by Trevanian
And if there was one thing in this world that made Widow Etcheverrigaray's eyes roll with exasperation, it was the way some people forever lugged about a dusty old cushion, shoving it under your nose until you were forced to ask what on earth it was. Then they would dump a cartload of drivel on you about the strength and speed of some ignorant brute of a wood-for-brains who lacked even the common politeness to send his mother a little gift on her saint's day. She who had carried the oversized beast under her heart for nine months!.... Well, seven.
Seasons flowed into years. A paved road penetrated our valley, and soon the wireless was inflicting Paris voices on our ears, and planting Paris values and desires in the hearts of our young people. There is a sage old Basque saying that goes: As youth fades away, one grows older. And thus it was with the two women. Stealthily at first, then with a frightening rush, what had seemed to be an inexhaustible pile of tomorrows became a vague little tangle of yesterdays. But still they toiled in their gardens to produce the finest, or second-finest, vegetables in our village, and still they honed and refined their rivalry, urged on in no small part by their neighbors, who were amused by the endless sniping until our peace was shattered by the Battle of the Apple Tree. The tree in question was very old and gnarled, but it never failed to produce an abundant crop of that crisp, succulent fruit with specks of red in the meat that used to be called Blood-of-Christ apples. One never sees a Blood-of-Christ apple anymore, but they are still remembered with pleasure by old men who never tire of telling the young that everything modern is inferior to how things were back in their day: the village fêtes, the weather, the behavior of children.... Even the apples, for the love of God!
Because the tree stood exactly on the boundary between their gardens (indeed, the wall separating them touched the tree on both sides and was buckled by its growth), they had always shared the apples, each picking only from branches that overhung her property. To avoid appearing so petty as pointedly to ignore the presence of the other, they picked on different days, although it could be a tooth-grinding nuisance to have planned for weeks to harvest on a certain morning, only to look out one's window and see that hog of a neighbor picking on that very day! Not to mention the fact that young Zabala would surely have asked one to marry him if someone else had not always been throwing herself at him in the most scandalous way!
The fate of the apples on the disputable branches running along the boundary wall was a source of tension each year. Neither woman would run the risk of picking apples that did not indisputably overhang her own property lest she give the other a chance to brand her a thief at the lavoir so they were obliged to wait until God, disguised as the Force of Gravity, settled the matter at the end of the season, causing the apples to drop on one side or the other of the dividing wall. There were years when the Devil, disguised as a Strong Wind, stirred up strife by causing most of the debatable apples to fall into one garden. And every year a heart-rending number of apples fell onto the wall itself, only to rot away slowly on that rocky no-man's-land under the mournful gaze of the women, both of whom muttered bitterly over the shameful waste caused by that back-biting, gossiping old— May God forgive her.
Even if mankind cannot.
Now, the baker from Licq who drove his van from village to village, sounding his horn to bring out the customers, had a sharp eye for profit, like all those coin-biting Licquois. He knew that everyone liked the rare Blood-of-Christ apples and would be willing to buy some... at a just price, of course. Aware of the competition between the two widows, the baker was careful to offer each of them a chance to make a little extra money. After much hard and narrow negotiating, he arranged to buy five baskets of apples from each.
Early the next morning, Widow Etcheverrigaray went out to her tree carrying five baskets that she intended to fill before—what's this?! Madame Utuburu was on the other side of the stone wall, filling her baskets with the fine, plump fruit. Under normal circumstances, the widow would never pick at the same time as her greedy neighbor, but as the baker was coming that afternoon to collect his apples, without a word she set grimly to her task. It was not long before she realized that she was unlikely to fill all five baskets, for this year the apples, while especially large and beautiful, were less abundant than usual (thus does God, in His eternal justice, give with one hand while taking with the other). Indeed, when she had picked all the apples from the branches indisputably overhanging her garden, Widow Etcheverrigaray found that she had filled only four baskets. And even this had required a most liberal definition of the term 'full' as applied to baskets of apples. A covert glance over the wall revealed that Madame Utuburu was in precisely the same state: her branches stripped and still an empty basket left. And her idea of a 'full' basket was obviously one that was not totally empty! At this moment, Widow Etcheverrigaray was shocked to see her neighbor lean over the wall and squint down it, estimating whether some of the branches along the no-man's-land between them might, upon reconsideration, be judged to be on her side of the wall. The widow's eyes grew round with indignant disbelief! This covetous old greedy-gut of an Utuburu was actually contemplating breaking the unspoken truce that had permitted them to share the apple tree! She stepped forward to forestall her neighbor's iniquity by picking the apples that might just as well be judged to be on her side of the disputable branch. "So!" hissed Madame Utuburu to herself. "This grasping hussy of an Etcheverrigaray wants to play that way, does she? We'll see about that!" And she vigorously set herself to harvesting the apples that were erstwhile dubious but had now become clearly her own by right of self-defense—to say nothing of revenge.
They were furiously picking on opposite sides of the same branch, when Madame Utuburu happened to tug it towards her just as her rival was reaching for an apple! "What?" muttered Widow Etcheverrigaray between her teeth. "Well, two can play at that game! And one even better than the other!" And she boldly grasped the branch and steadied it while she picked frantically with her free hand. "God-be-my-witness!" snarled Madame Utuburu. "Is this shameless strumpet prepared to rip the branches off the tree to satisfy her greed?" And she jerked the branch back to her side, dragging the unprepared widow halfway over the stone wall. "Ai-i-i!" screamed the widow. "So the brazen harlot wants to play rough, does she?" And she was reaching out to wrench the branch back to her side when Madame Utuburu, having picked the last apple, released it, and it sprang back, striking the ample bosom of the astonished widow, who staggered and ended up sitting with a squish in the middle of her prized leeks. There was no time to allow her fury to seethe and ripen, or to communicate her indignation to the villagers who had begun to gather along the road to watch the fun, for her neighbor was already picking at a moot branch on the far side of the tree. Grunting to her feet and slapping the mud from the back of her skirt, Widow Etcheverrigaray returned to the fray determined to punish this outrage. Crying out every vilification that years of rivalry had stored up in their fertile imaginations, they clawed at apples and ripped them from the branch, all the while decorating one another's reputations with those biologically explicit calumnies for which the Basque language might have been specifically designed, were it not universally known that it was invented in heaven for use by the angels. There was a moment when, as each of them reached for the same apple, their hands touched, and each cried out and recoiled as though defiled by the contact. Still fuming over the way Madame Utuburu had underhandedly released the branch, Widow Etcheverrigaray decided to repay the insult in kind. She set all her weight against the branch, bending it back to her side so that when Madame Utuburu reached out for the fruit, she could let it go, and it would snap back and give—
—the branch broke, and the widow found herself sitting once again in her leek bed, the hoots and jeers of the spectators flushing her cheeks with rage and embarrassment. She sat there snarling descriptions of Madame Utuburu's character, ancestry, practices, and aspirations, while that thoroughly slandered woman, finding her last basket still not filled and the branch bearing the
remaining apples broken off and lying out of reach in her neighbor's garden, lifted her palms to heaven and called upon God to witness this plunder! This larceny! This piracy! And she hastily crossed herself and begged Mother Mary to put her hands over the ears of the baby Jesus, that He might not be offended by the obscenities gushing from the foul mouth of this scurrilous, vulgar, low-born Etcheverrigaray!
Which description impelled the widow to make a gesture.
Which gesture obliged Madame Utuburu to throw a lump of mud.
Which assault forced half a dozen villagers to rush up from the road to prevent bodily damage from spoiling the innocent pleasure of their entertainment.
In the final accounting of the Battle of the Apple Tree, it was the Widow Etcheverrigaray who was able—just—to fill her baskets from the last of the apples, while Madame Utuburu had to bargain long and hard before the tight-fisted Licquois baker accepted her scantier baskets with much sighing and many martyred groans and predictions that his children would die in the poorhouse. But many villagers judged Madame Utuburu the victor for, after all, it wasn't she who had twice had her broad bottom dumped into her leeks.
For the next few weeks, every time the women in the marketplace asked about the battle (which they did with wide-eyed innocence and cooing tones of compassion), Madame Utuburu threatened to bring legal action against the vicious vandal who had damaged her tree! And Widow Etcheverrigaray made public her suspicions concerning what her neighbor had offered the baker to make up for her missing apples; although, in the widow's opinion, that commodity had been worth little enough when it was young and fresh and would now be accepted by the baker only if he were attempting to shorten his time in purgatory by mortifying his flesh.
During the next year, they fought out their rivalry on the battlefield of their gardens, each working from dawn to dark to produce vegetables that were the pride of the village and the despair of other gardeners. The work in the open air kept their bodies strong and flexible, and the praise of passersby kept their spirits alive, particularly if this praise could be interpreted as a slighting comparison to the other woman's crop.
Then, one cold, wet, autumn day, Zabala-One-Leg died. Not of anything in particular; he simply ran out of life, as all of us eventually must. Zabala had no family, but he was of the village, so we all went to his burial and stood in the rain while the priest took the opportunity to promise us that death was the inevitable portion of each and every one of us, so we had better start preparing for it, and particularly certain people he could name, but he wouldn't mar this solemn occasion with accusations... however just! Everybody left the cemetery, the women to home and work, the men to the café/bar of our mayor to have a little glass in memory of Zabala. ...Perhaps two.
Only Madame Utuburu and Widow Etcheverrigaray remained in the churchyard, standing in the rain on opposite sides of the scar of fresh earth, their eyes lowered to the rosaries they held between work-gnarled fingers. For an hour they stood there. Two hours. Although their shawls became sodden with rain, and they had to clench their teeth to keep them from chattering, neither was willing to be the first to leave, for to do so would be to relinquish the role of chief mourner and admit that the other had the most reason for grief.
Their thick, black skirts became too heavy with damp to stir in the wind that began to drive the rain diagonally across the grave, but still neither would leave the field in the possession of one for whom that handsome rogue of a Zabala had never cared a snap of his fingers. To do so would be an insult to his memory. ...To say nothing of his taste!
In the end, the priest came trotting out from his house beside the church, sleepy-eyed and grumbling about being torn from his meditation by a couple of stubborn old women. He stood at the head of the grave, the wind tugging at his big black umbrella, and angrily ordered them to come away with him. At once! As it is rash to disobey the messenger of God, especially when one is standing so conveniently in a graveyard, they allowed him to shepherd them home, but only after each had made a brief attempt to lag slightly behind. They walked home, one on each side of the priest, each with one shoulder protected by the umbrella while the other shoulder was drenched by rain running from its rim. Without a word, they left the priest at the bottom of their gardens and trudged up their paths, each to her own house.
The next morning dawned with that cold, brittle sunlight that signals the end of autumn, and Madame Utuburu knew it would soon be time to harvest the apples, which had been plentiful this year, but small and not as sweet as usual. (Is not God's even-handed justice everywhere revealed?) As she worked putting up jars of piperade, she glanced from time to time out her kitchen window to see if that greedy Etcheverrigaray was already stripping the tree. But the widow did not leave her house all day, and Madame Utuburu wondered what sort of game the old hag was playing. Oh-h, wait a minute! Was she pretending to be too stricken with grief to attend to garden chores? Was this her sly way of implying that she had the greatest reason to mourn young Zabala, who had never cared a fig for her? What an underhanded trick!
After mass the next morning, the priest asked Madame Utuburu why her neighbor had not attended service, and she replied that she was sure she didn't know. Perhaps she had given up going to mass, realizing that although God's mercy is infinite, it might not be infinite enough to save certain people who are forever parading their pretended grief! The same kind of people who always go about carrying thick books written by spindly legged sons who are so feeble they couldn't throw a pelote against a fronton! No, not if the child Jesus Himself begged him for a game! The priest shook his head and sighed, sorry he had asked.
That afternoon Madame Utuburu looked up from mulching her garden against the coming winter to see the priest plodding dutifully up the widow's path. He was inside no more than two minutes before he came out, a leaden frown on his brow. When Madame Utuburu called over the wall, asking what old Etcheverrigaray was playing at, the priest picked his way across to her, holding his skirts up so as not to muddy them. "Your neighbor has been summoned to judgment," he said in that ripe tremolo one associates with calls for funds to reroof the church.
Madame Utuburu could not believe it! That healthy old horse of an Etcheverrigaray? She who was strong enough to rip a branch off another person's apple tree? It couldn't be!
"No doubt her bone marrow caught a fever from standing in the rain at poor Zabala's burial," the priest said. "I found her sitting in her kitchen, her feet in a bucket of water that had gone cold."
The priest went off to make the usual arrangements, and soon four women of the village came down the road wearing hastily-put-on black dresses; their heads bowed, their palms pressed together before them, their tread slow, but each radiating a tremor of restrained excitement at being part of the great events of Life and Death. They turned into the Widow Etcheverrigaray's to wash, dress, and lay out the body, first opening the bedroom window to let her soul fly up to heaven. Then the First Mourner—who merited this privileged title because, as the oldest of the watchers, she was probably 'next in line', though this was never mentioned aloud—went out back to announce the death to the chickens, so they wouldn't stop laying. In other parts of the Basque country, the custom is to go to the Departed One's beehives and whisper that their keeper has died, so that sudden grief will not cause the bees to swarm and abandon their hives. No one in our village keeps bees, so we tell the chickens instead, and it must work, because none of them have every swarmed and abandoned their roosts.
Back in Widow's Etcheverrigaray's kitchen the mourners sat gossiping in felted voices, thrilling one another with pious reminders that any one of them might be called unexpectedly to God, so they had better be ready with clean souls. ...And clean underwear.
The First Mourner suggested that they invite Madame Utuburu to watch with them. After all, the two women had been neighbors for more years than boys have naughty thoughts. But the Second Mourner wondered if it might not offend the Departed One to allow her lifelong rival to nose about in a
kitchen she hadn't had time to clean. After some deliberation, it was decided that they would tidy up carefully, then invite Madame Utuburu to join the wake.
Stiff and very, very proper, Madame Utuburu sat in her neighbor's kitchen for the first time in her life. Awkward silences were followed by spurts of forced conversation that collapsed into broken phrases, then faded into feeble nods and hums of accord. None of the mourners wanted to praise the widow in the presence of her rival, and no one dared to gossip about her in the presence of her spirit, so what was there to talk about? Finally, to everyone's relief, Madame Utuburu rose to go, but the First Mourner urged her to follow the ancient tradition and take some little trifle from the house as a memento of the Departed One. At first she declined, but finally—more to get away without further embarrassment than anything else—she allowed herself to be prevailed upon. After she left there was a long moment of silence, then a gush of repressed talk burst from all the Watchers' lips at once. Why on earth had she chosen that as a memento?
The whole village came to see the widow off to her reward. Only after standing beside the grave for a respectable amount of time, shivering in a wind that carried the smell of mountain snow on it, did we begin to drift away, the women to their kitchens, the men to the mayor's café/bar to take a little glass as they discussed the priest's warning that every hour of life wounds, and the last kills. ...All right, maybe two glasses.
Madame Utuburu had not intended to linger beside the grave; it was simply that she didn't notice the departure of the others. Fully an hour passed before she lifted her eyes and, with a slight gasp of surprise, realized that she was alone. Alone. With nothing to mark the passage of her days. No one to prompt her to greater efforts at gardening and greater praise from the village. No little victories to warm her throat with flushes of pride, no little defeats to sting her ears with flushes of shame. Nothing left to talk about but her expensive, beautiful, hand-embroidered silk cushion from Buenos Aires.