When i sing mountains da.., p.7
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, page 7
I’m not the only one who returned to the forest. There are always souls passing through on the route we took to France. Every day, that same little stretch. Their belongings on their backs, their faces grim. I used to tell them they should come swim in the river, that there’s no war in the mountains, that wars end but the mountains never do, that the mountains are older than war, and wiser than war, that once you’re dead they can’t kill you again. But they didn’t want to swim. My brother calls them the Republicans. The Republicans are like me.
One day when I got to the river, my brother was bathing. It was my first time seeing him. There are two pools in the river that are mine. One is close by, the other is far off. The first one is always in the shade. But it’s deep and you can jump from the rocks and the river comes down fast and you can make little boats and move rocks to make dams. The water is always cold. On the other side there’s a meadow where sometimes the roe-deer graze. There are always tadpoles in that pool, and you can reach it by going down a steep slope. It’s so steep that no grass grows on it, only oaks and fir trees and stinging nettles. Or you can go the long way around, through the meadows, crossing streams and boar dens. Depends on how much of a rush you’re in. I slide down the steep slope on my backside, using my crutches to push away the nettles and avoid the trees.
The second swimming hole is farther off. You have to keep walking for a long time after you pass the first pool. The second one is always sunny. And the water is calmer and there are flying fish and it’s better for fishing. It’s not as deep but there is more room for swimming, and the water is more still. I don’t know how to swim but I’m teaching myself. You can reach the pool from the top of a hill, and there are rocks. I throw my crutches onto the rocks, and sometimes they fall into the water and then I wriggle down like a lizard. Once I fell straight into the water but it didn’t hurt. I bathe naked because I’m not ashamed. And because nobody’s watching me. And because the women who say, “Pssst, pssst,” and the other women in the cave also bathe naked and nobody’s ashamed. I wish I could’ve seen my mamá’s thighs and breasts. My mamá was a happy mamá. The day I met my sweet Hilari, he was bathing. Belly up, with his eyes closed, his face smiling and his little willy floating. His willy was like Juan’s and Pedro’s, but hairy. And his skin was incredibly white and shiny like a fish’s. I wasn’t scared. But I had never seen a man in the river before. It was just the women and me. Maybe the men were all too sad to swim.
“Hey!” I said to him. “Hey, you!” And he stood up. “This is my pool!” Like when the older boys would take the rocks Juan and Pedro were playing with. Hey, you, dum-dum, give him back his rock. The man came out of the water and sat down on the bank. At first I didn’t want to take off my clothes or get into the river; I wanted to stay like a guard dog watching over the water. But then I thought, It’s my pool, I can do what I want, so I took off my clothes and jumped in. And he stood naked on one bank, with his butt and thighs all muddy. And when I turned around suddenly, I saw that he’d stuck his big toe into the river, and I told him, “You can get in if you want, but it’s still my pool.” He got in. And after swimming, he stayed. His name was Hilari and he didn’t want to be alone. He knew a lot of things about the mountains because he has always lived here, and he knew poems, stories, and songs. I was happy living alone in the forest. I liked the forest and the occasional company of the women and the roe-deer and the rabbits. Then I found my sweet brother bathing in my pool and he came to live with me. I introduced him to the women one day, and I told him, “You have to make animal noises,” and he went, “Mooooooo, moooooooo,” like a cow, and the women liked that and after that they would always wave to us from a distance and sometimes they gave us fruit, and if we caught a lot of trout, we’d give them some fish. And I showed him the other women in the cave, and he said he’d seen them before, and I told him that he shouldn’t bother them and he said fine.
Today my brother wakes me up and tells me he has something to show me. “Run, Palomita, run, has de veure una cosa, you have to see this!” I grab my crutches quickly and scoot my way out of the cave. Our little home is rather high up. To get out, I grab my crutches, throw them onto the ground outside, which is always soft with grass and leaves, and then I slip down the rock like it’s a slide. I’m a grasshopper with just one leg, who never gets hurt. To get into our little home, I grab my crutches and throw them inside. Clank, clank, they bang against the walls and floor. Then I grab the rocks that have bumps and ears to grab on to, and with my belly glued to the rock face, like a frog, I dangle from my hands. My arms are very strong. And then I hop with my leg and anchor it on the rock, and when I’ve got my bearings, I put my hands a little higher up, near the curve of the mouth of our little home, and another hop, and by then my hands are already gripping the cozy floor where we sleep, and another hop, and with my elbows on the ground, I push my belly and I’m in. I don’t need anyone’s help. Except when I’m really tired, then I let my brother carry me in his arms.
The early morning is fresh and the sun is warm. My brother waits in the bushes while I leave the house, and then runs in front of me and stops every once in a while so I can catch up. He turns and looks at me and then looks up at the sky and then continues on.
“Darling little Palomita,” he says in a whisper, “bona companyia, such good company.” When my brother puts his hand on the back of my neck, it’s like he’s holding out his hand for me to walk with him. Sometimes, with his hand on my nape, he recites poetry. Or he tells me things about the pica-soques, the nuthatches. “Pica-soques, pica-soques, pica-soques pica bé,” he sings. Hilari is my older brother, but he’s an itty-bitty older brother who says, “Palomita, look. Palomita, come. Palomita, you have to see this. Palomita, will you keep me company?”
Now he says, “Palomita, you can’t make any noise.”
I can be very, very quiet. My crutches grip the ground in silence, like bird legs.
“We’re getting close,” he whispers.
We walk through the trees and the bushes, along the slope, beneath the branches. And he says, “Sssssh, ssssh, veus? You see it?”
I can’t see a thing.
“Over there,” he says. “Over there.”
I see brown leaves, and yellow leaves, and green leaves, and gray and brown and green trunks, and there it is, I see it now! For the first time ever. A man like a dog. Like a crazy man who lived in my town, who would call women whores and bitches. With long, dirty hair and twisted fingernails. He is skinny and crouching and naked and we can see his whole backside. It’s dirty. His head is on the ground. We get a little closer. He’s eating grass. And then he sticks his face into the black earth and eats dirt. Grass with dirt. Roots. Worms.
“That man is my father,” says my sweet brother.
My father was called Israel. My mamá, Elena.
“What’s your father’s name?” I ask.
“Domènec,” he answers.
And I don’t bring up the fact that his papá is eating dirt, because he can see that for himself.
III
CRUNCH
Don’t come looking for me. Blind as I am. Immense as they made me. Deaf, from my ear-shattering birth. You have no need for my voice nor for my perspective. Leave me be.
My slumber is so deep that it slips beneath the seas. The sea used to cover me, millennia ago, I can scarcely recall. Blind and deaf and sleeping as I am. Out, out. Grow, mosses. Reproduce, wee beasties, the pitter-patter of your tiny feet rocks me to sleep, the creeping of your roots consoles me. Nothing lasts very long. Not a thing. Not stillness. Nor calamity. Nor the sea. Nor your ugly little children. Nor the earth that tolerates your puny little feet.
Oh, to think of that woeful crunch, the impact.
The terrible awakening.
If I made the effort to evoke the deafening crunch. The incandescent, red, uncontrollable depth. If I recollect the slow, terrible crash, the annihilating blind violence, the jerking and the earthquakes, the columns of smoke and dust, the tearing deep into the hot liquid rock.
If I thought about how we hurled your little tiny feet. How we tore out your roots, clinging miserably to clumps of earth. How we destroyed your house, how it was never the same again. If I thought back to how you died. How all of you died, you who didn’t fly, you who didn’t run, you who were too fat, too heavy, too dumb, too weak.
How you all died, while we took off. Up, up into the air. Tons upon tons of rock and earth, granite, gneiss, and calcite. Up to the heavens we rose from the depths. With all the tenacity, all the patience, the slowness, the destruction. The dark surge lifted us into the air, the brute strength sent us up, the rock coiled, the earth piled upon itself, heaped up, folded, burst.
Now leave me be, let me sleep in peace, rootless broods, rambling weeds, piddling storms, sad trees. More of you came, more always come. To make nests and to make dens and to stomp your hooves. To make green shoots grow from split trees. And my rock faces and my peaks and my crests were new lairs for you, my poor, miserable wretches.
Come here, come, I shall give you a stretch of my back so you can build a house there.
But don’t make me speak another word. Silence. Enough.
Don’t make me tell you what will happen then, once you have all sunk your roots deep down into me, when your burrow is nice and comfy, loyal, and good to you, when you’ve guzzled my fresh water, when you’ve closed your little eyes, and you’ve named your offspring. Then a boom of blind violence will thunder down, much older than I, much more infinite than I, much less merciful than I. And it will exert new forces.
The continents will curl up over their foundations. The rock walls will grind with the blows, the sky will suddenly darken, the rivers of lava will flow, setting everything aflame, the sea will make way, and everything will shake as the volcanoes erupt and the air fills with smoke and ash. The mountains we’d been, the houses and the dens and the lairs and the terraces and the crests we had been, shall cease to be. And our peaks will become valleys and plains, and our ruins, our remains, will become tons of rubble sinking into the sea, new mountains.
The movement will have begun again. The disaster. The next beginning. The nth end. And you will all die. Because nothing lasts long. And no one remembers the names of your children.
BIRTHING BABIES
All their stories are lies. Listen to me. All the stories they tell. The ones that say we are evil. Lies. The ones that say we are good and beautiful as silver and that all the men become mesmerized and throw themselves into the pools. Lies. Those that say we are a mysterious mystery, lies. Most men are liars. The men who invent stories and those who tell them. The ones who cut us out, who collect us and force us inside words, so we are the story they want to tell, with the moral they want to explain. Cut out and shrunk down to fit into their little tiny heads. Tiny and dumb, but not any less evil.
Blanca, your mother, waddled like a goose and went here and there, belly growing ever bigger. Her abdomen was full and hard like a drum, and her breasts had swelled and would soon have milk. Like magic. Like true magic, because a whole baby would come out of her vulva, with all its finger- and toenails, and little eyes and tongue, and that baby would be you. A pretty little crybaby, because in every mother’s eyes her baby is pretty, but you were truly pretty.
Blanca, your mother, wanted company. Before. And she went to find a man. And she found one. She found a strong man who worked the fields, with such big hands at the ready, who had skin dark as night and black-and-yellow eyes because he’d seen sad things and lived far from the country where he’d been born. And they loved each other in the evenings, Blanca and your father, always beneath the trees and atop the grass. Blanca would put her hands on his chest, and he would say, in another tongue, “Look, like a butterfly.” But Blanca didn’t want to save any man, after so many years of wanting to save men. She didn’t want to bring him home. She wanted only his seed, to bear a girl, brown as a chestnut. Filled with laughter and ideas. Truly lovely, because she was made of meat. Yummy, juicy meat! Not all white and silvery like a lily. No. She was made of real flesh. The kind you can sink your teeth into! Grrrarr.
Lots of animals give birth at night. The mares won’t if you’re looking at them, to protect the filly from your eyes and your intentions. But Blanca went into labor in the morning. One spring morning that dawned cold. You remained still, inside her, ready, and her whole belly squirmed in a shuddering spasm. “The baby’s coming,” she said. And we sat her down in the back of the cave, on the blankets and sheets, and she couldn’t get cool. And then out came the brown plug, and water and water and water from inside her, as if her vulva were a spring. And you, you couldn’t swim anymore, you were almost here, and Alba and Flora ran off to find the women who know about birthing babies.
I stay with Blanca, and I tell her to breathe with the contractions, and I hold her hands when she can stand to be touched. And I give her an infusion of thyme. And I put more water on to boil and I prepare more blankets, and Blanca moans on and off, and then, her head all fuzzy, she says, “I’m fine, I’m happy, I am. Now we’ll have a little baby to play with.”
The sun reaches its midmorning height and Blanca is crawling. And she squats and breathes heavy and moves her hips from side to side, and she says, “It hurts more and more, coming faster now,” and I tell her, “Breathe, breathe, Blanca,” and I remember the other times. The times I carried babies inside me. Three, like three stars. And I tell her, “Don’t you remember, Blanca, don’t you remember the last time you had a baby in your womb?” And Blanca says, “You forget the pain so fast …” And she smiles a little and then she goes, “Aiiish …” and lays her palms flat on the ground.
“My little ones had hair like wet hay,” I tell her. “And the man who’s nameless now because I erased him when he raised a hand to me and said, ‘What was I thinking, marrying a water sprite!’ and then he brought it down, hard, against my head and my cheeks and my chest. That man said that children belong to their fathers, not their mothers. And I said no. I said I’d carried them inside me all that time, and they were made of me, and they’d come out of me, they’d cracked me open like an egg that could never be closed again. And he shouted, ‘Shut up, shut up, you just shut up, you whore, you stupid vessel.’ I told him my children would be like birds and they wouldn’t love him. He threatened me, saying that if I ever came back, he would kill all three of them. But my children grew and like birds they flew from him. This baby will be ours,” I tell her.
And then Alba and Flora arrived with a woman who knew about birthing babies. There are always four of those women. And they all have white hair. There’s the one in charge, her name’s Joana and she wears her long hair messy, and her face is severe and she doesn’t speak, but her eyes are full of the things she knows. There’s the one who’s always laughing, she’s named Dolceta and she wears her hair in braids, and she’s Blanca’s friend because they both like to joke and laugh. Then there’s Margarida, who’s always crying. And Eulàlia, who tells us stories. She tells us stories we love because they’re never in the voice or through the eyes of those men who write the bad stories.
The women who know how to birth babies live in the forest, but I’ve never been to the cave where they sleep. Eulàlia told me one day that it wasn’t like our cave, that it was a bandits’ cave. But maybe that was a riddle.
The woman they bring today has short white hair, and wears a purple robe with a sash. Alba leads her, and Flora brings up the rear, and the woman follows them, nimble and calm as a rabbit.
Her face is candid and attentive. She enters the cave and Blanca opens her arms as if she were a little girl who wanted to be picked up.
“Here she is, this is her,” says Alba, and the woman approaches Blanca, takes her by the hands, and says, in a whisper, “We’re animals and we know how to give birth. It comes naturally to us. People are animals, too, and sometimes we forget that. Just listen to the baby and listen to the pain. Hold tight to the rock,” she tells her. “Breathe,” she tells her.
And Blanca turns herself over to the woman as if she were a mother. Then Blanca takes off her clothes.
“That’s it, that’s it,” says the woman. “Naked, like the animals. What’s your name, little beastie?” she asks.
And Blanca says her name. “Where did you learn about birthing babies?” she asks her, moaning.
“Helping cows give birth,” says the woman. “And I had two children,” she says. “The first one like a stubborn stalk, wouldn’t come, wouldn’t come out. Second one like a frog, hopped right out on his own.”
She feels Blanca’s belly.
“It’s coming face-first,” she says. “Calves lead with their legs.”
Blanca doesn’t scream, she stops breathing, grips the wall, and moans from deep inside, a long, painful moan, her face sopping wet and her hair stuck to her head and her hands all white from clenching the stone face.
