THE CARPATHIAN MOUNTAIN WOMAN[La mujer de los Cárpatos, in
La frontera más distante, translated by Alex Ross.
Bomb Magazine 119, Spring 2012, First Proof viii-xi].
Write this. We have burned all their villages.
Write this. We have burned all their villages and the people in them.
Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress.
Michael Palmer, "Sun", in Codes Appearing, 233.
“I first came here twenty years ago,” I answered softly as I pretended not to notice his intense blue gaze. He didn’t believe me. That’s what I assumed-that he didn’t believe me; so I went on to tell him I’d arrived on the back of a grey donkey with a bit of food and a couple of notebooks. He put a blade of grass between his teeth and said nothing. The hint of a smile between his lips. The sky as blue as his eyes. The wind.
“And you’ve been dressing like a man ever since?”
I remembered how he had taken me: violently. A stray longing in each hand. A private fury. His fingers like can openers in my mouth. How long I had gone without seeing an artifact like that! I remembered the smell of his sweat, vaguely carnivorous. And the bitter taste of his cheeks. Still bent over the river and still pretending not to see his intense blue gaze, I told him it was better to live alone as a man. He didn’t ask me why I said that. He picked up his small leather satchel and started to leave. I counted his steps without turning around to look at him. When he got to number twenty-three, he hesitated. He turned around.
“Will you wait for me?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, still bent over the river water. I put my hand in the current and pulled out a smooth, round stone. I held it in front of me as if it were a mirror. Then I slipped it into the right-hand pocket of my trousers. I thought I wanted to remember that afternoon. I thought the stone was in place of the stranger.
I never knew why I had mentioned that figure – twenty years. I also didn’t know what it was he’d made me promise to wait for.
Before choosing my destiny, I had read about them. A strange book, half history and half legend. A book from a library in the city. I read it immoderately, as I used to do in those days. With the moistened tip of my index finger perpetually poised to turn the page, I forgot to eat. I only stopped occasionally to get a drink of water, but I never actually drank it; as soon as I put the rim of the glass to my lips, I would become distracted again. Something urgent called to me from the across the room, and I answered the call. Before closing the book, I had already made up my mind: I would leave that place – that kitchen, that library, that city. I would become someone else. One of them. It’s difficult to explain why one does the things one does. But everything happened just like it does in books: I left that place, and, almost without a plan, I showed up in a small village where they needed men. I put on my new clothes and committed myself to a life of celibacy. And they, who were so few, bowed their heads when I passed.
The stranger showed up in front of my door one day at around noon. He didn’t arrive, as I once had, on the back of a donkey, but on the battered seat of a military vehicle. A mud-spattered windshield. Four thick tires. A torn canvas roof. The letters on the door made no sense to me, but the words he spoke to me did. He asked me for water, and, since I didn’t move, he opened his canteen and turned it upside down.
“Do you understand me?” he repeated, with growing exasperation, “I need water.”
I hadn’t seen anyone like him for a long time. His gestures, so childlike, so unnecessary, moved me. He seemed to be afraid of dying.
“Where are you from?” I asked him, trying to make him feel less uncomfortable as he stood there in the doorway. Perhaps I was already trying to dissuade him, to distract him. I’ve never known how to get rid of people. When he gave a start, which he attempted to conceal, I realized that he couldn’t see me well. My house, like all mountain houses, was small and dark. Later, he would refer to it as “the shack.” Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. That’s why our houses are that way.
“So you’re a woman,” he whispered in a tone expressing both surprise and amusement. His body was blocking the sun, so I couldn’t see him well either. I didn’t know how to answer. Then he crossed the threshold. A long and voluminous stride. I was very slow to react.
He talked about the war. When he finished gulping down the water, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and sat down at the table. He asked for food. He asked for more.
“What’s that?” he asked when he heard the sound of the bells.
“A mass,” I said as I set a plate with pieces of meat in front of him. “Part of a funeral,” I murmured later.
He ate the same way he had drunk a few minutes earlier: Eagerly. Voraciously. He ate the food with his hands and he lifted it to his mouth without turning to look at anything else. Then he chewed and swallowed noisily. Then he sucked his fingers clean.
When he’d had his fill, he began to talk. He lit a pipe and talked, without stopping, about the war. The words flowed from his mouth just as the food had entered it a few moments earlier: in a deluge. He told about the years of his life. He saw the adolescent he had been, thoughtful and serene. He heard gunshots, the echo of gunshots. He felt thirst. A relentless sun once more wrinkled his skin, blinded his eyes, dried his lips. He swallowed dirt. He desperately craved the taste of salt on his tongue. He allowed himself to be hypnotized by color of fire. He walked for entire nights, climbing hills and descending them again, soaked with urine and with fear. He shot. He closed his eyes and shot. Many times.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. And then, without waiting for a reply, he continued. The cold. The filth. The smell of rotting flesh. Death. He relived it all again. A small body beneath the infinite, maddening sky.
“You’re never more vulnerable than when you’re under the sky,” he insisted.
I offered him some liquor because he seemed to need it. The noise of the bottle touching the wood broke his concentration. He looked at me again. He must have been wondering who I was, what I was doing here, where he actually was, but he didn’t ask any questions. He drank the liquor in small sips. After a while, he fell asleep with his head on the table.
Every forest always has another forest inside of it. The one on the inside is the mythical, enchanted forest found in fairy tales. Living in the outside forest, however, is not easy. Life in the mountains requires effort, discipline, sacrifice. Above all, you need to have good hands. And it never hurts to have a level head on your shoulders, one that’s accustomed to solitude. You need to cut down trees, plant seeds, use frigid water from the rivers. There can be fires. There are bears, and eagles, and other frightening animals. Sometimes, toward the end of winter, everything is covered with snow. And you have to walk on the snow, keep moving forward. Sometimes it’s good to be able to recognize the sound of a breaking branch. It’s good to walk, slowly, on the dry leaves. Sometimes you take a deep breath. Sometimes everything stops. But more than anything else, there’s work in the forest, lots of work. Fairy tails rarely mention that.
“And you can do all that by yourself?” he asked me later.
I told him the truth: I told him No. That I couldn’t do all that by myself. And my answer seemed to satisfy him.
“Do the local men come to help you?”
“As often as I help them,” I told him, defiantly. Or it seemed to me that my tone of voice was defiant.
He returned to that topic many times, each time from a different angle, as if he couldn’t find the best way to ask what he wanted to ask.
“Every forest always has another forest inside of it,” I murmured when he got out of bed and went to the window, and stood there with an attitude of expectation. He stayed that way, very still, for a long time. When he turned around to look at me, I lowered my eyes. Then I covered my shoulders with the blanket. Then I said:
“You shouldn’t be here.”
For the complete story go to
Bomb Magazine 119.
--crg
