Death in Spring (8 page)

III

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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