I would have spent the whole day with her, but in mid-morning she told me to leave, she had work to do, and while she was telling me this, she was unraveling her braids and shaking out her hair, which again fell down, past the rope I had tied round her waist. I left, and when I was some distance away, I turned round: the window was open and she had placed the pot with the white flower on the sill; she was watering it. The curtain fluttered in the wind. When I was little, mother would take the curtain down to wash it and I would secretly breathe in its musty odor. When it was washed, it smelled of soap.
That afternoon I discovered my father wasn’t my father. My fingers were firmly clasping the ball of resin in my pocket when the blacksmith told me he was my father; he said he would have to take care of me. He said all you had to do was look at my face, especially from the mouth up. He said he was my father, and that was why I always liked to keep him company, just like my mother, who couldn’t walk by without stopping to look at the sparks and listen to the iron screaming in the water. He showed me a corner of the forge, where pieces of old iron and rusty chains lay, and told me that was where they had made me. I looked at his crooked legs, and when he noticed, he told me I had a bit of everyone. Then he laughed, and his teeth were drenched in saliva.
When I was little, mother was like a bee, buzzing from one place to another, kitchen, pasture, river, her braid black as night and teeth the color of bitter almond. When she raised her arms to hang clothes in the bright sun, it was as if the morning light was rising. She spoiled wedding nights because all the women on her side of the family had done the same. Like shadows that possessed a voice. The voice from those shadows screamed and screamed through her mouth all night long beneath the newlyweds’ window. Then my mother grew ugly. Her eyes became sad; her braid lost its luster. And her cheeks. And her shapely arm. Her elbow no longer seemed pretty or made of honey.
IV
Font de la Jonquilla, the buttercup fountain, dried up that summer. The old men from the slaughterhouse talked about it in the Plaça; they said it had never happened before. The river ran only half as high as usual. Beyond the bend, past the tree cemetery, you could see the sandy bottom in places. The flowing water was earth-colored. Horses would go into the river, many of them rolling in it all day. People were afraid the village would sink. They said the drought was worse than the water from the melting snow coursing beneath the desperate village. Everything looked burnt: grass, ivy, wisteria. Courtyards were full of dead bees. Grey, white-bellied snakes from Pedres Baixes slithered into corners. They hid wherever they could, as a nursing mother realized one morning when she found one attached to each breast. They killed the snakes by beating them with canes and stones. The Muntanyes Morades were quite far away, yet seemed so near. They changed colors — grey in winter, blue in spring — so we never knew their real color. Maraldina was different; it was dark green all year, and when the heather bloomed it had a reddish-purple streak. The flatland from the river to Pedres Baixes was riven with cracks that slowly widened, forming a colorless, butterfly-like design. Night was suffocating: the hot shadow settled on your chest, giving the impression it wanted to crush you. I saw stars falling on the other side of Maraldina, beyond the forest of the dead.
One night, perhaps the brightest of all — sky taut, moon low — I heard the front door open. From the window I saw my stepmother strolling up the street. I went down and followed her from a distance. Doors were closed, windows open, the pebbles on the pavement beneath my feet hot. I felt someone staring at me from behind a window. It caused me more anguish than the anguish caused by the sleeping people. Not a single leaf stirred. When I had left the village behind, I found the earth warmer than the pavement. My stepmother had a strange gait. When I finally realized she was stepping from crack to crack, I became afraid she might get caught in one, like a fox in a snare. She stopped, and so did I. We seemed little because everything was very large and very dead. Legs helped draw us near other people; without legs everything would be isolated. I was thinking about legs because fear had settled there. My stepmother started walking again, heading for the Pont de Fusta. When she reached it, I sensed she had seen me, and I wanted to draw near. She was standing in the middle of the bridge. Just the thought that she was waiting for me set my hands sweating, and I rubbed them on my clothes. As I approached, I started thinking things I had thought before: people are closed in, but they open up when you approach them. Instinctively I opened my mouth wide and shut it slowly because an open mouth courts fear. I wasn’t sure what she wanted. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and leaned over to gaze at the water, not thinking, just listening. She leaned on the railing too, and we stood for a while watching the water flowing calmly. The stench of putrid fish rose from the parched river. The smell merged with a flash of lightning — a falling star — and her voice. She told me she had left the village because she preferred expansive heat to the narrow heat between walls, among houses. When she asked me whether I preferred day or night, my hands started to sweat again, and I rubbed my palms against the tree trunk that served as a railing; it was rough. I told her I didn’t know, but when I was little, even though I was afraid of night, I liked it more than daytime because you could see things too clearly in the light, and the utter hopeless ugliness of some things became too enormous. I told her then that I had left the house because I had seen her leave, had followed her, and a man had watched me from behind a window, frightening me. She told me that fear was nothing, and had I noticed there were two types of fear? One real, the other pretend. She had suffered real fear, the fear of hands, because hands can grab you. My fear of the man who had watched from the window was pretend, because from inside he couldn’t hurt me at all. She took a stone out of her pocket and threw it in the river. I asked her if she too had noticed the odor from the river, but she said she didn’t smell anything; one day we would go to the Pont del Pescador because the thing she most liked about the village was the bridges. I told her during fishing season the Pont del Pescador drank so much fish blood that just the thought of it caused me anguish, and my father had often taken me fishing with him on the days when others went to stare at the prisoner. I told her I found it all strange: the two rows of men, one at each railing on the bridge. When they caught a fish, they jerked the cane up in the air very fast, removed the fish from the hook, and flung it on the ground. Sometimes the fish would be stunned; sometimes it would leap up and fall back in the river. To keep it from flopping about, they would crush the head with their heels — if they could — slowly, so the blood would ooze out the gills without splattering them. When the fish was dead, my father would make me throw it back in the water. I would walk home again beside my father, my hands open, not knowing what to do with them because they were covered in scales. She said she had never understood why they fished, hour after hour, glued to the railing on the bridge, only to throw the fish back in the river when they were dead. As she was speaking, we started walking again, falling silent for a moment, till we reached the end of the bridge. Then we ran all the way down the path. When we got to the fork — one side leading to the forest of the dead, the other to Maraldina — she told me she wanted to climb the mountain. We’d go down into the cave. But first she wanted to visit the cemetery below the heather, where people without souls were buried: those who died alone or from some misfortune. I told her I didn’t want to go into the cave; I would walk with her only as far as the cemetery at the foot of Maraldina, no farther. She took my hand, and we climbed up to the first cluster of heather. She drew me along, so I would go with her. I pulled away, in an effort to stop; then she let go of my hand and started up without a word. I called to her, told her we hadn’t gone to the cemetery for people buried in the ground, and she turned round. She was still close by, and in the moonlight her face was white as a root. She said we’d go another day, she wanted to climb down the well because it was cool.