DEATH IN THE CHEST

‘Across that stream, there’s a cave,’ declared Marcos, pointing to a slope covered in heather and broom. We’d been walking for almost two hours, and these must have been the first words he’d said.

         ‘A cave of badgers?’ I asked.

         ‘Of badgers or of men.’

         He fell silent, and I didn’t dare ask anything else. He’d never talked to me about his relations with members of the Maquis, if he had any. Up until then, I’d doubted whether it wasn’t just some local gossip. True, he did disappear for days, but I was fifteen years old and was too concerned with my own affairs to worry about the presence or absence of others. Now I think he was starting to feed me information in case one day I had to end up doing the same as him.

         The snow, so white, is treacherous. It can be a new sheet flapping in the wind. Or a shroud. But death isn’t always announced and, even when it is, we don’t always understand the signs.

         My uncle had one obsession that autumn: to hunt down the boar. It had ruined the crops in the summer, digging up the soil between the potatoes, rummaging with its lively snout. It was the middle of November, the birches had lost their leaves. Why he hadn’t gone after it at the start of the hunting season, why he’d had to wait until November, when it was already cold, is something I cannot explain. There may have been a reason and, with the passing of time, I’ve forgotten.

         I’d never seen a boar, even though at home it was invoked to make us children afraid. On outings with my father in the mountains, we’d come across timid-looking rabbits, hares, field mice. I’d once caught a dormouse with a white stripe on its face, like a mask. I’d kept it in the wood hut in a bird cage for ten days. But it wouldn’t settle, it went mad and ran around its prison like a creature possessed, until I decided to let it go. Wild animals don’t get used to being in cages. The boar, however, was a difficult animal to find. With my father, I’d learned to recognize the signs of its presence, the loose bark of a tree where it had sharpened its tusks, the double mark of its hooves when it came down to the river to drink. But I’d never actually seen one.

         I don’t know why Marcos was so obsessed with killing a boar. He was my mother’s brother, but much younger, only six years older than me. He worked in a sawmill in town and wasn’t much given to talking. I’d never dared ask my mother if he really had relations with members of the resistance. These were things one didn’t talk about. It may have been true, and the guards had killed one of his companions. Maybe that was why he wanted to pepper a boar with his shotgun.

         That early morning in November when Marcos and I left in the direction of Ernes to hunt down the boar, the sky was a dark bedspread and the wind cut like a knife. We had prepared our own cartridges, stuffing them with powder and adding pellets. The cartridges weren’t new, we used them again and again by straightening out the cardboard. It took time, but back then time was all we had. Or so we believed.

         A boar needs large-calibre ammunition like pellets. Marcos was carrying his 12-gauge Víctor Sarasqueta gun, a weapon from 1927 with a stock made of walnut that came from the mythical factory in Éibar and had somehow landed in his father’s hands, while I had a smaller, 16-gauge gun, probably also made in Éibar, but without a name. The Sarasqueta was what I envied Marcos the most, apart from the six years’ difference in age, which made him a man, while I was treated like a child. I didn’t even have a firearms licence. Just a dog, Ney, a cross between a griffon and a hound (with the blood of a mutt thrown in), hairy, not pretty, according to my mother, but capable of stubbornly following a scent and flushing out a rabbit or a boar, I hoped.

         The gusts of wind were getting stronger and it was starting to snow when Ney picked up a scent and began to follow it. Following the scent of a boar or any wild animal when it’s blowing a gale is madness, but Marcos’ face, when I glanced at it sideways, had such a look of determination that there was no option but to keep on going, despite the snow that, as it fell, erased the boar’s tracks. We climbed up hills, clambered down gullies, crossed streams carrying water between boulders, I slipped on a wet rock and grazed my hand, and even so we didn’t say a word. We’d been walking for five or six hours, perhaps more, by which time I didn’t know what we were chasing and sensed that, even if the boar was ten or twelve feet in front of us, we wouldn’t see it.

         Suddenly the wind changed direction, stopped blowing from the boar towards us and started blowing from behind us. Ney stopped, dropped his ears and looked at us in confusion. Marcos also came to a halt and by the look in his eyes, without the need for words, I knew that we were lost. We’d fallen into the boar’s trap, it had led us into the heart of its territory and now it was going to abandon us somewhere between a grey sky and some equally grey mountains. I realized the snow, which until then had fallen as dry as mill-dust, sweeping the land without wetting us, was now flying in our faces, mixed with water, and in no time at all we would be soaked.

         We had to walk, it was all we could do. Marcos kept quiet, just gestured with his head and started walking, and I followed. Ney came behind, feeling humiliated, though from time to time he insisted on sniffing at the grey snow in search of the lost trail. I don’t know for how many hours we wandered aimlessly – or so it seemed to me – over those mountains, turned from pursuers into pursued, threatened by gusts of wind that made us blind, by sleet that cut through to the bone, by darkness that grew thicker much faster than we could flee from it.

         It may have still been early, but the dark sky heralded the arrival of night. And, with night, despair. How on earth, in the dark, were we going to find a path we hadn’t been able to locate during the day? How long would we be able to carry on walking before we were overcome by exhaustion? I was just about to surrender to the blackest thoughts when I heard Marcos utter an inarticulate sound and saw him pointing into the distance, in a direction where all I could make out was darkness.

         ‘Finally!’ he muttered.

         I thought he’d gone mad. The cold, darkness and hunger had caused him to see a mirage. But, gazing in the direction of his hand, I spotted what might have been a light glinting between two spirals of mist. Was it possible that Marcos hadn’t been lost and all this time we’d been walking in a set direction? The idea gave me renewed strength and I hastened after him. Even Ney let out a muffled bark, sensing a change in our rhythm.

         It may have taken us half an hour to arrive, but, unlike the time before that, this went quickly. Once we were by the light, it seemed impossible we could have spotted it from so far away, so weak was the flicker coming from the only window not covered by shutters. Before Marcos could knock at the door, the dogs had already announced the arrival of strangers.

         In contrast to the darkness of the inhospitable exterior, the girl who opened the door was framed by the light of the fire behind her, like a virgin in a box that travelled from house to house. She opened her eyes in surprise and to me her cheeks seemed to acquire a rosy tint, though this may have been the impression of entering a warm room, where a fire was blazing.

         ‘Can we come in, Dora?’ asked Marcos. ‘This is Román.’

         A moment later, we were sitting in the warmest corner, next to the fire, with bowls of steaming broth in our hands. Marcos explained what had happened to us in a few words (I’ve already said he wasn’t keen on long-winded explanations) and I realized he’d visited this house before. There were five other people sitting around the fire: Dora’s father and mother, the latter now busy preparing some pancakes for supper; Dora, the girl who’d opened the door and must have been a couple of years older than me; and two older men I imagined were her brothers, though nothing in their features, which seemed to have been carved by an unqualified carpenter using an axe, or their behaviour, which was somewhat unsociable, suggested they shared the same blood.

         ‘A boar,’ said the father. ‘They’re not easy to catch.’

         ‘Not easy,’ one brother gestured towards the other, ‘though two years ago Ramiro killed one with his knife.’

         Ramiro didn’t say anything, he just glanced at the enormous hunting knife hanging from his belt.

         The mother led us to the bedroom furthest from the kitchen, where, despite the fact it was, like the others, above the stables, it was almost as cold as outside. There was only one bed, in which the woman placed a hot-water bottle, and, at the foot of the bed, a wooden chest we sat on to remove our clogs, though not our clothes, since the night looked as if it would be icy. Ney, who slept with us in the room, came up to the chest and howled softly, but I rebuked him and he fell silent. We were guests, and the last thing we should be doing is making noise. Despite the cold, the truth is as soon as I lay down on my side of the bed and nestled my feet against the hot-water bottle, I fell fast asleep.

         When I woke up, the other side of the bed was empty. One glance through the window convinced me we weren’t going to abandon our shelter so quickly, since the snow storm was still in full force. My nose and ears, the only things above the blankets, were frozen. I put on my clogs and headed to the kitchen.

         ‘Román, right?’ said Dora, handing me a bowl of porridge.

         Her hand touched mine, and now it was my turn to go red. A lock of chestnut hair fell from a checked headscarf and shone like the skin of new conkers. Her eyes were grey, the colour of the overcast sky, and her lips appeared moist. Maybe the storm would last for a whole week and I could stay beside her, watching how she arranged things in the kitchen, her hands fluttering like birds.

         ‘Aren’t you eating? The porridge will grow cold. Don’t you like it?’

         ‘Of course I do,’ I said, greedily swallowing two mouthfuls and burning my tongue. ‘Did you make it?’

         She nodded.

         ‘When you finish, you can go to the wood hut and cut wood with Marcos and my brothers.’

         Before I could reply, the door opened and in came Ramiro, the one with the knife, carrying an armful of firewood. He was heading for the hearth, but on his way there a log fell, he tripped on it and lost his balance, spilling all the wood on the kitchen floor, though he himself managed to stay on his feet. As soon as he’d straightened up, he turned to Dora and shouted:

         ‘For goodness’ sake! You’re always getting in the way!’

         I jumped, spilling some of the porridge on my trousers. The accusation was so unjust that for a moment I felt like getting up and punching that idiot in the face, something that was quite beyond me, since a single one of his hands was almost as big as my head. Dora lifted her eyes, saw my frustration and raised her eyebrows, preventing me from putting my plans into action. A moment later, Ramiro left, while Dora and I set about collecting the firewood.

         ‘Don’t worry,’ she said and smiled.

         Crouching next to her, breathing in the scent of freshly cut firewood, the warm smell of a woman emanating from her body, I wanted Ramiro to carry on spilling armfuls of firewood for the rest of the day. For a smile like this, I was capable of moving all the logs by the hearth.

         That day, while the wind howled about the house and the snow fell mercilessly, I helped Dora feed the cows and carried the buckets of milk she’d filled. Coming out of the shed towards the wood hut, with Dora behind and me in front, we met Marcos at the door. He stopped on the threshold, a pile of wood in his arms, a smile flickering about the corners of his mouth. Dora also stopped for an instant, though I couldn’t see her face. She didn’t ask him to get out of the way, nor did he budge, and then, without saying a word, she passed him very slowly, rubbing shoulders. It may have been my imagination, but I’d swear Marcos flared his nostrils, breathing in the combination of sweet sweat and soap as I had.

         I tried to cut firewood, but my inexperience made me drop the heavy axe and I almost hurt my foot. The men laughed and took away the axe. It was obvious that, in such weather, we weren’t going to return home, let alone go hunting for the boar. In the evening, Ramiro warmed chestnut branches in the fire and opened them with his knife, weaving them into a basket. He finished them differently from the way I’d seen them done at home, tying two strips over the handle. I didn’t think his hands, which were like rakes, were supple enough for the job he was doing.

         From side to side of the hearth, Dora and Marcos exchanged glances. Although they didn’t say a word, her manner of looking at him – him and not me, the one who’d been with her all day – the colour of her cheeks, a stifled laugh that left a dimple next to her mouth, ripped my heart to pieces the way Ramiro’s knife shredded the branches. What’s more, Ney was angry with me and carried on howling at the chest every time we entered the bedroom.

         Darkness fell and it stopped snowing, but the frost seized the night with its long, glassy fingers. Dora’s mother gave us a hot-water bottle to put in the bed, while her father gave us something stronger.

         ‘Take this in case you’re thirsty. You’ll need it tonight.’

         When we entered the room, Marcos placed the bottle of brandy on the chest and Ney started howling.

         ‘Do you want a swig?’ he asked.

         I’d never tried brandy, but to say no would have meant admitting I was still a boy, a boy who couldn’t cut wood with an axe or make a girl fall in love with him. I put my lips to the neck of the bottle and took a swig. I cannot say I liked the taste, but the effect was like drinking fire. My throat and chest ignited, and I felt capable of racing down icy paths and hunting that boar, armed only with a knife. With such renewed courage, I made a suggestion to Marcos:

         ‘What’s in that chest that’s got Ney so worried? Why don’t we open it?’

         To start with, Marcos refused, but then, probably because of the alcohol, he grew bold and yanked the lid upwards. A vain attempt, because the chest was locked. But, having made up our minds, we weren’t going to be put off so easily. Marcos took a wire out of his bag and, while I held on to the carbide lamp, he fiddled inside the lock until, creaking, the lid gave way. Ney howled in terror.

         What I saw inside the chest was death. Death in the shape of an old woman dressed in black, stiff as a board, staring at us with one eye, the other being closed. We gazed at this horrifying vision for a moment, no more, since I was holding the lid and let it go out of fright. When it banged, the lock re-engaged, and we didn’t feel brave enough to open it again.

         ‘Do you think they killed her?’ I asked. ‘Otherwise, why would they hide her like this?’

         This question led me naturally to imagine Ramiro clutching his enormous knife. But Marcos shrugged his shoulders and, blowing out the candle, got into bed. I also got in – what else could I do? – and, while it took me a while to get to sleep, in the end I was standing in the doorway of the cow shed, blocking it, while Dora attempted to pass, first one way, then the other, until being captured by my arms. I was just bringing my lips to hers, so moist, when I heard a noise like the slamming of a door. The first thing that came to mind was Ramiro entering our room with his knife out. I turned to ask Marcos for help, but feeling around, searching for his body, my hand reached the edge of the bed without coming across anybody. I was alone in the room, that corpse that heralded my death watching from inside the chest.

         From that moment on, it was impossible for me to sleep. In various parts of the house, the floorboards creaked, revealing the presence of ghosts or one of those malicious brothers. Inside the room, underneath the covers, I could hear a dull thud, which might have been my racing heart, though I took it to be the old woman thumping the lid from inside the chest. Her open eye chased me in mine, and I couldn’t get rid of this vision. On the other hand, whenever I tried to come back down to earth, I had no other option than to imagine Marcos tussling with Dora in a much more welcoming bed than mine. And even without the interventions of ghosts or the holy company, when Marcos came back from his nocturnal expedition, I was afraid he would bump into one of the girl’s brothers, thirsty for revenge.

         Never has a night dragged on for so long. I hated the old woman staring at me from inside the chest, announcing my death, with all my strength, I hated Marcos, who had abandoned me to my fate, Ramiro, who threatened to stab me, and I almost hated Dora as well, for choosing Marcos over me. I felt so sorry for myself I must have fallen asleep. It seemed I’d only slept for a couple of minutes when Marcos was shaking me awake:

         ‘Up you get, Román! It’s stopped snowing, we can go home.’

         In the kitchen, I examined Dora’s face, searching for signs of the previous night’s events, traces I was sure would reveal an amorous struggle, but if there were any, I wasn’t able to decipher them. Her eyes gleamed, but hadn’t they done so the days before? Perhaps the only difference was today she wasn’t wearing a headscarf and her chestnut hair shone like silk.

         I consumed Dora’s porridge for the last time, her father drank a glass of brandy to warm himself and her mother scrubbed a frying pan. Marcos had finished his breakfast and suddenly broke the silence by asking:

         ‘What about your grandmother? I remember her when I came last year, peeling potatoes next to the fire.’

         Dora’s mother wiped her hands on her apron and crossed herself.

         ‘My mother, God forgive her, died last week.’

         ‘May God keep her soul in peace,’ said Marcos, which sounded strange coming from a free thinker like him. ‘I suppose you buried her…’

         ‘Actually no. The priest couldn’t come on account of the snow, we put her inside the chest, poor thing, in the room you slept in, which is the coldest in the house. And there she is, all shrivelled up like a bird.’

         ‘Do you want to see her?’ asked the father.

         I didn’t, but it would have been rude to say no. We processed towards the bedroom, the father solemnly opened the chest and the old woman stared at us again with her right eye no less malignant than the night before. That watery gaze, rather than the warmth of Dora’s hand when we took our leave, was the premonition that accompanied me on the journey home.

         Marcos never did hunt down the boar. Four months later, his body was found in the mountains, pierced by wounds that for some came from the guards’ bayonets, though they may also have been caused by a boar’s tusks. The Civil Guard was in the habit of exposing the bodies of fugitives, or their intermediaries, to public shame, not leaving them on the mountain, but, in that war without rules, habits could always change. I realized then that it wasn’t my own death that had been announced from inside the chest.

         After Marcos died, someone had to take food and messages to the people in the mountains, and I knew the route. It was difficult to persuade my mother, but for me this meant abandoning my childhood and becoming a man.

         The second time I made one of those journeys, halfway through the month of May, I came to what I called the badgers’ cave, but found only two men, one who’d been a waller in my village and another I didn’t know. They asked me to wait, the others wouldn’t be long. I sat down at the entrance to the cave and my eyes alighted on a basket different from the one I’d brought from home, a basket with two strips tied over the handle, covered with a checked headscarf. My heart started beating fast. While we waited, the men didn’t talk about the resistance or the guards, but cracked jokes about the food I’d brought.

         We heard footsteps in the bushes and there appeared, confounding my wildest hopes, not Dora, but the unfinished face of Ramiro looking thinner, with an expression of despair. There were another two men, slightly older than me. The five of them fell to eating like famished dogs, while I looked the other way, promising myself I would bring them more food the next time.

         There wasn’t a next time. The guards carried out a raid, surrounded the cave, and the men, rather than giving themselves up, placed the barrel of the shotgun in their mouths.

My mother was afraid someone would suspect me of having relations with the Maquis and come and get me, but a year went by and no one came. I still remembered Marcos, but my age caused me to think of other things. Life carried on. I worked in the sawmill and occasionally went hunting with my unnamed shotgun. The Sarasqueta hadn’t turned up next to Marcos’ body and, when I searched among his things, thinking he might not have taken it with him since it would be difficult to justify outside the hunting season, I couldn’t find it. I imagined it might be in the weapons room of the Civil Guard museum, with a sign saying ‘Captured from bandits in Lugo province’.

         One night in the month of April, a man came from Ernes with a message for me from Dora. She wanted me to visit her at home, though the man assured me she’d said it wasn’t urgent. My heart went racing off, as did my imagination. Had I been ruled by my impulses, I would have left straight away, crossing the mountains at night without fear of wolves or boars, or more dangerous encounters that could end up with the body of a man ripped to pieces in the broom. It was Wednesday, however, and I still had three days’ work before I could take time off.

         I left home early the following Sunday in the direction of Ernes. The route was the same, but the landscape was completely transformed. From both sides of the road, spring assailed me with its yellow buds and new leaves. From within, memories prickled like gorse thorns. Every step I took, Marcos took with me, rebuking me for wanting to steal his girlfriend, now that he was no more than a shade.

         Keeping up a good pace, I reached the house we’d slept in shortly before midday. I’d just turned seventeen. I was a well-built young man, taller than Marcos, not quite as tall as Ramiro, though I couldn’t have measured myself against either of them.

         Dora opened the door, dressed in mourning. She squeezed my hands, but I realized from the beginning that I didn’t set her cheeks on fire. He may have been only a shade, but Marcos was still stronger than I was.

         ‘Shhh!’ she said, raising a finger to her lips, which were still moist. ‘My mother… You mustn’t say anything to remind her of Ramiro.’

         She took me silently through the house to the room we’d occupied on those nights a year and a half before, which seemed so distant now. Once inside the room, she opened the lid of the chest.

         For a moment, I went back to being fifteen and feared seeing death again, in the guise of an old woman with one open eye. I was even afraid I would come across Marcos’ wounded body, despite the fact I myself had borne his coffin and helped to bury him.

         Dora lifted some blankets and pulled out a long package wrapped in an old cloth. When she opened it, I saw it was the Sarasqueta.

         ‘Marcos,’ the name when she said it seemed to stick in her throat, ‘showed me where he’d hidden it. In April, he couldn’t take it out of the house, nor did he have it when…’

         She couldn’t carry on, nor was it necessary. I took the gun, which was no longer what I envied Marcos the most, and shut the lid of the chest, harbinger of ill omens.

         I realized I didn’t have much time. I took Dora’s hands in mine.

         ‘Dora, I…’

         ‘I know, Román, but… not for now.’

         Pondering these words that were a refusal, but also perhaps a promise, I had to go. With the Sarasqueta, which is all I have left for now.

ALF LAYLA WA-LAYLA: 1 RESOL

‘That said, the pay for scribes was never high. In 301, the Edict of Diocletian (Edictum De Pretiis Rerum Venalium) fixed the payment for scribes at 25 denarii for every hundred lines.’

H. Brandt, ‘Erneute Überlegungen zum Preisedikt Diokletians’, Millennium-Studien, 2004.

Papers hemming her in, always papers. Wall after wall, raining old books that stopped you walking about the house, blood clots in the veins of memory. Pages gnawed by lines, their age certified in the freckles of mildew. Sheets saved from the shredder, from a fate that led to reincarnation in the form of egg boxes or kitchen rolls. How was it possible for an archaic system of measurement based on twelve to survive the passing of time when other cultural entities (‘constructs’, her thesis director liked to call them) were set aside, conquered not by fire, that would have been an honourable death, but by banality? She swept her hand over the row of books, lightly, a pianist stroking the keys. Disposed once again to yield to temptation, to add yet another brood to those lacking a fixed place on the shelves, ‘my poor, homeless books’, as she called them. But Samuel wasn’t there now to criticize her irrational behaviour, ‘don’t buy books you don’t know where to put or, if you do, get rid of some others’. ‘They have nowhere to go,’ she would defend herself. ‘If I don’t give them shelter, what will become of them?’

         ‘My aunt’s the one that knows about old books,’ the boy looking after the bookshop had excused himself, ‘she’ll be back in a moment. Why not go upstairs and have a coffee while you wait?’ She went upstairs, but not to serve herself a coffee from the coffee machine installed next to the hearth. She already had enough problems falling asleep without drinking coffee at five in the afternoon.

         Many years ago, Bradbury had imagined the prohibition, flames, clandestine resistance. He was unable to foresee the slow decline, the replacement, first on shelves, in publishers’ catalogues, by substitutes that only possessed a book’s outward appearance, after writers who’d been cornered by characters using fame acquired on television screens to publish disconnected volumes which sometimes came from mercenary pens.

         Occasionally, she dreamed of a silver age in which, according to references to what specialists called the Era of Barbarity on the Internet (EBI), it wasn’t only possible to buy copies on paper of most of the books ever written, but lots of classics would be available on the net for free or at a minimal price. Mila found it difficult to believe that such times had ever existed. Apart from book one of the Metamorphoses, there had never been a silver age. Particularly unlikely seemed the existence of Google, that mythical virtual library where one could consult any theme.

         ‘Not any theme,’ she’d said to Roberto, her thesis director, distrustfully. ‘Popular themes might have had hundreds of entries, but ours…’

         ‘Ours!’ His eyes dilated as he remembered. ‘Listen, you of little faith, for Ovid, that’s right, for Ovid, there were close to five million references on the Internet… including his complete works…’

         ‘In English…’

         ‘In Latin!’ he roared.

         ‘But the rigour, the academic quality of these references… who controlled them?’

         ‘Obviously, they weren’t all on a par with what is published in Classical Antiquity, Millennium-Studien or Arion. By the way, may I remind you we still have to write an article on your thesis? I await the draft with impatience.’

         Impatience was one of Roberto’s qualities (defects?). Everything had to be done at once, right now, straight away. But in this instance he came up against Mila’s indifference. An article, for what? She wasn’t going to continue her academic career, nor were there many work opportunities in the field of Classics. Who had any interest in her analysis of narrators and narratives in the Metamorphoses and their comparison with the narrative techniques in the One Thousand and One Nights?

         The proof of a lack of interest in Classics was the fact they had to study another theme: Galician publishers exiled in Argentina during Franco’s dictatorship. ‘It’s the only project for which I have funding,’ Roberto had said, ‘from a private foundation, so for now you’ll have to work on this.’ For now. A pet phrase of his, which could mean three years, or seven, or ten. For now, she had a contract with the aim of collecting and examining any documents on the publishing activity of those in exile. ‘I wish I could be so lucky!’ Sara had said. ‘You can hardly complain. A guaranteed salary for three years for you to carry out research on an interesting theme. Not like me. I have a degree in biology and have to dish out hamburgers.’ Her sister appealing to common sense, leaving little margin for contradiction. ‘It’s something I know hardly anything about. It has nothing to do with Ovid, who narratives inside others in the Metamorphoses are told to, mythical sources and oral tradition in Ovid and the One Thousand and One Nights.’ But: ‘Will someone pay you to write about Ovid? You’re lucky you have someone to pay you to write.’

         What she didn’t understand was how, when there were so many references available, thousands upon thousands of pages and complete texts on the Internet, Roberto and the others hadn’t downloaded them on to their computers while it was possible. The same question could be asked of the publishing activity of Galicians in exile. According to Roberto, there was no point downloading – or ‘taking down’, as he called it – and filling up the hard disk with files that could be accessed at any moment. ‘When the combined attack on the Internet of censorship, the society of authors demanding exaggerated fees for rights and telephone companies took place, we thought it was a paper tiger and wouldn’t go any further. Like the crisis. It caught us all with our pants down.’

         María, the one who understood about old books, climbed the stairs, apologizing for being late. ‘I’m normally always here, but today I had to go and value a private library. There aren’t many opportunities to do that any more. Listen, here you’ll find the oldest books, valuable first editions. From this shelf on, ordered by theme – history, literature, anthropology, cooking – old books of varying quality. And in the corner at the back, though they’re still unsorted, piles of papers and books that couldn’t be assigned to a particular author with any certainty or were just too difficult to catalogue. What are you searching for? Galician publishers in Argentina. I don’t know if we have anything about that. There are some books published by Editorial Losada, but since old books are listed by theme, not publisher, you’d have to search by section. I suggest literature. That said, in the corner at the back, next to the hearth, by the piles of firewood, I think you’ll find some magazines edited by Luís Seoane.’

         In the corner at the back, by the hearth, Mila calculated there were as many books and papers as in the other part of the room. Since the space was so tiny, they sat in rows of two or three on the shelves, were heaped up on a table, while others were kept in boxes and packages underneath. A world of old papers, there were few places she imagined could make her so happy. ‘But what if I move them about,’ she objected.

         ‘Don’t worry. They’re unsorted, as I told you. You can rummage around as much as you like. The magazines were on top of the table, but we may have buried them and they can’t be seen.’

         ‘Ink-drunk’. That was how Samuel used to describe her. Capable of doing anything for a sheaf of written documents, the older, the better. ‘The most effective drugs are those that originate inside the brain, we neurologists call drugs that have a similar effect to opiates endorphins.’ ‘Do you think ink comes from within or without?’ ‘I couldn’t say, but I know it produces an addiction for which there is no cure.’ Ink has its own peculiar smell. Ink addicts have recognized each other over the centuries. Becoming emotional as she read, in chapter nine of Don Quixote, Cervantes’ introduction to the discovery of the supposed manuscript in Arabic of Cide Hamete Benengeli:

         One day when I was in the Alcaná market in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclinations to pick up one of the volumes…

         From the other side of the window, Cervantes watched Mila approach the table, ready to read whatever kind of torn papers there might be among the piles on the ink-stained table. Books without a cover, missing the first pages. Pages written sometimes according to orthographic rules different from the current ones or else perhaps from a time when there were no rules:

         The first distinctive factor about the bilingual situation of Galicia is that Galician is not a minority language. It is – still – the language of most Galician people, that of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and other peoples of Africa and Asia.

         The second distinctive factor is that Galicians are ashamed to speak in their own language.

         Books with strange titles such as Moses and the Modern Geologists by Victor de Bonald. Fragments of poems:

         But I, while I’m still here, in the middle of species: ris-ras, ris-ras

         awaiting the wound.

         Yes, I await the wound.

         Pages with compressed handwriting, witnesses of a time when there wasn’t much money to print large books or else the intention was to make small books that would fit in the pocket and escape censorship, as was the case with the first edition of Forever in Galicia, printed in Argentina and measuring 13.5 by 9.5 centimetres:

         The heart of the debate on environmental themes. Conservators and conservationists.

         To aim with a single, systematic pen stroke to disentangle the particularly chaotic situation current ideas about ecological problems seem to be in is obviously unrealistic.

         ‘The magazines I talked about are over there, on the right side of the table.’ The bookseller’s comment caught her by surprise. She looked in the direction of a dusty pile of papers. Magazines? She couldn’t see any magazines. Unless she meant that folio that must once have been green, though the colour had only been preserved in a rectangle in the centre, where it had presumably been protected by a book. She hadn’t noticed it.

         A double folio: Resol, Fledgling sheet of the people, number 6, December 1932. Santiago de Compostela. It wasn’t one of the magazines published in exile in Argentina, it was earlier than that. If she wasn’t mistaken, a poetry magazine which, according to Ánxel Fole, one of the editors, had no fixed price. It was handed over and you paid for it whatever you liked. The money received for one number paid for the next, a model that would be followed almost a century later by the poets of Letras de Cal (tiny books she’d heard about, but never actually held in her hands). Luís Seoane was another of the editors, though the person in charge was Arturo Cuadrado Moure. Before being exiled, Cuadrado had had a bookshop on Caldeirería, not far from the one where Mila was standing, he must have dropped by lots of times when it wasn’t a bookshop, but a shop for fabrics. It may have been here, mused Mila, he worked for a while, since his first job was in a textile establishment. Resol, number 6, December 1932:

         This is the exact point.

                                               Here

         – between the hours’ broken,

         motionless rope –

                                               stops

                                               the crystalline

                                               wheel of night.

         Six poems by Cunqueiro. Underneath, another number of a pale orange colour. Resol, number 7, April 1933. An issue devoted to Portugal. Poems by Almeida Garrett. Was the collection complete? Roberto had a budget for the purchase of documents, but could magazines published in Santiago in the 1930s be considered relevant to their project? With a quickened pulse, an excitement she knew only too well, she picked up other papers, magazines from the end of the last century, an issue of Madrygal, another of Braña, the magazine of the Galician Society of Natural History, texts written on a computer, ‘But the most important thing for him wasn’t the enchantment or the bamboo rod. The most important thing was getting under the trout’s skin’, number 2 of Resol, June 1932, more loose sheets, ‘What I saw inside the chest was death. Death in the shape of an old woman dressed in black, stiff as a board, staring at us with one eye, the other being closed’, an issue of Galicia Libre, another of Resol, number 8, Day of Galicia, 1933, ‘Before placing a corpse on the dissection table, they take off all its clothes until it’s as naked as a worm’. What a mixture, the texts written by computer must come after the late 1980s, before that people used typewriters. What was a text doing here, written in SMS language?

         flng djctvs

         sh rn s fst sh cld chsd b djctvs tht wntd 2 ntr hr mnscrpt sftnng t wth thr slmy slv; 1 prprxytn spt n 1st pg & sh hd n chc bt 2 sqsh t wth hmmr

         Mila laughed, drawing the bookseller’s attention. The unknown author shared her aversion for adjectives. ‘Did you say something?’ ‘How much would all of this cost?’ she surprised herself by asking, though she had no idea whether Roberto would reimburse the money. Or whether she wanted the papers for the project or herself. ‘All of it?’ ‘Well, all the loose sheets and folios. Perhaps not Madrygal or Braña.’ The bookseller mentioned a price that was ridiculously low for such a treasure. She mentally contemplated Samuel shaking his head in disapproval. ‘What did you expect her to say, no one’s interested in old books and papers.’ A prick of anguish reminded her that Samuel would never disapprove of her again. Or kiss her.

         Alone at home with her spoils, a heap of disordered papers, first thing to do is separate the wheat from the chaff, the numbers of Resol here, seems there are seven, from 2 to 10. Numbers 1, 5 and 9 are missing. There may not have been many more, number 10 is dated July 1936. Not exactly the time to be publishing literary magazines in Galician in an area occupied by insurgents. And the other one, by the author fleeing adjectives? It would be easier if people numbered the pages of their texts. This was a recommendation of Roberto’s she didn’t always obey.

         But an expert in narratives should be able to follow the thread of a story from one page to another. A page with a folk-song, ‘My father’s mill, I know how it behaves’, must have something to do with the title ‘Lawless Mills’, which has a page to itself. Another with lazy trout must belong to a different story or else perhaps to a different chapter, another part of the same novel. ‘They place a cone or stone inside his mouth’, no. The one about the miller, yes, she needs to locate references to mills and millers. Eight, including the one with the title. It may not be complete. Six follow one after the other, the last line of one continues on the next page. The first talks about the dissection table, so the one beginning ‘Before placing a corpse on the dissection table’ must belong to ‘Lawless Mills’, it could even be the start of it. This one, with the blind man’s song from page one, is the second, and the one with the pails is the third, then follow the other six. Half an hour later, Mila has numbered thirteen pages of a story in pencil and sits down to read.

LAWLESS MILLS

Before placing a corpse on the dissection table, they take off all its clothes until it’s as naked as a worm. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the body of someone who’s young or old, male or female. It doesn’t matter what rank they held, whether it was the last beggar seeking alms at the door of the cathedral or the Archbishop of Santiago himself, should the circumstances of the person’s death require a post-mortem. It’s as if the individual, victim of a violent or mysterious end, has lost all his dignity, together with the breath of life, and been turned into flesh for the lancet, little more than a body in decay.

         So it was that the first woman’s body Xosé contemplated in the nude was the one lying on the marble in Fonseca’s Room. On entering the room, he’d heard that she was thirty, an age that from his perspective as a nineteen-year-old seemed distant and mature, which meant he was surprised by the tautness of her skin, which was white, no longer pink, but yellow, by the firmness of her breasts, the perfect curve of her hips like two lines pointing to the hidden centre of pleasure. Two days earlier, thought Xosé, no one would have dared uncover a leg of this woman, only her husband, if she had one, only a lover would have gradually peeled off her clothes. Now any of those taking part in the dissection could see even the most intimate details of her body, that beautiful body, though the face that crowned it was squashed and vulgar, could perceive she had one breast slightly larger than the other, the slit of her tummy button was small, delicate, like the cross of a t, like a buttonhole of flesh ready to be sealed by the button of a kiss that would never arrive.

         It was the Professor of Forensic Medicine who’d asked him to attend the dissection, a privilege rarely extended to first-year students, which he put down to his good marks and the skill he’d shown in sessions of work on muscles and tendons, on fragments of corpses of a very different nature. Not like this one, which the professor had to write a report about, slit from the throat to the chest by a knife, a knife that had anticipated the path taken by the scalpel. A part of Xosé’s mind wondered – though he did his best to ignore the question – whether he’d be able to gaze at a naked woman without recalling this beautiful, repellent body, without smelling the formalin, the corruption, without seeing the shadow of death.

         This had taken place three years earlier, when he was starting his degree and had just arrived. Not that he was used now to dissections, but he’d never witnessed another one related to a crime:

With sharpened knives,

early one winter’s morning,

with sharpened knives,

he slit her open from her throat to her chest.

         When he came to study medicine in Santiago, he thought he knew what he wanted: to escape the fate assigned to his father and, before that, to his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather in a line that went back hundreds of years, to guide the cart laden with manure along tracks, having loaded it up and levelled it off; to tend to the mill, having prepared the mill-race that diverted the water; to gather in the wheat, having harrowed the ground and worked it with a hoe. He imagined, in a life like this, routine would end up making furrows in the spirit in the same way carts leave tracks in stone, while he carried on dreaming with a spirit yearly renewed like oak leaves, on account of books, studies, new horizons.

         Whenever he thought about his father, he saw him working in the mill, covered in dust from head to toe, levelling the runner when it got out of synch, lifting the heavy sacks of grain to pour them into the hopper. From all the jobs he’d had to do as a boy, before his teacher’s insistence unexpectedly persuaded his father this clever boy needed to attend university, the mill was the only place he didn’t resent. In the mill, when he was alone, he could read, or dream, while a part of his mind attended to the monotonous tatara-tatara, tatara-tatara, tatara-tatara, that signalled the feed-shoe was still knocking against the runner, like the mill’s heartbeat, indicating everything was OK. In the mill, the young men said, things happened, a girl might bring her grain and have to wait for several hours, watching how the hopper spilled the grain on to the runner, listening to the regular beat of the shoe. She might then want to spend her time doing something, getting covered in flour, committing venial sins. The tatara-tatara could easily accompany whatever might happen to the quickened rhythm of a tambourine. When they were boys, the mill was a kind of centre where the village’s sensuality throbbed, even though he’d never been presented with such an opportunity himself.

         That may be why, on days when nostalgia for the village was like a thorn stuck in his throat, almost suffocating him, it was the mill he saw before his eyes. The mill on the inside, his father white with dust, the girls laughing out loud at something he’d said and he couldn’t remember. The mill on the outside, sunk in the river, hanging in the mist like a stone boat, almost hidden among the alders and ferns.

         The mills in Santiago were by the Sar, the Sarela, in places he rarely went to on his way from his lodgings to the faculty, from the faculty to the hospital, from the hospital to his lodgings. Nor would he have dared to go in, even if he had been passing that way. What was a medical student in a dark jacket doing in a mill? A jacket like that was not for walking among flour, nor could he take the white coat he wore to keep clean while dissecting a corpse. In Santiago, the waterways don’t pass through mills. The waterways sometimes pass underground, through tunnels and wells as dark as the souls of the damned; other times, they are airways, where water is so small it becomes invisible. In Santiago, water leaps inside fountains to see the eyes of young women, beautiful young women waiting to fill their pails, going numerous times each day to and from the fountain with water for cooking, drinking, washing. Apparently, in a year, they’re going to create a water supply and soon there’ll be water inside the houses, a small fountain with a tap that can be opened or closed. Xosé wonders what will happen then to the women who work in houses, ferrying water to and fro, where they will go, how the fountains will feel, uselessly spilling water each day, with no one to collect it.

         In his lodgings on Hortas Street, there were two women who went to the fountain for water and carried out household chores, as well as the cook and the washerwoman, who didn’t sleep there, and others who turned up on days when there was a lot of work. Of the two women, one, Clotilde, was very young and pretty, with white skin that easily blushed when you looked at her, and fearful green eyes. The other, Mercedes, must have been about Xosé’s mother’s age, quiet, always dressed in black and with a matching headscarf. Not all the women who wait at fountains are young and pretty, but these are ignored by students who go out of their way to pay compliments to the others. They are like blank spaces in between words, like silences in music, whose function is to highlight the beauty of words that have meaning, of notes that sound. Xosé wasn’t one of those who went out of his way to praise the girls and, while, whenever he caught sight of Clotilde, he was reminded of the tender maize kept in the granary, the way a puppy he’d left at home used to lick his hands, and he felt a sudden desire to tell her how the maize shone and to stroke her blond hair, he was in the habit of refraining his impulses, of directing them towards the motive of his stay in Santiago, which was to qualify as a doctor. Apart from that, he thought that love affairs between people of such different backgrounds as students and maids didn’t normally end well, and he considered himself less irresponsible than others on his course or in his lodgings.

         He sometimes thought he needed or used up more water than the other guests; when he returned to his room after an afternoon spent dissecting, a jug wasn’t enough to rid his hands of the stench of decay mingled with sweetness. On days like this, he recalled with intensity the scent of his village, the warm smell of freshly baked bread, the aroma from the stables in the morning, the smoke of vines burning on the hearth like the promise of contentment, the fragrance of the earth after the summer rains, even the stink of dung on the paths. He’d have given anything to perceive any one of those smells, to cling to it, to put it in his nose and get rid of the stench of rotten meat or the memory of the stench, which seemed to have infiltrated him permanently. Medical students said one got used to carrying out dissections, one could approach a corpse with a scalpel without a trembling hand, cut off a finger with the surgeon’s knife like pruning an apple tree, perceive the stench of death and not feel nauseous or like throwing up. They also said there were those who, no matter how much time passed, never got used to it and never got rid of the stench in their nose and hands, even if they immersed themselves in all the water of the fountains, of the Sar and the Sarela.

         The waterways today caused the water in the sky above Santiago to beat noisily against the tiles and flagstones. It may not have rained here any more than in his village near Fisterra, and it may not have rained in a different way, but in his village the rain and wind formed part of the landscape of his childhood, they welcomed him in, made him feel well, as if he were on a boat being tossed by the waves, but which we know will make it to port, or as if he were safely ensconced in his mother’s kitchen, next to the fire. Here, the rain made the city more inhospitable. Even after three years, it was still a stranger to him and continued to treat him like an outsider. Money being short, it was better on rainy days not to go for a walk if one could not afford to enter the Suízo or the Quiqui Bar on Senra. Sometimes, on stormy nights, the landlady would have a large log placed on the hearth and, instead of the embers that kept the fire going until the next day, there would be a roaring fire which encouraged one to sit beside it, to roast chestnuts in the ashes and to tell stories of apparitions and goblins or to talk about real events that had taken place in each person’s village, land disputes, arguments between neighbours that sometimes ended with a death or two.

         So it happened that night. When the chestnuts had been sliced open and buried beneath the ashes, when the landlady had ordered a jug of wine to be warmed up, causing expressions of gratitude, the conversation turned to real-life crimes and murders. One of the students, Leonardo, who wanted to become a lawyer, related with a miniaturist’s attention to detail the crime of the express train, in which two postal employees guarding the sacks of correspondence had been killed. For several minutes, the wicker chairs creaked in time to the rattling of the carriages and the smoke from the hearth resembled soot. The flames recreated the employees’ faces as they contracted, first in a gesture of surprise, then in their death throes. Perhaps because Clotilde had followed the story with her mouth wide open, her beautiful eyes fixed on Leonardo, her cheeks flushed with excitement, Xosé broke the silence that fell when the murderers were finally sentenced to the garrotte and began to relate the Crime of Vedra Mill, which had taken place in a parish close to Santiago three years earlier.

         It’s sometimes difficult to know why a name captures people’s imagination. The crime had not been committed in a mill, though there was a mill in the story, but everybody referred to it as the Crime of Vedra Mill. This was how it was announced by blind men on Thursdays, market days, as they vied for the best place next to the Alameda fountain. Nor later, when rebuking himself for his behaviour, could Xosé explain what had caused him to think about this event. It may have been because part of it took place inside a mill, or because the protagonist, the murderer, was a young man more or less of his age, or because he’d planned it with his girlfriend, which added a disturbing element to the story. He shuddered whenever he imagined the two of them in love’s embrace discussing the details of the crime, though he wasn’t going to talk about that tonight. Perhaps it was because he couldn’t stop thinking about that woman’s naked body on the dissection table, the squeal of the lancet on her skin, the pincers crushing bones in order to expose the inside of her corpse, so that everybody could see the insignificant tear, the tiny slit in her heart from which life had escaped. A ritualistic form of butchery to reach a conclusion that had been evident from the start: she had died because someone had stabbed her in the heart. The moment in his life when he’d doubted the most whether he wanted to be a doctor, whether it was worth qualifying for something that made him suffer like that.

         He began by explaining how there lived in Vedra a rich woman who’d recently been widowed and who owned one of the largest mills in the area, and how – according to reports in the press and in pamphlets sold by blind men – two lovers without a penny to their name planned to make off with her fortune. They agreed he would start by courting her, and this was how it went. Xosé gets carried away by the story and uses his narrative skill to adorn the story told in blind men’s romances, to describe the young man he never saw, strong, with grey eyes, dark green like the water of the Sarela, wavy hair and enchanting speech. Now he’s the one Clotilde is looking at, staring at him as if on the other side she could see that wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing, showing its white teeth to the widow in what the widow took to be a provocative smile, but which in reality, says an inspired Xosé, was the moment the wild beast bared its teeth and prepared to bite down on the victim’s neck. Not only Clotilde, but also Mercedes, normally so quiet, the landlady and his companions hang on his every word as if the drama were unfolding right there, inside the circle of light and heat given off by the hearth. Xosé goes on to describe how the young man courted the widow, how to begin with she resisted and he insisted on the sincerity of his love. He suggests, without saying so, that there may have been something more than words between them, something that cannot be told out of respect for the ladies present, unconfessable caresses, milling away, we all know what’s behind such words, the things that happen inside mills, and it’s not only the mill-wheel that keeps turning.

         In the end, the widow agreed to marry him. The vanity of old people imagining someone younger could love them! Xosé hurls such considerations into the hearth in the same way the hearth spits out shiny sparks. Much later, reflecting as he would on these words spoken so lightly, he realized the difference in age between the widow, who was almost thirty, and the man, who at the time of the crime was twenty-one – the age he was on the night he rekindled the story for the other guests in his lodgings, for the landlady and her maids – that difference was the same that, years later, would separate his own wife and him. But tonight he feels superior to the scheming couple and the widow who fell into their clutches and, encouraged by the expectant silence in the room, he continues to adorn the story, telling how the young man and his girlfriend planned the marriage. The widow’s family’s opposition, which the widow put down to jealousy and fear of losing their inheritance, was to no avail, as was the advice of the young man’s mother, who foresaw terrible misfortunes. It wasn’t a large celebration, continues Xosé, there were people in the village who refused to attend the wedding, but they got married and for a time it seemed as if they were happy. The young husband appeared intent on working in the mill and pleasing his wife. If on the odd evening he wandered down by the river in the twilight, if among the alders there was another person, someone other than his wife, no one could say for sure, alders do not have ears, nor ferns eyes that allow you to see in the mist, and, while a river has a voice and knows how to sing, we are unable to understand its language.

         Winter came and the miller, as he was known in the village, had been working in the mill since before daybreak. He worked alone, his wife, as on many other days, being somewhere in the house or the garden. On such days, the river where the mill was carried lots of water that poured down the mill-race, turning the wheel with force. The inside of the mill was like a cloud, there was so much flour in the air, and the miller, covered in dust, as white as a miner is black from coal, skilfully managed the runner, raising and lowering the stick they call a spindle, according to whether the flour had to be ground more coarsely or finely. At this point, the narrator pauses and, changing his voice, affirms there is a song where he is from that goes like this:

My father’s mill,

I know how it behaves,

how to lower it when it’s up,

how to raise it when it’s down.

Come to the roaring mill,

come, my pretty girl,

come to the mill that grinds so well.

         That’s how it goes, muño is the word for ‘mill’ in the village he comes from, though, were he now to be talking about the ones by the river, under his house, he might say molino. The song resounds with the tatara-tatara, the rhythmical beating of the feed-shoe on the runner. And, though he doesn’t say anything, everybody knows when such songs are sung in mills, people wink at each other, if a pretty girl is asked to come, it’s not just about grain and flour, there are other sticks apart from spindles that go up and down.

         Xosé carries on telling how the miller ground without a rest, occasionally cleaned the mill-stone whenever it got stuck, distributed the flour into sacks, keeping the best stuff, for making bread, and putting the bran to one side. Various customers who went in and out of the mill during the day heard him complain, half jokingly, how his wife hadn’t brought him anything for lunch, as on other days, and he’d have to make do with a slice of bread and some chorizo he kept there for when they were needed.

         When evening arrived and darkness fell suddenly over the mill, the miller headed back to the village, chatting carelessly to the other neighbours. And since the neighbours lived further away, they were still with him when they reached the door of his house, which was closed, with no light in the windows. The miller was surprised, or seemed to be surprised, and even grew alarmed, since this wasn’t the time for the house to be in darkness, and he claimed he didn’t have a key for the front door, since it was always open when he arrived, his wife waiting for him. One of the neighbours made a joke about her having had enough months of being married and not wanting to know any more about him. But nobody laughed, because the house was enveloped in an ominous silence, a silence that seemed to smother sounds and words. In that silence, the thumps the miller gave on the door rang out like the shots of a shotgun. Nobody opened or answered. At that point, when somebody first suggested they might have to knock the door down, to open it by force, it may have been then they began to feel sure they would discover a corpse.

Widow, we’re nothing!

Less than nothing are you now:

through the rivers of your blood

life has ebbed away.

         Xosé again pauses, feeling everybody’s eyes fixed on him, as if they didn’t know how the story went, as if it were possible for the story suddenly to take another turn, a few hasty steps along the street, expressions of relief: ‘Where on earth have you been!’ ‘I went to my mother’s house.’ ‘You really gave us a fright!’ Or a dead woman, yes, but killed by a chance robber, a random murderer, not by her husband, not by the hand that used to caress her, to pat her bottom on passing by. But the story follows its course, is as unlikely to change as a river is to flow from the sea to the mountain. Three men run upstairs, the husband leading the way, they do not even stop to remove their clogs or shoes. One never goes upstairs wearing shoes, leaving mud all over the floor, but today it doesn’t really matter, the floor is stained with blood, mud and blood are intermingled, black and sticky. It’s difficult to describe what one can see at such a time in a dark room. One neighbour would later claim the woman was lying face upwards, her arms outstretched, in the shape of a cross, having been cut open from her neck to her chest, not wanting to be too graphic, the way corpses are cut open on the dissection table, says Xosé without thinking, and a shudder runs around the circle sitting in front of the fire. Another thought she was lying face downwards, her husband had to turn her around in order to see whether she was dead or just wounded, and he claimed the knife had entered her heart, but this second neighbour had to admit he’d spent the first few minutes attempting to light an oil lamp; owing to his nerves, he’d spilled some of the oil on the floor, another dark liquid, like the mud and blood, for the feet to slip around in. This neighbour also thought the husband had gone to the window to close it, but the husband said he’d gone to the window to open it, to let in some air to counteract the suffocating stench of blood, sweat and stronger things, dead people losing control of their movements. The husband cries, sobs, tears his hair, everybody agrees about this. Whether there were any signs in the room of a struggle, they cannot say, it was all very dark and to begin with they only paid attention to the body on the bed, to see if it was still alive, if there was some way to reanimate it.

         The Civil Guard arrives, then there are declarations in front of the judge. A rumour goes around the village, low whispers, that she’d recently written a will in favour of her husband (he’d done the same for her, but nobody talked about this; besides, the only thing he owned was the coat on his back), one neighbour had seen the window of the room open during the day and the Civil Guard had found some deep footprints underneath the window, as if somebody had jumped out; the coroner had said the woman had been dead since the early morning, since the bodies of the dead go stiff and rigid after a time, Xosé explains, and no one in the room has any doubt he’s the one who knows the most about death. But he doesn’t clarify whether he saw that stiff body, whether he was present when the coroner announced the hour of death, whether there are still times, before he falls asleep, when the disgusting, desirable body of that woman rises before him. There’s a general opinion that accuses the husband, but at the same time is sure the crime will go unpunished. There is no proof, and people carry on taking their grain to the mill, all of them, or almost all, not the brothers of the widow – for some reason, she is called this, when actually he’s the widower now – who do not mutter, but shout their terrible accusations in a loud voice.

         Several weeks later, the bailiffs arrive at the mill with a couple of civil guards and arrest the miller. There’s still a quarter of a bushel to be ground, the mill-wheel turning, one stone ends up beating against the other, uselessly, without grain, releasing a shrill lament. He is accused of murdering his wife, of stabbing her in the throat, the way one does with animals, though they’re not the same, and then leaving through the window so the door will be locked from the inside as if the woman had barred it while still alive, a weak alibi, ‘I don’t know anything, I spent the day in the mill, everybody saw me, it must have been a robber, one of those beggars who came to steal the money in the house, the jet necklace’. Apparently they beat him to get his confession, they’d have got his confession, and a few other things besides, it seems he was missing a couple of teeth when the court case opened, those gleaming white teeth with which he’d enamoured the widow. He had to confess once the knife and money turned up, after the Civil Guard searched the house of his lover and discovered the jet necklace, black as their sins. A convicted murderer, what other sentence could they give to someone who kills his wife in cold blood when she’s still stretching in order to wake up, when the warmth left by night is still on her body before icy dawn? He was sentenced to death.

         Xosé stops to take a swig, again feels their eyes on him, waiting for him to describe the garrotte in detail, if it was the garrotte he was sentenced to, Mercedes’ mouth is half open as if she were about to say something, but everybody keeps quiet until he returns to his story. It is unclear how or why the miller’s death sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment, in blind men’s romances it’s said it was because of the king’s pardon, but others claimed the reason was his lover being pregnant, not to leave the unborn child, who was not to blame, without a father, though one cannot say which is worse, to die at once or to rot slowly in the dungeons of El Puerto or Santoña, he doesn’t know where the murderer is serving his sentence, where he curses the day he ever set eyes on the mill and wanted to become the miller.

         While other crimes are described that night, the conversation continuing for another hour, everybody agreed no story was told with so much passion, nobody managed like Xosé to make them see the murderer’s bloodshot eyes, discern the panting of the victim, feel the mill-dust on their skin, hear the water under the wheel, shake in time to the movement of the stones. Xosé went to bed with his feet warm from the heat of the hearth, and his head even warmer as a result of such minor vanities. It was cold in his room, he needed courage to get undressed and slip between the sheets, which were always a little damp, remnants of water that would never go away. Xosé had only taken off his jacket when he heard a gentle knock at the door. He imagined for a moment a scene where he opened the door and Clotilde fell into his arms, before he donned the jacket again and opened the door, his heart beating fast, one can control one’s rational mind, but not the beating of one’s heart, even being a medical student.

         It was the shadow of a woman, yes, but not Clotilde. It was Mercedes, wrapped in her shawl, wearing her black headscarf, quiet as always, with lowered gaze.

         ‘Good evening, Mercedes, can I help you?’

         Xosé wondered whether the landlady might not have been taken ill, too much wine and chestnuts.

         ‘Don Xosé, I wanted to ask you something,’ she said and fell quiet, glancing left and right at the empty landing, as if she were afraid someone might be watching them from the darkness.

         ‘Come in,’ he said, adding, ‘please sit down.’

         But although he sat on the bed in order to leave the only chair vacant, she remained standing, a motionless bulk on which the only oscillations were those from the light of the candle that shifted the shadows on her body.

         ‘Tonight you told…’ she started, pausing for a moment as if she found it difficult to pronounce a word, ‘you told the Crime of Vedra.’

         She was silent, and Xosé didn’t know what to say. The two of them remained in silence until she began to speak again, whispering very softly:

         ‘It was my son.’

         These four words resounded inside Xosé’s ears like the boom of a cannon, making him feel extremely uncomfortable and terribly ashamed. What a gossip, what a vainglorious creature he had been! He’d shown off with that story, boasting like a child with a new pair of shoes, without taking into account the feelings of others, his own ignorance of reality. She would now rebuke him, demand redress, but what redress could he offer? How can one erase words that have been scattered to the wind?

         She put her hand under her shawl and took out some folded papers.

         ‘He’s serving his sentence in Santoña Prison,’ she said. ‘He sent this to me from there,’ and she held out the papers to him.

         Xosé took them, feeling rather uncertain.

         ‘A teacher taught him how to read and write. So he was able to write these to me. The village priest read the first one to me and even wrote an answer. But now the priest has gone, and I’ll have to explain the whole story to the new one. Which is why I thought you…’

         Xosé read the letters, which were written in Spanish, out loud.

Santoña, 20 May 1925

Feast of St Bernardino

Dear Mother,

         I will be happy if, when you receive this, you are well. I am fine, thanks be to God, given the circumstances to which my foolish head has led me.

         If I am able to write, it is because of the attention paid to me by the prison teacher, Don Verísimo, who taught me how to read and write. Reading, I am not doing badly and have started studying a School Encyclopedia for eight-year-olds the teacher lent me, where I have learned many useful things. I am on lesson five, about natural history and physics, and have learned that the atmospheric pressure on top of a man of normal stature, such as myself, is 15,000 kilos. Isn’t it amazing that we are not crushed by such an enormous weight? He also lent me one called The Book of Spain, which tells about some children who travel around all the towns and cities, though I am unable to read the pages that talk about Galicia without the tears coming to my eyes.

         Lessons are in the afternoon; in the morning, I work in the carpenter’s workshop, making doors and shutters, and then painting them. I like working in the workshop; on Sundays, when we do not work and I spend all the time twiddling my thumbs, all I can do is think about how I have destroyed my life and yours as well, dear mother, since you had to leave the village on my account, and there are days I think my head will explode and I’ll go mad from so much thinking. Then I take the School Encyclopedia and start reading how scorpions have eight legs, the way bees make honey, or the list of rivers in Africa, since it is better to keep one’s head busy with scorpion legs and African rivers than to spend all the time thinking about what I have or haven’t done. Which is why I am grateful to the teacher for teaching me how to read and for lending me books.

         Do not worry about me, I deserve everything that is happening to me. Tell me where you are working and if they treat you well, not like those neighbours of ours, who were more like wild beasts than Christians. Tell me if you know how Isabel is, her sentence must be shorter than mine, but she will still have several years, and what happened to the child, if she was allowed to keep it or it is with her mother.

         That is all, from your son who loves you,

         Ubaldo.

Santoña, 25 April 1926

Feast of St Mark

Dear Mother,

         I hope, when you receive this letter, you are well. I am fine, thanks be to God.

         I was very happy to receive your letter, written by the priest, and I even cried a little when I read the things you said about our village, which for me is like another world, though I realize the one who lives in another world is me.

         You write that you are well, the landlady treats you like one of the family and you do not have to work too much. Take care of yourself and do not carry buckets that are too full, I remember how at home, after you had been lifting heavy things, your back used to hurt.

         As for what you asked me, about the food here, what can you expect? It is edible. For breakfast, we have porridge, which would be nicer if it was still warm, but there is a long distance between the kitchens and our building. For lunch, we have a stew of beans or lentils, which doesn’t normally have any meat, except for the odd weevil, and a slice of bread. Dinner is similar. On Sundays, there is a special meal, and sometimes we get pork, though it resembles what we used to eat at home about as much as garlic resembles a gall. Recently, we have been eating a lot of raw onion, there was a kind of epidemic and lots of people’s teeth fell out as a result of not eating fruit. I was lucky that only two of mine fell out and, since we have been eating onion, I have been fine again.

         The worst thing about this place is the lice that suck on us and the bedbugs hidden in the blankets or in the straw mattresses that never let us sleep. They must be tiny bedbugs if they can live off such cold and terrible blood as we convicts are supposed to have, bugs and lice capable of drinking black blood. It is difficult to delouse oneself; what’s more, there isn’t much light in the cell. So whenever we are allowed into the courtyard, I ask a friend to pick them off my head and, if I close my eyes, I can imagine my head is in your lap, dear mother, and these are your fingers, always fresh as raindrops, delousing me as when I was a child.

         Kisses from your son who loves you,

         Ubaldo.

Santoña, 22 June 1927

Feast of St Paulinus

Dear Mother,

         I hope you are well. For God’s sake, send me a message, I haven’t had a letter from you since the first one and I spend all day wondering whether something has happened to you. I know, in your first letter, you said the priest was about to leave and you would have to find somebody else to write your letters.

         Tell me if you know anything about Isabel, whether the child is growing up, if it is in the village with its grandmother. If it is with her, that is no place to raise a child.

         I am fine, thanks be to God, given the conditions in this prison, I am not consumptive, no more teeth have fallen out, though I would happily give two teeth and even a finger of my hand for a letter from you.

         I continue to work in the carpenter’s workshop during the morning and I can now manage planks so that they do not warp, make drawers without using nails, brush wood well, following the vein, and distinguish heartwood from sapwood. I sometimes imagine I am not in prison, but am learning the trade and, once I am proficient, I will be allowed to leave here and become a carpenter on the coast of Muros or Porto do Son. I would never go back to the village, because I never want to set eyes on those neighbours again. I know this is just talk and I am sentenced to spend my life here, but what do you expect? I cannot spend all my time thinking that every day will always be the same.

         I finished reading the School Encyclopedia for eight-year-olds, and Don Verísimo has lent me a novel, Don Quixote, telling me it is the best book ever written. I read in it about the story of the fight between Don Quixote and some windmills, not like ours, the wheel is turned by the wind, not by water. I know now, having read the School Encyclopedia, there is not the same force of water in other lands as in ours, there are places where months can go by without rainwater linking earth and sky. But in the book Don Quixote is riding on horseback through the fields of Montiel and, mistaking the windmills for lawless giants, engages in a fierce, one-sided battle with them and ends up lying on the ground, thoroughly beaten; a mill is a mill, if you mistake it for something else, it can gnaw away at your soul, leaving you lying on the ground or something worse.

         As we approach the feast of St John, I remember the bonfires we used to build in the village and how we jumped over the flames. There is no bonfire here, and only on the coldest days in winter do they let us make a small fire in the courtyard, when I can gaze at the flames as if they were coming from our hearth.

         Take care of yourself and send word to this son of yours who loves you,

         Ubaldo.

         That night, as Mercedes was leaving, after Xosé had promised he would act as scribe on the following day in order to reply to the letter, she turned around in the doorway and said:

         ‘There’s one thing you were wrong about.’

         ‘What’s that?’ asked Xosé, holding his breath.

         ‘His eyes. They’re not green, they’re black.’

ALF LAYLA WA-LAYLA: 2 THREE LEAVES OF RUE AND ONE GREEN GARLIC

‘Perpetual ink is made from oak apples that have been crushed and soaked in water. Once the tannin has been filtered out, take 2 drachmas and add 4 drachmas of vitriol and 3 of gum arabic.’

R. Halleux, Papyrus de Leyde. Papyrus de Stockholm. Fragments de recettes.

She suffered from an attraction for abysses. Samuel called it ‘getting caught on brambles’. Instead of following the trail of Seoane through the various publishing initiatives he took part in, getting caught up in those shuffled texts by an anonymous author – let us call the author A for the moment – which probably didn’t even come from a published book. Even without the existence of Google, it was possible to find information on the Internet, but Mila found no reference to ‘Lawless Mills’. When she entered the term in the search engine, it asked whether she meant ‘Lawless Minds’.

         Not working on the project of publishing houses in exile, nor writing her own articles, an analysis of the explicit and implicit sources of narrators in both books. In the Metamorphoses, the Muses, Orpheus, Ovid himself, other characters telling stories inside stories, Hermes deceiving Argus by telling him the story of Syrinx embedded in the metamorphosis of Io; a wealthy Sinbad relating his seven voyages to a poor Sinbad. With her analysis, she wanted to show that the Metamorphoses was one of the oldest examples of mise en abyme, stories embedded in other stories like Chinese boxes. Of course, there were those who questioned whether or not embedded stories were actually mise en abyme, reserving this term for motives that repeat themselves like fractals. According to such purists (and, without a doubt, were Samuel to dedicate himself to the theory of literature instead of neurology, he would be one of them), the One Thousand and One Nights was just an embedded story, tales in which the characters became narrators.

         However that may be, were one text to have influenced the other, the Metamorphoses must have influenced the Arabic stories, not the other way around. Ovid wrote his text shortly before the start of the first century, whereas Alf Layla wa-Layla was compiled in about the ninth century, though lots of the stories proceed from the oral tradition of Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt or the Middle East. Little is known about their origin or whether Abu abd-Allah Muhammed el-Gahshigar (also transcribed as el-Djahshiyari or el-Yahxiari), the narrator who is supposed to have translated the stories from Persian into Arabic, actually existed, since the earliest preserved Arabic manuscript dates to five centuries later. Unless we take into account the fragment of broken paper.

         Mila would have given anything to be in the shoes of Nabia Abbott, the woman who in 1947 discovered, among a mass of papers sent to the University of Chicago, a ninth-century fragment with the beginning of the Nights: ‘The collection… contains but few early paper documents – 6 out of a total of 331 pieces. But one of these 6, incredible as it may at first seem, is an early ninth-century fragment of the Alf Lailah or “Thousand Nights”.’ Manuscript number 17618 contains six distinctly different entries, covering all the available space: the Alf Lailah fragment and, in chronological order, scattered phrases in the margins, the drawing of the figure of a man, the rough draft of a letter and formulas of legal testimony dated Safar 266, which is to say in the year 879 AD. Papers and parchments were rare objects for many centuries, being reused again and again by their owners. For Mila, they were still a precious object, the remains of another time, where you could still come across treasures if you knew how to spot them. It was true the manuscript had passed through several hands, and nobody had noticed the Alf Lailah fragment. Mila wouldn’t have been able to decipher the Arabic text, let alone analyse it, as Nabia Abbott had done in her famous article: the vertical strokes of the alif, their Syrian influence, the inference from the title on the first page – ‘A book of tales from a Thousand Nights’ instead of ‘Book of a Thousand Nights’ – that this was just a volume of selected stories.

         And if the paper had been used for the draft of a letter, if the ink’s durability was more important than the content, clearly el-Gahshigar was of less concern. The storyteller must have been held in low esteem, contemporary references to Alf Layla treated him with disrespect. That said, Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea as a result of his writing. In the tenth century, the historian Al-Masudi wrote that Alf Layla was full of false stories and, around the same time, Ibn al-Nadim, the famous bookseller of Baghdad, described it as ‘a coarse book’. Which stories are false and which are true? Which is the authentic version of the Thousand Nights, if there is one we should prefer over the others? Some of the most famous stories, the ones we never tire of hearing – Aladdin and his wonderful lamp; the voyages of Sinbad; Ali Baba and the forty thieves with Mila’s favourite character, the quick-witted slave-girl Morgiana – are not to be found in the original manuscript, they were added by Antoine Galland, the Frenchman who carried out the first known European translation at the start of the eighteenth century. According to Galland, he heard them from Hanna Diab, a storyteller from Aleppo whose existence is even more uncertain than that of el-Gahshigar. Must we take out Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and Morgiana, send them into the exile of characters who lack a story? Be as strict as the Pope when he removed St George and his dragon, St Catherine and her wheel, St Margaret and her sheep, from the book of saints? Galland found room for them in his text, while purging the stories of blood, sex and poems.

         ‘My sex shuddered’, the anonymous writer had not purged his or her texts like Galland. Or of blood, either. ‘A form of butchery. And they’d only carried out twelve operations. They would stick the knife in another twenty-eight times.’ Why purge them of poems? Don’t ask that, we might give the impression we understand why they were purged of sex and blood.

         There are times when an editor cannot publish his own texts, this is how Three Leaves of Rue and One Green Garlic, Seoane’s initial work of fiction, remains unpublished, though perhaps we shouldn’t say that a book with a published translation in Spanish is still unpublished. Mila wrote down, among the things she had to investigate, the existence or not of a Galician original for Three Leaves of Rue and One Green Garlic. Some biographies of Seoane, including one by Helena González, suggested this original had never existed and the twelve stories in the book had been written in Spanish. At the time, during the 1990s, here and elsewhere, Seoane’s commitment to the Galician cause was questioned, since, while fervently defending Galician, he wrote most of his work in Spanish. A suitcase of Seoane’s had gone astray, a suitcase that may have been left behind in Argentina when Seoane returned to Galicia, and that may be where the manuscript is, if it ever existed. The search for Seoane’s papers, currently as fruitless as the search for Kafka’s twenty notebooks and love letters confiscated from his lover, Dora Diamant, by the Gestapo. Possibly a way of fulfilling Kafka’s own wish, that ‘everything I leave behind me… in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread’.

         In the task entrusted to her by Roberto, it was necessary to approach separately the participation of Galicians such as Seoane, Arturo Cuadrado and Lorenzo Varela, in the publishing houses of others and in publishing initiatives they undertook themselves. All part of what Seoane called ‘the cause of the Galician book’. A cause, like so many he fought for throughout his life, he considered to have been lost.

         To Lorenzo Varela and Arturo Cuadrado, for everything we did together in Buenos Aires, losing.

         For everything we dreamed of in Galicia from Buenos Aires, writing, painting, fighting and losing. Alone.

         Perhaps that was the central question of her study: was the Galician book, Galician culture in Argentina, a lost cause? Roberto used to say all good research needs a well-formulated question. Seoane was probably referring to wider causes: democracy, the restoration of the Republic, which never happened. That said, Mila didn’t think the cause of the Galician book had been lost, since for decades, when publications in Galician were forbidden in Galicia by Franco’s censors, it was only those in exile who kept this little lamp burning. An Argentinian author who had studied editorial output during this period affirmed that almost a third of the 150 titles published in Argentina between 1939 and 1956 were Galician books. Were numbers a valid criterion? How to evaluate whether a cause had been lost or not?

         Did Seoane feel guilty about his lost causes? Is that why he sometimes signed as Hernán Quijano? Are we to blame for projects that fail? For projects we never undertake?

         Is the narrator to blame for telling his characters’ stories? What right does Xosé have to turn Ubaldo into a character? The prisoner’s mother, rising out of the night in order to give him back his words, unsettling him. There is no redress possible for stories that have been scattered to the wind. What has been written cannot be unwritten. From this moment on, however, the guilty one is no longer Ubaldo, but Xosé. The main character is not Xosé, but the prisoner, who holds on to books – the School Encyclopedia for eight-year-olds – in order not to dwell on his guilt. The character steals the story from the narrator. It might be better to tell lies, to weave the story of Aladdin or Sinbad, than to tell the true stories of characters who cannot object.

         Mila wondered whether A, the narrator whose name she didn’t know, might not have stolen this story from someone; whether it wasn’t Xosé (who probably wasn’t even called Xosé) who, years later, having qualified as a doctor or even retired, had told A the story of his shame next to a hearth.

         There had to be a way of finding out A’s name, his or her story. Whether there was a story apart from the one in the narratives. She had put together four complete tales – ‘Death in the Chest’, ‘Karl and Charles’ and two shorter ones – and was just about to read them when her mobile rang. The name on the screen, her sense of unease. ‘Hello, Samuel.’ ‘How are you?’ He knew how much she hated rhetorical questions: ‘I could say I’m fine and it would be a lie, I could confess I’m angry and it would seem I wanted you to pity me’. But he didn’t wait for her answer. ‘There’s a jazz session tonight… I thought you might fancy it…’ The implicit message: ‘Perhaps, despite the fact you don’t want me in your house, you miss me in bed’. She could say no, come up with some excuse, thought Mila, but her tongue wasn’t paying attention, was already saying yes, they could go for something to eat beforehand, suggesting the same place as always.

Text © Marilar Aleixandre

Translation © Jonathan Dunne

Other books by Marilar Aleixandre are available to read in English – see the page “YA Novels”.