Despite all the years that had passed, I had little difficulty recognising her. My mother was just as I remembered her, exactly the same as when she was alive and wandered about the house, day and night, tending to the livestock and to the whole family. She was still wearing the dress that Sabina and my sister had put on her after she died and the black scarf that she never took off. And now, sitting on the bench by the fire, her usual still, silent self, she seemed to have come to prove to me that it was not her but time that had died.
All that night, the dog sat howling at the door, wakeful and frightened, as she did when the people in Ainielle still used to keep vigil over their dead or when smugglers or wolves came down into the village. All night, my mother and I sat in silence watching the flames consuming the gorse twigs on the fire and, with them, our memories. After all those years, after all that time separated by death, the two of us were once again face to face, yet, despite that, we dared not resume a conversation that had been suddenly interrupted a long time ago. I did not even dare look at her. I knew she was still in the kitchen because of the dog's frightened barking and because of the strange, unmoving shadow that the flames cast on the floor by the bench. But, at no point, did I feel afraid. Not for a moment did I allow myself to think that my mother had come to keep vigil over my own death. Only at dawn, when, still sitting by the fire, I was woken by the warm light and realised she was no longer with me in the kitchen, did a black shudder run through me for the first time, when the calendar reminded me that the night ebbing away behind the trees was the last night of February: the exact same date on which my mother had died forty years before.
After that, my mother often came to keep me company. She always arrived around midnight, when sleep was already beginning to overwhelm me and the logs were starting to burn down amongst the embers in the hearth. She always appeared in the kitchen suddenly, with no noise, no sound of footsteps, without the front door or the door from the corridor announcing her arrival. But before she came into the kitchen, even before her shadow appeared in the narrow street outside, I could tell from the dog's frightened yelps that my mother was approaching. And sometimes, when my loneliness was stronger than the night, when my memories became too full of tiredness and madness, I would run to my bed and pull the blankets up over my head, like a child, so as not to have to mingle those memories with hers.
One night, however, around two or three in the morning, a strange murmuring made me sit up suddenly in my bed. It was a cold night, towards the end of autumn, and, as now, the window was blinded by the yellow rain. At first, I thought the murmuring was coming from outside the house, that it was the noise of the wind dragging the dead leaves along the street. I soon realised I was wrong. The strange murmuring was not coming from the street, but from somewhere in the house, and it was the sound of voices, of words being spoken nearby, as if there were someone talking to my mother in the kitchen.
Lying absolutely still in my bed, I listened for a long time before deciding to get up. The dog had stopped barking and her silence alarmed me even more than that strange echo of words. Even more than the rain of dead leaves that was staining the whole window yellow. When I went out into the corridor, the murmuring abruptly stopped, as if they had heard me from the kitchen. I had already picked up the knife which, ever since the day Sabina died, I always carry in my jacket, and I went down the stairs determined to find out who was in the kitchen with my mother. I didn't need the knife. It wouldn't have been any use to me anyway. Sitting in a circle round the kitchen fire with my mother there were only silent, dead shadows, who all turned as one to look at me when I flung open the door behind them, and amongst them I immediately recognised the faces of Sabina and of all the dead of the house.
I rushed out into the street, not even bothering to close the door behind me. I remember that, as I left, a cold wind struck my face. The whole street was full of dead leaves and the wind was whirling them up in the gardens and courtyards of the houses. When I reached Bescos' old house, I stopped to catch my breath. It had all happened so fast, it was all so sudden and confused, that I was still not entirely sure that I wasn't in the middle of a dream: I could still feel the warmth of the sheets on my skin, the wind was blinding and buffeting me and, above the rooftops and the walls of the houses, the sky was the yellow of nightmares. But no, it wasn't a dream. What I had seen and heard in the kitchen in my house was as real as me standing at that moment in the middle of the street, stockstill and terrified, again hearing strange voices behind me.
For a few seconds, I stood there, paralysed. During those seconds - interminable seconds made longer by the wind rattling the windows and doors of the houses - I thought my heart was going to burst. I had just fled my own house, I had just left behind me the cold of death, death's gaze, and now, though how I didn't know, I found myself once more face to face with death. It was sitting on the bench in Bescos' kitchen by a non-existent fire, watching over the memory of a house that no one even remembered any more, on the other side of the window against which I just happened to be leaning.
Terrified, I started running down the middle of the street, with no idea where I was going. My whole body broke out in a cold sweat and the leaves and the wind were blinding me. Suddenly, the entire village seemed to have been set in motion: the walls moved silently aside as I passed, the roofs floated in the air like shadows torn from their bodies and, above the infinite vertex of the night, the sky was now entirely yellow. I passed the church without stopping. I didn't think for a moment of taking refuge there. The belfry leaned menacingly towards me and the bells began to ring again as if they were still alive beneath the earth. Yet in Calleja de Gavin, the fountain seemed abruptly to have died. Water had ceasing pouring from the spout and, amongst the black shadows of the algae and the watercress, the water was as yellow as the sky. I ran towards Lauro's old house, battling against the wind. The nettles stung me and the brambles wrapped about my legs as if they too wanted to hold me back. But I got there. Exhausted. Panting. Several times I nearly fell. And when I was finally out in the open country, far from the houses and the garden walls, I stopped to see what was happening around me: the sky and the rooftops were burning, fused into one incandescent brightness, the wind was battering the windows and doors of the houses and, in the midst of the night, amongst the endless howling of leaves and doors, the whole village was filled by an incessant lament. I did not need to retrace my steps to know that every kitchen was inhabited by the dead.
During the whole of that night, I wandered the roads, not daring to return to my own dead. For more than five hours, I waited for dawn, afraid that it might perhaps never come. Fear dragged me aimlessly, senselessly through the hills, and the thorns snatched at my clothes, gradually eating away at my courage and my strength, not that I was aware of them. Blinded by the wind, I could barely see them, and madness propelled me beyond the night and beyond despair. And so, when dawn finally arrived, I was far from the village, on the top of Erata hill, by the abandoned watering hole of a flock that had not been seen for several years.
I continued to wait, though, sitting amongst the brambles, until the sun came out. I knew that no one would now be waiting for me in the village - my mother always left with the dawn - but I was so tired I could barely stand. Gradually, though, my strength returned - I may even have managed to sleep for a while - and when the sun finally broke through the black clouds over Erata, I set off again, ready to go back. Downhill and in the full light of day, it did not take me long to cover the distance walked that night. The wind had dropped and a deep calm was spreading softly over the hills. Down below, in the river valley, the rooftops of Ainielle were floating in the mist as sweetly as at any dawn. As I came within sight of the houses, the dog joined me. She appeared suddenly at the side of the road, from amongst some bushes, still trembling with fear and emotion. The poor creature had spent the night there, hiding, and now, when she found me, she looked at me in silence, struggling to understand. But I could tell her nothing.
Even if she had been able to comprehend my words, I could not explain something that I myself could not grasp. Perhaps it really had been nothing more than a dream, a murky, tormented nightmare born of insomnia and solitude. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I really had seen and heard everything that I saw and heard that night - just as now I could see the garden walls and hear around me the cries of the birds - and those black shadows were perhaps still waiting for me to return to the kitchen. The presence of the dog gave me courage, however, to walk past the houses and go towards my own. The street door was still open, just as I had left it, and, as always, a profound silence welled up from the far end of the corridor. I did not hesitate for a second. I did not even stop to remember the things I thought I had experienced during the night and on many other previous nights. I went in through the door and entered the house convinced that it was all a lie, that there was no one waiting in the kitchen and that everything that had happened had been merely the nightmarish fruit of insomnia and madness. Indeed, no one was in the kitchen. The bench was empty, as it always was, touched by the first light of day coming in through the window. In the fireplace, though, quite inexplicably, the fire I had doused before I went to bed was still burning, still wrapped in a strange, mysterious glow.
Several months passed and there was no recurrence of these events. I sat waiting in the kitchen every night, alert to the slightest sound, fearing that the door would again open of its own accord and that my mother would appear once more before me. But the winter passed and nothing happened, nothing disturbed the peace of the kitchen and of my heart. And so, when the spring arrived, when the snows began to melt and the days to grow longer, I was sure that she would never return, because her ghost had only ever existed in my imagination.
But she did return. At night, completely unexpectedly, while it was raining. I recall that November was drawing to a close and that, outside the windows, the air was yellow She sat down on the bench and looked at me in silence, just as she had that first day.
Since then, my mother has returned on many nights. Sometimes, with Sabina. Sometimes, surrounded by the whole family. For a long time, so as not to see them, I would hide somewhere in the village, or else spend hours aimlessly, senselessly wandering the hills. For a long time, I preferred to shun their company. But they kept coming, more and more often, and, in the end, I had no option but to resign myself to sharing with them my memories and the warmth of the kitchen. And now that death is prowling outside the door of this room and the air is gradually staining my eyes with yellow, it actually consoles me to think of them there, sitting by the fire, awaiting the moment when my shadow will join theirs for ever.
© Julio Llamazares
Translated by Margaret full Costa
Julio Llamazares (1955) was born in the now non-existent village of Vegamian near Leon and currently lives in Madrid. Initially he trained and worked as a lawyer, but soon abandoned that career to work as a newspaper, TV and radio journalist. He has published two books of poetry: La lentitud de los bueyes (1979) and Memoria de la nieve (1982), for which he won the Jorge Guillen Prize. He has also written two books about his childhood and the area where he was born - El rio del olvido (1990) and Escenas de cine mudo (1994) - and two remarkable novels: Luna de lobos (1985) and La lluvia amarilla (1993), winner of the Premio Nonino for the best foreign novel published in Italy. The latter, from which this extract is taken, is an elegiac account of an abandoned village near the Spanish Pyrenees, of which the narrator and his dog are the sole remaining inhabitants.
Until I was thirty years old, I lived quietly and virtuously and in accordance with my own biography, and it had never occurred to me that forgotten characters from books read in adolescence might resurface in my life, or even in other people's lives. Of course, I had heard people speak of momentary identity crises provoked by a coincidence of names uncovered in youth (for example, my friend Rafa Zarza doubted his own existence when he was introduced to another Rafa Zarza). But I never expected to find myself transformed into a bloodless William Wilson, or a de-dramatised portrait of Dorian Gray, or a Jekyll whose Hyde was merely another Jekyll.
His name was Xavier de Gualta - a Catalan, as his name indicates - and he worked in the Barcelona office of the same company I worked for. His (highly) responsible position was similar to mine in Madrid where we met at a supper intended for the dual purpose of business and fraternisation, which is why we both arrived there accompanied by our respective wives. Only our first names were interchangeable (my name is Javier Santin), but we coincided in absolutely everything else. I still remember the look of stupefaction on Gualta's face (which was doubtless also on mine), when the head waiter who brought him to our table stood to one side, allowing him to see my face for the first time. Gualta and I were physically identical, like twins in the cinema, but it wasn't just that: we even made the same gestures at the same time and used the same words (we took the words out of each other's mouths, as the saying goes), and our hands would reach for the bottle of wine (Rhine) or the mineral water (still), or our forehead, or the sugar spoon, or the bread, or the fork beneath the fondue dish, in perfect unison, simultaneously. We narrowly missed colliding. It was as if our heads, which were identical outside, were also thinking the same thing and at the same time. It was like dining opposite a mirror made flesh. Needless to say, we agreed about everything and, although I tried not to ask too many questions, such was my disgust, my sense of vertigo, our lives, both professional and personal, had run along parallel lines. This extraordinary similarity was, of course, noted and commented on by our wives and by us ('It's extraordinary,' they said. `Yes, extraordinary,' we said), yet, after our first initial amazement, the four of us, somewhat taken aback by this entirely anomalous situation and conscious that we had to think of the good of the company that had brought us together for that supper, ignored the remarkable fact and did our best to behave naturally. We tended to concentrate more on business than on fraternisation. The only thing about us that was not the same were our wives (but they are not in fact part of us, just as we are not part of them). Mine, if I may be so vulgar, is a real stunner, whilst Gualta's wife, though distinguished-looking, was a complete nonentity, temporarily embellished and emboldened by the success of her go-getting spouse.
The worst thing, though, was not the resemblance itself (after all, other people have learned to live with it). Until then, I had never seen myself. I mean, a photo immobilises us, and in the mirror we always see ourselves the other way round (for example, I always part my hair on the right, like Cary Grant, but in the mirror, I am someone who parts his hair on the left, like Clark Gable); and, since I am not famous and have never been interested in movie cameras, I had never seen myself on television or on video either. In Gualta, therefore, I saw myself for the first time, talking, moving, gesticulating, pausing, laughing, in profile, wiping my mouth with my napkin, and scratching my nose. It was my first real experience of myself as object, something which is normally enjoyed only by the famous or by those with a video camera to play with.
And I hated myself. That is, I hated Gualta, who was identical to me. That smooth Catalan not only struck me as entirely lacking in charm (although my wife - who is gorgeous - said to me later at home, I imagine merely to flatter me, that she had found him attractive), he seemed affected, prissy, overbearing in his views, mannered in his gestures, full of his own charisma (mercantile charisma, I mean), openly right-wing in his views (we both, of course, voted for the same party), pretentious in his choice of vocabulary and unscrupulous in matters of business. We were even official supporters of the most conservative football clubs in our respective cities: he of Espanol and I of Atletico. I saw myself in Gualta and in Gualta I saw an utterly repellent individual, capable of anything, potential firing squad material. As I say, I unhesitatingly hated myself.
And it was from that night, without even informing my wife of my intentions, that I began to change. Not only had I discovered that in the city of Barcelona there existed a being i
dentical to myself whom I detested, I was afraid too that, in each and every sphere of life, at each and every moment of the day, that being would think, do and say exactly the same as me. I knew that we had the same office hours, that he lived alone, without children, with his wife, exactly like me. There was nothing to stop him living my life. I thought: `Everything I do, every step I take, every hand I shake, every word I say, every letter I dictate, every thought I have, every kiss I give my wife, will be being done, taken, shaken, said, dictated, had, given by Gualta to his wife. This can't go on.'
After that unfortunate encounter, I knew that we would meet again four months later, at the big party being given to celebrate the fifth anniversary of our company, American in origin, being set up in Spain. And during that time, I applied myself to the task of modifying my appearance: I cultivated a moustache, which took a long while to grow; sometimes, instead of a tie, I would wear an elegant cravat; I started smoking (English cigarettes); and I even tried to disguise my receding hairline with a discreet Japanese hair implant (the kind of self-conscious, effeminate thing that neither Gualta nor my former self would ever have allowed themselves to do). As for my behaviour, I spoke more robustly, I avoided expressions such as `horizontal integration' or `package deal dynamics' once so dear to Gualta and myself; I stopped pouring wine for ladies during supper; I stopped helping them on with their coats; I would utter the occasional swear word.
Four months later, at that Barcelona celebration, I met a Gualta who was sporting a stunted moustache and who appeared to have more hair than I remembered; he was chainsmoking John Players and instead of a tie, he was wearing a bow-tie; he kept slapping his thighs when he laughed, digging people with his elbow, and exclaiming frequently: `bloody hell!' I found him just as hateful as before. That night, I too was wearing a bow-tie.
The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy Page 14