Three Arched Bridge (10 page)

As if these dark clouds were not enough^ the bards at the Inn of the Two Roberts continued singing about the sacrifice that must be made at the bridge.

Work proceeded feverishly on the bridge. Ever since I had heard the most recent ballad' in which the immured victim cursed the bridge to perpetual trembling, it seemed to me that the bridge had really begun to shake.

F
OR SEVERAL CONSECUTIVE DAYS
carts loaded with barrels of pitch passed along the western highway. The ferryman poled them across the river, cursing the wagoners, the pitch, and the entire world.

They said that the pitch was urgently needed at the Vloré base. That is how it has always happened. As soon as tar begins to move fast along the highways,, you know that blood will flow after it.

Meanwhile dire foreboding continually thickened around us, or, 1 would say, around everything that centered upon this cursed bridge. Now it was not merely the bards who went on casting their grim spell night and day at the Inn of the Two Roberts. No, this matter was now a topic of general conversation from morning to night; strangest of all, it became a most simple and natural thing to talk about a sacrifice, as if it were the weather or the crops. The idea of sacrifice, up to now a truth within a song, had emerged from its cocoon and suddenly crept up on us. Now it moved among us, alive and on equal terms with all the other concerns of the day.

On the roads, at home, and in taverns along the great highway, people talked of the reward the bridge and road builders would give to the family of the man who would allow himself to be sacrificed in the bridge piers. I could not accustom myself to this transition at all Things that had been savage and frightening until yesterday had suddenly become tame. Everybody talked about the sum of money the immured man's family would receive, and people even said that, apart from the cash payment, they would receive for a long time to come a percentage of the profits from the bridge, like everyone else who had met its expenses. Other people gave even more astonishing explanations, They said that the compensation due to every member of the family had been worked out in the minutest detail, with every kind of eventuality borne in mind. Everything had been provided for, from the possibility of the victim being without relatives, an odd man out, as they say (which was difficult to believe), to the opposite case of a poor man who might have a wife, parents, and a dozen children. They had anticipated everything, from the possibility of an orphan (in which case, in the absence of heirs, the remaining portion of the reward would be spent on a chapel for his soul that would be built just next to the bridge piers) to the case of a needy man, who would be given a first and final chance of property to leave to his nearest and dearest, in just the same way as a meadow or a mill is left as a bequest, except that this property would be his death. They said that the planning had been so thorough that they had even provided for the sacrifice of rich men, in other words death for a whim, out of boredom with life, or simply for fame. In this case, if the immured victim did not care for the reward, the cash would be used to erect, besides the chapel, a statue or memorial, also next to the bridge piers,

They said that all these calculations had been put down on paper and fixed with a seal, so that anybody who was thinking of being immured could read them beforehand.

To me all this resembled a bizarre dream. This was something we had never heard of before, a kind of death with accounts, seals, and percentages, We were quite unused to it. Sometimes I could not take it in at all I called to mind the delegation and its talks with the count, and what the collector of legends and the bridge's master-in-chief had said, and I tried to establish some connection between these things, but the more 1 brooded the more perplexed 1 became. This business of calculated sacrifice confused me completely.

Sometimes I told myself that perhaps these were the signs of the new order that the master-in-chief had told me about in that unforgettable conversation. That jumble of words had been full of contracts, accounts, currency exchange, and percentages, percentages, percentages on everything. Even on death.

I
T WEIGHED ON ME
like a fatal burden. Its stone piers crushed me. One of its arches planted itself directly on my stomach, another on my throat. I wanted to break free and save myself from it, but it was impossible. The only movement I could make was a slight, a very slight tremor…. Ah yes, 1 thought, this was the perpetual trembling of which the ballad spoke. A cry rose in my throat. The cry struggled to come out, pressing against the stone arch. This went on a long time. Then, I do not know how, something was released inside me, and I budged. In that same moment, with eyes closed in terror, I felt the bridge collapse and fall on my body.

I woke drenched in sweat. The room was stuffy. I rose to open the window. Outside a warm, damp wind blew. One could sense that the sky, though invisible, was overcast. Some silent flashes of lightning burst against the mute flatness.

“Oh Lord,” I cried aloud, and I lay down again on my bed. But further sleep eluded me. A few awkward ideas, with a deceptive glitter as if frozen by winter, floated somewhere inside me. I do not know how long I remained in this state. When I finally opened my eyes, it was light. Somebody was knocking at the outside door. There was an anxious rattle at the iron doorlatch. The sky was cloudy, but not as overcast as I had imagined. Spring has unexpectedly come, full of fury, I said to myself.

Two village neighbors were at the door, with distraught faces. Their eyes were troubled and bloodshot.

“What is it?” i asked. “What's the matter?”

They raised their hands to their throats, as if trying to force out the words.

“At the bridge, Gjon … Under the first arch … They've walled up Murrash Zenebisha,”

“No.”

1 was unable to say anything else, or even to think. But these people, who seemed to have lost the power of thought before me, expected something from me. Soon ! found myself walking toward the bridge. We hardly walked but were blown where the wind bore us, like three waving scraps of rag, myself in the middle and the others on either side*

I knew Murrash Zenebisha. Among ordinary people, it would have been difficult to find anyone more commonplace than he. His appearance, his average height, and his whole life were ordinary to the point of weariness, I could not take in the fact that this extraordinary thing, immurement, had happened to none other than him. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed an aberration. It was more than turning into a leader or a statue* … Everything had gone too far … now he was divided from us by the mortar of legend.

From a distance, you could see a small gathering of people around the bridge pier. By the first arch. He must be there.

As I drew closer, I tried, I do not know why, to recall Murrash Zenebisha's commonplace face. Oh Lord, from this moment 1 could not picture it in my mind at all It swam as if under a film of water, with a broken, uncanny smile.

The small group of people moved silently to make room for me, Nobody greeted me, They stood like candles, looking strangely small against the background of the bridge. A part of the arch bent heavy and chill above them,

“There he is,” a quiet voice said to me.

He was there, white like a mask, spattered with plaster, only his head and neck, and part of his chest. The remainder of his trunk, and his arms and legs, were merged with the wall

I could not tear my eyes from him. There were traces of fresh mortar everywhere. The wall had been strengthened to contain the sacrifice. (A body walled up in the piers of a bridge weakens the structure, the collector of tales had said.) The bulging wall looked as if it were pregnant. Worse, it looked as if it were in birth pangs.

The body seemed planted in the stone. His stomach and legs and the main portion of his trunk were rooted deep, and only a small portion of him emerged.

A wall that demands a human being in its cavity, the collector of customs had said. Foul, sinful visions taunted me. The wall indeed looked pregnant, … But this was a perverse pregnancy…. No baby emerged from it, on the contrary, a human being was swallowed up…. It was worse than perverse. It would have been perverse if, in contrast to a baby who emerges into the light, the man who entered the darkness were to shrink and be reduced to the size of an infant and then to nothing…. But that was not to happen. This was a perversion of everything. It was perversity itself.

Around me, people's voices came as if from the next world.

“When?” asked the hushed voice of a new arrival.

“Just after midnight.”

“Did he feel much pain?”

“None at all”

I heard sobbing close beside me. Then I saw his wife. Her face was swollen with tears, and in her arms she carried a year-old baby, who was trying to nuzzle her breast. Paying no attention to the men standing around, she had uncovered one breast. The breast was swollen with milk, and the nipple occasionally escaped from the baby's mouth. Her tears fell on her large white breast, and when the nipple missed the child's mouth, her tears mixed with drops of milk.

“He was very calm,' explained one of the count's scribes, who had apparently come in search of explanations. “He asked about the terms of the agreement one more time, and then …”

A workman who stood holding a pail near the place of sacrifice splashed the dead man with wet plaster. The plaster trickled down the hair sticking to his brow, gave a sudden gleam to his open eyes, which was quickly quenched, and then patchily smeared his features before coursing down his neck and disappearing into the walk

“Why are you throwing on plaster?, ' a nervous voice asked. But no one replied.

It seemed that they were sprinkling him at intervals, because after emptying its contents over the sacrifice,, the worker went to refill his bucket from a nearby barrel

His wife's interrupted sobbing became louder after the sprinkling.

“He didn't tell anyone about what he was going to do?” someone asked his wife softly.

She shook her head.

“No one,” she said.

Only then did I notice the other members of the family, standing around his wife. His parents and two brothers with their wives were there. Their faces were petrified, as if they too had been splashed with that plaster of eternity.

“No one,” his wife repeated. But I could not look at her eyes any longer, they were so swollen with weeping.

The count's scribe asked something of her too, and she gave a short answer. Then she turned to me and said something, but my eyes were fixed on the immured man; I stared at the lower part of his neck, at his collarbone, just where the cavity above his chest…

But at that moment the man standing by with the pail of plaster in his hands splashed him again, and once more the plaster ran down his forehead, igniting and at once quenching his vacant, blind, oblivious white eyes. Then the trickle meandered down his neck, quickly whitening the very spot from which I could not tear my eyes.

The baby had again missed, his mother's nipple, and was whimpering, I asked the woman whether they had been in financial straits,

“No,” she said, “He'd been earning plenty recently.”

Recently, 1 thought. Like many inhabitants of the surrounding district, he had been working as a day laborer on the bridge and must have been receiving a normal wage, as normal as everything else in his life,

Another of the count's men arrived and whispered the same questions.

“When?”

“Just after midnight.”

It seemed that we would all stand rooted to the spot, and people would arrive and mutter the same questions until the end of the world.

Now and again one could hear the words “brother, brother” from his sister. But his mother's sobbing was more muffled. Only once she said, “They killed you, son.” And a little later she very softly added, “As if your mother had no need of you.”

I would never have dared to interrupt a mother's lament, but the words “They killed you, son” gave me no peace,

“Is it possible someone killed him?” 1 said to her in a low voice, “But why?”

She wiped her tears.

“Why? How should a poor old woman like me know? No doubt for nothing. Because he cast a shadow on this earth,”

“He had always been worried recently,” said his wife by my shoulder, “He had something on his mind.”

“And last night?”

“Last night particularly.,'

My eyes froze again on the dead man's neck just above the collarbone, as if something were about to appear there, a shadow, a … I do not know what to say. But the plasterer with his usual gesture once more emptied his pail of plaster over the immured man. The grayish white liquid, the very stuff of legend, poured over him.

“Last night particularly,” his wife went on. “I thought I saw him move at midnight and get up. At dawn he was gone,'

The milk from her breast had again missed her baby and trickled to the ground, but she seemed not to care.

“Did you need money?” someone asked.

“What can I say?” his wife asked. “Like everyone else.”

The members of the dead man's family still stood grouped in silence. There was the splashing of the pail again as it was refilled with plaster from the barrel. 1 was completely numbed. 1 would not have been surprised if the man with the bucket had now coated us all with plaster.

A
LL THAT DAY AND THE NEXT
1 was not at all myself. His open eyes fixed under their film of plaster seemed to stare from every wall around me, Walls terrified me, and I tried at all costs not to look at them. But they were almost impossible to avoid, 1 only then understood what an important and powerful part walls play in our lives. There is no getting away from them, like conscience, I could leave the presbytery building, but even outside there were walls, close by or in the distance,