Читать книгу Death in Spring - Mercè Rodoreda - Страница 14

VIII

In the firelight the men and the women all looked alike. In the daytime they appeared quite different: some were tall, some short, some thin, some fat; some had more hair than others, or a broader or longer nose, or different-colored eyes. But in the firelight they all looked alike. In the very middle of the day, when they were calm and occupied, the only ones who looked alike were fathers and sons. Some sons were identical to their fathers; some, however, did not resemble them at all. This almost drove the fathers mad, but little by little they grew accustomed to the idea. They said it all came from looking. Near the canes where I was hiding, a group of dirty, disheveled women were sitting on the ground away from the fire, their eyes blindfolded. They were the pregnant ones. They covered their eyes because if they gazed at other men, the children they were carrying would also take a peek and begin to resemble the men. They said a woman fell in love with every man she saw, and the longer she was pregnant, the faster she fell in love. So, what with women falling in love and children looking, what shouldn’t happen, happened.

They filled their plates with soup and sat down on the benches round the tables, like brothers and sisters, drinking the soup straight from their plates. The faceless men were seated at another table closer to the river; the men without noses, or their foreheads ripped away, or missing an ear, could sit at the table with everyone else and live like everybody. But the faceless men wished to be alone. They drank the soup with a funnel of sorts and chewed the meat with one hand grasping the hole in their mouths so the meat would not slip out. They were ashamed to live in the village and preferred to be alone. They lived together in an enclosure behind the stables and helped each other. Once a man had lost his face, he was always in the company of another faceless man. It was as though they had never had anything at all; being mutilated meant relinquishing whatever they possessed. They started work at night: they grazed horses, cleaned streets, chopped wood—all manner of jobs. When they were among themselves they talked about the water and the strange taste of the drink they were forced to swallow before swimming through the river. And the serpent, and the waterfall that sounded like it was hidden but was more formidable than Font de la Jonquilla, the buttercup fountain. They were always at peace, according to the elderly, because they had perceived truth up close. They were reborn, it seemed, after crossing the river; they were less driven and possessed greater clarity than before. But they died the same as others: one moment alive, then their mouths filled with cement, all the way down to their stomachs.

The canes whistled softly. When the villagers had eaten their fill, the shouts and cries of joy commenced. They called out to each other from table to table or ear to ear and laughed. The digestion-paste was passed round and all of them swallowed a spoonful. The blacksmith didn’t want any, so they grabbed hold of him and stretched him out on top of the table. Two women pulled at his feet, trying to make him fall off, onto the ground. One was my stepmother. The pregnant women stood up to dance. They danced alone, giving the impression that each was planted in the ground. And they sang to themselves as they danced. They lowered their heads to their chests, raised them up, threw them back, and spun round as if they would be spinning round like that all their lives, amidst shadows and flames, without a man, alone, bellies protruding in front of them, hair unkempt.

Until the canes began to sway in the wind, I had not realized they had been still for a while. The sky had blackened, leaving no trace of the moon. The first drops fell, fat and far apart. If it had not been for the shouts, I would have heard the rain falling on the river. They sprang to their feet and started to run, pursued by the rain. My stepmother ran too; she was the last one I saw in the firelight. The smell of extinguished fires pervaded everything. The water fell on the dead coals, drenched ashes, gnawed bones and grimy tools. A flash of lightning drew everything out of the shadow, and suddenly everything died . . . died . . . filled with cement, upright inside the tree. Father was dead. I felt I could not leave him there, that I should go back. I crossed the river again at the Pont de Fusta in the torrential rain. At the end of the slope, I took the path that led to the forest of the dead. As I approached the tree, the rain stopped, and I could hear it making its way to the other side of the forest. The cross on the tree was bubbling; the tree was digesting. I rubbed a finger over the resin and pictured the wall with the people passing by, heard the voice of the man with shiny eyes and the screams of the woman who had to be removed . . . and I had done nothing for my father. I gathered some resin and held it for a moment in my fingers. When it started to dry, I fashioned it into a ball and carried it for a long time in my pocket. My fingers were clasping the ball of resin the day the blacksmith told me things, and when I emerged from his house, I threw it away.

I left the forest by the seedlings and walked back toward the bridge, the Pont de Fusta, bordering the trees. A dead bee was trapped in a spider web suspended between two tall bushes. I broke the web and shoved it into the ground with the tip of my foot, bee and all.