But her period had come early, and that would help her in her denial. She wouldn’t have to make the decision of whether to have the child or not. Because, with Jaume dead, would she have more reasons to have it, or less? A dead father gave more reasons than a living father to continue the pregnancy. A dead father couldn’t talk, so everything had to continue its course. But how could she have done that — have his child — to Jaume? And to which Jaume, if continuing the pregnancy would mean accepting his death? That was also a crack in the deniaclass="underline" who would want a child after revealing life’s uncertainty and absurdity with his own death? Really, who would want that world for his child? Would Xavi and Jaume’s parents have had children if they’d known they would end up driving into a tree at twenty and twenty-two years old?
Or at thirty? Or forty? At fifty? Sixty, seventy, eighty? How many would you like, ma’am? Well, if I can’t live a hundred years, there’s no point. Well, I’ll settle for twenty-five. What luck, not to have to think about that. No, thirty or so’s enough for me, because I know we’re part of a chain and are here to perpetuate the species. . And what if you don’t have kids? What if you can’t or you die too soon, like Jaume? Here we can only guarantee you a link to the dead, ma’am.
And what if it wasn’t her period? What if it was an early miscarriage? A miscarriage before fertilization, a period coming early to impede a birth, nature rushing to expel the part that came from him, the part he had wasted, and replace it as fast as possible, to give someone else a chance, a better role model for Iona’s child. Nature wasn’t rushing. Nature was immediate.
Jaume hadn’t even been buried, and he’d already lost all his rights. Nature went against itself by bringing you into the world, but when it came back for you it regained its place on the throne. She had gotten naked in front of her mother and, at some point, she would do it in front of another boy. She would let another boy undress her, even if just to reclaim her own body, while she waited for Jaume, so she could give it back to him. Death — that death that wasn’t — simplified things. All her doubts about Jaume, all the ambiguities constructed in the four or five years they’d been dating, all the inaccuracies, were gone with his death, as if down the drain. Everything that was unresolved, everything that still had to be discussed.
She covered her thigh with her panties and quickly grabbed some clean ones. She pulled up the top sheet, crumpled it, placed it over the stain, and left the room. She went into the bathroom, washed, and put in a tampon. When she came back to the bedroom, her mother had laid out her clothes on the mattress. She had stripped the sheets off the bed; they were in a pile on the floor. Beside her mother was Mireia, her younger sister.
“I have to get dressed,” said Iona.
Her breasts were still showing, her breasts which were Jaume’s and his children’s, because they’d wanted to have children. They had talked about it, picked names, names that were now lethal. . Her forsaken breasts were now, once again, her’s. Not even that. They were shrinking. They were regressing to a barren girl’s. My god. Her pubis shaved the way Jaume liked it. How could her mother welcome the part of him that her daughter embodied?
She wanted to tell her sister that everything was okay; as the older one she had to take the lead and guide her little sister, but she couldn’t. She hugged her to console her. Her sister was crying for her, but Iona had to bear the denial of Jaume’s death alone, and she felt it scattering, she couldn’t hold on to the denial; it was slipping through her fingers; it was bringing her other deaths to life, four grandparents, three dogs, so vivid that if the well had been open, she would have asked Mireia to accompany her to see the woman at the bottom, swimming in her clothes, peaceful, trusting, waiting for them to throw her a rope. That woman was Jaume’s death. It wasn’t going to be easy to settle into living in a false reality. She resisted at the border of fantasy, entering that country had too high a price — insanity — but holding out on the border. . it wasn’t just that her own body was denying the denial. The denial expanded inside her, a new pregnancy that drove out Jaume’s, and countered reality, resituated it, corrected it to underscore the incongruities. Who talked about menstruation? She searched for the cherry tree from the window. It was too sunny for a winter day. No, nothing about menstruation. The cherry tree that festered. The dogs’ blood traveled up through its roots, swelling the cherries, dripping off the leaves, trickling down the branches and trunk to the ground and there, in the day’s white and intense light, like a frozen flash of lightning, it seemed like the shadow of the fruit tree but wasn’t; it was a red shadow, a puddle, the ground was wet. The other cherry tree was also bleeding, and the peach trees had matured so suddenly that the peaches hadn’t had time to fall; they had rotted on the branches, and their bone-colored pits hung among the leaves. Late January and that sun. It couldn’t be. The pomegranates and figs, filled with seeds, erupted; the apple tree lost its leaves, and its branches curved, loaded down with red apples. The garden covered the tubers’ rapes, the pregnant watermelons burst, across the sky came a flock of seagulls from the dump in Solius.
The two sisters and their parents didn’t have lunch; they watched television without speaking all afternoon and evening. Then their father said he was going out for a walk through the fields and left. The funeral was the next afternoon. The silence of Can Bou covered the other silences. The televisions’ volumes were low, fewer people walked down the streets of town, kids didn’t cry. The air had frozen over the plain. Even the weekenders from Barcelona, driving through the fields of Vidreres in search of the freeway, slowed their pace.
“I’m very tired,” said Mireia, as the evening drew to a close. “I just want to go to sleep.”
“Wait a minute, until your father gets back, and then go on to bed,” said her mother. “You don’t have to come to the wake.”
“I don’t think I’ll go to the burial either,” said Mireia.
Iona felt she should say something, as if she were in charge of protocol and invitations, as if she had the right to excuse her sister from attending. What was the point of her little sister being there? But Jaume and Xavi were dead, and it seemed that, in turn, the two sisters should have to go to the funeral, like an offering to the God who had taken the two brothers and not them. Iona would go as if it were nothing; she would fly over the funeral just as she was flying over this first evening with Jaume dead. The more immediate realities — the furniture in the house, the smells, the words — had intensified, as if to help her hide from what was going on.
“Maybe it’s better if you don’t come, Mireia,” said Iona. “It won’t do you any good, not you and not them.”
“I’m really sorry, I’m so tired, emotionally. I just don’t have the heart, and it’s better I say it now. I don’t want to worry all night about having to tell you tomorrow. But it seems rude not to go. Wouldn’t they have wanted the whole town to see them off? Wouldn’t they have come to our funeral, if it had been us?”
“What they would have wanted was to not have the accident. Would you want a funeral full of people?”
“I don’t know, Iona.”
“Forgive me, Iona,” interjected their mother. “Today’s not a day for arguing, but the funeral isn’t for them; no one expects it to help or to be meaningful to them in any way. The funeral is for those of us left behind, to be there for their parents and to be there for you, to share in the pain.”