IV
For some time I couldn’t rid myself of the blacksmith’s son, so I began doing everything I could to avoid encountering him. I left the house when I knew he was coming. I stopped going to the places I used to frequent. I would pretend to go down one path, then cut off to another. He appeared everywhere, as if I had told him where I was going before even I had decided. My child would wander aimlessly if she wasn’t with him; and if she spent a whole day without seeing him, she would throw herself on me, scratch me, crying that she wanted him, wanted black night. When we slept, she would sneak out, and I would have to search the village streets to find her. I finally had to let it be, and when I allowed them to do whatever they wanted, then the blacksmith’s son spoke of the green window. I could tell he was happy to talk about it because he sensed I was weary of him, and while he talked he stared at me with a leaden look, pretending he was sorry to tell me these things, but happy inside that he could. I began to know him. He carried about him all the rancor of having suffered the life he had been forced to live. Without my wishing it, he knew how to draw me to his side. For some time he told me that I was a hand to him, repeating it so often that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It entered my blood. When he sensed I was snared, he breathed deeply, and I shriveled up. I would take hold of my daughter and ask her whose child she was, and when my child said she was his, she looked at me for a long, long time without blinking, her eyes like still water. He asked me if I had ever looked behind the green window. I have, he said. I had never wished to grab him and kill him as much as that day. Often I had had to restrain my desire to kill him, push him off the Pont de Fusta into the river, strike him with an axe as if he were a tree of the dead. He told me in the red-powder cave, where for a long time he had wanted to go, but not alone. He told me, sitting on the ground, my child on his lap, breathing in the crimson powder — a lot had recently fallen from the ceiling, and a mound of it lay near the opening my stepmother and I had made to gain entrance to the second well. Everything smelled of powder and heather-earth. My child had fallen asleep, and he was stroking her hair, gently, almost without touching her. I told him another well existed, where you could hear the river flowing, but the water from that river had no outlet. If it had, the water would have been red when it surfaced the day we threw so much powder in it. He said the mud-flower pond lay beyond the tree cemetery, hidden in the growth at the end of the marsh, and the water in the pond was always half-red. The flowers bore the color of the water, as if in order to grow they had drunk from it. The pond was bloody from the red powder and the horses and old men from the slaughterhouse. He said he’d looked carefully at my house. As soon as he was able to leave his bed, he said, I started looking at things slowly because my eyes couldn’t hold so many new things at the same time. I wanted to see things; I knew nothing. Not about grasses or other people’s faces. You can’t imagine what it is to never see another person other than your parents, then to see a face and glimpse it in the open air, by yourself. When I was little, people would come to stare at me, but then they stopped coming, and the only thing I saw was the wall of ivy, a swarm of those creatures that make honey, my father’s crooked legs, my mother’s purple cheek. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t hungry, nor will I ever be again, but my eyes’ hunger will always exist. those twigs the day we lay on the ground, the ones we saw in front of the fog, we saw only the twigs, as if everything were dead. He had said, look at them, they’re swimming in the air in front of the fog, but there is no air, and if you stare at them long enough you can’t tell what they are, just thin streaks on fleeing water that’s turned into fog. The wish to see comes from not knowing anything. I could only remember you. And you, you’re a hand. The first night I was able to stand and walk a bit — because they fed me — I went in search of your house, the hottest night of all, a snake hidden in the courtyard under a sack. They said the wisteria was tilting the houses, and I grew uneasy, afraid your house would collapse. No birds were strung on the doors; I’d imagined all the doors with birds hanging by their feet. The leaves were yellow, the wall just beginning to turn red. This was the only thing I knew about plants: some leaves turned yellow, others red. Later, I lifted the curtain. I could see nothing. Later still, I learnt that your house had a worn step, the one in the middle. The transparent leaves on both the white and red flowers had thick veins. I know, he said — I can still hear him — when they opened up your father’s tree, his fingertips were red, his hair standing straight up. I know the wisteria trunk bears three incisions that your mother carved with a knife. I know what my father said when your father died. One word from a mouth is enough for me to guess everything. They say the prisoner tells lies. Do you believe it? And that my father is right. Do you believe it? I’ve learnt a lot, yet I can tell you I know nothing, only this: what happens is what counts. I felt he was uttering many of the things I thought, almost as if he were me. Maybe he had become me, from so many years of thinking about me as he lay in bed, lived in bed. He said, they all come, all of them. Everyone knows, you too. Your door is an open door. They go in and out. I tell you everyone knows. You’ve always known, from the time your father was still living. No one would want them because they stink of blood. Everyone keeps quiet about it because it suits them. You’re afraid to look. You were afraid to look, and you know nothing. You don’t know what she does: she fastens a rope round their necks. Playing. She’s always liked to play. They become little again when they’re with her. She ties a rope round their necks, he said, and she lies on the bed and makes them go round and round, one side to the other; the faster they run, the happier she is, but she doesn’t laugh — I’ve never seen her laugh — until finally the old men tire. The one I saw was tall and fat, with a sunken chest and soft hands. He was like a horse. Have you noticed that the men in the village look like horses? I realized as soon as I saw a group of them together. and she’d pull on the rope or loosen it, sometimes moving her lips, never allowing a word to escape, but you could see she was saying, gitty.
We left the well. Outside, a gust of wind filled our eyes with earth, and we started walking, the wind bending us. When we reached the bottom, he said, you knew. Then we headed to Pedres Altes and sat on the sundial, contemplating the night. The following day he taught me how to make fire with two dry branches.
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.