The threads of the heart, p.19
The Threads of the Heart, page 19
Some women carried her back to her mother, who had been shouting her name in the rebellion-swept streets.
Fires were being lighted on all sides, and the autumn air was filled with the smell of blood. While the wounded screamed, the church was torn apart, as was its priest. Intoxicated by slaughter, men armed with rifles and torches marched in procession toward the haciendas. Most of the envoys dispatched onto the roads to call for help and bring reinforcements were killed like rabbits. It was the general feeling that all the harm possible had to be done before dawn, that all accounts had to be settled, all old ills avenged, because there would not be another night. The very next morning, the army would come running, and they would have to fight again and die.
“I too recognized the voice that sang,” Manuel said, trying to silence Salvador. “The child is with a woman from Santavela, on the other side of the sierra. She says she dragged her cart all the way here.”
“This woman you’re talking about,” Blanca said, “did you notice if she had a son with red hair?”
“Yes, she did, and behind him there was a radiant little girl with straw-colored eyes.”
“But that’s Frasquita, the seamstress! She’s the one who could mend his face. You must send for her . . . Manuel! If you want Salvador to live, go back and find that stranger. She alone will be able to patch him up for you the way you want. But be quick about it, he’s coming apart before our eyes!”
Frasquita did not like the world. It was not as she had imagined it, up there in her mountains. She did not wait for the sun to rise before setting off again. In the middle of the night, she pulled her cart southward. They had to get away from the slaughter as quickly as possible.
Despite the fatigue of the journey and the late hour, only Clara was asleep in the cart, dazzling in the midst of flowers that had closed for the night. None of the other children could get what they had seen out of their minds: the corpses on both sides abandoned on the square, trampled by those still fighting, the priest who had been dragged from his church, guts spewing from him, leaving a bloody trail behind, the little boy, hit in the head by a bullet, bobbing up and down on the shoulder of the woman who must have been his mother and who did not seem to have noticed yet that the child she was carrying was dead, the cries of the old woman recognizing the wide-open eyes of her youngest brother in the middle of a pile of corpses.
The fires consuming the presbytery, the barracks and the public buildings lit up the night sky, making the town look suddenly imposing, sending free men out from it and through the countryside. Free, that is, to make a class that had starved, terrified and used them pay them back for centuries of humiliation, free to smash, to kill, to rob, to scream.
Free to die.
Manuel passed columns of fire raisers intoning Angela’s song, and he asked everyone where the woman was, the stranger who had arrived wearing a big wedding dress, the mother of the child who had sung in the main square.
Everyone remembered the child, she was part of their story now, she was the heart of it. Who could have called her a stranger? She had been born in the region, of course, this girl whose birdlike voice had carried their cause. She had died in the main square bombarding the civil guard with her song. A heroine! One person had seen her fall from Jesús’ shoulders after a bullet had hit her full in the chest, another said that the captain himself had rushed to her and cut her throat, but that for a long time the melody had continued to emerge through the long gash in her young neck. The astonished captain was said to have been stabbed in his turn by one of the comrades as he was shaking the dead girl to silence her. According to others, the child was still alive, and had rejoined Salvador in his camp.
“She’ll be here tomorrow when the army comes. Unless she escapes in time to lead other men into battle in other towns. Long live the revolution!”
Manuel could not get any reliable information from these hysterical people caught up in slaughter and unmoved by anything but fire and blood and the beauty of that ink-black sky lapped by the flames of rebellion. He finally came across one of the women, spared by the collective madness, who had taken Angela to her mother before seeing to the dead and wounded. She pointed out to him the route the cart had taken. In a column of beggars, he recognized Juan and managed to tear him from his revolution by reminding him of Salvador’s importance to their cause. Their leader’s life depended on Frasquita, and both of them set off in pursuit of her, spurring their horses mercilessly.
She had gotten farther than they would have believed, and at first categorically refused to retrace her steps. But when they mentioned Blanca, she calmed down and agreed to let Manuel take over pulling the cart so that they could get back to the encampment. But there was no question of her mounting behind on one of the horses in order to get there more quickly. She would not abandon her children to a stranger, especially not on such a night! Pedro and Angela were mounted on Juan’s horse and Martirio and her mother on Manuel’s, while Manuel himself walked between the two animals, holding their bridles. As for Anita, she had taken her place on the cart with her box in her arms, next to Clara, a small light barely visible in the firelit darkness.
On the way, Frasquita tried to remember the face of the man who had given her his purse a few hours earlier. She recalled each of his features with a precision that surprised her. Perhaps she was reinventing them as she wanted. The two rebels insisted that she sleep: she would need all her strength to sew Salvador back together.
The night was quieter now. Of course, fires were still burning, but only a few shots still echoed in the distance. The presence of the men, the breathing of the foam-flecked horses, their tranquil pace all reassured the children. They had never before ridden such animals. Angela had fallen asleep against her brother’s back, her face buried in his red curls.
“Why are all these people fighting?” Pedro finally asked the man who was leading them.
“To invent a new world,” replied Juan. “‘The joy of destruction is at the same time a creative joy.’ They’ve suffered too much and accepted too much for too long.”
“They smashed everything!” the child went on.
“Don’t believe that. The old world is tough, it has every chance of being born again from its ashes. The peasants are far from having won. Tomorrow we’ll probably all be hanged or garroted. But it hardly matters, we’re already dead.”
It was still pitch black when the little group reached the camp. Blanca hugged Frasquita and told her that there was nothing to fear for the moment and that she would take care of the children. While waiting for them, she had made them a bed out of moss and leaves in a cave not far from there. They would be fine. She would make sure they got to sleep.
Her sewing bag in the colors of the olive grove across her shoulder, my mother entered the little cave where Salvador lay. She barely greeted Eugenio. For a long time, she examined the torn face by the light of the oil lamps.
From among the reels she had inherited, she chose a very fine but very solid thread, inserted it in one of her needles, and set to work. In spite of the blood, she stitched away as calmly as if the skin were fabric.
The half-light was a strain on her eyes, and she started to feel her sight become blurred. As it did so, the olive grove man and the cry of his coat as it was torn by the iron spurs came back into her mind. That was the first time she had mended a man, giving him back his shadow and his desire, but the stitches had not been solid enough: he had left her house once the debt was paid, he had not followed her on her journey, she had seen his shadow moving alone on the walls for some time after his body had abandoned the place. Perhaps she would make this face that had been entrusted to her into something other than was being asked of her. As she darned, as she said the prayers for cuts, for pains, for sleep, as she called age-old powers to the bedside of this revolutionary and gave him a face, she realized what she was doing. After all, she was free now, nobody could force her to be what she didn’t want to be, to keep quiet, to hide her work, to hate or love. She was free, as free as the torturer had been when he had given Salvador this nightmare face. Others pillaged, slaughtered, burned, why couldn’t she mend this man the way she wanted? And even if he looked like someone else, nobody would be able to take his blue eyes from him.
She remembered what he had said the previous day, the passion with which he had spoken of his cause as his companions tried to load the miller’s sacks on their donkeys. In this man, desire was immovable. She smiled at him and stroked his right cheek, having just given him the last piece of it.
“Your work is astonishing!” cried a delighted Eugenio, who had been regularly dipping his dark little pen into scarlet ink, taking notes and making sketches. “How do you know where the muscles are?”
“I don’t even know what a muscle is,” replied my mother, jolted out of her daydream.
“The muscles make the different parts of the body move. They shrank, but you managed to find them anyway in all that mess.”
“It’s like a thread, you pull it and see what happens. I try it and then I understand.”
“And those prayers you say, what’s the point of them?”
“Things like that can’t be explained. I have custody of them. Find me some eggs and something to boil them in.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No. Stir the embers too!”
Eugenio knew he would not be able to find out more this time. He put down his pen, went to look for the two eggs he still had in his basket of provisions and a little cast iron casserole, then watched Frasquita as she treated the carne cortada and tried to note down the words of her prayer.
As his pen flowed over the paper, he felt dizzy and collapsed on the floor of the cave.
Day was breaking, the combined effect of Frasquita’s prayers and Eugenio’s drugs was slowly wearing off and Salvador started moaning. Frasquita was making one last stitch near the upper lip when he half opened a huge purple eyelid. Frasquita smiled at him as she put away her needles and, stepping over Eugenio, who was still lying on the ground, she left the cave to rejoin her children.
She went and lay down beside her children in the cave where Blanca had chosen to put them. She noticed with amusement that Pedro had already daubed the stone walls with chalk, drawing a big welcoming face, beneath which he and his sister were curled up. A toothless angel to guard their sleep.
A few hours later, she was wakened abruptly by Eugenio, who was looking everywhere for his notebook.
“Give it back!” he implored. “Tear out the pages about yourself if you like, but give me back that notebook. You can’t read, so it’s no use to you anyway!”
“I haven’t touched your notebook.”
“When I lost consciousness, I saw ghostly figures working with you on Salvador’s face. Later, you stepped over me and something grabbed the notebook I still had in my hand. Did I dream that?”
“All I saw was my sewing. No ghosts, no demons, no notebook. Nobody but a man to be sewed back together.”
“Go on, get out of here, you!” cried Blanca, who had fallen asleep while keeping guard outside the cave and had been wakened by Eugenio’s shouting.
Eugenio obeyed reluctantly, his hands reddened by the ink that had spilled when he fell. He walked past Clara, who was trying to plant back in the ground the flowers she had gathered the previous night, glanced into the little cave where Salvador lay, his face swollen, and went and collapsed on his bed a few yards away.
The balcony
In the town, the rebellious peasants woke up from their night of killing as if from a night of drinking, their heads throbbing, their hearts heavy. In broad daylight, their revolution looked very different. It was impossible now to be blind to the previous night’s slaughter. Now that they could count the victims, many realized the cost of their rioting. So many corpses, so much blood, so many ashes! The embers were still dying down. Yesterday’s murderous and sacrificial unity had disappeared. They looked for their dead in the streets, screaming their names.
They lamented, cursing the anarchists and the civil guard, cursing Bakunin and that child who had sung their sorrows. Of course the shops and the haciendas had been plundered, but once their bellies had been filled, the pain seemed stronger still.
The uprising would not bring back those whom poverty had killed in the past. The barracks had yielded, but how many had fallen in order to enter it? A hundred, perhaps more.
Some even wondered what was to become of them now that they had no more masters. Others, including the anarchists, felt an immense relief, which they tried to communicate to the weeping widows and mothers. The most persuasive took turns on the balcony of the still smoking remains of the town hall, a balcony that threatened to collapse at any moment and on which the flag had been torn to pieces. They harangued the crowds, exhorting them not to let their passion run out of steam. Hope would spring up again, despite the horror of the early morning, despite the taste of tears. Now that the abscess had been lanced in the necessary savagery of a spontaneous uprising, the future presented all kinds of possibilities! The State, the Church, the army, the king, the scheming of politicians in the pay of the landowners: the whole repressive apparatus was now obsolete. They were pioneers, builders, they took turns in proclaiming from the height of their unsteady perch, facing the bitter street.
What a victory! They declared the municipality of P. a free commune. The peasants had not died in vain. They would now have to hold fast and organize the defense of the sanctuary!
In one of the rooms in the town hall that had been more or less spared by the flames, what remained of Salvador’s group had established its headquarters. Here, they pondered what to do next. It was obvious that, even though Sagasta’s falsely liberal government had just established universal male suffrage and authorized all parties, it would not let them take over a municipality like this. The army was sure to march on the town! The authorities would not flinch, they would send a captain at the head of at least five hundred men to put down the uprising before it spread throughout the region, passing from town to town all the way to Granada, from where it would set all the south of the country alight.
It would take more than a song to overcome a regiment. The rebels had collected a good deal of paraphernalia: hunting weapons from the landowners, rifles from the civil guard, ammunition, powder. Everyone had to learn to use them. This time, anger, knives and pitchforks would not be enough.
How much time did they have left to organize their defense? They had no idea. Children would be given the task of keeping watch, they would be posted in trees or behind bushes and would sound the alarm immediately anything moved on the roads.
Another question arose: what to do about those few men who had already installed themselves in the haciendas, enjoying the luxury that had belonged to the dead, sleeping in their silk sheets, caressing the still warm bodies of their women? How to bring such people, led astray by the previous night’s violence, back to the path of reason?
Juan organized the clean-up operations in the town. The streets had to be cleared and the dead buried.
When it came to sewing the shrouds, they missed the priest and the church. The meager words of these ragged anarchists could not match the eloquence of Catholic ritual, they could not promise these men who had fallen for the cause any kind of afterlife! The farewells took on a permanent and derisory character. Bodies rolled in flags, tablecloths or the curtains of those public buildings still standing were shoved into hurriedly dug trenches. What a price they were paying for this freedom! For reasons of hygiene, they also buried the men of the civil guard, the priest, a dozen bourgeois and nobles, and a few local worthies, and to erase the bloodstains already partly imbibed by the sun and earth they stirred the dust in the streets and the main square, which had been renamed Plaza de la Esperanza as a tribute to the events of Jerez de la Frontera.
The balcony creaked when Juan spoke in his turn of that good red rich earth that the wealthy had fed with the corpses of starving children for generations, that charnel house forever watered with the sweat and blood of the peasants and which was now everybody’s. Each person would be entitled to his share, but there would be nourishment for the soul too, he insisted: a school would be opened where children and adults could learn to read and write . . .
Juan moved about, facing the deserted street, crying his hope in the future to a few passers-by with dead eyes and dangling arms who watched him as he gesticulated, alone, perched on his rickety promontory.
It was then that the balcony gave way.
Fear
Untransportable!” declared Eugenio. “Your Salvador can’t be moved, nor can many of the others! We’ll stay in the mountains as long as is necessary. The wounded need me down there, you say? But I have enough work here with those they’ve brought back to the camp. I have more men to tend to than I need! Not to mention the place where you put them! A cave with a worse echo than the refectory of a monastery! I’m alone with two women and a whole lot of kids, dealing with some fifteen poor fellows who’ve been badly messed up. Take Blanca with you, she knows a lot of things! Or Frasquita, she’s a miracle worker! Take them to town! I’m not going to set foot there. And, while we’re about it, I prefer the people down there not to know I’m here. They’re going to blame me for the disappearance of those three children a year ago . . . They’re hungry for justice and blood, your peasants, and I know there have been rumors about me . . . So I’m staying here! Of course, I’ll need fresh supplies. In the countess’s house, there was a fantastic collection of plant extracts of all kinds. I’d like to take a look at that. I hope that old hag is dead, at least?”
