Death in Spring. Mercè Rodoreda

away she wanted to go further into the river, but the water was already up to her waist. Then she slipped. I don’t know how she did it, with that tiny arm of hers, but she grabbed hold of my ankle. I lifted her up and her lips were pale. We climbed out of the river, water dripping from her dress, and she headed home. I stood and watched her until she was just a black speck in front of the houses.

      I jumped back into the river. The water that enveloped my legs still seemed to hold her. We had been in this water together. Mourners were flying above the blue and purple river, beneath the branches, searching for mosquitoes and soft grass. Night arrived, and suddenly I scarcely knew my way back to the village: from Pedres Baixes to the slaughterhouse and from the slaughterhouse to the Pont de Fusta, where the river beneath the bridge transported stars and pieces of moon.

      III

      The white flower was the same as the red: the only difference was color. Five little leaves, five larger ones beneath, and a handful of yellow threads crowned by a little saucer sprouting from the heart of the flower. They bloomed year-round. When one withered, a new one immediately shot up inside the dead flower: death thrusting life upward, summer and winter, endlessly. The only flowers like that in the whole village were my stepmother’s. We didn’t know where she found them. The day she entered our house, she set the two flowerpots on the table. Father brought her bundle of clothes; the bundle and the two flowerpots were all she possessed.

      The first night we were by ourselves, I sat on the floor by her door. Inside she was alone and I thought I could hear her sleeping. I imagined her covers had fallen off, like when my blanket would slide off the bed and I couldn’t be bothered to get up and put it back. While I was turning this over in my mind, I fell asleep. I woke up when I sensed I was being watched. Two eyes were bent over my face, two little rabbit eyes, small and round, like a shadow shining. When she realized I was watching her, she moved away, to her corner. The corner where she always retreated whenever father scolded her.

      She would have stayed there if I hadn’t told her to sit at the table with me. She came and sat, and I told her that her hair was mussed and she laughed, and when she laughed she seemed so tiny. Then I combed her hair. I made four braids for her—two in front, two in back—like the four corners of the earth. I tied a rope round her waist and right away the dress was shorter and didn’t drag the floor so much. When she was all fixed up, we went out to the courtyard and collected wisteria blossoms to make necklaces. Then we lay flat on the ground to watch the roots emerging from the earth, lifting the house. We exposed the base of the largest root and the deeper into the ground it went, the whiter it was, as white as the worm clinging to it.

      I would have spent the whole day with her, but in mid-morning she told me to leave, she had work to do, and while she was telling me this, she was unraveling her braids and shaking out her hair, which again fell down, past the rope I had tied round her waist. I left, and when I was some distance away, I turned round: the window was open and she had placed the pot with the white flower on the sill; she was watering it. The curtain fluttered in the wind. When I was little, mother would take the curtain down to wash it and I would secretly breathe in its musty odor. When it was washed, it smelled of soap.

      That afternoon I discovered my father wasn’t my father. My fingers were firmly clasping the ball of resin in my pocket when the blacksmith told me he was my father; he said he would have to take care of me. He said all you had to do was look at my face, especially from the mouth up. He said he was my father, and that was why I always liked to keep him company, just like my mother, who couldn’t walk by without stopping to look at the sparks and listen to the iron screaming in the water. He showed me a corner of the forge, where pieces of old iron and rusty chains lay, and told me that was where they had made me. I looked at his crooked legs, and when he noticed, he told me I had a bit of everyone. Then he laughed, and his teeth were drenched in saliva.

      When I was little, mother was like a bee, buzzing from one place to another, kitchen, pasture, river, her braid black as night and teeth the color of bitter almond. When she raised her arms to hang clothes in the bright sun, it was as if the morning light was rising. She spoiled wedding nights because all the women on her side of the family had done the same. Like shadows that possessed a voice. The voice from those shadows screamed and screamed through her mouth all night long beneath the newlyweds’ window. Then my mother grew ugly. Her eyes became sad; her braid lost its luster. And her cheeks. And her shapely arm. Her elbow no longer seemed pretty or made of honey.

      IV