All of a sudden the racket of flapping wings made him raise his head. He was petrified.
Five Guinea fowls were hanging by their necks in a row. The last one was still struggling, flapping its wings, uselessly attempting to fly. Two tall, stout men had stopped to watch.
“They don’t kill them like that in my country.”
A wasted-looking woman dressed in mourning ran the stall. She was wearing an apron and white oversleeves, her thin lips tightly shut. She was absorbed in her work. Without waiting for the hen to die, she took the whole row off the hooks and threw them in a pile on the counter where another twenty or so lay dead.
She took a piece of string from her apron pocket, went over to the cage that was half filled with hens, and removed one. It immediately began to screech. It was dark gray, its feathers covered with tiny white spots, a touch of white erupting on the tip of each wing.
With considerable difficulty she tied its neck with the string, then pulled with all her strength, and hung it up. The hen seemed startled for a moment, not moving, its small head twisted, eyes protruding. Then it spread its wings, its feet tucked into its stomach, ready for a last, deadly flight.
Quimet watched the scene breathlessly, the entire chocolate bar in his fingers, a half-chewed piece of bread in his mouth.
The woman returned to the cage and pulled out another hen. The creature let loose a terrifying, plaintive coo. The dying hen that had been hung up began to close its eyes and stretch out its legs, string dangling from its neck. The woman tied the leftover string around the neck of the next hen, which she then hung up. The tragedy was repeated. At first the second hen was stunned. Suddenly it spread its wings wide, as if it had been crucified, and started to struggle desperately, till finally, with twitching claws, it grabbed the head of the neighboring hen, which again started to make a racket. The more they struggled, the more the string tightened around them, till the neck feathers were damp on both sides from sweat or blood. A third was hung up to keep them company, then a fourth, then a fifth. The last was gray, but less dark, whitish, with a larger head, but the same elegant neck as the others. This hen’s beak remained open for a moment, then it gasped violently, causing its breast feathers to undulate. The beak closed abruptly, then slowly reopened, the thin tongue, pointed like a pistil, throbbing helplessly. This one took longer to die. Every time Quimet thought, “It’s over,” the hen moved its wings. It spread them slowly, then flapped them furiously, the sudden gust of air making the whole row of hanging hens dance. Finally, without warning, it let out a screech. It was a final cry for help, directed to the fields and blue sky, to the space traversed by birds, filled with light and pollen. Its eyelids rolled back. Behind the motionless curtain the eyes grew glassy.
“How can anyone be so cruel!” mumbled an elderly woman to her wizened, hunchbacked companion as she passed the stand. They glared indignantly at the vendor, as if she were an executioner. “Hanging those poor creatures!”
The vendor pretended not to hear. When the women left, she addressed the two gentlemen who were still watching:
“They’re better like this. All the blood stays inside.”
Slowly she began to take down the row of hens, preparing for the next batch.
But an incident occurred. The dead guineas, piled high on the counter, tottered, and many of them fell on the ground. A huge cat with a lustrous coat sauntered by the stall, attentive and cautious. The vendor wasn’t pleased at this sight, for she suddenly yelled in alarm:
“Hey, lad, quick. Give me a hand. Help me pick them up!”
As if in a trance, Quimet laid his chocolate and bread on the edge of the counter. Yellow as wax, his eyes round, his legs trembling, he began to collect the warm feathery pillows. They were so soft.
He lifted one at a time, clasped beneath the stomach, and placed them on the counter. He was careful not to touch the tiny heads that waved on the ends of pliant necks. He felt a weight in his chest, as if all the dead birds’ suffering was pressing against his lungs, keeping him from breathing. The thought that a lifeless body might suddenly start flapping its wings and hit him in the face sent pearls of sweat dripping down his forehead.
“Thanks, lad. For your help.”
The vendor offered him an apple, but he didn’t take it. He grabbed the bread and chocolate and ran off. Once outside, he crossed the street, raced up the stairs, and entered the apartment all out of breath. He found his mother in the kitchen and hugged her skirt.
“What’s this? You haven’t eaten your chocolate?”
Quimet started sobbing uncontrollably. He wept loudly, his mouth open, his eyes all wrinkled from being closed so tight.
“What’s the matter? Did someone hit you? What is it?”
He shook his head after each question, but couldn’t stop crying. All his grief, all his pent-up pain, came pouring out. When the trauma began to pass, his chest still shaking from the last of his sobs, he announced, as if he had suddenly grown older:
“I’m terribly sad.”
The
Mirror
The doctor accompanied her to the door and shook her hand.
“It’s up to you now, Madame. I don’t think it’s anything serious, but bear in mind that, for a diabetic, diet is more important than treatment, or at least as important.”
Not knowing what to say, she smiled and started down the stairs. Her hands and feet were freezing, her forehead burning.
On the street, the fiery summer light left her in a daze. The girls’ sheer dresses, the yellow trams, the polished cars, the green foliage of the trees—everything was ablaze with eager life, but the unrelenting brightness made it all seem unreal. She felt weak. The moving shapes had a touch of excessive color that made her dizzy. “Gluten, Gluten.” When uttered in a whisper, the word seemed to fill her mouth with a shapeless, tasteless paste.
She paused in front of the window of a jewelry shop. On the staggered shelves, lined with dark blue velvet, the diamonds rings and brooches emitted icy reflections. In the center stood a gold bird with ruby-encrusted wings and emerald eyes. When I was coming along, she thought, diamonds were the thing. I’ve strewn all the jewels of my youth across France—the ones my husband gave me. What would he say if he hadn’t died? I can’t even imagine. The dead are quiet; that’s why they frighten us. The things I’ll carry with me to the grave! Enough, enough. She glanced at the jewels one by one, making an effort to forget the unpleasant moment at the doctor’s. She had broken into an anxious sweat when her blood pressure was taken. The cold, rubber sleeve around her wan, pale arm, the needle jumping back and forth. She reached up to feel the brooch she was wearing: she wasn’t sure she had put it back on when she got dressed. The shop window reflected her hand, a long hand, furrowed with dark veins, the joints of the fingers deformed, a hand that was slow like a sickly animal.
Two girls stopped beside her.
“The ring I like the best is at the back. Do you see it? With the seven diamonds in a row.”
“Are you serious?”
Their voices drew her out of her lethargy. French had gradually become familiar, but a few words still escaped her. On some days, it made her furious, and she would tell herself that she was going back to Barcelona, alone, even if she had to walk. What am I doing, standing here? she thought. As she was about to cross the street, a gentleman with a straw hat took her arm and escorted her to the opposite sidewalk.
“Thank you. Thank you very much. All these cars, at my age, they’re rather frightening.”
•
Place Gambetta was filled with people, the outdoor cafés overflowing. The air was tepid, though the sun continued to burn hot. She stopped in the center of the square, beneath a magnolia tree. Some ladies were sitting in the shade, knitting or calmly chatting while their children ran around and yelled. Bees swarmed over the open magnolias and an acidic smell reached her. From her bag she removed a
handkerchief embroidered with drupelets and carefully wiped her left eye. This happens to people who have been too happy, her oculist had told her with a smile many years ago. One way or the other, tears need to find a way out. Nothing had ever been able to stop that little bit of involuntary weeping that occasionally dampened her eyes.
She walked slowly along, small and bent. Her dark green poplin coat, with its threadbare elbows and underarms, looked shiny in the sun. With a slight caress, as if from feverish fingers, the perfume from the magnolias wafted across to her, weakened by the distance.
When she reached L’abeille d’or she hesitated, then entered. A dense smell of cream-filled puff pastries made her mouth water. Her cheeks were rosy now. With an unconscious gesture she anxiously opened and closed her hand. Trays stacked with pastries were spread out before her. Some were golden, spongy, light, apt to melt in your mouth; others were heavy, buttery, dripping with liqueur, covered with a caramel topping that shone like glass.
“What would you like, Madame?”
“Half a kilo of cookies.”
The shop attendant smiled at her and picked up a paper cone. While the woman filled it, she studied the trays.
“Vanilla as well?”
“Yes, please, and some of those wafers over there. The ones with the little cherries, just two of them. I’ll eat them right now.”
As she strolled up the shady side of rue Judaïque, her mouth felt all sweet and a tooth began to hurt. In her bag she was carrying two paper cones, one with cookies, the other with candy.
•
Her daughter-in-law, Elena, was seated by the garden gate, sewing.
“What did the doctor say?”
“The doctor? What doctor?”
Just beyond, her grandson was digging around a bed of carnations. When he heard his grandmother’s voice, he turned around.
“Come here, Grandmother! Watch me plant these sunflowers!”
“I told my son not to buy him that hoe. He’ll dig up the whole garden.”
Elena raised her head from the sewing.
“Don’t worry. I’m keeping an eye on him. Didn’t you say you were going to the doctor’s?”
“I’ll go another day. With this wonderful weather, I preferred to go for a walk. What could the doctor tell me?” She tightened her grip around her bag with an irritated reflex; she could feel the weight of the cookies. “What could he say to me?”
She strolled over to her grandson and stood there for a while, observing him as he dug.
“That’s it, keep planting.”
She wanted to be alone, to rest. Her room was her world, filled with secrets, with pictures of people that not even her son or daughter-in-law knew. As she entered, the mirror on the wardrobe reflected the mysterious-looking green garden, barely visible behind the slats on the partially lowered blinds, a dreamlike landscape.
She closed the door, took off her coat, and sat down in the wicker chair by the window. She struggled to remove her shoes. With an effort she reached her feet, her bony feet, just a bit of flesh covered the edges of the tendons. She left the shoes by the armchair, stretched her legs, and wiggled her toes, all the while thinking about the cookies. The doctors can go to hell, their diets too. She began to eat the cookies, slowly, so they would remain in her mouth longer. With her tongue she removed the gooey remains lodged in her teeth. Her stomach began to feel heavy, as if a lump of plaster had slowly set up shop inside. She closed her eyes, then picked up the hand mirror, a wedding present from the witness at her marriage. The frame was embossed silver with laurel leaves intertwined with ribbons. She observed the face of a sixty-year-old woman, slightly congested, the delicate skin wrinkled like an old apple, two pulpy, bluish bags under her eyes. She pulled an eyelid up. The inside was damp flesh, pinkish in the center, a brighter color at the edges, the white globe streaked with red veins. “Green eyes and black hair. Enough to drive you wild,” a suitor had said to Roger before he met her. Black hair. The mirror reflected white, yellowish, thinning hair pulled back from her wrinkled forehead. Without letting go of the mirror, she reached for another cookie with her left hand. “Why won’t you dance with me?”
•
Roger didn’t dance that day. He was standing by a window of the drawing room, talking to an elderly gentleman. He seemed uneasy as he watched someone she couldn’t see. Between the dancing couples she caught a glimpse of the gardenia he was wearing in his lapel.
“Why won’t you dance with me?”
Jaume Mas, her husband, had entered her life in that manner: timidly, as she gazed at Roger, remembering that afternoon. She was filled with the terrible wish to scream. Jaume had entered her life too late, but it was at the precise moment when she was losing her bearings. Are you tired? She was gazing at her fan, the mother-of-pearl ribs, the silk tassel. She had had a mauve dress with a lilac posy at the waist made for her. She had it made with Roger’s words in mind. We’ve begun to love each other beneath the sign of the lilacs. You could see clumps of lilacs in the park, and branches of them stood in vases around the room. On that afternoon. If Roger comes near, he’ll see the landscape on my fan, tender apple green with a peach-colored sky. But he didn’t approach. I don’t think he even saw me, and I wanted to scream.
“You don’t want to dance?”
I felt sorry for him, a sudden sadness, as if I had just been shown a condemned man. Had I chosen him as a victim while I watched Roger? Scarcely a month had passed. The man in charge of closing the park had scolded us because he had to wait. The streetlights were beginning to come on and a slight drizzle had started. In the sand near the bench where we sat, I had written “Roger” with the tip of my umbrella, and the drizzle had slowly erased the name.
The waltz was sad. Sad as the light that afternoon when we left the park. She passed me. Agata dancing, her shoulders bare. Agata. Her dress was white as daisies, and she was wearing a ruby necklace, shiny as drops of fresh blood. Lovers. Agata and Roger, lovers. I had only been told a few days before. Long-time lovers. Roger and Agata. Roger. When I scribbled “Roger” in the sand that day. He and I were lovers that afternoon. The first and last afternoon. A few drops of blood on a white sheet. Red as Agata’s ruby necklace. I could still hear Roger’s voice when, with the last embrace, he asked: “Don’t you feel well?” All so far away. The kisses, the blood, the lilac perfume.
I found myself dancing in the center of the drawing room. An expressionless face had drawn near mine, its cheeks too round. It belonged to the man who would become my husband.
•
“Get the watering can, little girl, and help me water the plants.”
“The sunflowers, too?”
Her daughter-in-law must have locked the gate and was probably watering the geraniums beneath the dining room window, as she did every afternoon. Then she would water the chrysanthemums that were beginning to grow tall. She sighed and turned the mirror sideways. She had small, pearly ears with pinkish lobes. One was slashed. When she was breastfeeding her son—she had wanted to call him Roger—she would often wear her long emerald and diamond earrings. The child, who was just beginning to walk, used to take hold of her lips with his tiny hand and squeeze them tightly. Sometimes the hand seemed to be grasping air. One day he pulled furiously at one of the earrings. With the earring in his hand, he continued to suck the blood-splattered breast.
White lilacs adorned the altar the day she married, like lilacs from another world, a world of the dead. She was frightened. She suddenly wanted to flee.
•
I was sinking. Sinking into a dark well. Two invisible hands had grabbed hold of my head and were pulling me down, down, backwards. “Remember when we first met? I asked you: ‘Do you want to dance with me?’” That memory will haunt me all my life. When he embraced me, he said: “Say my name, say it.” In my mind I said, “Roger.” I didn’t say it, only thought it, but my husband moved aside. I didn’
t understand what he said. I never knew what he said. I could sense him getting dressed; then I heard the outside door closing, his footsteps walking across the pavement. I wasn’t sad, nor did I feel like crying. It was as if I had turned to stone. I stroked my belly. Roger’s son would live, and I could give him a name. I woke when it was still dark. Someone beside me was weeping. The smell of night and wind reached me. He had returned. I felt the suffering, and it calmed me. He wept with his face close to my back; the smell of wind and night were in his hair. Against my skin I could feel his burning breath broken by sobs. Another breathing, within my belly, burned me. Every drop of blood gathered together to create flesh. I lay very still, observing the shadows in the corners of the room. Dawn would devour them. I held a monster within me, a footless, handless monster. I thought my belly moved, that hands were forming as I watched, determined to emerge. A bitter, sour taste coursed into my mouth. He wept, and I fell asleep.
Beneath the lilac-filled vases lay purple stars; lots of tiny flowers had fallen. Roger was getting dressed. His initials, R.G., were embroidered on the left side of his shirt. I too needed to get dressed, but I lingered, afraid that the most insignificant gesture would shatter that mirror of sad, fragile happiness. As if my dismay could make the afternoon last for years and years. When we went down to the street, we stopped beneath a streetlight and shook hands, as if we were simply friends, and said good-bye. Yet coming down the stairs, we had stopped to kiss on each step. When I was alone again, I thought, “We’ll never see each other again as we have today.” I looked around for something to call my own: the light from the streetlamp, the purple sky, a window with a light. Then I started walking. And later? The dance, Agata, the child, my marriage.
•
I had only the instinct to say: “Don’t shout.” He walked up and down the bedroom, occasionally opening a drawer in the dresser, only to slam it shut furiously, with an abrupt, brutal gesture.
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda Page 4
