When i sing mountains da.., p.8
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, page 8
The woman touches her and looks at her and says, “You are wide open and soon we’ll see the little head.” Blanca gets on all fours and breathes. The woman tells us, “Bring more rags and more water.” And we bring more rags and more water, and Blanca moans and grinds her teeth harder and harder and then all of a sudden she lets out a groan that starts with an aaaaah, an aaaaah deep inside, an aaaaah that’s soft and coarse and hurts to hear.
“Squat, hunker down, feet on the ground, like you are taking a shit,” says the woman, and Blanca lifts her knees and places her feet flat against the floor and then the woman adds, “It’s coming fast, I can already see the little head.”
“I’m scared,” says Blanca. And the woman says, “Don’t be scared,” and she says it confidently and severely and Blanca pushes. The woman kneels behind Blanca and stays there, with both hands beneath her womb. One arm in front, the other arm behind Blanca’s ass, round, white, and full. The woman has her hands at the font where life emerges, as if harvesting grapes, as if gathering handfuls of water, and then the little head comes out all at once. “Breathe, breathe,” she says, “now come the shoulders.” And she puts her hands around the baby’s neck, like a fish, still wrapped, all purple, and out come the shoulders. The woman supports its little back with her forearm, and its little butt—which comes out fast—with the other hand, and out come the legs, little and curled up, so perfectly formed. Blanca puts her hands back down on the ground, like a cow, and you are completely out now, and you take in air and you cry a big cry, and Blanca puts her hips down on the rock, on the blood and the blankets, with the dark, thick cord between her legs. You’re a girl! The woman places you on your mother’s swollen belly, between her breasts like two mountains. Your eyes are wrinkled and your hands are wrinkled and your hair is dark, and Blanca smiles a lot, with a laugh so very bright, and eyes so very bright, and skin so very bright, and with a girl like a dark butterfly at her breast. And then comes the placenta.
After you’d been born, Blanca, all foggy and tired, asks the woman, “What’s your name?” And she replies that her name is Sió, and that she’s very, very sleepy. She curls up in a corner and falls fast asleep. And she sleeps an entire day. She sleeps deeply and when she wakes we give her thyme soup and then she goes back to her home.
Three days later, when you are nursing like a little calf and Blanca waddles around like a plucked goose, she tells me: “Her hands were warm.”
And I don’t know what to say and she continues: “Her hands were warm like the folks in the towns, that woman who birthed the little calf.” (She named you Bruna but we all called you the little calf.) “She wasn’t hanged, that woman. She has a house with windows and lives in the towns.”
I put down the sock I’m knitting. Little booties for little footsies.
“Blanca, what makes you say that, now?”
You are glued to her breast, suckling and suckling, and Blanca looks at you as if in a dream and says to me: “She won’t come back. She was lost, she’d gotten lost. Alba helped her find her way home.”
I shake my head because I don’t like that, and we sleep the sleep of the restless for a few nights because you cry so much, and because we imagine them, the folks in the towns, coming, cornering us.
THE SNOW
I get out of the car and the dog greets me and I knock on the door and ask to come in and once I’m sitting at the kitchen table I blurt out: “I tried to tell your mother and she didn’t like it. But now that Sió’s dead, I’ll say it to you, Mia. You’ve got somebody in this house.”
She looks at me calmly. “Is it somebody dead?”
“What’s left of ’em,” I say.
“With bad intentions?”
“Better out of the house than in.”
“Like all animals,” she says. “Is it my father?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it blind?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it Hilari?”
I don’t know if it’s Hilari.
“Can I think about it?” she asks.
I don’t go into Matavaques if I can help it. I avoid looking at its windows. I look at the garden and the vegetable patch and the ridge on the other side. When I sense it, I imagine a man. But it isn’t a man. I imagine a man so I’ll feel a little less afraid. An angry man. Violent and out of control, with the dark certainty of strength. Pouting, like a child. Hidden in a corner. Steeped in the poison of his own failure. Incubating rage and waiting like a brooding hen whose eggs have been stolen.
It used to really snow. It snowed so much that it rose up like prison walls along the roadsides. Like labyrinths. Like castles. Kids would grab sacks and slide down the slopes without sleds. Their butts on the sacks, on the snow. You would hear them laughing and shouting over the absolute silence of the mountains after a snowfall. As if everything, trees and beasts, had been struck dumb by shock. By the blinding whiteness. Snow like a white hand covering their mouths. Kids celebrating. Because you can’t control snow, sort of like death. It comes when it wants to and changes everything. The weatherman Tomàs Molina says it will snow. Today. I say it won’t. I can tell when it’s about to snow, because the light is white. When it’s about to rain the light is gray, silvery. You start to see the gray light and the white light almost a day before. Depending on their intensity, you know how soon it will rain or snow.
My grandmother used to seek out water with iron rods, like two Ls, and her father knew when it was going to rain, and people—who were generally not fond of my great-grandfather because they said he was scary—would come to see him and ask him when to plant their crops. One day when we were gathering brushwood with my grandmother, I asked her what the cascades were. I had always seen them, the cascades, hanging in the middle of the sky, like the clouds. Some of them thicker, some of them skinnier, of a transparent, lovely, muffled blue like the river. My grandmother looked up at the patch of sky I was pointing to and exclaimed: “Oh, dear lord, my girl. What’ve we done to you.” And she said no more. My grandmother was named Dolors. Nana Dolors didn’t say that beneath the cascades there are wells and underground rivers. She didn’t say that the cascades signal water, and that only she, me, and my great-grandpa could see them. That was how she found water. And she didn’t say that those who see cascades see other stuff. But not with their eyes. With their bellies. With each and every one of the hairs on their arms and on the napes of their necks, and with their livers and their lungs and their hearts and their bile and in all the parts of the body that feel fear and grief. And she didn’t say a word about the darkness in the corners. Not a word about the things that are so sad they’re like a slap in the face. Not a word about the things you must never do under any circumstances. Or about the ones that die and don’t leave. Or about the holes where the earth breathes. Or about the balance.
Sometimes my husband jokingly calls me the Snow Queen. Because my name is Neus, which means “snow.” And I always know when it’s going to snow. I call my husband Agustí, which is the name his mother gave him, but everybody else calls him the Bailiff. Except for our daughters, who call him Papa. In the story of the Snow Queen, she had a mirror. A mirror that, when you looked into it, would reflect back only sad and bad things. Once some trolls were carrying the mirror to the Winter Palace and it slipped away from them and fell and shattered into a thousand pieces. And those thousand pieces scattered everywhere. They got into some people’s eyes, and then everything those people saw was sad and ugly. And they got into some people’s hearts, and they could feel only bitterness and grief. And a shard of the mirror got stuck in one of my eyes, and I see some sadnesses, I see where a person’s been hurt, and I sense the dead who are stuck in this world. And if I have the strength, if I have the energy, or if they get too close to people I care about, I tell them to go.
The telephone rings. It’s Mia. “Neus,” she says, “get it out of the house.” I tell her I can come over tomorrow. On Mondays Mia and my daughter Cristina go out walking. “Let’s do it during the day,” I say. She says she can make lunch for me, I say there’s no need. “I’ll come at ten. You’ll have to wait outside.” And I think about Tomàs Molina saying it’ll snow.
The next day the sky is like the belly of a table, low and flat and gray. When Domènec died and Sió was left alone, I would visit her every week. I wasn’t even married at the time. I would bring her green beans, or zucchini, or anything that provided an excuse to pay her a visit. And years later, when Sió lost her marbles, I came by often too. But not often enough. It’s never enough. If I did have to go into the house, I would keep to the kitchen. The kitchen is a good kitchen. Or if I could, I’d keep to the threshing floor, out front, where the sun beat down hard and hot. Our patch of mountain has its own microclimate.
When I get to Matavaques, Mia comes out with her dog.
“Do you need anything?” she asks me.
I don’t need anything.
I go in. The house waits for me in silence. Surprised. Expectant. It is an old house but not very large, for tenant farmers or shepherds. The entrance sits over three steps like three teeth. It’s a small entrance, with rough walls and unmatched floor tiles. The coatrack and the shoe rack. A streaky wooden built-in closet. A solid table with a tray of keys and papers and letters. The kitchen is to the left, with white tiles that occasionally sprout a blue flower. The sink is of pink marble, there’s a window with embroidered curtains and an old rack shelf that displays the dishes, all white. A sturdy table, dark and polished and gleaming from years of use, and a bench that must be quite old, with linen cushions, and a vase with dried flowers, and small chairs and a television. Mia is good about maintaining her furniture. Saving unsavable things. And the house is neat and welcoming. Not like our house, always messy. Everything all over, that man of mine and those grandkids of mine.
The stovetop area is new. With a vent made of wood, but you can tell this is wood that’s never lived in a forest, that was cut and polished by soulless machines. The fireplace is lit. It’s an old hearth. Built into the floor of the house, set into the walls. White, edged in wood, and a tiled chimney black with soot. A good kitchen. There’s a separate walk-in pantry with doors, I’ve never been inside. To the right of the entryway is the room where Mia sleeps, which, if I’m not mistaken, was Grandpa Ton’s. I go in there to nose around, because I know nothing’s in there. It’s pretty. Yellow walls. Two tall windows. A hope chest and a dresser and a wardrobe, big and solid, with a simple border carved into the wood. A small mirror with a porcelain basin. A chair covered in clothes clean enough to wear again. A bedside table with more dried flowers and Vicks VapoRub and medicines and a small lamp and a white radio and a photo of Mia and Hilari from when they probably weren’t even twenty years old. And books. Toni Morrison. Marta Rojals. Stieg Larsson. With the Bookmobile library bus sticker. She has a little brown mat beside the bed, which must be where Lluna sleeps. Her bed has a headboard and feet of dark wood. It’s a warm bedroom.
Nana Dolors’s father, my great-grandfather, would sometimes take someone aside and tell them: “Say goodbye because you’re going to die.” That was why people were afraid of him. Because a few days later, whoever it was he had singled out really would die. And when they saw my great-grandfather coming, people started to tremble. The man didn’t have an easy time of it. He had a murder of crows circling over his head. You can’t go around saying things like that. Not even if you see them. Not even if you know them. Not even if you know them with the same certainty you know that the sun will come up in the east. That’s what my grandmother would tell me. Ssssh and buttoned lips. Buttoned so tightly that she never explained anything to me, not what she saw or what she did or how she did it. There was only one thing my grandmother would tell me. “The dead are dead. Don’t touch them, my girl, and don’t talk to them.”
It’s time. The problem is upstairs. I go over to the wood staircase with coffee bean tiles. It’s upstairs and already waiting for me. Expectant and unhappy. Gooseflesh rises at my tailbone, then spreads up my whole back. I begin slowly. Calm. As I go up the steps. Like a mother. Like a grandmother. Sometimes these things have never had a mother or a grandmother. I nicely tell it that it has to leave. I tell it that this isn’t its house. This isn’t its house anymore. It’s okay. I explain why this is no place for it anymore. “You no longer belong here,” I tell it. “You have to go. You have to find the path.” Its grief and rage weigh heavy in my stomach. In my liver. It approaches and clings to me and sticks into me like a thick, rusty hook. It gets mad. It gets really mad. Full of rage. Full of black juice. All my hairs stand on end, like quills, like needles. And then it starts. Bastard. It doesn’t speak. They don’t speak. They don’t speak in any way I can understand. They have no words they can use. They only have all that pain, all that hatred, all that dirty water.
I don’t lose my temper. I again insist that it must leave. You can’t lose your temper with these things. You can’t fly off the handle. It’s terrible if you do. When you fly off the handle, bad things happen. They win. They cause harm. So. “This is not your house. This is not your house. It’s not your house anymore. Out. Begone. Find the path. This is no longer your place, this is no place for you, not anymore.”
Sometimes you can get rid of them, these things. Some of them are people. Others, I don’t know what they are. Some things can’t be understood. I don’t know where they go when they leave. I don’t know if there’s something beyond. I don’t know anything. But you can get rid of some of them. You can comfort them like a baby. You can calm them down. You can explain to them what must be explained to them. And after hours, once they are small and docile and calm, they leave.
Some you can’t get rid of. There are really big things in this world. Really bad things, and all you can do is battle night and day to get them to leave, to curl up and hide elsewhere. So they come out of where they’re stuck and rotting, and go do it some other place.
I go into the bedroom at the top of the stairs. It’s a master bedroom. Worn wooden floor. Large, old, tall bed with a gilded headboard painted with a Virgin Mary, and a chubby baby Jesus, who’s already a toddler, and a sheep, and a Saint Joseph. I think this must be Sió’s bedroom. And before that, it would have been Sió and Domènec’s bedroom. Mia doesn’t use it now. It smells of bags of herbs for the linens and of the liquid used to kill woodworms.
I stretch out on the bed, which is hard and has a yellowed white bedspread. I put my hands on my belly and close my eyes. It squirms inside me like a snake. Nasty thing. But I tell it what I have to say. Without losing control. Severe. Deathly afraid. I talk and talk and talk and repeat the same things over and over. “Out. Out. Leave. Leave.”
But when I open my eyes, it’s before me. Horrifying. Completely dark and with two immense, elongated white eyes. I don’t move. Its face draws close to me, it’s not a face at all. Mouth like a hole. I would scream but the scream is stuck in me like a bone swallowed down the wrong pipe. It’d do me no good to scream. It’s not here, I tell myself. It’s not here. And it looks at me impassively. It’s not here. It’s a child yawning with that mouth. A sleepy child with those eyes. A monster. With that gaze, terrible as all the pain in the world. Those frenzied eyes. “Out. Out. Leave. Out. This is not your house. This is not your house. This is not your house. Out. Out. Out.”
And then it leaves.
I get off the bed. My feet feel so heavy, and my legs and my knees. Getting old, Neus. I go to the door and I lean on the frame. I look back at the bed. I look in the stair closet, but it’s not there. It’s not in the bathroom either. I go downstairs. Nothing in the kitchen. Nothing in the entryway. Nothing in the bedroom. I concentrate and listen. It’s not there.
I pull myself together in the entryway and I go out.
“Would you like a coffee or something?” asks Mia.
It’s drizzling.
“No,” I say, “I’m tired, I’m going home.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“Did the dog go upstairs?” I ask.
“Not much.”
“Do you want me to tell you where it was?”
“No,” she answers without hesitating.
I nod. Some of those things like stairs.
“Goodbye, Mia.”
When Sió lost her marbles, my husband said that sometimes, to survive, you have to throw dirt on the memories, but those who’ve suffered too much always throw on too much dirt. Agustí thinks a lot about our town history. He searches for the why behind things. Analyzes it. That’s his way of finding peace. Understanding things, people. But not everything can be understood, my dear.
I get into the car. Drops small as needles fall onto the glass. That’s not snow, Tomàs Molina. I wave goodbye to Mia, she goes into the house, and I drive off. I grip the steering wheel hard and shift into second and the seat is soft and comfy. It smells like that pine air freshener Agustí buys. The road isn’t paved, and the car bounces. The mountain slope is to my left. There’s a guy walking in the middle of the road, with dark hair and a cane. I slow down. Who takes a walk on this road in this weather? I think. Who is he? He’s going to see Mia. He’s young. And then we cross paths. But as I pass him, I turn my face away from him, downward, toward the mountain and the river. I turn it abruptly, quick as a flash, and I’m sorry not to say hi, but I just can’t. I’m tired. I don’t want to see them, all the shadows and all the sad things clinging to his jacket.
FEAR
“I could be your mother,” she says. And another day she’ll say, “I’m not your mother.” Separated by all the things that happen in between. And inside me all the things that don’t make sense somehow do, and all the things that should make sense no longer do. Because if she’d had me at nineteen, or eighteen, I don’t know, but I suppose I can imagine it, she could be my mother. But she never will be my mother, not even if she wanted to and I wanted her to, but I don’t want that and neither does she. Sometimes I’m just as I once was. Other times it’s like the person I used to be never existed, as if he’d slipped out through the hole in my head, and the only thing left is black fear, and the things heavy around my neck. And I can’t stop looking at the darkness of my one eye that can no longer see and getting upset, and thinking I’ll never be who I was, and that they didn’t kill me but they did ruin me for the rest of my days. And thinking that someday I’ll have to die again, and it’s so scary, dying. I should have died then so I wouldn’t have to face it again. Then I wouldn’t have learned fear. Because there are things you don’t ever want to learn, that you shouldn’t ever learn, and you end up learning them forever. And you can’t do anything, you can’t want anything, you can’t feel anything, not with all that fear. You can’t go back to being who you once were, before you learned fear. Once fear gets you, that’s it, it’s over. And then you have to take the pills, and try to sleep, and you have to do it again the next day, and the one after that.
