She walked around the castle, which still had its moat; she strolled along its walls with the dog behind her, and at the excavation site she noticed that Seda couldn’t go any further, she was limping on her aching, stiff leg. A lame dog, a castle atop a hill with crumpled walls and a view over the whole plain. .
She sat down, and Seda stretched out at her feet; she’d made her walk too much, poor thing, she hadn’t been thinking about her bum leg. Animals don’t complain. She reached down to pet her. Seda brought her snout close and wanted to lick Iona’s face, but she didn’t even have the strength to get up. Iona gradually calmed her. She thought about the boxer she’d helped die, took Seda’s snout between her palms, and stroked her head as if she were that boxer. She looked into her eyes again and said to her:
“It was a second. It was only a second, right? You didn’t suffer, it was just a surprise. Like a prick. Because. . Where are you? Xavi is with you, isn’t he? Tell him not to be mad at me. And not at you, either, you guys are brothers. . poor Xavi. We think about him too, he shouldn’t worry. . If you came back now, it would be like nothing happened. Everyone would act like nothing happened. Really. Your poor parents, you don’t know how this is affecting them. If you can leave, you can come back too. . I’m convinced of it. . If you came back, it wouldn’t be any stranger than it is now. . and it would be a comfort to everyone. . Explain it to Xavi. . but, most of all, don’t be upset, don’t be upset with me, not that. . and don’t go off on your own, eh, don’t leave your brother, stay together, like when you were little, okay? And if you can come back, everything will be the way it was, no one’s going to mind at all, don’t worry about a thing, really, come back, we’ll all be really happy. . We have those tickets for the summer. . and your parents will be so happy. . they’re like me, they can’t believe it. And my parents will act like nothing happened too. And Mireia. Everyone will. Me too. They’ll be so happy, right, Seda? We’ll act like nothing happened, right? You don’t have to worry about what you did, it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, no one will blame you for anything. All day long I tell myself that you’re not dead. But if you are, it doesn’t matter. . What would it change? Being here a little bit longer? Who cares? What does it matter to anyone? Look around. Remember Nil Dalmau? I saw him yesterday, he wanted to meet up, and I didn’t know how to say no; he’s the weirdest guy in the world, he has a ring in his ear, in his earlobe, he collects insects and. . If you were here, he wouldn’t have shown them to me. But don’t hold it against him, everyone’s taking advantage. . I guess I should understand, I’m in vet school. . I didn’t go to class yesterday or the day before; I went back today, Jaume, to see if I’d chosen the wrong profession. Everything’s so different now. Do you see poor Seda, how far I made her walk? I wasn’t even thinking about her, the poor thing. And now what? How do we get back? But you’re okay, right, where you are? Don’t be sorry about having to leave. . I think you’re here and you haven’t died, not to me and not to anyone. . Isn’t he here, Seda? Your leg’s hurting, huh?”
She thought about calling her sister to come pick them up in the car, but the path was bad, and Mireia was working in Girona that afternoon anyway. She tried to carry the dog, but Seda got anxious and scratched her, and she wasn’t exactly small. She put her down and walked slowly, stopping frequently to give her a chance to catch up. Seda limped behind her. They passed right by the new cemetery and the still-empty morgue, a concrete mass set down between the fields, because the dead no longer fit into the old cemetery, and if the dead didn’t fit there, thought Iona, we could bury them like the dogs, at home, beneath the cherry tree, and when the cherry trees died we could take them to the cemetery, bury them stretched out inside the niches. And she thought about how the two brothers were there, on the other side of the wall, beyond the cemetery gates, among the bricks of the niches and among the wood of the coffins, and that she didn’t care at all. She could have walked within a meter of their heads or their feet and not have felt a thing, as if they’d been erased, as if they’d never existed.
They were already nearing the house along the back path, and Iona saw her father coming in from the fields with three black day laborers. She rushed over, coming up from behind without them seeing her.
“They were good kids,” her father was saying. “They were good kids, but they drove too fast. And better now than later.”
Iona couldn’t quite catch up with him, Seda was limping more and more. Her father said:
“My daughter will find someone else, it’s a tragedy, but you’ve got to keep going in life, I don’t need to tell you guys that, right? You know the boys I’m talking about? Those kids. I’ll miss them; no way around that. I would’ve liked to have a son. But then who’d hire you guys? But that kid wasn’t perfect. Where were they coming from, in the wee hours on a Sunday morning? They died coming out of Vidreres. But where were they coming from, at that time of the night? Where were they going? I wonder where all this is going to lead. We won’t be able to change Mireia; she’ll stay in Girona forever. Real bad luck, shit, you can’t even begin to imagine.”
“Dad,” she said, worried that he would think she’d heard him.
“Oh, there you are. I was just coming to look for you.”
Excited by him greeting Iona, the dog trotted as best she could over to her owner. She ran circles around his legs, happy and with her tongue out, but she was in such pain that she wasn’t nimble enough and made him stumble. He kicked the dog’s belly to get her out of his way, and she cried out, moaned, and lowered her ears as she moved away with her tail between her legs. Ondó, one of the day laborers, was smiling until he saw Iona’s expression. Then he looked her in the eye and smiled even wider, revealing all his teeth.
“You mind telling me what’s so funny?” she said.
Ondó suddenly stopped smiling. He lowered his gaze and left. There were plenty of people who could work at Can Bou. These three day laborers shared an apartment in Vidreres with four or five others, and Ondó could ruin it for all of them.
The dog took refuge at Iona’s side.
“Why do you let her do that?” her father said. “You’re spoiling her, don’t they teach you that? What are they teaching you, to give cats manicures?”
Maybe he was right. Maybe they treated animals like humans because they wanted to make them disappear. There was exasperation in her father’s face, as if he’d aged five or ten years in the last few days. He was hard to understand on the surface; he was a surly, remote man, and his relationship to the land and the crops made him predictable and simple. You knew there must have been more to him, behind that, and if you were his daughter, you could even rummage through the hidden part, but whatever was there never came to the surface; there were no shadows that hinted at anything more, ever, and so it was as if there was nothing there at all. But the boys’ death had touched his depths; he’d known those boys even longer than he’d know Iona, had seen them come into the world, and shared the same skies and seasons with them. More than once they’d come over to Can Bou to lend a hand and, for a man who’d barely had a mother, what had those deaths stirred up? A man who’d had a ghost for a mother must understand what Iona was experiencing. Maybe. Who knew?