for Leda, my daughter
The qualities of the solitary bird are five:
The first, that it flies to the highest point;
The second, that it does not suffer company,
not even of its own kind;
The third, that it holds its beak windward;
The fourth, that it has no specific color;
The fifth, that it sings ever so gently.
San Juan De La Cruz,
tr. Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez
Blackbird fly. Blackbird fly
Into the light of a dark black night.
Lennon / McCartney
I was born in a country place, in the high mountains. Among cliffs and crags. In a house with a floor of beaten earth, whitewashed walls and mist for a roof. A big house—with a brick-paved patio and a yard with a bitter-orange grove and a fig tree—situated on the edge of a town of fiends, knife-wielders and goatherds.
A slate-colored river bounded the town to the south, and to the north, within cracked earth walls, the cemetery. To the west, a scraggly wood of stunted bushes, twining boughs and trunks as black as coal. The sun came up from the rocky gaps in the mountains to the east.
I loved the river and I let it carry me away on its current. In its quiet pools I floated like a dry leaf, and I felt a dizziness akin to death when I spun like a humming-top in a whirlpool.
I grew up among goats, alders and cowherds, coming and going on the paths through the maize fields, riding my bamboo pony, sleeping in the sun and dreaming of hawks. Lying on a slab of ashen stone, I observed the summer grass, held my ear to the burnt ground and thought I heard the noise of battle: neighing and swearing, clashing of swords and the roar of a warrior with his throat cut.
When the rains came, my heart went wild. I devoted myself then to my favorite game, which consisted of hopping from puddle to puddle like a toad. Soaked through and with mud on my cheeks, I went back to the house at night and with the appetite of an ox devoured my ration of black bread, warm milk, cheese and honey. Then I retired to my room and in my toad’s mask challenged a dragon in my dreams.
Wild dogs were my best friends, my allies. They howled beneath the full moon, and even in my sleep I heard their call. I woke, left my warm bed behind and slipped out of the window. Beyond the boundary of the little wood, the dogs were waiting for me. They greeted my arrival with fresh howls; they danced on their hind legs, and some of them were straining to keep their balance, since their bodies were heavy and their movements lacked grace. All the same, the overall effect was harmonious, and it filled me personally with contentment to watch those dancing shadows thrown on the whey-colored grass. What kind of music sounded in their ears as they danced gleefully round and round me? They whirled and whirled until they were exhausted. Then they lay down at my feet and looked at me with meek eyes. And I, the king of the pack, let out my desert wolf’s howl and danced for them the jaguar’s dance. I improvised jumps and pirouettes, bold contortions and daring somersaults, that in daylight and in the presence of less noble creatures I would have been incapable of repeating. My allies barked for joy. Sometimes they treated me to a mouthful of calf meat—which I chewed with relish, dwelling on each nuance of taste, remembering it, so that even after a week had passed the slightly sweet taste of fresh blood remained on my tongue. On other occasions it was I who shared with my comrades a smoked leg of lamb or a plucked hen. The crowing of the first roosters was the signal for us to separate. I turned my steps toward the town and the dogs moved off in slow procession toward their lairs on the mountainside.
Set down in the middle of the river was a huge stone, which glittered in the afternoon light with blue reflections like cobalt. Perhaps it was black or simply grey, but in my memory it burns with that elemental color. A narrow vein of quartz divided it in two; seen from a distance it looked as if a ribbon of mist was holding it to the sandy riverbed. I climbed up on its rounded back and talked to it. No, I wasn’t talking to myself; I was talking to it, the stone. In a low voice, as if I was afraid the river would snatch my words away, I whispered my secrets to it. I wasn’t expecting answers; I never asked it any questions. I only confided my dreams to it, my daydreams, and I knew without a doubt that it was listening to me. I told it the bitter episodes of my struggle with the dragon. It also heard about my journeys with Sinbad and my adventures in the land of the troglodytes. And it knew, and certainly approved, of my decision to go to sea—when favorable winds should blow—and head for the coral islands of Atlantis. (I possessed a map of the north-east region of that continent, and on it I had marked in red ink the routes across the sea). No one would go looking for me in my distant haven, since only the blue stone knew my secret.
Although not lacking in excitement, my other journeys were less ambitious. One day I ventured as far as the potters’ village. I was surprised at the reddish color of the houses, the horsey faces of the women and the pyramids of pots drying in the sun. On shallow verandahs with roofs of straw or tin, a few women hummed as they kneaded lumps of clay; others, with black kerchiefs tied round their foreheads, were busy at the kilns. The men, stretched out on canvas cots or reed mats, were sleeping their siesta. The air smelt of green wood, dog piss and burning cow dung. There were no crops in sight, nor trees; one or two hens scratched at the earth or strayed among the rubble. And in the sunny patios naked children played cat and mouse. From behind a window a girl with black hair watched me with her big yellow eyes and I stared back at her. She smiled at me enchantingly and then began to laugh nervously as if the soles of her feet were being tickled with a rooster’s feather. Her laughter frightened me and I ran away, vowing never to return.
Another day I accompanied my father on a long journey over the moors. I rode a real horse, which got tired going uphill, and my father was riding his own horse, which was crafty and very dark in color. The wind roared and my hands were frozen. Late in the afternoon we reached a stone hamlet among the clouds. We spent the night in the house of some rough and bearded relatives. For supper they gave us a horrible soup, salty and greasy, which I pushed away prepared to get myself killed rather than be forced to eat it. My father mumbled through his teeth, and the others said nothing or answered in reluctant monosyllables; and from time to time, from a nearby room, a woman’s weeping could be heard. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but I imagined some murky affair, suppressed grudges, a debt of honor. I was ready to drop with exhaustion when one of my cousins sidled up to me and challenged me in a venomous whisper to a fight. Our return, the next day, was agony. A devilish rainstorm broke loose, my scratches were burning and my horse got stuck in a bog. I was trying to hide a cut near my left eyebrow with the brim of my hat, and the gusts of rain stopped me lifting my eyes; I could only see the soggy path and the black tail of my father’s horse. On top of everything, damn it all, I was overrun with lice. I consoled myself by thinking that it wouldn’t be my last fight; fresh challenges and more powerful enemies awaited me. What did I care for the shame of defeat if I was capable of confiding my dreams to a stone and sharing a mouthful of meat with dogs. How would one of my victorious enemies feel if he knew I could make myself invisible? What expression would he have on his face if he could see me fly?
* * *
One day at the beginning of January a lot of people gathered in my house to sing. Musicians came on horseback, singers of ballads with their hats atilt, and women with long plaits who hid their smiles behind silk handkerchiefs. I don’t remember the reason for the party, but I do remember some details of it: an arch of palm fronds with garlands, streamers on the porches, horses tethered to the fence, a girl’s green dress with red flowers on it. I had had a few glasses of punch on the sly, and I felt happy. With resolute steps I walked through the festive house wearing an air of self-sufficiency I thought proper in a grown-up person. My daring went to unheard-of extremes when I decided to adorn my hat with a black feather. If I’d looked at myself in the mirror I’d have smiled with satisfaction at that little bandit.
From an early hour I was loitering at the corner of the verandah where the musicians sat. To tell the truth, music didn’t attract me. I didn’t understand it. I enjoyed other sounds, the song of the yellow oriole, the rain beating against my bedroom window, the noise of the river making me dream. Besides, in my moments of leisure and even when I was asleep, I could hear myself whistling. Nevertheless, on the day of that party something faint and indefinable was floating in the air and summoning me. Perhaps it was nothing more than a certain transparency of the light, maybe the scent of laurel. And I, in my curiosity and my slight drunkenness, was prepared to find out. At dusk I became sure that the call was coming from the music, and I was not surprised, rather saddened. I placed myself in a strategic spot, leaning on a pillar, hiding my eyes with the brim of my hat. My attention fastened on the group’s instruments, until at last I discovered which of them was the cause of my uneasiness; the violin was giving out an almost human wail, which at moments muffled or completely silenced the sound of the guitar or the bandola. Before my eyes the air became tinted with a burnt yellow shade, which the shrillest notes turned to amber, and just when it seemed the spell was about to break, a fresh movement swept over space, and the rainbow with its seven colors settled in a thick net of transparent lozenges which multiplied inside a giant spider’s web on and on out of sight. I felt afraid and wanted to run away, but a force unknown to me kept me bound to the pillar. It was then I realized that someone was watching me. And my body began to tremble, from pure anger. The violinist was looking at me sidelong and his eyes were smiling. The rogue was mocking me; I had fallen into his trap. And now, as if enjoying his triumph, he showed me his crooked teeth. The devil! I’ll get even with the bastard. I’ll break loose and go and fetch the double-barreled shotgun and shoot it right into his chest and watch him writhe on the ground bellowing and drowning in blood like an ox with its throat cut. What am I saying? I’m raving. Someone will snatch the gun from me. It’ll be better to ambush him. No, that won’t be any use either. He must have been reading my thoughts, because now he’s laughing out loud and now he drinks from a bottle and laughs again. I remembered the girl in the potters’ village and, defeated, I moved away with my eyes on the brick floor of the patio. Then I ran till I was completely exhausted. I climbed up my tree and stayed there, crouching among the branches like a dim-witted bird, listening to the throbbing of my temples and the rapid beating of my heart. From my lookout I could see the moldy roofs of a few houses, the little valley with its dwarf trees and huge stones like sleeping elephants, and the distant horizon blotched with grey and blood.
It was getting dark and cold when I saw him coming. I don’t know how he managed to find my hiding place. I had been feeling so safe in my refuge and now I wanted to fly away, but even if I could have turned into an angel my wings would have got tangled in the foliage. And so I had no choice but to face him. I started to climb down and before I reached the ground I heard his voice, “My boy, that is not the best method of making yourself invisible.” I perceived in those words a warm, velvety timbre, a firm, assured tone which was none the less familiar. My anger left me, since a person who spoke to me in this way couldn’t be my enemy. Then, when my feet were on the ground, he added in a low voice, as if confiding in me, ”First you have to pass unnoticed… No going ‘round showing off like a clown.” I awoke from my slight tipsiness and felt light, very light. If the south wind had blown it would have lifted me up to the tops of the trees—but there was no air to support me in flight. In my euphoria I heard myself speak, in a rush. The words flowed from my mouth, tangling and trampling on each other, rolling in a torrent. To him I was able to confess my adventures with the wild dogs. I talked to him about crossing the high seas, my friendship with certain birds and my habit of whistling in my dreams. Later—too late—I realized I had kept hidden from him, without meaning to—or was it?—the secret of the blue stone. And I never knew what the violinist’s intention was in revealing to me the formula for making myself invisible. Three times he made me repeat the spell. And he made sure that the position of my feet and the wheeling movement of my arms accorded with the rotation of the earth around the sun. When I wanted to ask him about the meaning of the dance, he cut me off, “You don’t need to know everything… Besides, it would take me half a lifetime to explain it to you.” Satisfied with my silence, and this time almost in a whisper, he warned me, ”The day you give away the secret you will die.”
When the moon was already spreading its milky cape over the roofs, we returned to the house. As we separated, the violinist turned to say to me, suddenly, as if he had just then discovered it, ”You’re a fortunate person, you have no mother.” And as he moved away, I thought I heard him observing, “The unlucky ones like me have no choice but to kill her.”
The next day, very early, they tied him with ropes to his horse, across the saddle, with the violin hanging like a bandolier. A pale rider, mounted on a chestnut mare, led on a rope my friend’s horse, which was threatening to rear. They trotted away toward the regions on the other side of the mist. From my window I followed them, for a long stretch, until they disappeared from sight round a bend in the path. And, against my will, big tears ran down my cheeks, I wept for the death of that stranger, I rejoiced in it, and who knows if I reveled in my new power.
Forty days later I had a dream. I was dragging myself along a ditch dug among trees. My left leg was hurting and I felt a strong desire to cry. Between my teeth I was gripping a Spanish knife which was making me bleed. It had been raining and mud was sticking to my face, my eyelashes and my clothes, making it more difficult for me to advance. I was no longer a boy, I had lengthened; I could see on my hands the scars of old burns, and my beard grew very black and curly like my ancestors. Yes, but who was I? What was I doing crawling in that mire? I was asking myself this and that when I heard the beat of a horse’s hoofs. I tried to get up, but a stab of pain in my leg threw me down again. I looked up, and there in the road that ran parallel to the ditch, outlined against the row of trees, was the violinist’s horse. The bloodless face of the rider hung at the level of the stirrups; his yellow eyes, open too wide, moved like fishes at the bottom of a lake. His lips, which still had a slight purplish hue, also moved. I heard his voice, “My boy, that’s not the best way to confront the headless horseman. Get up, you aren’t a reptile.” His last words, almost fading away, I heard outside the dream. I woke up trembling with cold and shouting. After, I calmed down and covered myself with the blankets. Faintly glimmering lines filtered through the cracks in the window. Day was breaking. I fell asleep, swinging between joy and sadness, since my friend had come from the misty regions of death to offer me a fresh enigma.
* * *
Flying was certainly not easy. But isn’t it, in fact, more difficult to walk. As birds do, I didn’t fly. I lacked wings. I lifted off the ground and floated for a few moments, sometimes for a longer time, until my breath failed. On one memorable occasion I rose up to the roof of a house with balconies, and as I descended I saw, through a second-floor window, a naked woman embracing a black bear. Sparks flew from the woman’s hair, which was long, yellow and disheveled. I had heard of love, and I associated it with laughter, scented handkerchiefs, quadrilles and songs. Was that desperate embrace another of its manifestations? I forgot I was flying, and my absentmindedness almost killed me. On falling I broke my left leg. I was lame for some time, and, although I heard later that the husband of the bear’s woman was a fierce hunter, for almost a year I checked my desire to fly.
In my dreams I really flew. My wings hindered me. Like an arrow, I scaled the clouds and entered the blue dominions of the light. I glided and tacked, I let myself be carried away by the south wind. I saw huge cities that mimicked monkey cages or beehives. I saw canals like those on Mars, battlefields, bridges over the sea. But nothing was comparable to the vertigo of falling. I let go at an impossible height and rolled through the air feeling in my throat, my armpits and the soles of my feet a delicious tingling that left me breathless. Yellow suns burst in my head while my body shuddered like a tree bristling with thunderbolts. Then, emptied of all weight, I lay quiet, floating in a boat made of mist, which carried me toward the shores of awakening.
Except for a quarrelsome cousin, no one witnessed my prowess in the air. And my cousin, who boasted of I don’t know what feats in a river in the plains, refused to believe in mine, though a couple of times he saw me suspended several palms’ widths above the ground. And the third time I rose high enough to reach a ripe sweet-lime, which we then shared without looking each other in the eye. My cousin said that flying was an attribute of birds. And that it was essential to have air inside one’s bones to mock the law of gravity. My demonstration proved nothing. There must be some trick, invisible strings or an optical illusion. He didn’t trust appearances. He had been once to a circus, and there they had cut a woman in two in front of a hundred people; and when the show was over, the same woman, all in one piece, had waved to the audience with a smile. I knew my cousin’s skepticism was nothing but envy, and I was not at all bothered by his opinion. However, when he accused me of being a fraud I couldn’t restrain myself, and I insulted him in my mule-driver’s language: son-of-a-bitch, wretch, coward, braggart. We fell to blows. I spun in the air and landed him a kick in the neck that left him prostrate. The next day I accompanied him to the bridge of goats. We took leave of each other without any sign of affection or ill-will.
* * *
I had heard that sick people become gravely ill when they are about to die. Was that the law of gravity? Intrigued, I got up my courage and went to my father to ask him. I was careful not to make any reference to sick people, because I didn’t want anyone, not even my father, to laugh at my ingenuousness. I asked him a direct question. And he answered, with deliberation, “It’s the force that keeps us bound to the earth.” Then, as if his own words had surprised him, he smiled slightly—it was strange to see him smile—and observed in a less emphatic tone, “Ah, you’ve been nosing about in your grandfather’s books.” “No,” I said, “it was my cousin who talked about the law of gravity, and he couldn’t explain it.” “That often happens, son. People talk like parrots.” Evening was coming on and my father, sitting in a calfskin chair, was watching the bloody ribbon of the horizon. I knew that wasn’t the best time of day for him; however, he had called me “son”—a rarity that sounded in my ears like the oriole’s song at dawn, a word invested with splendor, which opened doors in his breast to summon beams of light—and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity of hearing what he had to say at such a favorable moment. What did my father think of men who could fly? I asked him. He never answered my curiosity with silence. And it wasn’t that he knew everything—on another occasion he had admitted his limitations, “What is what we know beside what we don’t know?” Perhaps he considered that a father is indebted to his son, and prolongs himself in him. Talking to me would then be a way of affirming his own being, a proof of his permanence. I hung on his words, fascinated, since they often suggested new questions, and his comments, which were more like thinking aloud, aroused in me a hunger to embrace everything, a perhaps sacrilegious desire to hold the world in my head. Nor did he disappoint me this time. ”In man, flying is a yearning. Birds fly, and angels and the wind. Man was made to walk upright. Flying like birds do, creeping like a snake or hopping like a toad, are mere figures of speech, likenesses of his soul.” I didn’t understand the issue very well, but neither was I sure I shared my father’s opinions. I could fly, and in my dreams I had crawled like a snake in a ditch, and my favorite game was the toad’s hop. So was I pure soul and were those my likenesses? Doubt distracted me and I lost the thread of what my father was saying. I caught in the air a brief, disconnected phrase, “…homesick for nature.” Then I listened carefully. “But man is not an entirely natural being. Although he lives, so to say, exposed to the weather, he stands above the fly and the ox. Instinct and necessity, even chance, place him on the level of nature, but he can choose… At least he can choose his own death.” The flying man had vanished, and the new subject of discussion didn’t interest me. I almost told him so. Yes, sir, I already know that. I suspect my mother killed herself. And the violinist, when he entrusted his secret to me, knew he was going to die. We all die, yes sir. But that’s not the point. Why don’t you talk to me about life? What have we done to deserve it? Can we choose it or is it life itself that imposes on us its own arbitrary decisions? No, he’s not listening to me, he’s gone as deaf as a mud wall. After a silence which was becoming horrifying to me, my father stood up and with a slight movement of his sharp-featured face invited me to follow him. “Dinner is getting cold,” he observed in a conciliatory tone. Some time ago the sun had gone down between the crags. Venus was blinking like a glowworm. And I wanted to clasp my father’s neck; I felt a terrible desire to hold on to him and cry. Don’t be ungrateful to your son, don’t desert him, sir. If you die tonight, who shall I confide my doubts to? Who will listen to me without teasing me? Who will take my worries seriously?
That was what I called them, worries. I had made a list of them, which included, among other things, my mother’s suicide, the habits of mermaids and the existence of God. The Argonauts, the headless horseman. The homunculus. The Black Death. And also the meaning of some words, such as ambrosia, felony and folly. But for that night the ration was used up, and although my appetite was unsatisfied, I had to resign myself. I followed my father with the gait of an ox on its way to the slaughterhouse. He didn’t die that night, nor the next; he still had eleven months to live.
* * *
The lizard wanders over the wall. It stops in a sunny patch and looks anxiously in all directions. It seems to have a presentiment of danger, or perhaps that’s just its way of getting its bearings. What does it matter, since once it enters my field of vision it’s condemned to death. It drops off the top of the wall, tracing as it falls a fleeting line that glints with iridescent green reflections. I don‘T know why I have to go on slaughtering these little beasts. I should save myself up for a really dangerous encounter. Challenge face to face a prairie buffalo or a powerful dragon. I’m bored with this game without risks: look, shoot with my eyes, kill. Why do I do it? Perhaps I find in the line of the fall something beautiful that gives me pleasure. An ephemeral pleasure, since memory doesn’t add it to its treasury. If my father knew about my hunter’s trade, he would say it was another “likeness.” Planes, fields, enclosed spaces. Likenesses. Geometry lessons. Why does the soul have to adopt so many masks? Can it really not reveal itself as clear and naked as an arrow? I look and kill with my looks. What’s the problem? I’m a basilisk.
Travelling in dreams is riskier, there’s always a danger of dying. Meeting someone else who is also dreaming can be fatal. And those mangy dogs lying in wait in the gateways can be a nuisance. They recognize you and threaten you with their pitiful barking. They retreat with their hair standing on end, as if they could see the devil. Poor creatures harassing a figure lighter than air. What a fright it would give them if I could travel with one of my wild dogs for company. The worst thing, when you get back, is the weariness. You wake up soaked in sweat and at the same time trembling with cold, your throat parched and that anxious sensation of not having any legs. What kind of game is this? You’re walking in a minefield just to see an evanescent landscape in which, with a lot of luck, you will succeed in recognizing some familiar object, a spinning-top in a puddle, a tree, a white wall with a crack across it. At bottom it’s no more than that, a futile, reckless game. And if I give up the dreaming game, what do I have left?
The most difficult game, the most elaborate, is hide-and-seek. Playing with only one player requires strict training, a detailed knowledge of the terrain and a large dose of imagination. The labyrinths in which you can go astray are as simple as a straight line or as unpredictable as the paths drawn on the night by a swarm of fireflies. False voices disorient you, a soft weeping confuses you. You run into a clown, in whom you recognize your own features, and you throw yourself on him yelling, believing you’ve won. Your rival doubles up and falls like a scarecrow full of sawdust. The parrots take flight over the maize field. They fly away shrieking and chattering. Are they mocking you? You go away too. You dig trenches, raise palisades and walls, secure your bedroom windows with steel nails and sheets of tin. You place buoys and decoys all along the path up the hill, and there at the summit you stick torn flags in the ground. If only you know the rules of this damned game, who are you trying to fool? That’s still not enough for you. You hide in a hole between two rocks, you hang on like a leech to the stone walls which become warm from your heat. You feel fine there, don’t you? Yes, but your throat goes dry when you look out of the cleft and there in the distance, among the bushes, you see yourself coming. Then you would like to dig a hole with your hands, and bury yourself in it till you feel the weight of the earth on your chest and the bitter taste of mire on the tip of your tongue. Sunk like a mole in the purest darkness, where you can’t find yourself.
* * *
One night in October I dreamt of a hawk. I was gliding over thick moonlit forest, and the silvery shine on the treetops was blinding me. I was flying over that vast and glowing sea without knowing the reason for my journey. In reality I didn’t mind. I was happy with my fate; I assented to being a hawk. I had been flying for a long time when I noticed among the trees a large rectangular clearing, so big that all the houses in my village could fit in it and there would still be space left over. I decreased my speed, descended a stretch, and then flew just above the ground. I was surprised by the bare, sandy surface, covered in a layer of something whitish like lime. In the very centre of that razed field rose a monument. A sort of truncated pyramid, which could be nothing else but a tomb. I felt certain that there, beneath the black marble, enclosed in a cedar-wood coffin, wrapped in a long gown of white cloth—which the damp had stained with rust—my mother was lying.
I woke in a cold sweat, gasping like a fish out of water. And I went round all day uneasy, at moments dazed, over-sensitive to noises and light. I thought of the violinist’s remark about my luck in not having a mother. Did her absence perhaps make me a privileged person? What fate did the lack of a mother bring with it? For the first time it worried me to remember that I had never visited my mother’s grave. Seeing it in my dreams, in a peculiar setting and through the eyes of a hawk, was perhaps an undeserved favor. Maybe a punishment. Anyhow, I didn’t feel guilty. I had never known her, my mother. No memory bound me to her existence. I was intrigued, certainly, by everything connected with her death. I studied that event in the same way I took an interest in the workings of a victrola. But it was pure curiosity, foreign to feelings. In my investigations—which were confined, in fact, to picking up other people’s conversations through a half-open window, or putting my ear to a door, or pretending to be asleep—I heard of so many different ways of dying that I was obliged to choose among them the one I would have wished for her. I shut my eyes and saw her little foot caught in the stirrup. I saw her slight body being dragged by the runaway horse and leaving a trail of blood on the surface of the stones, her long black hair brushing the dust of the road. Rid of its light load, the animal was going home. And in the middle of the patio it neighed. At that point I cut my thoughts off, because I didn’t want to see the shadow of anger and impotence that would veil my father’s face as he approached with hesitant steps from the verandah.
Deaths following on deaths. Resurrections. I myself plotted and perfected my own version. The other, although attractive, didn’t belong to me. This one allowed her a chance to live, and left no space at all for condemning her. Nor for forgiving. Dazzled by the juggling skills of a band of gypsies—who had set up their shabby canvas tents outside the village—my mother had run away with them. Her taste for singing and her talent on the trapeze, not to mention her unusual beauty and her youth—she was hardly seventeen—were credentials enough for that band of vagabonds to adopt her. My father accepted his abandonment, wholeheartedly. He set aside for the fugitive a narrow space underground, in case some day she should decide to return. I came to believe in my fantasy so strongly that I refused to visit her grave, since what sense would there be in weeping over a mound that hid an emptiness? I also canceled my plan to dig a tunnel from my room to the cemetery on the hill; my world would have fallen apart if in the place reserved for the girl who had fed me with her poisoned milk I had come across a pile of bones blanched by worms.
Even if she was flying on the trapeze, to me she was dead. Deathbed in installments, slow dying. And if now, in the dream of the hawk, she took on a kind of life, I was not going to let myself be seduced by such a stratagem. What did I care if I dreamt about her! Come on, I would dream of her in each new dream to forget her when I woke.
* * *
Fateful signs were seen early in the sky. That was to be the year of the plague. The first of January, at midnight, we saw a headless horseman go by. A horse of fire came galloping up. It veered violently at the north corner of the square, climbed the steep goatherds’ street, and glittered like a star up there on the Heights of the Cross. My dreams were tinted cinnamon color. And I forgot to fly. Astride a huge Horse of Troy, I saw my village besieged by an army of rats, which had established their headquarters in a Viking ship aground in the river. The loathsome beasts were devouring the air; they intended to subdue us by suffocation. I dug my spurs into Rocinante’s side and charged an enemy column that was advancing over the bridge. A pale rat, dressed in a faded sergeant’s uniform, came out to meet me. I drew my bamboo sword, and while I was adjusting my helmet darkness fell. Disconcerted, I wondered what had happened to my head. Severed from my body, it lay bloody at the bottom of a basket. I heard a very sweet voice, unfamiliar to me. I listened to the song; it told of an enchanted isle, girls with flowers in their hair catching fish in their ivory teeth. Who was lulling me with such a beautiful song?
On Twelfth-Night, a gang of outlaws, armed with blunt daggers and shotguns, burst into the church and interrupted the rite. A bandit of fierce appearance, who called himself Melchior and was small and agile, with long hair and honey-colored eyes, pushed his way among the congregation, dragging his left leg. With an accurate leap—which reminded us of the last step in a dance or a puma’s attack—he grabbed a girl. He twisted his sharp-boned hand in the long black braid of his chosen one, and pulled her delicately, as if she was a tame beast tied by a halter. The girl followed him, docile, her gaze fixed on some dot of light shining before her eyes. Outside, in the yard, they mounted the same horse. Sitting on the croup, she leaned her radiant cheek on the sweaty back of the ancient king. As they disappeared in a cloud of dust, followed by that host of fiends, I cursed the rider three times. Melchior enveloped in fumes of myrrh, shitty little king, deserter.
At the end of the month the cornfields were turned to soot. And as if that wasn’t enough, at Candlemas the barns burned. Months of hunger were in store for us. We slept with daggers for pillows, our arms ’round a jar of water. We dusted our shotguns and went out to hunt jays and black lizards.
In March I had my eleventh birthday and celebrated it up my tree, perusing the scorched sky, watching vultures pass, imagining fertile valleys furrowed by zigzag roads and watered by canals. A rattling disturbed me, and I fell out of the tree and fractured my right arm. A healer from El Volcán came to massage me. He rubbed snake fat on me, gave me aloes sweetened with honey to drink, and made a splint of alder bark for my arm. The pain became bearable, and was sharpened only by the damp of evening. I had left-handed dreams.
Days later, on Palm Sunday, they whipped an idiot in the main street. And on Good Friday, after dark, an unhappy woman who was the concubine of a cowherd gave birth to a creature with billy-goat’s hooves.
The hot weather continued. In May the last cows died. A few oxen, fed with earth and dry straw, still hung on. It rained birds. And on St. John’s day there were no bonfires nor punch nor banquets; we savored a mean soup of bitter roots and tough horse meat.
At the end of July there was a downpour. It rained in bucketfuls till five in the afternoon. The sun came out; and the air, from a few palms above the ground, was covered in a soft mist. From my window I saw the outlines of seven men floating in the mist, fixed like poles in the middle of the patio. Their long, lead-colored greatcoats flapped like flags in the wind. Those lords of the rain were completely unknown to me. As if I was dreaming, I saw my father walk, slowly and unworriedly, in the direction of the strangers. I heard a roar, which at first I mistook for thunder. The smoke from the guns, a watery sky-blue, shook me out of my dream. Then I saw myself holding the bleeding body of my father, searching in his eyes for the last spark of life, trying to erase the sinister image of the murderers and replace it with that of my kind and sorrowing face. While I embraced him with all the tenderness and all the anger I was capable of, I whispered to him words of thanks. I took leave of him. Goodbye, rider, lord of the mountain. Goodbye. And when I felt them pulling me away from him—with light, consoling voices—I knew I was free, because my only bond to the earth had been broken. I was not going to undertake labors of revenge. My father’s killers would find their reward sooner or later. I would not turn into a hawk to search for them. I was not a hunter but a warrior.
Sitting on the blue stone I wept all the tears I had. Then, relieved, I confided to the stone my decision to leave that land of sterile soil and orphanhood. I will not wait for the funeral. I will go this very night. My luggage is light, it will fit in this hemp bag. A piece of meat and a hunk of hard bread. My sharp knife, a mirror, a needle and a thimble. The map of Atlantis and my ruled exercise-books I bequeath to the rats, as well as the compass, the two of diamonds and the seamen’s charts.
Translated by Rowena Hill
