When i sing mountains da.., p.6
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, page 6
Like a sack of potatoes, like a child,
Like a dead buck, over your shoulder.
Don’t want to make you sad, so alone, Jaume,
Don’t want to leave you alone, so sad, Jaume.
After reciting my verses, I always pause for a small moment. After the words have echoed, after my voice has touched everything, and filled the spaces between all things, I am silent. To separate the poem from the rest. And I listen. The poet speaks. The poet proclaims. But the poet also listens. A bird or two. The air that once again stakes its claim as lord and master of the space between the leaves. The thin whistle the world makes, at the bottom of every ear …
I composed this poem for me:
Poem for Me, Hilari
I sing to the moon when it blooms full,
Round fang in the kindly night,
Expecting cat.
I sing to the frozen river,
My soul’s companion,
Like a vein, like a teardrop.
I sing to the watchful wood,
Sated with fish, hares, penny buns.
I sing to the bounteous days of sun,
To the summer breeze, to the winter breeze,
To the mornings, to the evenings,
To the thin rain, to the angry rain.
I sing to the slope, the peak, the meadow,
To the stinging nettle, to the wild rosebush, to the bramble.
I sing like someone plowing a garden,
Like someone carving a table,
Like someone raising a house,
Like someone climbing a hill,
Like someone eating a walnut,
Like someone lighting a fire.
Like God creating animals and plants.
When I sing, mountains dance.
Poetry has it all. Poetry has beauty, it has purity, it has music, it has images, it has words, recited out loud. It’s got freedom and the ability to move you, to let you glimpse the infinite. The great beyond. Infinity isn’t on Earth and it isn’t in heaven. The infinite dwells in each of us. Like a window on the top of our heads that we didn’t even know was there, and that the poet’s voice opens up little by little, and up there, through that crack, is the infinite.
I composed this poem for my sister, Mia. Because one day we never saw each other again:
Poem for Mia
I will be the fertilizer in your garden,
The tomato plant, the earwig,
The endive, the ornery weeds.
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
I will dissolve slowly,
Like butter; with a hand rake,
You will comb me into the earth.
My heart, Mia, is a stone.
A smooth stone like a longing,
A small fist like love dawning.
That doesn’t dampen, that doesn’t break,
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
The house, women and men, our mother,
The car, the dog, the TV, Sundays,
All of it slides like a river, over my back.
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
I have a weight on my chest, the memory of a quarry,
Hard grief, sad poem.
Sister-bonded to your own,
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
That last poem is one of the ones I’m most proud of. It’s not a sad poem. Make no mistake. It’s a melancholy poem. Because sometimes beauty leaves you gasping for air. I don’t suffer much, from sadness or melancholy, but melancholy, like beauty, is important for poetry.
I learned all that on my own. The importance of melancholy to give the poem weight. And the colors of words and verses. I’m essentially a self-taught poet. An ardent enthusiast. Feeling my way through the dark. And proud of it. I don’t miss the weight of tradition that burdens those who’ve read and studied. I shouldn’t say that. In another life I read a little Verdaguer and a little Salvat-Papasseit. And that’s it. From the book by Verdaguer called Canigó, which my mother kept in a drawer:
And higher and higher until you can see the face of the creator!
And a passage that said:
I want you,
Peasant poet.
Take this book
That celebrates our union.
In the book by Salvat-Papasseit called Rose on the Lips, which my mother kept in the same chest of drawers:
Nothing is paltry and no hour is barren, nor dark is the happenstance of night!
And another passage:
My lips are a rose
That opens to your kiss.
They were both inscribed:
From your Sió
And dated:
21 May 1964
The day my parents, Domènec and Sió, were united in holy matrimony. My mother kept poetry in a drawer. I don’t remember my father. My mother told me he was a peasant poet. I asked her if we had any of his poems. My mother said he didn’t write them down, he spoke them out in the open air. And then I asked her if she remembered any of his poems. And she said no.
At the time that made me angry. My mother’s negligence and forgetting.
But now I think that’s exactly what makes my father’s poems good, more pure, more poetic, absolutely transcendental, much better poems.
Like mine.
I wrote these two poems for my parents.
I leave space so you can breathe.
Poem for My Mother
Come here, Mama, we’ll keep each other company,
Like the tiles of our house,
Like the trees at our house,
Like Jesus and Joseph and the mother of God.
Come here, Mama, we’ll talk to each other
Of things that happen in the forest, at night,
Of things that happen in the heart, at night,
Of lightning that scorches the sky.
Come here, Mama, we’ll sing together
Melodies that put sobbing to sleep,
Songs that make the dead dance,
Tunes that comfort, bring joy.
Inspiration—good company!—comes from distant times, and from things around us. You remember being a child, or the day you died, or all the mornings that came after, or you think of your mother, or observe the things before you, the night and the stones, and inspiration comes, and fills your cheeks and your nose with the delight of sweet wine.
I often compose my poems with someone in mind. I think about someone in my life before or in my life now and I make a poem for them. The sound of friendly applause is warm, pleasant. Palomita’s little hands, the sound like walnut shells they make, like music. I like to write thinking about people because it’s like a gift. Because the poet’s voice conjures. Conjures up loved ones and time gone by and future time. And those named by the poet gather and join hands in a circle while the sound of his voice lasts, like a bonfire, intense and scorching hot, but that dies out, too, when the time comes.
Here’s the poem for my father that I mentioned:
Poem for the Hare-Man
You sleep in the open air, like hares.
No home, no burrow, no den,
Your blanket the great outdoors,
A thicket your shelter.
Small heart full of dread,
You never shut your eyes entirely.
Hidden amongst dark shadows
You leap, you flee, you die of fright.
Like a woodworm, like a weed,
You’ve been invaded by wilderness.
It’s gobbled up your words,
Your memories, your two children.
I never explain my poems, never.
The next one I wrote for the roe-buck who got away from us the day Jaume killed me on accident:
Poem for the Roe-Buck Who Got Away
Fly, roe-buck, run
For the hunter will come.
Through the bullet hole
Evil will get in,
Thirst will flee.
Fly, roe-buck, run
For he’ll rip out your antlers,
And when you close your eyes,
He’ll flay your belly
And stuff you with straw.
Fly, roe-buck, run
For far off there are greener meadows,
There are does, there is cold water,
Yellow evenings,
Fresher morns.
I like that last stanza a lot.
And in the poem for my mother, I really like the lines that say:
Come here, Mama, we’ll talk to each other
Of things that happen in the forest, at night,
Of things that happen in the heart, at night.
This next poem is, without a shadow of a doubt, the poem deserving of the longest round of applause in the history of Catalan poetry:
Poem for Dolceta, Margarida, Eulàlia, and Joana
This poem is to tell you,
Women friends,
With fingers long
As orange segments:
Thanks so much
For the berries
That you gave us last night.
They were good and black and sweet
And we ate them with great delight.
Sometimes I sing out my poems. To play, to test them out. Poetry is a game, too, after all. Poets must be playful. Poetry is a serious matter, among the most serious. More serious than death and life and everything. A profound and vital matter. And precisely for that reason we poets have to know how to play and we have to know how to laugh and we have to know irony.
I composed this song for my dear Palomita. And there’s so much rhythm inside the poem itself that you can’t help but sing the song. I sing it in different voices, making faces, and Palomita laughs and laughs and laughs, she claps and says more, more!, and she never tires of me singing her song for her:
Poem for My Joyful Palomita
I’ve got myself a little dove
Who’s pretty as a china doll,
One of her legs got a boo-boo
Now it ends in a wrinkled ball.
My pretty dove has seen bad things
That happened so, so far away
In the daytime she laughs and sings
But at night her fears come out to play.
She dreams of priests and soldiers,
But I tell her, don’t you fear,
For, my little mourning dove,
They’re all gone, away from here.
I’ve got myself a little dove
Cheerful as the day is long,
She calls me her sweet brother
So her brother sings this song.
EVERYBODY’S BROTHER
When the bomb fell it blew my leg right off. Zas!
Zas! No. There was blood and flesh and a smell of burned pig’s hair, and the doctors had to cut off my leg.
I had always wanted a big brother. Because I just had two little brothers, like two scared little sparrows, and I would hug them and tell them not to cry.
I don’t cry, because I like the forest, and the mountains, and everything in them. And I like the older brother the forest gave me. Germà, I call him, germà, brother, my sweet brother, Hilari, and since he can’t hold my hand, since I need my hands to hold my crutches, he puts his palm on the back of my neck. Like a ladle.
When the bomb fell Mamá died, and Rosalía, who was our neighbor, died, too, and it cut off my leg and it cut off my brother Juan’s foot. Mamá and Rosalía and Aunt Juani said the planes were coming. They were Italian planes. They told us to run and run. To the fields, to the olive groves. When we left our houses the planes arrived. We ran and ran and the bomb caught us in the football field. We ran and ran and all of a sudden Mamá shouted for us to lie facedown, “Cover your head with your hands!” We could hear the bombs falling on the rooftops. And everything was white and everything was still, and the whistling in our ears was very loud, because they’d dropped a bomb on us. They took good aim. Aunt Juani wasn’t our aunt but everybody called her Auntie. When Mamá and Rosalía died in the hospital, Papá didn’t say a word, and then they took us to Catalonia, first to Lérida, and then to Barcelona, and then, when Juan and I left the hospital, each with our own set of crutches, we went to La Garriga.
I like my older brother because he has the answers to so many questions, and because he knows poems. I like the forest because it’s not scary. Because it’s happy. Because the soldiers don’t come, because there are no soldiers, and no little brothers who cry when nothing you say will get them to stop. Who moan, I want to go home, please, please, let’s go home. And no sad papás. Just my older brother, Hilari, my germà, the germà of us all, of everybody who wants to be his brother or sister. Like me. I do. Even though sometimes I miss Juan and Pedro, my little crying sparrow brothers, little sparrow with a bad foot, and I wish they would come here to play in the forest, and swim in the river, and meet our other brother, and he would tell them that no more bad things are going to happen.
If you think about the war, it makes you sad. Our men wrecked all the bridges so the Nationalists couldn’t come in with their war cars, and so we could escape like little ants, even the girls on crutches, and the boys on crutches. La Garriga was a really sad town. When Papá worked in the sugar factory he smelled like caramel, when he worked as a guard in La Garriga he smelled like grief.
Later we got into trucks. Headed to France. And later you couldn’t travel by truck because the road was buried with stuff, with carts and baggage and even abandoned cars. I liked the mountains, they were so cold. I liked them more than everything we’d seen and more than our town and more than Barcelona and more than Lérida and more than La Garriga and more than anything. I liked the mountains because if you looked at the trees and the snow and the peaks, you could forget the war, forget crying little brothers like sparrows, and forget fear and all the rest. Snow like bleach. Clean, so clean. But you shouldn’t be sad. Me, I never cry. Except sometimes when I dream. But that’s not my fault. It’s like when you’re dreaming and you wet the bed. When I wake up from the crying dreams I curl up like a dove so my brother will sing me the song about the dove. That’s me, Palomita, little dove.
We have a small home, my brother and I, like a round hole in a tooth, like a pointy tooth sticking out of a thicket of trees. We sleep in the heart of our house, which is like a den, like a bed. And when we go up on top, we can see the valley below, with all the trees holding hands like the wool of a sweater, and the sister mountains above, and the river, which you can’t see, but you can hear, and sometimes we look at the moon from up there on our roof, which isn’t a roof but pointy rock. Our house is so snug, I call it our little home. The four women call it the Roca de la Mort. I understand enough Catalan to know that means the Rock of Death. One day I asked my little older brother, “Why is our house called the Roca de la Mort?”
He said, “Why are you called Eva?”
And I shrugged because nobody had ever told me. My mamá was named Elena, my papá was called Israel.
My little older brother said that nobody chooses their own name. “It’s called the Roca de la Mort because people call it that. Just like you call it our little home. Things are called what people call them.”
I told him, “If it’s just our house, only you and me can call it our little home.”
“Yes,” he said, “there are names that only some people can use.”
Like germà.
When we reached the coll—coll is “mountain pass” in Catalan and it is up above, far from our little patch of forest and our little home—we had to wait three days for them to open the border. I had never seen a border before. Waiting was more tiring than walking.
Later they told Papá that in the first French town they were separating children from their papás and we hid. We slept in a corral for two nights. Like hens. Like lambs. In the hay. And it smelled of manure but it was a good smell. Like food. In the corral, my sparrow brothers cried and cried because they wanted to go back home, “Please, Papá, please,” they would beg. And it snowed. And later a Frenchman came who walked with just one foot, like Juan. He came to help us. And he took us to a school. To a school in a French town. But in that French school nobody studied anymore, they just slept and waited. France was a very sad country. And then Papá and I got sick and they took us to the hospital again. The cold snuck into my chest, and Papá’s, like it was snowing in our hearts. And when I got better and woke up, because sometimes dying is getting better, I went back to the mountains. My papá, when he died, was so sad that he stayed in the hospital. It was a hospital for sad people. And Nono and Nona came to get Juan and Pedro, because they were orphans, and they took them back to town, just the way they wanted.
I went back to the forest alone because it was a tranquil and happy forest, on a happy mountain, for a happy little dove like me. Everything smelled really strong when I got here. And the animals buzzed really loud. All around, bzzz, bzzzz, honeybees and bumblebees and even bigger bees and flies and botflies and mosquitoes, like a party. And the grass was green and yellow, and the flowers were white and purple and blue and pink. The sky was very deep blue. The river was very cold. When we fled through this place you could barely see the river. Maybe it was scared, too, and hiding, and you could hear it only like a frightened whisper. But if you found it just once, and you saw it once, that was it. It was yours. I used to bathe in the river every day, and I still do, because the cold, cold water stabs like knives and makes the heart happy. I bathe in it every day, and every day the water is different. Sometimes the knives are bigger. Sometimes they’re thinner. And I play with the leeches and the little frogs, itty-bitty, teeny-weeny, and with the tadpoles and the water striders. There was no river in my town. My town was incredibly sad. And I dry off in the sun. And sometimes the fish fly. And sometimes the four women come to bathe and bring me blueberries. Those women are funny. When they see me they go, “Psssst, pssst,” like I’m a little animal. And I go, “Meowww, meowww,” and they laugh: “Cheeeeep, cheep, bowww wow,” and they clap and touch my hair and touch the stump of my leg. They are fun and happy, the women, but I didn’t want to live with them, I want to live alone and bathe in the river every day. And fish for trout. With still, blue hands. And suddenly, bam!, got the trout. Delicious trout from the happy river. And I send little boats out into the sea! Little boats made of twigs and grass, heading down the river, leaping over rocks and rapids. And I follow them along the bank, but never into the town with the pretty bridge. In town I once asked a man with a moustache who had built the river, and he said, “God.” Then I asked him who built the bridge, and he told me, “The dimoni.” The dimoni is the devil. And I told him, “Wow, the dimoni makes such pretty bridges. The devil should make all the bridges in Spain. Rebuild all the bridges our men wrecked.” And he looked at me with such a sad face, like he was saying, Shut up, kid, but he didn’t say anything. The little boats always beat me because with the crutches I run so slow. Now I have only one shoe and one sock. I used to wear two.
Like a dead buck, over your shoulder.
Don’t want to make you sad, so alone, Jaume,
Don’t want to leave you alone, so sad, Jaume.
After reciting my verses, I always pause for a small moment. After the words have echoed, after my voice has touched everything, and filled the spaces between all things, I am silent. To separate the poem from the rest. And I listen. The poet speaks. The poet proclaims. But the poet also listens. A bird or two. The air that once again stakes its claim as lord and master of the space between the leaves. The thin whistle the world makes, at the bottom of every ear …
I composed this poem for me:
Poem for Me, Hilari
I sing to the moon when it blooms full,
Round fang in the kindly night,
Expecting cat.
I sing to the frozen river,
My soul’s companion,
Like a vein, like a teardrop.
I sing to the watchful wood,
Sated with fish, hares, penny buns.
I sing to the bounteous days of sun,
To the summer breeze, to the winter breeze,
To the mornings, to the evenings,
To the thin rain, to the angry rain.
I sing to the slope, the peak, the meadow,
To the stinging nettle, to the wild rosebush, to the bramble.
I sing like someone plowing a garden,
Like someone carving a table,
Like someone raising a house,
Like someone climbing a hill,
Like someone eating a walnut,
Like someone lighting a fire.
Like God creating animals and plants.
When I sing, mountains dance.
Poetry has it all. Poetry has beauty, it has purity, it has music, it has images, it has words, recited out loud. It’s got freedom and the ability to move you, to let you glimpse the infinite. The great beyond. Infinity isn’t on Earth and it isn’t in heaven. The infinite dwells in each of us. Like a window on the top of our heads that we didn’t even know was there, and that the poet’s voice opens up little by little, and up there, through that crack, is the infinite.
I composed this poem for my sister, Mia. Because one day we never saw each other again:
Poem for Mia
I will be the fertilizer in your garden,
The tomato plant, the earwig,
The endive, the ornery weeds.
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
I will dissolve slowly,
Like butter; with a hand rake,
You will comb me into the earth.
My heart, Mia, is a stone.
A smooth stone like a longing,
A small fist like love dawning.
That doesn’t dampen, that doesn’t break,
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
The house, women and men, our mother,
The car, the dog, the TV, Sundays,
All of it slides like a river, over my back.
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
I have a weight on my chest, the memory of a quarry,
Hard grief, sad poem.
Sister-bonded to your own,
My heart, Mia, it is a stone.
That last poem is one of the ones I’m most proud of. It’s not a sad poem. Make no mistake. It’s a melancholy poem. Because sometimes beauty leaves you gasping for air. I don’t suffer much, from sadness or melancholy, but melancholy, like beauty, is important for poetry.
I learned all that on my own. The importance of melancholy to give the poem weight. And the colors of words and verses. I’m essentially a self-taught poet. An ardent enthusiast. Feeling my way through the dark. And proud of it. I don’t miss the weight of tradition that burdens those who’ve read and studied. I shouldn’t say that. In another life I read a little Verdaguer and a little Salvat-Papasseit. And that’s it. From the book by Verdaguer called Canigó, which my mother kept in a drawer:
And higher and higher until you can see the face of the creator!
And a passage that said:
I want you,
Peasant poet.
Take this book
That celebrates our union.
In the book by Salvat-Papasseit called Rose on the Lips, which my mother kept in the same chest of drawers:
Nothing is paltry and no hour is barren, nor dark is the happenstance of night!
And another passage:
My lips are a rose
That opens to your kiss.
They were both inscribed:
From your Sió
And dated:
21 May 1964
The day my parents, Domènec and Sió, were united in holy matrimony. My mother kept poetry in a drawer. I don’t remember my father. My mother told me he was a peasant poet. I asked her if we had any of his poems. My mother said he didn’t write them down, he spoke them out in the open air. And then I asked her if she remembered any of his poems. And she said no.
At the time that made me angry. My mother’s negligence and forgetting.
But now I think that’s exactly what makes my father’s poems good, more pure, more poetic, absolutely transcendental, much better poems.
Like mine.
I wrote these two poems for my parents.
I leave space so you can breathe.
Poem for My Mother
Come here, Mama, we’ll keep each other company,
Like the tiles of our house,
Like the trees at our house,
Like Jesus and Joseph and the mother of God.
Come here, Mama, we’ll talk to each other
Of things that happen in the forest, at night,
Of things that happen in the heart, at night,
Of lightning that scorches the sky.
Come here, Mama, we’ll sing together
Melodies that put sobbing to sleep,
Songs that make the dead dance,
Tunes that comfort, bring joy.
Inspiration—good company!—comes from distant times, and from things around us. You remember being a child, or the day you died, or all the mornings that came after, or you think of your mother, or observe the things before you, the night and the stones, and inspiration comes, and fills your cheeks and your nose with the delight of sweet wine.
I often compose my poems with someone in mind. I think about someone in my life before or in my life now and I make a poem for them. The sound of friendly applause is warm, pleasant. Palomita’s little hands, the sound like walnut shells they make, like music. I like to write thinking about people because it’s like a gift. Because the poet’s voice conjures. Conjures up loved ones and time gone by and future time. And those named by the poet gather and join hands in a circle while the sound of his voice lasts, like a bonfire, intense and scorching hot, but that dies out, too, when the time comes.
Here’s the poem for my father that I mentioned:
Poem for the Hare-Man
You sleep in the open air, like hares.
No home, no burrow, no den,
Your blanket the great outdoors,
A thicket your shelter.
Small heart full of dread,
You never shut your eyes entirely.
Hidden amongst dark shadows
You leap, you flee, you die of fright.
Like a woodworm, like a weed,
You’ve been invaded by wilderness.
It’s gobbled up your words,
Your memories, your two children.
I never explain my poems, never.
The next one I wrote for the roe-buck who got away from us the day Jaume killed me on accident:
Poem for the Roe-Buck Who Got Away
Fly, roe-buck, run
For the hunter will come.
Through the bullet hole
Evil will get in,
Thirst will flee.
Fly, roe-buck, run
For he’ll rip out your antlers,
And when you close your eyes,
He’ll flay your belly
And stuff you with straw.
Fly, roe-buck, run
For far off there are greener meadows,
There are does, there is cold water,
Yellow evenings,
Fresher morns.
I like that last stanza a lot.
And in the poem for my mother, I really like the lines that say:
Come here, Mama, we’ll talk to each other
Of things that happen in the forest, at night,
Of things that happen in the heart, at night.
This next poem is, without a shadow of a doubt, the poem deserving of the longest round of applause in the history of Catalan poetry:
Poem for Dolceta, Margarida, Eulàlia, and Joana
This poem is to tell you,
Women friends,
With fingers long
As orange segments:
Thanks so much
For the berries
That you gave us last night.
They were good and black and sweet
And we ate them with great delight.
Sometimes I sing out my poems. To play, to test them out. Poetry is a game, too, after all. Poets must be playful. Poetry is a serious matter, among the most serious. More serious than death and life and everything. A profound and vital matter. And precisely for that reason we poets have to know how to play and we have to know how to laugh and we have to know irony.
I composed this song for my dear Palomita. And there’s so much rhythm inside the poem itself that you can’t help but sing the song. I sing it in different voices, making faces, and Palomita laughs and laughs and laughs, she claps and says more, more!, and she never tires of me singing her song for her:
Poem for My Joyful Palomita
I’ve got myself a little dove
Who’s pretty as a china doll,
One of her legs got a boo-boo
Now it ends in a wrinkled ball.
My pretty dove has seen bad things
That happened so, so far away
In the daytime she laughs and sings
But at night her fears come out to play.
She dreams of priests and soldiers,
But I tell her, don’t you fear,
For, my little mourning dove,
They’re all gone, away from here.
I’ve got myself a little dove
Cheerful as the day is long,
She calls me her sweet brother
So her brother sings this song.
EVERYBODY’S BROTHER
When the bomb fell it blew my leg right off. Zas!
Zas! No. There was blood and flesh and a smell of burned pig’s hair, and the doctors had to cut off my leg.
I had always wanted a big brother. Because I just had two little brothers, like two scared little sparrows, and I would hug them and tell them not to cry.
I don’t cry, because I like the forest, and the mountains, and everything in them. And I like the older brother the forest gave me. Germà, I call him, germà, brother, my sweet brother, Hilari, and since he can’t hold my hand, since I need my hands to hold my crutches, he puts his palm on the back of my neck. Like a ladle.
When the bomb fell Mamá died, and Rosalía, who was our neighbor, died, too, and it cut off my leg and it cut off my brother Juan’s foot. Mamá and Rosalía and Aunt Juani said the planes were coming. They were Italian planes. They told us to run and run. To the fields, to the olive groves. When we left our houses the planes arrived. We ran and ran and the bomb caught us in the football field. We ran and ran and all of a sudden Mamá shouted for us to lie facedown, “Cover your head with your hands!” We could hear the bombs falling on the rooftops. And everything was white and everything was still, and the whistling in our ears was very loud, because they’d dropped a bomb on us. They took good aim. Aunt Juani wasn’t our aunt but everybody called her Auntie. When Mamá and Rosalía died in the hospital, Papá didn’t say a word, and then they took us to Catalonia, first to Lérida, and then to Barcelona, and then, when Juan and I left the hospital, each with our own set of crutches, we went to La Garriga.
I like my older brother because he has the answers to so many questions, and because he knows poems. I like the forest because it’s not scary. Because it’s happy. Because the soldiers don’t come, because there are no soldiers, and no little brothers who cry when nothing you say will get them to stop. Who moan, I want to go home, please, please, let’s go home. And no sad papás. Just my older brother, Hilari, my germà, the germà of us all, of everybody who wants to be his brother or sister. Like me. I do. Even though sometimes I miss Juan and Pedro, my little crying sparrow brothers, little sparrow with a bad foot, and I wish they would come here to play in the forest, and swim in the river, and meet our other brother, and he would tell them that no more bad things are going to happen.
If you think about the war, it makes you sad. Our men wrecked all the bridges so the Nationalists couldn’t come in with their war cars, and so we could escape like little ants, even the girls on crutches, and the boys on crutches. La Garriga was a really sad town. When Papá worked in the sugar factory he smelled like caramel, when he worked as a guard in La Garriga he smelled like grief.
Later we got into trucks. Headed to France. And later you couldn’t travel by truck because the road was buried with stuff, with carts and baggage and even abandoned cars. I liked the mountains, they were so cold. I liked them more than everything we’d seen and more than our town and more than Barcelona and more than Lérida and more than La Garriga and more than anything. I liked the mountains because if you looked at the trees and the snow and the peaks, you could forget the war, forget crying little brothers like sparrows, and forget fear and all the rest. Snow like bleach. Clean, so clean. But you shouldn’t be sad. Me, I never cry. Except sometimes when I dream. But that’s not my fault. It’s like when you’re dreaming and you wet the bed. When I wake up from the crying dreams I curl up like a dove so my brother will sing me the song about the dove. That’s me, Palomita, little dove.
We have a small home, my brother and I, like a round hole in a tooth, like a pointy tooth sticking out of a thicket of trees. We sleep in the heart of our house, which is like a den, like a bed. And when we go up on top, we can see the valley below, with all the trees holding hands like the wool of a sweater, and the sister mountains above, and the river, which you can’t see, but you can hear, and sometimes we look at the moon from up there on our roof, which isn’t a roof but pointy rock. Our house is so snug, I call it our little home. The four women call it the Roca de la Mort. I understand enough Catalan to know that means the Rock of Death. One day I asked my little older brother, “Why is our house called the Roca de la Mort?”
He said, “Why are you called Eva?”
And I shrugged because nobody had ever told me. My mamá was named Elena, my papá was called Israel.
My little older brother said that nobody chooses their own name. “It’s called the Roca de la Mort because people call it that. Just like you call it our little home. Things are called what people call them.”
I told him, “If it’s just our house, only you and me can call it our little home.”
“Yes,” he said, “there are names that only some people can use.”
Like germà.
When we reached the coll—coll is “mountain pass” in Catalan and it is up above, far from our little patch of forest and our little home—we had to wait three days for them to open the border. I had never seen a border before. Waiting was more tiring than walking.
Later they told Papá that in the first French town they were separating children from their papás and we hid. We slept in a corral for two nights. Like hens. Like lambs. In the hay. And it smelled of manure but it was a good smell. Like food. In the corral, my sparrow brothers cried and cried because they wanted to go back home, “Please, Papá, please,” they would beg. And it snowed. And later a Frenchman came who walked with just one foot, like Juan. He came to help us. And he took us to a school. To a school in a French town. But in that French school nobody studied anymore, they just slept and waited. France was a very sad country. And then Papá and I got sick and they took us to the hospital again. The cold snuck into my chest, and Papá’s, like it was snowing in our hearts. And when I got better and woke up, because sometimes dying is getting better, I went back to the mountains. My papá, when he died, was so sad that he stayed in the hospital. It was a hospital for sad people. And Nono and Nona came to get Juan and Pedro, because they were orphans, and they took them back to town, just the way they wanted.
I went back to the forest alone because it was a tranquil and happy forest, on a happy mountain, for a happy little dove like me. Everything smelled really strong when I got here. And the animals buzzed really loud. All around, bzzz, bzzzz, honeybees and bumblebees and even bigger bees and flies and botflies and mosquitoes, like a party. And the grass was green and yellow, and the flowers were white and purple and blue and pink. The sky was very deep blue. The river was very cold. When we fled through this place you could barely see the river. Maybe it was scared, too, and hiding, and you could hear it only like a frightened whisper. But if you found it just once, and you saw it once, that was it. It was yours. I used to bathe in the river every day, and I still do, because the cold, cold water stabs like knives and makes the heart happy. I bathe in it every day, and every day the water is different. Sometimes the knives are bigger. Sometimes they’re thinner. And I play with the leeches and the little frogs, itty-bitty, teeny-weeny, and with the tadpoles and the water striders. There was no river in my town. My town was incredibly sad. And I dry off in the sun. And sometimes the fish fly. And sometimes the four women come to bathe and bring me blueberries. Those women are funny. When they see me they go, “Psssst, pssst,” like I’m a little animal. And I go, “Meowww, meowww,” and they laugh: “Cheeeeep, cheep, bowww wow,” and they clap and touch my hair and touch the stump of my leg. They are fun and happy, the women, but I didn’t want to live with them, I want to live alone and bathe in the river every day. And fish for trout. With still, blue hands. And suddenly, bam!, got the trout. Delicious trout from the happy river. And I send little boats out into the sea! Little boats made of twigs and grass, heading down the river, leaping over rocks and rapids. And I follow them along the bank, but never into the town with the pretty bridge. In town I once asked a man with a moustache who had built the river, and he said, “God.” Then I asked him who built the bridge, and he told me, “The dimoni.” The dimoni is the devil. And I told him, “Wow, the dimoni makes such pretty bridges. The devil should make all the bridges in Spain. Rebuild all the bridges our men wrecked.” And he looked at me with such a sad face, like he was saying, Shut up, kid, but he didn’t say anything. The little boats always beat me because with the crutches I run so slow. Now I have only one shoe and one sock. I used to wear two.
