aimlessly if she wasn’t with him; and if she spent a whole day without seeing him, she would throw herself on me, scratch me, crying that she wanted him, wanted black night. When we slept, she would sneak out, and I would have to search the village streets to find her. I finally had to let it be, and when I allowed them to do whatever they wanted, then the blacksmith’s son spoke of the green window. I could tell he was happy to talk about it because he sensed I was weary of him, and while he talked he stared at me with a leaden look, pretending he was sorry to tell me these things, but happy inside that he could. I began to know him. He carried about him all the rancor of having suffered the life he had been forced to live. Without my wishing it, he knew how to draw me to his side. For some time he told me that I was a hand to him, repeating it so often that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It entered my blood. When he sensed I was snared, he breathed deeply, and I shriveled up. I would take hold of my daughter and ask her whose child she was, and when my child said she was his, she looked at me for a long, long time without blinking, her eyes like still water. He asked me if I had ever looked behind the green window. I have, he said. I had never wished to grab him and kill him as much as that day. Often I had had to restrain my desire to kill him, push him off the Pont de Fusta into the river, strike him with an axe as if he were a tree of the dead. He told me in the red-powder cave, where for a long time he had wanted to go, but not alone. He told me, sitting on the ground, my child on his lap, breathing in the crimson powder—a lot had recently fallen from the ceiling, and a mound of it lay near the opening my stepmother and I had made to gain entrance to the second well. Everything smelled of powder and heather-earth. My child had fallen asleep, and he was stroking her hair, gently, almost without touching her. I told him another well existed, where you could hear the river flowing, but the water from that river had no outlet. If it had, the water would have been red when it surfaced the day we threw so much powder in it. He said the mud-flower pond lay beyond the tree cemetery, hidden in the growth at the end of the marsh, and the water in the pond was always half-red. The flowers bore the color of the water, as if in order to grow they had drunk from it. The pond was bloody from the red powder and the horses and old men from the slaughterhouse. He said he’d looked carefully at my house. As soon as he was able to leave his bed, he said, I started looking at things slowly because my eyes couldn’t hold so many new things at the same time. I wanted to see things; I knew nothing. Not about grasses or other people’s faces. You can’t imagine what it is to never see another person other than your parents, then to see a face and glimpse it in the open air, by yourself. When I was little, people would come to stare at me, but then they stopped coming, and the only thing I saw was the wall of ivy, a swarm of those creatures that make honey, my father’s crooked legs, my mother’s purple cheek. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t hungry, nor will I ever be again, but my eyes’ hunger will always exist . . . those twigs the day we lay on the ground, the ones we saw in front of the fog, we saw only the twigs, as if everything were dead. He had said, look at them, they’re swimming in the air in front of the fog, but there is no air, and if you stare at them long enough you can’t tell what they are, just thin streaks on fleeing water that’s turned into fog. The wish to see comes from not knowing anything. I could only remember you. And you, you’re a hand. The first night I was able to stand and walk a bit—because they fed me—I went in search of your house, the hottest night of all, a snake hidden in the courtyard under a sack. They said the wisteria was tilting the houses, and I grew uneasy, afraid your house
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