Death in Spring (4 page)

I

The birds always came from the direction of the cleft mountain. The ones in mourning were the first to arrive. They headed straight to the pasture where the horses grazed, cawing raucously and circling the sky all day long. On the following day they would approach the houses, raising an enormous din, soaring and diving as they hunted. The birds were black-plumed and black-billed; a white selvage circled their even blacker eyes. When they took flight, their tail and wing feathers would spread apart: you could almost count them. They would slowly take to the air, then suddenly begin making furious loops, their feet embedded in their bellies, out of sight, as if they had been misplaced. Straight away, they would begin building their nests in the forks of wisteria vines, where the entwined branches were most tangled. They made them with old grass they had scavenged from beneath tender grass, weaving the blades together with sedge that grew in the river. Once the nests were finished, they would return to the pasture and perch on the horses’ haunches, running their beaks slowly through the dense horsehair. The horses were fond of the mourners and would stand very still, hardly breathing. They would live together for two full weeks. If anyone tried to approach the horses, the mourners attacked them with their beaks, and the horses would lower their heads and stomp the ground with their right front hooves. When the two weeks had passed, the birds would return to find their nests full of bees that had grown fat on wisteria juice, bees they quickly downed before laying three eggs. They would sit on the eggs a few days; then the white birds would arrive. These small, mateless birds had red eyes and short, wide tail feathers. As the white birds swooped down, the mourners would scrutinize them, then attack them furiously just before they reached the nests. But the mourners would soon tire, and the white birds would manage to lodge themselves beneath the mourners’ feet and bellies and take over the nests, sitting on the eggs until the chicks hatched. Many were blood-spattered by the time they finished nesting on the eggs. If the white birds did not take possession of the nests quickly, the mourners would crush the eggs; and if the chicks had already hatched, the mourners would peck the little ones to death. The third of the mourners’ three eggs held a white bird. No one knew its origin.

When the mourners were ousted from their nests, they would drift aimlessly above the water, through the canes, until the fledglings could fly. Then they would return to the village and kill all the white birds. This would happen at night, and on that night we scarcely slept. When we got up the next morning, we collected the dead birds, nailed one to each door, and threw the rest into the river. The newly-hatched white chicks fled; no one ever heard them or saw them fly. It was as though they had been transformed into leaves, settling among the ivy. I found a white bird once and hid it in some shrubs. When I returned a few days later, it had become a swarm of maggots that stuck to your hand.

The mourners remained in the village until the end of summer, and when everything had turned blonde they would fly down the river toward the marshes. For a while some would wander back, roosting for four or five days on the slaughterhouse tower at Pedres Baixes, coming and going. When none was left, the elderly allowed us to take the nests apart. We examined how they were built and gathered the feathers that were caught in the nests.

My stepmother had a little box full of white feathers, another of black feathers. Sometimes, when we were tired of making soap bubbles in the courtyard, she would climb onto the table and take down the box of black feathers with the hand on her tiny arm. With the hand on her other arm—the one that was like most people’s—she would take out the feathers one by one, letting them drop from as high as she could. They were the mourners coming. I would collect them and pile them up on the table. Then she would take the other box and cry, here come the white birds, and the white feathers would flutter down, twisting round and round, a little slower than the black ones. The villagers used to say my stepmother was a bit retarded, but I didn’t think she was. We played with the feathers in the early autumn when no birds remained. In the courtyard beneath the bloom-less wisteria, a few odd flowers would still be blossoming, those that had not known how to bloom in time. Hidden among the leaves, they didn’t have much color. At times a weary wind would expose them for a moment, as if ashamed of displaying them.

II

My stepmother was shorter than me; she came to just above my shoulder. Her hair was straight and black, her eyes vaguely green. The corner of her eyes fanned out into thin lines, the same lines she had on both sides of her forehead and round her mouth. Like a little old woman. She fretted on the days she had to put the flowerpot at the window, in front of the curtain, and the lines would grow deeper, slightly dark.

I liked looking at her toenails while we sat on the step in front of the house: they were well placed on her toes and looked like glass. Sometimes they were sun-dappled with all the colors that arch in the sky from mountain to mountain after the rain. Her hair was mottled too, though more subdued, not as many colors. And her small teeth. She would settle in a corner on the days she was happy, from time to time laughing a howl-like laughter that gave a glimpse of the roof of her open mouth and her lizard-thin tongue. Little lizard arm, little lizard tongue. Her dresses fell straight from the shoulder, trailing the ground. In winter her feet and hands turned purple. She said they hurt. She was always cold. It took her a long time to reach the window and leave the flowerpot on the sill because she could hardly walk.

She had a sweet tooth: she would rub her hands with sweet-smelling herbs before cupping them to drink from the fountain. I tried it, but the water always tasted the same. I caught her one day eating a bee. When she realized I was watching, she spit it out, saying the bee had flown into her mouth. But I knew she ate bees. She would choose the ones that had drunk the most wisteria juice and keep them alive in her mouth for a moment, let them play a little before swallowing. One day when we were walking along the stone path, I cut off a lizard’s tail, and she threw a rock at me. The lizard was stunned. She picked it up and tried to reattach the tail. Then she stared at me and put it down without uttering a word, giving it a shove so it would scurry away while the tail finished dying.

Not much was known about her father. Her mother hanged herself. The old men at the slaughterhouse took her in, but when she had grown up a bit, she began following my father like a shadow. Father finally brought her home with him. She would fall asleep on top of the table, and father would pick her up in his arms and carry her to bed. Some nights I would reflect on things and sneak down to listen to them sleeping. I would steal down the stairs, keeping close to the wall because one of the steps creaked. Standing in front of their room, I would imagine she wasn’t sleeping with father. I would imagine she was sleeping alone, and I was afraid she was choking, choking on a bee inside her mouth, between her cheek and gum. Maybe it was flying round inside, waiting for her to fall asleep so it could escape to the courtyard with its last remaining breath. She was wild about horse fat. She would climb up on the table to take down the balls of fat she had been given. She would scoop the center out, little by little, and when father wanted to eat one, he almost always found it half-empty. If he scolded her, she went off to her corner and laughed that strange laugh of hers. But the two of them walked together and I stood apart.

She didn’t know how to swim. All the boys and girls in the village swam. But not her, because of her arm. She would sit on the riverbank and gaze at the water, sometimes plunging her feet in it, kicking and splashing water on her face and dress. When she was completely soaked, she would rub her face with both hands at the same time, then kick the water even more furiously. One day she wanted to go all the way into the water, near the canes, in the shallow water. The afternoon air was filled with color, and on the opposite bank everything had a slight tremor. Right away she wanted to go further into the river, but the water was already up to her waist. Then she slipped. I don’t know how she did it, with that tiny arm of hers, but she grabbed hold of my ankle. I lifted her up and her lips were pale. We climbed out of the river, water dripping from her dress, and she headed home. I stood and watched her until she was just a black speck in front of the houses.

I jumped back into the river. The water that enveloped my legs still seemed to hold her. We had been in this water together. Mourners were flying above the blue and purple river, beneath the branches, searching for mosquitoes and soft grass. Night arrived, and suddenly I scarcely knew my way back to the village: from Pedres Baixes to the slaughterhouse and from the slaughterhouse to the Pont de Fusta, where the river beneath the bridge transported stars and pieces of moon.

III

The white flower was the same as the red: the only difference was color. Five little leaves, five larger ones beneath, and a handful of yellow threads crowned by a little saucer sprouting from the heart of the flower. They bloomed year-round. When one withered, a new one immediately shot up inside the dead flower: death thrusting life upward, summer and winter, endlessly. The only flowers like that in the whole village were my stepmother’s. We didn’t know where she found them. The day she entered our house, she set the two flowerpots on the table. Father brought her bundle of clothes; the bundle and the two flowerpots were all she possessed.

The first night we were by ourselves, I sat on the floor by her door. Inside she was alone and I thought I could hear her sleeping. I imagined her covers had fallen off, like when my blanket would slide off the bed and I couldn’t be bothered to get up and put it back. While I was turning this over in my mind, I fell asleep. I woke up when I sensed I was being watched. Two eyes were bent over my face, two little rabbit eyes, small and round, like a shadow shining. When she realized I was watching her, she moved away, to her corner. The corner where she always retreated whenever father scolded her.

She would have stayed there if I hadn’t told her to sit at the table with me. She came and sat, and I told her that her hair was mussed and she laughed, and when she laughed she seemed so tiny. Then I combed her hair. I made four braids for her—two in front, two in back—like the four corners of the earth. I tied a rope round her waist and right away the dress was shorter and didn’t drag the floor so much. When she was all fixed up, we went out to the courtyard and collected wisteria blossoms to make necklaces. Then we lay flat on the ground to watch the roots emerging from the earth, lifting the house. We exposed the base of the largest root and the deeper into the ground it went, the whiter it was, as white as the worm clinging to it.

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.

I began the ascent. The seemingly endless path snaked through the tall thicket. I spotted my stepmother’s shadow, half-hidden at times by the heather. She grabbed hold of twigs to keep from falling. She stopped for a moment, then abruptly vanished. I turned round to look at the view: below I could see the shimmering river that separated two strips of darkness. Looming above everything stood the slaughterhouse tower, the side with the clock sphere shining in the moonlight. You could see a brighter patch, the stables, and two or three windows lit up. Senyor’s house was silhouetted against the night. The wind whirled dust, and I was consumed by fear: fear of the village so quiet beneath me, its houses filled with sleepers. I spun round quickly, toward the mountain, and again caught a glimpse of my stepmother’s shadow in an opening in the path. I could tell she was looking at me, so I lay on the ground to be out of sight. Dust blew into my eyes and mouth. When I stood up, the heather was moaning. As I walked along I could feel the sleepers weighing things down, digging. Again, fear returned to my legs, the fear of night, the memory of revisiting my father’s tree. When this fear pierced me I always wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. Fear kept me scurrying between my father’s tree and the blacksmith’s house.

The wind was tiring. I glanced up the mountain and caught sight of my stepmother at the foot of the dead tree. When I drew near, I asked her what she was doing. Embracing the trunk, her cheek against it, she said she was thinking about things, things about my father and her, and the moon gazing down at us. She stretched out her hand and stroked my brow three times with her finger. I felt the urge to embrace the trunk, and when I finally did, my cheek against it too, I placed my arms and cheek higher than hers and we didn’t touch.

She let go and forced me to do the same. Again, she told me she wanted to climb inside the well, so we walked down the mountain a bit and stopped in front of the entrance. The access was steep, very steep, but some rocks served as steps. Had it been daytime, and if we held on to the rope, the descent would not have been difficult. A cool, damp air rose from the well. She made me go first, practically shoving me, and even though I stepped from rock to rock, my legs felt numb. Inside it grew darker and darker. When I reached the bottom I was stiff and felt like crying. I felt I would never again be able to leave the well; I would smother to death because the entrance would be closed off, or the rope would break
. . .
She descended slowly, blocking the little bit of sky I could see. She pushed me further inside, then clasped my hand again, telling me she had been afraid the first time, but she had killed the fear because it was bad for you. Her heart had almost run away. She made me sit down near her. I wanted to know where she was, and I stretched out my arm, groping for her left and right, but found nothing. Still sitting, I began edging backward until my shoulder hit the wall. I searched for my stepmother with my outstretched hand. Suddenly I let out a yell that echoed in my ears as if it had issued from someone else: she had dug her teeth into my hand. I shoved her away and with my other hand found a mound of dust. It was cool, and I sank my aching hand into it. I grew accustomed to the dark, even though I couldn’t see a thing, just a thread of dying light spilling down the shaft. Soon, not even that glimmer reached me: the moon must have shifted. The fear within me began to subside, replaced by a sense of peace as I sat, head against the wall, eyes shut. Then she began to speak. In a thin voice she told me that her father had died swimming under the village; no one ever saw him emerge. Every day, at the same hour her husband had died, her mother would go into the courtyard and stand there, head between her hands, rocking back and forth, back and forth. She told me that the day before the hanging, her mother had got a splinter in her foot and couldn’t remove it, so she had to hobble. She hanged herself during the night, with a rope tied in the fork of the wisteria vine. The first thing she saw the next morning when she went out to the courtyard was her mother’s dangling feet, but she wasn’t at all frightened. She didn’t know then what a hanged person was, or that the position her mother was in meant she was dead. Using her two fingers as pliers, she had removed the splinter from her mother’s foot. She told me she didn’t really know where her tomb stood, but she was sure it was where they bury the soulless dead, at the foot of Maraldina, with no marker. That was why, on her visits to Maraldina, she was always afraid she would step on her mother. She said if she hadn’t been hungry, she would have been fine the whole time she wandered through the village streets, even though she could hardly remember it. When the old men from the slaughterhouse took her in, they gave her a lot of blood to drink, and that was why she was so strong. One sunny, winter day she began to follow my father; his shadow, she said, was warm. She told me her feet were cold and asked if I wanted to warm them. I don’t know how she was sitting, but she put her feet in my lap and I took hold of them. They were freezing and, as I held them, I must have fallen asleep.