I stayed on alone; the tree was barely visible without the torches. I went up to it and placed my ear against the bark. It seemed empty. I looked up because I wanted to see a little starlight. As I gazed upward, I could feel my link with life snapping. I felt detached from everything. I searched for my tree; night was a hand, wrenching me from my father’s tree, leading me to mine. I knelt down and crawled on my knees from one trunk to another, fingering the names of the living and the dead. I could smell the fretted leaves and trampled grass. When I lifted a plaque, the ring sometimes squealed, as if it were tearing something that was deeply hidden, something that thrust blades of grass and leaves on branches upward. A ray of moonlight helped me locate my tree; it was directly in front of my father’s. The plaque smelled of rust. I would end my days locked in that tree, my mouth full of cement that had been mixed with crimson powder, my entire soul within. Because, you see, the blacksmith used to say that with the last breath, without anyone realizing, your soul flees. And no one knows where it goes.
The village was deserted. Only the grieving sound of the hidden river reached me. From time to time a blossom fell from the cluster above, grazing my cheek. This was the hour that roots strained to upwrench houses. When a large crack appeared in a wall, it was filled with cement and the house became safe again. I followed all the villagers, as though I wasn’t following them. I could still hear the voice of the man in the forest. I entered many kitchens where eyes waited behind stars in cupboards, just as mine had waited for the elderly to come and free me. I opened the doors to all the cupboards, and the sleepy children staggered out. I made my way to the blacksmith’s house, where I struck the anvil two or three times with my open hand. I walked further inside. The blacksmith’s son was skeleton-thin, and they always kept him in bed. I went over to gaze at him and touched him, but he didn’t move. I continued on to my house and went upstairs; I could see the glow of the fires on the other side of the stables, on the Festa esplanade. All of a sudden I wanted to go and see them. No one was home, and as I was leaving I ran my hand along the windowsill. No flowerpot stood at the window; my stepmother always had a pot with a flower on the sill. Sometimes the flower was white, sometimes red. But there was no flowerpot that day. My stepmother wasn’t at home. She was sixteen years old.
The horses ate the juiciest grass, gorged on the sweetest alfalfa, chewed the flattest carob beans. Horseflesh, they told us, would replenish your blood. We ate it in a variety of ways: often raw (chopped up and mixed with herbs), roasted in drippings in winter, sometimes cooked over a log fire — always cooked over wood at funeral feasts. The fat was made into balls and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen or dining room. The balls of fat went well with the soap bubbles from the wash area where the water was playful; some hung from the courtyard arbors all spring, even part of summer. As though they were made of glass. The ones the children made almost always burst when shot from canes; no one could explain why some lasted a long time, others only a moment. If one ever turned into glass, we placed it carefully in the fork of the wisteria vines. At home, we had always had soap bubbles and balls of fat. Two or three times a week my stepmother would say to my father, go to the fields, I’m expecting some fat. And father would say, fine. I would also say, fine, very softly so they wouldn’t hear me because the two of them were walking together and I was farther off. Then my stepmother would put the flowerpot on the windowsill, and that night she had a ball of fat hanging from the ceiling.
My stepmother was so short she had to climb up on a wooden box to put the flowerpot on the windowsill. While she was waiting for them to bring her some fat, she would drag the bed to the middle of the room, where she usually slept, and crawl into it. An earth-colored blanket lay across the bed. If father and I were at home, she would sit in a chair, her legs folded beneath her, head resting against the back of the chair. She would often sit like that when father and I straightened up the kitchen. Sometimes while sitting in her chair she would take a cane and rock the balls of fat with little nudges. Father used to say she thought only about playing. Some days he would fill a basket with wisteria blossoms and tell her, play. She would say she was working because she was stringing wisteria flowers together with a needle and thread, threading all the flowers through the stems. They were necklaces. Some nights she didn’t want to go to sleep because she said she had slept all day, and on top of sleeping during the day, she couldn’t sleep all night too. I would sneak down and watch her. I discovered she didn’t want to go to bed because she wanted to eat the fat without anyone seeing her.
I slept upstairs. If I leaned out of the window, I had a glimpse of a speck of sky overhead. From my bed I could see the ivy wall on the cleft mountain. At times when I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I thought how I wanted to bring Senyor crashing down — especially in winter when it snowed — or help the roots upwrench houses, or walk the horses on Maraldina where no one had ever been. I would think about things like that with my eyes closed until I got sleepy. The last thing I would hear, while everyone rested with their eyes shut, was the river dislodging the rocks that supported the village.
I wanted to see the Festa, so I went. The villagers had gathered near the river, on the esplanade by the canes that whistled because it was windy. Tables and benches had been built from tree trunks. The horse hoof soup was already boiling in large cauldrons, and standing beside each pot was a woman who was removing scum with a ladle and throwing fat and lumps of cooked blood on the ground. For a funeral Festa, they killed horses and pregnant mares. First, they ate the soup, then the horse or mare, and then a morsel — but only a small piece because there wasn’t much to go round — of the little ones the mares were carrying inside them. They made a paste with the brains; it helped digestion. They peeled them, boiled them in a pot used only for brains, cleaned them, and then chopped them to bits.
With one spoonful of the paste, you had plenty. It was mixed with honey and went down like oil, passing through your innards, leaving you feeling fresh. More than one spoonful and you went mad. Just one spoonful, they would say. The paste provided them with the stamina needed to raise horses, cut alfalfa, and trudge all the way to the carob trees to look for beans. They used to say that those carob trees had witnessed the birth of the village, the two conjoined shadows, and the first horse’s leap as it neighed and emerged like a flame, all alone, from the middle of the river. They used to say that if those carob trees could talk.
I stood very still behind a clump of canes. They were still slitting open horses. They tied their legs and strung them up on a kind of clothesline; you could see the empty space inside them lighting up, glistening in the firelight. The blacksmith’s wife — short and ugly, with the purple mark on her cheek — was peeling brains with the two women who had accompanied her to the forest of the dead. Suddenly she jumped up, telling everyone to be quiet. She thought she heard the prisoner neighing.
VIII
In the firelight the men and the women all looked alike. In the daytime they appeared quite different: some were tall, some short, some thin, some fat; some had more hair than others, or a broader or longer nose, or different-colored eyes. But in the firelight they all looked alike. In the very middle of the day, when they were calm and occupied, the only ones who looked alike were fathers and sons. Some sons were identical to their fathers; some, however, did not resemble them at all. This almost drove the fathers mad, but little by little they grew accustomed to the idea. They said it all came from looking. Near the canes where I was hiding, a group of dirty, disheveled women were sitting on the ground away from the fire, their eyes blindfolded. They were the pregnant ones. They covered their eyes because if they gazed at other men, the children they were carrying would also take a peek and begin to resemble the men. They said a woman fell in love with every man she saw, and the longer she was pregnant, the faster she fell in love. So, what with women falling in love and children looking, what shouldn’t happen, happened.