Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda Page B

coming home with me. One night he explained to her all about souls, described what they did. After that they were inseparable. I heard him telling her. One evening when we had gone to see the prisoner, my child wandered off without our realizing; a while later the blacksmith’s son got up to look for her, saying he would bring her back. They had been gone for a long time, so I went in search of them and found them at Pedres Altes. He was stretched out on top of the sundial, my child sitting on his chest, her feet on his neck, sometimes putting her foot in his mouth to make him be quiet. I listened from behind a large rock as the blacksmith’s son explained to her that all souls went to the moon. Souls went to the moon. I watched them. My child’s mouth was agape, and the blacksmith’s son placed a finger inside her mouth and told her again that all souls went to the moon. All the ones that emerged from an uncemented mouth, because the ones that had lived inside people whose mouths were cemented couldn’t escape. He said it wasn’t exactly that souls could fly, but if they took a big leap, they were able to soar upward. He said they departed one at a time, sometimes joining up with others, like soap bubbles often do if you blow them one after the other. Occasionally, he said, they would catch the cloud cart pulled by the oldest souls, just like horses. They would go up and down, faster than mourners, and no one knows this—just like no one knows when the white birds fly away—but when they can no longer see the earth, it means they’re approaching the moon. My child asked him what souls were like, and he told her there was no real way of knowing, and she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, he would tell only her—if it was even possible to explain. They were like a breath, a luminous breath in dark night. They fly up, he told her, and when they get close to the moon they go half mad with joy, like the birds when they fly down from the mountain, but just the opposite, because souls fly up. And they are so happy they don’t know what they are doing, and they jump into the moon, and those that haven’t got up enough speed—because they’re tired, the voyage lasts a thousand years—fall back to earth. Some have time to grab onto an edge of the moon, and if they are strong enough, they remain there, and if not, they tumble down, and it’s as if they had never even started their ascent. The ones that fly round and round on Maraldina are the ones that are waiting, or the ones that have fallen. He told her that on the moon there were patches of white grass, the most tender of all grasses—more tender than anything that could possibly be tender—because it was always half-grown. The best souls—that’s when my child told him to be quiet—the best souls reach the center of the moon, not the edges, and they bore through it as if it were made of fog, and the souls that are waiting for them see them bounding up from the earth like a new sprout. Then he told her, yes he did, he told her that the oldest souls could eat the grass; they ate it through a horn in the middle of what had been their forehead . . . all of them aslant, eating grass . . . all of them, he told her, all of them aslant, eating grass in the pastures until they come to the river that goes round and round, no beginning, no ending, the river’s mouth biting its tail. The ones that want to drink water drink water, and as soon as they’ve drunk they don’t remember a thing. Not about you, not about me. Not about anything. The little they have inside them dies. If they suffered hunger, they don’t remember what it means to be hungry; if they slept very little, they don’t remember what it means to sleep. At first they’re calm when they don’t remember a thing, but soon they begin to feel uneasy; they don’t know what it is, and no one explains to them why they feel like that . . . my child put her feet in his mouth and fell backwards, and he leaned up