Return to Your Skin

by Luz Gabás

  Luzer.

  She crossed the garden and uncertainly rested her hand on the doorknob. A movement caught her attention, and she turned. Her uncle’s enormous black dog was staring at her, chained to a post behind the shed. Safe from his reach, Brianda stared back at him. He looked like a different animal. In his eyes there was no sign of his previous ferocity. Quite the opposite. Luzer emanated sorrow, even disinterest toward her, as if, after his master’s death, there was no more need to stand guard. He let out a sad, short howl and lay down.

  Brianda headed inside and went to the sitting room. Several people she did not recognize filled the wooden benches in front of the cold fireplace. When Isolina saw her, she broke away from Laura’s arms and walked toward her. Brianda was shocked by her appearance. Her aunt seemed to have aged years overnight, and her voice was a barely intelligible mumble.

  “He knew,” she said. “He had a premonition.”

  Brianda hugged her. The body that shook against her own seemed to belong to a very different person from the woman she knew. Aunt Isolina—chatty but cautious, smiling but restrained, attentive but never overbearing—had been consumed by death and transformed into someone strange and feeble, as if the decrepitude of the house had eaten her alive. It was hard for Brianda to understand how the death of a man like Colau could affect anyone so deeply.

  Brianda wondered if Esteban’s death would cause her anything like this desolation.

  “The body is in the office,” she heard her mother say. “Do you want to come with us?”

  Brianda shook her head. It would be difficult enough to sleep in the blue bedroom just knowing there was a dead person in the house. She sought refuge in the kitchen, where she ran into Petra, who was busy preparing a huge pot of beans.

  “Have you seen him?” Petra asked.

  Brianda shook her head.

  “Better that way,” Petra said. “I’ve seen many dead bodies in my life, and their faces were all peaceful.” She rubbed her arms. “But the look on Colau’s face is horrible. I can’t get it out of my head. It is the face of someone who died suffering.”

  The following morning, the warm breeze unexpectedly gave way to a howling north wind that made the wooden barns creak, slipped treacherously into the house, and rattled the roof tiles. As was the custom in Tiles, the priest came to Anels House to accompany Colau in his farewell to the house he had shared with Isolina for so many years. Daniel, Jonas, Bernardo, Zacarias, and two other men carried the coffin out on their shoulders and placed it in the hearse. At the church, Brianda looked for Neli but didn’t see her. She really wanted to talk to her, and not solely to apologize for having left without saying good-bye.

  After a simple ceremony during which Isolina’s sobbing frequently broke the moments of silence, they went to the small graveyard where Brianda had left flowers back on All Saints’ Day. Hunching to withstand the gusts of wind, they navigated around the iron crosses of the graves on the ground and stopped in front of the small Anels family vault. The men put Colau’s coffin in one of the niches, and Jonas began to cover it with a piece of plasterboard.

  Brianda watched the ritual closely. The scene was acted out with the precision of a dress rehearsal. Jonas mixed the plaster with water to close the grave as the wind made the white dust rise. Petra placed stones on the wreaths and bunches of flowers so they wouldn’t blow away, and the entourage slowly filed past Isolina to offer their condolences. Everybody Brianda had met here had come to pay respects. That included Neli, who she had spotted the moment she entered the sacred site with her unruly red hair and her informal clothes, and who had hung back beside Mihaela, oddly removed from the rest of the group.

  Everyone was there—except Corso.

  Maybe he was away on a trip, Brianda worried. With his wife.

  Standing in that tiny graveyard, Brianda thought about how death was the most definite of all good-byes. Nothing she had suffered compared to what her aunt must be going through. Isolina needed all the support and love in the world—not the self-pitying mess Brianda had been these past months. She decided it was time to focus on someone else for a change. She would look after Isolina and the house. They would go for walks and tend the garden. The best way to repay her aunt for how she had looked after her was to stay in Tiles as long as necessary for both of them to find some sort of peace.

  After the funeral, the mourners went back to Anels House. So that Isolina would not have to immediately face the new and cruel loneliness, Laura and Petra had prepared food and drink for the rest of the day. And, as it had been years since her last visit to Tiles, Laura kept the conversation in the sitting room flowing, reminiscing and catching up with everyone there.

  When she got the chance, Brianda went looking for Neli, who had slipped out of the sitting room. She found her alone in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water while staring out the window.

  “You won’t believe me, but I’ve thought about you a lot these past few months.”

  Neli gave a start and turned around.

  “Why wouldn’t I believe you?” she asked.

  “Because of how I left. Because I haven’t called all this time.” Brianda hesitated, looking to make sure that nobody was coming. “Neli, I followed your advice. I bought the books you recommended and read them. Not only that. I even had some sessions of regressive hypnosis.”

  Neli’s eyes shone.

  “And?”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “How about the beginning?”

  In a low voice, Brianda told her about the first isolated scenes she had visualized, about the longer ones that followed, and about how they all fit together to make up a strange story that seemed far-fetched.

  “Far-fetched? What do you mean?” Neli asked.

  “I mean, how could I actually be seeing the distant past? It seems crazy.”

  “And those scenes—did you experience them as real? Not like you were remembering, but like you were reliving.”

  “Only some of them.” Brianda thought about how she had met Corso and about how she had said good-bye to him beside the river in the monastery in Besalduch, but she did not say a word about it. “The rest seemed more like a dream or a memory from a movie or a book. Why do you ask?”

  Neli was silent for a few moments. Then she said, “Your mind may have processed all the information in a symbolic manner, inspired by memories and desires, but we cannot rule out the irrational. Being beyond reason does not mean being impossible. The ancients believed that from the things they saw in dreams and hallucinations it was possible to better know the essence of the soul. Maybe in these visions or reconstructions of the past, or whatever you call them, there was some clue that you can now trace—”

  Brianda shook her head. She had honestly tried to believe in all that stuff, but she still suspected her imagination had just been inspired by her obsession with Corso and curiosity about Brianda of Anels. The woman’s name and her execution had prompted Brianda to read stacks of books on the sixteenth century. With all that fodder, the encouragement of the hypnotist, and plenty of reason to flee the present anxieties, no wonder her mind had cooked up a good story.

  “Let’s suppose that there could be a grain of truth, though, OK?” Neli continued. “Think about what you learned from the visions that you didn’t know before. For example, the confessional in Besalduch.”

  “The carpenter who made it carved into the back the symbols of the warring factions. But I could have read that somewhere.”

  “What about the graves? Did you see anything that would explain fainting like that?”

  Brianda shook her head, and Neli’s face fell.

  “And the documents I found? Executions? Witches?”

  “Nothing.” Brianda had asked herself the same questions. She had also wondered about the document in the Besalduch archive where a husband requested the exhumation of his wife’s body. But she had seen nothing during her hypnosis sessions about any of that.

  “Anything else
that stands out?”

  Brianda squinted her eyes.

  “The man who appears as my father in the past, Johan, asks me to keep the name of Lubich alive, which I don’t understand. What do I have to do with that place? At the entrance to Lubich, there’s a stone with Johan’s name carved on it, so I probably got the idea from that.”

  “Colau’s genealogy research could be helpful here.”

  Neli sighed, and Brianda wondered if Colau would have been willing to share that information with them.

  “Any special objects?”

  Brianda thought hard.

  “A pendant, like a glass-and-silver locket, with dried flowers inside. Edelweiss.”

  Neli cried out triumphantly.

  “Do you know what those flowers symbolize?” She did not wait for Brianda to reply. “They represent honor, the world of dreams, and eternal love that never fades.”

  “That’s very nice, but so what?”

  “Edelweiss flowers grow in remote and inaccessible places. Just as it is difficult, but not impossible, to find them, I know that, while it will be hard, you will solve this mystery.”

  “Of course, because you’re a witch!” Brianda chuckled nervously. Neli was the only person in the world who she could talk to about this, and it was a huge relief to finally share what she’d been going through. She would never judge her or treat her as deranged. “Couldn’t you be more specific?”

  “Each search has its protagonist, and in this case it’s you. Think about it. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”

  “The only thing I can think of is Colau’s papers,” Brianda murmured. Maybe there she would find some clue that could show her whether her elaborate regressions were grounded in any historical reality.

  Laura came in with a tray of canapés, interrupting the conversation. When she left, Brianda finally decided to ask Neli something she had been wondering for hours.

  “Nice turnout for the funeral, wasn’t it? Although I didn’t see Corso—”

  She was as casual as possible, but her body gave her away. She felt her cheeks burn and her breath quicken. She prayed Neli would say she’d seen him recently and that he’d asked after her.

  “He went to Italy to see his family, but he told Jonas he’ll be back soon.” Neli looked at her closely. “Esteban couldn’t make it?”

  “It was so unexpected, he wasn’t able to change his work schedule.”

  “Is everything all right between the two of you?”

  Brianda shrugged but did not answer. She had not thought about Esteban since the moment she had arrived in Tiles. Just as Beles Peak loomed over everything here, her desire to see Corso again overshadowed any other feeling in her heart.

  25.

  The day after the funeral, Laura convinced Isolina that the most pressing task was to sort out Colau’s clothes and personal effects, donating whatever they could to charity and throwing away the rest.

  “How can you ever move on if you’re surrounded by his things?” she asked to her sister. “Cry all you want, but the only way to overcome fear and pain is by confronting it. Like our mother used to say, to know how to live, you have to know how to die.”

  Many times that day, Brianda wondered where her mother got the energy that she herself obviously hadn’t inherited. Laura made them clean from the top to the bottom of her childhood home, cracking jokes about old trinkets she rediscovered, and marveling at how time had stood still. Watching carefully, Brianda saw that her mother’s intensity stemmed from a desire to bottle up her own emotions in order to better help her sister. But whenever Isolina left the room, Laura raged against Colau for the visible decline in each corner of Anels.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Brianda needed a rest. She felt terrible for not having told Isolina about the ring, but she couldn’t find the right moment. Maybe when her parents left. She looked outside. The sky threatened rain and the air was thick. She decided to get some air before the storm came, and there, in the garden, was Luzer. He was still chained, and his water and food bowls were empty, apparently forgotten. On an impulse, Brianda reached a hand toward him. Luzer responded with a guttural growl and showed his teeth, but he did not get up nor try to attack her. Brianda pulled her hand back and retreated a few steps. Then she reached out again, with the same result. She went back to the house and looked for her aunt.

  “Why is Luzer tied up?”

  “I couldn’t separate him from Colau,” Isolina answered sadly. “If I let him loose, he would run to the grave and die there.”

  Brianda asked where his food was kept. She went to the kitchen, filled a bowl with water and another with kibble, went back to the animal, and left the bowls beside him. Luzer remained motionless, but Brianda saw curiosity in his eyes. An animal that missed his master that much couldn’t be truly savage, she thought.

  “If you do that every day,” said her father behind her, “he’ll end up liking you.”

  “I suspect that would take quite a while,” she replied, thinking how much the dog’s character was like his dead master’s.

  Daniel smiled.

  “I’m finished with the paperwork for his will and the widow’s pension, and I thought I’d get started on Colau’s office. Isolina has agreed. Will you help me?”

  Brianda jumped at the chance. Nevertheless, when she entered that guarded sanctuary, she felt apprehensive. It was difficult to get rid of the fear of being discovered at any moment, as if the door might suddenly open and reveal Colau. And not only that. Now that she was free to root around in his research, she remembered Petra’s dismal observation about the body. She wondered if the man’s sudden death and his horrified expression had anything to do with what was kept there, maybe something terrible he found out, maybe with the discovery that the ring was missing … Her heart raced and she bowed her head. What an absurd idea.

  “It would take weeks to do a proper cataloging job in here,” grumbled Daniel. “I don’t know where to start. If it were up to your mother, she’d put it all in the recycling bin.”

  “That would be a sacrilege,” Brianda responded. “Colau’s whole life is here.”

  “His and many others’.” Daniel picked up a pile of folders, sat in the armchair in front of the desk, and read the titles: “Marriage Capitulations, Testaments, Chapbooks, Statutes of Indictment—” He stopped, looking puzzled. “Um, this one says Brianda of Anels.”

  Brianda took it out of his hands and nervously stroked the cover before opening the folder. She couldn’t believe she was finally going to learn something about her ancestor.

  The first paper clip grouped a copy of the documents Neli had found in the sacristy. Since she already knew about them, Brianda quickly flipped past, then suddenly remembered Colau’s resistance to her knowing who had signed the executions. She stifled a yelp: Jayme of Cuyls. Like a lightning bolt, the image of a tall, good-looking man, with abundant brown hair and a cunning smile, appeared in her mind. She sat in an armchair and closed her eyes for an instant. When she saw Johan’s cousin again, a shiver went down her spine. Jayme of Cuyls signed the executions. Wait, Cuyls. An ancestor of Colau’s. Could Colau have been so ashamed that it was one of his ancestors that he’d tried to hide it? That was ridiculous. More than four hundred years had passed.

  The notion made her reconsider Colau’s strange temperament. Maybe she just couldn’t understand because she hadn’t grown up in a place like this. In villages, the collective memory was a fearsome thing and secrets were jealously guarded. Once those documents saw the light, dark rumors about the Cuylses would become implacable certainties. Even though centuries had passed.

  She turned to the next page, a copy of the fragment of the request by the Master of Anels to exhume his wife’s body shortly after the executions. There were some notes scribbled by Colau showing he wondered why. The third page was a copy of a will from Anels. Colau had drawn a big red exclamation mark on the page. The fourth was the beginning of incomplete transcriptions from what looked like a jud
icial process for the inheritance of Lubich dated at the end of the sixteenth century and discovered in the Barbastro Cathedral Archive years before.

  Brianda’s eyes shone. She did not know what she would learn from these papers, and she regarded the idea of finding some clue to corroborate her regressions seductive but ludicrous—and terrifying. Still, she couldn’t deny that she was deeply curious and profoundly energized. It was the strongest and most positive thing she’d felt in months—other than her desire to see Corso again.

  “Look at you,” said Daniel. “I didn’t know you shared historical interests with Colau.”

  Brianda smiled. “Historical research is contagious.”

  She recalled some of the images in her visions: a long-haired girl running in the rain, a man injured in a riverbed, the same girl shouting in the church.

  “And what was Colau researching that you find so interesting?” Daniel smiled to see the change in his daughter. How long had it been since he had seen her happy?

  Brianda told him about the list of twenty-four executions and that it named a Brianda of Anels.

  “Isolina told me that Mom got my name from a dream. Is that true?”

  “Well, she told me that when she was young, on stormy nights, she used to hear a voice from Beles Peak repeating the name.”

  Brianda raised her eyebrows incredulously. “Don’t you find that a little hard to believe?”

  Daniel shrugged. “She was young. Maybe she imagined it.” He got out of the armchair and stretched. “I need to get some air. It makes me sad, thinking how a lifetime of work just ends when we die.”

  Daniel left and Brianda pressed the folder against her chest. Just as Brianda from the past had felt obligated to keep the name of Lubich alive, she could not leave this place until she knew what had happened to her.