Death in Spring (11 page)

XI

The blacksmith did not want me to entomb my child in the tree. He said he would use the ring for some other dead person. I left home, carrying my child, who had turned wooden, like the table. My innards were on fire, as if the night fire blazed within me. I made my way through a group of men, most of them coming from the blacksmith’s. One of them had killed another man by twisting the bones that supported his head. They walked slowly, taking up a lot of room, as if the street were too narrow for them. After they had passed, I looked back at them; they walked like the dead, stiff and stretched tight. Smoke still billowed from the crumpled houses, destroyed by the fire. Some horses stood motionless near the wash area, their reflections doubling them in the water. Many had run away, but others were caught and returned to the enclosure. I had stopped at Pedres Baixes, exhausted, my child in my arms, when the blacksmith’s son approached, eyes brilliant and skin that overnight seemed to have grown tight and fresh. The blacksmith’s son stopped in front of me, ran his finger across my child’s cheek, and said he had seen her leave the village with the boys chasing her, calling out, deformed, deformed. He knew nothing more about her until, on his way back from the stables, a little boy told him she had run away desperately, trying to escape the men who were fighting. As soon as she had left the village she wanted to return, but they had surrounded her; to keep from feeling cornered she had run from one side to the other, all of them pursuing her, shouting. Halfway into town, one had thrown a stone at her, the others followed; all of them threw stones and handfuls of dirt as they corralled her, shouting, go with the dead, with the dead. When they had almost reached the cemetery, they came to a halt, and she turned and faced them. They were silent for a moment, but soon the shouts began. Then a boy picked up a large rock that one of the smaller boys standing next to him was holding and threw it furiously. The rock struck my child on the forehead, and she fell backwards; then they all threw themselves on her and killed her with the rocks. She didn’t feel a thing because the first rock left her in a daze. I asked him to tell me which little boy had told him about my child’s death. The blacksmith’s son sat down next to me and told me he would recognize him if he saw him, but he couldn’t tell me who it was, he didn’t think he had ever seen him before. I could feel the weight of my child on my lap, and there was barely a thread of life left in me. Not because she was dead, but because everything had happened without my understanding it. When she was born, I had not loved her. She looked peculiar when my wife showed her to me; it was as if a nuisance had settled into the house. I wanted to run away, so I would not have to see the thing that clearly I had made, because life is sad, to be born is sad. I could not look at her; everything had turned bitter, less full of life. Her eyes, her legs, every little bit of the flesh I had made—had been made from me—all of it drove me mad. When she cried, I was the one who wished to cry loudly; I would have preferred her not to be born, because I knew what awaited her. Breathing. Only the chore and sadness of breathing and breathing, as things change from tender to dry, new to old, the night-moon that grows thin then swells, the fireless sun that lights up, the soughing of wind that transports, shatters, gathers, and drives away the clouds, raising and flattening the dust. Only the sorrow of going to sleep and waking up, feeling life without knowing where it comes from, aware that it will flee without knowing why it was given to you, why it is taken from you. Here you are: there is this and this and this. And now, enough. I saw the blacksmith’s son approaching; I had not noticed that he had left. He was carrying a shovel and he said, it’s to dig a hole. Time to go. I stood up, cradling my child in my arms, all of my body still aching from the beating and from lying on the ground during the night. The blacksmith’s son carried the shovel. We reached the foot of Maraldina, and I laid my child on the ground, her legs contracted the way I had found her, shriveled up by death; I picked up the shovel and told the blacksmith’s son to leave. He said he would help me, but I told him to leave. It was difficult to dig a hole, not because the earth was hard—which it wasn’t, just full of little stones—but because I picked up only a bit of dirt with each shovelful. It was taking forever, and the sharp edge of the shovel was digging into my sole from pressing my foot down so often. I wasn’t sure if I was making the hole slowly because the shovel removed only a little earth each time, or because the center of my foot hurt, or because as long as the digging lasted I had my child near me and could look at her while I was digging the hole. Let the moment last. But the hole was dug: the same size as my child with shriveled legs. I sat on the ground in front of the hole. A strong, earthy smell reached me, I laid my child in it, on her side because of her shriveled legs. Quiet, alone with my child, amongst the smell of earth and little stones, I again saw the forest and remembered the first day the blacksmith’s son had jumped in front of me while my child was sleeping, tired from holding on to my neck as we crossed the river. I had half closed my eyes, the back of my head resting against a tree trunk while at my feet by fits and starts a butterfly was being born, struggling without knowing if it would issue forth, out of itself, like a flower thrusting up from a branch. While I was watching my sleeping child and the butterfly struggling into life, I glimpsed the starveling legs of the blacksmith’s son. That was the first time I saw him in broad daylight. My child woke when she sensed something strange nearby—otherwise, she would have slept longer. The blacksmith’s son waited for the butterfly to be born, then immediately gave it to my child, and she laughed and looked at the blacksmith’s son while the butterfly flapped its wings, tickling her hand. She laughed and looked at the blacksmith’s son, and the two of them laughed. When I had come to love her, the two of them laughed together. I watched them laugh, and it seemed as if I was not present because they laughed and I was quiet. I had only the tree behind me, and I had lost everything, except the tree, I lost everything in that moment with the butterfly in the hand that had never held a butterfly. As I sat silently between two laughs, I cast a shadow on my child’s face with my hand, but within me I wanted to kill the blacksmith’s son. With all my being. I blocked the fiery sun that had risen and was falling full force onto my child’s face. The fiery sun rose, and its light fell across the hole, onto my dead child’s face, the child who when alive wanted black night because the blacksmith’s son had explained that you could only see them in black night. I watched her dead, as if the sun were forcing me to look at her, as if all the time that had passed previously—all the time I had tried to keep from looking at her—all of it now kept my eyes glued to her face. Lying face up, her body on its side. When she was on the verge of dying, she must have looked up. What I saw then is difficult to explain. Her mouth seemed to laugh; a half-open eye was shining, seemingly laughing too. It was the laugh of an elderly person, tired of life, who with a little laugh hides everything. It also seemed like a laugh that was laughing at me, as if it also wanted to convince me that everything I had believed was a lie, that in life, only this was true: the laughter of having been able to die. I threw a shovelful of dirt mixed with stones on her. Then another. And another. I stopped and put down the shovel because my hands suddenly wanted to touch my dead child, from deep inside me I wanted to stroke her. If I had not touched her, I would have thought that she was alive, only playing dead so I would search for her in some place, some hiding place where she was still alive. Her face, her cheek
. . .
she is not
. . .
Her legs were dead. I do not know how to say it, I do not know. Her fingers were closed; I took her hand and tried several times to pry open a finger. I did not even realize it was my child’s hand, so obsessed was I with trying to make it be the hand I had known: flat, fingers extended, like a hand floating in water that will not harm you. Her little fingers were strong, because they were dead and mine alive. I threw more dirt on her, I had started by throwing dirt on her feet, then moving up to her glassy eyes and mouth. Open your mouth, I would say to her when she was just beginning to understand, and she would open her mouth. I could see the streaked roof of her mouth and the little uvula that would not stop moving. I put down the shovel, feeling there was something I should do, but I was not sure what. Without knowing why, I walked over to Pedres Baixes and returned with a smooth, flat rock that I placed over her head. I covered her with dirt, but her hands showed, especially that one, a bit of skin with a tiny black worm curling and uncurling. Her blood is corrupt. The hand melts away, only the black speck remains. Her hand returns as if wanting to slip beneath the black speck. The knot on her little finger is wrinkled when her hand is open, and when her hand is closed it shines. The hand approaches. Sometimes, when I want it to approach it does not, or it comes with an open hand holding a tremulous butterfly in its palm, and the blacksmith’s son releases his fingers from round the butterfly on that first day we met in the forest and they laughed. The hand is dissolving, only a tip remains, a smudge that has been erased, and it too disappears. I finished covering my child with dirt and that first day, first moment, first night, returned to me. Always the first day and first night and the last day and final night, the earth above my dead child forming a mound because the body was a nuisance to the earth, the grave could not hold all of the earth. Using the shovel, I leveled the earth with a few blows and thought that when the village had buried all of its dead, I would place a circle of pebbles on top that would represent a soap bubble, and I would nail the cane she used to make the bubbles in the courtyard into the earth. I knew that time and rain would level the mound, the flesh would dissolve and the earth would settle and above no trace would remain. The pebble circle would come undone, scattered by the rain. Drenched. The bones. Dead bones that are of no use. Better for it all to disappear. No child lies there. Nothing that once breathed. Bones last and last, like stones, like things. The smell of turned-up earth filled everything, the sun had fled, and slender clouds had arrived, letting a fine rain fall, more like dew than rain. Very fine. Rather than being born from grass, it fell from a higher grass, planted far above. I raised my head and opened my mouth, and the thin rain led me to close my eyes. I closed them on purpose so the rain could stroke them and enter my mouth. I held out my palm, still warm from the shovel handle, and waited for each drop of rain as if it were a surprise. Is this it? Yes. That bit of rain falling from a passing cloud that had been rent by the sun, giving rise to the strong odor of recently-moved earth, earth that is not accustomed to air or light, furious that it has been brought to the surface. It was this. Insignificant. Just a trace of life. Now I know. It has been a difficult lesson. It was this thing that comes but never when I want it to, if only again to have a short while, the length of time for a breath or for death, not memory. Memory is worthless. It is. A soft rain one morning at the foot of Maraldina seems like dew that has fallen from I know not what grasses on the summit.

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.