IX

When the work in the forest ended, it was time to paint the village. And there were no paintbrushes. My stepmother and I hid behind the blacksmith’s house; from there we could hear the shouts. Hurriedly they made new brushes, but not enough; they had to be shared, passed round from person to person. The village could not be painted quickly, nor all at once.

When the painting was completed, the thick-clustered wisteria had already finished blooming. The day of the Festa, everyone was uneasy: about the souls, the powder, the welter of disorder in the forest, the bees buzzing nervously through the fields (they must have told each other they were dying off).

The women had decorated the streets. From one house to the other, from one side of the street to the other, they had strung lines, adorning them with scraps of old, brightly-colored clothes. The blacksmith took the prisoner some honey, and when he returned he announced that soon the neighing would begin, the prisoner’s mouth was already horse-like. Mid-afternoon, the pregnant women began to dance in the center of the Plaça. From a courtyard, someone started hurling stones against the rock wall, trying to free the cane, wedged high in the ivy, that neither wind nor rain had been able to dislodge. You could see the cane and stones flying past. All of a sudden the cane quivered, then fell; for a moment it seemed that it would again be trapped, further down. But it wasn’t. The person who had freed the cane appeared in the Plaça and started breaking it into bits, handing them to whoever wanted a piece. He was young and tanned. The pregnant women stopped their dancing and approached the boy who was distributing the scraps; they removed their blindfolds, pretending to want a bit of cane, but they had eyes only for the young men round them. When the boy offered one of the women a piece of the cane, she grasped his hand before anyone realized and planted a kiss on his fingernail. The blacksmith standing beside me said the villagers would soon be busy killing desire. I did not know then what they did to kill desire, nor what it meant. The pregnant women began to dance again, but they could see nothing. Before they resumed dancing, their husbands had retied the bandages so tight that they pulled the skin on their foreheads.

My stepmother was sitting at the entrance to the house, a ball of fat in her lap. Everyone who passed by shouted things at her, but she kept eating, never glancing at them. But as soon as they had passed, she shook her finger at them. The pregnant women finished their dance, and all the men lined up to race. They ran with their eyes bulging, arms in front of them, chests forward. They gave the appearance of being disjointed. Their breath preceded them, and they followed it. Two very old men had already prepared the hollow tree trunk with the short sticks. All of the sticks had sharp pointed tips, except one, which ended in a fork. The man who drew the forked stick was forced to swim under the village. The faceless men, the noseless, the earless, all of them shut themselves in the stables so as not to dishearten the others. The one who drew the forked stick needed to be brave, brave as the sun. The hollow tree trunk with the sticks inside was painted pink, inside and out. It was repainted every year, just like the houses. The men and older boys had to run past the trunk and seize a stick. When a sharp stick was drawn, everyone was silent. When the forked stick was drawn, everyone burst out laughing and the children jumped up and down.

A boy who was not much older than me drew the stick. His face was like others’, but his nose was straighter, his cheeks more delicate. When he glimpsed the tip of the stick, he turned pale with the pallor of fear, and everyone knew—even before seeing it—that he had chosen the forked stick. Always, always, the one who drew the forked stick turned pale.

The blacksmith and a group of men accompanied the boy to the upper edge of the village, where the water from the river thrust itself downward, toward darkness. The boy stripped, and they gave him a drink; while he drank, his eyes wandered from one man to the other. He took too long to dive into the water, and the men had to throw him in, alone and naked. I had gone to watch, my stepmother beside me, and when the boy plunged into the water, she pulled a piece of string from her pocket and began swinging it. A man noticed us, and he struck me on the chest with his fist, knocking me to the ground. All of the men raced to the lower edge of the village to watch for the boy. In the Plaça, three women were pounding and mixing together wisteria blossoms and bees in a wooden mortar: this was the ointment to dress the boy’s wounds, re-sheathing the skin over his blood. Senyor observed it all from his towering window. He was waiting for the boy to emerge and announce that the village would soon be swept away by the river. He could see when a man entered the water and when he emerged. If the man was unconscious when he reappeared, the villagers would fish him out and carry him to the riverbank. As soon as the man had left the water, Senyor would close his window.

My chest hurt, and I headed for home. My stepmother followed me. We sat on the step in front of the house. I looked at her and she laughed, and all the while the water beneath the village was thrashing the boy against the rocks, mutilating him.