I emerged from my hiding place, and they glanced at me. He kept on explaining to her as if I wasn’t there, all souls are good, evil things are done with hands and eyes, they don’t have any of that, only one thing, they are souls and they can create wind. They blow, creating the wind, and the wind rushes through the heather and pushes men down the mountain, then up, because the souls that are waiting and the ones that have fallen to earth are sad, they want no part of anything, never again any part of this world. So they blow.
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.