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.