B0040702LQ EBOK (33 page)

Then, without warning, the faithful leave the rows of
benches and follow the man. There he goes. They march
silently along behind him. The preacher too. Where he goes,
they follow a few steps behind. When the man stops, they stop.
Whatever the man does, they do. The preacher too.

They go across country. They are all walking along now
carrying picks and shovels, because the man took up a pick
and a shovel. The march continues, silent, ecstatic. The man
walks; that is all. He is followed by men and women and by the
preacher.

When he reaches an open plain spreading out before them,
the man stops walking. Behind him, the cortege stops too.
Above their heads, vast space. Beneath their feet, flat, dry earth.
The sky is cloudy, the sun cannot be seen. It is midday.

Still saying nothing, the man begins to dig with his pick and
his shovel. The others dig alongside him with theirs, in the
same piece of ground. The preacher does the same. For a brief
time, picks and shovels work as if subordinate to the continual
rise and fall of arms. When the hole is fairly deep and wide,
the man sets down his tools and looks up at the sky. At that moment, everyone does the same; they put their tools down
on the ground and look up at the sky. But the man has now
lain down in the hole, which is longer than it is broad, made to
fit his body. Lying horizontal and rigid on the dug earth,
between his pick and his shovel, he has closed his eyes. He says
nothing, he merely waits. Everyone gathers round the hole
and takes up a shovel. Only one of those present is crying,
unseen, some way from the group. It is the preacher.

All eyes are on the man, down below, apparently asleep. A
woman sticks her shovel into the pile of earth and throws the
first spadeful onto the man's face. Immediately, the others
follow suit. It does not take them long to cover the man, lying
there, horizontal, motionless, alive, in answer to that call for a
sacrifice of the lower depths. He is no longer alive and the
others stamp down the earth to leave it flat again.

The clouds have cleared now and the sun bathes the plain
in light.

Further off, another hole is dug. This time it is that same
woman who is buried alive. They move off and dig elsewhere.
Another member of the faithful is laid to rest. Further off
another hole is dug, and another and another and, over there,
another. And fewer and fewer of the faithful remain. The sun
is setting, appearing and disappearing between dense clouds.
Before evening comes, a small group of the faithful are filling
in a hole with the earth dug from it. The sky is the colour of
lead and the violet horizon glows blood-red.

The sun is setting. Two men walk along carrying picks and
shovels. They stop, stick their picks into the earth to loosen it,
then use their shovels to dig. They have dug another hole like
the others, with some difficulty this time, for they are tired.
They watch the sun sinking down below the horizon, where
there are now only thin ribbons of cloud. It is beginning to
rain when the one remaining man has finished filling in the
hole. He walks slowly away. He walks back in the encroaching
gloom, a pick and a shovel on his shoulder. It is the preacher.

© Carlos Edmundo de Ory

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Carlos Edmundo de Ory (Cadiz, 1923) is the son of the
modernist poet Eduardo de Ory and he grew up surrounded
by writers and books. In 1942, he moved to Madrid where he
was the co-founder of an Iberian branch of Dadaism, called
Postism. The first and only number of a magazine they
published was promptly banned, and a later manifesto met
the same fate. In the end, he left Spain and settled in France,
where he became the librarian of the Maison de la Culture in
Amiens. He has always written both poetry and prose, but his
work remained largely unpublished until the 1960s and 70s
when collections of his short fictions came out: Una exhibici6n
peligrosa (1964), El alfabeto griego (1970) and Basuras (1975),
from which this story is taken. A selection of his poetry was
published in 1970.

Four large candlesticks were burning, oozing large drops of
wax. A bat had detached itself from the vaulted ceiling and
was beginning to describe ragged circles in the air. A small,
dark shape crossed the flagstones and sombrely, cautiously
climbed one fold of the pall covering the tomb. At that precise
moment, Dorotea de Guevara, lying inside the tomb, opened
her eyes.

She knew perfectly well that she was not dead, but a leaden
veil, a bronze padlock had prevented her from seeing and
speaking. She could hear, though, and she had been aware, as if
in a half-sleep, of what they did to her as they washed her and
wrapped her in the shroud. She had heard her husband sobbing, felt her children's tears on her stiff, white cheeks, and
now, in the solitude of the locked church, as she gradually
regained consciousness, she was overwhelmed by horror. This
was no nightmare, this was real. There was the coffin, there
were the candles ... and there she was wrapped in the white
shroud and, on her breast, the scapular of Our Lady of Mercy.

Sitting up now, the joy of pure existence overcame all other
feelings. She was alive; how good it was to live, to come alive
again and not to fall into the dark grave. Instead of being
borne down to the crypt at dawn on the shoulders of servants,
she would return to her own dear home and hear the joyful
clamour of those who loved her and were now weeping
inconsolably. The delicious idea of the joy she was about to
carry back to that house made her heart - weakened by the
deep faint into which she had fallen - beat faster. She swung
her legs over the side of the coffin and jumped down onto the
floor; then, with the alacrity of thought common in moments
of crisis, she drew up her plan of action. It was useless calling
out or asking for help at that hour of the night, and yet she could not bear to remain until dawn in the deserted church.
She thought she could see the prying faces of ghosts amidst
the shadows in the nave and hear the doleful cries of souls in
torment. There was another option: she could leave via the
Christ chapel.

It belonged to her; it had been endowed by her family.
Dorotea always kept a flame burning, in an exquisite silver
lamp, before the holy image of Christ on the cross. Beneath
the chapel was the crypt, the burial place of the Guevara
family. To her left, she could just make out the ornate railings
decorated here and there in mellow, reddish gold. In her heart,
Dorotea sent up a fervent prayer to Christ. Lord, let the keys
be in the lock! She felt for them. All three were there, hanging
in a bunch. The key to the chapel itself, the key to the crypt,
reached by a winding staircase inside the wall, and the third
key that opened a small concealed door in the carved retable
and gave onto a narrow alleyway skirting the noble, lofty
facade of the great house of the Guevaras flanked by towers.
That was the door through which the Guevaras entered in
order to hear mass in their chapel without having to cross the
nave. Dorotea unlocked the door and pushed it open ... She
was outside the church, she was free.

Only ten steps and she was home ... The house rose before
her, silent, grave, enigmatic. Dorotea placed a trembling hand
on the doorknocker, as if she were a beggarwoman come to
ask for succour in her hour of need. `This is my house, isn't
it?' she thought, as she knocked again. At the third knock, she
heard noises inside the mute, solemn house wrapped in its
own thoughts as if in mourning weeds. And then she heard
Pedralvar, the servant, grumbling:

`Who's there? Who's knocking at this hour of the
morning? A curse on you whoever you are!'

`Open the door, Pedralvar, please. It's your mistress, Dona
Dorotea de Guevara! Quick, open the door!'

`Go away, you drunkard! If I do come out there, I'll skewer
you, I swear I will!'

`It's me, Dona Dorotea. Open the door. Don't you
recognise my voice?'

Again there came a curse, this time hoarse with fear. Instead
of opening the door, Pedralvar went back up the stairs. The
woman knocked twice more. Life seemed to be returning to
the austere house. The servant's terror ran through it like a
shiver down a spine. She knocked again and in the hallway she
heard footsteps, whispers, people scurrying about. At last, the
two leaves of the heavy, studded door creaked open and the
rosy mouth of the maid Luciguela emitted a shrill scream. She
dropped the silver candlestick she was carrying. She had come
face to face with her mistress, her dead mistress, dragging her
shroud behind her and looking her straight in the eye.

Some time later, Dorotea, clothed now in a dress of
Genoese velvet with slashed sleeves, her hair threaded with
pearls, was sitting ensconced amongst cushions in an armchair
by the window and she remembered that even her husband,
Enrique de Guevara, had screamed when he saw her; he had
screamed and stepped back. It was not a cry of joy but of
horror, yes, horror, there could be no doubt about it. And had
not her children, Dona Clara, aged eleven, and Don Felix,
aged nine, wept out of pure fright when they saw their
mother returned from the tomb? They wept more grievously,
more bitterly than they had when they had borne her there.
And she had imagined that she would be greeted with
exclamations of great happiness! It is true that a few days after
her return, they held a solemn mass of thanksgiving; it is true
that they gave a lavish party for relatives and friends; it is true,
in short, that the Guevaras did all they could to show their
contentment at the singular and unexpected event that
had restored to them wife and mother. As she leant on the
windowsill, though, resting her cheek on one hand, Dona
Dorotea was thinking about other things.

Since her return to the house, however hard they tried to
disguise the fact, everyone fled from her. It was as if the chill
air of the grave, the icy breath of the crypt still clung to her
body. While she was eating, she would catch the servants and
her children casting oblique glances at her pale hands, and she
noticed that the children shuddered when she raised her
wineglass to her parched lips. Did they think it unnatural for people from the other world to eat and drink? For Dona
Dorotea came from that mysterious country whose existence
children suspect but of which they as yet know nothing.
Whenever those pale, maternal hands reached out to tousle
Don Felix's blond curls, he would pull away, his face as white
as her hands, like someone avoiding a touch that curdles the
blood. And if, at the fearful midnight hour, Dorotea happened
to meet Dona Clara in the dining room next to the courtyard
where the tall figures in the tapestries seem to stir into life,
the terrified child would flee as if she had seen a ghastly
apparition.

For his part, her husband, though he treated her with
commendable respect and reverence, had not once put his
strong arm about her waist. The woman come back from the
dead rouged her cheeks, wove ribbons and pearls into her hair
and doused her body in perfumes from the Orient, but all in
vain. The waxen pallor of her skin shone through the rouge;
her face still bore the marks of the funerary wimple they had
placed upon her, and no perfumes could disguise the dank
smell of the mausoleum. One day, Dorotea gave her husband a
wifely caress; she wanted to know if he would reject her. Don
Enrique passively allowed himself to be embraced, but his eyes
were dark and dilated with the horror which, despite himself,
peeped out of those windows of the soul. In those eyes, once
gallant, bold and full of desire, Dorotea read the words buzzing
in his brain on which madness was already beginning to
encroach.

`People do not return from the place you have returned
from...'

She took every precaution. Her plan must be carried out in
such a way that no one would ever know anything: it would
remain for ever a secret. She managed to get hold of the
bunch of keys to the chapel and asked a young blacksmith,
who was leaving for Flanders the next day with the infantry,
to make her another set. One evening, with the keys to her
tomb in her possession, Dorotea wrapped a cloak about her
and left the house without being seen. She entered the church
by the little door, hid in the Christ chapel and, when the sacristan had left the church locking the door behind him,
Dorotea descended slowly into the crypt, lighting her way
with a candle she had lit from the chapel lamp. She opened
the rusty door, closed it from the inside and lay down, first
snuffing out the candle with her foot ...