Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda

Author:Merce Rodoreda [Rodoreda, Merce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Alone and bored while my child and the blacksmith’s son roamed through the fields of black night or the forest or Pedres Altes, I would visit the prisoner. I’d sit by his side, and when I was tired of being there, I’d leave. One day, without my asking him anything, he spoke. He told me you had to live pretending to believe everything. Pretending to believe everything and doing everything others wanted; he’d been imprisoned when he was young because he knew the truth and spoke it. Not the truth of the faceless men. The real thing. The only person I felt close to was the prisoner. With my wife it was always the same—she couldn’t abide me—and the child was crazy, infatuated with the blacksmith’s son. I would wait until the wash women had left, and then I’d sit close to the prisoner. His fingers and toes were very long, his bones covered with dark skin, shriveled from being exposed so much to the sun, cold, and wind. Sometimes I’d find him half asleep, weary from neighing and listening to the women screaming at him, ordering him to neigh. His voice was different when he talked to me. It became human. He told me the burden of life came from the fact that we sprang partly from earth, partly from air. He was silent a moment, then told me not to keep company with the blacksmith’s son because his mother was a beast. Then he repeated: part air, not like fish that are only from water. Or like birds that are from the air. One married to water, the other married to air. Man is made of water, lives with earth and air. He lives imprisoned. All men. He explained that when the villagers came to gaze at him, exhibiting him to their children, they all said he’s a prisoner, but he wasn’t a prisoner, he said, he lived differently from others, only that. He’d grown accustomed to living that way, and when they removed the cage because they thought he was no longer a person, it was all the same to him. So he stayed. Nothing mattered to him, living behind bars or with no bars. He was his own prison. Everyone bears their own prison, nothing changes, only habits, from listening so long to the coursing river, he said, and from seeing so much water drift past. What drifted past was him. I flow past, he said, everything else remains. Man lives between earth and air, is made of water, and lives imprisoned like the river that has earth beneath it and air above. The river is like a man. Always along the same appointed path, and if at times the river overflows, like a man’s heart when he can no longer bear it, a law returns it to its course. He spoke without looking at me. He could only look in front of him—with red-ringed eyes consumed by fire—as if he couldn’t turn his head, as if what bound head to shoulder had grown rigid.

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