to blame, it was in his blood, while the others continued calling to him to come down. Many hours later the man gave up and came down from the roof. They cracked open his skull, but he wasn’t dead, so they strung him up by his feet from a tree in the Plaça. Like a horse, they said, when they left him there; and before returning to the fighting arena, they gave him a shove so he’d swing back and forth. That was when, while the man and my wife. yes, that was when the blacksmith’s son yanked me by the arm and led me away, I still don’t know. it all happened so fast, time has muddled everything. When we left the village we came across Senyor’s stretcher, abandoned in the open, and the blacksmith’s son told me to move fast. A cloud of smoke was pouring out of the stables, followed immediately by flames, and as the flames battled the smoke and wind, the sound of galloping horses reached us. They sped past, almost brushing against us, knocking over the stretcher and Senyor, treading on them. The earth shook, and I covered my ears. When the horses had passed, the blacksmith’s son pulled me along and, without knowing how, we found ourselves at Pedres Baixes. Night was ending, and the smell of fire pervaded everything, cleansing it all. Sparks were shooting up from the blacksmith’s house, and his son calmly said, that’s it. He told me my child was dead. He said, come and you’ll see her. He led me to the cemetery on Maraldina. Though still dark, night was ending, and the light from the fires couldn’t reach us there. He directed me to the first heather shrubs, where the path began; she was lying there, on her side. I picked her up. Her legs were drawn against her chest. She was on her side. I picked her up and carried her home, leaving her on top of the table. Without saying a word, the blacksmith’s son had followed us.

XI

The blacksmith did not want me to entomb my child in the tree. He said he would use the ring for some other dead person. I left home, carrying my child, who had turned wooden, like the table. My innards were on fire, as if the night fire blazed within me. I made my way through a group of men, most of them coming from the blacksmith’s. One of them had killed another man by twisting the bones that supported his head. They walked slowly, taking up a lot of room, as if the street were too narrow for them. After they had passed, I looked back at them; they walked like the dead, stiff and stretched tight. Smoke still billowed from the crumpled houses, destroyed by the fire. Some horses stood motionless near the wash area, their reflections doubling them in the water. Many had run away, but others were caught and returned to the enclosure. I had stopped at Pedres Baixes, exhausted, my child in my arms, when the blacksmith’s son approached, eyes brilliant and skin that overnight seemed to have grown tight and fresh. The blacksmith’s son stopped in front of me, ran his finger across my child’s cheek, and said he had seen her leave the village with the boys chasing her, calling out, deformed, deformed. He knew nothing more about her until, on his way back from the stables, a little boy told him she had run away desperately, trying to escape the men who were fighting. As soon as she had left the village she wanted to return, but they had surrounded her; to keep from feeling cornered she had run from one side to the other, all of them pursuing her, shouting. Halfway into town, one had thrown a stone at her, the others followed; all of them threw stones and handfuls of dirt as they corralled her, shouting, go with the dead, with the dead. When they had almost reached the cemetery, they came to a halt, and she turned and faced them. They were silent for a moment, but soon the shouts began. Then a boy picked up a large rock that one of the smaller boys standing next to him was holding and threw it furiously. The rock struck my child on the forehead, and she fell backwards; then they all threw themselves on her and killed her with the rocks. She didn’t feel a thing because the first rock left her in a daze. I asked him to tell me which little boy had told him about my child’s death. The blacksmith’s son sat down next to me and told me he would recognize him if he saw him, but he couldn’t tell me who it was, he didn’t think he had ever seen him before. I could feel the weight of my child on my lap, and there was barely a thread of life left in me. Not because she was dead, but because everything had happened without my understanding it. When she was born, I had not loved her. She looked peculiar when my wife showed her to me; it was as if a nuisance had settled into the house. I wanted to run away, so I would not have to see the thing that clearly I had made, because life is sad, to be born is sad. I could not look at her; everything had turned bitter, less full of life. Her eyes, her legs, every little bit of the flesh I had made — had been made from me — all of it drove me mad. When she cried, I was the one who wished to cry loudly; I would have preferred her not to be born, because I knew what awaited her. Breathing. Only the chore and sadness of breathing and breathing, as things change from tender to dry, new to old, the night-moon that grows thin then swells, the fireless sun that lights up, the soughing of wind that transports, shatters, gathers, and drives away the clouds, raising and flattening the dust. Only the sorrow of going to sleep and waking up, feeling life without knowing where it comes from, aware that it will flee without knowing why it was given to you, why it is taken from you. Here you are: there is this and this and this. And now, enough. I saw the blacksmith’s son approaching; I had not noticed that he had left. He was carrying a shovel and he said, it’s to dig a hole. Time to go. I stood up, cradling my child in my arms, all of my body still aching from the beating and from lying on the ground during the night. The blacksmith’s son carried the shovel. We reached the foot of Maraldina, and I laid my child on the ground, her legs contracted the way I had found her, shriveled up by death; I picked up the shovel and told the blacksmith’s son to leave. He said he would help me, but I told him to leave. It was difficult to dig a hole, not because the earth was hard — which it wasn’t, just full of little stones — but because I picked up only a bit of dirt with each shovelful. It was taking forever, and the sharp edge of the shovel was digging into my sole from pressing my foot down so often. I wasn’t sure if I was making the hole slowly because the shovel removed only a little earth each time, or because the center of my foot hurt, or because as long as the digging lasted I had my child near me and could look at her while I was digging the hole. Let the moment last. But the hole was dug: the same size as my child with shriveled legs. I sat on the ground in front of the hole. A strong, earthy smell reached me, I laid my child in it, on her side because of her shriveled legs. Quiet, alone with my child, amongst the smell of earth and little stones, I again saw the forest and remembered the first day the blacksmith’s son had jumped in front of me while my child was sleeping, tired from holding on to my neck as we crossed the river. I had half closed my eyes, the back of my head resting against a tree trunk while at my feet by fits and starts a butterfly was being born, struggling without knowing if it would issue forth, out of itself, like a flower thrusting up from a branch. While I was watching my sleeping child and the butterfly struggling into life, I glimpsed the starveling legs of the blacksmith’s son. That was the first time I saw him in broad daylight. My child woke when she sensed something strange nearby — otherwise, she would have slept longer. The blacksmith’s son waited for the butterfly to be born, then immediately gave it to my child, and she laughed and looked at the blacksmith’s son while the butterfly flapped its wings, tickling her hand. She laughed and looked at the blacksmith’s son, and the two of them laughed. When I had come to love her, the two of them laughed together. I watched them laugh, and it seemed as if I was not present because they laughed and I was quiet. I had only the tree behind me, and I had lost everything, except the tree, I lost everything in that moment with the butterfly in the hand that had never held a butterfly. As I sat silently between two laughs, I cast a shadow on my child’s face with my hand, but within me I wanted to kill the blacksmith’s son. With all my being. I blocked the fiery sun that had risen and was falling full force onto my child’s face. The fiery sun rose, and its light fell across the hole, onto my dead child’s face, the child who when alive wanted black night because the blacksmith’s son had explained that you could only see them in black night. I watched her dead, as if the sun were forcing me to look at her, as if all the time that had passed previously — all the time I had tried to keep from looking at her — all of it now kept my eyes glued to her face. Lying face up, her body on its side. When she was on the verge of dying, she must have looked up. What I saw then is difficult to explain. Her mouth seemed to laugh; a half-open eye was shining, seemingly laughing too. It was the laugh of an elderly person, tired of life, who with a little laugh hides everything. It also seemed like a laugh that was laughing at me, as if it also wanted to convince me that everything I had believed was a lie, that in life, only this was true: the laughter of having been able to die. I threw a shovelful of dirt mixed with stones on her. Then another. And another. I stopped and put down the shovel because my hands suddenly wanted to touch my dead child, from deep inside me I wanted to stroke her. If I had not touched her, I would have thought that she was alive, only playing dead so I would search for her in some place, some hiding place where she was still alive. Her face, her cheek. she is not. Her legs were dead. I do not know how to say it, I do not know. Her fingers were closed; I took her hand and tried several times to pry open a finger. I did not even realize it was my child’s hand, so obsessed was I with trying to make it be the hand I had known: flat, fingers extended, like a hand floating in water that will not harm you. Her little fingers were strong, because they were dead and mine alive. I threw more dirt on her, I had started by throwing dirt on her feet, then moving up to her glassy eyes and mouth. Open your mouth, I would say to her when she was just beginning to understand, and she would open her mouth. I could see the streaked roof of her mouth and the little uvula that would not stop moving. I put down the shovel, feeling there was something I should do, but I was not sure what. Without knowing why, I walked over to Pedres Baixes and returned with a smooth, flat rock that I placed over her head. I covered her with dirt, but her hands showed, especially that one, a bit of skin with a tiny black worm curling and uncurling. Her blood is corrupt. The hand melts away, only the black speck remains. Her hand returns as if wanting to slip beneath the black speck. The knot on her little finger is wrinkled when her hand is open, and when her hand is closed it shines. The hand approaches. Sometimes, when I want it to approach it does not, or it comes with an open hand holding a tremulous butterfly in its palm, and the blacksmith’s son releases his fingers from round the butterfly on that first day we met in the forest and they laughed. The hand is dissolving, only a tip remains, a smudge that has been erased, and it too disappears. I finished covering my child with dirt and that first day, first moment, first night, returned to me. Always the first day and first night and the last day and final night, the earth above my dead child forming a mound because the body was a nuisance to the earth, the grave could not hold all of the earth. Using the shovel, I leveled the earth with a few blows and thought that when the village had buried all of its dead, I would place a circle of pebbles on top that would represent a soap bubble, and I would nail the cane she used to make the bubbles in the courtyard into the earth. I knew that time and rain would level the mound, the flesh would dissolve and the earth would settle and above no trace would remain. The pebble circle would come undone, scattered by the rain. Drenched. The bones. Dead bones that are of no use. Better for it all to disappear. No child lies there. Nothing that once breathed. Bones last and last, like stones, like things. The smell of turned-up earth filled everything, the sun had fled, and slender clouds had arrived, letting a fine rain fall, more like dew than rain. Very fine. Rather than being born from grass, it fell from a higher grass, planted far above. I raised my head and opened my mouth, and the thin rain led me to close my eyes. I closed them on purpose so the rain could stroke them and enter my mouth. I held out my palm, still warm from the shovel handle, and waited for each drop of rain as if it were a surprise. Is this it? Yes. That bit of rain falling from a passing cloud that had been rent by the sun, giving rise to the strong odor of recently-moved earth, earth that is not accustomed to air or light, furious that it has been brought to the surface. It was this. Insignificant. Just a trace of life. Now I know. It has been a difficult lesson. It was this thing that comes but never when I want it to, if only again to have a short while, the length of time for a breath or for death, not memory. Memory is worthless. It is. A soft rain one morning at the foot of Maraldina seems like dew that has fallen from I know not what grasses on the summit.