V

On the way back she told me she didn’t want to walk through the village. The faceless men would be sweeping the streets, drawing on the last bits of straggling darkness, and they frightened her. We headed toward Pedres Altes, through the fields of thirsting, fractured land. We sat down on top of the sundial. It was a round, flat stone the color of dry mud, black-flecked. The blacksmith told me the sundial used to stand in the middle of the Plaça; he had marked the hours and forged the pin in the center to signal them. A year later someone had stolen the pin, but no one cared; no one wanted time in their lives. From where we were sitting, we could see clumps of canes and a few birds flying low over the water. The sun came up, and we watched the sunrise, our eyes wide-open, though we wished they were closed. It was a globe of fire, splashes of flames everywhere, all of it ablaze. When we closed our eyes, a black spot quivered before us. We heard the hammer beginning to strike the anvil. She got up and stood right in the center of the stone, placing her feet firmly together to cover the hole where the iron pin had been. She said she would be Time. She stood very still, casting the edge of her shadow between two hours. Slowly, the shadow moved. Later, as the young men were leaving the village for the stables and the eldest for the slaughterhouse, her shadow rested on an hour before inching away. Once more it came to a halt between two hours. I asked her if she knew what time was, and she said, Time is me—and you. She made me stand beside her; I took her by the shoulders, and she took me by the waist. The sun dispatched a trail of misty haze over the slopes of Maraldina and Senyor’s mountain. And while we were Time, a strange force arose within me, as though my guts had been made of iron, as though my mother, behind the forge, had moulded me from iron as she merged with the blacksmith. At that moment I understood what it meant to experience the force of the boy leaving childhood behind. She looked at me. I took her hand and made her step down from the stone; then she dropped my hand. I headed to the stables, she to the village. I turned back to look at her; she had turned round too.

From out of nowhere four or five children appeared, naked, with skinny legs and fat bellies. They yelled, go with the ugly girl, go with the ugly girl, and jumped up and down like goats. The oldest one threw a rock at me, and the others followed suit. Then all at once five or six more appeared from behind some shrubs and started hounding me with rocks. I couldn’t respond to the aggression; there were too many of them. Besides, I was afraid that if I threw rocks at them, I would really hurt them. So I started running, and that excited them; they chased after me, their skinny bodies sunburned. I took the path to Maraldina, knowing that would tire them. They looked like little stumps, pursuing me, yelling, go with the ugly girl, the ugly girl. Without warning, a rock struck my upper arm and blood spurted out. Let’s kill him, kill him . . . They continued to run, but I had gained ground. Two were boys I had set free from kitchen cupboards. When I reached the cemetery of the uncemented dead, they froze. I watched them; even from a distance I could see the fear in their faces. They stopped throwing rocks and were silent for a moment. The oldest boy, head up, straight as a staff, flung his arm forward from time to time, his hand open, yelling, go with the dead, the dead, and they all shouted, the dead. As they strode away, they swung their heads round to shout, the dead.

We returned to the cave that night. We left the house together and slept there. We cleared a space in the dust, and in our crimson bed sweet sleep enveloped the delicate skin over our eyes. My arm hurt. The blood had formed a scab. With a trace of daylight from the shaft, we made two beds, like two cradles, one beside the other, so we could sleep holding hands. We formed a mountain of dust for a pretend table, and mounds of dust for pretend chairs, and little piles of dust for pretend pots and pans and little cups and round platters.

Every night we would go to the cave. As soon as we woke up, she would tell me what she had seen while she slept. One night a finger of hers turned into a caterpillar, and the tip gave birth to a red butterfly that died almost immediately. Another night she saw bees forming crowns above the horses’ heads, and the horses wore their crowns of bees. Then the bees crowned the old men’s heads, and when the men slaughtered the horses, horses and men were crowned by bees. On another night she saw a stack of horses’ eyes, and the mourners swooped down, snatched them in their beaks, and flew away, high into the sky. When they could fly no higher, they let the eyes fall into the river, and the water carried them away, flowing past the wash area where the women exclaimed, look at the spangles floating in the river. They said the prisoner had hurled them. Then she explained why some soap bubbles turned to glass: the ones that quivered and rose little by little burst, but those that shot straight up, did not.

Inside the well, we found another well. She discovered it. She said she could hear water beneath her and told me to listen. We held our breath. You could hear water flowing, just like I could hear the river from my bed. We stood up but heard nothing; we could only hear it if we were lying down. Stretched out on the ground, she began running her hand across the wall, very slowly. She located an opening in a corner, a long way from where we collected the red powder, and managed to squeeze through it. She crawled inside and returned much later, backing out of the hole. She said she had found a well with light and water flowing through it. The following day, I enlarged the hole with a shovel; every day, bit by bit, I widened it, until we could both go together to see the well and listen to the water.

We would throw red powder in our newly-discovered well and then go down to watch the river: we didn’t know where the water flowing deep inside the well came from or where it was going. We scrutinized the river, searching for a thread of rose-colored water. But the water from the second well dwelt in darkness, and the red powder we threw in it . . . who knows where it ended up? We threw almost all the powder into the water, all we had piled up when we had enlarged the opening, all that slowly fell from the cave walls from one year to the next, the powder used for painting the village.

We didn’t play in the afternoons. She stayed at home and placed the flowerpot on the windowsill. When the heat grew less poisonous, but still persisted, I took her to the forest of the dead. For a while we strolled from tree to tree, reading the names on the plaques. We found a low fence of thorny branches; the trees on the other side were very old, and on all the plaques, above the names, you could spot a bee flying into a bird’s open beak. We made piles of dry leaves, the ones the wind had left from the previous spring, naked, just veins and nerves.