The threads of the heart, p.13
The Threads of the Heart, page 13
The referee, who was standing on a box, gave the signal. They climbed on the platform and presented the opponents to each other, but without letting go of them. The birds tried to grab each other by the beak. Then the two men returned to their respective corners, and, at another signal from the referee, the olive grove man and the former wheelwright placed their champions in the arena.
An explosion of movement and color and tension. Two animals coming together in an indiscriminate tangle of wings, feathers and heads, becoming one new, fearsome monster. The spectators intoxicated by the battle, the blood, the cries, and the alcohol. And the woman somewhere, waiting, hidden in the mind of one man. The fight continues: lightning speed, chaos, savagery. In the crowd, he alone is silent. Absent. Far from the fray where men and birds merge together, swaying in front of his unseeing eyes.
In this apparent confusion of feathers, steam and blood, the roosters’ movements are rapid, precise, well considered. They leap, arch their bodies, thrust their feet forward, strike with their tarsus bones, then regain their balance.
This close combat makes him dream of another embrace.
They crash into one another in mid air, some three feet above the ground.
He is lost amid the hullaballoo.
In the first phase of the fight, the black rooster proves less powerful but craftier and more clear-sighted than its rival. When the red bird leaps, Olive flattens itself, passes beneath its opponent, then swivels and leaps in its turn.
He is hungry for her.
After an uninterrupted succession of lightning-fast attacks and swerves, the two roosters pause, face to face, self-collected, watching each other.
He is hungry for her body.
The Red Dragon manages to catch its opponent by one of the few feathers on its head, thus ensuring its thrust reaches its target, pins Olive to the ground,
Hungry for her breasts,
and strikes home, hard.
her mouth,
One wing is broken. José’s bird leaps forward again, one of Olive’s feathers in its beak,
her vagina.
but this time the wounded rooster flattens itself, unbalancing its opponent and forcing it to let go.
He possesses her
The fight slows down, the two weary warriors keep their good wings well away from their bodies to keep cool, steam is coming off them, rising in the icy air, they push at each other with their chests,
body to body.
which stops them from leaping. Broken-winged but determined, Olive shows its courage:
He slips inside her,
although much weakened, it continues the struggle, withstanding its opponent’s attacks.
she is open and soft.
The crowd is going wild. The Red Dragon, excited by its imminent victory and the taste of blood, speeds things up in order to have done with it, and in so doing drops its guard.
She writhes
Then, in a final bust of energy,
as his penis
Olive leaps,
goes in and
grabs hold of one of the the champion’s gorgeous scarlet feathers and
out.
with a long thrust of its spur tears open the throat of the red rooster, which reacts to this mortal wound with surprise.
He goes further
Olive will not let its opponent go, it rips its flesh, opening wide gashes, and the red bird’s guts gush out.
into her.
The Dragon has lost, gored by its rival’s spurs.
More!
In the total silence that follows Olive’s victory, Heredia was heard to murmur this one word: “More!” Then, still stunned by the outcome of the fight, the villagers saw him rush onto the platform to tear the remains of the defeated bird from the spurs of his wild rooster and, holding his own bloodstained beast by the feet like a common chicken, turn to José and cry, “Give it to your wife! Let her sew it back up! Maybe it can fight again!”
As Heredia stuffed the victorious rooster in his sack, José, aroused by this final hope, came back to his senses and, as he clutched the remains of his red bird to his chest, had the feeling it was still alive. He quickly put the guts back inside the stomach, took it in his arms and ran home, yelling his wife’s name.
Heredia left, without joy, without a glance at its downcast brothers, without saying another word, carrying at arm’s length, far from his body, apparently with disgust, the clear cloth sack, now stained with blood and shaken with violent convulsions. Olive, which had just doubled its master’s fortune, giving him a share of his brothers’ cornfields, animals and vineyard, Olive, so full of savagery and resentment, was still fighting an invisible opponent, in a fight to the death it had been waging forever and that it, too, would never win . . .
In the night, the men had children’s nightmares . . . With a single gesture, Heredia was scattering their bones beneath an icy sky, spreading them through the village, on the red earth of the hills, abandoning them on lanes white with dust.
A mountain of white knucklebones shone in his dark pockets.
The caress
Like all the women in the village, Frasquita had followed the fight from a distance, from her kitchen, relying on the cries to imagine the scene. She had closed her eyes and her body had opened to the men’s commotion.
The exclamations, the roars of encouragement, the cries of joy had suddenly disappeared, extinguished by a heavy silence.
Something touched her lightly on her taut belly, causing the down on her arms to stand on end.
Had the others felt that caress?
And then a single call had broken the absolute calm that had fallen over the area. Her name cried out in the streets, knocking at all the doors, groping for her in the icy shadow.
The cold air had vibrated . . .
She had understood. She had gone upstairs to fetch her sewing box and had waited for them, the man and the rooster. And for the first time, her needle had entered living flesh.
Sitting by the stove, she had worked on the rooster while it lay there as lifeless as a torn cloth. She had sewed it back together with red thread, then had recited the prayers for carne cortada and made the sign of the cross.
Once the rooster was saved, Angela, who had watched her without intervening, had asked, “Why?”
Frasquita had not known what to reply.
Why?
She had no idea.
Because of that caress, perhaps . . .
The furniture
The day came when the first debt had to be paid: the olive grove man was going to take possession of their furniture.
Closets, beds, chests and chairs would go from their house to his. They would be left only with Clara’s cradle, the cast iron stove, the kitchen utensils, the forge and José’s tools, now silent and useless, and, of course, the handcart and the sewing box, both indispensable to the continuation of our story.
It is unfair to say that my mother was insensitive to the loss of her objects. I think that at first she resigned herself, feeling neither joy nor sadness, just a gentle indifference. Then, as she looked at her little world on the verge of departure, she felt something awake and touch her.
The caress . . .
Her cheeks turned crimson beneath a shower of red feathers and her hands got down to a task that absorbed her for two whole days: the objects that were leaving had to be more beautiful than they had ever been.
Frasquita left the younger children to Anita and began preparing the furniture.
Her gaze was drawn to a dented corner of the big table, and she discovered a forest of signs, the entry to which was usually concealed by habit. Her duster slowly followed the knots of the wood, blindly sensing the blows received, reading the oak as if it was a book. As her hand rubbed, my mother felt as though new sap was rising in the flesh of a dead tree.
She was repeating everyday gestures that had filled her life as a woman, but this time a hidden world came to the surface, revealing the tracks left by generations of dusters sacrificed on the altar of the Carasco inheritance.
It was on that scoured table that old Senora Carasco’s tiny body had been displayed. That thin, shriveled body, which Frasquita had washed with María, that body so thin and light that she could carry it on her own without any effort. She remembered lifting that inert, naked little woman, that almost nothing, barely real. She remembered combing the hair for a long time, then draping the body in the fantasía of blue thread she had used as a shroud. She remembered all those who, coming for the wake, had kissed the end of the material—which she had embroidered sitting on that chair, her chair, her seat—rather than the thin, lifeless hands. She remembered how it had been stolen from her mother-in-law’s grave and how, after that desecration, she had felt like throwing away her needles.
And now she had mended the rooster!
She would keep her chair! Frasquita weighed up each thing and jettisoned it, loosening invisible bonds, feeling an unknown intoxication as she stroked the door of a closet.
In that bed, she had dreamed unspeakable things. The sheets had kept their heady scent, a scent of olive trees, which José had complained about in the morning.
Frasquita rubbed the furniture until her arms hurt, sanded the feet of the rickety chairs, polished their wooden companions.
A madness took sudden hold of her, and she whispered words of love into the half-open chest, words of love that she then locked in it along with a bag filled with dry lavender cut out of the lining of one of her four skirts. She placed a kiss on the wooden lips of the gaping closet, cooled her cheeks against the cold hinges, kissed the lock, savoring it, and the iron seemed bloodstained.
The key was adorned with a tongue of red cloth that she treasured.
This detail made the massive closet seem tragically female.
Frasquita did not have to wait, he was already there in his fine dark woolen coat, the very one she had mended with her needle through the window, between the iron beaks and spurs.
Over her dark eyes passed the shadow of a caress.
She barely saw her house emptying.
The empty house
Frasquita was looking at her children in the flickering light of the oil lamps.
Martirio and Pedro were playing by the stove with the straw-filled rag dolls she had sewed for them and the toy cart, José’s one gift for his son, while Angela, exhausted by her long day’s work in the olive grove, had closed her excessively round eyes and fallen asleep with her head on Anita’s knees. Anita herself was sitting on the floor, plunged in one of the priest’s thick tomes. Their dresses, both stained with mud and dust, made a little ocher and gray heap, a little heap in the colors of the winter, which rose and fell to the gentle rhythm of their breathing.
The body of her eldest daughter would soon be transformed.
In memory of the women who had gone before her, Frasquita would have to initiate her.
Initiate her into what? Where was the magic in this empty house?
What had she herself done with her gift?
Life had passed so quickly . . .
And besides, no prayer could ever emerge from her daughter’s mouth because she never spoke.
It was all doubly pointless. Absurd.
Anita said nothing, but her eternal smile drove the others to tell her their stories and she would listen to them all, young and old, with infinite patience. Nothing could ever stem the flow of words: whoever spoke to her lost all notion of duration. Time and finiteness disappeared, time was suspended on either side of this mute young girl’s long attentive smile. Everyone confided their secrets in her, hiding nothing of their terrors, their impulses, their desires.
But what did she then do with all the words she had drunk in?
She would hold them close within her, she would never forget the slightest phrase, the smallest confidence. Everything had its place in her unfathomable memory.
And now, sitting beside the lamp, this silent young girl—whose body beneath her clothes, that little ocher and gray heap in the colours of winter, was beginning its silent trasformation—was reading as if reading was merely a harmless gesture and not a rare, solemn act reserved for a circle of initiates.
And Frasquita, looking at her, would feel her heart swell with joy and pride.
One day, the priest had called to Anita as she was passing the church. He knew that she was gentler, deeper and less severe than his confessional, which was why she was the guardian of everyone’s secrets, old stories as well as the news of the day. Because of that, and in memory of another young girl and an embroidered little heart that he had never seen again but that he felt beating beneath his skin when it was cold in the church and his prayer dried up, he had asked her if she wanted to learn to read and write.
Writing anything other than figures did not interest her, but reading . . . That was like having other stories to listen to.
So several times a week she attended the lesson the priest gave to a few boys. Insatiable, driven by her hunger for stories, she learned very quickly to read. Lives of the saints, the Old and New Testaments in the common language, a storehouse of sad and edifying tales: she swallowed everything greedily, to the last drop.
Teaching a girl to read, a mute girl what’s more, had been seen as yet another aberrant idea of the Carascos. That the priest should lend himself to such an absurdity beggared understanding!
Surprisingly, although she read in silence, for herself alone, nobody ever doubted her ability to decipher the words. The priest had seen by the way her eyes moved that she was going steadily through the text without making any mistakes. At first, she would fix her gaze on one finger in order not to lose balance, not to be thrown to the bottom of the page, not to jump from one word to the next or tumble several lines and catch herself up at the last moment on the crest of an initial letter, no matter which one. Later, she would use her finger, slightly moistened, only to turn the pages.
An infinite luxury, this reading, unknown to the others! All these words coming in and never going out again. A veritable stroll in a forbidden garden reserved for the rich, the well-read, the scholars, a garden where the pride of men flourished, concealed beneath an apparently innocent rosary of little black marks.
Was Anita not committing a sin, as her mother had done before her, by trying to brave convention in this way, by not contenting herself with being a wordless child who listened so well to them and their miseries? Would they still talk to her now that she could read?
Frasquita, proud to see her daughter engrossed in her reading as soon as her day’s work was over, cared little about the gossip.
Although mute, her daughter was escaping, following a narrow trail toward a vast unknown world, a world entirely contained in that open object that absorbed her.
But which of the two was devouring the other, the book or its reader?
Frasquita made up her mind. At Easter, she would empty the box of her threads and needles.
At Easter, the box would no longer be hers. She would make herself a bag to put her gift in.
It was so long since she had last embroidered anything.
The bag would be gray-green on a red background, the colours of the olive grove where she worked now with Anita and Angela, since they had to earn a living and her husband was recovering at the same speed as that foolish scarred red bird to which he was now devoting all his time.
One evening, coming back from the hills, she had found the white walls of the kitchen all covered with drawings. Pedro had dispelled the emptiness of the house with clay and ashes. He had given the kitchen back its furniture. And as nobody had reprimanded him for it, he had continued, every day drawing more imaginary objects in the deserted rooms.
Gray-green on a red background.
For a moment, Frasquita was lost in thought. In the semi-darkness, her son’s long hair was the same color as the ocher earth of the olive grove. By day, as she embraced the trees, slipping her hands between their branches so that the ripe fruit should fall on the sheets, or as she descended the hills with a basket filled to the brim with olives on her head, she would hear the horse’s steps behind her, feel its close, hot breath on her back and her sight would grow blurred. At night, lying in the dark on the floor beside José, she could not always get to sleep, despite her fatigue, and she would wait determinedly for morning in an explosion of white flowers.
José entered the room along with the cold air from outside. Angela woke up, Frasquita emerged from her daydream, Anita put down her book, and they all sat down on the ground, beside the painted table, to have supper.
The sun child
Curled up in a cradle that was too small for her, Clara would sink into sleep, whether she had eaten or not, as soon as the sun disappeared behind the hills. Blanca had to spend every day taking care of the child. Her mother did not see her these days: she would leave for the olive grove before dawn, and work there until the last light had faded and it was difficult to distinguish her hand from the barks of the trees. Men, women and children would then come down off the hills and walk in the darkness, their limbs like lead, along the paths that converged toward the village. At first, little Angela had sung at work or on the way home, and those with their hands free to clap in rhythm responded with palmas flamencas, but the recent cold weather had dried up her singing as it had those of the other cantaores, freezing the tears in their voices so that no modulated cry emerged now from their painful throats. They all walked at the same somnambulent pace, without any liberating sob to revive their great joy in feeling alive.
As nothing could overcome the sleep that engulfed Clara as soon as night had fallen, and as none of the two children remaining in the house were of an age to take complete care of her, she would have died of hunger if Blanca had not fed her.
