Authors: Alberto Méndez
Blind Sunflowers (4 page)
I found a mountain goat half-eaten by wolves. There was a lot of meat left on it, so today we will eat the remains. I’ve made a very mild soup from its bones and innards which the boy seems to keep down well.
At this point there is a significant change in the handwriting. Although it is still very neat and tidy, it seems to be written in more haste. Or perhaps less steadily. Probably some length of time has elapsed.
Would my parents recognise me if they saw me? I can’t see myself, but I imagine I am filthy and humiliated. I am yet another product of the war they tried to ignore but which flooded their stables, their starving cattle, their sparse crops with fear. I remember the poor, silent village of ours that closed its eyes to everything apart from fear. I remember how it shut its eyes when they killed Don Servando, my teacher, when they burned all his books and exiled all the poets whose work he knew by heart.
I’ve lost. But I could have won. Will someone else take my place? I’m going to tell my son, who is gazing at me as though he understands, that I would not have left my enemies to flee with nothing, I would not have condemned anyone for being a poet. I threw myself into battle armed only with paper and pencil, and words gushed out of me that brought comfort to the wounded. But the comfort I gave also created bloodthirsty generals who were the reason for the wounded. Wounded, generals, generals, wounded. And there was I, stuck in the middle with my poetry. Their accomplice. And then there were the dead.
Here there is a sentence crossed out which is illegible. The text on this page is placed around the outline of an infant’s hand. Presumably he used his child’s hand as a stencil. He wrote on it:
Time has passed. I have no idea how many days because they are all the same, but what most surprises me is how the boy grows. When I reread this notebook, I realise I no longer feel the same. And if I lose my anger, what is there left? The winter is a closed box which stores up all the snowstorms. These mountains still seem like the place where winter spends the winter. My sadness has also frozen with the cold. All I have left is the fear that used to make me so afraid. I’m afraid the boy might fall ill, afraid the cow will die because I can barely feed her by digging up roots or giving her the few shoots of grass still growing when the snow came. I’m afraid of falling ill myself. I’m afraid someone will discover we are up here on the mountain. I’m afraid of so much fear. But the boy is unaware of all of this. Elena!
At night, the wind howls round the mountain with an almost human moan. It’s as if it were trying to show me and the child how humans should grieve. Fortunately, the cabin is strong enough to withstand all the storms.
Today I killed a wolf! Four of them came sneaking round the cabin. At first I was frightened, because their hunger gives them an almost human ferocity. But then I thought they might be able to provide us with food. When the biggest wolf came scratching at the door, I carefully opened it wide enough for him to poke his head in, then I quickly trapped his neck in the door’s edge. A single blow from the axe was enough. I hit him so hard his appetite spilled out with his blood. I’ll eat its flesh, and the entrails will provide the boy with nourishment. That is good, but the bad thing is I have smelled blood once more, I have heard again the sounds of death, and seen the colour of victims.
On this page there is a drawing which shows a boy riding on a wolf; both of them are smiling and seem to be flying through the air above a field full of flowers.
A wolf told a boy that with his tender flesh
He could survive the winter.
The boy told the wolf to eat only one leg
Because he was so young and tiny
That he needed the wolf to be nice and plump
Ready for the moment when
Even one-legged, he would need some roasted
Wolf to dine on.
They stared at each other, sniffed one another and felt so bad
That they would have to harm each other
They agreed to repeat the scene
Without resorting to the deceit
That for two people who love each other to survive
They always have to admit
That whatever their feelings, one must live
And the other one die.
And as a corollary:
The pair of them perished of hunger.
Underneath these lines there is a musical scale and some notes, although these do not correspond to anything that resembles real music. Several experts have tried to decipher this supposed tune, but to no avail.
The snow keeps coming down. I feel so weak it’s harder and harder for me to chop firewood to heat the cabin where the cow, the boy and I live. All three of us are losing strength. Yet the boy, whom I still have not given a name, is surprisingly lively. He makes noises in his throat when he’s awake that sound like gurgling. On the one hand, I like it that he’s not asleep, because his total dependence on me makes me feel important in a way that no one except Elena has ever done before. On the other, his eyes
are so huge in his eye sockets and his cheeks so sunken that I can see his skull. He is so skinny! The cow is too, but she still gives enough milk for the boy and me. I am emaciated too, and frozen stiff.
I have no idea what month we are in. Could it be Christmas already?
Today I followed an animal’s tracks and went down the mountain in the direction of Sotre. In the valley bottom I saw some woodcutters. I felt a familiar, solid fear grip me. Nowadays I am proud of my fear, because at the end of this monstrous war I have seen too many people die thanks to their courage. If we stay up here, the cow, the boy and I will die. If we go down into the valley, the cow, the boy and I will die.
I’ve thought a lot about it, but I don’t want to give them the final
satisfaction
of victory. It may be right and proper for me to die, since I was nothing more than a bad poet who sang of life in trenches where death ruled the roost. But for the boy to die is nothing more than necessity. Who is going to tell him about the colour of his mother’s hair, about her smile, the graceful way she glided through the air as though trying not to disturb it? Who is going to beg for forgiveness for having conceived him? And if I do survive, what am I going to tell him about me? That Caviedes is a village perched on a mountain that smells of the sea and firewood, that I had a teacher who could recite Góngora and Machado from memory, a father and mother who were unable to keep me on the farm, that I have no idea what I was looking for when I went to Madrid in the midst of the war… a balladeer dodging bullets? That’s right, my son! I wanted to be a balladeer dodging bullets!
Now I’m your gravedigger!
This last phrase is underlined with a thick, heavy line, so firmly drawn it has torn the paper of the black oilskin notebook.
I can no longer provide food for the cow, and the cow can no longer provide food for the boy. I scrape about under the snow searching for grass shoots, but they are increasingly rare and straggly. Among the roots of the
frozen hazel trees I found some kind of bulbs. I use them to make a paste that is completely tasteless but which, when boiled and mashed, I offer to the cow and the boy. I don’t know if it is of any use as food, but I am giving him my saliva, and he is surviving. Even though he is very weak, he is already trying to stir, but he doesn’t have the strength. He bends backwards, supporting himself on his head and feet. He quickly collapses. If I could, I would go down into the valley and beg for food, but it’s impossible now to get out of these mountains. I was born in a village where it never snows, and nobody taught me how to cope with this silent, endless snow. Whenever I stray further than usual from the cabin I find myself buried up to the waist, and it takes me an age to free myself from this white trap. What little the wolves left of the dead cow is so hard by now I can’t even shave off any bits with the axe. Fortunately, the carcass is covered with snow, because yesterday I tried to dig it out to find lean meat
among its remains and I discovered a beast, half torn flesh and half
skeleton
, which stretched out its neck as though trying desperately to escape. The cow’s few remaining ribs form a kind of bowl that looks as if it should contain its soul. But the soul has also been devoured by the wolves. And by me. And the boy.
Here there is a drawing meant to show a stylised cow’s head, elongated like an arrow, flying through the air. Underneath is the phrase:
Where can cows’ heaven be?
I ought to kill the other cow while she still has some meat on her. But I have no way of keeping it fresh. If I leave the meat out in the snowdrifts, the prowling wolves would only sniff it out. I keep the inside of the cabin warm enough that what’s left of her would soon go off. I wonder if the cow thinks I am saving her from the wolves, or does she know that it is the wolves that are saving her from my axe? Perhaps she knows the truth, and that is why she no longer gives milk.
There follow several pages, nine in total, which must have been torn out together, because the tear is exactly the same in all of them. It has been carefully done: there are no jagged edges. In the numbering that follows, we have not taken into account the sheets missing from the notebook.
The boy is ill. He hardly moves. I’ve killed the cow, and am giving him her blood, but he can barely swallow any. I’ve boiled her meat and bones to make a thick, dark broth. I’m giving it to him diluted in snow water. Yet again, everything smells of death.
He’s very hot. I’m writing with him asleep on my lap. How much I love him! I sang him a sad song by Federico:
The tears of a skull
Awaiting a golden kiss.
(Outside, dark wind
And muddied stars).
I can’t remember any more which poems I used to recite for the soldiers. When you are hungry, the first thing that dies is memory. I can’t write a single verse, and yet my mind is full of a thousand lullabies for my son. They all start the same way: Elena!
Today I kissed him. For the first time. I had not used my lips for so long I had forgotten about them. What must he have felt when he first came into contact with their cold touch? It’s terrible, but by now he must be three or four months old, and until today nobody had ever kissed him. He and I know how, without a kiss, time stretches out interminably, and now it seems as if there’s not enough of it left for us to be able to catch up. Fear, cold, hunger, rage and loneliness drive out tenderness. Like a crow it only comes back when it scents love and death. Now it is back, but it’s confused. It can smell both things. Can tenderness be white and black? Elena, what colour was your tenderness? I no longer remember. I don’t even know if what I feel is sorrow. But I kissed the boy without trying to take your place.
There’s a smell of something rotten. Yet all I remember is the scent of wild fennel.
In large, very large letters, the remainder of the page is covered with the words
‘OH, WITHOUT YOU THERE IS NOTHING’
written in an unsteady hand.
I couldn’t find my pencil (or what’s left of it) so was unable to write for several days. That is silence too, that is being gagged. Today, when I discovered the stub again under a pile of firewood, I felt I had
rediscovered
the gift of speech. I don’t know what I feel until I write it down. It must be my rural education. Today I spent a long time up on a leafless tree trunk trying to spot the tracks of an animal that could provide us with food. All I saw was an uninterrupted white expanse stretching to the horizon. A stubborn, freezing wind swept across the snowy waste, its howling only reinforcing the silence. While I was up there
watching
, I felt something I could not identify, something that might have been good or bad. Now I’ve found my pencil, I know what it was: solitude.
I have the feeling that everything will come to an end once I come to the end of this notebook. That is why I only write in it occasionally. My pencil must also have lost the war. I think the very last word it will write will be ‘melancholy’.
The boy has died. I have decided to call him Rafael after my father. I did not have enough warmth to keep him alive. He learned from his mother how to die without any fuss, and this morning simply did not respond to my words of encouragement.
The rest of the page, written in an almost beautiful handwriting that is much more carefully done than anything up to this point, repeats over and over
Rafael, Rafael, Rafael,
a total of sixty-three times. The R of Rafael is always a vertical flourish interlaced with a big round circle that starts on the left, rises above the
vertical
line, and comes back to the vertical more or less in the middle, only to part from it again like a starched petticoat that tails away at the bottom. It is both English and gothic at the same time.
The word
Rafael
is repeated a further sixty-two times.
The word
Rafael
again, in the same handwriting, but much smaller: one hundred and nineteen times.
This is no longer written with the same pencil, which has probably run out. Instead the author has used a piece of charcoal or something similar. The words are hard to make out because, after they were written, he obviously drew his hand across the page in an attempt to rub them out. Bearing this in mind, we think we have
faithfully
transcribed what was written:
‘Infamous flock of nocturnal birds.’
EDITOR’S NOTE:
In the year 1954 I visited a village in the province of Santander called Caviedes. It is perched on a mountain top and smells of the nearby sea, although this cannot be seen because the houses all overlook an inland valley. I asked around, and was told that the local schoolteacher, known as Don Servando, was shot as a Republican in 1937, and that his best pupil, who had a boundless love of poetry, had fled aged sixteen to the loyalist zone in order to join the army which lost the war. Neither his parents, who were called Rafael and Felisa and died at the end of the war, nor anyone else in the village ever heard from him again. People thought he was crazy because he was always writing and reciting poems. His name was Eulalio Ceballos Suárez. If he was the author of this notebook, he must have been eighteen when he wrote it. I personally think that is too young for so much suffering.