Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda Page B

would collapse. No birds were strung on the doors; I’d imagined all the doors with birds hanging by their feet. The leaves were yellow, the wall just beginning to turn red. This was the only thing I knew about plants: some leaves turned yellow, others red. Later, I lifted the curtain. I could see nothing. Later still, I learnt that your house had a worn step, the one in the middle. The transparent leaves on both the white and red flowers had thick veins. I know, he said—I can still hear him—when they opened up your father’s tree, his fingertips were red, his hair standing straight up. I know the wisteria trunk bears three incisions that your mother carved with a knife. I know what my father said when your father died. One word from a mouth is enough for me to guess everything. They say the prisoner tells lies. Do you believe it? And that my father is right. Do you believe it? I’ve learnt a lot, yet I can tell you I know nothing, only this: what happens is what counts. I felt he was uttering many of the things I thought, almost as if he were me. Maybe he had become me, from so many years of thinking about me as he lay in bed, lived in bed. He said, they all come, all of them. Everyone knows, you too. Your door is an open door. They go in and out. I tell you everyone knows. You’ve always known, from the time your father was still living. No one would want them because they stink of blood. Everyone keeps quiet about it because it suits them. You’re afraid to look. You were afraid to look, and you know nothing. You don’t know what she does: she fastens a rope round their necks. Playing. She’s always liked to play. They become little again when they’re with her. She ties a rope round their necks, he said, and she lies on the bed and makes them go round and round, one side to the other; the faster they run, the happier she is, but she doesn’t laugh—I’ve never seen her laugh—until finally the old men tire. The one I saw was tall and fat, with a sunken chest and soft hands. He was like a horse. Have you noticed that the men in the village look like horses? I realized as soon as I saw a group of them together . . . and she’d pull on the rope or loosen it, sometimes moving her lips, never allowing a word to escape, but you could see she was saying, gitty . . .
    We left the well. Outside, a gust of wind filled our eyes with earth, and we started walking, the wind bending us. When we reached the bottom, he said, you knew. Then we headed to Pedres Altes and sat on the sundial, contemplating the night. The following day he taught me how to make fire with two dry branches.

V
    In a cave behind Pedres Altes lived the man with the cudgel. His palms were scarlet from swinging his cudgel on so many nights. The cudgel was his defense; he earned his living from it. He was old and no longer agreed to daily fights with boys from the village. The townspeople sent him boys one by one, and he received them, cudgel in hand. He was a tall man, taller than all of them. His hair was thinning, part-white, part-yellow. His toenails were like horse hooves: long and hard. Black. Because he walked through the manure pit near his cave to breathe in the stench, drawing strength from it. He had been trained in this manner since he was a child. To live patiently. A boy from the village awoke feeling brave one morning, wanting to devour sky and river, and asked to be allowed to fight the man with the cudgel. With his long, razor-sharp cane, the boy went in search of the old man, calling him out of his cave, challenging him, jumping and running about. The man emerged slowly, asked the lad what he wanted, knowing full well he wanted to battle; when the boy declared that he had come for combat, to defeat him, the man picked up the cudgel with both hands, lowered his head, and announced that they could begin. He opened his legs wide, planting himself firmly on both feet, and began to dodge the cane. Sometimes the cane grazed his skin, but