Death in Spring (10 page)

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.