Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda Page A

blacksmith’s son jumped from the rock, he grabbed the braid’s arm and stuck his face right up against hers and told her to leave me alone and hurry back to the village, the wisteria roots were upwrenching her house: two Caramens had come in the night to water them with the grass juice that makes them grow uncontrollably. The protruding eyes told him to stop plying them with stories and go back to the bed where he’d spent his whole life, where he should end it, and if his father was the leader of a group of people with stones for brains, her husband was a watchman, so the two men were about the same, maybe the watchman was a little better, he didn’t pester anyone. The braid jerked her hand away from the boy, said he was always looking for excuses to touch her, told him to watch out because, scrawny as he was, one slap from her and he’d be knocked to the ground, and she’d make him fall with such fury that his flimsy, marrowless legs would break into three pieces: two to plug his eyes and the third to stuff his mouth. They picked up their buckets and strode off together, but they turned round after a moment, and the braid stuck out her tongue at us, crying, so you think you’re as good as Senyor? Ha! My child was hugging the blacksmith’s son’s legs, telling him she wanted black night.

II
    The blacksmith’s son was five years younger than me. He had been frail since birth; the blacksmith’s wife, she of the purple cheek, said it was better that way. He had lived all his life shut away, lying in bed. Only in the last year had he been allowed to go wherever he wished. It wasn’t clear if he had lived in bed because he was ill or because his bones were soft. He would speak in a low, hoarse voice—like the prisoner’s—that rose from deep inside him. Sometimes he would stop talking when he tired and breathe deeply, a sort of music emerging from inside him. He had coarse, blonde hair, a bit darker at the back of his head. When he talked for a long time, the first two fingers on one hand would spread apart the fingers on the other, as if he wanted to tear loose the skin where the fingers joined. He always said he had learnt many things from lying in bed so much. So much time to think. The day I first took my child to the forest of the dead, he jumped out in front of me without my hearing him; he had never spoken to me before. He told me he had been following me for days because I had entered his house one night when all the village had gone to a funeral; ever since then my hand seemed to accompany him. He told me I had touched him. He said before I left I leaned over to look at him, but he didn’t know how to speak then; his tongue wasn’t strong enough to form words because he had been forced to grow without food, so that he would always be ill and not have to swim under the village, not when he was young or old. He wanted me to touch his arm, said it was like a corpse even though blood flowed through it, like a dead person’s arm because all the flesh had fled, everything that helped him to move it had vanished. Ever since the night he spoke to my child about souls—less than a year before—my child had loved him more than me. From the time she had the use of reason, she only wanted to be mine. The day he appeared before me in the forest, by surprise, without my hearing him, he told me he knew more things than I did because I had always been able to eat according to my appetite. He said he knew who turned the forest of the dead upside down, who played with the bones, and he never told anyone, but he asked me if one day I would open up a tree—he would help me—because he wanted to examine some leg bones, learn how knees bent in order to walk. My child was looking at a butterfly that had just been born; when the blacksmith’s son realized, he caught it and put it in my girl’s hand. She laughed and looked at him for a long time with quiet eyes. When we separated, she wanted to go with him instead of