Mercè Rodoreda - War, So Much War

We worked well into the night, first loading the wood and then unloading it. At dinnertime again I could hardly swallow a thing. An apple, and that was it. The cat wouldn’t let me. It jumped on my knees, crawled up my back, nibbled at my ears. What’s the matter, not feeling well? The fisherman sucked on his tobacco pipe and stared me in the eye. He had sun-wizened skin, three deep wrinkles that creased his forehead from side to side, kind eyes. He wore high, camel-colored boots, and what little shirt was visible under his sweater appeared to be silk. As the cat dozed on my lap, he started telling me about his life, though I didn’t much care to hear about it: He had two daughters whom he had not seen in years, he liked them better from afar because it allowed him to see them as he would have wished them to be. He had married young, and his bride was beautiful. I never fell out of love. The daughters we had are the spitting image of their mother. A year after our second was born, their mother died. All of my love — so much of it I hardly knew what to do with it — reverted to my daughters. I never took a step without their knowing. A rich man, I was able to provide everything they wanted and more. I strove to anticipate their every wish. They grew up, and I fell in love again. The girl was splendid, a springtime of joy, much younger than me. But the drama began when I introduced her to my daughters. They repudiated her. Our home became a battleground. And for them, I renounced what would have been my link to life. Until they were of an age to marry. You listening? They both married around the same time, to a couple of lowlifes who snatched them away from me. By that I mean they turned my daughters against me. They took them from their father. One day we were all together, and I don’t recall what I was saying, but I lost my train of thought when I realized they weren’t listening, so I stopped short. This happened on several occasions, until I realized they drew great satisfaction from seeing me lose my train of thought. His mind is deteriorating. I could almost hear them. I could just imagine them. And once his faculties become impaired, he will die, and we will be rich for the rest of our lives. I’ve always been one to give without waiting to be asked, and I wanted to put an end to that troubling situation, to that sordid state of affairs. Are you listening? I decided to sell everything I owned, properties, homes, farmhouses, arable lands, apartment buildings in the city. . I converted it all to cash and divided it into four parts: one for my eldest daughter, one for my other daughter, a third for charity, and the fourth for me. And I have shut myself away here, with my forest, my moonlit skies, my rivers and my lakes. . and with this cat that seems to have fallen in love with you. Off to bed now! If the lightbulb doesn’t work (sometimes the filaments burn out), you’ll find a candle and matches in the shed. Good night. The candle and the matches are on the first shelf of the medicine cabinet above the workbench.

ALTHOUGH THE LIGHT WORKED, I TOOK THE CANDLE AND MATCH-BOX and placed them on a crate next to the workbench. The cat had followed me and now sat by a heap of sawdust. My head was filled with thoughts, sullied by thoughts. It felt as though my brain had been turned inside out. I studied Eva’s picture for a long time, then tucked it under the pillow, neatly folded. I usually liked the smell of apples, but that day it was making me dizzy, and I cracked the door to let the smell escape. I stretched out on the bench with the light off. The pillows were soft, but I had the same problem I had encountered when I was napping: If I moved, the pillows separated. I was forced to lie as still as a corpse. I dozed off and then woke again. I couldn’t fall into a sound sleep. I had visions of the hearth, the red-winged flames curling up the chimney, licking the blackened bricks, the logs changing shapes, with the grill above them, and on the grill, smoking and weeping as they emptied themselves of lake water, the fish, all neatly lined up. I stretched out my arm and, grasping the box of matches, I sat up on the makeshift bed with my legs dangling. The flame from the first match rose high above the tiny stick and then inched downward in fits and starts, trembling, growing shorter, as the slender piece of wood turned black and started to coil, assuming the shape of a ringlet. I lit ten matches, and as the flame fluttered — white at the bottom, orange at the top — it occurred to me that one tiny flame such as that would suffice to set fire to an entire forest. The air would fan the flames, allowing them to spread their wings, lighting new flames, turning the whole forest into a resin-tinged scream which, after every speck of life had been set ablaze, would come to rest as quiet embers. But it was not the match or the flame that was foremost in my mind, it was Eva. The cat was no longer by the sawdust. A bird was pecking on wood. Pecking and pecking. The smell of apples escaped out the door and in poured the starlight and the scent of night. A beak was pecking on a piece of wood. Pecking and pecking. A beak pecked on a piece of wood. . I climbed down from the workbench and tripped on the crate. The night was glassy, littered with dead stars; the moon was high, bluer than the icy snow of the celestial cemetery. The grass was damp. The mountain — a black silhouette against the black gleam of night — beckoned. I started toward it down a path so smooth and even that I could not hear my own footsteps. I stopped by the pond to listen: The voice, coming from afar as though rising from the depths of the water, was so sweet that it made me want to drop to my knees. Who was I? I had no bones, no nerves, no will. The song was lulling me to sleep, quelling every thought. A beak was pecking on wood. Pecking and pecking. Standing by the shore, I looked into the water and saw the stars yearning to flee their own death and leap to some unknown part in their urge to streak the vault of the sky with tangled moonthreads, shrieking, frenzied. I knelt and was searching for a twig to toss into the water, when suddenly someone shoved me into the pond, and I was swallowed up like an olive. I coursed through the whirlpool as if I were in a gurgling sink that was being emptied, swallowing everything it could. I was spinning as I was being sucked under; I felt a drunken sort of dizziness, and yet I still had my senses about me. Then the downward spin seemed to stop and the water, rather than pull me down, was pushing me forward. I was dying. I opened and closed my hands as I tried to cling to something, but I found only slimy water that reeked of blood. A beak was pecking on wood. When I thought that everything had come to an end, my feet lodged somewhere and I found myself lying on a beach rocked by silent waves. I could not feel a thing, but I knew I had to rise, I could not lie there forever; if I wanted to save myself, I had to keep going. Someone seized me by the nape like a cat and set me down on my feet with the water up to my belly. I swayed a little to avoid losing my balance. It was as if I had just been born, I hardly knew how to walk. One step after the other. . one step after the other. . A tenuous voice embraced me. I found myself sinking only to rise again. . The water came up to my chest now. I finally reached a lacerated stone wall: I was edging closer to the song. The roof of the cave sang, the water sang. The song came from below, from above, from everywhere. I was enveloped by a cobweb voice that was like a thread spun by the Virgin Mary, showing me the path to follow. I stretched out an arm and felt a stone ridge. And in that instant there was a great commotion, as though a glass mountain had crumbled nearby. I glimpsed a distant light and that light drew me toward it. I felt, time and again, that it was almost at hand, and yet it stayed forever beyond my reach. I wanted to scream but could not, I wanted to run but could not. And then my nose caught, stronger than ever, the familiar scent of yellow roses, the kind that do not smell like red roses, but have the simple fragrance of dawn-fresh roses that have bloomed with great effort, earning their scent by their patience and finally able to share it: the scent from the rosebush at home that climbed all the way to the rooftop. The song, the rose. . none of it was real! Not the murmur of the water cascading down a horsetail-shaped waterfall, not the sharp ridges of the crumbling rock wall. But the light was drawing nearer, I was almost to it. . deep in the entrails of the earth, lost, never to find my way out. The walls gleamed, the rocks going up and the rocks going down gleamed. A moonbeam filtered through a crack near the ceiling and spilled onto a slab, upon which lay a girl. The most dream-like dream of all dreams! I approached the slab. The girl — I could see her clearly — naked as a lily, with violet eyes dappled with specks of gold, was Eva. Lying on the stone that was her bed, neither seeing nor breathing, she seemed to be made of ice. A hand of the palest white fell limply from the stone slab. I wanted to hold it, but as I tried to move closer I found that my feet were tied, and the more I strained, the tighter my ankles were griped by whatever it was that bound me. Until I jerked so furiously that everything shook and glass powder rained down on me. Someone was laughing at me. Someone I could not see was playing with my feelings, with my life, so that I would know that it was not my life, but had simply been loaned to me and was at that person’s disposal. If ever a boy had yearned to love a girl, that boy was I. To hold her hand in mine. . but I could not reach it. . A beast leapt from the ceiling and fell upon me. I lay half dead. When I came to, the shaft of moonlight fell far from the stone. I was holding a handful of bones — bones that had once been a hand. I released my grip, fearing they might break into tiny bits, and I heard myself muttering, poor bones, poor bones, as though trying to appease them, lest they attacked me. I had become deranged. I wished I were not me, I wished I were above rather than below, a tree hugging the earth, deeply rooted, with branches aloft, the sun overhead, blue skies overhead, the furious aliveness of the stars overhead. Snow rain frost. For the birds not to nest in my branches but to come and sing in them. My tresses of leaves tousled by the winds. . Who was licking my face? Someone was running a tongue over my cheek, again and again. I found it difficult to open my eyes. The cat’s face was next to mine. I was lying at the entrance to the toolshed, half in, half out, my feet caught in a rope that led to a tangled pile of ropes by one of the legs of the workbench.