When i sing mountains da.., p.12
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, page 12
Núria comes into the kitchen and says: “Jaume, don’t you fall asleep in here,” and she smiles in that way that throws me off and I don’t know how to respond. “Two steaks with fries for Assumpta and Marc from Can Sala.”
And I say, “Your wish is my command.” And then I feel totally stupid and ridiculous. She is swallowed up by the plastic curtains.
I peel and cut up the potatoes myself, and leave them soaking in water overnight. I pull the steaks out of the fridge, with watery red blood, and before I put them on the grill I go out for a sec to say, “Hand me a beer.”
Núria’s good like that, she doesn’t judge. She doesn’t get riled up about that sort of stuff. She grabs the beer, opens it and hands it to me, and keeps on doing what she was doing. She has her moments, her hard-ass jokes, with that fox face of hers, but fucking with you for drinking at work or driving drunk, nah. “Thanks,” I say, and I put the steaks on the grill. The Salas, who ordered the steaks, are nuts. Pair of hippies who came to the Montseny to smoke weed, you never know what to expect from them. Sometimes they fight and scream at each other and it looks like they’re about to start throwing chairs, and other times they just laugh and drink and get in the car and drive over to Vic or Girona to go out and party, and it’s not like they’re young either.
And then there’s Genís, with his white socks and his shoes, and you have to watch how many beers you serve him, because he’s a good guy but you can’t let him drink too much. He’s around forty, or older, no one knows, because he looks like a little boy and he’s got a little-boy mouth. His parents are old, old enough for him to be forty, but Genís seems like he’s nine or ten or at most eleven. Núria told me one day that after the first beer all the others she gives him are alcohol-free and that she doesn’t charge him for half of them. Genís goes everywhere on foot, and you always run into him walking around, and sometimes you say, “Do you want a lift?” And sometimes he’ll get in and other times, even if it’s raining, he won’t.
And then there’s Carmeta, she’s the one I like best, Carmeta, who’s missing an arm, and is all joyful and slow and kind, as if having one less arm has made her life easier instead of harder. And Carmeta drinks vermouth, and sometimes she comes in with her brother or her sister, both of them with long arms and a dusty grief inside. And when she’s celebrating something she orders cockles. And then there are the men who make buses at the factory, who all shout as if they’re used to talking over the sound of the machines. They start with beers and then move on to whiskies and patxarans and mixed drinks. And sometimes families come in, but early, and the kids share an order of steak and fries and the parents eat without talking much. Young couples never come in. As if they were embarrassed to love each other or something, I don’t know.
When it’s two minutes to midnight, I close up the kitchen. I like cleaning the kitchen, because I’m preparing everything for another day, and when it’s clean and you look at it, all polished and shiny, it makes you feel good. I learned all I know about cooking in prison. And I learned it pretty well. I’m good at it and I enjoy it. Valentí, he was the one who taught me, would say that cooking is like singing, there are those who are born knowing how, like a gift, but with a little bit of effort anyone can do it. I don’t know if it’s the best example. I already knew how to cook a few things for my dad by the time my mom died, but with a bit of technique, with a few basic skills, you can do wonders.
I finish cleaning up, I go out to the bar, and Guifré shows up. Always at the last minute and always just him and his shadow. And he tells me he has a story about bears for me. And I say, “Oh yeah? Let’s hear it.” Because that’s the joke, some people around here call me the Pyrenees bear. They’re just jealous, with their tiny pimple of a mountain while I’ve got a whole mountain range. And sometimes they don’t even call me by my name, they just call me the Bear. I actually like when they do that, because it makes me think of home and of Mia. And at the same time I don’t like it at all, because it’s like a stab under my armpit to think about home and about Mia.
The bear story he told me goes like this:
“Once upon a time there was a blacksmith, who was irascible, hairy, strong, and corpulent, like you,” he says, “who lived alone, and was always angry and always cursing, so much so that when he picked up his hammer, the iron would already start to tremble, and when he had to shoe an animal, it would hold its breath. One day, a vagabond showed up in the blacksmith’s town, dirty and barefoot. He went over to the smithy and he asked for some alms. The blacksmith, from the forge, shouted: ‘Put on some shoes, you animal, and begone!’ as he threw a red-hot horseshoe at him.
“The beggar, without moving, stared at him and exclaimed:
“‘A bear you are and a bear you shall be!
And you shall climb every tree,
save the hawthorn, too prickly,
and the fir tree, too slippery.’
“And the blacksmith immediately turned into a bear and ran off growling to the forest, because that beggar was Our Lord.”
Guifré explains that all bears are descendants of that blacksmith, and that’s why they walk upright like people and climb every tree except the hawthorn and the fir. I laugh when I hear him say “Our Lord” and I pour him a draft beer. The rest of the night passes quickly, and Núria, who has me behind the bar and can go out every once in a while for a smoke, is happy. Quim the boss left a while ago, so we use beers to treat our thirst and our boredom and our desire for the shift to be over with. And when I start to feel bloated, we switch to gin and tonics. Everybody’s had a good day, everybody’s relaxed, nobody wants to pick a fight, or complain, or any stupid drunken bullshit, and everybody leaves when it’s time to go home.
When we lock the door from the inside and lower the blinds halfway, Núria lights a cigarette and leaves it in the ashtray on the bar. She goes down to the storeroom with the hand truck to get four cases of long-neck beers. She comes back and grabs the smoke and takes a drag. She puts the full plastic cases onto the wooden bar, gets behind it to load up the fridges, cigarette in her mouth and her gaze like a fox. She’s got the gaze of a fox who likes to play around with her victims before she kills them. And I can tell she’s itching to pick a fight, and she asks, out of nowhere, “What about you, Jaume, what’s your story? Where’re you from?”
I’m putting the chairs up on the tables, and I answer, “From up in the Pyrenees. Like the bears.”
She already knows that much. She puts down her cigarette and places the bottles in the fridge in the shape of a pyramid.
“My mother was a water sprite,” I say then. And I think about my mother, who spoke so little, with that tranquil smile she had, good as gold, when she was happy, it made you feel so good to make her laugh, even though her smile showed her missing front teeth. My mother, all her kindness squandered. My mom, who died before the accident, and I’m so, so glad of that, that she died before it all went down. I go over to the bar, like I’m a regular. I’ll sweep up, but first I pick up her cigarette from the ashtray, because I’ve finished putting up the chairs. She asks, “Are there water sprites in the Pyrenees?”
“There are sprites everywhere.”
“How do you know she was a sprite?”
I gesture with one hand for her to pour me another gin and tonic and I tell her another truth. “When my mom and dad got married, my mother made him promise he would never say out loud that she was a sprite. But when I was born, I was so ugly that my father couldn’t believe I was his son, and he said, ‘What was I thinking, marrying a water sprite!’ And, poof, my mother disappeared and we never saw her again.”
“It’s always the same story with water sprites.” She smiles.
She pours two gin and tonics. I keep her cigarette and she lights herself another.
“You know what I think about secretive, mysterious men who keep everything to themselves?” she asks. “I think they’re empty like a shell, and don’t have anything to say.”
I lift my head, and she looks at me with eyes that smile combatively, capable of so many better things than being here. The eyes of a fox, bored of the boys in this town, and the cars of the boys in this town, and the views and perspectives in this town. I have nothing to offer her, and I don’t want her to look at me like that, with her mouth slightly ajar like a door, so I say, “I killed a man.”
I say it without looking at her, because I don’t want to see her reaction. She changes position, smokes, and waits.
“I killed a guy who was my friend. By accident. We were hunting and I shot him in the back. My shotgun went off. Up in the mountains, so high up that he died in my arms and it took me hours to carry him down.”
There you have it, a secret like a treasure. A little jolt to the soul. A story to ponder, an anecdote to tell your friends. A truth like a rotted fruit. A sad scene.
Then I look at her and say, “And I spent some time in prison.”
She is still as a fox.
There are things that remain etched in your soul. Article 545 of the 1973 Penal Code. Five years. Three years provisional and two sentenced. That’s how it is when you live right beside the fucking French border. No one believes you won’t take the ten steps across it to avoid five years in a cage. And I can recall everything, one thing after the other, almost without pain. What I remember least is Hilari. Hilari dying. The blood and the hair. I barely remember how I got him out of the forest. Or the faces of the civil guards, or the first night in jail, or the second. And then I’m at Pont Major penitentiary awaiting trial, and then the trial happens and I don’t care about anything anymore.
And she asks, “What was prison like?”
I say something random, and make a gesture sort of like a smile and I ask, “Can I take a beer with me?”
She wants me to stay and tell her more secrets, and to do something with this night, because it will be a night to remember, better than a lot of others, because tonight we’re alive and we’re here at the bar, in front of each other. But I don’t want to stay, and I don’t want to think about prison, and I don’t want her to look at me with that ajar-door mouth, and she hands me a beer and I ask if I can leave, if she minds closing up alone. My father died during the second year. Before my trial. It’s like a goddamn well. You shouldn’t open the door to memories, because there’s nothing good inside there.
The car is waiting for me in the dark and I get inside and it smells like a little house. I drive toward the edge of town instead of toward home, because the night is cool and the beer is cool and the curves in the road are the promise of some comfort. A little comfort, please. I step down hard on the gas, and I take the curves like I’m dancing, like I’m escaping. The road is black, the median like a necklace, an ornamental border that goes through it all like the skin of a snake. And the forest opens up before me, yellow and gray, as if I were a knife. The sky is lighter than the forest and the road, because the sky has the light hidden beneath it. I open the windows and the good night slips into the car. There are no other cars on the road because the cars are sleeping. The golden water slides quickly from the neck of the bottle and it’s a field of barley. A field of wheat. A field of oats. The dance of the oat harvest. The dance of the oat harvest I shall sing to you, the dance of the oat harvest I shall sing to you, my father as he sows it, over here, over there; he bangs on his chest and then there is a huge bang. The violence of a body crossing into the car’s path makes a horrifying thud. Holy shit. My hands—electric with shock—grip the steering wheel and the beer, which goes flying, spills all over the floor. The car stops and the darkness grows hushed in atonement. I feel myself breathing hard and I could cry with the fear of not wanting to see what it is I killed. In front of me the road is clean. The trees turn as if looking at me, and I remain still for a moment, with my back to the darkness and death.
When I get out of the car, I can see right off it’s an animal. And when I get a good look at the roe-deer in the middle of the road, red, lit up by the car’s taillights, I shout, “God!” over and over and really loud, and then I say, “Fuck!” over and over and really loud, and then, “Fucking hell,” and when I kneel down by the animal and put my hand on its forehead and between its ears, I think how it’s the roe-deer. I know, I know it’s not that roe-deer. But I think it’s the roe-deer that Hilari and I didn’t kill. The beer ricochets off the walls of all my veins, and the memories that flood in afterward ricochet off the walls of my skull, and I take the animal in my arms, just like how I carried Hilari. I never told Mia I was sorry. I didn’t allow any visitors. I didn’t go back when they let me out. I open the rear car doors and the dead beast weighs more than you’d think, with how light it is when it’s running, on those thin little legs. I’m careful not to let him bang against the door frame, those knees and those hooves that hold up all that flesh. I have to get in from the other side, to pull the animal in by its neck, which is hard and thick and fibrous and hot. His two back legs slip, inert, off the seat, outside the car, and I go back to the first door and grab its haunch and lift and push it into the seat, without blood, it wasn’t even bleeding. It’s Hilari’s roe-deer, and I never told Mia I wanted her and I was sorry. How could anyone ever forgive me, if Mia can’t forgive me? I close the doors and I know that all the animals of the night are watching me, bewildered and terrified, from the darkness, with their eyes lowered so the gleam doesn’t give them away.
Sometimes words don’t come, and not even a thought comes. The only thing is the doing with your hands, like turning the keys that are still in the ignition, which is a simple thing, and releasing the hand brake and putting the car into first, which is easy and mechanical. The roe-deer like a child sleeping in the back seat. I would have wanted to have kids. With Mia.
The road stretches out before me. The empty beer bottle clinks on the floor. The place of the accident, in the morning, will seem like a different place. It’ll take me an hour and a half. An hour and fifteen minutes if I drive fast. I drive fast, so air will rush in hard through the window and make that noise that fills my ears and mixes with the acrid smell of the forest, and of wild game, and of fear and death and my sweat and the sweat of the beast fermenting, getting only stronger and more sour and more frightened. I turn on the radio so it can keep me company. And that’s when I feel them, even before I find a station. Deep, like the dark holes that reach the depths of the earth. I feel them on the nape of my neck, like two fingers. I feel them long before I see them, and long before I understand them, and it takes me a while to locate them, and then I turn and there they are, the two of them, the open eyes, like two wells, of the roe-buck. Wet and black.
THE GHOST
The moon is round and full, and Lluna lies at the foot of the bed, and we go to bed early because we’re tired. I don’t let Lluna sleep up on the bed, and if she wakes me up in the morning because she’s feeling impatient or hungry or overflowing with love, I get angry or I pretend I’m angry so she won’t keep doing it.
I get into bed and say goodnight to her, and I don’t see her, but I know she’s lying down with her snout resting on her front paws, and a resigned expression. She doesn’t take long to fall asleep.
“It’s been a few years since I’ve been with anybody,” I tell him. Like I told him the first time. And he keeps kissing me. I thought I was over all this stuff, that I didn’t need somebody else to give me my pleasure, that I hadn’t missed any of it. But now that my desire is stirring, deep inside, I cling to it because it’s blooming and fun and I want it to grow. Oriol says, “Me too,” like the other time. And I laugh, because it can’t be. And he laughs.
