Death in Spring

I

Many people accompanied me as I prepared to swim under the village. I don’t know who they were; I don’t know if we hurried or dawdled, if they talked or were silent. If I try to recall walking to the wash area, I cannot. I remember turning back and seeing the two women from Font de la Jonquilla in the doorway of the last house in the village, the one with the protruding eyes and the one with the long braid. I remember the sound of water. I don’t know whether it was because of the women or the sound of the river, but I thought about two types of water. One good, one bad. They all wanted it. They had contrived to do it. They were bored and needed it to keep living. Everyone’s face bespoke a craving, although what they wished was not really clear to them; they just wished it at whatever cost. I never realized they had all joined together to do this to me: men, women — even the pregnant women — the old men from the slaughterhouse, the man in charge of blood, the faceless men, all of them incited by the blacksmith. The Festa was late that year because of the fighting and because the villagers needed time to lick their wounds. I remember the heat, appearing suddenly out of nowhere, I can still feel it, and the strong light that was like a summer light when summer blinds. It returns and furrows into the unease of now, which isn’t really unease, I don’t know what it is. The heat beats against the rose-colored walls of the houses and reflects onto me, blinding me. I think endlessly about my life and feel that it is dying. The broad river flowed past, covering the banks, flattening the grass. It carried away earth and stones whose edges had been polished by the years. Joyful mornings still exist, but where I can’t say. Amidst the canes, perhaps, in the wind rustling through leaves, in the wing feathers of mourners as they circle Muntanyes Morades but never venture to Maraldina. Everyone was in the Plaça. Dark smudges marked the tree — and the ground beneath it — where the man had hung by his feet for three days. The two old men who held up the stake-laden trunk seemed wooden, their fingers full of tree nodes rather than knots. I should have told them to leave, or grabbed them by the collar and choked them. It seemed like years since the day I took my child to Font de la Jonquilla, but in reality only a short time had passed. My life had been filled with the struggle of growing, the kind of death my father endured, everything he did to me, everything that happened round me. Life had turned ugly from so much living. This never-ending chain of men and women coming together, children never ceasing to be born. My mother had been beautiful, and then one day, without knowing what had happened, she turned ugly. Everyone was in the Plaça, and the race had finished. The moment had come to swim the river. I looked up. The window in Senyor’s house was closed; the ivy was sending up sprouts that stretched upward as far as the windowsill. The pregnant women, with only the lower part of their faces showing, were sitting in the Plaça under the shade of the trees. My wife had climbed up on a branch and was observing it all as she swung her hard-soled feet back and forth high above the ground. The blacksmith’s son had spent hours lying on the spot where the prisoner’s cage had stood. The aftermath of the clash was apparent: fewer men in the village, dark smudges on the tree, burnt houses being rebuilt.

When I drew the forked stick, which was practically placed in my hand, the pregnant women raised their heads and laughed out of the corners of their mouths. While still in the Plaça, an old man said, drink. The drink they forced on me burnt my throat, my entire body, as it went down. The blacksmith came over to me, slapped me on the back a few times and said, don’t be afraid. I don’t know who accompanied me. I can visualize the two women from Font de la Jonquilla standing motionless, their eyes fixed on me; for a long time I could feel their gaze on my back, at once a burden and a companion. I remember the blacksmith; he was with the others who accompanied me. He walked beside me. A child holding a cane appeared out of nowhere and drew a line on the ground, shouting with his hands in the air that we couldn’t cross it. We stepped on it, the broken line through which things escape when you are little, broken from within, the break through which everything escapes. I can’t see the blacksmith, but I see his mouth — lips the color of crimson powder, teeth rotten, eyes that never looked but always saw. The child who had drawn the line was standing in the middle of the street; I saw him again the last time I turned round. We reached the river, right at water level. I didn’t strip. I approached the edge of the river without knowing why I was there. My mouth filled with the strong taste of the drink, a wave of blood in my forehead, throbbing and throbbing. The blacksmith removed my clothes. I’ll have to take care of you. He took my clothes off slowly, blocking the sun. Standing beside the water, my back to everyone, I felt as if I were more insignificant than the thing I was before I was born. A large hand gave me a shove on the head. Before I fell into the water, I had a glimpse of the blacksmith’s son facing me from the other side of the river.

II

I felt as if I was water and my body of flesh and bones had stayed on land with my clothes. The water pulled me under. As I had neither hands nor legs, at first the water drew me down. The drink did not calm my fear: it numbed my arms and legs. When I emerged from the glass darkness, I still carried the afternoon glare with me and I could see nothing. Then the shadows split; just as I felt that all was lost, a rock stopped me. I grabbed hold of it and my legs and arms seemed to come alive again. It occurred to me that perhaps the drink only numbed you at the beginning. I caught the strong smell of moss, and the rock beneath my hand was viscous, snot-like. My father’s hand was large, covered with hairs, the dry skin cracked, a white half-moon at the base of his fingernails. When I was little my father was a hand. A hand behind my head, pushing me forward, grow up fast, you’re a nuisance. If I was in the dining room, he pushed me into the courtyard; if I was in the courtyard, he pushed me toward the dining room. My mother said my father was changing, becoming strange. He would leave and we wouldn’t see him for two or three days. He would return and act like he always had, but he stayed away longer each time. That’s when my mother began her plaintive keening beneath the windows of newlyweds. She grew full of rage, sometimes whimpering and groaning, we won’t ever see him again. He always returned, but I fretted over the idea that he might not, and I would sit and listen behind the door, my back nailed to the wood. In the end, every time my father reappeared, my mother would tell him that it would be better if he never came back. Let him leave and not come back, let him leave and not come back. My back to the door, sleepless, listening to the sounds from the street, I would whisper in a low voice, don’t come back, don’t come back. He started saying he wanted to kill himself, he was going to kill himself and we would never see him again, one day we would wait for him and never see him again. He looked at us and said he would kill himself, and when he killed himself he would laugh thinking we would be waiting for him but would never again see him. And then my mother grew ugly. The water was freezing. With the hand that wasn’t holding tight, I touched the rock. At first I was repulsed, but then I liked it; I could feel it against my back, darkness streaming out of the rock. He would say, in order to survive, you have to live as if you are dead. He said it as if he weren’t addressing anyone, while my stepmother sat on top of the table stringing flowers, one after the other. When my stepmother first came home with us, she began to change and my mother said. No, that was before my stepmother arrived, when my father first began to say he wanted to kill himself. When my stepmother appeared, my mother was already dead, I think. Yes, my mother was already dead. I realized during the early days with my stepmother that father had changed; he was the man he had been years before: he would come home happy, his eyes glowing. Later, his face always showed the same thing. It never changed, and he entered the house slowly. When my mother died, he told me that in order to survive you have to live as if you are dead. The following day I crossed the river with the bee chasing me; I wanted to visit the tree cemetery I had never seen. My father had grown thin; he said he couldn’t sleep, on certain nights the lifeless gash on his forehead seemed alive. He had grown thin and the tree was consuming him, as darkness was consuming me. I rubbed my hand over the slimy rock, again and again. The water created fat waves against the rock and I swayed back and forth. I felt there was no time; Time, I mean, was not present. It merely created light and change. I wanted to move, wanted to cross to the other side of the rock to see if. And while I was thinking about the “if,” a huge wave crashed against me and swept me away. Like a tiny particle I floated downstream until something blocked me and my feet got entangled. The smell of moss was settling in my nose, stronger than before. I wanted to disengage my feet from the reeds, but I couldn’t. The harder I tried to loosen them, the stronger they clasped me. Something horrible grew in my chest, as if a lump that held the fear of life, fear of people, fear of the unknown had formed in the center of my chest. A lump filled with suffering in the center of my chest, secured by root-like nerves. The reeds were binding me tighter and tighter. Like rope. She had told me to make a rope for her. The first winter she was with us. I ignored her. But when my father was dead and I slept at the foot of her door so I could hear her breathing. The river flowed through my bound feet as it circled the earth like a snake wanting to bite its tail. She made me enter the room where she slept with my father. No, my father was already dead. She opened a box and pulled out a rope, saying it was very old, tomorrow you’ll make me a new one. Two of them, many of them. She gave me some hemp and told me I had to make more rope: thin, fat, a lot of rope. Rolled up inside the box, the rope I made her looked like a young snake on top of an old snake. Beneath it lay the rope that was her mother and the awl that was used on me when I was little. When we were going to have the child, she clawed me, made my cheek bleed, told me that no one had ever made her a child. When she heard me enter the house, she hid; if I called to her, she fled and sometimes didn’t come back all night. She would go and watch the man with the cudgel fighting with the village boys. She would watch from her hiding place, hear the shrill sound he made with his tongue, the things he said and she couldn’t understand. When the old man entered the cave, leaving a boy lying unconscious on the ground, she would come out of her hiding place in the grass and kick the boy in the ribs. My legs were trapped, and I was enveloped by darkness, the whole village above me, a group of men waiting for me to emerge. I would have stayed there, among the reeds, with the cold water. I was thirsty and sick. I drank some water and was thirstier still because the thirst was born deep within me, beneath the lump in my chest, and the water couldn’t reach it. My tongue was thick; the taste from the drink had grown stronger, and my mouth was salty and sour. I ran my tongue over my teeth, finding everywhere the taste that grew and grew, changing from salty and sour to bitter. I touched my teeth and glassy eyes without understanding that I was doing it. As if, without my realizing, some other person wanted to touch my eyes to see if the slime was on my teeth, in my eyes, on the rocks dashed by the water as it surged from inside the earth. Darkness emerged thick, as if night— the night I carried within me, that no one could dislodge — were gushing from the rocks. I moved a leg, and the reeds that bound me seemed less strong. I grabbed hold of something and leaned down, how cold, and severed many of the reeds, some were stubborn, some decomposing. Little by little, I constructed a well of water without reeds around me, and when I was on the verge of being able to escape from that prison, I didn’t. I saw my child and the blacksmith’s son. I saw them the first time I crossed the river, not alone but with my child in the patch of dog roses, spider webs stuck to her leg, she had said, get it off, get it off. you knew it, you knew it, you knew it. With an effort I disentangled myself from the reeds, though some of them still wished to grasp me. Again, Time, and no way of knowing if I had been among the reeds very long, the water and me beneath the village, all of me on fire, the cold water carrying me along. I stretched out an arm and found a branch to clasp, it was a root, coming from above, the roots that upwrenched houses were dry, and some, wishing to drink, had come in search of the water that flowed beneath them. I tightened my hand round the root, as if it were a friend, as if it were the prisoner’s hand waiting for me ever since that night because he had been able to escape his suffering when I had shouted that the village was burning. I felt my head becoming clearer; I was again becoming me, with arms and legs that could swim and walk. Everything was darker near the root. Darker than all the darkness I had left behind. The rock wall was slimy, the moss grass-like; I followed the course of the water with my hands as it combed the moss, flattening it. This rock was slimier than the other, as if all the snails, all the slugs had deposited their mucus and foam on it. The rock was a snakeskin, and snake and water were one and the same, and the river of the dead killed whoever swam beneath the village. As if suddenly awakening, I felt an obstacle approaching. An obstacle and an odor. I stopped breathing, as if the thing lived only in my head, as if I could kill it by holding my breath. It and the smell were approaching, closer and closer. I glimpsed a darker shadow within the blackness and a faint gleam. Out of fear of the thing approaching with its breath, I loosened my grasp on the root, and the water swept me away, leaving the malodor behind; again, I found my arms and legs numb. I cried out, as if someone could hear me and come to my aid. I was alone, and the rock crushed my forehead, many sharp-edged rocks slashing me at the same time. The whole ceiling had lowered, water and ceiling meeting, or the river had risen. A mouthful of water was mixed with the taste of blood. The water deposited me on top of a rock. Whether I rested there for a short time or longer, life had ended. My innards burned, and I was surrounded by freezing water. I could hear water surging, a waterfall, I thought. Only water, the flowing water, and my aching forehead, everything was moving, the river widening, the ceiling rising as if it were made of resin that the water could erase. I had only to wait. The rock was warm. I was dead, and Time did not exist. I could feel a breath-like warmth entering my body. I moved my hand away and reached toward my sleeping father’s mouth, when he breathed out, I moved my hand away, my father had fallen asleep in the courtyard, seated in a chair, early one afternoon. The gash on his head was recent, and I wanted to look at his eyes, know if he could see me through the slit in his eyes, even though he was asleep. I tiptoed over to him, leaned down to gaze into his eyes. He was sleeping, and the bit of eye that was left open was staring. I placed my open hand in front of his eyes. He didn’t budge. He seemed to see me, but didn’t. He was breathing deeply, and a rattle rose from his throat. I waved my open palm before his eyes, then held my hand in front of his mouth; his breath was warm as it came and went. One night, shortly thereafter, I saw. I saw it in my sleep but I was awake, on the real day, in the courtyard, there was a green brightness, and my mother’s blue apron lay on the table, and that night I noticed that the light in the courtyard was also green and the apron on the table, blue. Afternoon and night merged. My father was reclining in the same chair in the center of the courtyard, but fog circled his feet, round his legs. I wanted to look at his eyes. I was just as frightened as that afternoon. Frightened that he might see me, frightened he might wake up. Again, I waved my hand before his eyes, he didn’t seem to see me, even though the slit in his eye was shining. When I was tired of leaning over to look in his eyes, I placed my open hand in front of his mouth, and while I was doing that, I thought about the fog that enveloped his legs, but I didn’t dare look at it. I was thinking about the fog when I had to jerk my hand away because the breath escaping my father’s mouth was fiery hot. I glanced down at my stinging palm. It was scarlet and large, like the palms of the man with the cudgel; I backed away, but my father’s burning breath still reached me, like a scorching wind. I kept changing places, moving about the courtyard, my father’s chair spinning round as if its four legs were not fixed to the ground, his breath following me, hotter and hotter. I don’t know how I managed to get to the dining room; from there everything seemed far away. I went upstairs and lay on the bed, my heart pounding. I shut the door. I think I was falling asleep, I don’t remember a thing. I couldn’t see the door because it was at the head of the bed. I couldn’t see it. Without seeing the door, which lay just behind my head, I observed a ring of fire in front of me, at the foot of the bed. Ember red. A black ring began to form near it. The smell of burning wood didn’t reach me until the black ring had formed. I was unable to think why I was seeing what I was seeing and shouldn’t be. A hole formed in the center of the embers, and the embers closest to the hole were surrounded by ashes. As the black ring widened, the embers followed it and the hole grew larger. My father’s mouth appeared in the center of the hole, his breath burning the door. When I realized that the door behind me now lay before me, at the foot of the bed, and that my father would begin to burn me, a rattle rose in my throat, the rattle my father had that afternoon in the courtyard. I awoke then, sweating and trembling. I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking or a knot from quickly swelling on my upper arm, as if an animal were living beneath my skin. The stone was warm, like breath. Wanting to know how large the stone was, I tried extending my leg to see if I could reach the edge of it with the tip of my foot, but it was as if I had no legs, only a swelling. The stone was warm, as if a calm stream of hot water were emerging from it. Slimy against my cheek. For a time that was not time, I lay with the cold and heat, a rattle in my throat, on top of the rock, as if I had turned to rock. I looked round and when I wanted to shut my eyes, I couldn’t. During that time when Time did not exist, the pain in my forehead had grown, and groans issued from my mouth of their own accord. I would have liked to touch my pain, know what had happened to my forehead, but I could not raise my arm, and I flattened myself against the rock. I would have stayed there forever, but just as the water had deposited me there, it carried me away. More furious, more enraged, the real thing. It swept me up, swept me away, and when the ceiling was almost upon me, I felt another low ceiling approaching, like the one that had reached down to the water and, again, the water forced me upward, as if offering me to the rock. I felt my forehead being ripped away. My entire forehead. The healed wound on my father’s forehead looked like blood when he raged or when it was very hot. It ripped his forehead off, someone was saying in a low voice as she nursed me.

III

The glare was so terrible when they removed the bandages from my eyes that I wanted to shut them but couldn’t. I covered them with my arm. An old woman, one of the group who had shouted horrid words at Senyor, told me that fire had consumed my body the first days after swimming under the village; she said I had talked about the prisoner. I put my hand to my forehead; I was missing an eyebrow. The old woman looked at me calmly, her hands clasped together over her stomach, and told me not to touch the wound because the skin was still very tender. She was small, with sunken cheeks, her earth-colored skin furrowed with deep wrinkles that went from her eyes all the way to the bottom of her face. She stared at me with an open mouth. My legs almost gave out when I stood up; instinctively I headed toward the village, and as I walked, my legs again learnt how to walk. I left without saying a word to the old woman who had taken care of me. At the entrance to the village, I turned back and headed to the stables. The enclosure had been rebuilt, reinforced. But the stables were just as they were the night of the fire. I remember stopping at the Festa esplanade. With the glare, everything looked blurred. A man walking in the distance seemed to be a man who lived only in my thoughts, and my thoughts could not bring him into focus. I reached the part of the river where calm water joined it. The canes were still. I sighted the tree of death on Maraldina. To my left, farther away, lay the dark green smudge of the forest of the dead with the higher mountains beyond, rising one behind the other. I sat down on a bench, my head on my arms, my arms on the table. I looked at my feet, moved them, scattered a bit of earth, then suddenly I kicked the ground and struck the table. I stood up, holding my arm in front of my eyes, and edged toward the canes in the water. Dead leaves and brush were floating on the river and a piece of driftwood where the canes started. In the shady spots, the green water looked black. I leaned down to the water, letting half of my body hang over it. I rested on my hands and knees: head over the river, body over the shore, hands in the mud. I remained like that for a while, gazing in front of me at the other side of the river; then I looked down into the water and saw my father’s face.

It was dark when I got home. The door was open and my wife was standing at the entrance to the courtyard. I stood before her, but she wouldn’t look at me. When she finally did, she turned her back. I left the village in the early morning and didn’t stop until I reached the spot where they had thrown me in the river. The sky was beginning to turn pink. The blacksmith’s son was lying down; from a distance I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or if he could see me. I returned to the village. The men leaving their houses passed by me, but it was as if they had not passed anyone. They talked among themselves, said “bon dia” to each other, as if I were a shadow, nothing at all. That night I went round to the blacksmith’s son. He told me I didn’t need to visit him, he didn’t need anyone. Said he spent all his time thinking about the fire, the joy of setting fire to the stables and his house, his father’s house. Said he wasn’t the one who set fire to the other houses. It all began when the boys returned from killing the old man with the cudgel, but he had been responsible for the killing because he had made people realize that without his cudgel the man was less than a feeble old woman. If he hadn’t hidden the cudgel that night, the old man would still be alive. I who have always seemed dead, I killed half the village. As he gazed at his blazing house, he had felt something he couldn’t explain, as if he were master of it all. He could give everyone orders, see them all bowing to him, subservient. Some were throwing water on the fire, others crushing the old man’s head, fire and flames spitting into the air, causing the black night to glimmer. I — he said, speaking in a clear voice — I who have spent all my life in bed, without food, I was in charge. My father — his legs crooked, his nails black from working with iron — was running back and forth, unable to cage the prisoner. Now I have made myself a prisoner, and I won’t stop until I am confined in the cage. The whole village will say the blacksmith is an evil man who caged his own son. He drew near me, looked at my face, and said, they made you a face like your father’s. Better that your child be dead, that she not see you with this face that isn’t a face, a child who was everyone’s child, you knew she was everyone’s child. You’ve always been subservient, you who could eat according to your appetite and I, son of the blacksmith, always ill, I set fire to my father’s house, I was in charge for one whole night. Man is partly from air, partly from earth — the prisoner’s stories — he always told the same, but it was the blacksmith’s son who set fire to the village, and the villagers still think the clash began because some of them wanted people entombed with cement, others without. All that was needed was to set the village on fire while their minds were on other things. We will never have another man with a cudgel, but we will have a prisoner. My father won’t have the house he once had; everything that I had wished for as I lay in bed had seeped into the walls and died with them. He asked me to touch him, so I would see he was alive. He said he wouldn’t die for some time yet, in order to remember that night when he roamed the village filled with joy, more joy than he was able to express, while all the men fought each other. Don’t think about it; you have to believe that it’s all the same to have a face or have your forehead ripped away. It’s all the same to live or die if you have to live as I was made to live. Learn to make fire by rubbing sticks together; learn to start a fire and you’ll be happy. A fire that causes damage.

I remembered a little animal with four legs and a tail that had allowed itself to be caught because I pretended I hadn’t seen it. When it had calmed down, I picked it up by its soft belly; its eyes bulged from its head. That animal came to mind because I felt as if I was being followed by several people, not just one, but the sound of the waterfall prevented me from hearing their footsteps clearly. I heard them when a branch broke, then another snapped. In the village, people pretended they didn’t see me, weren’t aware of me, as if I were dead, more than dead, so they could enjoy hunting me down, make my eyes bulge. The animal’s eyes were honey-colored. Without knowing where I wanted to go that night, I had headed to Font de la Jonquilla; I could see the tall shadow of the mountain in front of me, to my left the river and the trees I had loved when I was little, the ones that swayed in the wind — the entire tree, root to tip — and stretched upward during the night. I turned round sharply when the branch broke and again when it snapped. As the branch snapped, I thought I saw a shadow hiding behind a tree trunk. Everything that was green and leafy grew during the night, not with sun and light, but secretly, during the night. I too hid behind a tree trunk and waited there for a moment, but I heard nothing. Only the waterfall and the sound of gushing water. In the moonless night the river was black, and the path gradually turned away from the river as it approached Font de la Jonquilla. Again, I hid from the shadow walking behind me. As it passed me, I thought it looked like my wife, who no longer lived at home. I covered my eyes with my arm. After a while I started walking again. Someone was at Font de la Jonquilla, so I climbed to the spot where the white-flowered ivy grew and curled up. Not even the tree trunks were visible; everything was silent except the faint sound of the waterfall and the nearby fountain splashing over the rocks. The air was cool and the ivy leaves rustled, brushing against each other, giving the impression of speaking to one another every time they touched. Very close to me I heard someone move. Or were there two of them? Everything was dark. It seemed to be turning darker and darker, as if darkness were growing, emerging from the leaves that brushed each other. The smell of water and flowers reached me. The sound of gushing water from the fountain broke off for a moment, and I assumed someone was drinking from cupped hands. Then I heard the water cascading again with full force. I listened and heard someone groaning, but not from pain, and the groans were mixed with the sound of the water. I left my hiding place and jumped down, not sure where I had landed, but I could sense the shadow. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it and the cool air from the water blowing through my toes. Then the shadow jumped on me, grabbed me by the neck, and was tightening its grip on me, but I was able to throw it off and ran as fast as I could, somehow finding the path that led away from the fountain. The shadow chased me, but I ran faster, until finally I was back at the river and trees and the shadow came to a halt. It wasn’t the same shadow that had followed me at the beginning. I heard it turn back toward the fountain, and gradually the sound of the waterfall grew fainter, until it finally melted away, and only the noise of the river by the growing trees remained. The shadow’s breath smelled of dead horse.

IV

I wandered about during the night. I couldn’t sleep, and I roamed the night and came to understand why my father had done what he did and to understand better what lay ahead of me, but I can’t explain it. A few days after the night at Font de la Jonquilla, I fled, more from my face than from the village. It hurt if the children chased me during the day crying, his wife’s left him, but it hurt much more for them to see my ravaged face, and because my face was ravaged, they shouted what they did about my wife leaving me. Perhaps my hideous face was the real one, the one I should have had all along, but I couldn’t recognize myself in it; I was another, I was my father, and when I entered the house, I found it empty because my wife had returned to the old men at the slaughterhouse, where she had lived when she was little, before the shadow took my father, his life and all. More than anyone else, I carry the village inside me, from my night wanderings. I couldn’t lose my way even with my eyes blindfolded. Little by little everything had become different, obliterated, broken. Things become effaced, as if after great suffering, the hurt seems distant, the pain far away, so distant that it becomes more bearable. In black night, standing in the moonlight on top of the stone clock, I was Time. The moon gazing at me. Time moved forward with difficulty, and as I stood there, something fled from within me, from the hour, from Time. The thing that fled from me floated above the river, near the canes, observing the movement of the water. I looked to see if rings were forming in the water. I thought they were, but they weren’t. Standing on top of the sundial stone, the circles I wanted to see were the ones from that morning, made by a hand I never saw again. I was lost between two different hours, always waiting for what was to come, drawing circles in the air with my hand, but they didn’t spread like the ones in the water; I couldn’t make them appear, no matter how much I waved my hand. I could see only the shadow of my arm — which didn’t seem like mine — and the shadow of my body cast on the stone. Little by little, everything melted away, and the thing that had fled from within me was returned to me, devalued. I headed toward the village, slowly following the empty streets, smelling the last remnants of spring in the wisteria leaves, the vanishing spring that had lost its way. In black night I searched the streets for the girl, and if I heard the faceless men coming, I hurried to another street. If I thought she lived on the street where I was walking, a sickly respite entered my heart, but it was only a brief respite because I would again wish to flee, wish not to be seen. Every time I stepped down from the sundial stone, I thought that would be the night I would find her. A glimmer of light was beginning to appear behind me, rising from Pedres Altes. I returned to the village later every night, not that I didn’t want to return, but because I lacked the will to want. One night I went to the esplanade. I collected clay, and without knowing what I was doing, I made a little figure. The clay was too soft and the figure doubled over; I made two legs for it, but they buckled when they were joined to the body. In the distance I heard a horse neigh; it was coming from the wash area. The air echoed with the neighing that issued from the blacksmith’s son, the same neighing heard that night in the center of the village. I broke off a twig and pierced the figure, running the twig lengthwise through the center of the body, up to the head, then I shaped an arm. I also pierced the soles of the tiny feet with twigs and pushed them up the legs. I gazed at the still soft figure and, holding it in the middle, moved it forward, its feet resting on the ground. It looked as if it were walking. Sometimes I would lift it up a bit and let it fall toward the water. It was neither person nor bird. I made a lot of them, left them all facing the water. I enjoyed thinking of the rings spreading in the water that morning, maybe they were somewhere out of sight. The day after I moulded the figure, I didn’t go to the sundial. I was drawn to the esplanade, as if the figure I had left lying on the ground was calling to me. I went there every night, slept there, and in the morning, as if a hand were shaking my shoulder, I awoke. I gathered twigs, tied them together with leaf veins and covered them with clay. I formed tiny bones, fastened them securely, then covered them with clay, legs and all, the back too. I moulded many tiny figures with only one arm; I fashioned my child, my children, and while I was making them, I would think about my wife living with the old men and going to Font de la Jonquilla at night. I didn’t care that she went there. I made a larger figure that was my wife, so she would be with me. I threw it in the water soon after making it, because she was no longer the person who had been with my father, or the person who had been with me. She said she left me because I had become like my father and dead people frightened her. When she told me, she made the same face she did the day she told me she didn’t love our child, she just didn’t; she hadn’t wanted her, the child had arrived without being asked, settling into the house, carving out a space within the air where my wife lived. A sense of unease had settled on me because of my child’s life, because she would have to breathe without knowing why, without understanding why the light changed colors or the wind its course. I had felt like crying for my deformed child who was only the beginnings of a person. Her eyes shone, but she still couldn’t talk. She would follow the direction of my arm, linking word to object. That’s how she learned to say leaf. I would pronounce the word for her, then pick up a leaf as I mouthed it.

The figures waited for me. The broken ones I remade, and with soft clay I filled the crevices of the ones that had cracked. I modeled figures with arms and made them walk while they were still quite soft. I would stand one on the ground, an arm extended toward me, and step back. Sometimes I had to put clay round the figure to prop it up, and I would brush the fingertips, which were just a handful of clay, with my finger; I didn’t know how to fashion fingers, and if I tried, they always fell off. I would pick up the figure and draw it close to my neck and cheek. There was no sign of affection. Affection means skin brushing against skin; it may seem like nothing at all, but the pulsing of blood was shared. The girl from the river was nowhere to be seen. If she was nearby and had seen me, she would have fled — like my wife — her disheveled hair, her hands and feet. Perhaps the only thing that would remain of her would be the marks her wet feet made on the ground as she fled. Those feet carried something warm and tender above them that would have helped me to live and sleep and breathe.

With the break of day, I saw death. I was death reflecting in the water the face of a dead person. I didn’t know why I thought that. Where does death begin? I asked myself. Did it spring from your skin or surface from beneath it? Was it at your fingertips, at that point in your entrails where the pain of life begins, at your elbow, in the center of your knee? Where did it begin to kill? Where did each person’s death reside? In sleep or in the awakening? Did death die tired from having killed? When skin turned cold, flesh hardened, and all grew icy and wooden, where had death gone? If death was each person and each person was death, why don’t we refer to “deaths”? The deaths of men and women, deaths waiting inside like the worms of misery. The deaths of children: silent, hidden, ready for the stone to strike. One eye open and laughing. Why not “deaths are coming,” instead of “death is approaching.” Deaths inside trees. Arborideaths — rotted from within — die in the end. The tree that has sheltered death turns very slowly to dust, over time’s time. It comes apart. It is like a caterpillar, the prisoner had said. Death lives within the tree, like the butterfly within the caterpillar. To emerge from within is painful. Many butterflies die when they emerge from the caterpillar; if they are unable to send blood to the wings, they die, caught in the dry caterpillar’s skin. Perhaps the soul flees without any color, unable to weep, alone and abandoned. People think it is locked inside by cement, beneath the bark; the prisoner said it escapes, always searching for the point where the flesh comes undone the fastest, where the tree is quick to open. It lives within the tree, from the farthest tip of the last leaf down to the deepest base of the root. The deaths surrounded me, escaped from trees, like flowers furiously strewn far and wide. My death was me, my heart a prisoner to my veins, binding me above and below, at my sides. Like snakes that never spare you, heading to my liver, my breath, arcing as they split in two, so that now the pair of them can be put to use. All of this beneath my ribs. Desire is born and grows strong at the center of the heart. Many mornings, as I was moulding clay figures, I would be short of breath and open my mouth, my hands grasping the air, trying to force it inside me, but it would not enter. I would destroy the figures; I would pick up those I had made with only one arm and crush them. Those with two arms I would gather, one by one, and hold under the water so they would slowly dissolve. The water consumed them in the same way that my father’s death was consuming my life. The following day I would again make figures. I wanted a lot of them. A whole village of figures, all the same, two arms, and I would talk to them in a voice so low, so full of sighs, that it wasn’t my voice. Tenderness changed me into water and everything that fled from me was in that water. I don’t know why, I don’t know what those mornings were because no words exist for them. No. No words exist. They have to be invented.

V

I was standing before the river, by the marsh, listening to the night. I thought I saw rings in the water. All my being brought the girl to life, brought her to me, her hair pulled high, and when she was almost at my side, it fell loose, down her back. She drew nearer and melted into me as if she and I were fog. She stepped back and took me by the arm with two strong, tiny hands, and we began to walk, we headed toward the water; as we approached it, the river withdrew, farther and farther away, as we walked. I had never walked with anyone like that. My wife and I would stroll hand in hand, or I would put my arm on her shoulder, or she would hold me by the waist, and it was something children did. But the girl from the water stood very close to me, held my arm with both of her hands and laughed. I couldn’t see her face. She didn’t have a face, but she laughed. We walked like that for a long time, toward the dead water at the head of the dry, sandy trail that lay before us. Motionless canes forming a fan-like vault sprouted on both sides of the narrow path, and soon the girl and I would walk through them, unable to see sky or mountain, only leaves. She dropped my arm and stood in front of me, I in front of her. Lips at the level of lips, eyes at the level of eyes, hearts troubled, but it was as if only separation existed, as if the two could never meet. I could feel her bird-breath beseeching tenderness. At that moment I stepped back from the unknown, and my voice, not addressing anyone, whispered very softly, don’t wish for this.

I reached the marsh. At the edge the mud flower grew, a lone flower born without green leaves. There were patches of them. From the damp sprouted a new-green stem, topped by a bud. The bud grew large, the green streaked with the color of crimson dust. One day I had curled up, waiting for the flower to blossom. It made a clicking sound when it opened and the flower released the leaves. I plucked it, and bitter, viscous water spurted from the stem. If you touched it and rubbed your fingers over your lips, you got sores. All of a sudden, I realized what I desired: sorrow. The stones scattered in the mud were like sorrow, patches of sorrow. I turned back. I don’t know how long I wandered about during those nights. The clay figures were dead, destroyed. I was searching for a bond, but I didn’t know what I was searching for or where to look. Now I know, now that my life has come full circle, like a glass ball on the verge of shattering. I waited for dawn to examine myself in the water. With my hand over my mouth, the water reflected grief-filled eyes. The sky was wide, the earth wide, the village small. I clutched a rock, and as if the hand were someone else’s, I struck my forehead. My eyes filled with tears, although I had no wish to cry, and I saw everything as if I were under water, but now salty drops filled my eyes. I raised my arm and gazed at my hand; it wasn’t the hand I wished. I made my way to the blacksmith’s to see his son. He was lying down, touching himself, and I pretended I didn’t see him. To avoid seeing him, I thought about hands: my child’s, Senyor’s, the hands of the old man who had given me the drink. I looked at mine, and the hand didn’t belong to anyone, not to me, or the water, or life, or death. The same as me. My hand, like me.

I had to stop at the slaughterhouse. I was ill and paused by the wall to gaze into the distance. Clouds were coming from the direction of Pedres Altes. I glanced up. Looking at the slowly approaching clouds made me dizzy. I turned round, my face to the wall, and banged my forehead against it. I felt like vomiting, but didn’t. The stench of dead horse rose from the wall, blending with the night air, attempting to restore past things to life, things that could no longer be, things that wished to live again for a moment but could not. I started walking toward my house, afraid I wouldn’t make it. The door was ajar, and I could see a bit of starlight in the courtyard at the end. That’s when they beat me. The voice of the person beating me was telling me to stop wandering at night: if I continued to roam about at night, they would kill me. The words carried the stench of dead horse and the memory of swimming under the village. As the river hurled me along, the breath of that thing that had approached me, causing me to release my grip on the root, bore the stench of dead horse, but I hadn’t recognize it that day because it was accompanied by the smell of water and moss. It was the same malodor from the shadow that had pursued me at Font de la Jonquilla, the same breath. The blacksmith struck me, again and again, until I turned round and knocked him to the floor. He grabbed my legs, trying to pull me down, but there was a door behind me and I let myself fall against it. When he stood up I kicked him, heard him groan. He must have rolled away because I couldn’t find him. Again, he threw himself on me and knocked me senseless.

I woke up feeling I was being watched. I ached all over, like that night by the river while the village went up in flames. They were looking at me. My wife was kneeling in front of me, very close, looking into my eyes, as I had looked into my father’s that afternoon in the courtyard. She moved away when I stirred. Seated with my back to the wall, I bent forward, as if I were searching for a link with life, but the feelings that bound me were like blighted grass, and I leaned back against the wall. When my wife left, I stood up not knowing what to do. I opened the white wooden box that had blackened over the years; inside it lay the old rope and awl. I leaned over, gazing for a long time at the rope and awl, until finally my knees began to hurt. Then I picked up the rope, wrapped it round my wrist three times, and with my free hand followed the rope to the end. But I discovered nothing.

Lightning flashed, followed by a clap of thunder. Before the rain began to fall, more thunder sounded, as if the sky were rent and the lightning had come to cauterize the heavenly wounds. The water fell like a torrent over the house. It rained all night, the sky never tiring until early morning.

VI

I wanted to see the village. The wisteria trunk in front of my empty house bore three incisions that my mother had carved. The men were leaving for work, and I looked them in the face. Never before that morning had I gazed so intently at the faces of the people from my village. The men didn’t look at me, the women did, but I couldn’t discern if the women looked at me with pity or revulsion. The men had dismissed my face from those things that were visible. Old faces, young faces, all of them bear life experiences, as if histories were written on them. Suddenly I could hear a hammer striking the anvil. It was coming from the opposite direction. The last faces were those of three children. I left the village by the stables and headed toward the Pont de Fusta, where three little boys were fighting with sticks. I stopped. Two of them were running about, but one knew how to dodge the blows without moving and strike the others. The one delivering blows had a long, narrow face with little eyes and a low forehead. The other two had round faces, large ears, and desperate eyes. I started across the bridge, but I came to a halt when I reached the center. The day was limpid, the sky and water young, the dark mountains sharply outlined against the sky. The day was so clear I could almost count the trees on the farthest mountains. I retraced my steps. The little boys were still fighting. When they saw I was returning, they stopped fighting for a moment, and I covered my eyes with my arm. One of the round-faced boys came and stood by me, and when I began to walk, he did too. Soon he left me because I was moving slowly. He trudged in front of me, but stayed close by. From time to time he twisted round, searching for my feet, and when he had seen them, he would turn his back to me. At the horse enclosure, I stopped to contemplate Maraldina, the Muntanyes Morades, and Senyor’s mountain with the still green ivy. It was tiring to look that far away. In my pocket I carried the awl my mother had used to pierce my ears when I was little. You can have everything you want, but accompanied by pain, until you learn not to want anything. I had found it in the box where my wife kept the ropes. I paused to look at the grazing horses, their coats shiny, eyes entranced. I turned back round and the little boy was standing firmly in front of me, his head up, staring at me. The sun was falling on the esplanade of Pedres Baixes. Behind Pedres Altes it was all grey, everything was lost in the greyness where the watchmen lived with the tiny horses whose tails reached the ground. The little boy continued on his way in front of me, but he turned round from time to time, until we parted at the end of the horse enclosure. When I looked he was far away, and I could barely make out the dead tree on Maraldina because of the curve in the Festa esplanade. When I reached the bend in the river, I searched for the place where I had crossed the first time. I remembered a shrub on the left, but it has disappeared. I knew the shrub was there that day because at first I had planned to leave my clothes beside it rather than by the tree. Many trees were now scattered about the area. Close to the water, I found a spot I didn’t remember: long and narrow, covered with large, very white pebbles. Where had I crossed? Memory plays tricks on us. The man who killed the serpent had died at the bend in the river, trampled by his horse; I didn’t know it the first time I swam across. He and his horse had been one and the same as they chased the serpent; then they became two. I was looking for some small sign, whatever it was that could help me find where I had crossed. I strolled up and down, occasionally placing my arm in front of my eyes because the light was getting stronger and I couldn’t bear the glare. I undressed and sat naked, my back against a tree, feeling the support. To my left, in front of the marsh, lay the mud-flower pond. To my right, at a distance, the canes by the esplanade. The morning was dead, the canes swaying, and in the daylight the green water was almost colorless. Water got in my eyes. Soon the blacksmith’s house would be ready, as well as everyone else’s; the horses would neigh on moonlit nights and the blacksmith’s son would respond and the man would be. Water got in my eyes; the river was very broad in that spot. Calm, but very broad. Shiny flecks on the sun-splashed water, darkly mottled where there was no sun. When I got out, I sat down to rest. I would have wished for things to come, but things did not come. The grasses were breathing, enjoying the moment; I was breathing only from exhaustion, having swum the breadth of the river.

VII

All morning I lay down, watching the water and sky and round clouds that had gathered above Maraldina. The sun was bright, air cool, spiders weaving their webs from branch to branch. I fell asleep lying on my stomach so the light wouldn’t bother me, the sun beating down on my back. I had perhaps never slept so deeply, so deeply that I was surprised when I awoke. Feeling as if I couldn’t sleep, I strolled over to the river and lowered myself into the water, completely, eyes and hair, then I got out. When I reached the center of the seedlings, I noticed the odor of manure and the scent of wisteria blossoms, the two mixed together. I didn’t know where the smell came from, everything was so far away, and the river separated us. After the sun and water, it seemed like night beneath the trees. Countless butterflies were fluttering about, many of them resting, wings up, forming white leaves. The axe and pitchfork stood in their usual place; on the ground near the tree trunks lay some nails used to fasten the bark when extracting the seedcase from the tree. I made my way slowly beneath the trees and butterflies, the axe on my back, the awl and pitchfork in my hands. I marked the cross with my fingernail. My nails had grown hard, like my father’s. I marked the cross. I wanted to walk about because I was trembling all over. From head to toe. But not because I had moved from the sun into the shade. The trembling sprung from my heart; neither my will nor that of the wind was the cause. Some tiny bones still lay on the stone that had served as a pot. I picked up a few, threw them in the air and let them fall. They were the same color as before, made the same sound as before. Senyor’s tree had full leaves and a thick truck. I went over and embraced the trunk, my hands barely able to encircle it. The bee-emblazoned ring was fastened to the base. The fence of thorny brambles had been leveled. I glanced up and was enthralled by the butterflies; then I returned to my tree and began to open up the cross. My heart pounded with each blow of the axe, with each blow. Suddenly I was consumed by fear. Behind me stood the shrub where I had hidden the day my father killed himself, the one with the yellow flower and the furious bee. I leaned down and picked up an old leaf that was full of veins, a web of stiff filaments that had once been tender and clothed in green. I crushed it, then opened my hand and let the pieces fall. I remembered being frightened and hiding behind the shrub as I heard footsteps. It all came back to me. The person who was now unsealing the tree was someone else, and I was hiding behind the shrub. The shadow of two butterflies chasing each other distracted me. I shooed them away and returned to my task of striking the tree with the axe. The trunk was hard. A tree is solid the first time it is split open, but if it has already been breached, it is not difficult to open again. My palms began to sting after a while, and I rested the axe on the ground and spit into them, rubbing one palm against the other. Between two fingers, where the palm hollows out a bit, a blister had formed.

When I had the cross open from top to bottom, I opened it from side to side. I paused and shielded my eyes with my arm. The blister popped, and water oozed out of it; skin was pushed to one side and the raw flesh smarted. A smell emerged from the interior of the tree, like nothing I had ever smelled before. It had a faint trace of something fresh, like a wave that delved deep inside me, compelling me to breathe in what seemed to be a scent of life, enveloped by gasps of smoke, that was coming to me from within the tree.

The butterflies were going mad after flying all day. There seemed to be more and more of them, as if the sun and axe blows were encouraging them to be born and grow faster. Fear returned. Fear caused a drop of salt water to trickle down my back. I had the impression that behind me, where the bee had sucked the flower for so long, a hidden child was watching what I was doing, and the child would run away to alert the villagers, starting with the blacksmith. He would tell them that a man was hollowing out a tree with a pitchfork in the forest of the dead.

I strode over to the shrub. When I had taken four steps, I tripped. One of my feet had caught in the handle of a root, and I hurt my knee. Nothing was behind the shrub. A stream of warm blood ran down my leg. As I turned round to finish opening up the tree, I heard a little laugh, like a memory. On my left cheek, above my heart, I felt a caress mixed with wet hair, as if the air that wasn’t air were brushing my cheek with green cane leaves. With a sudden movement, I covered my eyes with my arm, burying the raw flesh from the blister in a fold in my scarred forehead, and I did what I could to keep the caress on my cheek from dying. I took hold of my cheek so the caress would not flee. A ray of sun burnt my chest and dried the blood from my knee. The branches moved. Time was fleeing, and I had to bring Time to a close. Branches swayed, leaves swayed, blades of grass swayed, as if everything that lacked a voice wished to speak to me.

The seedcase rolled out of the tree. I picked up the awl and pointed it at my heart. I was giving them only a corpse. Death without the Festa. I walked back and put away the pitchfork and axe, then returned slowly because my knee ached and the blood that had become a scab pulled with the movement. I gave the seedcase a prod, rolled it to another tree, and covered it with leaves. I hope it will be a long time before they realize. If they drag me from the tree, they will drag me out dead. I removed the four nails from the bark, letting them drop one by one. I pierced my heart with the awl and my life closed. I can begin the story of my life wherever I wish; I can tell it differently, I can begin with the death of my child, with the morning the blacksmith’s son jumped in front of me in the forest of the dead, with my visit to Senyor. It matters not what I do, my life is closing. Like a soap bubble that has turned to glass, I cannot remove anything or add anything. I can change nothing in my life. Death escaped through my heart, and when I no longer held death within me, I died.