The Island by Ana María Matute

Author:Ana María Matute [Matute, Ana María]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241374290
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

10

He wasn’t angry, and maybe that threw me. He looked up when he heard my footsteps, and I remember – so clearly it could be happening in front of me – the creak of the pulley, the unsettled dampness rising from the well. A hot dampness like the breath of the earth. I said, ‘The water’s very cold,’ or something equally banal. Whatever I said, it made him turn his head and look at me. I knew his sunburned nape from seeing him bend over his vegetable plot. As he turned his face to me, I thought, ‘He’s never looked at me before.’ He hadn’t looked at me, or at Borja, that afternoon when he took the boat. (And suddenly I was overcome by the smell of the patio at the mayor’s house the morning they buried José Taronjí, and by the sun glinting between the vine leaves, and more than anything by a kind of dazzlement. And I remembered the light as it swarmed between the cruel glass shards, green, gold and ruby along the edge of the wall.)

It was, I think, barely quarter past three, the sun full in the sky, the ground littered with scorched leaves. The dragon wore a covering of green ash, like the droplets of an unending rain. Manuel had a slim, hard face. And the deep hollows of his eyes, and his face with its worn wood lustre, seemed to burn in the sun. His eyes were a deep black, the cornea nearly blue. I have never again seen eyes like his, which would make anyone forget – as I have forgotten – the rest of his features. And strangely, when that boy looked at me – that maligned boy, whose father had been killed for his sinful beliefs – I felt something I had never felt before, even though Borja, Guiem and Juan Antonio always teased me and tried to humiliate me : I felt ridiculous, insignificant. I felt a wave of blood rise to my cheeks, and all at once my memory was full of the echo of my bragging talk, the fragrance of my Murattis, my superior airs and even my mint sweets, which seemed now idiotic and meaningless. I didn’t know what else to say. I could only look at him and stand there, holding out to him – I realized suddenly – one incongruous hand, aware of how strange it was that I, Doña Práxedes’ granddaughter, Borja’s cousin, former inmate of Our Lady of the Angels, should be standing there at all. I thought, ‘He’s not angry.’ He seemed, rather, to be full of sadness, a dark sadness not only for himself but also for me, as if he had encompassed and included me, as if he were holding me to him very tightly (as I held to me very tightly a round globe full of snow). There was room in that sadness for my badly knotted plaits, now slipping down the back of my neck ; for

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