Blind Sunflowers

by Alberto Méndez

  The sick cow lows plaintively. Its milk has dried up. I don’t dare kill her yet because I need snowdrifts to build up for me to keep the carcass in. There is plenty of firewood, and I’ll try to feed the other one by digging out grass from under the snow. What worries me most is this pencil. It’s the only one I have, and I want to be able to write everything so that whoever finds us in spring knows how we met our death.

  Written in capitals as if in a printed book, the following phrase: I AM A POET WITH NO VERSES.

  Page 11

  Today it snowed all day. These mountains must be where all winters have their home.

  The boy is still alive. The snow round the cabin is like a shroud. The dead cow provides us with meat: I keep some of it smoked, and the rest has been frozen by this early winter weather. Fortunately we get plenty of milk from the living cow, which is now inside the cabin with us. It helps to keep us warm. The sweet potatoes we stole as we went through Perlunes keep perfectly, buried in the snow. To judge by the greedy way he drinks the soup I make, the boy seems to like them. What’s surprising is the way he is beginning to fill the space. I can remember when he was an intruder in the cabin, something that should not have been there. Now the entire hut revolves around him. On the few days when there is sun, our bed reflects the light like a mirror, and the silence piles up around the noises the boy is constantly making, either because he is crying, or is taken by surprise by his bare leg waving in mid-air, or the sight of the withered, weary cow that has replaced a hearth to warm our family. His gentle, rhythmic breathing helps ward off the loneliness which without him would vanquish me.

  Page 12

  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.

  Page 13

  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.

  Page 14

  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.

  Page 15

  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.

  Page 16

  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.

  Page 17

  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.

  Page 18

  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

  Page 19

  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.

  Page 20

  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.

  Page 21

  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.

  Page 22

  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’.

  Page 23

  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.

  Page 24

  The word Rafael is repeated a further sixty-two times.

  Page 25

  The word Rafael again, in the same handwriting, but much smaller: one hundred and nineteen times.

  Page 26

  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.

  Third defeat: 1941

  or

  The language of the dead

  In the intense, abstracted manner of someone pronouncing a spell, Juan Senra, cello teacher,
said yes, and without realising it saved his life.

  ‘Did you really know him?’ asked Colonel Eymar, roused from his somnolence. He leaned forward to examine the accused with the kind of distant interest an entomologist shows in a tiny bug.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, colonel sir!’ said the colonel in his reedy voice.

  ‘Yes, colonel sir.’

  Juan Senra had been on his feet since dawn, dressed in blue overalls and a threadbare jersey that let the cold in and his fear out. He was so thin, with his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously up and down each time he swallowed, and so crushed, that his shoulders curved so far forward he looked like a convex mirror. The scar of a man, incapable of resting his eyes on anything without feeling nauseous.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Porlier jail.’

  Colonel Eymar was tiny. His hands poked out of the ends of his sleeves just far enough for him to hold a cigarette between the first and middle fingers, where his nails had been toasted a dirty amber by the constantly burning tobacco. A scrawny neck like some bird of prey’s projected above the stiff collar of a tunic that was so loose and tattered it did not seem to belong to a real soldier. And yet, contrasting in a virile way with all this decrepitude, he sported a thin, horizontal moustache, its line in perfect parallel with the courtroom floor. This gave the colonel a look that made him appear not exactly fierce, but at least incapable of smiling. There were medals too: a whole panoply of them seemed to be armour-plating his chest rather than honouring it.