XI
Another summer ended. It was as though all the dead autumns were the same, with their relentless insistence on returning. Autumn was here again. Nailed to the rock wall, from the ground to the top of the cliff, autumn was a surge of fiery leaves that would be snatched away when the sulphur-bearing wind returned, grown old and icy. Leaves fell on the village streets and on the river that carried them away. Swirling in whirlpools, they drifted to the clock tower, as far as Pedres Altes. They tumbled down, still bearing the scent of their former, tender-green selves. The sickly stems that had held the leaves all summer were now devoid of water, and they thudded to the ground as well. The leaves were blown down and swept away. We waited for the last to drop so we could rake them into piles and set fire to them. The fire made them scream. They screamed in a low voice, whistled even lower, and rose in columns of blue smoke. The smell of burnt leaves pervaded houses and air. The air was filled with the cessation of being. If the leaves burned too slowly, we poked the pile with a cane, lifting one side so the flame could leap upward. Little by little, spring died in autumn, on the round stones in the Plaça. Soon the first, small rain would extinguish the last warmth and unpaint the houses. Everything pink faded, vanishing in black trickles. The village was a different village with no leaves and no color. A village of weary, decaying houses, clustered together above the water, embedded in Senyor’s mountain.
One night when the horses were standing asleep in their enclosure and the village was dead, my stepmother and I went out. We strolled past the horse fence, my stepmother’s dress down to her feet, her hair to her waist, her forehead capturing the nocturnal dew. She told me she had seen the blacksmith’s son sitting in front of his house, mere bones clothed in skin, his face all eyes. We held hands as we walked; then all at once we laughed because we had turned to gaze at the shadows stuck to our heels. We jumped backwards, treading on them. We turned to face the shadows and they stuck to the tips of our toes, and we trod on them. Suddenly my shadow was longer than hers, then hers longer than mine. I caught an unfamiliar scent. I couldn’t say of what herb or what flower hidden within the earth, something that — before going to sleep — was preparing the scent it would offer at the conclusion of cold. We climbed up onto the fence and sat on the rail. She told me she knew many things: far away the river was flowing; the dead were asleep; trees that held a dead person likewise died a bit; cement inside a dead person took a long time to dry. She said we knew many things about the light, about everything that transpires as it goes round, returning to us — neither too fast nor too slowly, like our shadows cast on the sundial hours. The same, always the same, no beginning, no ending, never tiring. You and I grow tired. She stretched out her arm, searched for my face in the dark, and stroked my brow three times with her finger. She climbed down from the fence, wanted to play, to make ourselves into a ball. We sat on the ground, our knees against our chests, arms clasping knees. We played for a while, leaning first to one side, then the other. Let’s stretch out, she said, and roll far away. The trampled grass allowed itself to be trampled as it played with us. And the horses slept.
When we tired, we got to our feet. She turned and met me, and we stood facing each other. Her eyes shone, and within the dark gleam cast by the ever-higher moon, I seemed to glimpse the swaying leaf of a cane, a tiny one. Without a word, we began to run, as if we were flying; we stopped when we reached the center of the bridge, our hearts pounding.
The smell of the water rose from the river below, as though the water itself lived in the air, coursing through its channels. The scent of moist flower, earth, and root reached us. The water that flowed in smelled the same as the water that flowed out. The same, always the same. We looked, straining to glimpse what could not be glimpsed. Behind us, the moon pinned our shadows to the ground, slowly casting them onto the river; it partially erased them, and joined them at the mouth. When the moon died, it carried away the shadows, still joined at the mouth, as if it had dragged them away by their feet.
We had a little girl, just like my wife. And my wife always said: she’s just like me.
Part Three
I
The day my child turned four, I took her to Font de la Jonquilla. She didn’t want to go. I went with my father to the fountain when I was my daughter’s height, and I had never been back. I remembered it as a dark hollow in the shade. I knew that once you passed the slaughterhouse the path followed the river, and you could see the wash area and the prisoner’s cage on the opposite bank. Midway, the sound of the falls reached you. If you looked back after walking a while, Senyor’s mountain began to turn sideways. When you got to the Pont de Pedra, the ivy-shrouded cleft came into sight; opposite it, a slope with trees at the bottom and grassland at the top. Three paths led from the Pont de Pedra. One of them winded up the mountain. The wasteland round the bridge welcomed only stinging nettles and weeds, weeds that — if you boiled and swallowed the liquid — would bring up everything inside you. My child stopped near the bridge to gaze at the river. When we left the village the sun was asleep behind Pedres Altes, but now it had risen and was sweeping through the bend in the river, splashing the green leaves, turning them yellow. The trees bordering the river beyond the Pont de Pedra had changed a great deaclass="underline" when I was little I could touch the lower leaves — I liked touching them because their underbelly was white — but now I could hardly reach them. Soon after crossing the bridge you could hear the waterfall. The path dipped, then gradually turned away from the river till it finally ended in front of a cluster of thick-trunked trees that surrounded a circle of rocks. The spring stood in the center; it was not dark, dappled sun danced on the ground, and the mountain loomed in the distance. When I was little I had been frightened by the worm-filled spring that always spewed water; it was something alive that I couldn’t understand. The rocks where the water gushed were covered by a dense climber with white-flecked blossoms; the water that collected at the fountain trickled off, down a canal adorned with blue buttercups. Taking hold of my child’s hand, I remembered myself at her age, my fear, my father, the first day my wife showed me the child and told me to look at her, saying she’s just like me (the midwife who birthed her wanted to show her to me, but I didn’t want to look because of all that had happened). The child stood still, her hand in mine, gazing at the buttercups. Bees were drinking, buzzing round the rocks and canal. I picked a buttercup and offered it to my daughter, but she didn’t want it and knocked it out of my hand; when I stooped to pick it up, she said she wanted black night. Two women carrying buckets joined us in the dark shadow of the trees; they glanced at me and began to laugh. One was young and tall with protruding eyes, like all the old women in the village. The other was short, her braided hair falling across her breast, all the way down to her waist. They approached the fountain, the protruding eyes staring straight at me, laughing all the while. The whole village had done the same, ever since the child was born. When the woman laughed, I sensed she was thinking the same thing the children did when they caught sight of me with the child and cried deformed, deformed with their hands cupped in front of their mouths, just as they had shouted, go with the ugly girl, the ugly girl. Now the children had grown up, and the youngest had learnt spiteful things from their elders. The braid was filtering the water when, all at once, she threw a handful on my child. She started to scream: a tiny, spark-size worm was curling and uncurling on her hand. The woman said my daughter was a child with corrupted blood. And a crybaby. They began talking to each other, but before they began to speak, I asked them how they would like to find a worm on their skin; they paid no mind. They talked as if they were on their own, but everything they said was for my benefit. They said both my wife and daughter bore withered arms. I had had the prettiest mother in the village, jealous of newlyweds, a woman who died, consumed by some kind of inexplicable rage. The braid stared at me with black eyes. She looked at me as though I were a tree or grass. She said I should be ashamed, should have been thrashed from time to time after my father had died, instead of disgracing myself by climbing into bed with my stepmother. The protruding eyes said my dead father had wanted an indecent death. They had killed his desire because they realized right away what he was doing. he was obstinate. And they couldn’t finish killing him because his soul had enveloped him with such a dense mantle. The braid spoke up, so he went to bed with his stepmother who has a flowerpot with one bloom. The protruding, stark-white eyes doubled forward with laughter, and the braided one doubled backwards, laughing even harder, like two mad women. At that moment the ivy on the fountain shook. It was the blacksmith’s son. The braid stopped laughing and shouted, you think we don’t hear you, you think we don’t see you, you think we don’t know you spy on everyone. I’ll tell your mother to strap you to the bed again. My child began to shout, come out, come out. As soon as the blacksmith’s son jumped from the rock, he grabbed the braid’s arm and stuck his face right up against hers and told her to leave me alone and hurry back to the village, the wisteria roots were upwrenching her house: two Caramens had come in the night to water them with the grass juice that makes them grow uncontrollably. The protruding eyes told him to stop plying them with stories and go back to the bed where he’d spent his whole life, where he should end it, and if his father was the leader of a group of people with stones for brains, her husband was a watchman, so the two men were about the same, maybe the watchman was a little better, he didn’t pester anyone. The braid jerked her hand away from the boy, said he was always looking for excuses to touch her, told him to watch out because, scrawny as he was, one slap from her and he’d be knocked to the ground, and she’d make him fall with such fury that his flimsy, marrowless legs would break into three pieces: two to plug his eyes and the third to stuff his mouth. They picked up their buckets and strode off together, but they turned round after a moment, and the braid stuck out her tongue at us, crying, so you think you’re as good as Senyor? Ha! My child was hugging the blacksmith’s son’s legs, telling him she wanted black night.