Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda Read Free Book Online Page A

felt the urge to embrace the trunk, and when I finally did, my cheek against it too, I placed my arms and cheek higher than hers and we didn’t touch.
    She let go and forced me to do the same. Again, she told me she wanted to climb inside the well, so we walked down the mountain a bit and stopped in front of the entrance. The access was steep, very steep, but some rocks served as steps. Had it been daytime, and if we held on to the rope, the descent would not have been difficult. A cool, damp air rose from the well. She made me go first, practically shoving me, and even though I stepped from rock to rock, my legs felt numb. Inside it grew darker and darker. When I reached the bottom I was stiff and felt like crying. I felt I would never again be able to leave the well; I would smother to death because the entrance would be closed off, or the rope would break . . . She descended slowly, blocking the little bit of sky I could see. She pushed me further inside, then clasped my hand again, telling me she had been afraid the first time, but she had killed the fear because it was bad for you. Her heart had almost run away. She made me sit down near her. I wanted to know where she was, and I stretched out my arm, groping for her left and right, but found nothing. Still sitting, I began edging backward until my shoulder hit the wall. I searched for my stepmother with my outstretched hand. Suddenly I let out a yell that echoed in my ears as if it had issued from someone else: she had dug her teeth into my hand. I shoved her away and with my other hand found a mound of dust. It was cool, and I sank my aching hand into it. I grew accustomed to the dark, even though I couldn’t see a thing, just a thread of dying light spilling down the shaft. Soon, not even that glimmer reached me: the moon must have shifted. The fear within me began to subside, replaced by a sense of peace as I sat, head against the wall, eyes shut. Then she began to speak. In a thin voice she told me that her father had died swimming under the village; no one ever saw him emerge. Every day, at the same hour her husband had died, her mother would go into the courtyard and stand there, head between her hands, rocking back and forth, back and forth. She told me that the day before the hanging, her mother had got a splinter in her foot and couldn’t remove it, so she had to hobble. She hanged herself during the night, with a rope tied in the fork of the wisteria vine. The first thing she saw the next morning when she went out to the courtyard was her mother’s dangling feet, but she wasn’t at all frightened. She didn’t know then what a hanged person was, or that the position her mother was in meant she was dead. Using her two fingers as pliers, she had removed the splinter from her mother’s foot. She told me she didn’t really know where her tomb stood, but she was sure it was where they bury the soulless dead, at the foot of Maraldina, with no marker. That was why, on her visits to Maraldina, she was always afraid she would step on her mother. She said if she hadn’t been hungry, she would have been fine the whole time she wandered through the village streets, even though she could hardly remember it. When the old men from the slaughterhouse took her in, they gave her a lot of blood to drink, and that was why she was so strong. One sunny, winter day she began to follow my father; his shadow, she said, was warm. She told me her feet were cold and asked if I wanted to warm them. I don’t know how she was sitting, but she put her feet in my lap and I took hold of them. They were freezing and, as I held them, I must have fallen asleep.

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,