Death in Spring (9 page)

V

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

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

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

VI

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

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

VII

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

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