She was sixteen years old.
The horses ate the juiciest grass, gorged on the sweetest alfalfa, chewed the flattest carob beans. Horseflesh, they told us, would replenish your blood. We ate it in a variety of ways: often raw (chopped up and mixed with herbs), roasted in drippings in winter, sometimes cooked over a log fire—always cooked over wood at funeral feasts. The fat was made into balls and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen or dining room. The balls of fat went well with the soap bubbles from the wash area where the water was playful; some hung from the courtyard arbors all spring, even part of summer. As though they were made of glass. The ones the children made almost always burst when shot from canes; no one could explain why some lasted a long time, others only a moment. If one ever turned into glass, we placed it carefully in the fork of the wisteria vines. At home, we had always had soap bubbles and balls of fat. Two or three times a week my stepmother would say to my father, go to the fields, I’m expecting some fat. And father would say, fine. I would also say, fine, very softly so they wouldn’t hear me because the two of them were walking together and I was farther off. Then my stepmother would put the flowerpot on the windowsill, and that night she had a ball of fat hanging from the ceiling.
My stepmother was so short she had to climb up on a wooden box to put the flowerpot on the windowsill. While she was waiting for them to bring her some fat, she would drag the bed to the middle of the room, where she usually slept, and crawl into it. An earth-colored blanket lay across the bed. If father and I were at home, she would sit in a chair, her legs folded beneath her, head resting against the back of the chair. She would often sit like that when father and I straightened up the kitchen. Sometimes while sitting in her chair she would take a cane and rock the balls of fat with little nudges. Father used to say she thought only about playing. Some days he would fill a basket with wisteria blossoms and tell her, play. She would say she was working because she was stringing wisteria flowers together with a needle and thread, threading all the flowers through the stems. They were necklaces. Some nights she didn’t want to go to sleep because she said she had slept all day, and on top of sleeping during the day, she couldn’t sleep all night too. I would sneak down and watch her. I discovered she didn’t want to go to bed because she wanted to eat the fat without anyone seeing her.
I slept upstairs. If I leaned out of the window, I had a glimpse of a speck of sky overhead. From my bed I could see the ivy wall on the cleft mountain. At times when I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I thought how I wanted to bring Senyor crashing down—especially in winter when it snowed—or help the roots upwrench houses, or walk the horses on Maraldina where no one had ever been. I would think about things like that with my eyes closed until I got sleepy. The last thing I would hear, while everyone rested with their eyes shut, was the river dislodging the rocks that supported the village.
I wanted to see the Festa, so I went. The villagers had gathered near the river, on the esplanade by the canes that whistled because it was windy. Tables and benches had been built from tree trunks. The horse hoof soup was already boiling in large cauldrons, and standing beside each pot was a woman who was removing scum with a ladle and throwing fat and lumps of cooked blood on the ground. For a funeral Festa, they killed horses and pregnant mares. First, they ate the soup, then the horse or mare, and then a morsel—but only a small piece because there wasn’t much to go round—of the little ones the mares were carrying inside them. They made a paste with the brains; it helped digestion. They peeled them, boiled them in a pot used only for brains, cleaned them, and then chopped them to bits.
With one spoonful of the paste, you had plenty. It was mixed with honey and went down like oil, passing through your innards, leaving you feeling fresh. More than one spoonful and you went mad. Just one spoonful, they would say. The paste provided them with the stamina needed to raise horses, cut alfalfa, and trudge all the way to the carob trees to look for beans. They used to say that those carob trees had witnessed the birth of the village, the two conjoined shadows, and the first horse’s leap as it neighed and emerged like a flame, all alone, from the middle of the river. They used to say that if those carob trees could talk . . .
I stood very still behind a clump of canes. They were still slitting open horses. They tied their legs and strung them up on a kind of clothesline; you could see the empty space inside them lighting up, glistening in the firelight. The blacksmith’s wife—short and ugly, with the purple mark on her cheek—was peeling brains with the two women who had accompanied her to the forest of the dead. Suddenly she jumped up, telling everyone to be quiet. She thought she heard the prisoner neighing.
VIII
In the firelight the men and the women all looked alike. In the daytime they appeared quite different: some were tall, some short, some thin, some fat; some had more hair than others, or a broader or longer nose, or different-colored eyes. But in the firelight they all looked alike. In the very middle of the day, when they were calm and occupied, the only ones who looked alike were fathers and sons. Some sons were identical to their fathers; some, however, did not resemble them at all. This almost drove the fathers mad, but little by little they grew accustomed to the idea. They said it all came from looking. Near the canes where I was hiding, a group of dirty, disheveled women were sitting on the ground away from the fire, their eyes blindfolded. They were the pregnant ones. They covered their eyes because if they gazed at other men, the children they were carrying would also take a peek and begin to resemble the men. They said a woman fell in love with every man she saw, and the longer she was pregnant, the faster she fell in love. So, what with women falling in love and children looking, what shouldn’t happen, happened.
They filled their plates with soup and sat down on the benches round the tables, like brothers and sisters, drinking the soup straight from their plates. The faceless men were seated at another table closer to the river; the men without noses, or their foreheads ripped away, or missing an ear, could sit at the table with everyone else and live like everybody. But the faceless men wished to be alone. They drank the soup with a funnel of sorts and chewed the meat with one hand grasping the hole in their mouths so the meat would not slip out. They were ashamed to live in the village and preferred to be alone. They lived together in an enclosure behind the stables and helped each other. Once a man had lost his face, he was always in the company of another faceless man. It was as though they had never had anything at all; being mutilated meant relinquishing whatever they possessed. They started work at night: they grazed horses, cleaned streets, chopped wood—all manner of jobs. When they were among themselves they talked about the water and the strange taste of the drink they were forced to swallow before swimming through the river. And the serpent, and the waterfall that sounded like it was hidden but was more formidable than Font de la Jonquilla, the buttercup fountain. They were always at peace, according to the elderly, because they had perceived truth up close. They were reborn, it seemed, after crossing the river; they were less driven and possessed greater clarity than before. But they died the same as others: one moment alive, then their mouths filled with cement, all the way down to their stomachs.
The canes whistled softly. When the villagers had eaten their fill, the shouts and cries of joy commenced. They called out to each other from table to table or ear to ear and laughed. The digestion-paste was passed round and all of them swallowed a spoonful. The blacksmith didn’t want any, so they grabbed hold of him and stretched him out on top of the table. Two women pulled at his feet, trying to make him fall off, onto the ground. One was my stepmother. The pregnant women stood up to dance. They danced alone, giving the impression that each was planted in the ground. And they sang to themselves as they danced. They lowered their heads to their chests, raised them up, threw them back, and spun round as if they would be spinning round like that all their lives, amidst shadows and flames, without a man, alone, bellies protruding in front of them, hair unkempt.
Until the canes began to sway in the wind, I had not realized they had been still for a while. The sky had blackened, leaving no trace of the moon. The first drops fell, fat and far apart. If it had not been for the shouts, I would have heard the rain falling on the river. They sprang to their feet and started to run, pursued by the rain. My stepmother ran too; she was the last one I saw in the firelight. The smell of extinguished fires pervaded everything. The water fell on the dead coals, drenched ashes, gnawed bones and grimy tools. A flash of lightning drew everything out of the shadow, and suddenly everything died . . . died . . . filled with cement, upright inside the tree. Father