Читать книгу Death in Spring - Mercè Rodoreda - Страница 8

II

I craned my head out of the water. The light was stronger now, and I swam slowly, wanting to take my time before leaving the river. The water embraced me. It would have seized me if I had let it, and—pushed forward and sucked under—I would have ended up in the place where nothing is comprehended. Reeds grew in the river; the current bent them, and they let themselves be rocked by water that was carrying the force of sky, earth, and snow. I got out, the water dripping down my body, making my skin glisten. The bee that had followed me for a long time had finally lost track of me. I lay down on the grass, in the same spot where I had stood before, beside the madman’s rock. A dip in the ground, that had been formed by a man hitting his head, had been turned by the rain into a bath for a black-crested bird. The dark shadow from the forest in front of me quivered. We called this grass rosa de gos, dog rose. Spiders were spinning webs from leaf to leaf, and insects—tiny, dead, dried—were trapped in threads that turned grey on cloudy days. I pulled up a clump of grass. Its roots were white and specks of dirt hung from them. On the tip of a curly root dangled an almost perfectly round speck. I clasped the grass by the blades and made it dance about, from side to side, but the dirt clung to the grass. I placed it on my knee as if I were planting it. It was cool. After a while, when I picked it up from my knee, it was warm, and I shook it hard to watch the dirt fall. Then I planted it again. In front of me lay the forest, where the elderly went from time to time, and when they did, they locked us children inside wooden cupboards in the kitchen. We could only breathe through the stars on the cupboard walls, empty stars, like windows in the shape of a star. Once I asked a boy from the nearby house if he was sometimes locked inside the kitchen cupboard, and he said he was. I asked him if the door had two panels with an empty star on each side. He said, there’s an empty star, but it’s not large enough to allow much air in, and if the elders are long in returning, we start to feel ill, like we’re suffocating. He said he watched through the star as the elderly people set off, and after that he could see only walls and ashes. Everything conveyed a sense of loneliness and sadness. Even the walls grew sad and old when the elderly left them alone and all the children were locked in cupboards like animals. And what he told me about things was true: alone, they grew old quickly, but in the company of people they grew old more slowly and in a different way; instead of becoming ugly, they became pretty. The elders would return early in the morning, yelling and singing in the streets, and sleep on the floor. Often they would forget to unlock the cupboards and the children became ill, their backs aching even more than when their parents beat them in a fit of anger. The village was painted pink, yet people still grew anxious because of the horses, because of the prisoner, because of the weather, because of the wisteria, because of the bees, because of Senyor who lived alone in the house on the ivy-covered cliff that on late summer afternoons looked like a wave of blood. And because of the Caramens, the shadows that crept among the shrubs, always threatening to attack the village. When a horse was born, the village held a Festa, but they didn’t lock us in cupboards, nor did they lock us up during the Festa Major celebrations that began with the watchmen’s dance and continued with people getting ahead of themselves in the race. They used to say that the day a man got ahead of himself, from then on he would have it easy, or mostly. Before dinner—after the dance and the race—a man, alone and naked, would enter the river and swim under the village to the other side, to ensure that the water had not dislodged any rocks, that the village was not about to be washed away. Sometimes the man emerged with his face ravaged, sometimes ripped away.

The ivy that crept up the cliff to Senyor’s house died each year. The autumn wind stripped it naked, and all the courtyards were strewn with crimson leaves. This is the only thing Senyor gives us, they said, other than children when he was young. But not now. And they would laugh and look up at the windows. When all the ivy leaves had fallen, we boys collected them in our baskets and left them to dry; then we piled them up in the Plaça. When we burned them, we would look up because Senyor’s head would appear through the long, narrow, middle window, and we would stick out our tongues at him. He would remain motionless, as if made of stone, and when the blue smoke disappeared, he would close his window, and that was it until the following year.

Senyor’s eyrie was on the top of the mountain and the mountain was small. It looked like it had been split in two by an axe. No one ever went to the other side of the mountain. They built the village over the river, and when the snows melted, everyone was afraid the village would be washed away. That is why every year a man entered the water on the upper side and swam under the village and came out on the lower side. Sometimes dead. Sometimes without a face because it had been ripped away when the desperate water hurled him against the rocks that supported the village.