When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà

Author:Irene Solà [Solà, Irene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SNOW

I get out of the car and the dog greets me and I knock on the door and ask to come in and once I’m sitting at the kitchen table I blurt out: “I tried to tell your mother and she didn’t like it. But now that Sió’s dead, I’ll say it to you, Mia. You’ve got somebody in this house.”

She looks at me calmly. “Is it somebody dead?”

“What’s left of ’em,” I say.

“With bad intentions?”

“Better out of the house than in.”

“Like all animals,” she says. “Is it my father?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it blind?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it Hilari?”

I don’t know if it’s Hilari.

“Can I think about it?” she asks.

I don’t go into Matavaques if I can help it. I avoid looking at its windows. I look at the garden and the vegetable patch and the ridge on the other side. When I sense it, I imagine a man. But it isn’t a man. I imagine a man so I’ll feel a little less afraid. An angry man. Violent and out of control, with the dark certainty of strength. Pouting, like a child. Hidden in a corner. Steeped in the poison of his own failure. Incubating rage and waiting like a brooding hen whose eggs have been stolen.

It used to really snow. It snowed so much that it rose up like prison walls along the roadsides. Like labyrinths. Like castles. Kids would grab sacks and slide down the slopes without sleds. Their butts on the sacks, on the snow. You would hear them laughing and shouting over the absolute silence of the mountains after a snowfall. As if everything, trees and beasts, had been struck dumb by shock. By the blinding whiteness. Snow like a white hand covering their mouths. Kids celebrating. Because you can’t control snow, sort of like death. It comes when it wants to and changes everything. The weatherman Tomàs Molina says it will snow. Today. I say it won’t. I can tell when it’s about to snow, because the light is white. When it’s about to rain the light is gray, silvery. You start to see the gray light and the white light almost a day before. Depending on their intensity, you know how soon it will rain or snow.

My grandmother used to seek out water with iron rods, like two Ls, and her father knew when it was going to rain, and people—who were generally not fond of my great-grandfather because they said he was scary—would come to see him and ask him when to plant their crops. One day when we were gathering brushwood with my grandmother, I asked her what the cascades were. I had always seen them, the cascades, hanging in the middle of the sky, like the clouds. Some of them thicker, some of them skinnier, of a transparent, lovely, muffled blue like the river. My grandmother looked up at the patch of sky I was pointing to and exclaimed: “Oh, dear lord, my girl. What’ve we done to you.” And she said no more.

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