The blacksmith’s son said he wanted to visit the man with the cudgel. We left the child asleep on top of the stone clock and circled Pedres Altes. At the entrance to the cave stood a clearing surrounded by high grass and shrubs. We caught sight of him right away, straight as a tree, swinging the cudgel above his head. He was uttering things we couldn’t understand because he spoke in a low voice, but we caught the word round and the word wind. They said patience had made him strong, the patience to live a life swinging his shiny cudgel — shiny from being held so often — and defeating the village boys. While we watched him, he swung the cudgel from side to side at shoulder level; then slowly he stooped to knee level. If any legs had been within reach, he would have smashed them. We saw him stop and enter the cave, by this time his body bent from weariness, as if putting aside the cudgel had made him instantly grow old, his backbone soft. Not many boys from the village wanted to fight him. The elderly said that all the good things were fast vanishing.
I found myself alone. The blacksmith’s son had disappeared; I didn’t hear him leave. The night had been clear, but clouds began to form, and a diaphanous fog rose above the river and remained there. While I was gazing at it, suddenly — without my realizing it — the blacksmith’s son appeared at my side again, telling me we had to hurry. I’ve taken the old man’s cudgel and hidden it in the shrubs; let’s leave before he notices. I think it was that very morning that I went down to the river to look for cane. The blacksmith’s son had collected my daughter and taken her home. The fog didn’t dare thicken; its drowsiness put the water to sleep. I headed to the Festa esplanade. It wasn’t yet dawn, but a brighter ribbon of light gleamed from the sun side, and I was thinking about the man with the cudgel and how it had turned his palms scarlet, as if they were covered in blood.
VI
By the esplanade the river vaulted underground, creating a wave; but the water by the canes was calm. I sat down on a bench, my arms on the table, my head on my arms. I shut my eyes as if I were dead. I was dead. I would have stayed there all my life, until the wind scattered my dust. I could envisage my body, no longer flesh, turning first into sulphur dust that caught on the underside of bees, then into earth, and finally breathing new life into flowers. Once my existence unraveled, it became death and flew about; from spring to spring only winter’s death would live. All of me was weighted down. As I was feeling the weight, I heard a splash and raised my head. Rings had formed in the water, giving birth to other rings, as if someone had hurled a flat rock. The rings kept spreading until they reached the point where they died. The days-old water was green on the opposite bank, where I had watched the Festa years before. When all the rings stopped, I glimpsed a hand by the canes. A hand above the water, as if supported from below, tiny and white and flat like a fearless spider. The hand rose, then fell furiously, striking the water. I approached the canes and hid. I caught sight of a girl who climbed out of the water and got dressed; she reappeared from behind the canes, tucking her bodice into her skirt, her back to me, the hem of her skirt almost grazing my knee. Her feet were pale. And the lower part of her legs. Her heels were rose-colored, like the pink houses in spring. When the bodice was tucked in, she took a few steps, stopped, looked at the sky, then dashed back to the water she had just abandoned and began waving her hand from one side to the other as she blew away the illusion of fog that wasn’t really there. Just a bit of smoke. She returned to where she had been standing, but faced me this time and, raising her arms, she grasped her hair with both hands, pulled it up and tied it. As she lifted her arms, her bodice again escaped her skirt, and again she tucked it in. At that moment, without giving it a thought, without wanting to, I got to my feet. We looked at each other. She stood in front of me, her hands still raised, I in front of her. Both of us standing. Eye to eye, mouth to mouth, our hearts troubled. Not wanting to, not thinking, I stretched out my open hand, wishing to touch her because she was alive, yet wondering if she was real. As if I had passed on to her the wish to do what I had done, she extended her arm toward me, her hand open. That was enough. The two of us standing, our fingertips on the verge of touching, barely separated by what might have been the thickness of a leaf. We remained like that as the morning mist grew thinner, as if the water in the middle of the river had swallowed it, instead of spitting it out. And she departed. I stood there with my hand outstretched. I jumped with a start when her hair abruptly came loose and fell like sudden night down her back. You, you are a hand, the blacksmith’s son had told me. I stepped forward, placing my feet on the water spots she had left on the ground and pressed the soles of my feet as hard as I could against the earth, my body weightless. Her short, wet hair, was swept up, away from her neck. This is what I most remembered about her, before her hair fell loose. All the women in the village have long, fine hair. Her husband takes hold of her hair, a strand of which dangles free. I felt the birth of desire as I had never felt it, desire alone, violent and solitary as a rock. Look at them, their eyes like horses’, never knowing when they live, when they die.
I gathered some canes and was heading back when I encountered a group of men leaving the village. I didn’t look at them. As I was approaching the first street, I had a glimpse of the blacksmith’s son running toward me. His father wanted to see me right away. I handed him the canes, told him to take them home, and hurried to the blacksmith’s.
VII
The blacksmith needed me to deliver a message: he was unable to visit Senyor. He explained how to make the journey up to Senyor’s house: after the bridge, the middle path. Three paths converged just beyond the bridge. One followed a difficult stretch through rock and water, ending in the village opposite some courtyards and rock. Another led to the flatlands. The path in the middle gave the appearance of being level but soon began to climb. I set out alone. My child was no doubt at Pedres Altes with the blacksmith’s son. Dusk was falling. As I made my way up the mountain, it quickly grew dark below, but the higher land was still enveloped in light. The wind swirled whirlpools of dust. The village fields and stables lay to my right, Senyor’s land — flat and endless — to my left. I told the blacksmith that Senyor might not believe his lie — that he couldn’t scale the mountain because he’d fallen in the courtyard — but the blacksmith replied that Senyor believed everything. The prisoner had told me that all the women in the village had long, fine hair, all of them. Soon the stables and esplanade were hidden and only the river was visible, still calm without the fury of melting snow. A pregnant woman was bounding down the path. She was almost beside me before I noticed her. The sound of her footsteps lasted a while, then faded. When I could no longer hear them, I turned back to look at her, but she was merely an earth-colored shadow blending into the earth. I realized then that her eyes weren’t bandaged, and I stopped to think about it. Higher up the air carried different, fresh smells. Two round rocks were planted in the ground on each side of the entrance. One was poorly set and leaned to the side. Above the door hung the stone coat of arms: at the top two birds faced each other; the rest was a bed of wisteria. I entered the patio. Several torches were blazing at eye level; a mourner was perched beneath each, half the number as on the coat of arms. I felt as if I had seen it all before. As I pondered the fact that I had witnessed this somewhere, I realized the impression sprang from the torches: the same torch flames that had made the low-hanging leaves glow that night in the tree cemetery. The sky was like that night, only now the butterflies had not yet been born. From the patio I glanced up. I could see a sliver of a moon; it was the same color as the sharp edge of the axe, and both ends curled toward the center. A man approached and asked what I wanted. I spoke to him of the blacksmith, and he immediately called to a woman who emerged from a little door and disappeared through the large one. She was gone a long time; when she returned she said Senyor was waiting for me. The woman led me down a wide corridor, through a very large room and another corridor, until we finally arrived at a long, narrow room that smelled of smoke from the extinguished fire. At the far end, in a black armchair, sat Senyor. As soon as he saw me he squinted to bring me into focus, said he knew me, had known my mother, I was beginning to look like her. He burst into a coughing fit and the glass in the window shook. When he stopped coughing, his chest rising and falling heavily, he asked about the blacksmith, and I explained about the fall. He had tears in his eyes from coughing and wiped them with a finger, shaking them away from the armchair. His upper lip curled a moment; then with both hands — which immediately turned whiter with the effort — he took hold of the arms of the chair to lift himself. When he was halfway up he sat back down, saying he couldn’t remember why he wanted to get up. His upper lip rose after every word and trembled slightly round the corners of his mouth. He said perhaps he could tell me what he needed to tell the blacksmith, since the blacksmith had sent me instead. He had known my mother. His remarks were all jumbled. He told me he had been forced to live like that, had been given that kind of life, but when he was little they didn’t prick his ear because his mother said he had enough with his twisted feet. He said maybe it would have been better if they’d left him completely empty. When he was little he always looked at people’s feet, didn’t know which feet were the proper ones, until little by little, thinking about it as he grew up, he came to realize that everyone had feet the way they should. Everyone except him. Then he was quiet for a long time, touching his knees. The moon — the skeleton of the moon — settled in front of the window; and finally Senyor said, when you’ve had to live, he said, when you’ve had to live with your lower body deformed, a man could at least choose his own way of dying. The prisoner — he called him the man in the cage — the man in the cage knew me, he was the bravest, forever looking straight in front of him, he’d always say: since you can’t choose the way you live, you should at least be able to choose the way you die, and you should finish. But I can’t finish anything; there are things you can’t do unless someone helps you, and these things include dying the way you wish, when you wish. Death is always ugly, those worms that have hatched within you, waiting for you, the worms of patience that do their work fast — when they can — and do it well. The man in the cage had to endure hours and hours of torment, of having his desire killed off. One day they told me he’d wanted to end his life, he wanted to end his life, he lived without living, always thinking about himself and about the village, as if the village was him and he the village. As soon as they locked him up, I think he began to live because he could no longer wish for anything, everything came from others rather than from himself. like what they did with your father. I didn’t find out for a long time. On this side of the mountain things are always chipped and dented when they reach us because of a sort of rupture built up over the years, but even so, news of everything reaches us in the end. Some people want to change things, maybe they’re right, it’s all the same to me. Now that I’m old, I only wish for one thing, to die with an empty mouth. I don’t want to die like your father, because what they did to him. I don’t want to die the way they force you to die. The closer I get, the less I want it and the more I think about it. He made me describe my father’s last death. From time to time, he placed a hand before his mouth, and his fearful eyes peered at me above the hand. I explained how they had pulled him from the tree, black night filled with shouts, everyone carrying a torch, a drop of saliva running with delight from the corner of an old man’s lip, how they had finished him off. He told me I was young; when he was young the villagers never glimpsed his eyes because he so rarely went down the mountain. Then he said: that’s what kept me alive, never stopping, never stopping, one woman after another, always preferring the other one. I didn’t know then what was inside a man, and when I discovered, I wanted to die. With unfocused eyes he said: accompanied by the wish to live, you have the wish to die; it’ll be like that till the end. Spring is sad, in spring all the world is ill, plants and flowers are earth’s plague, rotten. The earth would be calmer if it were green-less, without this fury, this blind will that consumes everything but craves more, the affliction of the green, so much greenness and poisonous color. When the wind drives everything from one end of the world to the other, seeds and particles and everything it covets, then men become tormented. Birds contribute to this, so do bees — they carry so much sulphur dust, caught on their backs, their legs, nothing carries as much sulphur dust as bees. The man in the cage used to say, kill the wisteria, he said it often, I know they spread honey on him, he’d often say that, he was truly a man, now they say he’s thin as a cane, his brain twisted round. One morning you’ll get up thinking that the things you carry within you have died, but it won’t be true; when you think this has happened it’ll really be you who has died a bit. Things don’t die. They continue. They pass from one to another, always in this fashion, from one to another. He waved his open hand from right to left, a worn hand, covered with blemishes, fingers stiff at the joints, the hands of a very old man. Always from one to the other, like water from the sky that falls to earth, like fog