Death in Spring (13 page)

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.