B0040702LQ EBOK (35 page)

Peering out through the baleens I saw seas of every kind.
All different kinds of blues, some the colour of wine, you
name it, with golden waves and mountains of ice and mists at
dawn. And me trembling and suffering. I used to tell myself all
the tears on earth flow down to the sea. And my clothes were
falling to bits, rotting away. First of all, my trouser bottoms
frayed, then my sailor's jacket fell to pieces, all my clothes just
fell apart, I don't know how, and all I had left was my leather
belt and my knife with its mother-of-pearl handle, thrust into
the belt. Soon I had to make new holes in it. Sometimes, if I
slept a little, I would dream that I was tightening my belt and
inside the belt there was nothing left ... A green coast! When
I saw that coastline, I prayed. Again, I risked my life and battered the cheeks with my plank. Cristina dived. We stayed
underwater for ages. When we emerged, my ears were popping like mad, but the baleens had opened like the doors of a lock, and I floated off into the blessed sea, which now did not
seem to be made of tears, but of the laughter of all the fountains in the world. And my plank and I were sailing on the sea,
like this ... rocked by the waves, towards the green land.
There were birds screeching by the shoreline and I thought
the breeze carried on it a scent of ears of wheat and pine trees.
But suddenly I heard her. Before I had time to turn round, her
shadow fell across me and she dragged me back inside her
again through the baleens. Then the bad times began. Six
months, every night spent hitting her from inside with the
plank, bashing her on the tongue with the thigh bone of that
sailor, God knows where he had got to. With my penknife I
cut crosses on the side of her palate and under her tongue. I
rammed the handle of the now rusty saucepan into her flesh
to start an infection, I pinched her with the buckle of my belt.
In the end, she stopped swimming; she just floated aimlessly
on the surface of the water, listing a little to one side. I made a
mark for every day by thrusting the blade of my knife into her
palate, which trembled like jelly, and white blood and red
blood gushed from the cuts. When one side of her palate was
ripped to pieces I started on the other. One day, I cut open
one of the granules on her tongue and I heard a groan like the
sound of the organ on the day of the dead. At night, she would
let out a scream from deep within her, as though all the bells
of all the belltowers in the sea were ringing at the same time,
drowned by the weight of the water and the salt. Cristina
rocked like a cradle, and she was rocking me to sleep, but I was
alert to that. I began to eat her. I would make a cross, then cut
out the meat below it and eat it, chewing it thoroughly, as I
had done with the sailor. One day, the groans sounded
human, and Cristina dived beneath the water and stayed
under for a long time. Although I breathed through my ears,
when we came back up to the surface, it was like returning
from a marine hell. I cut her tonsils, I propped my plank at the
entrance to her throat, and slashed crosses on her tongue.
Crosses and more crosses, for days and days. Sometimes I
would give her a clout with the plank on her palate, just
where it had least flesh. I never stopped. Her tongue was too hard; I only ate the palate, and the flesh would grow in again,
and I watched it grow like the grass in spring. When I thrust
the thigh bone of the dead sailor under her tongue she would
jump like a rabbit. But if ever I left her alone, she would sail on
again, still listing a bit, and slow, as though the waters of the
sea, tired of leaping and shouting, had grown thick and difficult. Time was passing, with its days, its months and its years,
and still we carried on because, in the depths of a strange
darkness, we felt that somewhere, in a place we never seemed
to reach, we would perhaps find the last ray of light in the
shadows, or that sliver of memory things leave behind when
they vanish for ever. In the end, I grew weary. I sat huddled in
a corner of her palate and she kept me there, protected by her
tongue and I felt myself growing stiff, and it was her encrusting me with her saliva. And neither she nor I knew which seas
we were sailing until one night, she ran aground on a rock and
on that rock she died, her insides all covered with cuts. The
beach was not far off, scarcely half an hour's row. I tried to
open the baleens by hitting them with my plank, but it was no
good because the plank was half rotted away at the ends and
had got shorter and thinner. With enormous difficulty I
scrambled out through the blowhole and when I was out,
I slid down the huge curve of her back into the water, but I
didn't feel anything because I must have entered a kind of
limbo world. The sea cast me onto the sand and that's where
they found me. When I woke up, I was in a hospital and a nun
was feeding me milk fresh from the cow, and I couldn't
swallow because my tongue and throat were like stone. And
another nun, with a little wooden hammer, which she later
told me they had had specially made, was tapping at my pearly
crust, to free me from it. Initially, the crust began to break up
under the hammer blows. Then, a few days later, it began to
come away in bits, because the nun kept rinsing it with a
bottle of specially prepared water. The nun was resigned to
her task and she would say, `Dear Lord, the skin under the
crust looks like the skin of an earthworm.' And when she had
got nearly all the crust off, and I only had a little left on my
cheek and one side of my head, the nun gave me some linen trousers and said I had to go and see about my papers. And I
went, and straight away they said all that about how had I
managed for all those years, and did I imagine I could fool
them ... And the wind and the rain, which sow and ripen,
gradually began to give me back a smooth skin, and just as
well that they did, for my whole body was stripped of flesh,
like the roof of Cristina's mouth. When I had wandered long
enough, I went back to the hospital and the nun asked if my
skin hurt when I went out, being so thin, and I replied that my
skin only hurt, and hurt badly, when she used to tap my crust
with the hammer and pour over it that specially prepared
water, which burned a bit on contact. Afterwards, I would get
into bed, very carefully, and sleep only fitfully. One day, of
course, they sent me away from the hospital, saying I was
cured. Instead of milk from the cow, they gave me a nice big
plate of hot soup and at the first spoonful, I started screaming
and running, because my insides were like an open wound,
rotted and eaten away because of all the putrid flesh I had
taken from Cristina. I ran out into the street still screaming,
just as the children were on their way to school, and a boy,
half-terrified because I looked at him, pointed his finger and
whispered to the others `He's made of pearl'. My hands still
sparkled with those little flecks that seashells have on their
smooth side. And I could see the children's eyes, a flock of
brown and blue eyes that followed me and never left me, that
seemed to float in mid-air with nothing around them and
were only interested in one thing. I stopped, with my cheek
and half my head in their pearly crust, so tightly joined, so
wedded to my flesh that the hammer had never been able to
budge it. And I stood still until the children got tired of staring
at me, and then I went right to the top of the cliffs, outside the
town, high up, to the highest point of all, where the sea birds
build their nests and where butterflies die in the autumn. And
with my heart full of things that trembled like the stars in the
night, I stood looking at the sea and at the darkness that was
gradually covering it. Where the sun had gone down, a bit of
light still lingered, then slowly faded, and when everything
was dark, from out of the sea, emerged a calm, wide pathway of light and along that calm, wide pathway came my Cristina,
spouting water, and me on her back with my plank, like
before, singing the sailor's anthem. And from where I was
standing, from the top of the cliffs, I could hear it plainly,
down below, sung by me in the middle of that vast expanse of
water, advancing along the pathway, with Cristina, who left a
trail of blood in her wake. I stopped singing and Cristina
stopped, and I could hardly breathe, as if all my strength had
drained away with my staring, until gradually Cristina and I
made our way, with me atop her, silent, but waving, to the
place where the sea turns round and takes off into the distance
I sat on the ground with my knees drawn up and I slept
with my arms on my knees and my head on my arms. And I
must have been very tired, for I was woken by the morning
light and the cries of the birds who don't know how to sing.
They emerged in a flash of brilliant white from holes in the
cliffs, great flocks of them, beating the air with their wings,
and plunged headfirst into the sea, then rose again, screeching,
with fish in their beaks which they fed to their young, and
there were others, who, instead of fish, brought twigs and
blades of grass, everything they needed to build their nests. I
stood up, giddy from the sound, and the sea was as smooth as a
roof, and I began to walk down to the town, and when I got
to the first houses, a woman came out of a doorway, all dirty
and dishevelled, and she hurled herself at me, and groaned and
hammered on my chest with her fists and shouted, You're my
husband, you're my husband and you ran away and left me ...
And I swear it wasn't true, because I had never been in that
town, and if I had ever seen that woman I would have
remembered, because her top teeth stuck out over her bottom
lip. I brushed her aside and she fell to the ground, and with my
foot I moved her carefully out of my way, because a child was
watching us from a window. And I went back again to the
place where they give you your papers. They were celebrating
something, I don't know what. The point is, they were all
drinking golden wine from small glasses. They were standing
up and the one with the moustache saw me right away and
came over with an expression that said he didn't want any trouble and I saw another man, wearing cuff-protectors,
and he was whispering to a third man who was as bald as a
coot, and from his lip movements I could guess what he was
saying: the pearl. And they all looked at me again and the one
who had come over said to me once more: tomorrow; and he
went with me to the door and practically threw me out into
the street, repeating over and over like a song: tomorrow,
tomorrow ...

© I'Institut d'Estudis Catalans

Translated by Annella McDermott

Merce Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908-Girona, 1983) was one
of Spain's principal women writers, and many of her poems,
plays, stories and novels are specifically about the lives of
women. Rodoreda lived in exile in Geneva for many years,
and it was there that she wrote a number of her books, including her best-known novel, La placa del Diamant (1962; Time of
the Doves, tr. David Rosenthal, Graywolf Press, 1989). In 1980,
she was awarded the Prize of Honour in Catalan Letters, and
in 1981, the City of Barcelona Prize. `My Cristina' is the title
story from La meva Cristina i altres contes (1967; My Christina
and Other Stories, tr. David Rosenthal, Graywolf Press, 1984).

I had gone to that quiet little university town at the invitation
of a friend, who had been appointed to the Chair in
Philosophy there a year earlier. The University had set up a
little theatre and it was felt that I could usefully contribute a
lecture on my experiences. I was very happy to accept the
invitation. A play of mine had just opened to some acclaim -
it was my fourth piece, my career in the theatre having begun
with a play on an anti-war theme - and I was in the mood for
a few days' quiet and rest. Besides, there were other reasons
why I welcomed Dr. H.'s kind invitation: I had been stationed
in that same city during the war, twenty-two years earlier, and
had never gone back since, but, with the passing of time, what
was once a dreadful experience had become a nostalgic
memory. On the train, as we drew nearer to our destination, I
began to relive some old, forgotten sensations. The feel of the
rough khaki shirt on my skin: I was a bookish student. The
smell of baked-in grime that pervaded the barracks where I
spent the first three months of my life as an infantry officer. I
even seemed to hear, as we passed through a tunnel, the shots
from our pistols as we practised in the yard, against the wall. It
was raining. Out of the window I could see a damp green
landscape that also held a place in my memory: for the parks
of the town for which I was bound had been like that too,
green and damp, and probably still were. As night fell, these
feelings continued, to the extent that I completely forgot that
I had intended to sketch out a mental plan for my lecture in
the course of the journey. When it got dark, I had the impression that the young foreign woman sitting opposite me had
not closed her eyes, but was staring at me in the faint light that
came in from the corridor. Who had put the light out? I
hadn't noticed. Suddenly, the last night came flooding back to me, I mean, the events of the night the bombs fell. I had drunk
a few glasses of wine (too many, if the truth be told) with a
fellow officer, in our usual tavern, opposite the barracks, and
next to a dark, moss-covered square. When the sirens went,
my friend and I left the tavern. It was night-time. The searchlights were sweeping the sky, and there was a wind on my face.
For reasons I can't explain, I felt surprised when I looked at
the flagpole on our barracks opposite. Stripped of the flag -
which had been lowered - the flagpole gave me a feeling
(how can I put it?) that there was something odd. People were
not hurrying: they had got used to air-raid alarms.) A dispatch
rider sped past on a motorbike, his siren wailing. My friend
and I crossed the road and went into the barracks. We made
our way across the barracks square, where the anti-aircraft
guns had been hastily moved into position, and went into the
officers' mess. It was deserted and half in darkness. We looked
at each other, and it was then that I realised we had both
drunk too much: my companion wore a look of foolish
abstraction. I realised he had no idea what was going on, and
when I heard the sound of the Junkers I began to tremble.