B0040702LQ EBOK (15 page)

When she goes in, however, she is met by a stench - not of
celebration - by the silence of a muted room, by an emptiness
in which only the colours glitter in the shadows. Our character leaves the hall and goes down the corridor as far as the
living room door; she enters the room and realises at once what must have happened only a matter of moments ago: the
inert, fallen bodies, one on top of the other, face down, blood
still pouring from their backs. She can scarcely see their faces,
she doesn't know what their last expression was, she doesn't
want to; she looks only at the woman lying there; she has long
black hair like hers that reaches down as far as the wound in
her back and which is steeped, like the wick of a lamp, in
blood; all that remains is a profile blurred by surprise; her eyes,
which are the eyes of our protagonist, are wide open and
bewildered, but no longer take anything in. In the half-light,
this mound of death seems even more improbable, for above
the corpses fly helium balloons and coloured streamers, beside
them stand the tables with their white cloths, the cake and
other delicacies, the sweets, the sparkling wine.

The woman goes out into the street, first closing the door
and putting the key back in its hiding place. And it is only
then that she is overwhelmed by grief; she does not know the
reason behind the crime, or if there was perhaps a clue. She
reaches the park and sits down on the grass, still thinking of
possible motives. She decides that she must return to the scene
of the crime, she must go back in order to raise the alarm, to
notify the authorities.

She reaches the white building and goes up the ten steps
that separate the house from the street. She again feels with
her fingers above the doorframe and she touches something
rough. How is it possible? The key is covered in rust, the
colour of clay, and it is now so huge that it will barely fit in the
lock. Our protagonist has to struggle to manipulate it and
turns the key twice before the door gives. As the rusty hinges
move, they emit a piercing noise.

Once inside, the air is the colour of amber, full of ancient
perfumes and thousands of dust motes quivering in the slender cones of light coming in through the shutters. The various
pieces of furniture are the ghosts of a remote past, covered in
long white drapes; on the floor are the remains of letters and
newspapers, the occasional kitchen utensil and fragments of
photographs of unfamiliar men and women. The white
shapes belong to furniture that does not correspond to hers. There are no lifeless corpses there; now there are only dead
objects.

She leaves again and walks about the streets. That place is
no longer her home and she does not know where to go. For a
long time, she walks and walks, aimlessly. At last, she stops; she
decides that she has no option but to go back.

And on her return, everything is as it was ... the birthday
party, the joyful celebration, the coloured balloons; and she
thinks about what might have been but was not, about what
could happen on some not so distant day, she thinks that it
might perhaps be best not to go out into the street, just in case.

© Isabel del Rio

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

My story is a brief one, so I won't take up much of your time.
Besides, there is no time, not for me at least. I haven't a minute
to lose, I have no more hours to spend. And if you're prepared
to grant me one final wish, let it be this: that I should be the
one to give the countdown. I am the only one with the right
to do it, because it's my life that you have in your hands. So
instead of the usual `Ready, aim, etc.', I will be the one to give
the order and I will do so with numbers. That will be my final
tribute: I will count from ten to zero, as they do for any
important event. And since I will be counting backwards, I
will do likewise with the events that have led me to my present situation. No, I don't want a blindfold, really, I don't want
to miss the spectacle that you have organised solely for me. I'll
begin. Ten, here I am before you, and you still have your rifles
trained on my heart. Nine, the local judge said that I was
guilty of stealing a chicken. Eight, the police found me roasting a chicken leg over a fire that I had lit next to that dusty
crossroads. Seven, I caught a chicken in a farmyard and split its
head in two. Six, for days I travelled the parched roads that
slice the mountains into green and black segments and I
ended up at a farm where, at night, I broke into the henhouse.
Five, early in the morning, with my pockets empty, I left the
city on foot to take a close look at what awaited me. Four, I
had a different dream from the one I dream every night, and in
this new dream it was revealed to me that the solution was to
flee the city and to wander the countryside with no plan, no
forethought. Three, I fell asleep on the desk in my office,
thinking about the many reports I had to finish for the next
day.Two, I drank more than I should, I talked more than I
usually talk, I regretted recounting what, until then, nobody
knew. One, I explained for the first time in public that every night I had the same dream, I dreamed about the violet-red
wallflowers that would grow on the grave dug for me, but I
never found my grave in that dream cemetery however hard I
looked, that is what I dreamed, doggedly, night after night, and
today I lived through the whole incident when the police
dragged me along the road, grazing my knees, me still grasping a chicken leg in one hand and a greasy wing in the other
because I didn't want to let go of what was going to cost me
my life, and I saw that very cemetery on the outskirts of this
village, I recognised the landscape of my dream - look around
if you like, no need to lower your rifles - the same single
cypress tree in the middle and the same fountain with the
sculpture of a fallen angel, the three white crosses on one side
and the two black crosses on the other, to the left a bare
mountain and a grove of trees in the middle of the plain of
yellow earth, and I told the police when they arrested me, I
told them I'd been through all this before, in a different way,
of course, but I had nevertheless been through it all before,
and I spoke to them of the circle about to close and of the end
that is implicit in each beginning and they said they didn't
know what I was talking about and told me to shut my
mouth, and that is why I decided not to defend myself when
they brought me before the judge, they heard me ask him are
you killing me on account of a chicken? and they heard him reply
we're killing you because your hour has come, and I'm going to
explain something to you who are about to kill me for whatever the reason may be, always remember this: the most
valuable thing I have done in my life is to track down the
landscape of that insistent dream, which is why I'm giving this
countdown now, the way they do on important occasions, like
I said, even though what I've found will be my ruin, and my
victory will be short-lived, even though everything I have
done has come to nothing, and could accurately be described,
in numerical terms, as zero ...

© Isabel del Rio

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Isabel del Rio (Madrid, 1954) spent her childhood and most
of her adult life in London. She has worked as a journalist and
writer in Spain and in the UK, including working at the BBC
World Service. She has also worked as a literary and commercial translator and currently works as a full-time translator
for a UN agency in London. La duda, from which `No one'
and `The Key' were taken, was shortlisted for the New
Writers' Prize and the Icarus Prize in Spain. `Countdown'
was published in Nomad as N6madas (1997), a collection of
short stories and poems by Spanish and Latin American
writers living in London. She writes poetry and prose, in
English and Spanish, and is now working on two novels and a
collection of short stories.

`Once upon a time, before mankind had wings ...'

That was how all my mother's stories began when I was a
little girl: harking back to an ancient or perhaps mythical time
when mankind had not yet acquired the ability to fly. I loved
hearing those stories, and I would beg her to tell me them
over and over again, even though I knew them all off by heart:
the one about the hero who, having no wings of his own,
made himself wings out of wax and bird feathers; but when he
flew too close to the sun the wax melted and he fell into the
sea and drowned. Or the one about the man who invented a
device made of canvas and wood that enabled him to launch
himself from the tops of mountains and glide over the valleys
of his country, taking advantage of the warm air currents,
something we all do today almost instinctively, yet hearing it
recounted made it seem strange and novel, as though I myself
had just discovered a phenomenon which is so common
nowadays we don't even notice it.

Little did I know as I listened to my mother's stories that,
one day, the lack of wings was something I would experience
very close to home, and the myth of those disfigured beings
would end up becoming part of my own life.

I never felt any great maternal instinct. I remember that
when we were teenagers, a lot of my friends yearned for the
day they would become mothers; they seemed to have no
other vocation in life, and I felt profoundly irritated by their
oohs and ahs and the silly faces they pulled every time they
saw a baby; they would surround the cot or the pram cooing
like doves and eventually they would ask the mother if they
could just hold the baby for a minute in their wings. When
the mother said yes and they gathered it to their breast and wrapped it in their flight feathers, they looked so happy that I
didn't know whether to set about them for being so wet and
stupid, or myself for being so detached and insensitive. It made
me feel odd to see them so carried away with something that
left me cold.

In time I grew to understand that there was no obligation
to be a mother. So as I approached the age of forty, happily
married and with a fulfilling career, I had given up the idea
of having children, but it was a sort of automatic decision:
quite simply, motherhood did not enter into my plans. Then I
discovered I was pregnant.