I hadn’t budged. Barefoot and tiny, she returned, strolling through the trodden grass, down the narrow paths we had beaten during our frequent walks. She sauntered along, carrying a round bone in her hand, throwing it up, catching it. We played at being afraid. They’re coming, she would exclaim. And we ran back and forth, our hearts filled with fearful blood because we didn’t know who was coming, from what direction, if there were many of them, or if it was just the one conjured up by the fear our voices awakened in us. They’re coming, they’re coming. We hid behind tree trunks. We would stand very still for a moment, then suddenly thrust our heads out from the side of the tree, quickly hiding again, as if each of us represented ‘they’ for the other; we never knew who they were — they never arrived. When we emerged from behind the trunk and listened, there was nothing to be heard: only the breath of light and earth, and the air that dwelt on high.
Again, she picked up the axe and again handed it to me. She lifted it by the blade, offering me the handle. Open. She never took her eyes off mine, and I grasped the axe and began to unbar my father’s tree, top to bottom, side to side. It was soft. Trees that held the dead inside were like rubber, hard to breach. When I had opened the cross, she told me to pull, and, with her help, I pulled as hard as I could. Then it all spilled out. Bark and rotted flesh. And a watery mixture: black sweat from the body. At eye level stood the decomposing heart, partially attached to the chest by four veins and, above it, the mouth sealed with rose-colored cement; deep within lay a damp smudge of brighter pink cement. The flayed knees were bent, the bones twisted. Further up, the face — rotted fruit, forehead stripped clean — seemed to be laughing. But the eyes were missing, burnt by the sap. I ran away. I could tell she hadn’t moved. Then suddenly I heard her laugh. I swam across the river, never stopping until I reached the house. When I entered, I found her already sitting on top of the table, scooping out a ball of fat with her finger.
I dreamt my father’s breath was burning me.
VIII
A woman died in childbirth, and when they went to bury her, they discovered the forest had been ravaged. The weather that afternoon was troubled. The sky was sulphurous, not a leaf stirred. The unrest that had commenced at the cave returned. Between young and old. For some time the young from the wash district had been saying that people should be left to die their own death. The old men from the slaughterhouse argued that everything should continue as before. The middle-aged men were inclined to side with the elders, except for a few that no one heeded. One elderly man lamented the sad affair of mixing bones and stuffing grass in eye-wells, it should never have happened. The blacksmith wasn’t listening; he delivered the first axe blow to the tree they wished to open. The wedge slipped off the handle. He told them to stop quarreling and go look for a new, broader axe head, one that wasn’t rusty. An old man moved away, muttering, leave the bones alone, they can harm us. A young boy said, we should just live our lives, peacefully, us the living, and stop thinking about souls. Have you ever seen one? A woman covered her ears, her face white as snow. The man who had been sent to fetch the wedge returned, and the blacksmith slipped it onto the handle, pounding it with a stone until again he had a strong axe. They said order had to be reestablished in the forest before the village could be painted. For many days in a row they went to the forest, endeavoring to restore each ring to its tree, each skull to its own bones. The women sewed the crosses on with thick needles and horsetail hair, because the trees no longer produced the resin to seal them.
For days my stepmother and I didn’t speak to each other. If her eyes met mine, we quickly turned our heads, as if an invisible hand were pulling us by the hair, forcing us to turn. Day and night, I had visions of the tree: the hoary, green bark with white streaks. The malodor was everywhere, that smell coming from within, from the heart of the trunk, from flesh blended with live wood. I heard a voice telling me it should not have occurred. The ashen face of that woman, and my father’s empty eyes that saw how mine. Soon she came to the courtyard with the boxes of black and white feathers and asked me to play. She climbed onto the table and let the feathers flutter down; I caught them and placed them in heaps, each color in its own pile.
We began to amuse ourselves by hunting bees. And crushing them. She gathered honey and put it on the ground, just a drop. When the bees came to suck it, we would squash them. Sometimes, instead of squashing them, we would cover them with an upside-down glass, imprisoning them until they died. That first night, I could hear the bees, the ones that weren’t trapped in honey, buzzing and knocking into the tin walls. On windy days, we noticed that the bees collected a tiny piece of gravel with their legs and flew with the added weight, so the wind would find it more difficult to toss them about. When the wind stopped, they immediately released the gravel. We discovered this one day when a bee flew past my stepmother and dropped a little piece on her forehead. The older bees would fly to the fountain for the buttercup tear; many died on the return, strained by the weight. The younger bees would collect the infants with their snouts — they had deposited them on a leaf while they worked — and carry them away to sleep. The bees couldn’t comprehend what was happening; they would fly to the sundial and bury their dead all round it. They were so sad that year: instead of sucking wisteria, they headed to the fields and sucked bitter flowers. They couldn’t be bothered to fly into the folds of our clothes or the ravel of our hair.
The water from Font de la Jonquilla had to be filtered. In the fountain little worms curled and uncurled, rapidly. If they entered a person’s body, they burrowed through bones, veins, and skin in order to escape. As soon as they broke the surface, they died, because they could not live without water.
IX
When the work in the forest ended, it was time to paint the village. And there were no paintbrushes. My stepmother and I hid behind the blacksmith’s house; from there we could hear the shouts. Hurriedly they made new brushes, but not enough; they had to be shared, passed round from person to person. The village could not be painted quickly, nor all at once.
When the painting was completed, the thick-clustered wisteria had already finished blooming. The day of the Festa, everyone was uneasy: about the souls, the powder, the welter of disorder in the forest, the bees buzzing nervously through the fields (they must have told each other they were dying off).
The women had decorated the streets. From one house to the other, from one side of the street to the other, they had strung lines, adorning them with scraps of old, brightly-colored clothes. The blacksmith took the prisoner some honey, and when he returned he announced that soon the neighing would begin, the prisoner’s mouth was already horse-like. Mid-afternoon, the pregnant women began to dance in the center of the Plaça. From a courtyard, someone started hurling stones against the rock wall, trying to free the cane, wedged high in the ivy, that neither wind nor rain had been able to dislodge. You could see the cane and stones flying past. All of a sudden the cane quivered, then fell; for a moment it seemed that it would again be trapped, further down. But it wasn’t. The person who had freed the cane appeared in the Plaça and started breaking it into bits, handing them to whoever wanted a piece. He was young and tanned. The pregnant women stopped their dancing and approached the boy who was distributing the scraps; they removed their blindfolds, pretending to want a bit of cane, but they had eyes only for the young men round them. When the boy offered one of the women a piece of the cane, she grasped his hand before anyone realized and planted a kiss on his fingernail. The blacksmith standing beside me said the villagers would soon be busy killing desire. I did not know then what they did to kill desire, nor what it meant. The pregnant women began to dance again, but they could see nothing. Before they resumed dancing, their husbands had retied the bandages so tight that they pulled the skin on their foreheads.