I went out to look at the blue stars, frantic at having lost the tooth, the cat sitting beside me, looking up, just like me. I took him back inside, closed the door, and started pacing, and as I paced, I kept saying to myself, Cosme loved Balbina, Cosme loved Balbina, and now Balbina is dead and the fact that she is dead makes me very, very, very happy. They never had the opportunity to embrace because between them stood the marble worker who made angel curls. From his hiding place he used to play the trumpet to drive Balbina mad, killing her little by little so he could bury her, devoid of the tooth, in that pink dress she had made one spring because Cosme had placed a pink geranium in the window overlooking the street. In this way he could see her walking past on her way to mass on Sunday mornings, wearing the finest of veils dotted with black sequins.
I bought a fish covered with scales and ate it fried with tomato and parsley. I gave the head to the cat and forced him to swallow the thick hard spine that I turned the wrong way round so the bones would prick him if he tried to cough it up. Right away he began to heave and heave to disgorge the bone, and the more he heaved, the deeper the bone cut into the pink flesh of his throat. His stamina kept him from dying quickly. It took days of dry heaving and attempts to dislodge the bone before he finally offered up his soul, and while he was still warm, just as I did when I dressed Balbina, I slit him open, top to bottom, with a razor blade. I discovered the tooth in a corner of his swollen intestine, as white as ever. I washed it with soap and rubbed my fingers over it for a long time to make it shiny again.
That evening I buried the cat. I began to go out every night to determine when the stars would cease to be blue. I would stroll down the road until I reached the fields where the houses no longer obstructed the streetlight and the wretched vegetable gardens stood with worm-gorged cabbage leaves and insect-ravaged rue. Here too, with no houses to interfere, the glow from the streetlights was blue. I came to believe that everything was blue, not because I saw that it was blue, but because it had turned that color. I asked people, one after another, what color the stars were, what color the moon was when it had been stripped naked, what color when it wore a necklace. They would stare at me for a while, as if I had asked something outrageous, then reply that the stars were the color of a light bulb, the moon too. And the water flowing from the faucets was the color of water, nothing else. I continued to chisel the marble. My employer had finished the angel, and I the curls. The tombstone was ready, and I was working on the pleated skirt of the girl who had died and been laid out, but the first pleats came out uneven and my employer remarked, Your work has gotten worse since your wife died. That night I wandered further than before, beyond the vegetable gardens, beyond where I had buried the cat, beyond the cabbages and rue. The last streetlight was blue, and for a while I threw rocks at it, all of them aimed at the blue glow. The night was dark, and after hours of hurling rocks, I finally smashed the light bulb, causing it to shatter and fall to the ground. Then I sat with my back to the streetlight, alone, facing the dark night, and when the first star appeared and the windows in the distant houses had blackened, out of the blackness of night and the smell of untilled land came a meow, then another, another, always closer, and out of a clump of tall weeds emerged the noiseless shadow. The approaching shadow was a huge cat, as big as three cats together, and the pupils that I thought might be as blue as the stars were honey-colored, the color of old honey, and the honey was cleaved, top to bottom, by a black line. The cat brushed past me, rubbing his belly against my knees three or four times as he circled the streetlight. I stood up and took the road back; he followed me, but I turned around when I reached the first gardens and realized he had disappeared. The following day, as I was chiseling the pleats for the girl who was laid out, constantly coughing up marble dust, I pondered the blue glow, the bulbless streetlight, and the cat.
That night I returned to the farthest light. You could hear a multitude of frazzled, mad crickets singing. The huge cat showed himself again. He didn’t appear out of the wasteland and tall weeds; I discovered him directly in front of me, his honey eyes staring at mine, blacker than the night of souls. He came every night. I would sit against the streetlight, waiting as the wind carried away the fallen leaves, and suddenly I would find him beside me, still as a corpse. I got in the habit of showing him Balbina’s tooth, and when he saw it, his body would rub up against my legs and he would go rrromm-rromm over and over again, looking at the tooth with eyes like honey. On the last night I found him waiting for me. I pulled the tooth out of my pocket and began tossing it in the palm of my hand. Without even a glance, he began to circle the light as if he were a rope, and each time round he tied me to the streetlight, tying and tying me, tighter each time. I felt as if he were tying up my life forever. My thoughts floated beyond the gardens, toward the cemetery and back, but they never quite returned to the fields and the bulbless light, and as I gazed at the night before me to see if it had grown blue, blue from top to bottom, back to front, with the knot at my throat, my tongue protruding, the night turned blue and tender, like the stars Balbina had embroidered on a tablecloth, because Balbina did needlework, and in addition to embroidering blue stars, she embroidered pillowcases and sheets with letters that looked like flowers and branches, and the blue of the night was blue like the stars made of thread, blue like Balbina’s blue eyes. When I first met her, I called her the girl with the blue eyes. But then I forgot she had them.
Author Bio
Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short stories—Twenty-Two Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street—that would make her internationally famous, while at the same time earning a living as a seamstress. In the mid-1960s she returned to Catalonia, where she continued to write. Death in Spring, her final novel, is also available from Open Letter.
Translator Bio
Martha Tennent received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Barcelona and served as the founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She has regularly translated between Spanish, Catalan, and English, and her translations have appeared in Two Lines, Words Without Borders, eXchanges, and Review of Contemporary Fiction. She has received many accolades and awards for her translations, including a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for this collection.
About Open Letter
Open Letter—the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press—is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.
Making world literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.
Current and forthcoming titles from Open Letter include works from Argentina, France, Iceland, Peru, Poland, South Africa, and numerous other countries.
www.openletterbooks.org
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda Page 25
